Robert Louis Stevenson and the Dilemma of an Uncritical Readership

 

It was the intention of the organizers of this centenary festival to invite both Stevenson scholars and non-specialists whose work has led them to be interested in Stevenson.  I am not a scholar, of Stevenson or any other topic; but certainly it is my work that has led me to be interested in Stevenson. My interest is not nostalgic or bound up with the private pleasures of youthful reading, because I didn’t read Stevenson when I was young. I knew verses from A Child’s Garden. I saw and was deeply affected by the Disney version of Treasure Island with Robert Newton. But what I read was Gods, Graves and Scholars, and Kon-Tiki, and Sons of Sinbad, and Lowell Thomas in Tibet. In adventure stories, I preferred fact to fiction. I still do.

            I began to read Stevenson as a grown-up, for professional reasons. I needed to learn how to write a story. It amazed me, beginning seriously to write long fictions, how little, despite a lifetime of reading them, we know how to set about writing one when the compulsion arises. I chose Stevenson not exactly at random to teach me; I divined that his were the qualities I needed, and perhaps they were, though to what extent I did or could adopt them is a question. I also came to admire profoundly qualities of his work which I could no more steal than I could the Elgin Marbles or a Turner sunset.

            I admired Stevenson; I did more than that, I did what we are not to do with the characters we encounter in books--I identified with him. I identified with a writer whose deepest and most original motives arose from early childhood. I identified with a man of outwardly sunny disposition and elusive inward darkness. I identified with someone able to be described as at once slovenly and dandified, who had the habit of looking at himself in every mirror he passed. And I identified with his dilemma as a writer:  that the kinds of stories he felt compelled to write were just those which a large and greedy readership were eager to read.

            Why do I call this a dilemma?  For most writers it would be a piece of sensational good luck, and certainly Stevenson in one sense flourished because of it. He died before the full implications of the dilemma were brought home to him--this is my personal interpretation--and yet they are apparent in Weir of Hermiston and his plans for completing it. And he discerned it clearly enough in some of its aspects. Here is a letter I first read quoted by John Noble in his illuminating preface to a collection of essays about Stevenson: 

           

What the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely executed; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim and knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if possible) be a little dull into the bargain. I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand upon my heart, I think it is by accident...

 

            “I do not write for the public,” he says. “I write for money, a nobler deity; and most of all for myself, not perhaps more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home.”  And after bewailing the “bestiality of the beast whom we feed,” he concludes, therefore:  “There must be something wrong with me, or I would not be popular.” 

            There must be something wrong with me, or I would not be popular. This can be read as simply the common snobbism of the period (common in other periods too) that the mob is incapable of appreciating the good and the beautiful and that great artists are bound to be scorned and ignored. But I would offer another interpretation:  Stevenson was perceiving that if his works were popular with the consumers of adventure and romance novels, then perhaps his conception of the sort of book he thought he was writing was mistaken. There was no way for Stevenson to know for sure, but the enthusiasm of large numbers suggested that his work might in fact be--might necessarily be--more like the slack and knotless work he despised than he had hoped.

            This uncomfortable possibility would have been reinforced by a comparison of his own work with work in the same line as his, equally or nearly as popular as his, but much worse by the standards Stevenson held to. “His” public--the public he shared with Rider Haggard and a dozen less memorable names--evidently didn’t mind if the sort of books it liked were well written or highly finished; but it certainly didn’t need them to be. Like a drunk capable of appreciating equally the one quality he seeks both in a vintage Burgundy and a pint of discount vodka, readers of romance knew what they wanted, and knew when they had it. And if Stevenson’s most devoted readers made no functional distinction between his works, which they loved, and other books, which they also loved but which were to Stevenson so evidently inferior, then was the distinction a real one?  Simply to dismiss their, the dear public’s, devotion as misguided wouldn’t do, for Stevenson’s dilemma was precisely this:  that whatever else he wanted from, or in, the writing he did, he recognized himself as one of them; he wanted what they wanted. He wrote, he says, for himself; and what he himself wanted to write was romances. He himself suffered from the craving he satisfied.

            At the time I was taking my lessons from Stevenson, I was beginning to publish work in certain modern genres of romance, fantasy and science fiction. There were, I suppose, clever career reasons for these choices, but at bottom it was because, wherever my imagination went, wherever I sent it, it tended to return with stories and situations of a certain kind. Only when I read Northrop Frye’s study The Secular Scripture did I learn that the stories and motifs that I found within myself with such effort, always dredging up the same ones with such a thrill of discovery, were, however they had come to me, the permanent features of that body of Western writings definable as romance. Dangerous journeys in search of treasure or knowledge or lost identity. Descents into underworlds of confusion, repetition and dream, and upward journeys into integration, knowledge, community. Riddling prophecies, which prophesy the very journey undertaken to solve them. An abandoned or stolen home recovered; brothers and sisters reunited. I was writing romances, and there was a readership for them, certainly not as large as the readership for Stevenson’s romances even relatively speaking, but a readership that is easier, nowadays, to gain and hold. There is a reason for that, and it has to do with the nature of romance, and the hunger of readers for it.

            Stevenson can be seen as standing, with his readers, at the dawn of an age of popular literature whose noon has passed, but which is certainly the one we live in:  where much of the business of most publishers and writers is to determine specific readerly appetites, and satisfy them. As in the creation and marketing of other consumer products, the marketers of fiction have been able to discriminate ever more finely among shades of need--like the proprietors of the best kind of brothel--and thus to present work that has been distilled down to solely the elements that will meet each need. It is likely that the consumers of certain genres of romance today are literally incapable of comprehending work written in certain other genres:  all the integument common to all fiction, which still took up a good deal of all novels in Stevenson’s day, has been skyved off--no orientation is seen to be necessary, readers would not have bought a book that has a cover like this, a title ditto, and endorsements ditto, unless they already knew what they would get, and why they wanted it.

            This is perhaps most true of those branches and sub-branches of the romance genres now being published under the rubric of fantasy and science fiction, which almost no one reads except those who read almost nothing else. These are intensely committed readers; theirs is not a simple sweet tooth for a certain kind of fiction; it is more like a sustaining addiction, it is the madness of Quixote. They will hug to themselves the books that meet their needs, and reread them till they fall apart. They will keep them in print by their demand; they will not suffer them to vanish.

            These devotees like to gather together in large and small conventions where they meet each other and the writers who supply them with the books they need to read. We who attend these gatherings may share nothing else with one another except what draws us together, like the people at an AA meeting, or a revival. My greatest difficulty with my fellows in this fold is that though I know why I am among them I cannot bear to read most of the books they treasure. Many of these readers rate my books just as highly, they have been just as moved and exalted by them, as by books I have not been able to read more than a few pages of. “You,” one or another of these ardent fans will tell me, “are one of my two favorite writers;” and I have learned not to ask who the other is. I fear sometimes that what is centrally interesting to readers in what I have written is not that which is special to it, what I most prize in it, but only what it shares with a whole class of fiction.

            And that is why I identify with Stevenson, or why (as you may well be thinking) I project my own dilemma onto him:  I believe that the kinds of stories Stevenson genuinely and wholeheartedly wanted to write were the kinds of stories that many many readers were eager to read, but that he wanted to write them for reasons different from the reasons the public--his fans--wanted to have them.

            What reasons?  Stevenson’s writing on the subject of romance carries a tone more passionate than but similar to the tone of open-hearted and smiling delight, just tinged with condescension, that he takes in writing about eccentric acquaintances or favorite dogs, and his modest manly popularism might disguise as much as reveal what was most important to him in the sort of books he liked to read, and believed he wanted to write. The qualities he strives for are connected, he says, to how and why he read books as a boy:  “We read stories in childhood, not for the eloquence of character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident.”  The great writer ofsuch stories, he says, shows us “the realization and apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men:”

 

His stories may be nourished with the realities of life but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right sort of thing should follow... The threads of the story come from time to time together and make a picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story like an illustration.

 

            Achieving this impact seems to be in part a matter of leaving things out. In addressing Henry James on Treasure Island, he says that “the characters are portrayed only so far as they realize the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale.”         

            Like Edgar Allen Poe in his essays on poetry, Stevenson is here describing his own practice and accounting for his own work more than he is analyzing the nature of romance; but the distinction he makes, vital to what counts for him in writing, is illuminating from a working writer’s point of view. The writers of realistic fiction--the kind Henry James was in the process of creating, or re-creating, the kind most writers write now--spend much of their efforts trying to add meaning to the things in their stories, by various writerly means, usually while trying to conceal their efforts from the reader. The old house is not, for the characters and therefore for the readers, simply an old house; the inheritance is more than just an inheritance; the car more than a car. Of course it is. Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse, or her moths. The Joad’s truck in The Grapes of Wrath or the coffin in As I Lay Dying. What Stevenson says is that in novels of adventure, in romance--at least in the kind he conceives--the things don’t require this added meaning, in fact can’t use it; they must be, simply and cleanly, what they are; the pieces of gold are simply glittering and desirable, the ship is only tall and swift and imperilled. And of course this is right too. But if a writer is unable to create things and places and moments with the authority of a Stevenson, can’t grant them the living brilliance, the transparency, that Stevenson can, then the fact of their having been given no added meaning by the writer will often mean that they have no life whatever; they lose actuality and have only a factitious activeness, like the things and people in a computer game--computer games being, in fact, the terminus of one branch of the adventure tale in our time.

            The computer game, the genre fantasy novel, the Marvel comic, all aim at and even share a certain--shall we call it an audience?--and it is one central to Stevenson’s conception of his writing and even of himself as a writer. A well known science fiction writer, when asked when the Golden Age of science fiction was, answered that the Golden Age of science fiction is twelve. And we are to understand by this--though less now perhaps than at one time--twelve-year-old boys. Girls have their own genres.

            In writing Treasure Island, Stevenson said to James, he was consciously writing a boy’s book for grownups:  He no more than James had ever gone questing after gold, but he was, he says, “well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader,” and he “addressed himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream.”  Stevenson justifies his bold reductive swiftness because it is thus that successful boys’ adventures must be written.

            Now it has been pointed out by Leslie Fiedler that the central fictions of the American canon, from Cooper’s novels through Moby-Dick to Huckleberry Finn, have all spent time on the children’s shelf of the library, as books for boys. (Books that fail to make this grade, Fiedler opines, can end up, like Thomas Wolfe’s novels, as books for adolescents.)  A distinction ought to be made, though:  those books, which do not by any means all meet Stevenson’s criteria of swiftness and simplicity, were all written for adults; whereas Stevenson is quite conscious not only of himself as boy, participating in the creation of and appreciating the unfolding of his own inventions, but of the actual audience of boys who he suspects will read the finished books. But writing for boys, like cooking for boys, depends for success more on quantity and familiarity than on quality. Did Stevenson wonder, finally, whether the effort it took to bring off such astonishing things as, for instance, the Hispaniola’s journey adrift around Treasure Island, was in fact unnecessary?  Would he have recognized, if he could have seen them, that the Classic Comics version of Kidnapped, or the Disney version of Treasure Island, actually contained all the magnetic essence of those works, and that his additional labor over them was largely wasted?  He forgives Walter Scott for being so often slack and witless and inattentive because Scott has the right romance stuff; did he ever wonder whether the fact that he himself evidently had the right romance stuff meant that, whatever airs he gave himself, or Henry James gave him, what was finally interesting to readers about his works was not what he thought special to them--what he prized in them--but what they shared with a large class of fictions?  There must be something wrong with me, if I am popular. Was he himself at bottom a sort of Scott? Doesn’t it seem likely that, much as he professed to love Scott, he would have hated the idea?

 

            There is of course another, or obverse, side of the dilemma I have described (dilemmas having two at a minimum.)  It’s not only that Stevenson’s personal standards and strengths were in a sense irrelevant to the production of effective adventure stories; it is that they actually were necessary if Stevenson were to try to free himself from the apparent bottomless childhood freedom of the adventure tale and write those other stories, or limn those other circumstances, that he also deeply felt; that were not common property, but his alone.

            The critic John Bayley has noted that a great novel inevitably creates an elsewhere. The sugar at the ball supper in Madame Bovary is whiter than the sugar in our world. Vladimir Nabokov says that the great novels of the realist tradition are actually great fairy tales. Stevenson was thinking along these lines in likening a work of art to a proposition in geometry:  “both inhere in nature, neither represents it.”   A work of art, he says, is “neat, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.”  And though he does not explicitly say so, it seems that he thinks of the romance, specifically the boy’s adventure tale, as the ideal case of this in narrative fiction. It isn’t; rather it’s the trompe-l’oeil novel that baffles the reader into thinking, for a moment, that it really is like life, just as bright, just as poignant, just as monstrous: only to dissolve, at a a subtle wave of the writer’s wand, into words--into the face of the writer, cruel or kind or godlike and grave.

            And how is that trick done?

            What Stevenson was discovering, or what lay ahead of him to be discovered, was that there is finally no difference between how a writer, a Stevenson, gives life, vividness, transparency to the exigencies of an adventure novel, and how that writer will illuminate, make wonderful and strange, any sort of event or encounter; and when a writer who has sought for wonder and captivation in the exotic or the drastic finds that he can transform, redeem, the diurnal and even the autobiographical by exactly the same means, not more timidly but actually more ruthlessly applied--there’s a new joy in the discovery, a joy that in itself powers the work of transformation. It’s the joy, the ease we can feel (strangely enough, but it’s there) in the death of the mother in Weir of Hermiston--the right sort of thing falling out in the right sort of way, the threads of the story coming together to form a picture in the web, a character falling into an attitude which stamps the story like an illustration.

            Can we think of Stevenson in the last year or two of his life, that time of wonderful enthusiasm and strength, coming to a new sense of just how far his gifts could reach?  That to do what he wanted to do in fiction did not in fact mean depending on the standard units of adventure and romance fiction, that it was all in fact up to him, and he could do as he liked?  What did he like?  At the end of his life he was still turning over those romantic circumstances that were obviously always going to be connected with the deepest wells of his creativity--the Covenanters gathering, the hills of home, the old wayside tavern. The work he was doing, though, seemed to be mutating, not always easily or evenly, into something with the force and simplicity of his adventure writing, but with its heart in another place.

 

            Finally it must be acknowledged that the dilemma very often--always?--makes the writer. In early stories--The New Arabian Nights, The Pavilion on the Links--the characters’ longing to find themselves in a romance, their delight in finding or believing themselves to be in one, mirror the readers’ and the writer’s own delight and gratification; in Kidnapped and Treasure Island there is not this self-consciousness about romance, and no uncertainty either. But the difficulties Stevenson had with The Master of Ballantrae were due it seems to me to Stevenson’s assumption that the working out of a romance plot was easier than it is, particularly for him, and perhaps to doubts about whether the work was worth doing well.  People read it anyway, in numbers. Down to the last projected books, Stevenson and his dear public were engaged in an embrace sometimes indistinguishable from an agon.

            What the present has to envy in Stevenson is the fluidity of the relation that still obtained between genre writer and consuming public, that allowed for the working out of a destiny rather than the mere treading of a path. It may well be that in even the most restricted genres being written today--in horror novels and sword-and-sorcery tales, books read only by their target readership--beauty and the privileged moments Stevenson writes of are being created, and by Stevenson’s means, that is, exquisite care for language and knowledge of the heart’s desire. Such writing will last its two weeks on the shelves along with the rest, in covers indistinguishable from its fellows, and will be praised by fans in terms also indistinguishable from the praise bestowed on others. Then it will be pulped or its acidic paper will destroy itself; and long before then it will have been swept aside by a host of others like it in most respects except that they are not good--dim, slack, knotless--and it is. A Dark Ages it seems can be brought about as easily by too many books as too few. Writers today who share Stevenson’s secret springs, and believe they may share at least some of his gifts, cannot make Stevenson’s blithe assumption that they will be able to use them in the creation of romances, and still have their work recognized as good, not simply good of its kind. Maybe it will be; maybe not.

1994