In August 1878, driven to distraction by the absence of his American lover, Fanny Osbourne, who had returned to California to patch things up with her estranged husband – Stevenson decided he could take no more of the emotional uncertainty in their relationship and, telling only his closest friends, bought a ticket on a transatlantic steamer from Glasgow to New York, planning to travel on to California to comfort and/or confront her.
The Amateur Emigrant describes in detail the transatlantic part of the trip, the journey by steamship from Glasgow to New York. This book picks up the second part – the train journey across America from New York to San Francisco. On Monday 18 August 1878 Stevenson took a river boat from New York to Jersey City, New Jersey, boarded the train and began the journey to California.
It is a shame for contemporary readers that these books didn’t all come out in chronological order or as he wrote them. Instead, The Amateur Emigrant wasn’t published till after Stevenson’s death, in 1895 (because of his family’s opposition to the image it painted of their boy slumming it with the roughest of the rough in steerage class) and Across the Plains was bundled up into a collection of miscellaneous writings, edited by his friend Sidney Colvin and only published in 1892, when Stevenson’s style and subject matter had moved far beyond it.
Across The Plains
You can tell that Stevenson was exhausted by now: the transatlantic journey had in reality been more gruelling than the Amateur Emigrant – for the most part buoyant, good-humoured and insightful – had implied.
In this book, for the first time, he seems to be failing in health and spirits, he feels oppressed, there are five bad experiences for every good one, and half way through the journey he actually falls ill, with no one to care for him. According to Claire Harman’s biography, when he finally arrived in Sacramento on the doorstep of his beloved Fanny, he looked like death, no longer the dashing blade who had charmed her at the artists’ colony in Barbizon two summers earlier, but a ragged, smelly, walking skeleton.
Things get off to a bad start as the emigrants squeeze into the emigrant shed in West Street, New York before being hustled down to the docks in the pouring rain. Several emigrant boatloads have docked in the city over the course of a few days, whereas no trains have left during that time, so all the facilities, waiting rooms, luggage areas and so on, are painfully packed. The ferry to New Jersey is wet and so over-crowded it leans to one side in the water.
The train is packed and uncomfortable, there is no food to be had apart from nuts and oranges, the hard wooden carriage benches are too narrow for two people to sit comfortably together and everyone smells like wet dogs.
It takes some time to get clear of the East Coast and into Pennsylvania, trying to sleep and being jostled awake again by rude neighbours or the rattling of the train. It’s a short book; you can read it in a couple of hours. Highlights for me include:
American sunsets
He finds American sunsets strikingly different from what he’s used to.
And it was in the sky, and not upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change. Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple, brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may be from habit, but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I thought so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the continent. If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is accomplice.
Afro-Americans
He came ready to be shocked and full of pity for the poor downtrodden negro of liberal myth, and so was disconcerted that the first few blacks he met in America were confident hotel staff who almost looked down on him as a stranger to their cities and country.
I had come prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.
He only meets two or three Afro-Americans and is impressed in each case by their self-possession and dignity. 140 years later American has, of course, solved all its issues around black people and is a beacon of racial peace and harmony.
America and guns
In the mid-West a drunk sneaks onto the train. It takes a couple of stops for the conductor to discover him but, when he does, the conductor manhandles the guy off the train (which is moving slowly through a siding). The man isn’t harmed, leaps to his feet and pulls a gun out of his belt.
It was the first indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some emotion. The conductor stood on the steps with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned without further ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter from the cars. They were speaking English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.
Luckily, 140 years later, America has completely sorted out its problems with guns.
Rude and cramped
He finds a lot of Americans a strange combination of the rude and the sentimental. There are few public announcements about the trains’ movements and timetable and, since the emigrants are at the bottom of the train food chain, Stevenson gets used to their train spending interminable hours in sidings and being shunted to one side to let the important expresses whizz past.
The conductors are rude and surly: one memorably simply refuses to answer a question Stevenson puts to him point blank. All the emigrants know is that, when the train has stopped and they’re ranged about the siding, some eating, some half stripped off to wash, at any moment there might be a shout of ‘All aboard’, and the train will begin to move off, and they’ll all have to drop everything or throw food and toiletries into bags and scramble back aboard as best they can.
In the absence of public announcements the newsboys, who sell newspapers, fruit and nuts, become a vital contact with the outside world, but these are also often crude and rude, one of them kicking Stevenson’s long legs out of his way every time he goes up or down the carriage.
Size and scale
Stevenson finds the size and scale of the country dispiriting. There’s a ‘chapter’ (or short section) called The Plains of Nebraska which is just long enough for him to give a good sense of being frightened of the endless flat featureless plains which spread out in all directions – ‘a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board’.
He has a harrowing vision of how appalling it must have been for the first settlers who moved for days and days and days at oxen pace across the plains and never saw any feature or thing of interest to mark their progress. How dispiriting.
The desert of Wyoming
He knows the hills are coming and hopes they will provide a respite from the despair of the plains, but –
I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which I knew we were soon to enter, like an ice-bound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country than the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the Rockies, which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications – how drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sage-brush, eternal sage-brush; over all, the same weariful and gloomy colouring, grays warming into brown, grays darkening towards black…
Mile upon mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river. Only down the long, sterile cañons, the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature…
Stevenson’s negativity is surprising. Nowadays super-real photos of the Rockies feature as computer screensavers or in cool movies about cruising through the astonishingly picturesque mountains. His negative response made me think that this whole huge area of America – like the desert which he describes later – only really became picturesque once you could travel freely through it in a car, not on foot. From the 1930s, say, you could drive out to these places, stay a night or two in a lodge or camp – and at any time drive back out of them, quickly and easily.
To someone used to walking – as Stevenson had just been walking in south-central France – and so used to the small-scale pleasures of copses and shaws and streams and dingles – the vast extent of the endless plains – and then the barren rockiness of the immense mountains – is truly horrifying. Imagine being lost there. You’d die far from any water, trees or shade, let alone human habitation.
The desert
Finally, appalled by the plains, then by the barren mountains, Stevenson is further disheartened by the fierce desert.
From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko… Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary.
He really didn’t like almost all the scenery he saw and, speaking as a fellow walker, as someone used to thinking about territory in terms of footfall and paces and hours of walking, I can only agree with him. Train through it, drive through it, fly over it, and the American West is astonishingly raw and beautiful. but imagine being dropped into it with just a bottle of water and told to walk – quelle cauchemar!
Emigrants as a group
His thoughts about his fellow emigrants are noticeably less charitable than when he was aboard the emigrant ship. more than before, he is forced to the conclusion that many of the emigrants are failures in life, alcoholics, stupid people, lazy people, all of them naively convinced that if they travel West a miracle will happen – that they will reach a place where their stupidity, laziness or alcoholism will be magically transformed and they will become as rich and worthy of respect, as they know – deep inside – is their due.
But they won’t. At the end of his analysis of the shortcomings of the emigrants, Stevenson throws off a far more profound observation. If you were looking for rational causes for the mass emigrations i.e. evidence that people really do change their characters in foreign lands, you would look in vain. By and large they continue to be failures wherever the are. No, it isn’t about wages and economics and jobs – the compulsion to travel is something deeper and far more primeval.
If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how many thousands would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.
Prejudice
Stevenson’s opinion of the emigrants sinks even lower when he considers their attitude towards the Chinese. The emigrant train was divided into three sections: one for white men, one for white women and children, and one for the Chinese (Chinese labourers having, of course, slaved away and died building the transcontinental railways).
Not only are the American conductors, officials and the emigrants generally rude or sometimes violent, but they display a wall of prejudice against the Chinese: Stevenson singles out the accusation the most vocal bigots make that the Chinese are filthy. Stevenson thinks this is almost funny, since he notes that the Chinese carriage was probably the cleanest and the Chinese most often to be seen washing as much of their body as was decent in the stations and sidings – unlike his filthy, stinking white companions. (Stevenson slips in mention of a white demagogue he hears, weeks later in San Francisco, calling on a crowd of whites to rise up and throw off the ‘oppression’ of the Mongolian, again marvelling at how stupid and ignorant this kind of rabble-rousing is.)
Luckily, there are no demagogic politicians appealing to racial stereotypes in America these days.
Native Americans
Displaying admirable, and for his day astonishingly liberal instincts, Stevenson also goes out of his way to feel sorry for the Americans’ gruesome treatment of native American Indians, the original owners of this ‘great’ land.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man of old story –over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget.
Final relief
The bareness and sterility of the desert oppresses Stevenson almost as much as the stink of his unwashed companions and their brutal attitude to the Chinese or Indians. All combine to make the journey hellish and explain the excess of relief he feels when the train finally emerges into the wooded, watered scenery of the Pacific side of the Rocky Mountains.
It is a spiritual and emotional relief for Stevenson and for the reader – that this short book ends on this sudden up-beat note.
I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one’s wife. I had come home again – home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more dear to me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily than I did.
Stevenson is always interesting and entertaining, but this is easily the most disillusioned and bleak of the four travel books I’ve read so far.
An Oxford University Press volume which contains the works in Stevenson’s volume, Island Nights Entertainment and a few others, being:
1. The Bottle Imp (1891)
Stevenson planned to write a volume of ghost and supernatural stories which, alas, like so many of his projects, he never got near to completing. This was to be one of the main stories. The Bottle Imp is a short story, loosely based on an 1828 play by Richard Brinsley Peake, but relocated to the South Seas.
A Hawaiian man, Keawe, buys a magic bottle from a friend. The bottle contains an imp or genie which grants wishes. Keawe wishes for – and promptly receives – a big house and lots of money. There is just one catch – if you die in possession of the bottle you spend eternity burning in hell.
Keawe falls in love with a beautiful woman, Kokua, and the genie makes his wishes come true i.e. she returns his love and they get married. All goes well except that, when he is away from her, Keawe slumps and weeps and bewails his fiery fate.
Kokua initially thinks he is having an affair then, observing him weeping, thinks she is a bad wife. But when she finally worms the truth out of Keawe, she arranges for an old man to buy the bottle off him, and then immediately buys it from the old man: thus nobly sacrificing herself for her husband.
But when Keawe learns about her self-sacrifice, he is plunged into a whole new set of misery and despair. He himself commissions a drunken bosun to buy the bottle off his wife, planning to buy it off him – but the bosun, the first white man in the story, selfishly refuses to hand it over – it obeys his drunken wish to put a few more whisky bottles in his pockets and he’s not selling it to anyone!! and staggers off into the night – thus condemning himself – and thus setting Keawe and Kokua free of the curse!
Possibly this fable might amuse children but it contained nothing uncanny or scary for me; there are scores of more intense, atmospheric and eerie scenes in his ‘straight’ novels.
The one ‘issue’ or thought arising is the way the hero and heroine are South Sea islanders but, contrary to the racial stereotypes of the day, behave with tremendous chivalry and love – while the drunken fool who goes off to hell is just one among Stevenson’s larger collection of useless white trash who throng the South Pacific islands.
2. The Beach of Falesá (1892)
A working-class white trader named Wiltshire is dropped on a South Sea island to take up the trading post there which has been left vacant. He is befriended by one Case, a denizen of the island, who gives him dinner the first evening, then arranges a ‘native’ marriage to a local girl, Uma.
But almost immediately the natives start to give Wiltshire and Uma a wide berth, apparently frightened of them. Is he taboo? Has he done something wrong?
Case is all sympathy and takes Wiltshire to a meeting with local chieftains where Case speaks and interprets – Wiltshire not understanding a word. Case tells him there is some unknown reason for the natives’ fear and resentment of him. But Wiltshire has by now spoken to other whites and begun to suspect that it is in fact Case who is putting the bad word around about him.
These include the itinerant missionary Tarleton – indeed, Case is on the beach when Tarleton’s boat puts in and tries to prevent the two meeting but Wiltshire, a big man, knocks him to the ground and carries on. Tarleton confirms what the skipper of the ship which brought Wiltshire to the island hinted, which is that Case is widely suspected of having persecuted, poisoned and possibly murdered all three of Wiltshire’s predecessors (old Adams, Vigours).
His native wife, Uma, tells Wiltshire that Case has cowed the natives because they believe that he communes with a ‘devil’ in the forest. When Wiltshire explores into the tropical forest, he finds gimcrack gadgets designed to scare the credulous natives – including an Aeolian harp which moans in the wind, a building whose wall is topped with weird dolls, and a cave in which Case has painted a monster face in luminous paint, so that when he swings his lantern at it in the night, the vision terrifies the natives he’s brought there.
In the story’s bloody climax, Wiltshire takes dynamite and fuses and returns to Case’s cave-base – himself a little daunted by the noises of the dark forest – with the plan to blow it up and with it, Case’s authority with the natives.
He’s set the charges and barely lit the fuse before Uma turns up, with the news that Case has heard Wiltshire has visited his den and is on his way into the forest after them. He arrives just as the dynamite goes up, destroying the base and littering the forest with burning fragments. By the light of these, Case is able to shoot Wiltshire when he gets up to move away, and then plugs Uma in the shoulder as she runs over to her wounded husband.
The triumphant Case then makes the classic mistake of sauntering over to the injured man, gun at rest, at which point Wiltshire unexpectedly grabs him, twists him to the ground, pulls himself up over his struggling torso and stabs him again and again and again in the chest, feeling his blood spurt over his hand like hot tea.
Realism
Stevenson was very aware that this story marked a departure in his fiction from the starry-eyed romance of his adventure yarns towards a new, more brutal, realism. It’s not just the violent ending, but the emphasis all the way through on real islands, people, customs, practices and stories Stevenson had heard, which all combine to give this story an unprecedented sense of reality.
Working class hero
In a novel like The Master of Ballantrae, there is a huge amount of psychological tension (and then dread) but very little violence – only the carefully staged and gentlemanly affair of the duel – for the most part it is psychological intimidation. This story reverses that formula, with violent expressions flowing freely in Wiltshire’s mind, and giving rise to a lot of violence in the real world.
Wiltshire’s rough personality comes over in the ease with which he resorts to physical violence, his readiness to knock Case down on the beach, and then his complete lack of scruples about setting off to blow up Case’s den and then – admittedly after Case has shot him and Uma – to relentlessly stab him to death.
But what hasn’t been commented on in any of the criticism I’ve read, is the characterisation of the first-person narrator, Wiltshire, through his language. Wiltshire’s uneducated character is expressed in a steady stream of odd, distinctive and – one assumes – characteristic Victorian working-class phrases and idioms. I found myself entranced and fascinated by the virile, rough locutions of this angry man.
Devil a wink they had in them. [The natives camping round his house don’t move or alter their stares]
… she [Uma] said something in the native with a gasping voice. [This use of ‘the native’ indicates Wiltshire’s uneducated lack of interest in the exact name of the language Uma uses.]
The boys had not yet made their offing, they were still on the full stretch going the one way, when I had already gone about ship and was sheering off the other. [Wiltshire walked out into the crowd surrounding his house and scared off some boys – the other phrases are naval, it was the phrase ‘they were still on the full stretch’ which I found typical of Wiltshire’s expressive use of slang, here, presumably, naval slang.]
‘I’ll make it square with the old lady…’ ‘O no, don’t you misunderstand me Uma’s on the square’… Case never set up to be soft, only to be square and hearty, and a man all round… ‘… you’re to fire away, and they’ll do the square thing…’ ‘Now, Mr. Wiltshire,’ said he, ‘I’ve put you all square with everybody here.’ [From which we can see that for something or someone to be square, on the square, to be put all square, means to be put to rights, to be honest, open, true-dealing.]
‘O, the rest was sawder and bonjour and that,’ said Case… ‘Well, they don’t get much bonjour out of me,’ said I. [So bonjour (French for ‘good morning’) is apparently used as a generic term for meaningless politenesses and pleasantries.]
The mere idea has always put my monkey up, and I rapped my speech out pretty big. [Meaning rubbed up the wrong way?]
It’s a cruel shame I knew no native, for (as I now believe) they were asking Case about my marriage, and he must have had a tough job of it to clear his feet. [To make a plausible explanation, to get away?]
‘They have a down on you,’ says Case. [Meaning they’ve something against you, this phrase is till sometimes used today?]
‘… she cottoned to the cut of your jib.’ … ‘That’s what I don’t cotton to,’ he said. [Nowadays people would say ‘cotton onto‘, if they say it at all. Apparently because cotton seeds clung easily to clothes. The jib sail on a sailing ship was a different shape depending on the nationality of the ship. Watchers could immediately see which country a ship was from by the cut of its jib, and like or dislike it accordingly.]
I cannot justly say that I ever saw a woman look like that before or after, and it struck me mum. [We use the related phrase, ‘mum’s the word’]
… and pretty soon he began to table his cards and make up to Uma. [We still use ‘put your cards on the table’]
I so wanted, and so feared, to make a clean breast of the sweep that I had been… I’m what you
call a sinner what I call a sweep… [Referring to the blackness of chimney sweeps, a reference which has completely disappeared.]
I gave him first the one and then the other, so that I could hear his head rattle and crack, and he went down straight. [Wiltshire’s business-like description of punching Case first with one hand, then the other.]
As he came nearer, queering me pretty curious (because of the fight, I suppose), I saw he looked mortal sick… [The missionary has witnessed Wiltshire beating Case to the ground and looks at him pretty peculiarly.]
Since then I’ve found that there’s a kind of cry in the place against this wife of mine, and so long as I keep her I cannot trade. [The way Uma is ignored or scorned by other natives for consorting with Wiltshire, who Case has been briefing all the natives against.]
He stood back with the natives and laughed and did the big don and the funny dog, till I began to get riled. [‘Riled’ we still have as an Americanism: ‘the big don’ means swanking like a VIP and since ‘dog’ just means ‘fellow’ or ‘bloke’ (we still have ‘you lucky dog’) doing the funny dog simply means joking around, playing the fool.]
And then it came in my mind how the master had once flogged that boy, and the surprise we were all in to see the sorcerer catch it and bum like anybody else. [‘Bum’ meaning cry.]
‘I’m not on the shoot to−day,’ said I. [‘On the…’ gives the English user a number of expressive phrases: ‘on the wagon’, ‘on the piss’, ‘on the make’ – ‘on the…’ gives a phrase a kind of rolling energy.]
‘I’ll tell you what’s better still,’ says I, taking a header, ‘ask him if he’s afraid to go up there himself by day.’ [From diving head first into water.]
He had knocked over my girl, I had got to fix him for it; and I lay there and gritted my teeth, and footed up the chances.
… every time I looked over to Case I could have sung and whistled. Talk about meat and drink! To see that man lying there dead as a herring filled me full.
I can see why Henry James genuinely admired Stevenson as a writer because, although his books are mostly written for children, and although lots of them are scrappy, rambling and episodic in structure, Stevenson nonetheless has this key interest in creating a consistent voice for his narrators.
Thus the reader is impressed by the sheer effort it must have taken to write The Black Arrow in a cod-medieval style throughout; or the creation of the personality of Mackellar, the sober, measured family retainer and main narrator of The Master of Ballantrae, through the chasteness of his Scots accent and style.
And, here, in his breakthrough ‘realist’ work, I have given so many examples in order to show the consistency of the voice Stevenson gives to his tough, violent working class trader. A complete departure from the over-educated, self-deprecating irony which dominates The Wrecker, and all the more powerful and convincing because of it.
3. The Isle of Voices (1893)
Bewilderingly different from the rough style of The Beach, this story announces itself as a fable or fairy tale from the start.
Keola was married with Lehua, daughter of Kalamake, the wise man of Molokai, and he kept his dwelling with the father of his wife. There was no man more cunning than that prophet; he read the stars, he could divine by the bodies of the dead, and by the means of evil creatures: he could go alone into the highest parts of the mountain, into the region of the hobgoblins, and there he would lay snares to entrap the spirits of the ancient.
Briefly, Keola is lazy and notices that his father-in-law Kalamake always has money. The latter invites him to learn how. Kalamake gets out a mat and some herbs, burns them, and he and Keola are magically transported to an unknown island.
Here Kalamake tells Keola to gather leaves of a particular tree from the trees at the treeline, then goes scampering along the beach collecting shells. Keola duly collects the leaves, builds a fire and fans it until, as it start to burn low, Kalamake comes running back along the sand and leaps onto the mat just in time for both of them to be transported back to Kalamake’s house – and the pile of shells has turned into a pile of shiny dollars! Why didn’t anyone interfere with their activities, he asks Kalamake? Because on the island they are invisible, just disembodied voices to the scared natives.
Keola, amazed, takes his share and spends it quickly and foolishly and then grumpily starts complaining about his stingy father-in-law. He shares his moaning with his wife, who warns him not to challenge the old warlock – remember: various members of the tribe who crossed him and then disappeared without warning!
But Keola approaches Kalamake and says he needs more money because he wants an accordion to while away the time. (Note, although the most unrestrained fairy tale in content, the text contains unashamed references to the contemporary world and its bric-a-brac: Kalamake’s house has armchairs, a Western-style bookshelf and a family Bible, in among the native possessions.)
Irked at his son-in-law’s laziness, Kalamake invites Keola to come out fishing in Pili’s boat. But once they are out to sea Kalamake does magic and turns into a giant, then into an enormous leviathan, big enough to step into the ocean and only come up to his middle. He rages at Keola’s greed and crushes Pili’s boat like a matchbox just as Keola leaps free and swims for it.
Keola manages to escape his monster father-in-law in the wild and stormy seas and is nearly run down by a white man’s schooner. The sailors grab him aboard and, since they are a crewman short, press gang him to join them. The food is good but the first mate is a sadist who beats the native crew incessantly.
But Keola knew white men are like children and only believe their own stories… The captain also was a good man, and the crew no worse than other whites…
A month later, as the white men’s ship approach a remote island, Keola, at the wheel, takes a chance and steers close to the shore then jumps overboard. The white men shout after him but turn the ship and steer away and back out to sea.
At first Keola is alone on the island and, being a self-sufficient native, builds a hut, catches fish and makes lanterns from coconuts. Venturing to the other side of the island he is surprised (though the reader not so surprised, maybe) to discover it is the very beach where Kalamake’s magic transported them that first time. And sure enough he hears voices – just as Kalamake says the natives do – and sees little fires like the one he built for Kalamake dotted all over the beach. In fact, he hears lots of voices, voices from all around the world, English and French and German and Tamil and Russian and Chinese.
One day six boatloads of natives arrive from another island. To Keola’s surprise they are very gracious to him, build him a proper hut and give him a wife and don’t insist that he works with them. Unusual. When he hears some of the elders describing the place as ‘the isle of voices’, Keola is prompted to explain to them that it is where magicians and warlocks from all round the world come to collect magic shells. The way to stop them and possess the island in peace would be to cut down the tree whose magic leaves Kalamake showed him how to burn to create the fire which magically transports all the warlocks home again. Aha.
One night his new wife tells him the tribe are cannibals; they are fattening him up and plan to kill and eat him. Keola flees to the other side of the island, to the beach of voices, and there finds a great confusion and hustle of invisible spirits. They all seem to be rushing past him and inland. When he follows them he comes across a grove of the magic trees and finds that the tribe are following his advice and chopping down the magic trees – and that is why the spirits are hastening to that spot.
In a hallucinatory scene, Keola watches the tribe coming under attack from invisible spirits, backed up against each other and swinging blindly at invisible enemies with their axes, while he also sees disembodied axes, floating in mid-air, making sudden shrewd strikes at the islanders, who are falling in a welter of screams and blood.
Terrified, Keola runs back to the beach, determined to swim for it when he hears the voice of his first wife, Lehua. She is making a fire from the magic leaves. ‘Come quickly’, she says and he leaps into the circle of the fire and in a flash, they are both back safe in Kalamake’s house.
And the warlock never reappeared, though whether because he was slain in the battle of the spirits, or was marooned by the lack of magic leaves – who can say?
Anti-white
Stevenson’s anti-white attitude runs through the story like a thread – whites are stupid, lazy, refuse to believe anything a native tells them (generally to their own cost) and are cruel and sadistic. Any reader of Stevenson’s South Sea stories, let alone the quotes from letters which litter the various introductions and Wikipedia articles, quickly learns that Stevenson took a very dim view of white man in the tropics and the hollowness of their so-called civilisation.
Magical realism
It isn’t the correct term but some reference should be made to the way that, although it concerns Arabian Nights-style magic mats and instant travel, the story is nonetheless studded with contemporary references – to the Bible and western books, as mentioned, but also to the trading schooner and its very contemporary manners. And in the final pages Keola ends up telling his story to a local missionary who (typically) dismisses it all as hogwash and then goes and tips off the colonial authorities that Kalamake and his son-in-law are forging money.
This detail a) clinches white men’s stupidity and obtuseness b) but confirms the story’s setting in the bang up-to-date contemporary world.
It creates an odd, anomalous effect.
4. The Ebb-Tide
This OUP volume also very usefully contains the short novel, The Ebb-Tide, but it deserves a separate review.
The auctioneer was surrounded by perhaps a score of lookers-on, big fellows, for the most part, of the true Western build, long in the leg, broad in the shoulder, and adorned (to a plain man’s taste) with needless finery. A jaunty, ostentatious comradeship prevailed. Bets were flying, and nicknames. The boys (as they would have called themselves) were very boyish; and it was plain they were here in mirth, and not on business.
(Chapter 9. The Wreck of the Flying Scud)
Robert and Fanny and Lloyd
Fanny Stevenson
Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne in France in 1876 and became deeply attached to her. She was ten years older than him (born 1840 compared to Stevenson’s 1850) and had three small children by her husband Samuel Osbourne, who she had married at the age of just 17. Samuel was an adventurer who headed to California to take part in the silver rush, brought his family out to stay with him, but was consistently unfaithful to Fanny until she decided to cut loose and took her children for a prolonged trip to Europe.
Fanny’s choice
In 1876 Fanny returned to America prepared to reconcile with her husband. So infatuated was Stevenson that he saved up for three years to have the fare to travel out to California there to woo her (the journey described in his travel book The Amateur Emigrant) and poor Fanny was faced in 1879 with the choice between unfaithful husband and ardent devotee – who just happened to be a literary genius into the bargain. Eventually she chose the sickly Scotsman and they were married in 1880, Stevenson acquiring two step-children Isobel (born 1858) and Lloyd (born 1868), the third, Hervey, having died as a child in Paris. They spent two months in the Napa Valley near abandoned mine workings, an experience fictionalised into the novel The Silverado Squatters.
Stevenson’s travels
The couple moved back to Britain for a while for Robert to patch up relations with his scandalised parents. For the next seven years they moved around England and Scotland, Devon, Bournemouth, spending the winter months in the south of France or Switzerland. These were the years of his masterpieces – Treasure Island, Kidnapped,Jekyll and Hyde, as well as The Black Arrow and much poetry.
The South Seas
In 1887 his father died and Stevenson returned to America, wintering in New York state. In 1888 he was in California charting a yacht to take him, Fanny and Lloyd to the islands of the South Seas and there began an extensive period of travel among the islands of the Pacific, getting to know customs, traditions, languages and politics. Lloyd was now 20 and very close to RLS. Stevenson restlessly wrote wherever he went, and in a wide variety of forms, children’s and adult poetry, adventure stories and romances, short stories, novels, travel books, essays and letters.
Collaborations with Lloyd Osborne
It was here during his south sea travels and after he settled on an island of Samoa that Stevenson collaborated closely with his step-son Lloyd on three novels: The Wrong Box, The Wrecker and The Ebb-Tide. And, whereas he wrote two more novels and a number of south sea stories which are part of the ‘canon’, it is maybe no coincidence that most people haven’t heard of these three collaborations.
The Wrecker
The Prologue of The Wrecker, titled In The Marquesas, describes the litter of whites, beach bums and local South sea natives who live near the harbour of Tai-o-hae, ‘the French capital and port of entry of the Marquesas Islands’. It has colour and flavour and promises much.
Outside, the night was full of the roaring of the surf. Scattered lights glowed in the green thicket. Native women came by twos and threes out of the darkness, smiled and ogled the two whites, perhaps wooed them with a strain of laughter, and went by again, bequeathing to the air a heady perfume of palm-oil and frangipani blossom.
A schooner enters the harbour and the captain, Mr Loudon Dodd, is invited along to the whites-only club, where they drink and roister and the inebriated captain finds himself boasting about all kinds of scrapes and semi-crimes he’s been involved in. His host, back at his house, says surely that was all bluff. Oh no, says Dodd, it was all true. ‘Pray tell’, asks his host. Alright, says Dodd.
Dodd’s life story
At which point the novel cuts away to become a completely different book from the one promised – a long, humorous, self-deprecating first-person narrative of Dodd’s life and times. Dodd’s dad was a typically boosterish American businessman who sends his son to college to learn how to gamble on the stock market. But the young boy wants to be an artist! They square the circle by sending Loudon to Paris to study sculpture – so that he can provide the statues needed for the new state capital the father is crookedly involved in.
Student in Paris
Loudon’s adventures in student Paris are all firmly tongue-in-cheek, told with a drollness which is completely at odds with the pithy, psychologically acute style Stevenson demonstrated in his classic adventures, The Black Arrow or Ballantrae.
At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin Quarter. The play of the Vie de Boheme (a dreary, snivelling piece) had been produced at the Odeon, had run an unconscionable time–for Paris, and revived the freshness of the legend. The same business, you may say, or there and thereabout, was being privately enacted in consequence in every garret of the neighbourhood, and a good third of the students were consciously impersonating Rodolphe or Schaunard to their own incommunicable satisfaction. Some of us went far, and some farther. I always looked with awful envy (for instance) on a certain countryman of my own who had a studio in the Rue Monsieur le Prince, wore boots, and long hair in a net, and could be seen tramping off, in this guise, to the worst eating-house of the quarter, followed by a Corsican model, his mistress, in the conspicuous costume of her race and calling. It takes some greatness of soul to carry even folly to such heights as these; and for my own part, I had to content myself by pretending very arduously to be poor, by wearing a smoking-cap on the streets, and by pursuing, through a series of misadventures, that extinct mammal, the grisette.
San Francisco
In Paris he meets a fellow American art student, Jim Pinkerton, who is lousy at art but addicted to doing dodgy business deals, he nicknames him ‘the Irrepressible’ or ‘the Commercial Force’. This man is to loom large in his life because, when Loudon’s father dies after one business crash too many, Loudon, deprived of daddy’s monthly stipends, falls on very hard times and after trying all available options, is forced to travel back to the States and out to California where he becomes a side-kick and cultural fig leaf for Pinkertson’s numerous scams and cons: selling counterfeit brandy, organising a preposterous regular sea-side picnic, wild speculations on all and every business venture.
A taste of the South Seas
Suddenly in chapter eight we learn that Loudon has taken to exploring San Francisco, the secret slums and hidden places – there are rich descriptions of its multi-cultural shops and bars and dives.
My delight was much in slums. Little Italy was a haunt of mine; there I would look in at the windows
of small eating-shops, transported bodily from Genoa or Naples, with their macaroni, and chianti flasks, and portraits of Garibaldi, and coloured political caricatures; or (entering in) hold high debate with some ear-ringed fisher of the bay as to the designs of ‘Mr. Owstria’ and ‘Mr. Rooshia’. I was often to be observed (had there been any to observe me) in that dis-peopled, hill-side solitude of Little Mexico, with its crazy wooden houses, endless crazy wooden stairs, and perilous mountain
goat-paths in the sand. Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew and held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous, interracial atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at its outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell in commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors open and the scent of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American air, its kites of Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western telegraph-wires, its flights of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along Western gutters.
And in amid these he starts listening to tales of sailors and seafarers of the remote romantic south sea islands, visits a seafarer who has a collection of south sea island artefacts, gets bitten by the bug. So he enthusiastically falls in with Pinkerton’s latest scheme to bid for a ship which they hear has been shipwrecked on Midway Island, the brig Flying Scud. It’s meant to be a rigged auction i.e. Pinkerton has arranged to buy the ship from the auctioneer at the nominal sum of $100, so everybody is surprised when a well known, seedy lawyer, Bellairs, starts bidding against Pinkerton and the bidding climbs to the absurd and giddy heights of $30,000 then $40,000.
By now our boys have realised something very suspicious is going on – maybe the brig must have been packed full of Chinese opium! Loudon notices that the captain of the wrecked ship – Captain Trent – is at the auction, looking very nervous. Our boys eventually win the ship but at a budget-breaking cost of $50,000. In the corridor Loudon overhears Bellairs telephoning the man whose instructions he was obeying, a certain Mr Dickson. But when Loudon gets hold of his address and goes to visit and question Dickson, he finds he has beaten a hasty retreat from his boarding house. Why?
Voyage to Midway
Pinkerton and Dodds hire a schooner, the Nora Creiner, appoint a Captain Nares and hire a dodgy-looking crew. Pinkerton appoints Dodds his agent for the mission – which is to find the brig, find the opium, take it on to Honolulu to sell, and return to San Francisco with the profits. There is a brisk clear good humour about the narrator’s tone which seems different from any other Stevenson I’ve read. It has an often modern sense of comic timing and a brisk easy pace. Stevenson’s sentences are generally more broken up with semi-colons and edgy angular additions and clauses; The Wrecker‘s sentences run on smooth and debonair.
I was presented to the commissioner, and to a young friend of his whom he had brought with him for the purpose (apparently) of smoking cigars; and after we had pledged one another in a glass of California port, a trifle sweet and sticky for a morning beverage, the functionary spread his papers on the table, and the hands were summoned. Down they trooped, accordingly, into the cabin; and stood eyeing the ceiling or the floor, the picture of sheepish embarrassment, and with a common air of wanting to expectorate and not quite daring. In admirable contrast, stood the Chinese cook, easy, dignified, set apart by spotless raiment, the hidalgo of the seas.
The Flying Scud
Eventually they reach the site where Captain Trent said The Flying Scud ran aground and, sure enough, find it. The captain, crew and Loudon spend days ripping the poor brig apart and, sure enough, do eventually find boxes hidden in the mats of rice – and they do contain opium – but only a few hundred pounds of the stuff – value, at the absolute maximum, maybe $10,000. Whereas Pinkerton had bid $50,000 for the ship! It looks like a complete bust. Sadly captain Nares and Dodd conclude they’ve done everything they can, set fire to the hulk and sail on to Honolulu.
Illustration for The Wrecker by William Hole (1892)
The mystery
Here I didn’t quite understand some scenes but I think Loudon disposes of the opium to two agents Pinkerton has arranged to meet him. He then bumps into the captain of the British warship which found and rescued the crew of the Flying Scud, is invited to a party aboard, and quizzes the ship’s doctor, Urquhart. From all this he discovers that the survivor of the Scud, who later paid Bellairs to bid against Pinkerton, and who gave his name as Dickson, was in fact one Norris Carthew, an Englishman from a noble family. What the devil is this all about? Dr Urquhart gives the impression of knowing but Loudon fails to wangle it out of him and is left as completely perplexed about the mystery of the wrecked brig as we the reader, and the narrator is the intrusive kind who comes right out and confronts the reader with it:
I have never again met Dr. Urquart: but he wrote himself so clear upon my memory that I think I see him still. And indeed I had cause to remember the man for the sake of his communication. It was hard enough to make a theory fit the circumstances of the Flying Scud; but one in which the chief actor should stand the least excused, and might retain the esteem or at least the pity of a man like Dr. Urquart, failed me utterly. Here at least was the end of my discoveries; I learned no more, till I learned all; and my reader has the evidence complete. Is he more astute than I was? or, like me, does he give it up?
Pinkerton’s bankruptcy
So Loudon sails back to San Francisco and confronts Jim and his new wife, Mamie, with his failure to find treasure on the ship. Pinkerton, for his part, explains about his bankruptcy – an official receiver was called in, who could only secure 7 cents in every dollar for the creditors. Jim was thoroughly pilloried in all the newspapers and now lives in a shabby apartment with shabby clothes and is working as the meanest type of clerk.
Loudon inherits a fortune
Which is why, when Loudon receives a telegram telling him he’s inherited a fortune from his doting grandfather in Scotland, they all celebrate wildly with a champagne dinner and pack up and head to the country for a rest and recuperation. Within days Pinkerton is back to his classic best, a wheeling-dealing shyster, going to the office of the local newspaper, investigating mining operations, sniffing for new business ventures.
More Flying Scud mystery
Loudon leaves him and returns to San Francisco where he dines with Captain Nares who he got to like and respect during the long voyage. Nares says they still haven’t got to the bottom of this Scud business. Loudon is then buttonholed by the lawyer Bellairs, who reveals himself as a weedy, uneducated shyster but who menacingly says he knows all about Loudon’s inheritance and makes vague threats to undermine him or Pinkerton or both. In addition, Bellairs says he knows all about the fake mate on the Scud, Norris Carthew. What? Loudon is puzzled: what fake mate? Who is Carthew? Why does is matter?
Bellairs goes on that Carthew comes from a venerable family in England, in Dorset, aha yes you can’t fool old Bellairs. Loudon wonders what on earth he’s babbling about.
Chasing Bellairs
Next day, in a passage which I read twice but still didn’t understand, Loudon discovers that Bellairs has left his hotel and set off East, presumably to go to England and find Carthew, and decides to follow him. Why? I know the narrative has to take us to England and Carthew but Loudon’s decision to do so is extremely flimsy.
Across the Atlantic
Loudon and Bellairs find themselves on the same transatlantic ship and get to know each other more, Bellairs alternating between wanting to be friends and show off his miserably uneducated mind, and sudden bursts of aggression and threat. Loudon finds out the whole of the poor man’s life story, which I won’t bother repeating here.
Stallbridge-le-Carthew
From Liverpool the odd couple find themselves making American tourist day trips to local towns and then heading further south, to Gloucester, Bath and so by stages to Dorset. Bellairs disappears, presumably to get to Carthew first – and Loudon races to the fine ancestral pile of the Carthews arriving before the lowlife lawyer. Here Loudon is treated to a guided tour of the grand Carthew mansion, the gardens and stables and prize-winning horses and flower beds, and then the local village and the local inn kept by ex-servants of the Carthews.
From these people he learns that Norris was the black sheep of the family, the second son, wanted to be an artist (don’t they all) argued with the father and was packed off to the colonies. He has, apparently, only recently returned, promptly had a big fight with his mother, and has disappeared again. Through the roundabout method of examining the inn-keeper’s daughter’s stamp collection, Loudon gathers that Norris has gone to Barbizon, a village in France a little north of Paris and a popular hang-out for would-be artists. (In fact a place Stevenson knew well and visited when his cousin, the artist Bob Stevenson, was a regular visitor there in the 1870s.)
Barbizon
Loudon sets off straight away, across England to London and then across the Channel to France and so on to Barbizon. He arrives to find the place packed with art students as in his day, and even knows some of the older-timers who show him round. And as there aren’t many Anglos he is almost immediately introduced to the dapper Carthew, who is going under the false name of Madden. Loudon recognises him as one of the sailors rescued from the Scud and Carthew admits it and admits using a fake name in San Francisco.
They talk late into the night, with Loudon giving his side of the long convoluted story of The Flying Scud – rather wearing the reader’s patience by this time – before Carthew says he will tell his side of the story.
‘And now,’ said he, ‘turn about: I must tell you my side, much as I hate it. Mine is a beastly story. You’ll wonder how I can sleep.’ (Chapter 21)
Carthew’s life story
Once again, as in the switch right at the start of the text to Loudon Dodd’s point of view, we don’t get anything like a crisp narrative focused on explaining whatever the secret is behind the wrecked ship. The exact opposite: we get a long, long, long account of Carthew’s childhood and teenage years and prolonged arguments with his father about his wish to become an artist, the family force him to go to Oxford where he is kicked out with huge debts, after which he is packed off to Europe and makes even more debts gambling, before the disgusted family sent him even further away, all the way to Sydney Australia, to contact a lawyer who would pay him a living allowance only if he regularly visited the office. It is a strange kind of echo or just repeat of the life story of loudon which we had to crawl through in the early chapters.
Carthew puts up with this treatment in Australia for a while, spending all the money before he has it and ending up a homeless bum in a Sydney park, before he gets a tip to go and work on the railways where he discovers the joys of manual labour and rough proletarian company.
Scheme to do business in the South Seas
Back in Sydney with his pay saved up, he bumps into a well-known speculator, Tom Hadden, who gets him interested in the vast profits to be made trading in the south seas. They recruit a legendary old sea captain, Bostock, ‘a slow, sour old man, with fishy eyes’, who introduces them to another captain, one Wicks who was indicted for murder when he struck down a mutineering crewman and has been in hiding as a cabman in Sydney for three years. He says he knows a good schooner that’s been laid up rotting while a massive lawsuit fights around it which has finally settled and they can get her cheap.
The deal is done, they pool their money, buy the schooner, rename her Currency Lass, hire a Chinese cook, Carthew has a final interview with the lawyer who’d been paying him his stipend to inform him he’s off for six months trading in the south seas, and they set sail.
Business success and nautical disaster
After ten days sailing they come to an island where they are steered in by the drunk pilot and the captain makes a good deal with a susceptible white trader, enough to pay off the price of the boat and make a handsome two grand profit. The businessmen celebrate and are merrily sailing on towards San Francisco, when they are caught in a severe storm. The main boom swinging round hard cuts off the foremast at the root and then is blown overboard shattering the main mast. The ship now has no power of movement at least 1,000 miles for the nearest port.
Journey to Midway
One of them has been reading the maritime guidebook by Hoyt which claims there is a coaling station only forty or so miles away at Midway Island, so they pack the whaling boat with food, all their gods and the money, and row there, arriving next day to find no station, no people, no civilisation, just a low coral island haunted by gulls and driftwood. Here they settle in, building a fire, cooking meals and slowly despairing.
Rescue
Five or six days in they are in the middle of a despairing card game when they spy a sail. It is the Hull brig The Flying Scud which the second part of this yarn has all been about. They light a big fire with driftwood and to their amazed relief the ship comes up and anchors outside the reef. They take their whaling boat out to it and are helped aboard, asked questions, fed, to their great relief.
A hard bargain
But then the captain, Trent, invites them all down into his cabin along with the big Scandinavian first mate, Goddedaal, and the mood changes. Thoughtfully he puts it to them that there is a price for their rescue. Once he’s heard the story of the big profit they made at the island, he says his offer is this: hand over the entire £2,000 profit and he’ll take them to San Francisco; refuse, and he’ll dump them back on the island. Even his own first mate is appalled and sinks his head in his hands. But as he insists and even threatens them, Mac, the unstable passionate Ulsterman in the Lasses crew, whips out a clasp knife and in the ensuing scuffle it ends in Captain Trent’s neck, he collapses onto the table and bleeds out. At which the huge Scandianavian goes berserk, whipping up a stool, bashing out Hemstead’s brains at one stroke, breaking Mac’s arm at the next, at which point Carthew draws his pistol and shoots him, then a crew member puts his face round the door and they shot him and then – in a pitiful scene, unlike anything else in the book and destroying forever its sense of humorous deprecation – our crew hunt down and methodically slaughter the whole crew of the Scud, refusing their pleas for mercy but shooting them like animals and throwing them overboard. This has all the horror of a very modern sensibility, like something as cruel and amoral as a contemporary movie, but all told in incongruously Victorian prose. Our crew throw the bodies overboard, make an effort to clear away the blood, getting drunk on raw gin until they pass out.
Saved
The next morning they awake with terrible consciences and the psychological damage is described in depth by passages which must surely have been by Stevenson. They dispose of the last bodies, clear more blood, are going through the ship’s papers when they spot the smoke of a coal-fired ship approaching. In a mad panic they try and hide all evidence of the slaughter, search for the ship’s papers and dispose of as many as possible. Wicks comes up with the mad idea of stabbing his writing hand as if in an accident to explain why the most recent parts of the ship’s log were written by Goddedaal. And as the steamer anchors and a jolly boat rows towards them, Wicks hurriedly assigns them all identities from the slaughtered crew: he himself will impersonate Trent, Carthew with be Goddedaal, and so on.
Almost caught
All goes sort of well as the young officer sent to investigate accepts their story and takes them, with their chests containing the treasure, back to the ship which turns out to be a Royal Navy boat, the Tempest. Here they start like guilty things at the least questioning, Wicks is permanently trembling and the climax comes when someone taps Carthew on the shoulder and recognises him as Carthew; he faints clean away. Their saviour is the ship’s doctor, Urquhart. he realises Wicks’s stabbed hand is self-inflicted, he hears Carthew mentioning the dead shipmates in his delirium and eventually the two guilty men confess what happened. Surprisingly the doctor helps them cover it up, helps smuggle Carthew off the ship in San Francisco and carries on covering for them, even when Loudon tracks him down to question him.
Tied up threads
And thus almost all the mysteries of The Flying Scud, the ship Pinkerton and Loudon set out so innocently to buy and do a little trading with, are sorted out, from the nervous appearance of the crew in the Frisco bar where Loudon first saw them, to the crazy auction, where Bellair was under instructions from Carthew – masquerading as Dickson – to pay any sum to ensure nobody else came into contact with it. And when Loudon overheard Bellairs speaking to Dickson/Carthew on the phone and then rang the same number and asked him why he wanted to buy the Scud so badly – the conspirators in their paranoia took it as a sign that the authorities were onto them and scattered to the four winds, Carthew travelling back to England, revealing something of his disaster to his appalled mother, before hurrying on to France.
Where Loudon finally tracked him down to hear the whole of this long and grim narrative.
Epilogue
The final few pages consist of a letter to one Will H. Low, who I don’t think we’ve heard of before. The narrator of the letter seems to be a newspaperman (?) who has helped arrange the publication of this whole narrative. (There is a sarcastic aside where he claims to be ‘wholly modern in sentiment, and think nothing more noble than to publish people’s private affairs at so much a line’, a thought which sheds light on Henry James’s contemporary story, The Aspern Papers). He describes what became of all the participants. Pinkerton is now in business with Captain Nares, who keeps him on the straight and narrow. He’s bought a newspaper and has plans to become state senator. Dodds is in partnership with Carthew: Carthew bought another schooner and Dodds manages it, going on the voyages as super-cargo. Hadden and Mac (whose hot temper caused all the trouble) took a turn at the gold fields in Venezuela, and Wicks went on alone to Valparaiso. Why is he writing this letter?
Why dedicate to you a tale of a caste so modern;—full of details of our barbaric manners and unstable morals;—full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce a page in which the dollars do not jingle;—full of the unrest and movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama—in the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic?
And he describes how the authors were discussing recent nautical tales and disasters – so maybe this letter is being written by Stevenson in his own character (?). Stevenson then explains how he and his collaborator thought to make the story into that modern genre,
the police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the end;
The risk of these is they often appear mechanical contrivances. Hence the decision to give such a very very long lead-in to the main characters – hence Loudon and his pa back in the States, and the long section about being an art student in Paris, and the long sections about Pinkerton’s preposterous schemes.
All this is meant to draw the reader in – but I defy any modern reader of this book who wouldn’t have found it do exactly the opposite and eventually tire and exhaust them so much that they give up reading the book before the mystery proper even appears.
Humour
Stevenson’s speciality is derring-do and adventure, risks and perils and threatening – often Gothic horror – tension. By contrast, this long book is written in a tone of urbane drollery. Once in Honolulu, Loudon goes to visit one of the men contacted by Pinkerton to take receipt of and fence the opium, a Mr Fowler.
This gentleman owned a bungalow on the Waikiki beach; and there in company with certain young bloods of Honolulu, I was entertained to a sea-bathe, indiscriminate cocktails, a dinner, a hula-hula, and (to round off the night), poker and assorted liquors. To lose money in the small hours to pale, intoxicated youth, has always appeared to me a pleasure overrated.
The last sentence is not exactly Wilde, but it is a deliberate epigram, intended to be dry and witty. The books is full of this kind of effect, far from the style used in Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Master of Ballantrae. Whereas the narrators of those books talk up the action, and contrive an atmosphere of tension and melodrama, the narrator of The Wrecker takes a self-deprecating view of himself and everything around him, with a steady stream of epigrams, witticisms and a self-conscious punning attitude to words.
In such a mixed humour, I made up what it pleases me to call my mind, and once more involved myself in the story of Carthew and the Flying Scud. The same night I wrote a letter of farewell to Jim, and one of anxious warning to Dr. Urquart begging him to set Carthew on his guard; the morrow saw me in the ferry-boat; and ten days later, I was walking the hurricane deck on the City of Denver. By that time my mind was pretty much made down again, its natural condition.
For all the thousands of times I’ve heard people having their mind made up, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make the fairly obvious joke claim that their mind is made down, and it is typical of Loudon to go on and joke that this is pretty much his mind’s natural condition.
In his humorous mode, the narrator is well aware that he is writing rubbish. When Loudon and Captai Nares are ransacking the shipwrecked Scud, they find some artists’ pencils which gives Loudon a moment’s pause.
‘Yes,’ I continued, ‘it’s been used by an artist, too: see how it’s sharpened–not for writing–no man could write with that. An artist, and straight from Sydney? How can he come in?’
‘O, that’s natural enough,’ sneered Nares. ‘They cabled him to come up and illustrate this dime novel.’
One small moment particularly struck me: Loudon creeps up behind him to eavesdrop on the lawyer Bellairs as he makes a telephone call to his client from the auctioneer house:
I scarce know anything that gives a lower view of man’s intelligence than to overhear (as you thus do) one side of a communication.
How prophetic, now that all of us have multiple moments on any bus or train where we are forced to listen to half a conversation as someone natters on their mobile phone and are invariably drawn to conclude that both participants are imbeciles.
Psychological acuity
A feature of Stevenson’s successful books is their psychological insight. Jekyll and Hyde is a sustained investigation of the human mind, but his other successes throw out all kinds of insights into human nature. In my review of The Master of Ballantrae – itself a sustained contrast between the two psychological types of the feuding brothers – I’ve mentioned the scene where the servant Mackellar tries to kick the wicked Master over the edge of the ship they’re sailing on in a storm – the acuteness comes in from the way the Master actually respects Mackellar for trying to kill him and Mackellar, in turn, can’t help admiring the master’s largeness of spirit, even while still detesting him. Peculiar insights into human behaviour like this litter the better books.
And so – through the essentially light and mostly dry ironic style of The Wreckers – there are occasional moments of something deeper, more visionary. Safely back in San Francisco Loudon takes captain Nares to dinner and both of them find it hard to reconcile the intensity of their hard labour dismantling the Scud in the harsh glare of Midway Island, amid the screeching seagulls and the crash of the waves, with the polite restaurant they now find themselves in, formally dressed and waited on hand and foot.
The same night I had Nares to dinner. His sunburnt face, his queer and personal strain of talk, recalled days that were scarce over and that seemed already distant. Through the music of the band outside, and the chink and clatter of the dining-room, it seemed to me as if I heard the foaming of the surf and the voices of the sea-birds about Midway Island. The bruises on our hands were not yet healed; and there we sat, waited on by elaborate darkies, eating pompano and drinking iced champagne.
‘Think of our dinners on the Norah, captain, and then oblige me by looking round the room for contrast.’
He took the scene in slowly. ‘Yes, it is like a dream,’ he said: ‘like as if the darkies were really about as big as dimes; and a great big scuttle might open up there, and Johnson stick in a great big head and shoulders, and cry, ‘Eight bells!’—and the whole thing vanish.’
If the plot and dialogue are given in an almost entirely even, sensible, sober, rather ironic style, it is the ‘strange’ moments like this which keep the reader reading… Just about.
Until the final grisly scenes. The massacre at the climax of the book comes in chapter 24 of the book’s 25 chapters. I.e. it is only at the very very bitter end of the text that we have anything like Stevenson’s characteristic psychological depth and this itself is a little overwhelmed by the amount of blood and gore. Still, the feelings of the sailors as they land on Midway and realise they are doomed to starve to death – and then their feelings in the aftermath of the massacre – are completely at odds with everything which preceded them and leave an odd, damaged taste in the mouth.
Old words and phrases
One of the main appeals of reading old books is they have a different way with the English language: individual words are used in a different sense from our contemporary meanings, and entire phrases appear which you can puzzle out but which have long disappeared. Therefore, reading old books gives you a sense on the wider possibilities of the English language and, even if only momentarily, expands your mind.
That was a home word of Pinkerton’s, deserving to be writ in letters of gold on the portico of every school of art: ‘What I can’t see is why you should want to do nothing else.’
‘A home word’? Presumably meaning, a particularly telling or accurate saying.
‘Just let me get down on my back in a hayfield,’ said he, ‘and you’ll find there’s no more snap to me than that much putty.’
‘Snap’? Presumably meaning vim, vigour, zest, energy.
It was blowing fresh outside, with a strong send of sea.
‘Send’ being, apparently, the heave of the sea, the motion of the sea against a vessel.
Just before the battle, mother
In a typically comic touch, Loudon not only finds himself made the reluctant front man for Pinkerton’s surprisingly successful business venture of organised trips to have picnics on boats out of San Francisco, but after humming it once finds himself called upon to sing the full version of the classic American tune ‘Just before the battle, mother’ until his performance is advertised on the posters and becomes a regular part of the excruciating routine. Listening to it gives a sense of how long long ago this society, its values and morals, its fundamental beliefs and values, are from our own.
Conclusion
Very broadly speaking there are two Stevensons: Bad Stevenson rambles without focus, his plots unravelling into increasing preposterousness and he exhausts the reader in endless peregrinations which eventually make you vow never to read one of his justly-forgotten books ever again. The classic example is the awful New Arabian Nights and, I’m afraid, this novel jostles into that group.
Then there is Brilliant Stevenson – as in Kidnapped and Treasure Island – works which make you think you must track down and read every word this genius of atmosphere, pace and incident ever wrote.
Until you find yourself reading another long, gruelling, amusing but ultimately inconsequential folly like The Wrecker. And so the would-be fan finds himself ping-ponging from one pole to the other.
The first two Holmes novellas, first published in magazines then in book form, weren’t particularly successful. But the editor of The Strand magazine, George Newnes, saw their potential and commissioned Conan Doyle to write 12 short stories using the Holmes and Watson characters, publishing one a month from July 1891 to June 1892. It was these monthly instalments which began Holmes’s rise to global fame.
A Scandal in Bohemia
Client: The King of Bohemia calls to say he is engaged to an eligible aristocrat but has had an affair with Irene Adler who has photos of them together. Holmes disguises himself as a groom to get the lie of the land, visits her and arranges an elaborate ruse whereby a fire cracker is thrown into the living room and her startled glance at the wall shows Holmes where the safe is. But the next day when he calls to claim them, she has decamped. She is always The Woman.
The Adventure of the Red-Headed League
Client: Jabez Wilson. Jabez is invited to join a league established by an American philanthropist; he is paid to go sit in a room and transcribe the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is an elaborate ruse to get access to his cellar and tunnel into the bank next door.
A Case of Identity
Client: Mary Sutherland, a quiet legatee of a will, becomes engaged to Hosmer Angel at a dance but he mysteriously disappears. Turns out it is none other than her mother’s young second husband trying to swindle her out of her inheritance.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
Client: Alice Turner. In Herefordshire a landowner has been murdered by Boscombe pool and his son found bloodied and with the weapon. Eventually the richer neighbouring landowner reveals the back story where one was a bandit and one a security guard in Australia. The bandit, John Turner, came back to Blighty to go straight but was haunted by the blackmailing McCarthy who was determined to marry his son to Turner’s daughter, Alice.
The Five Orange Pips
Client: John Openshaw, his uncle Elias returned from the States in the 1860s but has been nervous since receiving an envelope containing 5 orange pips, becoming drunk and paranoid until he is found dead in a pool. Then his brother receives a letter containing five orange pips and instructions to leave ‘the papers’ on the sundial… It is leaders of the Ku Klux Klan coming and going to Britain on sailing ships, posting threats and murdering the unfortunate recipients of the pips.
The Man with the Twisted Lip
Client: Mrs. St. Clair. She glimpses her husband at the window of an opium den, runs upstairs, there is no-one but a raddled addict. The addict is her husband, ashamed to be a City beggar.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
No client. A goose contains a vast blue jewel. It was stolen by James Ryder in league with a serving girl to the Countess of Morcar, smuggled across London then, in a panic, stuffed down the crop of one of his sister’s geese at her goose farm in Brixton, but then the wrong goose is despatched in a job lot to a pub where it is bought by a man who, drunk, is beset by toughs and drops the goose, which is rescued by a hotel commissionaire who brings it to Holmes!
The Adventure of the Speckled Band
Client: Miss Helen Stoner. Impoverished Dr. Roylott forces Helen Stoner, an heiress, to move into a particular bedroom of his heavily mortgaged ancestral home, Stoke Moran where her sister had mysteriously died, her last words being, ‘The speckled band’. It is a poisonous snake brought back by Roylott from India.
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
Client: Victor Hatherley. Victor is hired by a German-speaking man to fix a powerful hydraulic device in the country. He quickly realises it is not mining but counterfeiting equipment and makes his escape with the help of a sweet anguished lady but not before the swinish German has hacked off his thumb with a cleaver! He makes his way to Watson who brings him to Holmes…
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
Client: Lord Robert St. Simon marries Miss Hatty Doran of San Francisco in a very high society wedding but she disappears from the wedding breakfast. Holmes establishes she has been contacted by her first, American, husband, long thought to be dead and has returned to him.
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
Client: Alexander Holder of Streatham, a banker, brings home a priceless coronet but awakes in the night to find his son wrestling with it, half of it snapped off and stolen, his son refuses to say more and is charged. Holmes to the rescue!
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Client: Violet Hunter is mysteriously offered a job at very high pay to be a governess, to have her hair cut, wear a blue dress and sit in a window just so every day. She realises there is a locked wing of the house and suspects someone is incarcerated there, and asks Holmes’s advice…
The Sherlock Universe
From the get-go Conan Doyle deploys the simple strategy of having Dr Watson refer to innumerable other cases which Holmes has investigated, but most of them never written up in his case notes or stories. For example, Watson mentions in passing that in 1887 along Holmes was involved in the Adventure of the Paradol Chamber, the Amateur Mendicant Society, the loss of the Sophy Anderson, the adventures of the Grice Patersons, the Camberwell Poisoning, the Tankerville Club Scandal and so on. In The Speckled Band he says that Holmes was involved in now fewer than 70 cases between 1882 and the time of writing (1891).
This multiplicity, this cornucopia of events and cases which Watson conjures up in throwaway references, creates a universe around the adventures which he actually writes up, which 1) helps to give them plausibility and 2) continually reinforces the sense of Holmes’s fame and superhuman abilities.
It is also attractive to a certain type of mentality, a certain type of fan, who loves immersing themselves in the minutiae of the fictional universe, a mentality which in our day extends to a vast range of adaptation and merchandising – the Robert Downey Jnr movies, the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series, the new books and stories, the books about the historical background and wider context, quiz books, the board games and mugs and t-shirts and top trumps sets etc etc.
Literature and quotations
Early on in A Study in Scarlet Watson humorously summarises Holmes’s fields of knowledge and says ‘Literature: Nil’. In fact this is extensively refuted in the texts themselves, where Holmes is very given to sententiously quoting from a wide range of literary sources:
In A Study in Scarlet Holmes quotes Boileau: ‘Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire’ (‘A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him’). The very last words of the novella are a quote from Horace: ‘Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo / Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplor in arca’ (‘The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box’)
Almost the last words of The Sign of Four are a quote from Goethe: ‘Schade dass die Natur nur EINEN Mensch aus Dir schuf / Denn zum wuerdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff’ (‘Nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man and a rogue’)
In The Boscombe Valley Mystery, when bored, Holmes pulls out a pocket edition of Petrarch.
In A Case of Identity he quotes the Persian poet Hafiz.
In The Red-Headed League he quotes Flaubert writing to George Sand, ‘L’homme c’est rien, l’oeuvre c’est tout’ (‘The man is nothing, the work is everything.’)
In The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor he quotes Thoreau.
Apart from Watson being wrong about Holmes’s lack of knowledge of literature, I think these literary quotations demonstrate two key aspects of the texts:
Their sententiousness: Holmes is an extremely didactic character. On one level, the stories consist of Holmes endlessly lecturing, teaching and scolding Watson.
Their multitextuality: the stories are made up of numerous other texts: newspaper reports and adverts, notes, police reports, Holmes’s own files and records, and so on. The stories are pieced together, stitched together like puzzles made of fragments of other texts.
The fin-de-siècle and Oscar Wilde
There are numerous points of contact between the Holmes and the works of Oscar Wilde.
We’ve seen how The Sign of Four was commissioned by the same publisher who commissioned The Picture of Dorian Gray, an indication of 1) how close the London literary scene was and 2) the financial realities underlying the creation of short dramatic stories.
But Holmes also has a lot in common with Wilde’s aristocratic protagonists, Lord Henry Wotton or Lord Arthur Saville. It’s true he is not an exquisite fainéant, a dandy, an aesthete. But he does display plenty of aristocratic disdain for convention, effortless superiority over the laughably incompetent bourgeois police detectives, a lordly indifference to how he is perceived, sang-froid and indifference to personal danger.
Ennui He suffers from the same kind aristocratic ennui (boredom) which drives the Wildean hero into dangerous moral territory. At the end of The Adventure of the Red-Headed League, when Watson admires his deductive skills, Holmes replies:
‘It saved me from ennui,’ he answered, yawning. ‘Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.’
Paradox And Holmes is much given to paradoxes: time and again his detective work reveals the strange and telling lying behind the apparently innocent and mundane, or vice versa; and sometimes he summarises his attitude in witty paradoxes which sound just like Wilde:
‘It is, of course, a trifle, but nothing is so important as trifles.’
London the cesspool of Empire
One of the many appealing things about the stories is how Doyle capitalises on London’s position as heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known to bring in characters with backstories from all over the world:
The Red-Headed League claims to have been set up by an American millionaire.
In The Boscombe Valley Mystery the two fathers made their money in the colonies, in Victoria state, Australia.
The Five Orange Pips is about the long reach of the sinister Ku Klux Klan from far away in the American South.
In The Adventure of the Speckled Band the ill-fated Dr. Grimesby Roylott has brought his snakes back from India.
The Noble Bachelor marries the daughter of an American who made his pile in the California Gold Rush.
And so it goes on, creating a particularly quaint and dated vision of the world when half the map was painted red and the world was run by Anglo-Saxon chaps.
Women
If the chaps are, for the most part, noble Anglo-Saxons, then the women are even more dated, fixed in amber from that period – saintly, innocent, virginal helpmeets, dutiful daughters, and damsels in distress. The image of the concerned and helpless young lady, flushed and panting, caught in a hapless plight and requiring help from Holmes the Master-Male, recurs again and again. Any grown-up would be repelled by this stereotyping, but Holmes isn’t for grown-ups.
‘Nada the Lily’ is Rider Haggard’s sixth novel. Haggard distinguished between his ‘Romances’ – which included the She and Allan Quatermain series, both featuring a large element of fantasy and the supernatural – and his ‘Novels’, which are more naturalistic, where the emphasis is more on human relationships than the fantastic.
Blacks
The most striking feature of Nada the Lily is that it is set entirely among South African blacks. An (unnamed) white man only appears in the few pages of the frame narrative where he meets an ancient witch-doctor. I don’t know of any other novels of the time which are set only among blacks, and where the thoughts of black characters good, bad and indifferent are described in great detail.
Tragic romance
The last hundred or so pages of the novel describe the love affair between the the mighty warrior Umslopogaas and the beautiful Zulu maiden, Nada, which gives the book its title. (It’s true that, early in the book the narrator hints that Nada might have white blood in her, from a Portuguese trader who stayed with the Swazi tribe from whom Mopo’s wife, Mcropha, came.)
Chaka the tyrant
But this love story is completely overshadowed by Mopo’s long servitude to the Zulu tyrant, Chaka, and the multiple examples of Chaka’s appalling cruelty and sadism which dominate the first 200 pages. Chaka (nowadays known as Shaka) was a real historical character, founder of the Zulu nation as the predominant military force in south-east Africa, a dominance they held from his kingship (1816-28) until the Zulu wars with the invading British in the late 1870s. Chaka is portrayed as a precursor of Stalin, paranoid and cruel in the extreme, given to ordering the extermination of whole tribes, the casual execution of complete innocents on the slightest pretext. The Wikipedia article on Shaka says some of the legends about Shaka’s cruelty might be colonial and apartheid propaganda; but still says there’s plenty of evidence of the large areas laid waste, of murder, torture, cannibalism carried out under his unhinged edicts:
‘After the death of his mother Shaka ordered as a sign of mourning that no crops should be planted during the following year, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people who were deemed to be insufficiently grief-stricken were executed, though it wasn’t restricted to humans, cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like.’
Violent African novels
The novel is like this only more so, and for 200 long pages. It cast a cloud of misery and murder over me for the week it took to read. The sadistic cruelty and casual violence found on every page reminded me of other African novels I’ve read –
the psychopathic African leader, Sam, at the heart of Chinua Achebe’s 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savannah
the sadistic father, Eugene, at the heart of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel, Purple Hibiscus
the psychopathic Idi Amin at the heart of Giles Foden’s 1998 novel, The Last King of Scotland
the sadism and cruelty taught to child soldiers during the war in Sierra Leone described in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s 2005 novel, Moses, Citizen and Me
several books about the Rwandan genocide, the civil war in the Congo, about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, about the Sudan and Darfur, about the civil wars in Mozambique and Namibia..
Thus, most of the books about Africa I’ve ever read, whether fiction or non-fiction, detail a stupefying level of violence and cruelty, so Nada, extreme though it is, fits right in with what I’ve read elsewhere.
An African epic
However Haggard isn’t detailing Chaka’s psychopathic behaviour for racist reasons (unlike later Boer and apartheid propagandists). The opposite. Haggard is deliberately setting out to write an African epic, a genre which raises its characters to the level of archetypal heroes and is written in a high, unflinching and sombre style. The story of how Umslopogaas is rescued at his birth reminds me of the legend of Moses and even the childermass; the harsh man-to-man combats in the dust and heat of the African veldt remind me over and over of the unforgiving brutality of The Iliad.
Haggard, like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated by folk tales, ancient myths and legends but, unlike most, his vast output includes attempts to rewrite them or bring them into the modern age: Haggard actually wrote a Viking saga, Eric Brighteyes, and a continuation of the Odyssey, The World’s Desire. To my mind, in Nada, he is consciously striving for an epic oral style to give Homeric dignity to his Zulu protagonists. The long story is told out loud over a succession of evenings by the old witch-doctor, Mopo, to the anonymous white man who takes it down and publishes it. The opening echoes conventions of the epic form:
‘You ask me, my father, to tell you the tale of the youth of Umslopogaas, holder of the iron Chieftainess, the axe Groan-maker, who was named Bulalio the Slaughterer, and of his love for Nada, the most beautiful of Zulu women. It is long; but you are here for many nights, and, if I live to tell it, it shall be told. Strengthen your heart, my father, for I have much to say that is sorrowful, and even now, when I think of Nada the tears creep through the horn that shuts out my old eyes from light.’
It doesn’t quite invoke a Muse, but it does justify the purpose and form of the text, it foretells the tragic ending of the tale right at the start, and it uses multiple epithets to build up the heroic stature of the male protagonist, Umslopogaas. The whole text is cast in this style, an imagining by Haggard of the elevated yet also laconic style of a pre-literate, oral people. The deeper you read, the more completely convincing it becomes, and you find yourself entranced, sitting in the gloom of a cramped African hut, listening to the low voice of an eerie old man as he tells his long and tragic tale.
‘All that day till the sun grew low we walked round the base of the great Ghost Mountain, following the line of the river. We met no one, but once we came to the ruins of a kraal, and in it lay the broken bones of many men, and with the bones rusty assegais and the remains of ox-hide shields, black and white in colour. Now I examined the shields, and knew from their colour that they had been carried in the hands of those soldiers who, years ago, were sent out by Chaka to seek for Umslopogaas, but who had returned no more.’
In August 1897, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year, a few months after Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous was published in book form, Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’‘ began to appear in The New Review.
(This was a literary journal edited by WE Henley, major editor and minor poet, remembered for his poem Invictus, quoted by Nelson Mandela upon his release from prison and so used as the title of a recent movie about South Africa. Henley was an important player in 1890s literature. As editor of the Scots Observer he’d brought Robert Louis Stevenson to national attention. After Stevenson surprised the literary world by decamping to the South Seas, Henley was the first in London to recognise The Next Big Thing – Kipling – and helped him establish his reputation by publishing the Barrack Room Ballads in 1892.)
The Nigger is a novella, only 140 pages in the Penguin edition, a study of men isolated on a merchant ship on a long sea voyage who live through a terrifying storm which pitches the ship right onto its side and nearly drowns them all. It is directly comparable in length, publication date and subject matter to Kipling’s Captains Courageous.
Both books are, frankly, hard to read, but for different reasons. Kipling is concerned to show you he has mastered the terminology of sea fishing, so his text is stuffed with technical terms. When he’s not showing off his expertise, his characters are talking in a phonetically rendered version of New England fisherman slang which is almost unreadable:
“‘Ver’ good. Ver’ good don,’ said Manuel ‘After supper I show you a little schooner I make, with all her ropes. So we shall learn.’ ‘Fust-class fer a passenger,’ said Dan, ‘Dad he’s jest allowed you be wuth your salt maybe fore you’re kaownded. Thet’s a heap fer Dad. I learn you more our next watch together.” (Chapter 3)
In terms of meaning or purpose, Kipling’s book is a ‘coming of age’ tale in which a spoilt American brat is transformed into a Man by learning discipline and duty and comradeship from the fishermen he’s fallen among. Though all the characters are American, the message is British public school: Become a Man through Responsibility, Hard Work, through doing your Duty.
Conrad’s vision and style are far removed from this. His vision is one of European existentialism, of despair at the meaninglessness of human existence. His pages are overwhelmed with mournful asides about the immensity of the sea and the pettiness of human concerns.
A heavy atmosphere of oppressive quietude pervaded the ship. In the afternoon men went about washing clothes and hanging them out to dry in the unprosperous breeze with the meditative language of disenchanted philosophers. Very little was said. The problem of life seemed too voluminous for the narrow limits of human speech, and by common consent it was abandoned to the great sea that had from the beginning enfolded it in its immense grip; to the sea that knew all, and would in time infallibly unveil to each the wisdom hidden in all the errors, the certitude that lurks in doubts, the realm of safety and peace beyond the frontiers of sorrow and fear. (Chapter 5)
And as you can see, this vision is conveyed in a baroque style of exceeding wordiness – a seemingly limitless litany of boom words and big phrases, all circling hopelessly round his one big perception – the horror of existence. The word ‘horror’ is repeated a number of times.
Kipling’s bright, shallow British optimism. Or Conrad’s doom-laden European pessimism. Posterity – and literature courses everywhere – have favoured Conrad. But is that right?
As to the ‘nigger’ of the title, the novella centres on a black sailor – James Wait – who ships with the Narcissus knowing he is dying (presumably of TB, though this is never made explicit).
Various crew members – Old Singleton, the sneak Donkin, the youth Charley, sturdy Captain Allisoun, the first mate Baker – are described at length and become fairly ‘real’, but Wait is an allegorical figure, the man doomed to Death who melodramatises his plight, and becomes the psychological centre of the ship, mesmerising the crew.
I think the book is a failure. I didn’t understand from the text or from Conrad’s preface the point of Wait. Conrad keeps calling him a fake, an imposter, but Wait does, truly, die of illness, exactly as he’d been worrying.
I think Conrad is wrestling in a confused manner with the issues which obsess him: his sincere love of the sea and his sailor comrades is brought up against his just-as-powerful personal vision of the heartless universe, and the failure of the story is Conrad’s failure to make them coalesce in any coherent manner.
To my mind Conrad sorted these confused feelings out in his next book, also a novella, Heart of Darkness, published in 1899 – whose key quote, ‘The horror, the horror’, has become part of the culture thanks to the movie adaptation, ‘Apocalypse Now’, and whose critique of the mindless brutality of western Imperialism has never been surpassed. Here the horror of Conrad’s vision finds its ‘objective correlative’ – the publicly understandable image or symbol of Conrad’s private feelings – in the story of Kurtz, the exemplary imperialist servant gone grotesquely rotten in the depths of the jungle.
In the same year as Heart of Darkness, Kipling published his volume of stories about jolly public schoolboys, Stalky and Co., learning through their wily japes the ways of Brotherhood and Service which will stand them in good stead when they go out to run the British Empire.
Kipling’s reputation leapt even higher on the publication in 1892 of the Barrack Room Ballads (known as ‘series 1’, since he ended up publishing a further set or ‘series 2’ in 1896).
It took me just over 40 minutes to read the 21 short poems in this book and, wow, what a punch they still pack! I love music hall songs, and so I love the voice and ballad form of these poems. I love the Cockney spelling, I love the humour which shines out of every line, the cheekiness of the soldier, and the cheekiness of Kipling’s romanticising the soldier. My favourite is Fuzzy Wuzzy, which I’ve read out numerous times to the kids (these poems being designed to recite, boom or chant out loud). There is energy and enthusiasm and verbal felicity, there is something to entertain, in every poem.
‘E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,
An’, before we know, ‘e’s ‘ackin’ at our ‘ead;
‘E’s all ‘ot sand an’ ginger when alive,
An’ ‘e’s generally shammin’ when ‘e’s dead.
‘E’s a daisy, ‘e’s a ducky, ‘e’s a lamb!
‘E’s a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,
‘E’s the on’y thing that doesn’t give a damn
For a Regiment o’ British Infantree!
For their late-Victorian audience, they also made their mark by giving ‘official’, published voice to the little-heard-from Tommy, the ordinary soldier, the backbone of the Army which policed the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. Their boisterous confidence of form and tone, their geographic sweep, their underdogs’ point of view, combined to make a great hit and Kipling into a literary sensation.
Contemporary relevance
These poems from the late 1880s refer to Britain’s ongoing wars in the Sudan, in Afghanistan and in Burma where we were attempting to bring Peace and Civilisation. I open today’s paper (May 2012) and read that civil war is once again threatening in Sudan, the Americans are finally considering ending their 10 year occupation of Afghanistan, and the Burmese military have only just allowed the first fair elections in a generation to their oppressed population. Kipling may seem like a buffoon to us now, but we’re not doing an exactly brilliant job of solving the problems his generation struggled with.
A video
I’ve found musical versions of some of the ballads, sung by the (then) world-famous Australian bass-baritone, Peter Dawson. I defy you not to smile!
Books & Boots 