Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: The South Seas from Journal to Fiction

 Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson The South Seas from Journal to Fiction        .        By the s, Robert Louis Stevenson enjoyed international fame as the author of such masterpieces as Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde () and Master of Ballantrae (). Yet Stevenson suffered from a growing fear that his literary output was “inadequate,” an anxiety that reached a crescendo during his cruises in the South Seas (from ) and residence on Samoa (from ), remote from what his friend Edmund Gosse termed the “literary atmosphere” of London (McLynn : ).1 A significant source of this self-dissatisfaction was his failure to produce the magnum opus on the history, society, traditions, and culture of the South Seas that he had envisaged. “I am about waist-deep in my big book on the South Seas: the big book on the South Seas it ought to be, and shall,” Stevenson wrote Marcel Schwob on  August  (Ltrs : ). Yet, daunted by the scale and complexity of this undertaking, Stevenson was compelled to scale down this project and find other outlets for his South Sea materials. The spontaneous and random propulsions of “cruising”—Stevenson’s ideal mode of travel—were not propitious for the laborious production of a major volume of historical and anthropological analysis. Rather, cruising was conducive to the production of more informal texts such as journals and letters, which could be published in fragments, and the South Sea “yarns,” being marketable commodities, would yield profit from further excursions in the South Seas. Cruising, the antithesis of strain and labor, became a codeword for Stevenson’s state of well-being, both physical and emotional, signifying travel without a specific destination or external compulsion, pursued for sensual pleasure, and rewarded by enticing encounters with new scenes.2 In a letter to Sidney Colvin written in April  while on board the Janet Nicoll, Stevenson made clear that it was not simply the South Seas climate that he needed but also the stimulation of cruising itself: “this life is the only one that suits me; so long as I cruise in the South Seas, I shall be well and happy . . . I mean that, so soon as I cease from cruising, the nerves are strained, the decline commences” (Ltrs : ). I will argue that cruising also entailed a new practice of writing for Stevenson, a form of resistance to the pressures on him to commodify his experiences of the South Seas for consumption by distant readers. Stevenson continued to conceive of his nonfiction pieces on the South Seas as “chapters” of an imagined “big book,” rather than occasional letters designed to convey the flavor of the South Seas to the casual reader. Writing Colvin in June , Stevenson expresses his undaunted confidence that “By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels: masses of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry, never was so generous a farrago” (Ltrs : ). The ambitious purpose for this “material” was undermined, however, by the commercial arrangement Stevenson had made with the American literary entrepreneur Sam McClure with whom, as early as March , Stevenson had signed a contract to write a series of fifty “letters” from the South Seas. Planning to syndicate these letters in newspapers in Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, McClure wrote Stevenson (in May ) that he hoped to be able to get him $ per letter (Ltrs : n), a sum Stevenson expected would defray the considerable expense of chartering the yacht Casco and crew: as he wrote Charles Baxter in May , “the Casco letters may go towards repayment of the capital now borrowed . I shall think it unlucky if I cannot get from ten to fifteen hundred out of them” (Ltrs : ). As published in the New York Sun, the South Sea letters were subtitled “Letters from a Leisurely Traveller,” evoking a context of ease and suggesting that the act of cruising was casual and pleasurable, rather than pursued for profit or with literary labor as its pretext (Stevenson a).3 Such an ambience of dilettante leisure was likely to alienate those Victorians who lived by the Protestant work ethic. Indeed, the initial response to these letters by British and American readers was discouraging, as the critics who had always doubted the wisdom of Stevenson’s longterm “cruise” became more vocal. Colvin, rarely inclined to boost Stevenson’s confidence,  Scotland and the South Seas [3.146.105.137] Project MUSE (2024...