Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries

Whitman and Thoreau as Literary Stowaways in Stevenson's American Writings

Whitman and Thoreau as Literary Stowaways in Stevenson’s American Writings       .     Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters, the works based on his – journey to America, are, for several critics, the products of a travel experience that altered not only the man but also his writing.1 J. C. Furnas says that the American travel writings “have a new energy and pith,” and he suggests that Stevenson “might never have come so far had he lacked the physical and emotional shock treatment that America afforded him” (Furnas : , ). According to James D. Hart, who restored previously omitted material in his edition of the American works, From Scotland to Silverado, the trip follows a trajectory “from youth to maturity.” Stevenson’s famously uncomfortable journey, ill health, and new marriage, with its consequent burden of writing to support a family, developed a “mood of maturity, and a sense of substance” in his works (Hart : xxxvi, xxxvii).2 Andrew Noble, in his edition of the American texts, From the Clyde to California, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Emigrant Journey, also uses the word “maturity” to characterize the American works, introducing the figure of the “boundary” to describe the national, class, and personal frontiers traversed during the year in America. Of The Amateur Emigrant, he maintains: “This is a book concerned with crossing multiple, inter-connected boundaries: from Scotland to America; from being an upper-middle-class, slightly spoiled writer to mixing with a far lower social stratum; from being single to becoming married” (Noble : ). The experience, so the argument runs, formed a new and better writer. The creative gains that result from coming through painful realities are  substantial. Stevenson (Ltrs : ) himself was convinced of the quality of The Amateur Emigrant, writing from California a letter to Colvin in midApril  that “I shall always think of it as my best work” (Ltrs : ).3 Noble agrees that The Amateur Emigrant is Stevenson’s preeminent work: “The journey West had hurt Stevenson into great prose; into the creation of a book which, arguably, he was not to equal” (Noble : ). The trip to America, undertaken to reunite with Fanny in California, was an immersion course in the privation and misery of emigrant steam and rail travel. As almost everyone who has written about it concedes, the reality was a chastening corrective to Stevenson’s romantic view of the New World. “For many years,” Stevenson explains in The Amateur Emigrant, “America was to me a sort of promised land.” It had, moreover, the added appeal of release from constraint and convention: “the war of life was still conducted in the open and on free barbaric terms” (Stevenson : ).4 The emigrants he observed, however, were hardly brave seekers of the golden land of democracy and equality; they were largely life’s failures. “The more I saw of my fellow-passengers,” writes Stevenson, the subdued enthusiast, “the less I was tempted to the lyric note” (). It seems reasonable to approach the American travel writings, as others have done, by examining the details of Stevenson’s life as they emerge from letters or other accounts of this period. I would like, however, to explore the texts from the perspective of literary influence. It is not my intention to minimize the importance of Stevenson’s actual experience, the nearsteerage accommodations on ship, and the cramped, airless, and miserable circumstances of his emigrant train.5 Nonetheless, I wish to argue that Stevenson relied on more than his personal experience of the journey for his texts, and that for much of what appears in them he drew on his reading of American literature, and two works in particular. First, there is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (), which holds a central place in Stevenson’s essay “Books Which Have Influenced Me” as having “tumbled the world upside down” (Stevenson a: ). Equally important as an influence on the American writings is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (). To some extent emigrant and nonemigrant travelers alike project an imaginative idea of the places to which they travel. For those with a literary bent, the mental images of places and people derive from books. In Stevenson’s case, Leaves of Grass and Walden, I would suggest, helped to shape the imagination that created the American travel books. The evidence for my case comes not only from the traces of these works in the travel books but also from Stevenson’s essays on Whitman and Thoreau.  Textual and Cultural Crossings [3.145.183.137] Project...