Читать книгу Footsteps - Richard Holmes - Страница 11

Stevenson published his Travels with a Donkey some six months later, in the spring of 1879. He spent several weeks working on it during the autumn, in Cambridge, at Sidney Colvin’s rooms in Trinity; and then, over Christmas, at home in Edinburgh. All this time he had no news of Fanny in San Francisco. His aim was to expand his original journal from some twenty thousand words to a small volume of about double that length. To this purpose he filled in topographical details from guide-books and added the Camisard history from Napoléon Peyrat and other sources; he carefully rewrote his religious reflections (partly so as not to shock his father) and rehandled the encounters with the monks and the priest at La Trappe, and the old Plymouth Brother at Florac; finally, he deleted or generalised the amorous reflections that were originally written with Fanny in mind—so effectively that even a recent modern biographer has concluded that “there is only one passage in which we are made aware of the fact that he was missing Fanny intensely”.

The book was dedicated to Sidney Colvin, in one of those warm, enigmatic public letters of introduction that Stevenson could write so well, hinting at Romantic mysteries and philosophies but leaving everything half-explained, half in shadow:

The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck in the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls this wilderness of the world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend … Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped at every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage …

In private Stevenson was much more explicit, writing to cousin Bob in June 1879, in his downright and devil-take-it style. He makes no pretences as to who is at the centre of the work:

My book is through the press. It has good passages, I can say no more. A chapter called ‘The Monks’, and then ‘A Camp in the Dark’, a third, ‘A Night in the Pines’. Each of these has I think some stuff in the way of writing. But lots of it is there protestations to F., most of which I think you will understand. That is to me the main thread of interest. Whether the damned public—But that’s all one. I’ve got 30 quid for it, and should have had 50.

His preoccupation with money had a simple explanation. For he had at last secretly determined to rejoin Fanny in San Francisco, and once her divorce from Sam Osbourne was through to marry her. Two months later, on 7 August 1879, he bought a second-cabin steerage ticket to New York for eight guineas, and without telling his parents embarked on his second pilgrimage: the greatest adventure of his life.

For the “damned public” the book has remained essentially an exercise in style, “agreeably mannered”, and a model of polite essay-writing for generations of English and Scottish schoolchildren. My own little brown-backed copy, printed in 1936, still gives as likely essay-subjects, in an appendix after the text, such lines of enquiry as: “What are the respective advantages of a walking, cycling, motoring, and caravaning tour?” And, “What is Stevenson’s religious position, and can a charge of affectation be made against it?” However, I do like one suggestion: “Put yourself in Modestine’s place, and write a character study of your Master.” It might lead on to deeper matters.

For Stevenson himself there remains no doubt now in my own mind that the whole Cévennes experience was a kind of initiation ceremony: a grappling with physical hardships, loneliness, religious doubts, the influence of his parents, and the overwhelming question of whether he should take the enormous risk of travelling to America and throwing his life in with Fanny’s—“for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health”. In the desperate summer months of 1879, immediately prior to his departure for New York, the memory of the trip was obviously much in his mind. He wrote to a friend: “I can do no work. It all lies aside. I want—I want—a holiday; I want to be happy; I want the moon or the sun or something. I want the object of my affections badly anyway; and a big forest; fine, breathing, sweating, sunny walks; and the trees all crying aloud in the summer wind and a camp under the stars.”

So the pilgrimage begun at Le Monastier ended six thousand miles away in a honeymoon on the wooded hills of the Pacific coast of California. But that is another story, as eventually told in The Silverado Squatters.

For me, the Cévennes was a different initiation. I embarked on it, and finished it, in all innocence from a literary point of view. It never crossed my mind that I might write about Stevenson; or that my diary should be anything more than a “route-journal”, a record of my road and camps. If I wrote anything at all, I thought, it would be poems about walking, swimming, climbing hills and sleeping under the stars. But what happened was something quite other, something almost entirely unexpected. Instead of writing poems I wrote prose meditations. These concerned not so much the outward physical experiences of my travels but inward mental ones that were often profoundly upsetting. The full record of my black depressions, intense almost disabling moments of despair, and childish weeping fits, still seems inexplicable and embarrassing. The corresponding moments of intoxication and mad delight are still vivid to me twenty years afterwards, so that my pulse-rate increases when I write about them, even now. But all these inward emotions were concentrated and focused on one totally unforeseen thing: the growth of a friendship with Stevenson, which is to say, the growth of an imaginary relationship with a non-existent person, or at least a dead one.

In this sense, what I experienced and recorded in the Cévennes in the summer of 1964 was a haunting. Nothing of course that would make a Gothic story, or interest the Society for Psychical Research; but an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present. And in this experience of haunting I first encountered—without then realising it—what I now think of as the essential process of biography.

As far as I can tell, this process has two main elements, or closely entwined strands. The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man’s “journey” through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the “life and letters”. The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a “point of view” or an “interpretation”, but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions. It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.

The first stage of such a living, fictional relationship is in my experience a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject. More or less, because the real elements of self-identification are often much more subtle and subliminal than one originally thinks. This, strictly speaking, is pre-biographic: it is a primitive form, a type of hero- or heroine-worship, which easily develops into a kind of love affair. Looking back at the Cévennes, I can now see that I went straight into that phase with Stevenson, passionately identifying with what I saw as his love of bohemian adventuring, getting out “on the road”, and sharing with him his delight in all things French, original, eccentric. I saw him, naively, as a direct predecessor of figures like Jack Kerouac—though the European Kerouac, the Kerouac of Lonesome Traveller, a bit lost and a bit uncertain of himself, not the roaring American romantic of On the Road. The Kerouac who, at the very end of his drunken career, comes back to France looking for his lost family roots in Brittany, searching for the Lebris de Kéroack in Satori in Paris.

My real reasons for self-identification I now see as rather different: they involved the confrontation with religious upbringing and lost faith, Stevenson’s Calvinism having some equivalence to my Catholicism. They also involved a natural struggle to free myself from parental influences—benign ones, but nevertheless encroaching. Hence I suspect the powerful note struck by Stevenson’s exploration of the “dream childhood” theme, the poetry of homesickness—of travelling far away over blue hills and brown rivers, only to find yourself once more back on the final wooded ridge above the natal valley, the small boy wanting to come home.

This form of identification or self-projection is pre-biographic and in a sense pre-literate: but it is an essential motive for following in the footsteps, for attempting to re-create the pathway, the journey, of someone else’s life through the physical past. If you are not in love with them you will not follow them—not very far, anyway. But the true biographic process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where this naive form of love and identification breaks down. The moment of personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal, objective re-creation. For me, almost the earliest occasion was that bridge at Langogne, the old broken bridge that I could not cross, and the sudden physical sense that the past was indeed “another country”.

The past does retain a physical presence for the biographer—in landscapes, buildings, photographs, and above all the actual trace of handwriting on original letters or journals. Anything a hand has touched is for some reason peculiarly charged with personality—Thomas Hardy’s simple steel-tipped pens, each carved with a novel’s name; Shelley’s guitar, presented to Jane Williams; Balzac’s blue china coffee-pot, with its spirit-heater, used through the long nights of Le Père Goriot and Les Illusions Perdues; other writers’ signet rings, worn walking-sticks, Coleridge’s annotated books, Stevenson’s flageolet and tortoise-shell “Tusitala” ring. It is as if the act of repeated touching, especially in the process of daily work or creation, imparts a personal “virtue” to an inanimate object, gives it a fetichistic power in the anthropological sense, which is peculiarly impervious to the passage of time. Gautier wrote in a story that the most powerful images of past life in the whole of Pompeii were the brown, circular prints left by drinkers’ glasses on the marble slabs of the second-century taverna.

But this physical presence is none the less extremely deceptive. The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing, almost as fast as human skin. A building is restored, a bridge is rebuilt or replaced, a road is widened or rerouted, a forest is cut down, a wooded hill is built over, a village green becomes a town centre. Stevenson’s La Trappe had been burnt down, redesigned and rebuilt; many of his donkey-tracks had become tarred roads; his wild upland heaths had been planted over; and even his terraces of deep chestnut trees had been replaced by the commercial foresting of young pines.

The well-meaning attempt to conserve or recover the past can be more subtly destructive. Since the centenary of Stevenson’s Travels I am told the whole route has been marked out, by the local Syndicats d’Initiative, with a series of blazed stakes which lead the pilgrim from one picturesque point de vue to the next, and bring him safely down each evening to some recommended hotel, Carte Touristique, hot bath, and Souvenirs Cévenols. I have not had the heart to go back and see.

Beyond this sense of physical presences growing upon the biographer—which includes the whole aura of personal body influence, the sound of Stevenson’s voice, his particular loose-limbed gait, his mixture of frail boniness and hectic energy, the large mobile brown eyes, the quick thin wrists and ankles, the smell of tobacco and cognac and cologne and sweaty Scottish tweed mixed with the rank odour of Modestine—there is the growing awareness of psychological complication.

This is the second factor that awakens the necessary objectivity of the biographer. My gradual discovery of Fanny Osbourne, and her hidden importance in Stevenson’s journey, made me realise how Stevenson fitted into the enormously intricate emotional web of other people’s lives. The single subject of biography is in this sense a chimera, almost as much as the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, living in splendid asocial isolation. The truth is almost the reverse: that Stevenson existed very largely in, and through, his contact with other people: his books are written for his public; his letters for his friends; even his private journal is a way of giving social expression—externalising—his otherwise inarticulated thoughts. It is in this sense that all real biographical evidence is “third party” evidence; evidence that is witnessed. Just as the biographer cannot make up dialogue, if he is to avoid fiction; so he cannot really say that his subject “thought” or “felt” a particular thing. When he uses these forms of narration it is actually a type of agreed shorthand, which must mean—if it means anything factual—that “there is evidence from his letters or journals or reported conversations that he thought, or that he felt, such-and-such a thing at this time …” In this way the biographer is continually being excluded from, or thrown out of, the fictional rapport he has established with his subject. He is like the news reporter who is told something in confidence, “off the record”, and then can do nothing about it until he has found independent evidence from other sources. His lips are sealed, his hands tied. Otherwise he is dishonourable and prosecutable, not only in the courts of Justice, but in the courts of Truth as well.

My final lesson from the Cévennes is as much metaphysical as literary. It is the paradox that the more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past the more conscious do you become that they never existed wholly in any one place along the recorded path. You cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them, at any particular turn in the road, bend of the river, view from the window. They are always in motion, carrying their past lives over into the future. It is like the sub-atomic particle in nuclear physics that can be defined only in terms of a wave-motion. If I try to fix Stevenson in his green magic dell in the Lozère, or his whitewashed cell at La Trappe, or under his chestnut tree below Mont Mars; if I try to say—this man, thinking and feeling these things, was at this place, at this moment—then at once I have to go backwards and forwards, tracing him at other and corresponding places and times—his childhood bedroom at No 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, or his honeymoon ranch at Silverado, California.

So without knowing it, my youthful journey through the Cévennes led me over the hills and far away into the undiscovered land of other men’s and women’s lives. It led me towards biography.