Читать книгу Tales Of Adventure - Роберт Льюис Стивенсон - Страница 4

‘R.L.S.’, notes his most recent biographer Ian Bell, ‘wrote tales of adventure. That is true enough, but not the whole truth.’ Far from it. But the ideas of adventure and of the adventurer haunt his fiction in many guises. The highly unusual collection of stories in this volume shows us the young tale-teller experimenting, trying out his craft. It includes two short fables, three longish short stories, and two long stories which, for want of a better term, we will call ‘novels’. They are printed here in the chronological order of composition, so that, should you be so inclined, you can speculate about his artistic development. But such speculation is risky with R.L.S. His restless impulse to strike out in new directions and his habit of returning later to get unfinished work ‘unstuck’ have frustrated scholars in search of coherent development. Some vent their frustration by faulting him for uncertainty or frivolity. Others impose models that are too conceptual to contain his impulsive genius and that depreciate his early writing.

Storytelling surrounded Stevenson from childhood, and he was dictating stories to his mother and his nurse ‘Cummie’ before he was ten. At thirteen, he was editing a schoolboy magazine, and before he was twenty, he was writing stories about the Scottish covenanters. But the discovery of Scotland as his subject was far off in the future. His early published tales reflect foreign interests.

The fable as a form appealed to him through his career; indeed, Jenni Calder, the author of my favourite study of Stevenson, thinks all of his fiction tends toward fable. ‘The House of Eld’ and ‘The Song of the Morrow’ may have been drafted in 1874, though their final versions came only twenty years later. ‘Will o’ the Mill’, a tale of an Alpine village, was written in summer, 1877. ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’, a sketch arising out of the young scholar’s immersion in late medieval France, followed a few weeks later. Treasure Island, which carries us from the south English coast to a remote tropical isle, was begun at Braemar in summer, 1881, and after a delay when (characteristically) he got ‘stuck’ in Chapter Sixteen, was finished to meet serialisation deadlines in November in Switzerland. ‘The Treasure of Franchard’, an ironic idyll of a French town familiar to him as an artists’ colony, came a year later. The Black Arrow, an anti-romance of war-torn fifteenth-century England, was tossed off as a serial sequel to Treasure Island in 1883. Stevenson was then thirty-three. In 1884 at Bournemouth he settled down to serious reflection on fiction, and the ‘mature novelist’ emerged.

So, these stories belong to his first decade as a man of letters, when he was also publishing essays, travel books, biographical and historical studies, lay sermons, and critical reviews. He was experimenting tirelessly, seeking his form, style and matter. The variety is astonishing; versatility was Stevenson’s Delilah. His friend and admirer Henry James said:

it is a delight to read him, and … he renews this delight by a constant variety of experiment … It is just because he has no speciality that Mr Stevenson is an individual … It is easy to believe that if his strength permitted him to be a more abundant writer he would still more frequently play this eminently literary trick – that of dodging off in a new direction.

Less genial and pluralistic critics, wedded to the norm of consistency, have found this ‘dodging’ habit a symptom of immaturity or frivolity. James is the better guide.

Certainly the young writer was ‘eminently literary’, passionately committed to learning how to write. What to write, on what subject, in what form, followed after. In the 1870s and 1880s, his options were unsettling, overabundant; the choices hard to make. The literary world he entered was stirred by four currents.

First, the great practitioners of the mid-Victorian novel were dead or dying, and their mode – realistic, domestic, psychological – seemed restrictive, sterile. A taste arose for non-realistic modes, poetic, fabulous, which Stevenson the aesthetic theorist would later promote under the heading of ‘romance’. The term we adopt for this collection, ‘tale’, with its connotations of the exotic and the quasi-legendary, recalls that current.

Second, contemporaneous with, possibly related to the current of romance, was a programme to cultivate prose as an art, to elevate prose to the level of poetry. Its prominent spokesman was Walter Pater. And of the documents generated by this ‘cult of prose style’, Travis Merritt singles out Stevenson’s essay ‘On Style in Literature’ as ‘far and away the most important … and most amazing’ for its ‘sheer concentration on verbal method, for specific interest in the texture of language’. Stevenson was fascinated by style, and he freely admitted he had trained himself by playing ‘the sedulous ape’ to an array of past stylists. ‘Before all things he is a writer with a style’, wrote James, ‘a model with a complexity of curious and picturesque garments’. His denigrators accused him of being a mere mannerist, an ‘eminently literary’ poseur.

In our tales you will find a variety of accomplished styles. To be fair to Stevenson the artist in prose, let me gather here a few samples and let them serve as a first introduction to the tales. We can turn then to the more solemn matters beloved of scholastic interpreters, genre and meaning. But linguistic surface is not to be overlooked. As T.S. Eliot once wrote of Tennyson, his ‘surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his depths … By looking innocently at the surface we are most likely to come to the depths.’

In ‘Will o’ the Mill’, the style of quasi-allegorical romantic panorama:

Year after year went away into nothing, with great explosions and outcries in the cities on the plain: red revolt springing up and being suppressed in blood, battle swaying hither and thither, patient astronomers in observatory towers picking out and christening new stars, plays being performed in lighted theatres, people being carried into hospitals on stretchers, and all the turmoil and agitation of men’s lives in crowded centres.

In ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’, the style of the surreal grotesque:

His countenance had a strongly masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal, and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were quaintly and almost comically evil in expression.

In Treasure Island, the elegantly simple Augustan style of generalised image and antithesis:

I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table.

In ‘The Treasure of Franchard’, the style of parodic, playfully inflationary satire:

So he rattled on, copiously greasing the joint of his inconsistency with words … The Doctor sang, the Doctor whistled, the Doctor talked. He spoke of the woods, and the wars, and the deposition of the dew; he brightened and babbled of Paris; he soared into cloudy bombast on the glories of the political arena.

In The Black Arrow, the style of pathetic naturalistic impressionism (in striking counterpoint to the pseudo-archaic dialogue):

The words died in Richard’s throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels, and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence.

And finally, in the fables – in this case ‘The House of Eld’ – the scriptural mythical style of incantatory repetition:

The blood ran backward in his body and his joints rebelled against him for the love he bore his father; but he heaved up the sword, and plunged it in the heart of the appearance; and the appearance cried aloud in the voice of his father; and fell to the ground; and a little bloodless white thing fled from the room.

The precocious new stylist raised high expectations among men of letters in London, not always to his advantage.

The third current of the ’70s and ’80s was the growth of the institution known as ‘men of letters’, professional writers supported by a spate of magazines and reviews, who played multiple cultural roles as refined entertainers, arbiters of tastes, shapers of opinion, even lay moralists for a literate middle-class public that (as John Gross writes) ‘hungered for intellectual guidance’. In 1873, new friendships brought twenty-three-year-old Stevenson into a London coterie of men of letters. It was a mixed blessing. True, his new friends brought him status and income. But they also held their own high expectations as to what the promising protégé should write. This proved especially troublesome for Stevenson, whose chameleon-like temperament made him peculiarly susceptible to friendly influences. On at least one occasion, he angrily rebelled. His friend Henley had reported that some of their refined circle were distressed to see the gifted R.L.S. serialising ‘hackery’ in a magazine called Young Folks. Stevenson fired back at ‘those who ask me (as you say they do) to do nothing but refined, high-toned be-jay be-damn masterpieces … Let them write their own damn masterpieces. Let me alone.’ The hackery in question was Treasure Island.

In this story of adventure, written ‘for boys’ and thus freed of the need for ‘psychology or fine writing’, he had found the freedom he needed. Not many ‘boys’ were enthused, but a surprising number of older men, including Stevenson’s engineer father, were enthralled. The late nineteenth century – and this was the fourth current – saw a great revival of taste for adventure. Perhaps it offered an escape from the growingly repressive, grey utilitarianism of bourgeois culture. Perhaps it served as a romantic propaganda for the imperialism of the day. Certainly it constituted a key impulse in the late Victorian cult of childhood. Whatever the causes, Stevenson rode the wave of adventure.

What is ‘adventure’? Everyone knows, intuitively, vaguely. I like Paul Zweig’s evocative definition:

The cat’s paw of chance hovers tantalizingly, and suddenly the simplest outcome seems unpredictable. For a brief moment, we are like warriors, charged with the energies of survival, reading every detail of the scene as if it were a sign revealing what was to come … excursions of excitement … ‘vacations’ from our actual selves.

I would add Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s:

… by the grace of an ordeal in the night which stripped you of all that was not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious creature born of yourself. Great was this creature, and never shall you forget him. And he is yourself.

Paradoxes! ‘Adventure’ means ‘that which comes’ – but comes how? By chance, yet somehow fated? It joins peril and possibility in a brief, intense ‘island in life’, an ordeal, a thrilling challenge. Its opposite is stability, routine, home.

Adventure is a kind of experience, not a kind of story, and yet in it experience takes on the qualities of story. Adventure is the aboriginal stuff of which stories have been made, at least since the earliest Sindbad the sailor came home to enchant the homebound Sindbad with his fearful quests, encounters, dangers, and escapes. Adventure was Stevenson’s donnée. What he made of it and in what various moods is a more complex matter.

Our selection hints at the variety. In Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins’s home life is suddenly invaded by piracy and violence. A treasure map is found, the ship sails to a desert island, the pirate crew mutinies, and Jim must find extraordinary skill and nerve to outwit the Bad Guys and save his grown-up companions. In The Black Arrow, young Dick Shelton is caught up in a world of war and treachery and survives through all the game-like ordeals of adventure: flight and pursuit, hide and seek, tunnels and mazes, disguises and escapes. He ‘proves’ himself a warrior and saves his fair maiden. In ‘The Treasure of Franchard’, kindly, pedantic Doctor Desprez and his contented wife lead a bucolic existence until the doctor chances on lost treasure in the woods. Their minds fill with eager visions of opulent, adventurous life in Paris. The treasure vanishes, their house and fortune are lost, the treasure reappears, and the chastened couple contentedly stays home. In the two fables, an innocent young person leads a constricted home life, protected in a pleasant castle or fettered by a mysterious gyve. Chance breaks in: a walk in the woods or on the beach; a chance encounter with an unfettered dancing boy or a prophetic old crone. The young boy and girl rebel; the rebellion proves illusory and tragic. The boy discovers guilt; the girl falls into time. Such can be the price of adventure.

Will o’ the Mill, in his quiet mountain home, awakens to a desire for the intense, crowded life of the cities on the plain. After an encounter with a disillusioned, fat young man, he chooses not to pay the price, stays home, and even retreats from marriage to the girl he loves. His is a story of adventures that never happen – until the end. The young cavalier of ‘The Sire de Malétroit’s Door’ must pay the price or die. His story is of the essence of adventure. Surrounded by enemies in a strange town, he visits a friend and becomes lost in a dark maze of narrow streets: ‘It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities.’ A ‘chapter of accidents’ ensues to ‘make this night memorable above all others in his career’. Trapped in a lane, he backs through the door and finds himself locked in a noble house, where he is ‘expected’ by the proud, evil Sire. It is a ‘mistake’, but the Sire doesn’t care, and the young man learns that his only escape from death is through marriage to the Sire’s lovely, lovable niece. He accepts his fate. His evil new uncle chuckles.

What are we to make of this? Would he indeed, as we are told at the start, ‘have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed’, as Will would have done? Are we to seek any meaning? Is this simply a case of ‘the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things’? Is this that elusive thing some critics call ‘pure story’? If not, what kind of story is it?

These problems – and they are connected – have nagged critics ever since R.L.S. first puzzled them with his shifts in mode and seeming evasions of consistent meaning. ‘Will o’ the Mill’ offers an intriguing case study. Its first publisher felt reservations about ‘the story’s indeterminate hovering between realism and allegory’. David Daiches, the wise pioneer of modern Stevenson studies, calls it ‘pure allegory’ and complains, ‘The charm of the situation interested Stevenson as much as its meaning, with the result that the picture of rustic living is filled out in idyllic detail until the shape of the allegory is almost lost.’ (Daiches perceives the same problem – if it is one – in ‘Franchard’.) But what indications are there that ‘Will’ began with a ‘purely allegorical’ intention? And isn’t the charm of Will’s situation essential to the meaning?

Jenni Calder finds ‘Will’ a ‘puzzling story, part fable, part impression of an unfulfilled existence’. Why not both? The American critic Robert Kiely is not puzzled: ‘Will’ is one of Stevenson’s ‘finest short stories’, a ‘fable’ with a complex moral about living death and self-deceptive illusion. Henry James believes in puzzlement: ‘Will’ is an ‘exquisite little story’ with ‘that most fascinating quality a work of imagination can have – a dash of alternative mystery as to its meaning, an air (the air of life itself), of half inviting, half defying you to interpret.’ James is the safest guide for a reader who wonders what and how much Stevenson’s tales of adventure ‘mean’.

What of Treasure Island? Shall we accept and celebrate it as ‘sheer story’, ‘pure adventure’, or praise it for transforming ‘mere adventure’ into something of thematic complexity? Must we find either no meaning or too much? At one extreme are those like Kiely for whom the book is ‘unhampered’ or ‘unencumbered’ by symbolic burden or moral pattern: ‘To try to speak seriously of good or evil in Treasure Island is almost as irrelevant as attempting to assign moral value in a baseball game.’ At the other extreme are those for whom it is a parable replete with archetypes of mutilated fathers, thematic explorations of power, loyalty and duty, and of course dominated by that persistent phantom of Stevenson interpretation, the lovable, glittering scoundrel in the shape of Long John Silver. For such zealous exegetes, the story is remembered for its complex bond between Silver and Jim.

And here is an interesting problem in the reading of Treasure Island, akin to the problem of reading Stevenson’s other best remembered story, Jekyll and Hyde. These two have long since passed into that public domain of world story, half myths, half youthful memories, in the minds of countless people who ‘know’ them from some forgotten source, version or hearsay, and who have, in the mysterious workings of memory, transformed them into personal fables. No mere ‘introduction’ can, or perhaps should, dislodge such fables. I would simply urge that the story itself deserves a close, fresh look. Please pause and take your own look before even considering mine.

My Treasure Island begins with the perception of the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater (in Childhood Regained) that the story’s ‘most disconcerting’ character is Jim Hawkins. He is not a ‘good boy’, nor does he ‘play at pirates’. He is a creature of impulse, of reckless ‘notions’ he can’t account for and was wrong to follow, but which, as he often brags, result in the salvation of his friends. His most common emotions are terror, horror, disgust and sadness at adventures in which seventeen men are killed in the quest for treasure that does no one much good. From the start, his involvement with pirates causes him ‘monstrous nightmares’ and ‘abominable fancies’. Only once, early on, does he indulge in daydreams of adventure, ‘but in all my fancies, nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures’. At first sight he ‘hates the very thought of Treasure Island.’ After accidentally (?) shooting the pirate Israel Hands, he has ‘horror … on my mind’, but it is mitigated now by the habit of tragedy. ‘Horror’ and ‘black despair’ return. The only emotion sometimes stronger than fear is his curiosity. His ‘notions’ carry him away. His only pure, extended adventure is Part V, when he is on his own and sets out in a coracle, commandeers the ship with bravura, hides it, and then is overwhelmed with desire to get back to the stockade and boast. He is truly a young Odysseus.

What of his bond with Silver? When, hidden in a barrel, he overhears Silver’s plans, he thinks him an ‘abominable old rogue’ whom, ‘if I had been able to I would have killed’. Later he grudgingly admires Silver’s skill and nerve and feels pity at the thought of the ‘dark gibbet’ that awaits him. Jim’s only extended interaction with Silver is Part VI – the last, and hence most easily remembered – when he equals Silver in the deal-making of sea lawyers. The bond between them is one of mutual protection. Jim’s Silver is a clever, brave imposter, ‘hypocrite, murderer, and traitor’, whose only ambition is to get rich, become more ‘genteel’, go home, and set up as a gentleman with a coach and a seat in parliament, no worse than many another ex-colonial imperialist desperado.

For all of Jim’s boasting, it is Doctor Livesey who makes the deal that saves them, who risks his life to care for sick and wounded pirates, and who would remain behind on the island if he thought the marooned pirates were ill. And ‘Ben Gunn, the half-idiot maroon, was the hero from beginning to end’ in setting up the climactic trap. After the homecoming, we learn from Jim only that Silver ‘has at last gone clean out of my life’ and that Jim retains of the adventure only his ‘worst dreams’ of ‘that accursed island’.

But of course, our story is not the same as Jim’s horrific adventure. He is Sindbad the sailor, and we are the landbound Sindbads enthralled safely at home. And my text can never quite be anyone else’s. One hallmark of a true classic is that it can sustain and survive many ‘readings’ and still claim a consensus that it is a ‘supreme and deathless story’, one of the best ever told, loved by Gladstone, ‘about the only book’ Yeats’s seafaring grandfather ‘ever found any satisfaction in reading’, and for a student of mine, a tough, literal-minded cab-driver, ‘the best book I ever read’. I was fortunate – or unfortunate? – never to have read it as a boy, never read it until I was a jaded English professor, and then found it spellbinding, and still do.

The Black Arrow has no such reputation, if it has any reputation at all. Critics usually ignore it, quoting R.L.S. himself, often his own most deprecatory judge, that it is ‘Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery.’ He wrote it fast, hence perhaps could not trust it, and could not bring himself to read it. Yet, its Young Folks readers preferred it to Treasure Island; it raised circulation ‘by many hundreds of copies a week’; and a later printing in America, reports the editor McClure, ‘brought in more money than any other serial novel we ever syndicated’. Some astute contemporaries thought it his best book so far, and the historian G.M. Trevelyan praised it as a ‘good historical novel’ which ‘reads like the outcome of an eager and imaginative study of the Paston letters’, the correspondence of a fifteenth-century Norfolk family, a favourite book of Stevenson’s. The Black Arrow is his sole sustained novel of history, set in the socially brutal, politically chaotic, morally anarchic century which Stevenson had long studied and which had likewise intrigued and repelled Walter Scott in Quentin Durward. The difference is that Stevenson viewed history chiefly as tragic farce. In no other book is what he called ‘the profound underlying pessimism’ of the Stevensons, ‘their sense of the tragedy of life’, more apparent.

The first-time reader should at least try to read past the pseudo-Shakespearian style of the dialogue and overlook the hasty lapses in plotting. Stevenson had trouble remembering what he had written. And appropriately, his young protagonist Dick Shelton is so often oppressed by the memory of his adventures that he survives by forgetting and repeatedly running away from them. Escapism, yes. The escapism of moral desperation.

The intricate plot, no doubt all in all for the Young Folks, is a headlong dramatic enactment of ‘dark and dubious’ battles, bloody ambushes, terrified flights, catastrophic follies (notably Dick’s), swithering loyalties, and betrayals of trust. Dick is helplessly implicated with four adventurers, four variations on John Silver: his opportunistic guardian Brackley; his protector Duckworth, the ‘Robin Hood,’ who is as piratical and oppressive as Brackley; his drunken ally Will Lawless, who admits, ‘If my bottle were empty and my mouth dry, I would rob you, dear child, as sure as I love, honour, and admire your parts and person!’; and climactically, the brilliant, ruthless Diccon Crook-back, on his way to becoming Richard III. All four are unabashedly candid about their self-serving cynicism. Not surprisingly, Dick’s moods and responses fill increasingly with moral perplexity, helpless pity, remorse, and bitter regret. The ebullient adolescent of the start – ‘Give me to hunt and to fight and to feast and to live with jolly foresters’ – becomes the ambivalent partisan, ‘plunged in gloom’, who confesses his crimes and follies: ‘I am unfit for life.’ His confessor, a sprightly, ironic girl, laughs and forgives him. The story closes with acts of forgiveness.

The only clear ‘lessons’ of The Black Arrow are identical with those of Stevenson’s Prince Otto – not surprising, since The Black Arrow was turned out in a two-month ‘vacation’ from his long labours on Otto. In their worlds, Dick and Otto both learn, ‘nobody does right’. The only salvation is forgiveness, of others, of ourselves. The only stability for Dick is his love for Joanna, the girl companion whose rescue and protection are Dick’s only true goals throughout the story. It is surprising to find romantic love at the centre of Stevensonian adventure. Women were generally excluded. Stevenson knew he could not deal frankly with romantic passion; on the pages of Victorian magazines, only mums and maidens were welcome:

With all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered; hence my perils. To do love in the same spirit as I did (for instance) D. Balfour’s fatigue in the heather [in Kidnapped]; my dear sir, there were grossness – ready made!

So Dick and Joanna are permitted only a loving presexual friendship. But the idea – love, friendship, forgiveness as the only trustworthy code – is nonetheless central.

The rest of adventure is now seen simply as ‘the desperate game we play in life’. But not for the first time. My lasting impression of Stevenson the tale-teller of adventure is of the radical ambivalence he felt for his subject. There were two Sindbads in him: one the restless sailor; the other the landsman, who would stay home if only he could find the home to stay in, safely distant, like Dick and Joanna in their greenwoods, from the desperate game. Thus, it seems fitting to place Jim Hawkins and Dick Shelton in the strange company of the unadventurous Will, the amiable pedant of mediocrity Doctor Desprez, the hapless rebel of ‘The House of Eld’, and the princess who learns that ‘the song of the morrow’ simply turns her into the crone on the beach. She had better have remained home in her Lady of Shalott cloister, like those ambivalent lotus-eaters Will and Desprez. Yet, had the young cavalier stayed home, gone decently to bed, and not backed through the Sire de Malétroit’s door, he would not have found his love.

In the face of this ambivalence at the heart of adventure, we are left with the wicked Sire’s enigmatic chirp and chuckle, with the caustic Casimir’s equally enigmatic ‘Tiens!’ at the end of ‘Franchard’, and with Henry James’s amiable evocation of the author, ‘half inviting, half defying you to interpret.’

Francis Russell Hart