Thus I Lived with Words: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Writer's Craft

by Annette R. Federico

Overview

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) loved more than anything to talk about the craft of writing and the pleasure of reading good books. His dedication to the creative impulse manifests itself in the extraordinary amount of work he produced in virtually every literary genre—fiction, poetry, travel writing, and essays—in a short and peripatetic life. His letters, especially, confess his elation at the richness of words and the companionship of books, often projected against ill health and the shadow of his own mortality.

Stevenson belonged to a newly commercial literary world, an era of mass readership, marketing, and celebrity. He had plenty of practical advice for writers who wanted to enter the profession: study the best authors, aim for simplicity, strike a keynote, work on your style. He also held that a writer should adhere to the truth and utter only what seems sincere to his or her heart and experience of the world. Writers have messages to deliver, whether the work is a tale of Highland adventure, a collection of children’s verse, or an essay on umbrellas. Stevenson believed that an author could do no better than to find the appetite for joy, the secret place of delight that is the hidden nucleus of most people’s lives. His remarks on how to write, on style and method, and on pleasure and moral purpose contain everything in literature and life that he cared most about—adventuring, persisting, finding out who you are, and learning to embrace “the romance of destiny.” 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609385187
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	11/15/2017
Series:	Muse Books
Edition description:	1
Pages:	158
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Annette R. Federico is a professor of English at James Madison University. She lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia. 

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

RLS

In the 1960s, old gas lamps from the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, were removed and sold, mainly to scrap collectors and antique dealers from the United States, in preparation for the city's conversion to electric street lighting. More than 85,000 lamps were taken down, although a few in the closes — the narrow lanes and backstreets in Edinburgh's medieval Old Town — were refitted with sodium lighting. An article on the transition in the Glasgow Herald reported that the old lamps, cleaned and burnished, were valuable commodities, creatively refashioned into novelty lights or "indoor plant containers." There was some discussion about whether historically noteworthy streetlamps would be preserved. One lamp in particular was singled out: the one at the door of 17 Heriot Row, Robert Louis Stevenson's childhood home in Edinburgh's New Town, an elegant south-facing street across from Queen's Street Gardens. It is the gas lamp he made famous in "The Lamplighter," from A Child's Garden of Verses:

My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
This portrait of a child's fancy is quietly grounded in the actual. In the 1870s, unlike today, the lamps on Heriot Row were spaced far apart. The Stevensons were very lucky to have one before their door. And because Edinburgh's lamplighters were tightly supervised during their beat, Leerie really did have to "hurry by with ladder and with light" to fulfill his nightly quota. Stevenson recalled how "the lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus emulating the punctuality of heaven's orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely reached, and now and then an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet people commended his zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to say, 'God bless the lamplighter!'" It's quite believable that a child, even one from a well-off family, might wish to follow in Leerie's romantic profession. The glowing gas lamps were like "domesticated stars," the lamplighter a mythical being "distributing starlight." Here was a little Prometheus "knocking another luminous hole into the dusk."

*
The "quavering and flaring" of the wilderness of Edinburgh's street lamps in gusty weather, the way they "begin to glitter along the street" at dusk, the "humming, lamplit city," "the lamps springing into light in the blue winter's even" — the sight must have penetrated Stevenson's consciousness, for it appears in his writing fairly often, a piece in the mosaic of Scotland, childhood, and home to complement the incessant rain, his nurse Alison Cunningham's fire-and-brimstone stories (he called her Cummy), and the summers spent at his grandfather's manse in Colinton, just outside Edinburgh, where boys hid bull's-eye lanterns under their coats, part of some lost childhood game. Louis, as he was called, seemed from an early age to have had both a powerful bent toward the marvelous and a love of the concrete, printed word. "Men are born with various manias; from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a plaything of imaginary series of events; and as soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper-makers." As a boy he was afflicted with a series of ailments: scarlet fever, bronchitis, gastritis. He had horrid nightmares he could recall well into adulthood. It's unsettling to remember that some of the most charming children's poems ever written were composed in a darkened room at his house, La Solitude, in Hyères, France, after an attack of opthalmia left Stevenson, in his early thirties, temporarily blind; he wrote lefthanded on paper pinned to a board, his right arm bound to his body because of lung hemorrhaging. The world of A Child's Garden of Verses is ordinary, middle-class life made wonderful by a child's wonder — nightmares tamed by music. But Stevenson's instinct for the charming had a harrowing undertow. Lamplight casts long shadows. Leerie's ladder had its random victims.

Stevenson was called to the things of this world, as all writers have to be if they're interested in telling stories about it. He had a mind that could transform raw sensory data and scraps of memory into meaningful and unforgettable images. The poems in A Child's Garden of Verses are lyrical versions of Stevenson's essays on dogs, umbrellas, beggars, talking, walking, waiting, reading, writing, and the weather. He was an avid and reverent observer of materiality, and it is the clarity and vividness of his writing that make his stories so extraordinary. Mention Robert Louis Stevenson to someone over fifty, and it's as though you've turned on a switch in their memory.

G. K. Chesterton noted that Stevenson had "in the devouring universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as has not been known since St. Francis called the sun brother and the well sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight" in Treasure Island. In an age of realism, RLS pitched romance and the fiction of adventure. He had a distaste for novels that harped on "life's dulness and man's meanness," and felt that to "draw a life without delights" is proof of professional incompetence. "Vital; that's what I aim at first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life," he wrote in one letter. "Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind's eye forever."

As a young man, before he became "R.L.S.," Louis played the part of a literary gypsy, complete with long hair and velvet jacket. When they first met at the Savile Club, in London, Henry James described Stevenson as a "pleasant fellow, but a shirt-collarless Bohemian and a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur." It was not entirely a pose. His closest friend and literary executor, Sidney Colvin, recalled that originally Louis wore his hair long "from the fear of catching cold. His shabby clothes came partly from lack of cash, partly from lack of care, partly ... from a hankering after social experiment and adventure, and a dislike of being identified with any special class or caste." Louis was dead serious about being a writer. He gently satirized the real poseurs, the clubmen and the aesthetes, "those young eaglets of glory, the swordsmen of the pen, who are the pride and wonder of the world. ... They are all clever authors; and some of them, with that last refinement of talent, old as Job but rare as modesty, have hitherto refrained from writing." These young clubmen, always "rising" to fame, never actually get down to work, never write anything anyone can understand and enjoy.

Stevenson never forgot his readers. He didn't want to develop, in the fashionable phrase of the day, an "artistic temperament," which, after all, does not "make us different from our fellowmen, or it would make us incapable of writing novels." What he wanted was to become a writer, maybe even a great writer. He didn't pretend to be a genius, though he knew he had certain gifts. He came to think of himself as a toiler and a craftsman, and he was happy in those roles. His advice to writers was split equally between practical, tool-sharpening strategies and moral encouragement. He told others, as he told himself, not to think for a moment of fame or success. "Write as much as you can, and as slowly and carefully as you can," he advised one young author. "And keep up a good heart." "Do not think of distinction, but find pleasure in your work from day to day," he urged another. For Stevenson, it was one long apprenticeship. When he was in his early thirties, he wrote to Will H. Low, "Eight years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can now, I should have thought myself well on the road after Shakespeare; and now — I find I have only got a pair of walking shoes and not yet begun to travel."

Stevenson set out to learn the literary trade as a kind of wager with himself, the way someone might take up juggling or "learn to whittle."

All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write.

Stevenson gave himself exercises in description, he created dialogues, he kept diaries. Most significantly, as he remembered, he studiously impersonated authors he admired, ventriloquizing their stylistic habits and memorable turns of phrase. "I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann." At the age of thirteen, he worked on satiric portraits of the residents of Peebles, Scotland, after Thackeray's Book of Snobs. He tried his hand at an epic in the style of Keats and moral essays after John Ruskin. He wrote a stage drama in imitation of Alexandre Dumas (an author he never stopped admiring). Of course, he failed again and again — he was barely out of his teens, after all. Yet through these exercises, Stevenson said, "I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts." He developed a feel for good writing and for what makes an author's style interesting and pleasurable to the reader. "Think of technique when you rise and when you go to bed," he advised one young artist. "You have not to represent the world. You have to represent only what you can represent with pleasure and effect, and the way to find out what that is [is] by technical exercise." Reading and rereading the best authors, living with the sound and sense of their prose, and aping them sedulously was the springboard for Stevenson's literary education. "That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write."

Stevenson came from a family of famous lighthouse engineers — lamplighters on a larger scale. When he was seventeen, Louis spent four months on the Scottish coast studying the trade, or at least the poetic side of it. In "The Education of an Engineer," he described his frame of mind at the time:

I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of the string-course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary.

He soaked it all in, "the sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below, and the musical chinking of the masons." Indeed, he was eager to try diving, and twenty years later described the experience in splendid prose and with astonishing physical detail. But his "one genuine preoccupation" at the time was when he was not on duty. Then he drew in his chair and "proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder."

One simple exercise he practiced was description, for "to any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject." But what an impossible assignment! He wrote to his cousin Bob in these years that nature is "far too complex for our comprehension, how much more for our description: five square feet of Scotch hillside would take a man a lifetime to describe, and even then how lame, how empty: after he had chronicled heather, whin, bracken, juniper, grass, these little yellow flowers and the rest, it would only be to find that each of these objects taken separately are [sic] indescribable, and that their combination is as much above human powers as flying." Five years later he wrote to Mrs. Frances Sitwell from France, "I tried for long to hit upon some language that might catch ever so faintly the indefinable shifting colour of olive leaves; and above all, the changes and little silverings that pass over them, like blushes over a face, when the wind tosses great branches to and fro." Stevenson's early letters are bursting with descriptive vignettes, as though he had to capture in language every impression that possessed him —"the sight of people and things has pursued me," he will write, or "[t]hese are some of the things that took hold of me." "I am never satisfied, you understand, but long and long and long to do something with the beauty that I see, and I don't know what to do." Such are the dreams of an ambitious young man. Yet Louis obviously grasped very early how essential it was for a writer to hold onto sensory details, to pay attention. There are, of course and alas, gifts that come only from the gods: "Passion, wisdom, creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated." But other essential talents may be acquired, with a little effort.

RLS liked to make fun of his propensity to sermonize on almost any subject, a trait he acquired from his maternal grandfather, who was a Presbyterian minister. So he had plenty of advice for anyone who asked about the art of writing: read widely, study other authors, aim for simplicity, have a consistent focus, work on a style, cut out the twaddle, keep a stout heart. He could be both encouraging and brutal. To his cousin Katharine de Mattos, who had sent him a sample of her work, he wrote, "I am going to be rude. It's all bad. It is woolly, hard to follow, and disorderly. You should not have begun with a question; never put yourself so far into the reader's power: you don't come to him for instruction." He advised her not to be in a hurry. "Now, all this you cannot do just now; you have to learn to write first a good deal better. Do you understand me, when I say you are writing with gloves on just now; you must learn to write with the quick of your fingers." "Writing is a habit like fencing; but a little harder, because there are more passes possible, and more parries and returns," he wrote to another student, Charles Robertson. "It is fencing with a hundred rapiers at once." He thought that too many beginners fail to trust their own experiences. They begin with a hypothesis, when they should begin with a fact. "The point is this. It's not enough about anything. It's all in the air — like a kite," he complained to Robertson. Readers are interested in what's down here, on the ground, what's recognizable to them. The beginner, he said, "refrains as with a fevered caution from communicating his experience," yet in the last resort, "experience, whether about life or a man's own mind, is the only thing worth hearing, indeed is the only thing anyone can have to tell upon his own authority." For young author Robertson, he had three bits of advice:

First. Look about you in India and see what you see. Now, mark you, what you see, not what others have shown you. Think about your own experiences in the same way. Second. Try your pen on a little sharp detail; tackle a scene or a face that strikes you, and try what you can make of it in pen and ink. Third. Give up for the moment theoretical writing. You can come back to that after you have learned (first) to see with your own eyes and (second) to write with your own docile pen.

For a while Stevenson gave free writing lessons to a young woman determined to become an author. He pulled no punches. "I never in my life read a worse description," he told her during one of their sessions.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface,
RLS,
ROMANCE,
SIMPLICITY,
PLAY,
READING,
TRUTH,
TEACHING,
STYLE,
DREAMS,
Acknowledgments,
A Note on Sources,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

What People are Saying About This

Dennis Denisoff

“Federico offers a treasure trove of Stevenson’s often inspiring, always insightful thoughts on writing. With her insightful thematic introductions and tender engagement with his aesthetics and values, Stevenson comes to life as one of the most eloquent, innovative, and generous authors who have rambled in ‘the forest of art.’”

Editorial Reviews

Federico offers a treasure trove of Stevenson’s often inspiring, always insightful thoughts on writing. With her insightful thematic introductions and tender engagement with his aesthetics and values, Stevenson comes to life as one of the most eloquent, innovative, and generous authors who have rambled in ‘the forest of art.’

Dennis Denisoff