The building at 608 Bush St. in San Francisco (Provided photo)

“I am going for thirty now; and unless I can snatch a little rest before long, I have, I may tell you in confidence, no hope of seeing thirty-one.”

— RLS to Edmund Gosse, December 1879, San Francisco

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Robert Louis Stevenson lived out some of his darkest days while a tenant of a good-natured Irish landlady, Mrs. Carson, at 608 Bush St. This was a time of waiting for RLS, waiting for the day he would finally marry the newly-divorced and now Ms. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne. Fanny was living across the Bay in East Oakland with her children, Lloyd and Isobel, and her sister, Nellie. Once or twice a week Fanny would take the ferry to meet Louis in a restaurant for dinner. Fortunately for them, food was plentiful and cheap in the city Louis called the New Pacific Capital which, not surprisingly, was bursting with material for another essay.

Money, money, money! It’s always about money. Louis had little and Fanny had none after her ex-husband, Sam Osbourne, lost his job and could not live up to his promise to help out until spring. The twenty pounds Thomas Stevenson had sent from Scotland to help his son seemed to have got stuck in N.Y.C. Besides, Louis hadn’t asked for it. If he could not prove that he could make a living by writing, then his father would have won every argument they ever had about it and expose all of his efforts to have been nothing but an exercise in futility. When his friend, Sidney Colvin, took it upon himself to help him out, he got this for thanks: “Had I required money, should I not have asked it? … You are hard up and have many expenses; I would rather do anything than hamper you…I have taken my own way, and I mean to try my best to work it…It is my income, what I make with those two hands, that I care about, and that I mean, please God, to support myself and my wife.”

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” as a saying, also applies to this invalid writer. For all of his admirable intentions, Louis would not be able to support his family for eight more years and final realization of that goal would coincide with his winter in Saranac Lake in 1887-88. In the meantime, Daddy’s money, not book sales, would keep RLS alive. It helps to remember that he wasn’t popular in his ultra-conservative hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland, where his respectable elders wouldn’t appreciate his radical views and bizarre dress. When Cornhill Magazine published his essay questioning the morals of Robert Burns, Scotland’s deified national poet, he shot himself in the foot big-time because the backlash could have been predicted. As for England, by the time Stevenson entered the Adirondacks, he was telling his friends how he missed the obscurity he didn’t realize he had enjoyed there until he was catapulted to sudden fame in the U.S.A. on account of one character called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The American reading public gets the credit for discovering Robert Louis Stevenson and gets the credit, too, for keeping him poor, that is, until he came to Saranac Lake to share the home of the Bakers. Prior to that, he was robbed of the profits from millions of books because he was a foreigner, to whom American copyright laws did not yet extend.

But all that was just material for the future when the down and out tenant at 608 Bush St. began to hemorrhage blood from his lungs in frightening amounts. “Bloody Jack” had arrived. Thus began the payback from the frail, pitiful body that had taken too much of a beating on its first journey to the New World. Here is the origin of that popular, collective image of Robert Louis Stevenson in his sick room, writing in bed. Whatever he had for stamina before he went to California, would be lacking for the rest of his life.

If you ever find yourself strolling along Bush St. in San Francisco, you might notice a plaque on a modern high rise that reads:

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Lodged at 608 Bush St.

December 1879 to March 1880

And there wrote essays, poems

Autobiography and fiction

Plaque placed by admirers of the

author in cooperation with the

California Historical Society

July 26, 1972