‘The Celestial Surgeon’

If I have faltered more or less

In my great task of happiness

If I have moved among my race

And shown no glorious morning face;

If beams from happy human eyes

Have moved me not; if morning skies,

Books, and my food, and summer rain

Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:?

Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take

And stab my spirit broad awake;

Or Lord, if too obdurate I,

Choose thou, before that spirit die,

A piercing pain, a killing sin,

And to my dead heart run them in!

— RLS

The year that was — Aug. 7, 1879, to Aug. 7, 1880 — was over. A year to the day it was between the sailing of the emigrant ship Devonia with Robert Louis Stevenson aboard, alone, bound from Glasgow, Scotland, to New York City, and the author’s return trip aboard the City of Chester in the company of his brand-new secondhand family: Mrs. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne Stevenson and her 12-year-old boy, Lloyd Osbourne. “The Celestial Surgeon” is believed to be a product of this make-or-break episode in the life and career of a man whose presence in Saranac Lake in the winter of 1887-88 had earned him a local title, “The Penny Piper of Saranac.”

That first year with RLS in America has become literary legend made easy by the author’s autobiographical account of it all in “The Amateur Emigrant” and “The Silverado Squatters.” But mixed in with his skillful wordsmithing is another one of those true stories about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity, which have had such universal appeal down through the ages. The primary impulse behind the charter members of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake was their recognition that the life of Robert Louis Stevenson was one such example — “A Voyage to Windward,” so to speak, and the title of the still best biography by J.C. Furnas.

The mission statement of the Stevenson Society from 1920, when it incorporated, includes:

“His genius was so universal, his philosophy so boundless, that no country can claim him; he belongs to the world.

“His exquisite humor, kindly sympathy and dauntless courage, coupled with his literary talent, created for him a distinctive place in the mystic shrine of fame.”

All that doesn’t make him an angel. Remember, he did start a forest fire. This figure seems to have left memories of his presence wherever he roamed. In Saranac Lake, he was the Penny Piper doing his ice skating on Moody Pond or getting sick in Dr. Trudeau’s laboratory. In the South Seas he was Tusitala, Teller of Tales, coming to the aid of the Samoan people. Of memories he left behind at Silverado, Anne Roller Issler, a noted authority on Stevenson’s California period, recorded in her book, “Stevenson at Silverado” (1939):

“These neighbors remembered the traits he shared with the pioneers — especially his courage in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, the gay heart that belied the frailty of his hold on life, the strong spirit’s refusal to be bound by the body’s weakness. Scorning pity as did the hardy sons of the West, Stevenson was above all a valiant fighter.”

“Said a Calistoga woman whose father, remembering Stevenson, had read ‘The Silverado Squatters’ to her in childhood, ‘He was not robust, he kept to himself, he lived within his mind. They called him queer. What a struggle there must have been between his eager mind and his frail body! It’s so satisfying a thought that this brave spirit, creating beauty, has cheered so many frail and sick who have read his books.'”

Biographers pretty much agree that the California experience was pivotal in the RLS story. That he left as a boy and came back as a man is typical stuff. Maybe for Louis it was the realization of an old fantasy he had dreamed up in France: “to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.” As for his writing, it all had immense value. His wife, Fanny, had told her son, Lloyd, in Monterey just “what experience meant to a writer, and how in reality Monterey was a kind of gold mine in which Luly was prospering extraordinarily, little though he looked it.” Louis took with him to Scotland more real-life experience/material than he would ever be able to use. That included the shock a stranger feels in a strange land with little money and none of the comforts and securities and friends he could fall back on in the Old World. This son of a lighthouse builder had taken an enormous risk and succeeded but came close to dying doing it. Did the crucible that was California have anything to do with the quality of literature that henceforth spilled from the quill of the bard’s pen as he began to create the works that would be his greatest hits? The experts think so.

While in California, RLS had written about his father: “Since I have gone away, I have found out for the first time how I love that man.” On Aug. 17, 1880, Thomas Stevenson and his wife, Margaret, and Sidney Colvin were all three on the pier at Liverpool to greet the banished royal family of Silverado. It was a storybook happy occasion judging from Graham Balfour’s biography, “The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson”:

“And now his joy at seeing his parents was heightened, if possible, by the share which his wife had in their reception … the newcomer was received into their affection with so much readiness and cordiality as if it were they and not Louis who had made the match.”

However, Balfour continues, “The exile’s return to his native country and his consequent illness had rendered him quite unable to face a Scottish winter … and he was advised to try the climate of the High Alps.”