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‘My good health,’ Part II

When Robert Louis Stevenson sailed out of San Francisco, California, in June of 1888, to explore the South Seas, he had an itinerary of sorts, always subject to change, either by whim or necessity. In Oceania, at that time, RLS would learn that an itinerary was a pipe dream where all plans seemed to hinge on pure chance. “No post runs in these islands,” he says in his book In the South Seas. “Communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive, another…” But one part of his itinerary he thought he was sure of–going home again to greater Britannia when all this sailing around was finally out of his system.

But Stevenson never did return to his homeland, Scotland, though he grew homesick enough and Scottish homesickness is reputedly a more acute strain of homesickness. In his two unfinished novels, Weir of Hermiston and St. Ives, Louis was home again vicariously through his pen, but he never got closer than that. Why not?

“My good health does not cease to be wonderful to myself,” wrote RLS to Lady Taylor, a former neighbor in Bournemouth, England. It was June 19, 1889, when Louis wrote that letter, almost a year to the day since the Stevenson expedition began their voyage to the South Seas aboard the schooner-yacht Casco, Capt. Otis. It seems that Louis found what he was looking for out there, meaning a place where he could feel alive and according to his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, “lead the life of a man of ordinary health.” To his wife, Fanny, the improvement seemed “incredible and like a dream.”

It had been a bumpy road for Robert Louis Stevenson from birth to beachcomber. As a scrawny newborn baby, his father had nicknamed him “Smout,” for the small fry of salmon, because he was small and would always be small. At two-and-a-half, Louis came down with something they called the “croup,” which later medical experts might have called non-characteristic diphtheria. Whatever it was, they say it took away any chance the kid would have for a normal healthy life, leaving him with a frail constitution and an emaciated appearance befitting a certified invalid with a sunken chest in a 5’10” frame that weighed in at about 105 lbs.

And so it was that the only child of Thomas and Margaret Stevenson missed a lot of school growing up, having to stay home to play alone, just like he described it in “A Child’s Garden of Verses”:

“When I was sick and lay-a-bed,

I had two pillows at my head,

And all my toys beside me lay,

To keep me happy all the day,” etc.

When Will Hickock Low, Stevenson’s painter friend from Albany, first met RLS at a Paris, France, train station in 1875, he noticed two things right away, and when he got around to writing his book, “A Chronicle of Friendships” (1908), he said, “Here was one so evidently touched with genius that the higher beauty of the soul was his” and “that his slender frame encased a less robust constitution than that of others. ‘My illness is an incident outside my life’ was his watchword later, and I need not enlarge on his brave attitude in that respect.”

Robert Louis Stevenson was one who couldn’t resist “pushing the envelope” as they say nowadays, seemingly born to take chances. With his less than robust health he nevertheless planned and executed a canoe trip utilizing the rivers and canals of Belgium and France to come up with material for his first book, “An Inland Voyage,” still in print. The end of that adventure, in true Stevensonesque fashion, dove-tailed into his next and greatest adventure. He seemed to know that already when he wrote the last line of his first book: “…and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.”

Stevenson’s “Inland Voyage” had ended at a cute little French riverside village called Grez in late summer, 1876, when Louis was 25. At Grez, he pushed the envelope in a big way by falling in love with an older woman with baggage. Mrs. Fanny Osbourne was an American from Oakland, California, 10 years his senior and with two kids in tow from her estranged marriage to Sam Osbourne, a court clerk and active ladies’ man in San Francisco. “This Romance of Destiny” (a book by Alexander La Pierre) between Louis and Fanny got intense and when Fanny was forced to return to California for lack of funds, in August 1878, Louis put himself on course to take the biggest gamble of his life, literally “to be or not to be.”

The itinerary of that gamble is recorded in Stevenson’s next four books, namely, “Travels With A Donkey,” “The Amateur Emigrant,” “Across the Plains,” and “The Silverado Squatters.”

The hero’s journey to California began in late August, 1879, and concluded almost a year to the day later, when Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, newlyweds, and young Lloyd Osbourne were met at the docks in Liverpool, England, by the author’s parents, Thomas and Margaret and by his friend and mentor Sidney Colvin. Everybody who knew Louis was glad and relieved to have him home again and not in a coffin which they all had feared. Though he had returned victoriously against great odds, he had also returned as damaged goods. His invalidism had taken a big hit from an ocean voyage on an emigrant ship, the Devonia, and a transcontinental train ride with 19th Century limitations like no air conditioning, plus getting there as cheaply as possible while in a constant state of anxiety. After surviving that he was dumb enough to go camping alone in the California outback where the Grim Reaper would have surely claimed him had not two good samaritans got to him first. The future author of “Treasure Island,” and resident of Saranac Lake was saved for us by a goat rancher and a bear hunter who found him dying alone by a stream in some woods.

After three weeks of frontier amateur medicine, the Amateur Emigrant was able to return to Monterey where he got the cheapest room possible in a flophouse which survived to become the Robert Louis Stevenson House, courtesy of the California Park Service. Three months later, he was in the cheapest room he could find in San Francisco at 608 Bush St. The building is gone, but a plaque was placed there to remind passers-by that “Robert Louis Stevenson lodged at 608 Bush Street December 1879 to March 1880 and there wrote essays, poems, autobiography and fiction.”

At Bush Street, Stevenson’s health was still in decline and in February he had his first encounter with “Bloody Jack,” his nemesis-to-be.

To be continued.

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