Publication fascinated the young student of engineering, who had secretly become fixated on the consumption and production of literature. ‘I had already my own private determination to be an author,’ he wrote in ‘The Education of an Engineer’.12 But the acquisition of technique, that seemed to him all-important, was difficult. Three of the four stories in his juvenile ‘School Boys Magazine’ had ended on a cliffhanger with the words ‘To Be Continued’. The pleasure in writing the beginnings of stories (natural enough in an apprentice) and a revulsion from the work involved in finishing them would remain the most marked characteristics of Stevenson’s creative life.
To be continued … by whom? One solution to the problem was to share the burden with a collaborator. In the spring of 1868, while he was also trying to write his ‘covenanting novel’, Louis wrote to Bob, ‘Don’t you think you and I might collaborate a bit this summer. Something dramatic, blank verse and Swinburne choruses.’13 Just the idea of collaboration then set him off in the same letter on a long sketch of two possible plays, the second of which, a tragedy about the Duke of Monmouth, got so elaborate as to put off any potential helper from the start:
Scene, a palace chamber. Without famine and revolt and an enemy investing the plains. A. found making love to B. Enter Prince who overhears. P. and A. quarrel, P. being also in love with B. Swords are drawn but D., who resembles A. very closely separates them. Exit P., cursing and muttering
– and so forth. ‘Write me your opinion of the thing and I will write the first scene which nothing can alter. I’ll then send it to you for alteration, amendment and addition, and we can parcel out the rest of the thing or alter it,’ he wrote humorously, acknowledging how tenacious he was likely to be of all his own ideas. What he really wanted was not a co-author, but a goad – or at the very least an enthusiastic audience. No wonder Bob didn’t jump at the offer, and apart from friendly encouragement contributed nothing to ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’. But the object was achieved: the play was one of the few projects of the scores started during his teens that Louis managed to complete.
In his demanding, self-imposed and self-policed apprenticeship, Louis tried on a dizzying variety of literary styles, as he recalled satirically many years later:
Cain, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of Sordello: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of The King’s Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve [ … ] Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs.14
‘Nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it, day in, day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world,’ Stevenson wrote modestly.15 What he needed no time to learn, however, was what to write about: his subject was always, somehow, himself.
Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. 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.16
Study, practice, impersonation; ‘that, like it or not, is the way to learn to write’. One can hear in these heartening words a rallying cry for millions of would-be writers, and it may be no coincidence that much of the worst prose of the coming generation was written in imitation of Stevenson. Anyone can do it, he seems to be saying; all you need is persistence and humility. What is easy to miss (because the expression is so original) is that anyone who can coin a phrase such as ‘playing the sedulous ape’ to describe his debt to other authors owes nothing to anyone. The term passed straight into common parlance, and the essay itself, as Balfour averred a mere fourteen years after its first appearance in an American periodical, quickly ‘became classical’.
To be continued … It wasn’t simply a matter of by whom, but when? For three consecutive summers, Louis was obliged to attend engineering works in his capacity as apprentice to the family firm. Instead of travelling, as Bob was doing, to Paris or Fontainebleau, he found himself stuck for weeks in a series of inaccessible locations on the Scottish coast, with no company but that of the men on the works, and no entertainments other than tobacco, drink and letters from his mother. The men must have found him an odd specimen, a skinny teenager with no real interest in or aptitude for engineering, quite unlike his father and uncle, the firm’s obsessively dedicated partners. When there was an accident at the works in Anstruther, where Louis had been sent in July 1868 to observe the construction of a breakwater, the seventeen-year-old found himself in the middle of a minor uproar. Writing to his father about the incident, he reported how a little girl had pointed him out on the street, saying, ‘There’s the man that has the charge o’t!’, an identification that must have rung strangely in everyone’s ears.
Louis spent most of his time in Anstruther loitering on the quay, vaguely recording the progress of the works, or biting his pencil over calculations. ‘All afternoon in the office trying to strike the average time of building the edge work,’ he wrote home at the end of his first week. ‘I see that it is impossible. [My computation] is utterly untrustworthy, looks far wrong and could not be compared with any other decision.’17 In the evenings, Louis retreated to his lodgings at the house of a local carpenter, and tried to make up the lost time: ‘As soon as dinner was despatched,’ he recorded twenty years later, ‘in a chamber scented with dry rose-leaves, [I] drew in my chair to the table 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.’18 Believing himself to be doomed to die young, and doomed, what’s more, to spend what little time he had hanging around windswept harbour works, he felt compelled to sit up long into the night, ‘toiling to leave a memory behind me’.19
The scent of dead rose-leaves, the intimations of mortality and the burden of his unwritten masterpieces weighed heavily. The works were weighty too; the sonorously-named ‘Voces Fidelium’ was to be a dramatic monologue in verse, presumably on a religious theme; ‘Monmouth: A Tragedy’ was still in progress, as was the novel about the Covenanter, Hackston. He had come a long way from ‘The Baneful Potato’. But it was difficult to keep up a secret nocturnal career of writing, that must at times have reminded him of Deacon Brodie’s double life. The nights were warm that July in Anstruther, the rose-leaves and bowls of mignonette overpowering, and the window had to be kept open. Thus moths flew in continually and scorched themselves on the candles, dropping onto ‘Voces Fidelium’ in a manner so disgusting that the author was driven to blow out the lights and go to bed, seething with rage and frustration. Immortality was deferred yet again.
After an evening watching a wretchedly bad performance by strolling players at Anstruther Town Hall, Louis got into a dispute with a fellow engineering apprentice about the troupe’s pathetic actor-manager. His companion felt that