Prosperity, respectability, thrift, godliness, and all the douce values of bourgeois Edinburgh are affectionately mocked in ‘The Misadventures of John Nicholson’. In this retelling of the fable of the prodigal son – in the well-rounded shape of amiably fatuous John Nicholson – Stevenson exorcised the demons of his own past in comic form. John is a disappointment to his godly father, just as Stevenson was to his, but John’s failings have less to do with the young Stevenson’s bohemian habits, and more to do with an absurd concatenation of circumstances which conspire with his own nature – mild, plump and disorganised – to make him look like a desperate criminal on the run on no less than three separate occasions in his life.
If the corrosive relations between sons and fathers were later to lie at the tragic heart of Weir of Hermiston, here they are played out in a lighter and more generous vein. As for the terrible polarities of a Calvinist God, Stevenson confesses that John’s case can only be ‘perplexing for the moralist’ adding, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, that his hero ‘was a mere whip-top for calamity; on whose unmerited misadventures not even the humourist can look without pity, and not even the philosopher without alarm.’ Pity and alarm are far from our minds, however, as we laugh at John’s complacent ineptitude. And Stevenson sends-up all the conventions of disgrace and romance by having his hero saved in the end by a sickly and artistic younger brother, and by his youthful sweetheart Flora Mackenzie, somehow transformed from his memories of a creature ‘slender, and timid, and of changing colour, and dewy-eyed’, to an ‘undecorative’, plain-talking, large-featured, practical woman more than able to take ‘Fatty Nicholson’ in hand. As a Christmas story published in Cassell’s Christmas Annual for 1887, the tale is happily concluded on Christmas day with a flourish worthy of Dickens, and it is marked, too, by the most detailed and affectionate account which Stevenson was ever to give of the social and architectural topography of the city of Edinburgh in the days of his own youthful misadventures.
‘The Pavilion on the Links’ and ‘The Merry Men’ might be considered together, as tales of adventure and romance on Scotland’s wilder shores. Both stories bring a young protagonist into contact with his future wife, and in each case the young lady’s father is a compromised, or indeed a mad individual who must die in the course of the tale. Yet this love interest (with its oddly primal undertones) has little to do with where the real power of these stories is to be found. ‘The Pavilion on the Links’ is much the lesser of the two, for the mysteries beneath its telling turn out to depend on a rather far-fetched plot about wronged Italian revolutionaries seeking revenge on a defaulting banker. Some of the scenes are prophetic of the fort in Treasure Island (still to be written at this time), with the tense little group besieged in their pavilion at night, white faces in the lamplight, guns at the ready and the sound of the surf outside. But the symbolic force of the story comes from how Stevenson has imagined a setting in which the absurdity of an Italianate summer pavilion confronts the emptiness of beach and sea on a remote Scottish shoreline, presided over only by seagulls and the sea, and by ever menacing quicksands. It is against this backdrop that the love plot must be worked through, with the protagonist Frank Cassilis and his erstwhile friend Northmour in bitter rivalry for the affections of the banker’s daughter. Frank seems curiously boyish for a 30 year old, even one who has hitherto renounced society and women, and the changing dynamics between himself and his violent friend Northmour seem stronger in this dream-like isolation than the ostensible love-interest or the ramifications of the revenge plot. —Here, too, I think, are prescient echoes of Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins, of David Balfour and Alan Breck, of the Master of Ballantrae and Henry Durie.
‘The Merry Men’ takes a not dissimilar setting, but in placing it in the past – sometime after the 1745 rising – Stevenson seems to bring it much closer to the deep, rich and ambiguous Calvinist roots which nourish the other stories in this collection. Once again the ‘other’ is given its due in a story of great symbolic complexity. The other may indeed be the devil, or more likely he is just a ‘black man’ mistaken for the devil, in the fevered mind of old Gordon Darnaway, who lives on his remote little island off the west coast of Scotland.
As a once pious Calvinist, Darnaway is demented by guilt and a sense of his own religious bad faith, for he has found God’s hand at work in the tempests which have wrecked ships on his shore, and he has become greedy for their treasure or just, perhaps, for the sight of what he takes to be divine justice at work. The tide-ripped reefs where ships meet their doom are known as ‘the merry men’ and the island’s name is Aros, or ‘Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it means the House of God ’. This is the place where the Holy Spirit foundered as the great galleon Espirito Santo went down, and it’s where the Christiania or perhaps the Christiana ran aground, which old Darnaway can only read on splintered wood as Christ-Anna.
Narrated by Gordon Darnaway’s nephew, ‘The Merry Men’ has a much more complex vision of duality than ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Body Snatcher’ or ‘The Pavilion on the Links’, for the whole landscape has been re-imagined by Stevenson’s art to make it a theatre for his vision of the horror of the sea, and ultimately of existence itself. Old Darnaway’s conscience may conjure up fears of the devil as a black man, or he may dread the shape of a fish lurking like a ‘bogle’ below his boat, but these are only the shadows of his own guilt, coloured by his Cameronian past. In Stevenson’s text it is the actual physical world of the sea and the sea coast which moves us most as a place of terror and personified energy, where white waves are ‘the skipper’s daughters’ and ‘the merry men’ spout and dance on the deep with a roar like mirth or ‘portentous joviality’.
Young Charlie realises that ‘God’s ocean’ is also a ‘charnel ocean’, a place of constant change like life itself, where indeed we all perch, like his uncle, drunk with glee ‘out here in the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff … head spinning like the Roost … foot tottering on the edge of death … ear watching for the signs of shipwreck’. For in the last analysis the sea is only a mirror of ourselves, and in calmer moments its ‘sea-runes’ reflect no more than our own preoccupations. We may choose to interpret the drama around us in Manichaean terms, seeing it as old Darnaway does, as a struggle between God and the devil. But Stevenson’s eye and his fine descriptive powers, give us only one world, and it is this world, as mad and senseless as the storms of Aros Jay, with none other than God Himself ‘riding on the tempest’. This imagery of sea and storm with humankind perched, terrified or exalted, on the edge of a cliff is the most unforgettable aspect of Stevenson’s tale. It will return, although subdued, in our next story.
From the terror of being to the terror of personal identity, ‘Markheim’ takes us a step closer to Dr Jekyll. Written in late 1884, three years after ‘The Merry Men’, and intended as a Christmas story to ‘curdle the blood’ (as was Jekyll and Hyde scarcely more than a year later) this story was not published until 1886. The circumstances of Markheim’s plan to rob the old dealer, not to mention his extremely disturbed state of mind at the time, are very reminiscent of Raskolnikov’s visit to Ilyona Ivanovna, the old money lender whom he murders in Crime and Punishment, and his subsequent meeting with Svidrigaylov, the debauched ‘other’ who seems to know his inmost heart so well. It’s more than possible that Stevenson had already read the Russian novel in a French translation, and we know from his letters that he had certainly read Le Crime et le Châtiment by the spring of 1886. Questions of influence or attribution are less significant however, than the imagery which ‘Markheim’ shares with ‘The Merry Men’, and these links show that Stevenson has his own way of looking at questions of the stable and unstable self.
The angel, daemon, devil or double who appears at the end of ‘Markheim’ is characteristic of Stevenson’s tendency to give material form to the ‘other self, just as the old Covenanters never doubted the literal presence of the devil in