'Those for Whom Our Affection is Personal'

“[T]he current of your admirable style floats pearls and diamonds.” 

Has one writer ever so charmingly praised another? Consider the odd appropriateness of the metaphor. In what sense is a prose style a current? And how can pearls and diamonds float? One thinks of the Mississippi River – “sullen, untamed and intractable,” in T.S. Eliot’s words. In this case, “sullen” clearly isn’t right, though the rest fits the relentless force of nature that was the tubercular Robert Louis Stevenson. In a brief life he mustered millions of words. After writing the sentence quoted above in his first letter to Stevenson, on December 5, 1884, Henry James continues: “The native gaiety of all that you write is delightful to me . . .”

 

Things between James and Stevenson didn’t start out so swimmingly. They first met at a lunch with Andrew Lang in 1879. In a letter to a friend, James described the Scot as “a shirt-collarless Bohemian and a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur.” In 1881, in a letter to W.E. Henley, Stevenson rather oddly described James’ Washington Square as “an unpleasant book.” The short novel is terribly sad and Stevenson could never have written anything like it, but that hardly makes it “unpleasant.”  He went on to describe James to Henley as “a mere club fizzle (fizzle perhaps too strong, on representations from the weaker vessel) and no out-of-doors, stand-up man whatever.” The sparring continued when James published “The Art of Fiction” (1884), in which he describes Treasure Island as “delightful." Stevenson, however, replied with “A Humble Remonstrance,” in which he objected to this statement by James: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.” In his letter James replies:

 

“[I have] a friendly desire to send you three words. Not words of discussion, dissent, retort or remonstrance, but of hearty sympathy, charged with the assurance of my enjoyment of everything you write. It’s a luxury, in this immoral age, to encounter some one who does write—who is really acquainted with that lovely art.”

 

Writers are a jealous, touchy bunch, as sensitive as adolescents with migraines. Stevenson possessed the rare gift of inspiring love and devotion in a vast, varied group of readers and writers. Consider the brief roll call of writers we think of as “lovable” – Spinoza, Chekhov, William James, Italo Svevo . . . who else, besides Stevenson? Eric Ormsby writes of him: “His outlook, in writing as in life, was robustly joyful, and this belief in the importance of joyfulness shaped his literary aesthetic.” And James says in his 1899 review of Stevenson’s Letters:

 

“It was the happy fortune of Robert Louis Stevenson to have created beyond any man of his craft in our day a body of readers inspired with the feelings that we for the most part place at the service only of those for whom our affection is personal.”

 

Stevenson died on this date, December 3, in 1894, at age forty-four (the same age as Thoreau, Chekhov, Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald).

[A reader asks why I find Spinoza “loveable.” Borges gives a partial answer in his sonnet “Baruch Spinoza,” translated by Willis Barnstone:

 

“A haze of gold, the Occident lights up

The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript

Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.

Someone is building God in a dark cup.

A man engenders God. He is a Jew

With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;

Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in

A river, is borne off by waters to

Its end. No matter. The magician moved

Carves out his God with fine geometry;

From his disease, from nothing, he’s begun

To construct God, using the word. No one

Is granted such prodigious love as he:

The love that has no hope of being loved.”

 

Borges renders a sensitive understanding of Spinoza’s notion of amor intellectus Dei, and reminds how alone this young man was.]