Finally the sea cook is a fallen idol to the boy, and the ironic fall is what makes the novel a serious work of art. Jim himself perceives the irony, because he has matured. Henry James called Silver “picturesque” and added that in all the traditional literature of romance, Stevenson had created one of the most remarkable characters in Long John. Perhaps this ironic revelation is the story Stevenson had in mind all along, since he had originally titled the novel The Sea Cook. For Jim the ethical test is to read through the mask of a villain, a man who nonetheless is deeply appealing to him. Again, as Henry James observed in The House of Fiction, Long John adds weight to an otherwise overactive narrative full of “murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried doubloons.” Modern readers would call Long John Silver an anti-hero, and by reacting against this devious but delightful person, Jim escapes from a belief in simple-minded, clear-cut relationships that adorns the works of authors like Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848), who among other favorites wrote Mr. Midshipman Easy, or Stevenson’s Scottish predecessor R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), whose highly successful tale of three shipwrecked boys, The Coral Island (1858), was so humorous and optimistic that in our time Nobel laureate William Golding readily turned it on its head, monstrously, as The Lord of the Flies. Long John Silver forced the boy’s adventure story to grow up, even as its maturing readers could remain adolescents at heart.

 

 

THE AUTHOR IN A CROSSWIND

 

Here we need a digression from our own story, to insist on Stevenson’s unusual complexity, which contributed to the way he wrote. Without constructing large webs of social ambience, he introduced into his fiction the inward moral and emotional conflicts of his Calvinist upbringing, while his late fiction, such as the novella “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), reveals a vigorous and bold rejection of Victorian piety, the era’s so-called “morality,” which is not surprising since in his early twenties Stevenson had told his parents he was an atheist.

In some ways mother and son shared a dark understanding of life, for Mrs. Stevenson—born a Balfour, like the young hero of Kidnapped (1886)—was a semi-invalid. In the fashion of many Victorian ladies, she suffered from what was called “uncertain health.” Her son’s early troubles with breathing, his bronchial sensitivity, and what finally became a complex combination of bronchial and tubercular illness led him to “take the cure” in a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps, at Davos. Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel about disease and genius, The Magic Mountain, provides an intensely vivid picture of this medical scene; through all its layers of meaning it raises a question that similarly concerned Stevenson: What indeed is health? Pharmacology could not alter the course of tuberculosis, and it was thought that bracing cold air in a clear mountain climate would remedy the disease. Stevenson spent the winters of 1880 and 1881 at Davos, was erroneously pronounced cured, and left for a life of continued wandering in search of a salubrious climate. Not surprisingly for those who have read The Magic Mountain or the life story of the poet John Keats (1795-1821), TB is a disease of fevers and a feverish existence. With Stevenson this hectic rhythm animated his virtually desperate travels; he became more of an explorer than a tourist, a restless voyager who knew he would never return home to his beloved country. Scotland always remained an ominous land, however, not least for him because as a child he had been lovingly instructed by his governess, Alice Cunningham, a dedicated soul who filled the child with the darkest tales and scariest bogies to be conjured by Calvinist fears of hell and damnation. Given such a beginning, one is surprised, or relieved, to find that Stevenson was destined to write one of the great parables of the eternal battle between good and evil, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Even here his agnosticism played a part, for The Strange Case is made into a highly controlled detective story, as if in clear imitation of a similarly secular author Stevenson much admired, Edgar Allan Poe.

Despite many competing influences, it is clear that Stevenson sought paganism as a natural part of being an artist. A master of perfect poetical forms, he became famous for the delicate and loving verses in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Yet his schooling also cut the other way, since he studied the law, was admitted to the bar, and, quite differently, studied the principles of civil engineering. His last novel, Weir of Hermiston, left unfinished at his death in 1894, is an acute and troubling study of the violent abuse of judicial power. Having lived in France and effectively bilingual, Stevenson was yet to travel a much wider world. Again cutting crossways, it is said that during his college years in Edinburgh he was a notable bohemian, drinking, carousing, and frequenting the company of prostitutes. His bohemian, literary life in Edinburgh and later in London brought him many friends, among them brilliant writers. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the imminent threat of death hung always over him, as he endured a lifelong battle against tuberculosis and frightening bronchial infections. In print he almost never mentioned these afflictions. Even when he was hemorrhaging blood from his lungs, at no point did he avoid the most arduous physical efforts, traveling more widely than most humans ever travel and simultaneously driving himself as an author.