‘Will o’ the Mill’ offers an intriguing case study. Its first publisher felt reservations about ‘the story’s indeterminate hovering between realism and allegory’. David Daiches, the wise pioneer of modern Stevenson studies, calls it ‘pure allegory’ and complains, ‘The charm of the situation interested Stevenson as much as its meaning, with the result that the picture of rustic living is filled out in idyllic detail until the shape of the allegory is almost lost.’ (Daiches perceives the same problem – if it is one – in ‘Franchard’.) But what indications are there that ‘Will’ began with a ‘purely allegorical’ intention? And isn’t the charm of Will’s situation essential to the meaning?
Jenni Calder finds ‘Will’ a ‘puzzling story, part fable, part impression of an unfulfilled existence’. Why not both? The American critic Robert Kiely is not puzzled: ‘Will’ is one of Stevenson’s ‘finest short stories’, a ‘fable’ with a complex moral about living death and self-deceptive illusion. Henry James believes in puzzlement: ‘Will’ is an ‘exquisite little story’ with ‘that most fascinating quality a work of imagination can have – a dash of alternative mystery as to its meaning, an air (the air of life itself), of half inviting, half defying you to interpret.’ James is the safest guide for a reader who wonders what and how much Stevenson’s tales of adventure ‘mean’.
What of Treasure Island? Shall we accept and celebrate it as ‘sheer story’, ‘pure adventure’, or praise it for transforming ‘mere adventure’ into something of thematic complexity? Must we find either no meaning or too much? At one extreme are those like Kiely for whom the book is ‘unhampered’ or ‘unencumbered’ by symbolic burden or moral pattern: ‘To try to speak seriously of good or evil in Treasure Island is almost as irrelevant as attempting to assign moral value in a baseball game.’ At the other extreme are those for whom it is a parable replete with archetypes of mutilated fathers, thematic explorations of power, loyalty and duty, and of course dominated by that persistent phantom of Stevenson interpretation, the lovable, glittering scoundrel in the shape of Long John Silver. For such zealous exegetes, the story is remembered for its complex bond between Silver and Jim.
And here is an interesting problem in the reading of Treasure Island, akin to the problem of reading Stevenson’s other best remembered story, Jekyll and Hyde. These two have long since passed into that public domain of world story, half myths, half youthful memories, in the minds of countless people who ‘know’ them from some forgotten source, version or hearsay, and who have, in the mysterious workings of memory, transformed them into personal fables. No mere ‘introduction’ can, or perhaps should, dislodge such fables. I would simply urge that the story itself deserves a close, fresh look. Please pause and take your own look before even considering mine.
My Treasure Island begins with the perception of the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater (in Childhood Regained) that the story’s ‘most disconcerting’ character is Jim Hawkins. He is not a ‘good boy’, nor does he ‘play at pirates’. He is a creature of impulse, of reckless ‘notions’ he can’t account for and was wrong to follow, but which, as he often brags, result in the salvation of his friends. His most common emotions are terror, horror, disgust and sadness at adventures in which seventeen men are killed in the quest for treasure that does no one much good. From the start, his involvement with pirates causes him ‘monstrous nightmares’ and ‘abominable fancies’. Only once, early on, does he indulge in daydreams of adventure, ‘but in all my fancies, nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures’. At first sight he ‘hates the very thought of Treasure Island.’ After accidentally (?) shooting the pirate Israel Hands, he has ‘horror … on my mind’, but it is mitigated now by the habit of tragedy. ‘Horror’ and ‘black despair’ return. The only emotion sometimes stronger than fear is his curiosity. His ‘notions’ carry him away. His only pure, extended adventure is Part V, when he is on his own and sets out in a coracle, commandeers the ship with bravura, hides it, and then is overwhelmed with desire to get back to the stockade and boast. He is truly a young Odysseus.
What of his bond with Silver? When, hidden in a barrel, he overhears Silver’s plans, he thinks him an ‘abominable old rogue’ whom, ‘if I had been able to I would have killed’. Later he grudgingly admires Silver’s skill and nerve and feels pity at the thought of the ‘dark gibbet’ that awaits him. Jim’s only extended interaction with Silver is Part VI – the last, and hence most easily remembered – when he equals Silver in the deal-making of sea lawyers. The bond between them is one of mutual protection. Jim’s Silver is a clever, brave imposter, ‘hypocrite, murderer, and traitor’, whose only ambition is to get rich, become more ‘genteel’, go home, and set up as a gentleman with a coach and a seat in parliament, no worse than many another ex-colonial imperialist desperado.
For all of Jim’s boasting, it is Doctor Livesey who makes the deal that saves them, who risks his life to care for sick and wounded pirates, and who would remain behind on the island if he thought the marooned pirates were ill. And ‘Ben Gunn, the half-idiot maroon, was the hero from beginning to end’ in setting up the climactic trap. After the homecoming, we learn from Jim only that Silver ‘has at last gone clean out of my life’ and that Jim retains of the adventure only his ‘worst dreams’ of ‘that accursed island’.
But of course, our story is not the same as Jim’s horrific adventure. He is Sindbad the sailor, and we are the landbound Sindbads enthralled safely at home. And my text can never quite be anyone else’s. One hallmark of a true classic is that it can sustain and survive many ‘readings’ and still claim a consensus that it is a ‘supreme and deathless story’, one of the best ever told, loved by Gladstone, ‘about the only book’ Yeats’s seafaring grandfather ‘ever found any satisfaction in reading’, and for a student of mine, a tough, literal-minded cab-driver, ‘the best book I ever read’. I was fortunate – or unfortunate? – never to have read it as a boy, never read it until I was a jaded English professor, and then found it spellbinding, and still do.
The Black Arrow has no such reputation, if it has any reputation at all. Critics usually ignore it, quoting R.L.S. himself, often his own most deprecatory judge, that it is ‘Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery.’ He wrote it fast, hence perhaps could not trust it, and could not bring himself to read it. Yet, its Young Folks readers preferred it to Treasure Island; it raised circulation ‘by many hundreds of copies a week’; and a later printing in America, reports the editor McClure, ‘brought in more money than any other serial novel we ever syndicated’. Some astute contemporaries thought it his best book so far, and the historian G.M. Trevelyan praised it as a ‘good historical novel’ which ‘reads like the outcome of an eager and imaginative study of the Paston letters’, the correspondence of a fifteenth-century Norfolk family, a favourite book of Stevenson’s. The Black Arrow is his sole sustained novel of history, set in the socially brutal, politically chaotic, morally anarchic century which Stevenson had long studied and which had likewise intrigued and repelled Walter Scott in Quentin Durward. The difference is that Stevenson viewed history chiefly as tragic farce. In no other book is what he called ‘the profound underlying pessimism’ of the Stevensons, ‘their sense of the tragedy of life’, more apparent.
The first-time reader should at least try to read past the pseudo-Shakespearian style of the dialogue and overlook the hasty lapses in plotting. Stevenson had trouble remembering what he had written. And appropriately, his young protagonist Dick Shelton is so often oppressed by the memory of his adventures that he survives by forgetting and repeatedly running away from them. Escapism, yes. The escapism of moral desperation.
The intricate plot, no doubt all in all for the Young Folks, is a headlong dramatic enactment of ‘dark and dubious’ battles, bloody ambushes, terrified flights, catastrophic follies (notably Dick’s), swithering loyalties, and betrayals of trust. Dick is helplessly implicated with four adventurers, four variations on John Silver: his opportunistic guardian Brackley; his protector Duckworth, the ‘Robin
