Lockdown….. and as much snow and ice in the streets as if Edinburgh were in the Arctic….
Lockdown….murky by mid-afternoon and murky till mid-morning…
Lockdown…..your international blogger and influencer is travelling no more…
But finally a ray of sunshine - a request to be guest blogger at the Monthly Book Group, nowadays Zooming around the world!
Shoosh, the proposer is talking..…
“I chose to read all the works of RL Stevenson as a Lockdown project. The Book Group has already tackled Jekyll and Hyde. However, we did not discuss Stevenson’s life, which is so interesting. In his first vital years he was much influenced by his nannie and to an extent his father. This produced the Covenanter in him.
“Then in his youth he blossomed into a Romantic, a Cavalier and a Bohemian. He fell under the spell of an Edinburgh prostitute who then announced that she was about to emigrate to USA .He was bribed by his parents to try a career and was called to the Bar. This got him a period in an artistic community in the Loire valley where he met an American, Fanny Osbourne. When he got a chance he followed her to her home city, San Francisco. This is covered in his first interesting book. She shook off her husband and temporarily her children and they married and spent an amusing honeymoon on Mount Silverado, again recorded in a book. Then back to Britain , with the Osbourne children. He talked well and built up a group of literary friends including Sir Sidney Colvin who saw what he might be capable of and forced him on.
“ ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ was a great success but Stevenson and his friends realised it was a detour not a destination. He was commercially successful with ‘Treasure Island’ and his three Jacobite novels. The last, ‘the Master of Ballantrae’ took him nearer to his objective. His poor lungs and addiction to cigarettes led to his emigration to the South Sea Islands where he set up home with the Osbourne entourage and latterly his mother. He wasted time on Island politics but Colvin continued to write urging ambition. ‘St Ives’ was his next book, unfinished but completed much later by another friend.
Yours truly discreetly opens the five litre box of El Cheapo red cunningly placed just out of sight of the camera….
“Then at last he got stuck into the novel he had been incubating, ‘Weir of Hermiston’ (1896). He had sketched out the general outline some years earlier and his letters show the development of the book. I find so much in it and I hope you do.
“The last scene, and the scene before, took Weir to a climax of, as I see it, great drama. He finished, but perhaps he didn’t finish, writing about the meeting of Archie and Kirstie, then he taught his family some French, had lunch and died. “How can I keep this pitch?” he had written. And he failed, I suppose. His step daughter claimed that he had outlined how the novel was to end. You will I hope have seen this in the editions you have read. But the Osbourne family shared a lust for reflected glory and and did RLS actually know how the drama would end? Does this matter? It should certainly not deflect attention from what he wrote. But as a means of shedding light of the work, it is perhaps justified…”
The proposer was not alone in choosing the complete works of RLS as a lockdown project as, remarkably, another member had done the same. And a third member had read most of what RLS had written, and drew attention to the excellence of his travel writing - such as “The Silverado Squatters” - as well as the novels. Hermiston, however, was different - much more character-driven, with effort spent on establishing the characters and setting rather than narrative progress.
So the first part of the evening was to assess the unfinished book (or “fragment”, though clocking in at 122 pages), and the second part was to speculate about how the rest of the novel might have gone.
Most were keen - very keen - on the book. “Superb!”. “Really liked it”. “Characters very strong, plot building well, and real sense of place”. “It would have been a great novel, but as it stands it is a great fragment”. “Fantastic!”
It was interesting to see Stevenson attempting a “novel for grown-ups” rather than an adventure story, and to see influences not just from Scott but from other major nineteenth century novelists such as Emily Bronte and Thomas Hardy.
Indeed there were was only one of the dozen virtually present who did not have a positive view of the book. He could though see individual aspects of the book that were to be recommended, but would not recommend the book as a whole to someone else. There were too many dense passages that were hard work to wade through.
The use of Scots language attracted quite a bit of comment. For those not brought up in lowland Scotland, the passages in Scots posed an unwelcome problem, only partly relieved by the glossary found in most editions. The lowland Scots present admitted (to the surprise of others) that they did not recognise quite a lot of the words, and pointed out that even Burns had needed to put a glossary into the Kilmarnock edition of his poems (1786). But they understood enough words to be able to sail on picking up the general gist of words they didn’t know. Moreover, they felt the use of Scots - a language rhythmic, onomatopoeic and sometimes violent - gave a good sense of Scottish life at the time. “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life”.
“Remember, your faither is a hard man, reapin’ where he hasna sowed and gathering’ where he hasna strawed. It’s easy speakin’ but mind! Ye’ll have to look in the gurly face o’m, where it’s ill to look, and vain to look for mercy. Ye mind me o’ a bonny ship pitten oot into the black and gowsty seas - we’re a’ safe still, sittin’ quait and crakin’ wi Kirstie in your own town chamber…”
The characters were very well drawn, above all the elder Kirstie. Stevenson indeed seemed to be in love with her, and there was an underlying eroticism in her late night discussions with Archie. Stevenson had married a woman some 20 years older, and had had other relationships with women significantly older than him.
Gosh, refilling my glass already…the wine box makes the process soundless and invisible…
As readers we were shown in depth what Archie and Kirstie senior were thinking and feeling, and a fair amount of what Frank and Kirstie junior were thinking and feeling. However, Weir of Hermiston was viewed very much externally, with only occasional hints as to what might be going on beneath the hanging judge’s fierce exterior. Perhaps this reflected Stevenson’s own relationship with his father. There was also a distinct narrator in the novel - whose many reflections ranged from the nostalgic to the ironical, sometimes very funny - although such a narrator figure was rare for a late nineteenth century novel. “St Ives” also has a narrator, but that is St Ives himself, telling his story in the first person singular.
Stevenson’s nostalgia for Scotland while he was overseas in Samoa is very marked in the novel, and shown even in the dedication to his wife:
“I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind…”
Indeed all his best novels about Scotland were written while he was abroad.
The sense of place is rendered in fine descriptive writing:
“The road to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of a stream, a favourite with anglers, and with midges, full of falls and pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch…..
…..All beyond and about [Hermiston] is the great field of the hills; the plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows in a ship’s rigging, hard and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle one behind another like a herd of cattle into the sunset….”
Moreover, we had a view on where the place was ( a world first?!). Colvin as editor rejects the idea that the rural action is set in any specific part of southern Scotland, suggesting an amalgam of the Lammermuirs, Glencorse by the Pentland Hills, and in particular Upper Tweeddale.
But he seems unaware that “Cauldstaneslap” Farm, the home of Christina (Kirstie junior) is named after “The Cauldstaneslap”, which is part of the old drove road through the southern Pentlands, and was familiar to the hill-walkers in our group. Using that as the clue, one of our members found it fairly easy to fit most of the rural action and descriptions into the Southern Pentlands, with Kirsty’s farm plausibly being Harperrig Farm, and Hermiston being Baddingsgill Farm. The old drove road joins the two, with a climb up in either direction to a mass of peat hags in the central section. Glencorse Kirk is at the other end of the Pentlands, some eight miles to the north east, and the house at Swanston where the young Stevenson spent his summers is a mile or two further on. And the lonely gravestone of the “Covenanter’s Grave” lies only a mile or two away from the drove road over the ridge of hills to the south.
A writer in our group was intrigued by Stevenson’s creative process, as he talks of his books as eggs that he leaves, lifting the lid occasionally, until they eventually hatch. But did this writing process of long maturation contribute to leaving the novel unfinished? At the time of his death he was alternating between writing Hermiston one day and the less demanding St Ives the next. Perhaps he had the habit of starting something off with enthusiasm and then dropping it. The Tusitala edition of his works includes eight other unfinished stories alongside Hermiston.
Stevenson was forward thinking in having Archie an opponent of capital punishment, a plot element that would have come out even more strongly if the plot as originally conceived had been followed in having Archie himself sentenced to death…
….time to lay down the pen and have a generous refill of El Cheapo….
….But they were off again… it started with an innocent question - why are the “Black Brothers” called “black?” ….Well, part of the whole romantic push from the example of Dumas, to make them seem more villainous, indeed parts of this remind me of “Treasure Island”.…not that they were people of colour?…no, but maybe swarthy, like the pubs called “The Black Boy” which are not racist but are celebrating the swarthy Charles 2nd….well the one in Bristol is plausibly linked to the slave trade…well, black-haired?… the golden hair of Kirstie senior is contrasted with black-haired Kirstie junior…Stevenson makes a big deal of that black hair/gold hair contrast as if it has some special significance for him…
……struth!!….give a poor scribe a break!…
…indeed the novel is full of binary contrasts: town versus country, father versus son,18th versus 19th century attitudes, aunt versus niece, Scots versus French…perhaps we should expect nothing less from the author of Jekyll and Hyde….and so they went on….why two Kirsties?….why set near the end of the Napoleonic Wars?…………….
Waking with a start, I heard that………it was now the second part of the evening. Members had been asked by the host to consider how they thought the novel might have ended. There is an official version - from Stevenson’s daugher-in-law and secretary, Mrs Strong - of how he planned the rest of the novel. And some felt that novel as planned would have worked very well. But it was perfectly possible that he would have changed his mind as the novel progressed. In trying to write a more serious style of novel, he might have felt his plot as sketched out would have seen a relapse into adventure and melodrama (and one of us felt that there were already signs in the fragment of the adventure style of writing pushing through). And characters can of course develop unexpectedly in the course of writing - as, noted Mrs Strong, Kirstie senior already had done.
So - in another world first!!! - there follow two original proposals from Book Group members for how the book might have been completed, plus a a synopsis of the ending in the recent BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, plus Mrs Strong’s version. Fanfare!…..
………FOUR ENDINGS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR….
ENDING A/. THE PROPOSER
“ Braxfield [on whom Lord Hermiston was modelled] was my heavy lead.” “Hermiston felt drawn to his son with a softness of sentiment he would not care to admit.” Of course RLS was like Archie, an only son of a somewhat austere father who certainly loved his son but may have had difficulty showing it. Lord Glenalmond also tells Archie that his father loves him. And the family doctor does. “Just try to be less of an idiot.” Sounds timeless from father to son. So I suggest that the Hanging Judge is supporting his son as the tale comes to its conclusion. Innes has to seduce or rape Kirstie junior. If she is seduced, I do not see Archie killing Innes, being imprisoned, and then reconciled to Kirstie. If she is raped does Archie got first to her, and then kill Innes? I do not see this either, but I certainly assume Innes is killed.
The Elliot family are writ large and that invites the reader to put them in the frame. One could kill Innes. Stevenson in correspondence with friends has them possibly rescuing Archie from jail. In writing to JM Barrie he asks whether a tragedy and a comedy can start the same way and simply diverge with the last scene. He thought not. There is nothing but foreboding in the Introduction and is this not how it continues? We discussed Great Expectations a few years ago, and there Dickens intended a sad ending, a friend persuaded him to give way to sentiment, and he then admitted he should have followed his instincts. RLS is affected by the same conflict.
Then we have the two Kirsties. With a happy ending would they get on well together? No. Kirstie senior understood Archie as one who has seen him from birth and she is clearly a perceptive woman and very close to Archie. Also clearly, she loves him. Kirstie junior loves him too. But is this not the fancy of a young woman? She does not see the problems. Amor vincit omnia? In the last scene, she thinks she is being dropped. Archie felt “a bewildered fear of the explosive engine in his arms, whose works he did not understand, and yet had been tampering with.” Colvin wrote “there is a change in the characters under the writer’s hand.” And Stevenson, “I will not betray my secret or my heroine.” One of the Kirsties is that person, but which? Of course junior might have, with family help, raised the mob. But for me, the elder is more likely.
Archie. “He was dangerous when his heart was stirred.” But how dangerous? He might have gone home from the last meeting with Kirstie jnr , dismissed Innes who would leave in a few days, but Archie would have to give him money first for transport to his parents. Then possibly Innes seduces Kirstie and thinks that is ok as Archie has parted from her He then offers Archie and Kirstie snr this as his revenge. The killing must follow, and so this was a moorland death. Innes went out for a last walk before leaving the following day, and either Archie or Kirstie snr follows him and kills him. Kirstie sees no future for herself but would sacrifice herself for Archie. Might she do it? Then might Archie be arrested for murder and tried. Kirstie then comes forward and confesses.
So what is the central role for Lord Hermiston? Could be that Innes goes for his walk on the moor, Archie wants to go out after him but Kirstie beats him to it and stabs Innes. The young bloods of the Tuesday Club assume, when the body is found, that Archie did it. They take pleasure in reporting what they know to the authorities. Archie is arrested and the news is passed on to Lord Hermiston who goes straight to the jail. Archie confesses he did it, but his father examines him and realises he is protecting someone. He also finds out about Kirstie Jnr. He turns every precept of his upside down to get Archie released. They both go to the farmhouse and find Kirstie snr has killed herself.
Archie cannot cope with his sacrifice and he might then commit suicide, but his father as the “heavy lead,” devotes his time to saving his son with love and understanding. And Kirstie junior? The romance is over and her brothers would not take Archie into the Elliot family, so no happy ending.
B/. ANOTHER BOOK GROUP MEMBER
Frank makes advances but is rejected by the pure Christina. Feeling humiliated he seeks revenge by starting a rumour that she had succumbed! Dandie confronts Frank, and in a rage, Frank kills him and is arrested. Meanwhile Archie feels that he can’t live without Christina and decides to marry her no matter what his father says – after all he has defied him before. Surprisingly his father agrees to the match – “all the young lassies in Edinburgh are flighty and shallow and I, after all, married above myself!”
He is the “hanging judge” for Frank, but after this case he decides “no more” and retires. Have Archie’s feelings about hanging got through to him?
He retires to Hermiston and passes many happy days in the company of Christina, a companion that he never had.
Archie returns to the Bar where he is a very successful defender of the “downtrodden” and becomes a just judge himself, held in the very highest respect by society.
I haven’t decided on how many children the happy couple have and Kirsty(elder) adores the happy family atmosphere!!
C/. THE BBC RADIO 4 DRAMATISATION (with thanks to our member in Sweden)
At 28 minutes in to the second hour-long dramatisation, we reach the point where the book is cut short. The BBC producers, however, plough on seamlessly and present in the remaining half an hour how they believe the tale would or should have ended.
After the argument, Archie travels to Edinburgh to seek his father's approval to propose to Kirstie, but that is robustly refused and the relationship between Archie and his father is effectively ended. While Archie is away in the city, Frank Innes forces himself violently upon Kirstie, sexually assaulting her before fleeing Hermiston to take the coach to Carlisle.
When Archie returns to Hermiston, the older Kirstie Elliot is waiting outside with the terrible news (in a scene reminiscent of the scene at the start of the book when Lord Hermiston is met by Kirstie Elliot with the news that his wife is dead). Archie collects his pistols and gallops off on his horse to intercept the coach. He stops the coach and challenges Frank Innes to a pistol dual at 10 paces. Frank cheats and fires his pistol early, misses Archie and then is shot dead by his adversary.
Archie is arrested and put in jail in Kelso. When his father comes to ask him before the trial why he shot Innes, Archie stays silent, only telling his father that he (Archie) has finally found the capacity to judge, having been judged by his father all his life. In order to protect Kirstie's honour, Archie refuses to report the crime that Innes had committed. Lord Hermiston subsequently sits in the public gallery during the trial of his son and cries out to Archie to "say something!", but Archie refuses and instead pleads guilty. He is sentenced to death.
When young Kirstie comes to visit him before his execution, Archies proposes to her in his cell and asks her to "celebrate this day forever" and remember him at the Weavers' Cairn. Kirstie is distraught and returns home to report the whole sorry story to Dand. That night Dand successfully leads a party to break Archie free from the jail in Kelso. The lovers immediately escape together to Glasgow, from where they set sail.
The dramatisation ends by informing the listener that Lord Hermiston never lived down the shame and that he died a broken man as a result. Finally, a letter arrives to Kirstie Elliot at Hermiston informing her that Archie and Kirstie are safe and making a new life for themselves in Boston, and that Kirstie has just given birth to a baby daughter.
D/. MRS STRONG’S VERSION
Sidney Colvin, in his editorial note, writes: “The intended argument, so far as it was known at the time of the writer’s death to his step-daughter and devoted amanuensis, Mrs Strong, was nearly as follows:
“Archie persists in his good resolution of avoiding further conduct compromising to young Kirstie’s good name. Taking advantage of the situation thus created, and of the girl’s unhappiness and wounded vanity, Frank Innes pursues his purpose of seduction; and Kirstie, though still caring for Archie in her heart, allows herself to become Archie’s victim. Old Kirstie is the first to perceive something amiss with her, and believing Archie to be the culprit, accuses him, thus making him aware for the first time that mischief had happened.
“He does not at once deny the charge, but seeks out and questions young Kirstie, who confesses the truth to him; and he, still loving her, promises to protect and defend her in her trouble. He then has an interview with Frank Innes on the moor, which ends in a quarrel and in Archie killing Frank beside the Weaver’s Stone. Meanwhile, the Four Black Brothers, having become aware of their sister’s betrayal, are bent on vengeance against Archie as her supposed seducer. They are about to close in upon him with this purpose, when he is arrested by the officers of the law for the murder of Frank. He is tried before his own father, the Lord Justice-Clerk, found guilty, and condemned to death.
“Meanwhile the elder Kirstie, having discovered from the girl how matters really stand, informs her nephews of the truth: and they, in a great revulsion of feeling in Archie’s favour, determine on an action after the ancient manner of their house. They gather a following, and after a great fight break the prison where Archie lies confined, and rescue him. He and young Kirstie thereafter escape to America.
“But the ordeal of taking part in the trial of his own son has been too much for the Lord Justice-Clerk, who dies of shock. “I do not know” adds the amanuensis, “what becomes of old Kirstie, but that character grew and strengthened so in the writing that I am sure he had some dramatic destiny for her.”
Phew! As I finally laid down my pen, some clever clogs informed us that Stevenson’s death had been precipitated by the strain of pulling a cork from a wine bottle……….
….guiltily I looked again at the easy-pouring wine box……then refilled my glass and drank a toast to RLS.
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