On summer break from his university studies, a young Robert Louis Stevenson worked late into the night. He apprenticed in his family’s lighthouse engineering business but had no interest in the trade. Instead, he had “made his own private determination to be an author” and spent his nights writing a novel that would never see the light of day. Sickly, ambitious, and entirely unknown, he traded sleep for writing. Outside the open window stood the celebrated towers of his family’s achievements that still illuminate Scotland’s rocky coastline.
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But looking out into the darkness, he saw only the haunting prospect of his own early death and tried to pen something that would outlive him. Suffering from life-threatening pulmonary illness, Stevenson “toil[ed] to leave a memory behind” him in a monument of words. As the night wore on, moths came thick to the candles and fell dead on his paper until he finally went to bed “raging” that he could die tomorrow with his great work unfinished.
During this time, Stevenson liked to mope around graveyards, where he went, specifically, “to be unhappy.” More fruitfully, he began writing essays. Making a name for himself in nonfiction long before his famous novels, he grappled with “the art of living” and dying on the page. At the point of physical and mental breakdown at 23, he was sent by doctor’s orders to the French Riviera, as recounted in his early essay “Ordered South.” There, he experienced the beautiful setting as if “touch[ing] things with muffled hands, and see[ing] them through a veil.” The young invalid was “not perhaps yet dying but hardly living either.” At his low point, “wean[ed]… from the passion of life,” he waited for death to “come quietly and fitly.”
In a subsequent edition published seven years later, Stevenson added a surprising note to the end of “Ordered South”: “A man who fancies himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay,” and reversed its resigned conclusion. Through a maturation process he attributed to experience, interaction, and a great deal of reading, he came to recognize the “self-pity” behind his youthful “haunting of the grave[yard]”: “it [was] himself that he [saw] dead, his virtues forgotten, his the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more for where a man is all pride… and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded.”
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Twenty years later in the fall of 1887, Stevenson arrived in New York a global celebrity. In the previous four years, he had published Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and, most sensationally, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an adaptation of which had just premiered on Broadway. Reporters, publishers, and fans crowded Stevenson before he could get off the ship. For all his youthful longing for recognition, he found the experience of fame “idiotic to the last degree.”
He had come seeking health rather than publicity. For nearly three years, he’d been too sick to leave his house on the English coast. His doctor told him that he likely wouldn’t survive another winter in the British Isles. He often wrote in bed or, when he was in too much pain to manage a pen, dictated to a scribe. When the bloody cough of his lung hemorrhages kept him from speaking, he composed by signing, letter by letter.
But the sickness that once detached him from life had now made him greedy for experience. Making the most of brief periods of relative health, he accumulated several lifetimes worth of adventures. He canoed through France and Belgium, backpacked across a French mountain range with a very stubborn donkey, got arrested as a suspected German spy, inadvertently started a forest fire in California, tried deep sea diving, and crossed the globe to propose to a married woman, to name only a few.
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