Robert Louis Stevenson: A writer’s stay in Monterey

The Monterey Bay area is a favorite place for artists, photographers, writers, musicians, and other creative people.  Living an artist’s life is not necessarily the easiest choice, as Robert Louis Stevenson’s life illustrates. Recently while reading some of Stevenson’s poems for children from the Children’s Garden of Verse, I was curious to find out how his time in Monterey may have affected his writing and life.  

Stevenson, born on November 15, 1850 in Scotland, suffered poor health all his life. It seems in his worst times, he wrote some of his best work.  After studying engineering at the university in  Edinburgh,  he decided against following the family’s business of lighthouse designing. Having been writing since childhood, he  devoted himself  instead to the life of a writer.  His father encouraged him to study law as a fall back in case writing didn’t work out for him. After attending university, he traveled around Europe. While visiting an artist’s colony in Getz, France, he met and fell in love with a married woman, Fanny Van De Grift Osbourne.  Against the advice and wishes of his family and friends, Setevenson followed Fanny to the States.   

He arrived in Monterey in the summer of 1879. He was recovering from poor health worsened by his sea voyage to the U.S. and the train trip across the prairie to California.   Stevenson had come to Monterey to wait for his future wife’s divorce to become final.  Like other writers who have lived in Monterey, his stay was less than idyllic. To be near Fanny  and to recover his health, Stevenson  stayed in Monterey at the Swiss businessman, Griadin’s French Hotel, now the Stevenson House Adobe.  Fortunately for Stevenson, Manuela Girardin’s son-in-law,  Dr J.P.E. Heintz. Heintz and his wife took Stevenson into their care.  They cared for him during the worst of his health crisis.  The Heintz family also had him to dinner on a number of occasions.  While here, Stevenson’s family in Scotland worried about him, thinking he was making a mistake chasing after Fanny and ruining his health.  http://www.historicmonterey.org/?p=stevenson_house

http://oldmonterey.org/historicmonterey_stevensonhouse.html

While in Monterey, Stevenson was working on The Amateur Emigrant (1895), “The Pavilion on the Links (1880), and A Vendetta in the West, a novel that was never published and is thought to have been destroyed.  He was very interested in the feud between the local Montereyans and local land owner and fellow Scotsman, David Jack. Known for his shady and conniving land and mortgage practices, Jack was very unpopular. It was known that Jack had bodyguards with him wherever he went.  Stevenson raised a controversy when he suggested that famous San Francisco orator, Denis Kearney thought Jack should be hanged. This may have been the subject matter of the manuscript that was destroyed.  

While traveling throughout the U.S., Stevenson wrote a collection of  essays, Across the Plains With Other Memories and Essays.   One essay in the collection, “The Old Capital,”  describes Monterey from his perspective. Describing the physical geography of the Monterey Bay area he wrote:

“The Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman as a bent fishing hook: and the comparison ... still shows the eye of the soldier for topography.  Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb.  Thus the ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her left flank and rear with never-dying surf.”  (RLS, “The Old Pacific Capital”, in Across the Plains with Other Memories and Essays {London, Chatto and Windus, 1892], p.77).

Stevenson describes life and conditions in Monterey at the times including the haunting and pervading presence of the Pacific Ocean as, 

“A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the Pacific.”  

Of the town itself, he writes... “You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland is begirt with thundering surges “ (From his essay, “ The Old Capitol”).

Stevenson was fascinated by the recent history of struggle to control the land.  Once settled by Catholic missionaries, Monterey was first a Mexican capital, then an American capital, and lastly, the capital of a state until Monterey is left to find a new identity.  He noted, that, 

 “Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which the soil has changed-hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of their ancient air.” 

Of the town of Monterey herself he wrote, 

“The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets, economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to begin or end. The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.”

He also witnessed the plight of the local indigenous people when he attended a celebration at the mission

“...the praisers of times past will fix upon the Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with chaparral, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to preservation from all thinking people; but neglect and abuse have been its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is with the Indians for whom it was erected. Their lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American proprietor, and with that exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel.” (From “The Old Capital” by RLS). 

His language reflects the tone of the times toward all indigenous people and people of color.  He does, however, show the beginning of what would later develop into a greater understanding of how Euro-American colonization and land policies and practices have affected the indigenous cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere.  Known for his earlier works written in a more romantic tone, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, the Children’s Garden of Verses, and others, his latter essays reflect a changing attitude and perspective.  While still paternalistic when referring to indigenous and other cultural groups of people’s traditions, customs, and lifestyles, his writing while in the U.S. begins to show a growing concern for the impact of imperialism on indigenous peoples.  Later as he traveled and eventually made his final home in Samoa where his writing became more and more critical of how European expansion and colonization affected cultures throughout Oceania and the western peoples.

Later while attending an annual celebration at the mission for the indigenous people who had converted to Catholicism, Stevenson observed, “And it made a man’s heart sorry for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read and to sing, who had given them European mass-books which they still preserve and study in their cottages, and who had now passed away from all authority and influence in that land — to be succeeded by greedy land-thieves and sacrilegious pistol-shots. So ugly a thing may our Anglo-Saxon Protestantism appear beside the doings of the Society of Jesus.”

Robert Louis Stevenson lived in Monterey for a short period near the end of a decade when great changes were taking place in Monterey.  He left Monterey to live in San Francisco, again to be near his future wife Fanny. His final words for Monterey as he finished his essay, The Old Capitol, were:  “Alas for the little town! it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaire vulgarians of the Big Bonanza.”

Before Stevenson left Monterey for San Francisco and other parts of Northern California, he described what he found most interesting about the western U.S., “In my little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down from country ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from the Eastern States.”

Visit the online archive http://www.robert-louis-stevenson.org/, and walk in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson on Monterey’s historic http://www.seemonterey.com/tourist-attractions/