Where go the boats?

“WHERE GO THE BOATS?” NOSTALGIA AND ADVENTURE IN THE WORK OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

– MARK DEVLIN, UNIVERSITE DE PARIS – NOUVELLE ATHENES

INTRODUCTION:

Robert Louis Stevenson is perhaps still best known as the author of several timeless classics of children’s literature, among which we could name Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and A Child’s Garden of Verses. 

I would like to argue that this timelessness comes in part from the fact that these books speak not only to children, but also to adult readers … of their own childhood, of their childhood reading, and their childhood longings, and evoke also the fantasy – and the impossibility – of a return to childhood. 

That these books both provide that return to childhood while at the same time lamenting its very impossibility, is effected through the careful construction of a double temporality of anticipation of adventure and retrospective nostalgia.

Certain of Stevenson’s writings can provide us with a key to this complex retrospective reading of his work, particularly in the poems of A Child’s Garden of Verses. 

Start with one of these,

“Where go the boats?”

Dark brown is the river,

Golden is the sand,

It flows along for ever,

With trees on either hand

Green leaves a-floating,

Castles of the foam,

Boats of mine a-boating – 

Where will all come home?

On goes the river

And out past the mill,

Away down the valley,

Away down the hill.

Away down the river,

A hundred miles or more,

Other little children

Shall bring my boats ashore.

I believe that this childhood vignette can be read, like so many of the poems in the book, from the perspective of Stevenson as author casting a retrospective, nostalgic glance at the origins of his vocation for writing; we might read these “paper boats” as Stevenson’s books, constructions of paper with their origin in his own childhood reading and imagination, swept away from him far beyond his reach to be picked up by “other little children” far down the river – this river which, like time, sweeps all things forward, flowing only towards the future. “Where will all come home?” evokes the pain of that childhood home to which it is impossible to return, unless, like his books, these “boats of mine a-boating”, scattered leaves floating on the river, find new homes in the imaginations of future children who do not yet exist, who are almost impossible to imagine. 

In light then, of this image of Stevenson’s texts of adventure as these fragile paper-boats, set adrift on the irreversible river of time, I’d like to read other texts of his through the cues and clues given to us by his poetry, his essays, and the writings of other critics, to attempt :

• First of all to situate Stevenson’s writing in relation to the children’s literature of adventure of his time, to identify its readership, and hear from some of its readers.
• Secondly, I’d like to address the double construction of the reading subject in these books, as both child and adult, and the identification of reader as protagonist and protagonist as reader. 
• Finally, I will attempt to draw some brief conclusions in terms of Stevenson’s articulation of retrospection and anticipation, of nostalgia and adventure. 

1. “The old romance retold …”

Treasure Island begins with a poem entitled :

Immediately we are alerted to the author’s awareness of the conventions of the genre in which he proposes to write. Brief distillation of the entire genre in first lines. 

Draws attention to this playful inscription within the genre “All the old romance retold …”, prompts the immediate question: is it really? The self-consciousness of the gesture indicates that already, this is not just the “old romance”. 

It points to the figure of the author as a reader in his own childhood “as me they pleased of old”, but also questions whether the “old romance” is sophisticated enough to please these “wiser youngsters”. The youth of today are facetiously described as “studious”, in an almost mocking tone … A nod to the fact that more and more, at the time he was writing, boys’ adventure books were required to be “educational and edifying”, as witnessed by the establishment in 1879 by GA Hutchinson of Boys’ Own Paper, funded by the Religious Tract Society. There seems to be a claim here for lack of edifying, moralistic content, and rather an appeal to more violent and atavistic urges, those “ancient appetites”. 

HE evokes these three writers, WHG Kingston (Peter the Whaler trans The Swiss Family Robinson), RM Ballantyne (The Coral Island), James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans) of the previous generation, but also, while claiming kinship with them, cheekily consigns them and their works to the grave. Which is one thing when it comes to Kingston and Cooper, who were dead and long-dead respectively, at the time of writing, but quite another when it comes to poor Ballantyne, who was to live on to 1894 despite this premature burial. One suspects that, while overtly come to praise them, Stevenson has half a mind to bury them along with their work, as an older, less sophisticated form of adventure novel, and indeed, despite his protestations to the contrary, this is what Treasure Island did. 

“To make one a boy again …”

The critics of the time were well aware that what they had before them here was absolutely not just “the old romance retold, exactly in the ancient way”, but something far more rich and strange.

As the anonymous reviewer in The Graphic had it : 

“Needless to say, there is no resemblance between Mr Stevenson and any other boys’ writer” … his characters “are all creations, living, lying, swearing, murderous miscreants, as different from the sailors of Marryat and Ballantyne as any suit of clothes from a breathing man”

These suits of clothes are obviously off-the-peg creations, cut to a familiar pattern, and Stevenson’s far more awful pirates have the individuality, the spark, to truly live on the page. 

George Meredith described Treasure Island as “the best of boys’ books, and a book to make one a boy again” identifying this doubled readership that I’ve talked about. The book was seen as not only epitomising a whole genre, but also acting as a prism through which adult readers, of which there were many, could revisit their own childhoods, and their own childhood reading.

JM Barrie, who would later write that great classic of literature for those who refuse to grow up, Peter Pan, described Kidnapped as “the outstanding boys’ book of a generation” … again, identifying a Stevenson book clearly as children’s fiction, but one wonders if that generation would in fact ever grow out of reading Kidnapped, having grown up with this, and other works by Stevenson, as the children’s books of their generation. 

Indeed, Henry James states outright that “there is perverse humility in … keeping up the fiction that a production so literary as Kidnapped is addressed to immature minds.” For James, a great admirer of Stevenson, this literary quality puts the book out of the realm of children’s literature, but I would maintain that he is closer to the truth in his discussion of Treasure Island :

“It is a ‘boys’ book’, in the sense that it embodies a boy’s vision of the extraordinary.” 

But he also goes on to identify the appeal for “the weary mind of experience” which sees in it “not only the ideal fable, but … the young reader himself and his state of mind”

Here I think James comes very close to identifying the appeal of the Stevensonian adventure novel to adults. It provides an “ideal fable” to this “weary mind of experience”, an ideal example of the kind of reading material that one imagines having read as a child, but with an added literary sophistication that an adult can access. 

At the same time, the book presents to the adult reader an image of a childhood self, recaptures the young reader’s “state of mind”, and thus performs a doubled reading of itself. One reads the story, while at the same time experiencing an evocation of one’s childhood reader-self, in an almost voyeuristic nostalgia, a wistful sense of time past. 

2. “The Land of Storybooks”

In discussing this secondary level at which one might read a novel of adventure, we must not forget that there is also the pure escapism of reading a gripping, thrilling swashbuckling yarn. This is perhaps the level on which the child reads the novel, and on which the adult allows himself to when swept away by the glamour of exotic adventure. It is on this aspect, the sheer power of enchantment of this type of fiction, that Stevenson concentrates in his essay “A Gossip on Romance”, in which he tells us that:

“IN anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance”, Longman’s Magazine

He also concentrates on the power of identification with the protagonist in the adventure-romance.

“the triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene.”

“It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance”

“Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.”

This type of romance fiction then, is perhaps that “ideal fable” that Henry James spoke of … However, I would argue that Stevenson is somewhat swept away by his own rhetoric here : he’s writing in the early 1880s having written only one of his adventure novels, Treasure Island. The reality of the novels he himself wrote would be different from this elementary wish-fulfilment romance; even Treasure Island is not so simple :

The young hero about to set out on his adventurous journey is in a state of suspense, nourished by fantasy that is itself created out of the materials that he himself has read. 

AS in the poem “The Land of Story-Books”, where the child can “play at books that I have read/Till it is time to go to bed”. The material of the fantasy is not merely from imagination, but planted there by the books themselves.

In Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins reads that ultimate symbol of adventure, the treasure map, as if it were a matrix of classic adventure tropes … before his departure on this treasure-hunting voyage, he is filled with : 

“… sea-dreams and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures. I brooded by the hour together over the map, all the details of which I remembered. Sitting by the fire in the house-keeper’s room, I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spy-glass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.”

The spell will eventually be broken, as the reality of experience confronts the fantasy of anticipated adventure. The actual adventures are “strange and tragic” rather than the fulfilment of a day-dream.

Not merely the reader identifying with the protagonist, but the protagonist identified as reader/dreamer ….

Setting in motion familiar tropes of adventure novel, reflexive, self-conscious manner.

Foundational adventure trope, Robinson Crusoe shipwreck, washed up on desert island. Stevenson in Kidnapped: 

[the notes, at this point, become scattered, almost illegible … We believe they were written, in pencil, about 20 minutes before the paper was delivered, at the Institut Charles V, at a conference during the time when his hopes were still high, and his heart was light … – Mal. Ivern. Ed.]

• Transposes to barren Scottish island (not quite the tropics)
• David Balfour conscious of literary background to plight:

“In all the books I have read of people cast away, they had either their pockets full of tools, or a chest of things would have been thrown on the beach along with them”

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped!, 1886

• Pocketful of money, leaking through hole (wink at TI?)
• Gaelic-speaking natives … actually a tidal islet, wade to mainland!

3. “A child of air …”

The final poem that I would like to share with you is from the very end of Stevenson’s collection, A Child’s Garden of Verses. This “Envoy” acts as a wistful closing note to the volume. 

To Any Reader

As from the house your mother sees

You playing round the garden trees,

So you may see, if you will look

Through the windows of this book,

Another child, far, far away,

And in another garden, play. 

But do not think you can at all,

By knocking on the window, call

That child to hear you. He intent

Is all on his play-business bent. 

He does not hear; he will not look,

Nor yet be lured out of this book. 

For, long ago, the truth to say,

He has grown up and gone away, 

And it is but a child of air

That lingers in the garden there. 

Robert Louis Stevenson, “To Any Reader”, A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885

This “child of air” is a figure of the author as a child, the same child who set sail his little paper-boats on the “dark brown” river in “Where go the boats?” … Again, the emphasis is on this far-off childhood being set before us, but inaccessible. Just as the river only flows one way, the “windows of this book” can be opened to us the readers, to look back at that enchanted time of childhood, that “bright, troubled period”, but there is no way of reaching back through them. The children that we were have long grown up and gone away, and it is only this “child of air” that still lingers, untouchable, but available to us every time we open up one of Stevenson’s books again. 

Mark Devlin

Mythopoetic Cultural Anthropologist Bard

Tour Guide, Translator, Father of Two