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Notes Spinned Off of a Fragment on Memory from the Adventure Series: A Cluster of Quotations
… September, 1868, Far North of Scotland …
Robert Louis Stevenson was traveling in a land of wind-ragged mist, foam, spray, and great, grey waves, where the wind always whistled and roared in the weeds on the cliff’s edge, the sea-birds screamed, the sand gleamed among the darker weed, and the grim grey sea roared—Wick, Caithness …
«Save in north-east Ness, and in favoured spots elsewhere, also below the 500 feet level, the land of Cat was a land of heath and woods and rocks, studded, especially in the west, with lochs abounding in trout, a vast area of rolling moors, intersected by spacious straths, each with its salmon river, a land of solitary silences, where red deer and elk abounded, and in which the wild boar and wolf ranged freely, the last wolf being killed in Glen Loth within twelve miles of Dunrobin at a date between 1690 and 1700. No race of hunters or fishermen ever surpassed the Picts in their craft as such (1).»
From Wick—a low sky, a grey sea, and a whistling wind—Stevenson took the Thurso coach, whose «way […] lain throughout over a moorish country very northern to behold» (2).
In his biography of Stevenson, Michel Le Bris explains the decision to do the trip to Thurso—«La dernière malle-poste de Grande Bretagne!»—quoting Night Outside the Wick Mail, an unpublished text by Stevenson, enclosed in a letter dated October 17, 1868 (3), addressed to his cousin, Bob Stevenson, as follows…
«Pour moi, dont l’imagination avait été frappée par les Dick Turpin et les Claude Duval du siècle dernier, la poste ètait un objet de crainte religieuse. Je voyais les longues routes obscures, le tromblon du gardien, les passages emmitouflés dans leurs grands manteaux et leurs écharpes, semblables à des momies coiffées de tricornes; le brusque “la bourse ou la vie!”—l’arret, le miroitement de la lanterne sur le cocher—Ah, plus jamais je ne reverrai Wick (4)!»
«Latish at night», Stevenson wrote in «The Education Of An Engineer», an essay in which he narrated the trip to Wick and Thurso, «though it was still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the coach with its load of Hebridean fishers—as they had pursued VETTURINI up the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil’s tomb—two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of white mice. The coach passed on, and their small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was left to marvel how they had wandered into that country, and how they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres» (5).
«Latish at night», Stevenson wrote in «The Education Of An Engineer», an essay in which he narrated the trip to Wick and Thurso, «though it was still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare, white town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole. And here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the coach with its load of Hebridean fishers—as they had pursued VETTURINI up the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil’s tomb—two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy, the other with a cage of white mice. The coach passed on, and their small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was left to marvel how they had wandered into that country, and how they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres» (5).
The definitive version of the essay, «Random Memories: The Education of an Engineer» (6), ends thus…
«But in an old, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle.»
However, the original version of the essay, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories» (7), has a different ending…
For some reason, the passage describing the collision of a travel memory with a present occurrence by way of a newspaper clipping—a veritable «intersection reading» surely to be appreciated by William Seward Burroughs— was suppressed when the essay was published in volume. Nevertheless, it is a revealing example of the way in which the writing flow gushes from the mixis of two heterogenous images, or how memory and juxtaposition of images can conspire to produce writing…
However, I owe this cluster of quotations to Michel Le Bris, who quotes the conclusion of «The Education of an Engineer»’s original version (8). Cutting and rearranging various quotations from Stevenson’s essay, and from his letters to his mother and his cousin as well, he relates anew, cleverly and most effectively, the same occurrences reported by Stevenson, but changing the point of view and building a biographical narration which traces a different trail, and thus imparts a lesson on the art of writing similar to that imparted by Stevenson with the original ending of his essay…
NOTES
1. James Gray, Caithness in Saga-Time; or, The Jarrls and the Freskyns, Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1922, p. 8.
2. Robert Louis Stevenson, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories», Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4, Issue 5, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888, p. 640.
3. Michel Le Bris, Robert Louis Stevenson: Les années bohémiennes, 1850-1880, Paris, NiL Editions, 1994, p. 212n2.
4. M. Le Bris, op. cit., p. 211.
5. R. L. Stevenson, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories», cit., p. 640.
6. In Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892.
7. R.L. Stevenson, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories», cit., pp. 636-640.
8. M. Le Bris, op. cit., p. 212n2.
1. James Gray, Caithness in Saga-Time; or, The Jarrls and the Freskyns, Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1922, p. 8.
2. Robert Louis Stevenson, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories», Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4, Issue 5, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888, p. 640.
3. Michel Le Bris, Robert Louis Stevenson: Les années bohémiennes, 1850-1880, Paris, NiL Editions, 1994, p. 212n2.
4. M. Le Bris, op. cit., p. 211.
5. R. L. Stevenson, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories», cit., p. 640.
6. In Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892.
7. R.L. Stevenson, «The Education Of An Engineer: More Random Memories», cit., pp. 636-640.
8. M. Le Bris, op. cit., p. 212n2.