MY DEAR COLVIN, – I have been down with pleurisy but now convalesce; it was a slight attack, but I had a hot fever; pulse 150; and the thing reminds me of my weakness. These miseries tell on me cruelly. But things are not so hopeless as they might be so I am far from despair. Besides I think I may say I have some courage for life.

But now look here:

Fables and Tales

Here is my scheme. Henley already proposed that Caldecott should illustrate Will o’ the Mill. The Guitar is still more suited to him; he should make delicious things for that. And though the Lie is not much in the way for pictures, I should like to see my dear Admiral in the flesh. I love the Admiral; I give my head, that man’s alive. As for the other two they need not be illustrated at all unless he likes.

Is this a dream altogether? I would if necessary ask nothing down for the stories, and only a small royalty but to begin from the first copy sold.

I hate myself for being always on business. But I cannot help my fears and anxieties about money; even if all came well, it would be many a long day before we could afford to leave this coast. Is it true that the Donkey is in a second edition? That should bring some money, too, ere long, though not much I dare say. You will see the Guitar is made for Caldecott; moreover it’s a little thing I like. I am no lover of either of the things in Temple Bar; but they will make up the volume, and perhaps others may like them better than I do. They say republished stories do not sell. Well, that is why I am in a hurry to get this out. The public must be educated to buy mine or I shall never make a cent. I have heaps of short stories in view. The next volume will probably be called Stories or A Story-Book, and contain quite a different lot: The Pavilion on the Links: Professor Rensselaer: The Dead Man’s Letter: The Wild Man of the Woods: The Devil on Cramond Sands. They would all be carpentry stories; pretty grim for the most part; but of course that’s all in the air as yet. – Yours ever,

R. L. S.

To W. E. Henley

Monterey, December 11th, 1879.

MY DEAR HENLEY, – Many, many thanks for your long letter. And now to rectifications: —

1. You are wrong about the Lie, from choosing a wrong standard. Compare it with my former stories, not with Scott, or Fielding, or Balzac, or Charles Reade, or even Wilkie Collins; and where will you find anything half or a tenth part as good as the Admiral, or even Dick, or even the Squire, or even Esther. If you had thought of that, you would have complimented me for advance. But you were not quite sincere with yourself: you were seeking arguments to make me devote myself to plays, unbeknown, of course, to yourself.

2. Plays, dear boy, are madness for me just now. The best play is hopeless before six months, and more likely eighteen for outsiders like you and me. And understand me, I have to get money soon, or it has no further interest for me; I am nearly through my capital; with what pluck I can muster against great anxieties and in a very shattered state of health, I am trying to do things that will bring in money soon; and I could not, if I were not mad, step out of my way to work at what might perhaps bring me in more but months ahead. Journalism, you know well, is not my forte; yet if I could only get a roving commission from a paper, I should leap at it and send them goodish (no more than that) goodish stuff.

As for my poor literature, dear Henley, you must expect for a time to find it worse and worse. Perhaps, if God favours me a little at last, it will pick up again. Now I am fighting with both hands, a hard battle, and my work, while it will be as good as I can make it, will probably be worth twopence. If you despised the Donkey, dear boy, you should have told me so at the time, not reserved it for a sudden revelation just now when I am down in health, wealth, and fortune. But I am glad you have said so at last. Never, please, delay such confidences any more. If they come quickly, they are a help; if they come after long silence, they feel almost like a taunt.

Now, to read all this, any one would think you had written unkindly, which is not so, as God who made us knows. But I wished to put myself right ere I went on to state myself. Nothing has come but the volume of Labiche; the Burns I have now given up; the P.O. authorities plainly regard it as contraband; make no further efforts in that direction. But, please, if anything else of mine appears, see that my people have a copy. I hoped and supposed my own copy would go as usual to the old address, and, let me use Scotch, I was fair affrontit when I found this had not been done.

You have not told me how you are and I heard you had not been well. Please remedy this.

The end of life? Yes, Henley, I can tell you what that is. How old are all truths, and yet how far from commonplace; old, strange, and inexplicable, like the Sphinx. So I learn day by day the value and high doctrinality of suffering. Let me suffer always; not more than I am able to bear, for that makes a man mad, as hunger drives the wolf to sally from the forest; but still to suffer some, and never to sink up to my eyes in comfort and grow dead in virtues and respectability. I am a bad man by nature, I suppose; but I cannot be good without suffering a little. And the end of life, you will ask? The pleasurable death of self: a thing not to be attained, because it is a thing belonging to Heaven. All this apropos of that good, weak, feverish, fine spirit, – . We have traits in common; we have almost the same strength and weakness intermingled; and if I had not come through a very hot crucible, I should be just as feverish. My sufferings have been healthier than his; mine have been always a choice, where a man could be manly; his have been so too, if he knew it, but were not so upon the face; hence a morbid strain, which his wounded vanity has helped to embitter.

I wonder why I scratch every one to-day. And I believe it is because I am conscious of so much truth in your strictures on my damned stuff. I don’t care; there is something in me worth saying, though I can’t find what it is just yet; and ere I die, if I do not die too fast, I shall write something worth the boards, which with scarce an exception I have not yet done. At the same time, dear boy, in a matter of vastly more importance than Opera Omnia Ludovici Stevenson, I mean my life, I have not been a perfect cad; God help me to be less and less so as the days go on.

The Emigrant is not good, and will never do for P.M.G., though it must have a kind of rude interest.

R. L. S.

I am now quite an American – yellow envelopes.

To Sidney Colvin

608 Bush Street, San Francisco [December 26, 1879].

MY DEAR COLVIN, – I am now writing to you in a café waiting for some music to begin. For four days I have spoken to no one but to my landlady or landlord or to restaurant waiters. This is not a gay way to pass Christmas, is it? and I must own the guts are a little knocked out of me. If I could work, I could worry through better. But I have no style at command for the moment, with the second part of the Emigrant, the last of the novel, the essay on Thoreau, and God knows all, waiting for me. But I trust something can be done with the first part, or, by God, I’ll starve here…²⁵

O Colvin, you don’t know how much good I have done myself. I feared to think this out by myself. I have made a base use of you, and it comes out so much better than I had dreamed. But I have to stick to work now; and here’s December gone pretty near useless. But, Lord love you, October and November saw a great harvest. It might have affected the price of paper on the Pacific coast. As for ink, they haven’t any, not what I call ink; only stuff to write cookery-books with, or the works of Hayley, or the pallid perambulations of the – I can find nobody to beat Hayley. I like good, knock-me-down black-strap to write with; that makes a mark and done with it. – By the way, I have tried to read the Spectator,²⁶ which they all say I imitate, and – it’s very wrong of me, I know – but I can’t. It’s all very fine, you know, and all that, but it’s vapid. They have just played the overture to Norma, and I know it’s a good one, for I bitterly wanted the opera to go on; I had just got thoroughly interested – and then no curtain to rise.

I have written myself into a kind of spirits, bless your dear heart, by your leave. But this is wild work for me, nearly nine and me not back! What will Mrs. Carson think of me! Quite a night-hawk, I do declare. You are the worst correspondent in the world – no, not that, Henley is that – well, I don’t know, I leave the pair of you to him that made you – surely with small attention. But here’s my service, and I’ll away home to my den O! much the better for this crack, Professor Colvin.

R. L. S.

To Sidney Colvin

608 Bush Street, San Francisco [January 10, 1880].

MY DEAR COLVIN, – This is a circular letter to tell my estate fully. You have no right to it, being the worst of correspondents; but I wish to efface the impression of my last, so to you it goes.

Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning, a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it, may be observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an active step. The gentleman is R. L. S.; the volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of the original Pine Street Coffee House, no less; I believe he would be capable of going to the original itself, if he could only find it. In the branch he seats himself at a table covered with wax-cloth, and a pampered menial, of High-Dutch extraction and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. A while ago and R. L. S. used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this refection he pays ten cents, or five pence sterling (£0, 0s. 5d.).

Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observe the same slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little hatchet, splitting, kindling, and breaking coal for his fire. He does this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers. The reason is this: that the sill is a strong, supporting beam, and that blows of the same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the entire shanty into hell. Thenceforth, for from three to four hours, he is engaged darkly with an ink bottle. Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre and wear the natural hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush. The youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant enters or quits the house, “Dere’s de author.” Can it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the mystery? The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that honourable craft.

His next appearance is at the restaurant of one Donadieu, in Bush Street, between Dupont and Kearney, where a copious meal, half a bottle of wine, coffee and brandy may be procured for the sum of four bits, alias fifty cents, £0, 2s. 2d. sterling. The wine is put down in a whole bottleful, and it is strange and painful to observe the greed with which the gentleman in question seeks to secure the last drop of his allotted half, and the scrupulousness with which he seeks to avoid taking the first drop of the other. This is partly explained by the fact that if he were to go over the mark – bang would go a tenpence. He is again armed with a book, but his best friends will learn with pain that he seems at this hour to have deserted the more serious studies of the morning. When last observed, he was studying with apparent zest the exploits of one Rocambole by the late Viscomte Ponson du Terrail. This work, originally of prodigious dimensions, he had cut into liths or thicknesses apparently for convenience of carriage.

Then the being walks, where is not certain. But by about half-past four, a light beams from the windows of 608 Bush, and he may be observed sometimes engaged in correspondence, sometimes once again plunged in the mysterious rites of the forenoon. About six he returns to the Branch Original, where he once more imbrues himself to the worth of fivepence in coffee and roll. The evening is devoted to writing and reading, and by eleven or half-past darkness closes over this weird and truculent existence.

As for coin, you see I don’t spend much, only you and Henley both seem to think my work rather bosh nowadays, and I do want to make as much as I was making, that is £200; if I can do that, I can swim: last year with my ill health I touched only £109; that would not do, I could not fight it through on that; but on £200, as I say, I am good for the world, and can even in this quiet way save a little, and that I must do. The worst is my health; it is suspected I had an ague chill yesterday; I shall know by to-morrow, and you know if I am to be laid down with ague the game is pretty well lost. But I don’t know; I managed to write a good deal down in Monterey, when I was pretty sickly most of the time, and, by God, I’ll try, ague and all. I have to ask you frankly, when you write, to give me any good news you can, and chat a little, but just in the meantime, give me no bad. If I could get Thoreau, Emigrant and Vendetta all finished and out of my hand, I should feel like a man who had made half a year’s income in a half year; but until the two last are finished, you see, they don’t fairly count.

I am afraid I bore you sadly with this perpetual talk about my affairs; I will try and stow it; but you see, it touches me nearly. I’m the miser in earnest now: last night, when I felt so ill, the supposed ague chill, it seemed strange not to be able to afford a drink. I would have walked half a mile, tired as I felt, for a brandy and soda. – Ever yours,

R. L. S.

To W. E. Henley

608 Bush Street, San Francisco, January 1880.

MY DEAR HENLEY, – You have got a letter ahead of me, owing to the Alpine accumulation of ill news I had to stagger under. I will stand no complaints of my correspondence from England, I having written near half as many letters again as I have received.

Do not damp me about my work; qu’elle soit bonne ou mauvaise, it has to be done. You know the wolf is at the door, and I have been seriously ill. I am now at Thoreau. I almost blame myself for persevering in anything so difficult under the circumstances: but it may set me up again in style, which is the great point. I have now £80 in the world and two houses to keep up for an indefinite period. It is odd to be on so strict a regimen; it is a week for instance since I have bought myself a drink, and unless times change, I do not suppose I shall ever buy myself another. The health improves. The Pied Piper is an idea; it shall have my thoughts, and so shall you. The character of the P. P. would be highly comic, I seem to see. Had you looked at the Pavilion, I do not think you would have sent it to Stephen; ’tis a mere story, and has no higher pretension: Dibbs is its name, I wish it was its nature also. The Vendetta, at which you ignorantly puff out your lips, is a real novel, though not a good one. As soon as I have found strength to finish the Emigrant, I shall also finish the Vend. and draw a breath – I wish I could say, “and draw a cheque.” My spirits have risen contra fortunam; I will fight this out, and conquer. You are all anxious to have me home in a hurry. There are two or three objections to that; but I shall instruct you more at large when I have time, for to-day I am hunted, having a pile of letters before me. Yet it is already drawing into dusk. – Yours affectionately,

R. L. S.

To W. E. Henley

The Dook de Karneel (= Cornhill) and Marky de Stephen is of course Mr. Leslie Stephen. The “blood and thunder” is The Pavilion on the Links. Hester Noble and Don Juan were the titles of two plays planned and begun with W. E. Henley the previous winter. They were never finished. The French novels mentioned are by Joseph Méry. The Dialogue on Character and Destiny still exists in a fragmentary condition. George the Pieman is a character in Deacon Brodie.

608 Bush Street, San Francisco, January 23rd, 1880.

MY DEAR HENLEY, – That was good news. The Dook de Karneel, K.C.B., taken a blood and thunder! Well, I thought it had points; now, I know it. And I’m to see a proof once more! O Glory Hallelujah, how beautiful is proof, And how distressed that author man who dwells too far aloof. His favourite words he always finds his friends misunderstand, With oaths, he reads his articles, moist brow and clenchéd hand. Impromtoo. The last line first-rate. When may I hope to see the Deacon? I pine for the Deacon, for proofs of the Pavilion– O and for a categorical confession from you that the second edition of the Donkey was a false alarm, which I conclude from hearing no more.

I have twice written to the Marky de Stephen; each time with one of my bright papers, so I should hear from him soon. How are Baron Payn, Sir Robert de Bob, and other members of the Aristocracy?

Here’s breid an’ wine an’ kebbuck an’ canty cracks at e’en
To the folks that mind o’ me when I’m awa’,
But them that hae forgot me, O ne’er to be forgi’en —
They may a’ gae tapsalteerie in a raw!

I have mighty little to say, dear boy, to seem worth 2½d. I have thought of the Piper, but he does not seem to come as yet; I get him too metaphysical. I shall make a shot for Hester, as soon as I have finished the Emigrant and the Vendetta and perhaps my Dialogue on Character and Destiny. Hester and Don Juan are the two that smile on me; but I will touch nothing in the shape of a play until I have made my year’s income sure. You understand, and you see that I am right?

I have read M. Auguste and the Crime inconnu, being now abonné to a library, and found them very readable, highly ingenious, and so French that I could not keep my gravity. The Damned Ones of the Indies now occupy my attention; I have myself already damned them repeatedly. I am, as you know, the original person the wheels of whose chariot tarried; but though I am so slow, I am rootedly tenacious. Do not despair. Hester and the Don are sworn in my soul; and they shall be.

Is there no news? Real news, newsy news. Heavenly blue, this is strange. Remember me to the lady of the Cawstle, my toolip, and ever was,

George the Pieman.

To Sidney Colvin

With reference to the following, it must be explained that the first draft of the first part of the Amateur Emigrant, when it reached me about Christmas, had seemed to me, compared to his previous travel papers, a somewhat wordy and spiritless record of squalid experiences, little likely to advance his still only half-established reputation; and I had written to him to that effect, inopportunely enough, with a fuller measure even than usual of the frankness which always marked our intercourse.

608 Bush Street, San Francisco, California [January 1880].

MY DEAR COLVIN, – I received this morning your long letter from Paris. Well, God’s will be done; if it’s dull, it’s dull; it was a fair fight, and it’s lost, and there’s an end. But, fortunately, dulness is not a fault the public hates; perhaps they may like this vein of dulness. If they don’t, damn them, we’ll try them with another. I sat down on the back of your letter, and wrote twelve Cornhill pages this day as ever was of that same despised Emigrant; so you see my moral courage has not gone down with my intellect. Only, frankly, Colvin, do you think it a good plan to be so eminently descriptive, and even eloquent in dispraise? You rolled such a lot of polysyllables over me that a better man than I might have been disheartened. – However, I was not, as you see, and am not. The Emigrant shall be finished and leave in the course of next week. And then, I’ll stick to stories. I am not frightened. I know my mind is changing; I have been telling you so for long; and I suppose I am fumbling for the new vein. Well, I’ll find it.

The Vendetta you will not much like, I dare say: and that must be finished next; but I’ll knock you with The Forest State: A Romance.

I’m vexed about my letters; I know it is painful to get these unsatisfactory things; but at least I have written often enough. And not one soul ever gives me any news, about people or things; everybody writes me sermons; it’s good for me, but hardly the food necessary for a man who lives all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts. If one of you could write me a letter with a jest in it, a letter like what is written to real people in this world – I am still flesh and blood – I should enjoy it. Simpson did, the other day, and it did me as much good as a bottle of wine. A lonely man gets to feel like a pariah after awhile – or no, not that, but like a saint and martyr, or a kind of macerated clergyman with pebbles in his boots, a pillared Simeon, I’m damned if I know what, but, man alive, I want gossip.

My health is better, my spirits steadier, I am not the least cast down. If the Emigrant was a failure, the Pavilion, by your leave, was not: it was a story quite adequately and rightly done, I contend; and when I find Stephen, for whom certainly I did not mean it, taking it in, I am better pleased with it than before. I know I shall do better work than ever I have done before; but, mind you, it will not be like it. My sympathies and interests are changed. There shall be no more books of travel for me. I care for nothing but the moral and the dramatic, not a jot for the picturesque or the beautiful, other than about people. It bored me hellishly to write the Emigrant; well, it’s going to bore others to read it; that’s only fair.

I should also write to others; but indeed I am jack-tired, and must go to bed to a French novel to compose myself for slumber. – Ever your affectionate friend,