St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson.

St. Ives was left unfinished by Robert Louis Stevenson. The unmade chapters XXXI-XXXVI were entrusted to the British writer and poet Arthur Quiller-Couch, who used the Scot’s drafts and implemented them. It can satisfy in that the book can be considered completed, but only a creator can give an authenticity. But that point probably could apply to the whole novel, because about that I thought after reading the letters that Stevenson mostly wrote to his friend Sydney Colvin. An expression of view about St. Ives wouldn’t be correct. Therefore, I consider it as a draft.

The book isn’t promising if it turns into a pulp woman romance after reading less than twenty pages. All happening comes sudden. A hero falls in love with a main heroine in the first chapter. The second chapter depicts a rough Frenchman whom the protagonist challenges to a duel and his adversary dies in the end. I only stating all that as facts.

I’m slamming the loss of conscience after his big opponent falls on him – a screaming drama with entire ridiculousness of the situation. It was presented as if his enemy is already dead, yet he was dying for three days. He suffers all that time, but, a doctor utters that he didn’t do so in a moment when he stopped to be alive. I don’t accept it alongside with that the rough Frenchman could become kind and friendly after the duel. This behavior doesn’t match with his depicted personality. St. Ives reads to that moment as a dime pulp fiction; books having an inauthentic reality including that the authors don’t care about studying a subject when it is required. Stevenson did something with that, but not everything that asked. Maybe I can accept as a human factor that a prison’s administration decided to delay the interrogations until the next day after the discovery the impaled prisoner that night, though I don’t believe it. These French names make emphasis to the named type of books. The lead character is Champdivers, while his opponent’s quaint last name is Goguelat.

I stopped reading after finishing chapter three. Champdivers says that he came out as a winner in all five interrogations, but he contradicts by stating that everybody who questioned them and a court noticed the truth. He claims that the major exposed him, but that man hasn’t get anything after pressuring him in their personal meeting. The protagonist did it just agreeing with him with the fact that the duel had a place when the officer began a conversation in that way at their second meeting. That didn’t make a reason after all.

The prose isn’t beautiful. Its metaphors are surrealistic, weak, lazy and flaccid. Stevenson embarrasses by insertion the pieces of French phrases in talks between French people. He cannot imitate French English when the main hero says, “‘Frinds—frinds—dam frinds”. The Scot hurries the events and inserts a detail out of place when the hero makes an embedding about digging the escape tunnel.

The author’s letters open a bright understanding about St. Ives, which the first mentioning about writing dates to January 1893. I take the passages that relate to the novel.

To Sydney Colvin, August 24, 1893: “I am deep in St. Ives which, I believe, will be the next novel done. But it is to be clearly understood that I promise nothing, and may throw in your face the very last thing you expect—or I expect. St. Ives will (to my mind) not be wholly bad. It is written in rather a funny style; a little stilted and left-handed; the style of St. Ives; also, to some extent, the style of R. L. S. dictating. St. Ives is unintellectual, and except as an adventure novel, dull. But the adventures seem to me sound and pretty probable; and it is a love story. Speed his wings!”

To Sydney Colvin, August 27, 1893: “I do not believe I shall end by disliking it.”

A letter to his cousin Roland Alan Mowbray Stevenson, written in June 17, 1894, discloses a commercial cynicism of the author: “the present book, St. Ives, is nothing; it is in no style in particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will read it, that’s all I ask; and if they won’t, damn them! I like doing it though; and if you ask me why!”

To Sydney Colvin, June 18, 1894: “Of course, St. Ives has paid the penalty. I must not let you be disappointed in St. I. It is a mere tissue of adventures; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn; no philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the happenings very good in themselves, I believe, but none of them bildende, none of them constructive, except in so far perhaps as they make up a kind of sham picture of the time, all in italics and all out of drawing. Here and there, I think, it is well written; and here and there it’s not. Some of the episodic characters are amusing, I do believe; others not, I suppose. However, they are the best of the thing such as it is. If it has a merit to it, I should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all through. ’Tis my most prosaic book.”

To Sydney Colvin, September 1894. “I have been trying hard to get along with St. Ives. I should now lay it aside for a year and I dare say I should make something of it after all. Instead of that, I have to kick against the pricks, and break myself, and spoil the book, if there were anything to spoil, which I am far from saying. I’m as sick of the thing as ever any one can be; it’s a rudderless hulk; it’s a pagoda, and you can just feel—or I can feel—that it might have been a pleasant story, if it had been only blessed at baptism.”

Stevenson was careless about character development in this writing to Sydney Colvin on November 4, 1894: “You ask about St. Ives. No, there is no Burford Bridge in it, and no Boney. He is a squire of dames, and there are petticoats in the story, and damned bad ones too, and it is of a tolerable length, a hundred thousand, I believe, at least. Also, since you are curious on the point, St. Ives learned his English from a Mr. Vicary, an English lawyer, a prisoner in France. He must have had a fine gift of languages!”

The last letter was written almost one month before the collapse with Robert Louis Stevenson. St. Ives was one of his projects. By that time, he accented on Weir of Hermiston, whose existing text also could have been rewritten in the final version, as it can be assumed from one letter in which the author inserted a thought that a plot probably isn’t good. Honestly, I don’t believe that St. Ives could become a solid novel if the basis isn’t deep.