The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

Genres: Biographical

Synopsis

"An affectionate homage...a loving reconstruction of an era of storytelling now lost." —The New York Times

"[A] triumph...If a writer is going to put on Stevenson’s voice, he’d better, as the poets say, 'bring it.' Reader, Doyle has brought it...Adventures is a tonic for our bitter times." —Washington Post

The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco in the 19th century while waiting for his beloved’s divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady’s adventurous and globe-trotting husband—but he never got around to it. And very soon thereafter he was married, headed home to Scotland, and on his way to becoming the most famous novelist in the world, after writing such classics as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped.

But now Brian Doyle brings Stevenson’s untold tale to life, braiding the adventures of seaman John Carson with those of a young Stevenson, wandering the streets of San Francisco, gathering material for his fiction, and yearning for his beloved across the bay. An adventure tale, an elegy to one of the greatest writers of our language, a time-traveling plunge into The City by the Bay during its own energetic youth, The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World is entertaining, poignant, and sensual.

Release date: March 28, 2017

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

1


I MET JOHN CARSON FOR THE FIRST TIME on Bush Street in San Francisco, where I was at the time living in a rooming house owned by his wife, Mary Carson. Though born in Ireland, Mary had for some time been a citizen of The City, as she called our rough and misty citadel, as if it was a ship upon the water; which in truth it was, for a few streets west lay the Pacific Ocean, and a few streets east sprawled its impatient bay, like a tiny dinghy bobbing alongside a tremendous parent. To further the image, Mrs Carson’s house, tall and thin, stood at the apex of a hill, and swayed like a mast in the afternoon wind, and often featured a sort of sea-beacon at its peak—the night-lamp in my room, where I scribbled the remarkable stories I heard during the day from Mary’s husband John.

I was then a penurious man, forced to be so by circumstance, and I had much time on my hands, waiting for a marital entanglement to unbraid itself across the bay, and free the woman who would be my wife; and while I walked the city as much as I could, having learned that cities are best discovered on foot, I also had the open hours and eager ears for Carson’s adventures, for he was a terrific teller of tales, and spoke in such a colorful and piercing way, with such adornments of elocution and wonderful mimicry, that whole afternoons passed as unnoticed as the tide, as we sat by the sitting-room fire.

He had been everywhere and done everything, it seemed, and he was eager to tell of countries and peoples, crimes and misdemeanors, mendicants and millionaires, and all the manners of living he had seen, from high to low and every shade between; and while Mrs Carson would occasionally offer tart reproof and call him to task about one detail or another, his flow was never stanched, so long as I was there to listen, and later record what he had said, in prose as close as I could get to the way in which he had said it; for he had an essentially riverine style of speaking, and his reminiscence would wander into pools and oxbows, there to swirl meditatively awhile before returning eventually to the main stem of the story. But then other times he spoke so speedily that you were rushed headlong through the narrative rapids, before being released at last into a placid stretch, there to slowly regain your equilibrium, and smile with pleasure at the unforgettable rush of the voyage.

* * *

I had arrived at Mrs Carson’s estimable house in December of the year 1879, and spent the latter half of that month recovering from illness, essentially confined to my attic room, and in little contact with the other residents except for the solicitous Mrs Carson, who was kind enough to bring me small sustenance, and what books she could find unclaimed in the house; during that time I much enjoyed Mr Twain’s Roughing It and Tom Sawyer, and Mr Whitman’s new Leaves of Grass, and a steady run of excellent books by Mr Henry James, whom I had met in England and very much liked, though he seemed far more English than American to me, and, I suspect, to himself.

Having long been in poor health I was all too familiar with the land of counterpane, and was used to spending my ill hours in bed, writing. I was then by trade a scribbler, a writer of slight essays and occasional pieces for the newspapers, and it was to the hunting of this small game that I devoted my energies that wet December; not until after the new year did I improve enough to shakily go downstairs and sit by the fire, and then stroll the neighborhood, and finally wander the towered salty city itself, from wharves to hilltop thickets and back again. From January to April, then, I roamed as freely as the fog in what proved to be one of the most turbulent and riveting cities I had ever seen—fully as lovely and avaricious as Paris, as arrogant and fascinating as London, as windswept and grim and prim and delightful as my own native Edinburgh. And of those pedestrian journeys there is much to tell; but my most memorable travels in San Francisco that spring were all conducted in a deep chair by the fire in Mrs Carson’s house, as I sat mesmerized by the estimable Mr John Carson, gentleman and adventurer.

* * *

I should begin by showing you the man, insofar as I am able, as he was then, at the prime of life and the peak of his powers. Taller than not, and burly rather than thick; as he said himself, while we saw eye to eye as regards our height, he was twice the man I was in volume. A dense head of hair, just beginning to silver at the temples; clean rough clothes somewhere between the utilitarian garb of a sailor and the unadorned simplicity of a reverend; boots that were worn but buffed, boots that had seen something of the world but would never allow themselves to appear in public with stain or scuff. No watch fob, no necktie, no hat; I once remarked to him that I had never once seen him in a hat, and he laughed and said he thought most hats were affectations and aggrandizements, very much like the useless showy feathers that certain birds developed in order to lure unsuspecting females into their sensual bowers; the only hat he had ever worn and liked was a helmet, which had done its work well, and protected him from a shower of blows, any one of which would have been sufficient to make Mrs Carson a widow.

His face was like his clothing, rough but honest and open; no beard, by the express command of Mrs Carson, who disapproved of beards in general as disguises, and disapproved of his in particular as a brambly barrier between man and wife; and as he said with a smile, what sensible man, graced with the affections of the extraordinary Mrs Carson, would fail to do everything he could to encourage and fan those affections?

Sharp amused eyes, of a gray-green color, like the bay in mottled weather; dense eyebrows as thick as bushy caterpillars; large rough hands I would see at work around the house, carpentering this and that; as he often said, to build a house of mere innocent wood, and expect it to withstand a week of San Francisco’s weather unscarred, was the airiest folly; it was no accident that Our Lord spent eighteen years apprenticing as a carpenter, for surely the Holy Family was planning to move to San Francisco, where Our Lord would have been able to carve a good living from a career of household woodworking.

An unadorned voice, neither mellifluous nor harsh; his voice was like the man, direct and amused but capable of sharp turns and dangerous calms. A tiny tattoo of a falcon below his left ear, less than an inch long, noticeable only in crisp daylight. A man of measured tastes in food and drink, well read but not scholarly, sociable but not gregarious or garrulous. An aficionado of music, but none that I had ever heard; by his own account he loved the music of lands far away, the aboriginal music of Borneo and Australia in particular, and he rued his lack of instrumental skill, he said, for he would have liked to have that music drifting around the house, reminding him of his travels and his friends in far-flung regions of the world.

He was fond of gently teasing Mrs Carson, and gravely proposing fanciful adventures and enterprises to her, such as purchasing one of the Seal Rocks islands off San Francisco, and building a ship upon it, in such a way that the rough surface of the island was completely covered by the ship, so that while in residence there husband and wife would always be at sea, but never in danger of foundering; or that they erect such a collection of stalwart canvas sails on the roof of their house, that in high winds they could sail north to redwood country for the day, or south to Half Moon Bay, there to wreak joyous havoc among the oysters when it came time for dinner.

Indeed there were so many of these speculative invitations to Mrs Carson, two and three a day sometimes, that in my first weeks in the house I thought him perhaps slightly unhinged, or even politely inebriated, but soon I came to see that the custom was something of a coded conversation or verbal waltz between two people who much enjoyed each other’s company. I think now that I learned a great deal about marriage from John and Mary Carson, of Bush Street in San Francisco; for in my own marriage I have especially appreciated humor as a crucial virtue, and have seen for myself, perhaps too often, that wry wordplay and gentle jest are not only nutritious but sometimes the very seed of salvation.

* * *

Mrs Carson’s house, I have said, not Mr Carson’s, or the Carsons’ collectively; and that is a good place to let Mr Carson begin his story, for the house was not only the port and refuge to which Mr Carson returned again and again after his adventures, but the sweet old chapel of pine and oak, as he said, where he had courted “the extraordinary landlady,” and been married, in the sitting room, by the fire, by a priest with whom he had served in the War Between the States. So let us begin by that sitting-room fire, on a thoroughly moist day, early in the year 1880, as Mr Carson carries us back in time, to the year of our Lord 1864.

I had just asked him how he met the extraordinary Mrs Carson, and so we begin:

“That was a year after a legendary San Franciscan dog named Lazarus had died and did not manage to come back to life, despite several days of close attention by the newspapers to a possible miracle,” said Mr Carson from his chair on the other side of the fire. “October; I remember that your fellow ink-man Mark Twain was a reporter for The Daily Morning Call, and that he wrote a memorable article about visiting Lazarus’s grave in the Odd Fellows Cemetery, and waiting there quite a long time for the dog to be true to his name, to no avail. I thought the article was amusing, but Mr Twain was soon gone from the newspaper staff, for unspecified reasons. I suppose he left so as to pursue his literary career, but I have always savored the notion that certain segments of city society were affronted by his lighthearted speculation about Lazarus rising from his grave in the Odd Fellows and floating over Lone Mountain, the mercy of the Lord having been profligately poured upon even so meek a citizen as old Lazarus, who was a disreputable creature, as I remember, although a very fine rat catcher.

“I had met Mr Twain that spring, when he arrived from Nevada, where he had been a silver miner and a newspaperman, often reporting from Carson City, from which he speculated all Carsons came, perhaps hatched from tremendous pinecones and then set loose upon the world; indeed perhaps we were manufactured by seasons, he said, with Johns and Bills sprouting in spring and the Jims and Bobs arriving en masse in the fall, and the new females surging up the Truckee River by the thousands, more Susans in an hour than a man could count in a day.

“He was full of colorful ideas like that, and not loath to share them with you or anyone else; you never met a more cheerful headlong fellow in your life, and while some of his free talk earned him the threat of fisticuffs, not once in the time I knew him did anyone actually set about inflicting corrections on his person. But beneath the high spirits there was a darker man, as is so often the case with the publicly humorous. I saw that side of him here and there, when he was in his cups. But he was the sort of man that when most down on his luck was most generous and free; I remember when he discovered that his whole bulging trunk of silver mining stocks, which he had thought worth thousands of dollars, were not now worth a thousand cents, he laughed and took me to a dinner featuring a hill of oysters and a river of beer.

“The last I saw him was on this very street, down the hill toward the bay. He told me he was off to try mining again, this time for gold in the Sierras, because he had not a dollar to his name and must leave the city, but he would give me a tip worth more than Astor and Carnegie and Vanderbilt together, because he valued our friendship with all his soul, and would always remember that I was a true friend when he was down and dark and needed a grip and a grin to haul him from his dark crevasse. Up the hill there, he said, pointing to this very house, there is a building which I believe will loom large in your life. Do not ask me how I know such a thing. I do not know myself. I am a man of dreams and portents. I sometimes suspect I am a magnet for such things. There is Scotland and Wales and Acadia in my family tree, which may explain a certain predilection to omens and spirits. Also somewhere back a ways I have an ancestor named Ezekiel, who may have known the Biblical prophet himself, and lent a certain necromantic cast to the line ever after. Probably they ran a tavern together, or schemed to defraud the pharaoh of his crown. Who can explain these things? Not me. But trust me when I say that you and that willowy house up there will someday meet, and the auspices seem beneficent. So, John, this is farewell, for I don’t know when I will be back in the city, or whether we will meet again in Tahiti or Timbuktu; but I have given you the treasure of a lifetime, I believe, with this advice, and I hope with all my heart that someday I will hear of your happiness, and know that for once I did a good turn by a friend, who did so many good turns for me.

“And off he went,” said Carson, smiling at the memory of his friend. “I heard later that he had gone to the Sandwich Islands, and then around the world, and now he is a famous man, resident in a castle in Connecticut, he says; I had a note from him recently, with a copy of his newest book; our postman was much amused by the address, which was simply ‘John Carson, Bush Street, San Francisco, Where He Lives in That Tall Skinny House, If He Had Any Sense or Imagination at All.’”

“And did you,” I asked Mr Carson, “turn on your heel that day, and walk right up the street to the house?”

“Oh, no,” said Mr Carson. “No, I did not, for ephemeral reasons—I think I was hungry, and down to the docks I went for oysters and beer. No, Mr Stevenson, I walked east that day on Bush Street instead of west, downhill instead of up, and there were many strange adventures before the moment that I did finally knock on the front door of this house, and discover that my life was changed from that moment forward, to my great surprise, and eternal pleasure, and endless gratitude.”

* * *

That night, when I went upstairs to jot down this story, I realized that John Carson had not actually answered my question, and explained how and when he met Mrs Carson; and I was soon to discover that he was wonderfully deft at evading the skeletal facts of a story, especially that prized one, even as he was irresistibly fascinating at detailing the evocations and shadowy corners of a tale. No man I ever met was as riveting a storyteller in the matter of its moods and intimations, its scents and sounds; when John Carson told a story you were soon inside the story yourself, your feet on the sands of a beach in Borneo, your hands snatching at a fish in an Australian sea, your eyes scanning a ridgeline for enemy cannon emplacements; indeed after some long afternoons with John Carson by the fireplace I would climb the stairs to my room as tired as if it had been me walking miles through a pitiless jungle, or rowing from one end of a remote bay to another through sheets of rain, or salving and sewing the wounds of my friends by a guttering candle all night long—all things that John Carson had done, in several quarters of the world, when he was young.

Where was he born? He never did say; but he often spoke with great reverence and affection of Scotland, and the names of certain towns and rivers there tumbled familiarly off his tongue—Dalbeattie, Wigtown, Portpatrick, Kirkcudbright, the River Nith, the River Cree. It seemed to me that he must have had cousins at least in that western corner of Scotland, if not closer relations, for he would occasionally speak of his “people” in Caledonia, the old name for Scotland; he steadfastly refused to use English names and labels for anything, and grew sharp-tongued whenever he heard the phrases Great Britain or British Empire—“there is no such thing as Great Britain, only one country enslaving its three immediate neighbors, and much of the rest of the world, and to even acknowledge an empire is to acquiesce to its imperial murderous greed”—thus John Carson, in the rare moments when he was annoyed or angry.

Those moments were few; I never met a more equable man, or one more willing to listen to someone else’s questions and inquiries and speculations; and he was the welcome sort of man whose attentiveness drew you out, welcomed your own anecdotes and tales, sparked your own conversational liquidity; so that sometimes I would arrest my own flow of talk, and realize that I had been talking for fully twenty or thirty minutes uninterrupted, with John Carson hanging on every word, and not waiting impatiently to interrupt, or turn the line of talk toward his own experience, or denigrate or supersede mine, as so often happens between parties who are less conversational than oppositional, or merely taking turns as monologuists.

Now, I have met some wondrous talkers in my day, some mesmerizing storytellers, genius sculptors of the spoken word, male and female, young and old, from the glens of Scotland to the craggy mountains of France, from the streets of London to the endless plains of America, and some of them, I suppose, have been so riveting and unforgettable in tone and cadence that their voices have soaked into me unawares, and been born anew in the voices of characters in my pages; yet John Carson was a new species to me, for I sat with him for weeks and weeks on a regular basis, and heard the whole spill and swirl of his life in his inimitable telling, a tremendous outpouring, over four absorbing months; it was as if I was at the university of the man, studying biography and personality and theatrical flair, history and geography and psychology all at once, and all under the one tutor, who was by turns exacting, and airy as a child on the shore of the sea. Some days he would spend an hour detailing a monumental single moment from his past; other days he would sprint through a whole year in that selfsame hour, and toss off such tantalizing casual bait as “that man wore a suit of crocodile skin,” or “I was then offered the daughter to wed, but declined”—but then never return to that corner of the story, however strenuously I tried to bend him back in that direction.

When I was a child in Edinburgh I had a nurse, Miss Cunningham, whom I loved with all my heart, and who was the first fine storyteller I knew; in her case it was not only tales from the King James Bible, that glory of muscular literature, from which she read aloud with a voice that encompassed all weathers in the telling, but also a limitless parade of stories of haunts and ghosts, of terrors and glowering mysteries, at which I quailed but which I loved, in that strange way we human beings do, to want more of the very thing that makes your hairs prickle with a delighted horror; and then in my own jaunts and voyages I seemed to meet more than my fair share of wonderful raconteurs, all of whom appealed to me greatly, and not only for the zest and entertainment of their tales, but because the invention and spinning of a fine story seemed like the greatest of joyful labors to me. Something in tales and telling sang to me, in ways that the engineering of lighthouses, or the dreary practice of the law, never had, or could; so there may have been no more ready or rapt listener in the world for Mr John Carson, when he sat down by the fire in the dawn of the year 1880 to tell me of his tumultuous life; and perhaps there was no storyteller of more immediate and lasting effect on my life and work subsequently than that estimable San Franciscan, whose voice I can still faintly hear sometimes, in full and headlong flow, on certain days when the wind is up, and the windows are a-rattle, and the fire is ticking low. Even now, many years and miles from that tall mast of a house, I will hear him for a moment, and be thrilled again, and remember the pleasure of his company, and the zest of his tales, and the warmth with which he spoke of his friends, some of which he did not expect to ever see again in this life, but whom he savored and esteemed for their courage and kindness, counting himself the luckiest of men, to have had such companions for a part of his road.

* * *

The first adventure he told me complete, from beginning to end, with a proper setting-forth and returning-home, was his time in Borneo, in the year 1854, when he was not yet twenty, he said, and “wholly unattached, footloose and wandering wide, with neither a penny nor a worry to weigh me down; I felt then that no one cared for me and so I cared for no one, and so I did throw myself headlong into situations that a more sensible man would have avoided, or tiptoed gingerly around such scrapes; but not me, not then.

“How I got to Borneo is of no consequence; it was, of course, by ship, a long story in itself for another afternoon, perhaps, for that was a savage ship, and I was never so relieved in life as to be gone from it finally. Suffice it to say that I found myself on the coast of Sarawak, at the tail end of that year, and while I spoke none of the local languages, I could work, the language that needs no words; and soon I found myself upriver on the docks as a laborer, loading and unloading ships and boats during the day, and acting as a warehouse guard for a local merchant at night. Though ostensibly Sarawak was at peace that year, after years of savagery among various tribes and interests, piracy was not uncommon, and even a boy as young as me was welcome as a sentinel, or first to fall under attack, more likely. Also the merchant believed me somehow to be a soldier of fortune, though I had never claimed such a thing, and so he paid me to defend his interests at night against the pirates.

“I have not told you, though, of the scents and sights of Borneo then, the immediacy of jungle and mud and river and insectry; the many kinds of monkeys in the trees, leaping with astonishing skill from branch to branch, and chattering like so many high-spirited small boys; the fishing nets everywhere hung out to dry, and the palm-thatched houses of every conceivable size from sturdy house to tiny hut; and mud everywhere in every color of the rainbow from bright gold to the bleakest black; and alligators, and ants, and satinwood trees, and gardenias of breathtaking size and allure—you could smell them from a mile away, it seemed to me, and even now I will be stopped in the street occasionally by a gardenia calling to me from some distant window; another language without words, I suppose, the inexplicable wonders of scent. This happened to me a week ago Tuesday on Mission Street and for a moment I was absolutely sure a flower from Sarawak had seen me passing below and called to me, with a sudden cry of recognition, as a sister would to a brother she had not seen in years, and had not expected to see again in this life; but I could not find the source of the scent, and walked home saddened, and inarticulate, when it came time to explain my long face to Mrs Carson.

“The sun-snakes, the flower-snakes, the mighty cobra-snakes, some as long as eight or ten feet, and terrifying indeed when they reared broodingly up, as tall as a man; and the boa-snakes, big enough to eat deer; many was the man who told me stories of snakes so big you could hardly believe them possible still on this earth, and of unlucky people who vanished into the maws of boa-snakes, and of tribes in the mountains who could live for a month on the meat of a single snake, were they lucky enough to capture one of the old chieftains of that race.

“And the birds!—so very many birds of so very many species! Trying to make some sense of their variegation and relationships and cousinly pattern was how I came to meet Mr Wallace. There was the crocodile-bird, with a song like a thrush, and pigeons and parrots of every color, cuckoos and kingfishers, and ten kinds of eagle, two of whom dearly loved to eat snakes above all else. And all sorts of plovers and terns and stilts along the shore, and owls and swifts and woodpeckers in the forest, and what seemed like a thousand tiny songbirds of the warbler type, elusive as dreams among the fronds; my favorites of all of these were called sunbirds, tiny gleaming creatures that did indeed shine and glitter most amazingly, as if they had bathed every morning in the life-giving orb itself, and shimmered with its aura the rest of the day until dark, at which point they too subsided and vanished until tomorrow’s resurrection.

“For two months, October and November, I lived in a shed near the docks, a tiny structure that had long been used for curing tobacco, the scent of which was so powerful that Mrs Carson says she smells it upon me yet, although she may be joking. Curiously I was not lonely, for during the day I was so busy, and so thrown into the tumult of people and commerce, that in the evenings it was sweet to lie at rest, and smoke a pipe, and listen to the orchestras of birds at dusk, before going off to my night-work at the warehouse; that job was the lonely one, for I was by myself, and could not sleep for fear of being overpowered by the pirates, who were famous for their silence at night, and were said to be able to approach even the most cautious wild animals unawares, which they would do in training for their marauding. But while I could not sleep, and was anxious of incipient violence, and armed myself with knife and stick, I could fill the hours with contemplation of the myriad birds, and begin to draw them, and compare their structure and style of life one with another, to try to see some pattern in their profligacy; how did the eagles and hawk-owls differ, for example, in what they sought as prey, and how did they go about killing their daily fare? Did the one specialize in fish, and the other in small animals? How came the serpent-eagles to be so good at capturing that elusive food, and other eagles to choose another diet altogether?

“It was by chance I met Mr Wallace, who had sought among the natives for men and boys especially interested in local fauna to serve him as guides for the explorations he had planned into the wild country. He had found such a lad, of fourteen or so years of age, named Adil, whose family I had come to know and esteem, and occasionally sup with, and play chess with the children, bright young creatures who had learned the game from their elders. Adil it was who introduced me to Mr Wallace, persuading that gentleman that I would be the perfect additional companion for their perambulations, being of strong body and able to translate something of the local languages, bits of which I had picked up on the docks; ever it has been the case that workers along the shores and beaches of the world are the quickest linguists, for the tidal wash is where all the languages of the world meet and compete, and a man there must be able to speak some of all, if he wishes to earn his bread and avoid being cheated. So it was that I had a little Malay, and Chinese, and Dutch, and even Dayak, for the warrior peoples of the interior did sometimes have concourse with the Malays and the Chinese, in between bouts of piratical endeavor.

“Mr Wallace had arrived in Sarawak on the first of November, at the invitation of the white rajah of those parts, the adventurer James Brooke, and he was for his first weeks in residence with the rajah, with whom he too played chess, and discussed natural history, and smoked cigars, and debated the possibility that great apes like the local orang-utangs were our ancestral cousins and even perhaps remnant ancestors. During the day, however, he and his young assistant Charles, who had accompanied him from England, would explore the river and environs, utterly absorbed by beetles and butterflies. Occasionally Adil and I would help in these local jaunts, during which Mr Wallace’s energy was a most remarkable thing to see; he was perhaps thirty years old or so, and a lean and active man, and relentless in his pursuit of insects; also he was an indefatigable walker, quite capable of fifteen miles in a day, and there were days when all three of us with him on his expeditions arrived home bedraggled and exhausted, the boys to fall asleep instantly but myself off to duty at the warehouse.

“It was on one of these long expeditions into the forest that Adil was lost. Charles and Mr Wallace decided to go deeper into the jungle, toward the mountains, in pursuit of new species of butterflies that would, Mr Wallace believed, be nectaring on plants at higher elevations; Adil and I turned back toward home. It was late in the afternoon, and we were both weary, and I was not due for work on the docks for days, the ships being scarcer in December, the close of the rainy season; so as night fell, we made a fire, and ate a small supper, and fell asleep under a thicket of palm fronds.

“I awoke before dawn, as has been my lifelong habit, to discover Adil vanished. For a few moments I thought nothing of it, considering that he might be gathering fruit, or wood for the breakfast fire; but then I noticed bent and broken ferns, and realized that he had been hauled away through the underbrush, perhaps by a leopard, or even one of the sun-bears said to be common in these forests, though I had never seen one; I had, however, seen lithe and powerful leopards, and knew them to be quite capable of capturing