Here’s to you, Robinson

‘Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.’
– Weldon Kees, Aspects of Robinson

‘Robinson and I are exploring the moor together…’
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, letter to mother, 1901

The character Robinson appears in literature and film from time to time, a sometimes strange and mysterious figure; other times an everyman. Often it’s not obvious if it’s a first name or a surname: it’s just Robinson. But is it the same Robinson all along?

He first appeared as Robinson Crusoe in 1719, said to be the first novel in English. Crusoe is shipwrecked and spends twenty-eight years on a remote desert island. Daniel Defoe is said to have seen the name on a gravestone. Almost a hundred years later, Swiss Family Robinson (1812), about a family shipwrecked in the East Indies, was of course based on the Defoe classic.

In the late 19th century, cult French symbolist poet and adventurer Arthur Rimbaud apparently coined the verb ‘robinsonner’, meaning ‘to let the mind wander or to travel mentally’, also taking its cue from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

A real life literary Robinson, journalist Betram Fletcher Robinson, assisted his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in exploring Dartmoor, and told the Sherlock Holmes author of the legend of the Dartmoor hound. Robinson also introduced Conan Doyle to his coach driver, one Harry Baskerville, as well as the legend of Richard Cabell, Devon’s 17th century ‘evil squire’. So inspired was Conan Doyle by Dartmoor and its legends that it soon appeared in book form as, you guessed it, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Robinson himself suffered an untimely death, aged 34, said by some to be caused by an Egyptian mummy curse.

The 20th century sees a more underground, sinister Robinson, sometimes a Zelig-like character, part Harry Lime from The Third Man, always ahead of the game.

Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika (a country the writer never visited), published posthumously in 1927 (and not published in English until 1938), features a drifter and chancer called Robinson. There’s an enigmatic Robinson in Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932). He appears again in Aspects of Robinson (1954), a collection of poems by Weldon Kees. Simon Armitage ‘borrows’ Robinson in his book of poems, Around Robinson, 1991. With BBC producer Daisy Goodwin, Armitage made an (appropriately) faux-documentary-cum-film-noir about Weldon Kees (who mysteriously disappeared in 1955), called Looking for Robinson (1993).

Robinson by Muriel Spark was published in 1958 and concerns members of a plain crash on a desert island being helped by the mysterious Robinson, who lives on the island. With obvious nods to Defoe, the book was largely dismissed by critics on initial release, but has gained in popularity in recent years.

Another novel called simply Robinson, this one by Chris Petit (first published in 1993; reprinted 2001, appropriately now out of print), who directed the fine British road movie, Radio On (1979), continues the quest for the elusive Robinson. Here, the narrator is sucked into the dark, seedy underbelly of porn film-making and, er, London’s second hand bookshops. The mysterious Robinson is charming yet dangerous as the narrator becomes increasingly entangled in Robinson’s violent activities. Patrick Hamilton meets JD Ballard is an obvious analogy but Petit has a cinematic style all his own.

Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994) introduces the unseen Robinson examining ‘the problem of London’. ‘It is good to be born in depraved times’, says Robinson. Keiller’s later film, Robinson in Space (1997), has a mysterious advertising agency hiring an equally mysterious and still unseen Robinson, homosexual and potential spy, to look for ‘the problem of England’. Influenced by Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, the film takes us on a journey round England’s industrial past, stopping off at little known literary landmarks including the pub where Defoe found his inspiration for Crusoe, Rimbaud’s residence in Reading and Dracula’s mansion in Carfax. By the end, the narrator informs us, Robinson has disappeared: ‘I cannot tell you where Robinson finally found his Utopia.’

...I fell for a Robinson once (a woman, in case you’re wondering). More a Ms Robinson than a Mrs Robinson (‘We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files’) but she still took me for a journey into the dark depths of my soul.

UPDATE
Keiller’s latest film, Robinson in Ruins (2010) follows Robinson resume his investigations as he leaves prison. Vanessa Redgrave narrates this one (Philip Scofield died in 2008).