PHILIP CALLOW’S NEW BIOGRAPHY, Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, comes exactly one hundred years after the publication of Graham Balfour’s The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, the writer’s first biography, authorized by his widow and penned by his young cousin. In the intervening years, the volumes on Stevenson’s life by devoted followers, occasional scholars, and professional writers have formed nearly a genre unto themselves. Perhaps that’s because he died just after his forty-fourth birthday, and biographers, like the gods, love those who die young. Or perhaps it’s because every few years another publisher calculates a sure return on even a modest print run. In Louis, Callow has chosen to follow Stevenson’s life through earlier biographies. Some of his models, like the biographies by Frank McLynn and Ian Bell, are controversial or merely fanciful, and the result is a new life that offers, in fact, nothing new. That’s unfortunate, for the better explanation of the nineteenth century’s fascination with Stevenson is the fact that the man was, quite simply, spectacular. His sheer physical figure made an indelible impression on anyone who met him even casually, and a profound one on those who knew him well. That image has come down to us through painting and sculpture and photography in almost unparalleled abundance for a writer of his generation. There are the two famous Sargent portraits, one at the Taft Museum, which serves as the dust jacket for Callow’s book, the other in the Whitney, which Stevenson himself described as making him look like a “weird, very pretty, large-eyed, chicken-boned, slightly contorted poet.” There is an arresting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens, the writer propped up in bed, legs covered, supporting a manuscript, with a cigarette between his long, tapering fingers. And finally, there is the rich portfolio of black-and-white photographs taken in the South Seas. Stevenson may well be the most visually identifiable writer of the whole nineteenth century. But he was not just a favorite model for figurative artists. Ordinary people, not to mention famous ones, constantly tried to capture him in pen portraits, and these images, too, are liberally scattered through his innumerable biographies. “He is between 30 and 40, fearfully thin, with long emaciated hands & the most curious face I ever saw,” wrote the daughter of the painter William Richmond in 1886. “You would pick him out of any crowd, not for beauty oh no, but for general oddness & unsurmountable unconventionality in feature & gait & figure.” All the portraits, both the ones in painting and the ones in prose, sought to find in his physical features an expression of his striking personality and his dramatic life of emotion and adventure. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, and his story begins with the struggle to escape an overly protective family and what he believed was a stultifying culture—a struggle that culminated in an affair with a married woman he met in a French art colony in 1876. If this seems a bit of a problem morally, Fanny Osbourne was at least living apart from her husband, and Stevenson, ever the passionate idealist, did fall in love with her at first sight, a condition he fervently believed in. In any event, Fanny, Stevenson, and his brilliantly erratic cousin, Bob, were all bohemians together. And in Paris who really cared? But the plot took a decidedly original twist when Stevenson, against all advice, pursued his love to California, crossing the Atlantic in steerage and the continental United States by train. This act has few romantic equivalents, and no small bit of heroism, as Stevenson nearly lost his life in his travels. The two were married in San Francisco in 1880, and then retreated to an abandoned mining camp in Silverado. Stevenson, who had earlier turned his vagabond wanderings in France into literature with Travels with a Donkey, used his honeymoon to compose a marvelous pastiche of old California entitled The Silverado Squatters. Another good effect of the marriage was reconciliation with his father, Thomas Stevenson, who welcomed him back home upon his return from the United States. Stevenson was determined to make his living by his pen, and in the summer of 1881, at Braemar in Scotland, he composed Treasure Island. Although it was not quite the bestseller suggested by the legend that it kept Gladstone up all night, it gave Stevenson a direction for making his fiction accessible to a broader audience than such work as, say, the short stories he had collected in New Arabian Nights. By 1886 he was as popular as an author had ever been. That year saw the publication of both Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Kidnapped, his first novel of Scottish history, Stevenson created the shrewd and irresistible David Balfour, an orphan from the Lowlands who is seized and bound for slavery to America. David, a captive aboard ship, joins forces with the dauntless Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart (“Am I no a bonny fighter!”), and their flight through the Highland heather, evading the British troops, is a chronicle of nail-biting adventures. It is a story of three different cultures, Highland, Lowland, and English, bound together by geography and marked by a history of enmity. Kidnapped lives on the road with David and Alan, but its deeper life exposes the broad and complex history of eighteenth-century Scotland. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the “shilling shocker” that became a text for church sermons and an eponym for split personality, Stevenson dramatized a subject that had fascinated him all his life: the idea that every man has within himself another self, and that the two selves exist in a state of tension or even conflict. It was an idea he had explored before in “Markheim,” a short story of conscience and redemption told from the point of view of a murderer in dialogue with either the devil or his alter ego. But with the success of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he taught it to the entire world. After his father’s death in 1887, with his literary and financial success firmly grounded, he was free to pursue his life and his health wherever he chose. And he chose, first, America. Not only had he married an American and lived in the country before, but he was inspired by American authors, notably Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Whitman showed Stevenson the prospect of an open road, free of fear, while Hawthorne reminded him of the history of human failure and bondage to the past. Poe, Melville, Holmes, Thoreau—all were read and absorbed by a man who embraced American culture as earlier he had the French. Stevenson arrived in New York on September 1, 1887, and almost immediately traveled upstate to Saranac Lake, where Dr. Edward Trudeau had gained fame for his treatment of tubercular patients. It was here, in the midst of a brutal winter, that E.L. Burlingame, the Scribner’s editor, visited the writer and arranged for him to contribute a series of essays to the New York publisher’s magazine (including “The Lantern Bearers,” “A Chapter on Dreams,” and “A Christmas Sermon”). It was here, too, that Stevenson began writing The Master of Ballantrae, making use of the cold, clear mountain air for the novel’s most memorable scenes. But Burlingame, who admired Stevenson immensely and championed his work, also saw the difficulty of dealing with an artist who was headstrong and often impractical with respect to business. As he said in a letter to Charles Scribner, dealing with Stevenson “would be as hard to do as to pick up a globe of quicksilver…& he can’t be taught or cautioned….It is with him as Dr. Trudeau said it was in making him take care of his health—‘if he doesn’t have his head he will fret like a nervous horse.’” Saranac Lake was also where Stevenson met S.S. McClure, the entrepreneur who virtually invented newspaper syndication as a lucrative way to sell writing. McClure was the catalyst for Stevenson’s final adventure. He offered the author $10,000 to write a series of letters while cruising the South Seas. Fanny, who went on ahead to Oakland, found a yacht for hire, and Stevenson wired her to take it. The story goes that when the owner of the boat, the Casco, met Stevenson, he did not believe such a shabby figure of a man could afford it. When he learned otherwise, the deal was struck. In midsummer 1888, Stevenson, with his family, sailed out of San Francisco Bay, never to return to America or to Europe, except in imagination. The Pacific opened up a new period in his life, when for the first time he felt healthy and completely unbound from the European civilization he increasingly viewed as nothing more than ruins. Stevenson worked prodigiously while living in the South Seas, using the colors and scents of the islands. “The Beach of Falesá” begins gorgeously: I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The land breeze blew in our faces and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing. I should say I had been for years on a low island near the line, living for the most part solitary among natives. Here was a fresh experience; even the tongue would be quite strange to me; and the look of these woods and mountains, and the rare smell of them, renewed my blood. Still, Stevenson’s story is anything but a brochure for an island idyll. Wiltshire, a bigoted, alcoholic trader, has come to Falesá to trade in copra. Another trader ostensibly befriends him, tells him he needs a wife, and offers him a native girl, Uma, for his pleasure. A fake wedding is set up, replete with a marriage certificate that reads: “This is to certify that Uma, daughter of Faavao of Falesá island…is illegally married to Mr John Wiltshire for one night, and Mr John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her to hell next morning.” What turns the story around is Wiltshire’s realization, on the bridal night, that he is in love with Uma and that she is indeed worthier than he. “And what with her dress—for all there was so little of it, and that native enough—what with her fine tapa and fine scents, and her red flowers and seeds that were quite as bright as jewels, only larger—it came over me she was a kind of a countess really, dressed to hear great singers at a concert, and no even mate for a poor trader like myself.” Violence is endemic in Stevenson’s fiction, and the rest of the story is a taut contest between Wiltshire and his nemesis for survival on the island, the climax coming in a violent death struggle in the woods, with Wiltshire, enraged, stabbing his enemy repeatedly. Wiltshire remains on the island with his wife, remarried by a missionary, and all is well—except, the story concludes, I’m stuck here, I fancy; I don’t like to leave the kids, you see; and there’s no use talking—they’re better here than what they would be in a white man’s country….But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half castes of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got; I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find them whites? This is the kind of story, with its moral confusion and epistemological ambiguity, that enabled Jack London and Somerset Maugham to write about the Pacific in a modern way. In the last six years of his life Stevenson wrote novels and stories and poems and histories at a dizzying pace, and letters, always letters. He was an indefatigable correspondent, and his letters, collected now in a superb edition by Ernest Mehew, are an endlessly rich ledger of personal and cultural commentary, by turns witty, sober, humorous, and reflective. The quality and quantity of work produced during these last years was so dramatic that Graham Greene declared that any estimation of Stevenson would have to begin with the “granite” of his Samoan period. And all this time Stevenson was building a great home for his family in the islands, the expenses of which certainly spurred the frenetic literary activity. He needed to pay the bills, and the bills never stopped coming. Blessed with an incredibly fertile imagination, he had on the stocks an astonishing number of projects. But then, near noon on December 3, 1894, after a morning’s work on what promised to be his greatest novel, Weir of Hermiston, Stevenson was hit with a hemorrhage to the brain. He lay down but never got up. Carried to his grave at the top of Mount Vaea on a road cut by the Samoans who revered him as “Tusitala,” writer of tales, he could not have had a more romantic or tragic ending. Cast out in the Pacific, as he himself had said, he bowed his head “before the romance of destiny.” And yet, Stevenson’s legend survived to the detriment of Stevenson’s achievement. Indeed, in the popular imagination his life was his achievement. This is hardly a new observation. Henry James made it in a letter to Graham Balfour shortly after Balfour’s Life appeared: “You have made him—everything has made him—too personally celebrated for his literary legacy.” It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to understand the veneration that Stevenson inspired in his contemporaries, but it was as a writer that they admired him. When the news of Stevenson’s death reached beyond Samoa, there was a kind of shock. Walter de la Mare, years later, vividly recalled the image of the “newspaper placards” near London Bridge carrying the news in “gigantic black letters on that orange ground: ‘Death of R.L.S.’” English and American newspapers carried the story on their front pages, and the most important ones offered extensive retrospectives. Interestingly, the reviewers were dazzled not so much by the man’s life as by the writer’s achievement. There was universal agreement that Stevenson was already a “classic” of literature, the only question being where in the pantheon did he rank? It was not just the daily reviewers that held him in the highest esteem. He was the crown jewel of the literary fraternity. Rudyard Kipling, traveling in the South Seas in the early 1890s, told a reporter in New Zealand that he was there solely “to meet Robert Louis Stevenson.” Harold Frederic considered Stevenson “in a class quite by himself.” Frederic reviewed the unfinished Weir of Hermiston and said, simply, that it “would have been one of the great books of the language.” For seasoned writers like Oscar Wilde and George Meredith, and aspiring ones like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, Stevenson set the bar both for craftsmanship and authorship. But somehow, within a few decades, certainly by the end of World War I, it was all swept away. No other writer experienced such a catastrophic decline in reputation as Stevenson. He disappeared as a serious artist and was reborn as an author for children (albeit, in sumptuously illustrated editions by N.C. Wyeth)—and then, since the 1960s, even those children’s books have come under attack. The man who was thought a bohemian by his own generation was denounced as the spokesman for a Victorianism of Christian hegemony, white supremacy, male dominance, and European power. Of course, even Stevenson’s detractors are forced to recognize that he possessed one of the purest styles in English. But that, too, has been turned against him, the picture of Stevenson now one of an aesthete in a velvet coat, with no interest in anything other than the shape of a sentence. Impressive collected editions with exotic sounding names—Vailima, Tusitala, South Seas—were produced with regularity in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and fine press editions of individual texts, even chapters from books, remain in progress. And this, as well, has worked against Stevenson. His books are commodity icons, wonderful for antiquarians and bibliophiles who can afford them, but of no interest whatever to modern thinkers. Nothing could be more wrong. Stevenson was a lawyer, a linguist, a historian, and quite possibly the most brilliant theorist of art of his generation. He realized early on that mass reading, largely inspired by the enormous growth in newspapers, was changing the nature of writing. Readers expected to be entertained and delighted. Stevenson was the first modern to confront the dilemma of how to dress serious art in popular robes. New Arabian Nights invented the modern short story, but the texts were too sophisticated for the early 1880s. So Stevenson created Treasure Island. But in simplifying the narrative line he never sacrificed the substance: greed, egoism, the lust for power, these were among the themes of Treasure Island, as they had been in the New Arabian stories “The Suicide Club” and “The Rajah’s Diamond”—tales whose morbidity and taint of sexual corruption reminded readers of Edgar Allan Poe, and served up the first hints of the fin de siècle. (These stories also pay homage to the French police novel, which explains why Christopher Morley cited them years later as the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle.) Stevenson thought himself primarily a psychologist, but the psychology was revealed through action. In “A Lodging for the Night,” for example, Stevenson paints a picture of the medieval French poet François Villon wondering to himself what he is doing as he gropes through the skirts of a dead prostitute for any small coins he can find. The story not only gives a cameo portrait of the great French poet, but it makes medieval Paris feel contemporary, and in the process mixes murder with art, a lethal combination more common in our own day than a century ago. Stevenson’s short fiction is one of the best-kept secrets of contemporary culture. In “The Bottle Imp,” a story of witchery, Stevenson transferred the Faust story from Europe to the Pacific—converting it in the process into a beautiful parable of love and forgiveness. Told in the plainest yet most delicate English, and featuring the wonderfully resourceful and intelligent female Kokua, the story is illuminated throughout by the iridescent light of Hawaii. Stevenson always set himself to explore the preoccupations and passions of his time and place. He wrote travel books, but “travel” does not come near describing In the South Seas, a profound study of the history of islands and the degradation of their cultures. The text, published posthumously, was radically cut from the original newspaper articles, but it is shimmering in its beauty and poignancy. Stevenson’s commentary on the archipelagoes he visited was for years a standard reference for anthropologists. In his last years, Stevenson found new and grittier subjects in the Pacific. Nothing prepared his friends in London for the graphic realism of The Ebb-Tide, for instance. But he deepened older ones as well. It was in the Pacific that he wrote David Balfour, the sequel to Kidnapped, and it exhibits a richer texture than Kidnapped, perhaps even an autumnal tone informed by the author’s final years spent in self-described “exile” on a remote island in the Pacific. Stevenson was a marvelous essayist—some readers believed he would be remembered primarily for his essays—and his later pieces are reflections on life and art and creativity by a deeply philosophical man who believed that failure was the condition of our life, and struggle our only option. At Vailima he would lead the household in prayers, and the prayer known as “Sunday” was delivered the day before his stroke: “Be patient still; suffer us awhile longer to endure and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction.” This stoicism was captured in such scenes as the one in which David Balfour, afraid to jump from the rocks, is spurred on by Alan Breck Stewart—who tells him, aye, to be afraid of a thing and to do it, that makes the “prettiest” sort of a man. It is captured as well in his prose style, his passion for simplicity and elegance, for a lyricism that emerges not from an exuberance of imagery but from a studied and disciplined plainness. Stevenson’s most famous poem is his “Requiem,” its last lines carved on his tomb: Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be, Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. But Stevenson may have caught his own purpose better when he wrote in Songs of Travel: Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said— On wings they are carried— After the singer is dead And the maker buried. Robert Louis Stevenson brought language to bear, in all conceivable ways, on the human condition—to help us understand why we are here and why we suffer, and to offer balm to relieve the pain. It is past time for a rediscovery of the man as one of the great artists of the English language. Barry Menikof is professor of English at the University of Hawaii and the editor of the original-text edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
