STORYTELLER: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch
“Storyteller,” Leo Damrosch’s thoughtful, informative biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, introduces the 19th-century Scottish writer of “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” with tributes to his sterling personality and to the pleasures of his fiction. Stevenson’s mentor, the critic Sidney Colvin, described him as “infinitely kind and tender, devotedly generous, brave and loving.” Mark Twain admired the “smoldering rich fire” of his eyes. Calvino called himself “a Stevenson worshiper,” and Borges wrote, “Ever since childhood Stevenson has been for me one of the forms of happiness.”
It’s reassuring to sense that we are not about to watch another biographer eviscerate a subject or pounce on the scandal that might sell the book. Yet all this praise, so early on, raises a question that Damrosch — the author of acclaimed lives of Rousseau, Casanova and Swift, among others — will have to address:
Why is this prolific, gifted writer best known today for one brief, atypical work, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”? Many who use those two names as shorthand for the divided self have only little or no idea who created that tormented creature. “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” have been made and remade into films, but unlike his fellow Victorians — Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, the Brontës — Stevenson is rarely read or taught. Damrosch makes a convincing case for him as a skilled stylist and innovative narrator. He wants us to read Stevenson’s novels. He has a talent for quoting his subject. There are beautiful passages from Stevenson about his marriage to Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne and about marriage in general.
Stevenson’s life was as adventurous as the pirate exploits in his fiction, though obviously less criminal and aggressive. He was seriously ill for most of his 44 years, yet he traveled semi-constantly, beginning with trips to the Scottish countryside and ending with his final journey from the Adirondacks to Samoa.
Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Stevenson was expected to join the family business, structural engineering. His grandfather and father designed the lighthouses along the coast of Scotland. A sickly, imaginative, disappointing child, he grew up immersed in a harsh Presbyterian piety he would later reject, horrifying his family when he became an atheist.
He studied law to placate his parents but was determined to become a writer. A fervent admirer of Montaigne, he began with essays. An early book, “Travels With a Donkey,” depicts his trek through the Cévennes with the long-suffering Modestine. He was drawn to a congenial group of bohemian expatriates living in the French countryside, where he met and fell in love with Fanny Osbourne, a strong-willed, charismatic American. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the couple, reproduced in the book among an unusually generous number of illustrations, tells us volumes about the Stevensons, separately and together.
A decade older than Stevenson, still married to the father of her son and daughter, Fanny was reluctant to become the wife of an impecunious writer. Stevenson pursued her to California, where he fell ill, nearly died — and where they eventually wed.
The couple led a peripatetic existence, steered largely by concern for Stevenson’s health. They endured the boredom of Davos in the hopes that the mountain air might prevent Stevenson’s lung hemorrhages and bouts of depression. They spent three years at Bournemouth, the restorative British seaside resort.
During a rainy stay in Scotland, Stevenson and his stepson, Lloyd, were making up stories and drawing maps to pass the time when the idea for “Treasure Island” was born. Published in 1883, it was a popular success, ending the couple’s dependence on his family and enabling them to search for a more salubrious climate. Despite his frailty, Stevenson produced what Damrosch terms a “torrent” of writing, novels and collections of stories, essays and poems. He befriended other authors, most notably Henry James, and read widely. I love knowing that he was a huge fan of “Crime and Punishment,” which had not appeared in English, and which he read in French.
Stevenson’s romantic fascination with the South Seas brought the family — by then including Fanny, Lloyd, Stevenson’s mother, Margaret, and periodically his stepdaughter, Belle, and her troubled husband, Joe Strong — to Samoa.
The book’s last chapters are at once its most engaging and unsatisfying. Damrosch acknowledges Stevenson’s respect for other cultures, his opposition to the horrors of imperialism, his support for Samoan independence. We believe that he had a “deep and genuine sympathy with the people he lived among.” Yet “Storyteller” seems insufficiently curious about the reasons the Stevensons could buy a 314-acre plantation with 50 head of cattle on the island of Upolu and construct an enormous home, its veranda 90 feet long, staffed by 19 full- and part-time servants, virtually all of them Samoan. Every two weeks, a steamship brought them ice and oysters.
I am not saying that Stevenson should be “canceled” as an anti-colonialist colonialist. But the clarifying perspective of our historical moment does make you wish that Damrosch had looked more deeply into the complexities of the Stevensons’ position in the world around them.
Damrosch does a good job of summarizing the major novels and highlighting their virtues, but I can’t say I finished the last page of “Storyteller” and raced off to find my copy of “Treasure Island.” On the other hand, I was inspired — and thankful — to reread “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which I hadn’t read in decades, and which is a masterpiece. It’s a marvel of long elegant sentences, of precise word choice, of the economy with which Stevenson draws and uses his characters, and of sheer fun in how the plot moves and the puzzles are solved.
Nabokov’s “Lectures on Literature” includes an essay on “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which “belongs to the same order of art as, for instance, ‘Madame Bovary’ or ‘Dead Souls.’” He ends by retelling the touching account of Stevenson’s death, with which “Storyteller” begins.
Damrosch writes: “Robert Louis Stevenson spent the last day of his life working on his latest novel in his mountainside home in Samoa. That evening he poured wine for his wife Fanny and himself, and was mixing mayonnaise for a salad when he suddenly said, ‘Do I look strange?’”
Nabokov gives us different details: more wine, less novel, less mayonnaise. Stevenson has gone to the cellar for a bottle of his favorite Burgundy and is uncorking it when a blood vessel bursts and he says those amazing last words.
With his eye for irony, Nabokov spots “a curious thematical link between this last episode in Stevenson’s life and the fateful transformations in his most wonderful book.” How perfect that the author of a masterpiece about a man with two different faces should have asked, at the very end, whether his own face looked strange.
STORYTELLER: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson | By Leo Damrosch | Yale University Press | 554 pp. | $35
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