A hundred and thirty years after his death, just a few of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books are still widely read: “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” “A Child’s Garden of Verses” and above all his 1886 novella “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a masterpiece of the grotesque that presaged the coming Freudian era and has exercised a remarkable impact on Anglo-American culture, with some 60 film and television adaptations to date. But Stevenson’s oeuvre was far more extensive. In his short life (he died at just 44, after a lifetime of debilitating illness) he produced a stunning array of novels, short stories, essays, poems and newspaper reportage. His “Complete Works” take up more than three feet on my bookshelf.
Discerning contemporaries saw him as a consummate artist. “He seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins,” wrote G.K. Chesterton enviously. Oscar Wilde deemed him a “delicate artist in language.” Henry James, who became a close friend, judged that his writing style “floats pearls and diamonds,” and after Stevenson’s death he wrote that he had “lighted up one whole side of the globe, and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.”
Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny Van de Grift (1840-1914), was a powerful personality in her own right: an individualist who paid no mind to conventional gender roles, a brave and sometimes reckless adventurer who encouraged Stevenson’s penchant for a wandering life, and a domineering personality. Many in the all-male club of Stevenson’s writer friends considered Fanny a termagant, though there were a few, like James, who appreciated her character: “If you like the gulch and the canyon,” he wrote to Owen Wister, the western writer, “you will like her.”
Camille Peri, in her engrossing new dual biography of the Stevensons, “A Wilder Shore,” notes that previous Stevenson biographers have reflexively labeled Fanny as “difficult” without trying to understand how necessary she was to her delicate and high-strung husband, or the “passion, companionship and creative energy that became the life force of the Stevensons’ marriage.” While Fanny painted well and produced commendable short stories for the magazine market, she was modest about her own talents and conformed with the tacit marital arrangement: “Louis’s health came first, his work second and Fanny’s needs last.”
She herself was tough as rawhide. Hailing from Indianapolis, the state capital but still not much more than a frontier town, she had married an unreliable charmer at 17 and accompanied him to the silver mines of Nevada, where he failed to make a fortune and they shivered in a canvas and cardboard shanty. After a few years of tolerating her husband’s profligacy and infidelities, she made her escape, along with her children, studying art in Paris and then finding her way to the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, where she met Louis (as Peri refers to him), in France on his perennial pursuit of sunshine and health. Louis was enraptured with the battle-scarred, unsinkable American adventuress, a decade his senior.
Louis appeared to have tuberculosis but was never diagnosed with it. A credible posthumous diagnosis is bronchiectasis, which would have caused his frequent hemorrhages. His native Scotland provided the worst possible climate for him, with alleviation coming only from travel to warmer climes. Turning his back on the careers his solidly bourgeois Edinburgh father planned for him, first in the family lighthouse engineering firm and then in the law, he began his peregrinations in France, where he met Fanny in 1876; famously traveled with a donkey in the Cévennes; followed Fanny to California; and eventually honeymooned with her in a deserted Silverado mining camp.
After further travels through Europe and America the couple departed for the South Seas: Nuku Hiva, Fakarava, Tahiti, Hawaii, Micronesia, the Gilbert Islands and finally Samoa, where they bought 300 acres and created a cacao farm; Fanny’s extensive plantings would later become the nucleus of Samoa’s premier botanical garden, which can still be visited today. The Stevensons, passionate anti-imperialists, shed their Western ways and adopted local customs, becoming closely involved in regional politics, while Louis produced journalism and fiction at an almost frantic pace. During his four years in the country he wrote the now little-known but fascinating South Sea novels “The Ebb-Tide” and “The Beach of Falesá,” as well as the unfinished “Weir of Hermiston,” which he believed was the best work he had done to date.
Fanny’s writing has received scant attention from previous Stevenson biographers but Peri, co-editor of the essay collection “Mothers Who Think,” accords it respect. While she makes no exalted claims for Fanny’s literary gifts, she states that her stories “sit comfortably and creditably among those of other female magazine writers of her day,” and gives descriptions of Fanny’s plots that reveal a psychological sophistication and taste for the weird that is definitely allied with her husband’s aesthetic.
The couple occasionally collaborated, and Fanny advised Louis on his works in progress, most famously giving the thumbs-down to the first draft of “Dr. Jekyll,” which caused him to burn the manuscript and start again. This has led some critics to characterize her criticism as destructive — “but this view,” Peri correctly points out, “ignores the fact that destruction is often an essential part of the creative process.” The evidence shows that while Louis took Fanny’s criticisms into consideration, he felt quite free to follow his own inclinations. And what about her work? “Strangely, how Louis felt about his wife’s fiction is a mystery. … The glaring lack of praise in his surviving letters and other written documents implies that he did not think highly of it.”
Fanny’s rough and sometimes masculine manner, her abrasive Americanness and her apparent domination of her sickly husband raised hackles among Louis’s British friends. But Peri persuasively demonstrates that “Louis equated his love for Fanny with liberation and action,” and that she facilitated his exit from cold, rainy, conformist, high-imperial Britain into a far more congenial world of sun, freedom and unconstraint. Louis once wrote to J.M. Barrie that Fanny was “always either loathed or slavishly adored; indifference impossible.” But Peri’s narrative offers a balanced appreciation of her role in the partnership, so that we understand the gifts she provided to her husband: in his words, “honor, anger, valor, fire.”
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