Robert Louis Stevenson’s first major biographer, J. C. Furnas, recalled the mildly patronizing comments his project occasioned: “‘How interesting that you are doing a life of Stevenson! I hadn’t thought of him since my children read him,’ as if the subject were Beatrix Potter.” While reviewing Storyteller, Leo Damrosch’s “life” of Stevenson, I experienced something similar, the few I mentioned it to supposing I must be writing for the once and future enjoyment of my two sons. (There is some truth in this.)
That Stevenson remains so narrowly identified with “boys’ stories” says as much about his firm grip on the young as it does the character of his narrative genius. Yet, as Damrosch notes, his admirers range from Mark Twain to Italo Calvino. According to Marcel Proust’s Swann, he was “tout à fait a great writer … equal to the very greatest.” G. K. Chesterton perhaps captured Stevenson’s lean style best: “He hated dilution and loved to take language neat, like a liqueur.”
In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), he requires one line to conjure Mr. Utterson, the respectable lawyer who investigates the “case”: “His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.”
Later, Stevenson makes the reader uneasy about the mysterious Mr. Hyde without any description at all: “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.” And, of course, you can, too.
I never warmed to Weir of Hermiston (1896), the novel Stevenson left unfinished at his death. Even so, it precisely defined the headiness of youth: “She was in love with herself, her destiny, the air of the hills, the benediction of the sun. All the way home, she continued under the intoxication of these sky-scraping spirits.”
A professor of literature at Harvard and the author of fine biographies of Jonathan Swift and William Blake, among others, Damrosch is the perfect guide to Stevenson’s life and work, combining learning with affection and detachment with an old-fashioned sense of adventure.
Stevenson—Damrosch refers to him throughout as “Louis,” since, he explains at the top of his opening chapter, his tale is “heavily populated by other Stevensons as well”—was born in Edinburgh in 1850. His mother Margaret’s pet names were not the envy of the schoolyard: Boulihasker, Smoutie, Baron Broadnose, Signor Sprucki, and Master Sprook. Per the baby book she produced, Smoutie “stuck to him till he was about 15,” which, under the circumstances, could have been far worse.
He would, in time, discard his odious nickname and the curls, velvet tunic, and sanctimony that came with it. (He had been, by his own retrospective account, “sentimental, sniveling, goody, morbidly religious.”) The seed planted by his careful study of the Bible grew into an early and abiding desire “to be an author.”
His imaginary adventures and rich childhood fantasies were the wellspring of his art. “Some places speak distinctly,” he observed. “Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.” Although Henry James would praise Treasure Island (1883), he owned that “I have been a child, but I have never been on a quest for buried treasure.” Stevenson: “Here is indeed a willful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child.” James naturally became one of his most steadfast and thoughtful friends.
Half-hearted legal study did nothing to dampen his literary ardor. He fashioned tight-as-a-drum essays (“Short studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is impossible to detach a strand”); intelligent, revealing letters; and, after his marriage to Fanny Osbourne, an American 10 years his senior, in 1880, novels of varying lengths and degrees of success. (As Damrosch points out, the term “short story” appears not to have been coined until around 1884, to denote “a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short.”)
Suffering from poor health for most of his adulthood, Stevenson conceived Treasure Island—originally and rather less romantically called The Sea Cook—as he convalesced in Scotland. During the “endless” rain, he and his stepson, Lloyd, “drew a map of an imaginary island and made up stories about it.” The fresh and then uncommon first-person narration, vivid cast of characters—Long John Silver was based on William Ernest Henley, remembered for his 1875 poem “Invictus”—and cracking plot were instantly recognized. It was “the realization and the apotheosis of the daydreams of common men” and an antidote to the “novel with a purpose” in which “we see the moral clumsily forced into every hole and corner of the story, or thrown externally over it like a carpet over a railing.”
Eleven years would elapse between the publication of Treasure Island and Stevenson’s death, in 1894. In this period he traveled the world and published the wonderful Kidnapped (1886) and its less accomplished sequel, Catriona (1893). (Who can resist the former’s dedication to his friend and solicitor, Charles Baxter: “This is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter evening schoolroom when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near …”)
W. H. Auden once said that people do not “die until they’ve done their work, and when they die, they die…. People, as a rule, die when they wish to. It is not a shame that Mozart, Keats, Shelley died young: they’d finished their work.” I feel the same of Stevenson, who died at only 44. For he realized his 17-year-old self’s dream: “Becoming great, becoming great, becoming great.”
Max Carter is chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York
