Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections ed. by R.C. Terry

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

REVIEWS R.C. Terry, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996). xxxi, 216. $24.95 U.S. cloth. Two feelings that Robert Louis Stevenson consistently seems to inspire in the people who chronicle his life are affection and admiration. One recent bi­ ographer goes so far as to say, “I make no apology for yielding to his charm” (Bell xxi). R.C. Terry attempts in his introduction to distance himself some­ what from the “idolatry” (xxii) that characterizes many early accounts of Stevenson, but it is clear that Terry too is an admirer of this “genuinely lovable man” (xx). Terry suggests that a major theme of this collection is “the struggles of an exile from his homeland and the burdens of an artist’s isolation” (xiii), but the bulk of the excerpts he has chosen from diaries, letters, memoirs, and periodicals are concerned less with the inner life of the artist than they are with people’s responses to Stevenson’s personality — by most accounts a delightful one, to which this anthology pays tribute. Reading about the pleasure Stevenson gave to others is a pleasurable expe­ rience in itself. He was warm, lively, engaging, and intensely participatory — an active talker and listener. His effect on people was often vivifying; Mar­ garet Black, who knew him as a young man in Edinburgh, stated that “you wondered, long after you had talked with him, why it was that you saw new lights on things, and found food for mirth and matter for reflection where neither had suggested itself before” (40). Stevenson was a “spirited” individ­ ual in the fullest sense of the word. Baildon compared him to such mythical figures as Autolycus, “the sly god Hermes masquerading as a mortal” (22), Colvin likened him to an elf, a sprite, an Ariel (63), and Low even compared him to “the great god Pan” (73). Other accounts emphasize Stevenson’s ability to live fully in the moment: a response perhaps to his early exposure to the threat of death, during a childhood plagued by sometimes incapaci­ tating ill health. Although much of the material included in this collection has already been utilized by biographers, the length of the excerpts allows for the introduction of some information that others have sifted out. We learn from the baby book kept by Stevenson’s mother Margaret, for example, that “Smout” was not his English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , 23, 3, Sept. 19 9 7 only nickname, though it was the one that stuck; others were “Boulihasker, Smoutie, Baron Broadnose, Signor Sprucki, otherwise, Maister Sprook” (2). (According to the OED, a “smout” is a salmon in the intermediate stage, with silvery scales, on its way to the ocean: an apt and prescient epithet for Stevenson, with his quicksilver personality and penchant for voyages on land and ocean.) The playfulness with sound and sense evident in these names suggest much about the importance of the parental influence on Stevenson’s development as a writer. Another instance where Terry’s selections serve to fill out biographical accounts is in Henry Adams’s witty, catty reports about Stevenson and his wife Fanny when Adams first met them in Samoa, at which time they were hard at work clearing land and preparing for the construction of their new home. Adams recoiled from the back-to-the-earth mode of life that was so obvious on their dirty clothing, and Stevenson’s biographers, offended by his condescension, have tended either to make short shrift of Adams’s comments or to select the ones that reflect badly on Adams himself. Terry’s selection includes a humorous and rather endearing detail regarding the Stevensons’ indifference to conventional standards of cleanliness: Stevenson himself wore still [since a previous visit] a brown knit woollen sock on one foot, and a greyish purple sock on the other, much wanting in heels, so that I speculated half the time whether it was the same old socks, or the corresponding alternates, and concluded that he must have worn them ever since we first saw him. (162) It also includes a vivid, succinct description of that strange combination...