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Animated account of a tortured author
Sunday, February 13, 2005 - Reviewed by Dr Noreen Doody
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, by Claire Harman, Harper Collins, €36.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a man on the run. What he was running from is not certain - bad health, over-protective parents, gender issues or, maybe, the self.

According to this biography of the Scottish novelist, this restlessness manifests itself intellectually in Stevenson's difficulty in writing a novel to its conclusion.

Stevenson is perhaps most famous for his work Treasure Island. Indeed, this was the first book he ever finished - and that was partially because the story was being serialised in Young Folks magazine as he was writing it, and chapter 16 was urgently required so that the story could continue.

Stevenson's education was diverse and somewhat haphazard. He was a delicate boy and suffered bad health all his life. He attended a school in Edinburgh for “backward and delicate'‘ boys and girls, where “no homework'‘ was a central house rule.

He went on to study engineering at Edinburgh University, as it was his father's intention that he should enter the family business building and designing lighthouses.

However, he dropped out of engineering and took up law, in which he somehow managed to graduate. A friend said at the time: “We did not look for Louis at Law lectures, except when the weather was bad.”

Biographer Claire Harman outlines the duality present in many of Stevenson's experiences. His parents, she writes, were opposed to each other in personality, his father being melancholic, his mother optimistic. The mutual affection and interdependence of parents and son seem at times to have been so oppressive that Stevenson once wrote that it was sometimes difficult to separate love from hate.

The ambiguity that Harman traces within Stevenson is apparent in the conflicting images of decadence and innocence he projects. He is very much an image of the fin de siecle: his wasted appearance, ill health and opium-tainted cigarettes. A boyish figure, Stevenson seems perpetually agitated but eager for fun; keen for adventure but constrained by bonds of home.

In The Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, Stevenson reached the ultimate collaboration between his conscious and unconscious self.

The darkness and homoerotic overtones in the book are associated by Harman with Freud's work on dreams and illicit desire. She offers some interesting reflections on possible ambivalence in Stevenson's own sexual orientation and quotes Andrew Lang as saying that the author “possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him'‘.

Harman goes on to say that Stevenson is not known to have had any male lovers; his excessive passion for two older women, Frances Sitwell and Fanny Osbourne is, however, well documented in the biography. Stevenson travelled half way around the world from Edinburgh to Monterey to marry Fanny Osbourne; he was 29 and she 40 with two children.

Harman succeeds in involving the reader in the turmoil of Stevenson's life as he sets up home in one exotic location after another: the South of France, the Alps, a disused mineshaft 2,800 feet above sea level in Silverado California, Honolulu, the South Seas.

Stevenson spent his last days in Samoa but his writing there did not live up to the expectations of those back home. Oscar Wilde wrote: “I see that romantic surroundings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans.”

Harman uses new material to offer a sensitive, animated and insightful account of Stevenson, his milieu and his work.

Dr Noreen Doody is a lecturer in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra.