NONFICTION - Dec. 19, 1993

DREAMS OF EXILE: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Ian Bell (Henry Holt: $25; 296 pp.) Biographies run in cycles. Soon after the subject’s death, authors rush to confer sainthood, or genius. After an indecent interval the debunkers take over. Thus Robert Louis Stevenson is declared a “parasitic buffoon,” an “insane stork.” It’s the third wave of biographers that most often balances the boat. Ian Bell’s Stevenson is exasperating, spoiled, arbitrary--but above all courageous. Combatting horrendous health throughout most of his short, crowded life, he perseveres to write prose and poetry that continue to enchant even “functionally illiterate Hollywood executives.”

Stevenson died at 44 while mixing mayonnaise in his house on Samoa, his masterpiece yet to be written. “Treasure Island” was composed during an illness (to amuse his stepson; it ran serially in Young Folks’ Magazine). “Dr. Jekyll,” his catapult to fame, was knocked off in three days in a Bournemouth cottage while the author, significantly, was “dosed on tinctures, potions and draughts, some of them disorienting.” “The Weir of Hermiston,” “Kidnapped,” “The Master of Ballantrae,” “A Child’s Garden of Verses”--all penned under sentence of sickness but all connecting with the public taste at a “deep level.”

A proud Scotsman who loved everything about the hills of home except the “meteorological purgatory” the Scots call weather, Stevenson reluctantly kept on the move, “his career a paper chase that spanned the globe, illness dogging every page.” Bell is with him step for step in an equitable biography animated enough to stir even a movie mogul.