Happiness Is a Warm Pen

“The whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote excitedly from Honolulu to a London friend in 1889. It’s a tale that has often been told but nowhere with more zest and vividness than in his own letters. Ernest Mehew spent 25 meticulous years preparing the eight-volume complete edition that Yale University Press published for the centenary of Stevenson’s death in 1994. He has now selected just over a 10th of the original 2,800 letters, linking them with brief passages of biographical background. The result is the most enthralling, and most reliable, account of Stevenson’s life that has ever been available in a single volume.

Mehew’s task could scarcely have been more daunting; though as a retired civil servant he must have had more experience with documentary bulk than many literary scholars. Almost everything Stevenson touched from infancy on was filed away by his adoring and possessive parents. His friends and wife were to prove equally assiduous. Laundry lists are the least of it. In the Stevenson archives at the Yale University Library, the National Library of Scotland, Harvard University Library, the British Library, the Huntington Library and half a dozen other places, you turn up not only manuscripts of his multitudinous books, plays, letters and diaries but also locks of hair, drawings, childish scribbles, even notes giving instructions when the otherwise unstoppably talkative author had lost his voice. The profusion seems incongruous beside the physical frailty of its generator, so plangently caught in John Singer Sargent’s portraits. (These paintings are themselves described in the letters, along with their subject’s reactions to them, so that at times the reader seems to be in a hall of mirrors.)

If Stevenson was a great talker, his first great subject was himself. His early correspondents often complained that he didn’t give them enough “news.” This changes as he matures, particularly during his seven years in the South Pacific. Until then, the letters are for the most part unapologetically self-absorbed: minute accounts of his thoughts and dreams, many of them segueing naturally into his published books. In a letter to a friend about middle age, he writes as if drafting an essay: “As one goes on, the wood seems to thicken, the path to narrow. . . . We learn indeed to use our means, but . . . learn, along with it, the paralyzing knowledge that those means are only applicable to two or three poor, commonplace motives.” And here is part of one of the dreams which often gave him ideas for stories: “I saw a signal being given and knew they [the “horrid Malays”] were going to blow up the ship. I leaped right off and heard my captors splash in the water after me as thick as pebbles when a bit of river bank has given way beneath the foot.”

The concreteness is typical, as is the range of styles. There are verse letters, dialect letters, diary letters. They discuss Stevenson’s writing; his illnesses (this was a man who was so often ailing that, in his 30s, he dedicated a book of his poems, “Underwoods,” to no fewer than 11 physicians); his quarrels with his overbearing father; his queasily quasi-filial passion for the older and otherwise-attached Frances Jane Sitwell (“I am very young at heart and . . . what I want is a mother, and I have one now, have I not? . . . some one whom I shall love with a love as great as a lover’s and yet more . . . “).

For all their egocentricity, the letters are intensely alive, rich and comical; no wonder their recipients didn’t throw them away. And as Mehew’s de-censored edition allows us to see, they are also sometimes enjoyably delinquent, at least by the prim standards imposed by his early editors. The young Stevenson is revealed to have bought hashish in lowlife Edinburgh, the older one to have been experimenting with a franker approach to the fictional treatment of sex: “[I]f my characters have to go to bed to each other--well, I want them to go. . . . [W]ith all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly rendered.”

The problem of how to reconcile romance with truth-telling increasingly preoccupied Stevenson in the later years of his short life (he died in 1894 at 44). Two key factors were his marriage to Fanny Osbourne in California in 1880 and their robust and dangerous travels together in the South Pacific, where he broke decisively with the stifling respectabilities of late 19th century Scotland and England. The relationship with Fanny had from its outset been opposed by his parents and by most of his friends, who dreaded losing him and were shocked--it’s not clear in what order--by the facts that Fanny was going through a divorce, that she was 10 years older than Louis, that she was American and also, perhaps, that her complexion was, as one friend put it, “darker than one would expect in a woman of Dutch American race.” (Stevenson whimsically riposted “What if she be, sir? It is better to be a negress than a pessimist.”)

By traveling, and ultimately settling, in Polynesia, Stevenson was of course continuing the bohemian nomadism that had begun with his journeys by canoe and donkey through parts of Belgium and France, the subjects of “An Inland Voyage” and “Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes.” But he was also making a powerful statement about human relations in a part of the world where the workings of colonialism were particularly transparent.

Stevenson’s investigations into and criticisms of colonialism, which are an important theme of his later letters, were largely ignored by his English contemporaries and are still undervalued today. Few readers know that the best-selling author of “Treasure Island,” “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Kidnapped” devoted much of his time in the 1890s to writing a deeply researched work of historical anthropology, “In the South Seas” (to be reissued this fall by Penguin), and a polemical account of the effect of Great Powers intervention in Samoan politics, “A Footnote to History.” These books showed prophetically how destructive was the impact not only of northern hemisphere economic and military rivalries in the region but also of supposedly benign forces such as Christian missions. Their exploration of the interrelations of Europeans, Americans and native Polynesians was continued imaginatively in a novel written with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, “The Ebb-Tide,” and at a political level in a series of angry letters to the Times in London as well as in personal correspondence. These were unwelcome developments to many readers. Oscar Wilde commented, “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.” The vivid and moving “In the South Seas” so disappointed its magazine editors that they discontinued serialization. The work didn’t appear in book form until after Stevenson’s death. The publishers of “The Ebb-Tide” required it to be softened and bowdlerized. Stevenson’s trenchant, if obsessive, harangues to the Times were largely ignored--and even today, with one very short exception, they don’t make it into Mehew’s selection.

This absence leaves readers without some of the evidence by which to gauge the increasing seriousness of Stevenson’s many statements in his letters dating from the mid-1880s on, about his concern for facts and for truth. The discovery that life could be even more vivid than literature was exhilarating for a man whose appetite for fictions of adventure and romance had been fed by long periods of illness. At Vailima, his house in western Samoa, he was to claim that “[n]othing is so interesting as weeding, clearing and path-making.” But there was more than an improvement in physical health behind such assertions, as is shown by some powerful philosophical exchanges with Henry James and William Archer in which the correspondents slug it out over the rival claims of escapism and realism.

Not the least of the complexities of the issue was how divided Stevenson himself was about it. On one hand, there was a sense in which gilding the lily was his vocation, a key aspect of what he described in a poem as “my great task of happiness,” a task that had been forced on him by illness but also by the need to counteract the depressiveness of his father and of Fanny. As late as 1885, in a letter to Archer, whose own view of artistic duty had been formed by his respect for Ibsen, Stevenson claims that because the world is full of poverty, illness and death, the artist is obliged to improve on things:

“In my view, one dank, dispirited word is harmful, a crime of lese-humanite, a piece of acquired evil; every day, every bright word or picture, like every pleasant air of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat; the reader catches it and, if he be healthy, goes on his way rejoicing; and it is the business of art so to send him, as often as possible.”

Archer unyieldingly replies that an artist is a witness on oath. No one is obliged to give evidence about life, but if he does, “he should say all he knows.” This letter was written soon after and may have reinforced a political awakening on Stevenson’s part, occasioned by newspaper reports of events in Sudan and Ireland. He had always felt guilty that his acquaintance with the world of action was confined to the page, that the Stevenson family of marine engineers, who had built lighthouses on remote, storm-swept rocks, was petering out in someone like himself, “a child filling a sandbag with its little handfuls.” In the South Seas, he was to find that writers can influence action, that writing can be action--in ways that don’t preclude still more direct forms of involvement on the author’s part.

Of course, this is only one of the threads in the letters. Whichever of Stevenson’s books readers like best, they will find something absorbing about it here: For example, about his unconscious plagiarism of the whole inner spirit and a good deal of Washington Irving’s “The Tales of a Traveller” in “The Money Diggers” section of “Treasure Island” or the rapidity with which Jekyll and Hyde came to him: “I am pouring forth a penny (12-penny) dreadful; it is dam dreadful.” There are telling glimpses of other writers--J.M. Barrie, Ford Madox Ford, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw--and of Stevenson’s reactions to their work. And there are memorable moments of different sorts, not least of domestic farce, such as the occasion when the millionaire Charles Fairchild visits the Stevensons in Scotland and the cellar is empty of the only kind of wine Fairchild touches, the maid forgets to buy cream for the vichyssoise, and the cat eats the fish.

Mehew has made his selection adroitly, as well as with formidable expertise. The process has been less brutal than might have been expected, because Stevenson often wrote to half a dozen people in the same day, inevitably repeating himself. Just occasionally, a missing letter leaves an unexplained information gap. And, as in the complete edition, the notes explaining Stevenson’s dense stylistic web of quotation and parody are helpful but not exhaustive. For anyone who knows his books well (let alone his complete letters), the pace of the selection will seem hectic, but that’s appropriate enough for an author who ran his imagination on fast forward.