“Storyteller” was the name bestowed upon Robert Louis Stevenson by his friends in Samoa, where the Scottish adventure writer, who lived with the intensity of any of his wanderlustful heroes, settled at the end of his short life. This is the lens through which Leo Damrosch views the writer’s personal history in this thorough biography, which traces the path of Stevenson’s development from sickly infancy to halfhearted university student, to the full embrace of a literary career.
Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Stevenson was less interested in his father’s business designing lighthouses than in what was happening out on the high seas. “Youth is a hot season,” he observed, and he didn’t want to waste a single moment of his own. When he wasn’t bedridden, “like a weevil in biscuit”, he spent long periods in France and Switzerland, eventually making his way across the Atlantic with his American wife, supporting himself by writing essays and short stories.
It was back in Scotland, however, that Stevenson wrote his breakthrough book, Treasure Island, the novel he is probably still best known for. Even Henry James was a fan, extolling its “delightful” storytelling in his critical essay The Art of Fiction. So taken was Stevenson by James’s critique that they struck up a correspondence, which became a deep friendship when the Scot relocated to Bournemouth because of poor health. Kidnapped was written there. A Children’s Book of Verse, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde followed not long after.
Damrosch is less interested in decoding Stevenson’s oeuvre than in tracing the life, which, despite Stevenson’s fragile constitution, was almost as full of incident as his books. On at least one occasion, he signed his letters “Robert Louis Stevenson, Pirate Captain.” As Damrosch illuminates, he identified with Cervantes’ modern hero, Don Quixote: travel was a philosophical quest for Stevenson, and a well of inspiration.
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Indeed, it was when Stevenson was making his way across the Pacific Islands, where he set up a temporary home in Samoa, that he died at the age of 44. He had only recently penned a playful self-portrait that makes a good epitaph: “He loved but three things, women, adventure, art… and, as men whispered, adventure the most.”
