Biography: As with Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson's life always threatened to overshadow his literary output.
A good biography of RLS, then, must pay as much attention to the early bohemian years in Edinburgh, the dissolute period in France in the mid-1870s, the two sets of adventures in the US, the time spent in Switzerland and the Riviera and, above all, the years of roving and settlement in the Pacific (1888-94), as to Treasure Island, Weir of Hermiston and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Clare Harman's splendid and readable life passes this test easily, and it is a marked feature of her book that she usually avoids the cliché and comes up with fresh insights. This is no mean feat when one considers how much has been written about Stevenson.
She provides some admirable readings of the novels, and immediately made even a buff like me want to rush out and reread some of the lesser work. My only complaint on the literary side is that she tends to be overenthusiastic about minor achievements such as Prince Otto, while having nothing to say about more interesting fiction such as The Black Arrow. This fault becomes more serious when she also neglects (relatively speaking) the Jacobite trilogy of Kidnapped, Catriona and The Master of Ballantrae. It seems Harman underrates the role of Jacobitism and the Scottish Highlands in Stevenson's work; this was a man, after all, who regularly dreamed that he was a Jacobite, working for Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The global voyaging is not neglected, though the author spends more time on the European years than those on Samoa, which I think is a mistake of balance and pacing; indeed, I found the entire Pacific section rather rushed. On RLS the private person, Harman is shrewd and insightful. She is up to date with all the latest literature concerning his mysterious pulmonary ailment, and inclines to the view that he might have suffered from the hereditary Osler-Rendu-Weber syndrome, which would explain all the symptoms usually read as tuberculosis and the terminal cerebral haemorrhage in 1894. She picks up on the point, previously noticed by Richard Aldington (and overstressed by Elaine Showalter) that Stevenson, though not himself homosexual, was always deeply attractive to men of that orientation: Henry James, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, FHW Myers, Mark-Andre Raffalovitch, et al - and she develops this point interestingly. She is also good on the many conflicts in Stevenson's life: with his wealthy engineer father Thomas over religion and attitudes to life in general; with disease; with ex-friends like William Ernest Henley; with the bien-pensants over Father Damien of Molokai and a whole range of issues; with the German government over its colonialist oppression of Samoa; with what Melville called "the Angel, Art"; and above all with his ready-made family. Occasionally the book jars, though I suspect this is more the fault of the editor than the author. On one page she has an incorrect date (1749) for the notorious Appin murder in the Highlands while on the very same page she has the correct one (1752). Over-respectful, Harman feels the need to thank everyone in the notes, even on trivial matters. She thanks Graham Robb for identifying the Beranger lines from Le Réfus:
Mon coeur est un luth suspendu
Sitôt qu'on touche, il résonne
- but this quote is well known to anyone who has read Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher.
In 1880 Stevenson married an impoverished American adventuress named Fanny Osbourne, who brought two children from a previous marriage into the Stevenson ménage. Fanny clearly did not love RLS in any meaningful sense - she dithered about marrying him for more than a year before being persuaded by the wealth of Stevenson's father. She was deeply neurotic, manipulative (she destroyed all his male friendships), strident, aggressive, money-minded and philistine. Beneath a mask of bohemian insouciance she was a thorough bourgeoise, and she shared the delusion, common to partners of creative people, that she was just as talented as her husband but the world (and particularly England, a country she detested) would not give her a break. Detested by all Stevenson's friends and intimates (his cousin Bob, Henley, Charles Baxter, etc), coldly tolerated by those on the outer circle, such as Henry James and Sidney Colvin, cordially loathed by every woman she came in contact with, Fanny is one of the most unpleasant creatures in literary history. But because she was a woman, modern criticism of her is invariably tagged "misogynistic". In the end she broke down almost completely, with long psychotic interludes.
Her son Lloyd was a despicable, sponging idler, also with "creative" delusions, which the fond RLS encouraged by making him "co-author" of two of his books. Nevertheless, the baneful influence of the Osbournes was written out of the official biography, published by Graham Balfour in 1901, in which they appear as saintly helpers to the great man. It is amazing that this hagiographic drivel is still taken seriously by keepers of the Stevenson flame, including Ernest Mehew, and it is the great merit of Harman's book that she refuses to be taken in by such nonsense. Her analysis of Lloyd Osbourne is spot-on: "Lloyd had not grown up to be a particularly attractive character, and he didn't improve with age; he was lazy, not very clever, addicted to being 'kept', made two marriages, had children out of wedlock, and wrote lots of poor or indifferent books. His conduct . . . was characterised by raw self-interest, his letters by speciousness and bully's stratagems."
On Fanny she proves a devastating witness for the prosecution, but refrains from explicitly going for the jugular, possibly through a quasi-feminist solidarity.
Stevenson's death was essentially caused by the stresses imposed by the Osbournes and their incessant demands for more money. In the end the frail "cash cow" buckled. Stevenson's story has elements of Greek tragedy in it. His hamartia or fatal flaw was his inability, except occasionally and through a glass darkly, to perceive the true nature of his wife. In some ways his story is almost that of film noir, with Fanny as femme fatale. He was a great and still underrated writer and a complex and fascinating human being. In Clare Harman he has found a worthy, committed and sympathetic chronicler.
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Clare Harman, HarperCollins, 503pp. £25
Frank McLynn is the author of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (Pimlico)