RLS Letters: The Yale Edition

Book Reviews RLS Letters: The Yale Edition The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Volume One, 1854-April 1874. Volume Two, April 1874-July 1879. Bradford A. Booth and Emest Mehew, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 525/352 pp. $45.00 each LAST YEAR (1994) was the centennial of Robert Louis Stevenson 's death (hereafter called RLS to differentiate him from his father and from Bob Stevenson). There were memorial services, films, plays (including a musical), a large number of publications, celebrations and exhibitions (in Scotland, California, Tokyo, and Vailima, RLS's home in Samoa, which was opened to the public for the first time), and all the coUoquia and conferences that one has come to expect for any Victorian author whose audience, cutting across class barriers, remains worldwide . RLS's journey on a donkey was recreated in the Cevennes, and a tour of Silverado was arranged. The Beinecke Library at Yale, which holds more than half of his correspondence, sponsored both an international symposium and a major exhibition. But over the long run the most significant event was undoubtedly the issuance of the first four volumes of an extraordinary eight-volume edition of 2,800 of his letters. (Only 1,100 have been published up till now.) In France, operating independently, Robert Louit, Jean-Pierre Ricard , and Isabelle Chapman, working under the general editorship of Michel Le Bris, have published an 807-page volume entitled Lettres du Vagabond: Correspondance, Tome 1, and a second installment, Lettres des Mers du Sud, will soon follow. This impressive project reprints fewer letters: 456 in Volume 1 and presumably an equal number in the second volume. Its annotations are scantier. But it is bringing to the Gallic audience an enormous number of letters that have never been translated into French. Le Bris, a dedicated Stevensonian, has done wonderful things for RLS's reputation in a country he loved deeply. The progress of his edition is cause for rejoicing, even though there is considerable overlap with the Booth-Mehew edition. There is no question about the grandness of the scale on which the Yale edition has been planned, and is now being carried out. (The last 357 ELT 38:3 1995 two volumes, which conclude with RLS's death from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44, are scheduled for publication in 1995.) Bradford Booth, a distinguished literary critic and theorist who taught at the University of California, began work on this edition in the 1950s, but died prematurely in 1968. The torch was passed to Ernest Mehew, who, over the past quarter-century, has become, by dint of his determined tracking-down of letters widely scattered throughout the world, his ingenious decipherings of RLS's wretched handwriting, his authoritative datings, and his richly informative annotations, the world's leading authority on RLS's life. In his acknowledgements Mehew pays special tribute to the editorial procedures followed by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis in his edition of The Letters of Oscar Wilde, Roger Swearingen (whose The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson has proved a gold-mine of information not readily available elsewhere), Kenneth Mackenzie (whose knowledge of RLS's work in Samoa is indispensable to any writer on the final years), and some of RLS's relatives, as well as an impressively large number of courteous and hard-working librarians and curators. The 637 letters in the first two volumes do not bring us up even to Treasure Island, which was published in 1883. RLS's first important success, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), does form part of the subject-matter here, but the book must be considered, in some ways, a tour de force. Nothing quite like it recurs in the canon despite all his restless voyaging to exotic locales; more important, Travels with a Donkey was so unlike what RLS had previously written that its publication marked a distinct stage in his maturation as a writer. What we do get from a reading of the correspondence is a sharpened sense of a personality seeking to define itself in the midst of a continually expanding cast of characters. Many of them had strong, well-formed ideas as to...