Stevenson as Proto-Modernist

ELT 40:3 1997 authenticity of biography." His "No!" is emphatic but delivered without much supporting argument. As these examples suggest, the essays are personal reflections rather than scholarly pieces, more often anecdotal and practical than theoretical . Based on their personal experiences and preferences, the writers touch on—and disagree among themselves about—topics as disparate as the relative merits of authorized vs. unauthorized biography, the advantages and disadvantages of the long-dead vs. the recently deceased (or still living) subject, and the extent to which any story of a life can capture the truth of the life itself. Several discuss the role of empathy in biographical writing, and some question while others assert the importance of critical judgment in narrating a life. Most are at their liveliest, however, when they tell an intimate story or grind a favorite axe, whether it is to castigate their inconsiderate and inconsistent reviewers, to take to task those who have refused interviews or withheld information, or to lambast schools of contemporary literary criticism. Such eclecticism is both the charm and the weakness of the collection, which considers the "problems" of biography and their "solutions" in rather desultory fashion. Salwak has focused the book on literary biography (broadly defined to include works of literary merit as well as books that narrate the lives of writers). None of the essays, however, explicitly addresses the peculiarities ofthat genre as distinguished from other types of biographical writing. Nor is there any discussion of the particular problems presented by gender, class, culture, or race in writing biography. Those familiar with current issues in biography will not find much that is startling or, for that matter, new in these pages. They will find much to enjoy. The range of personality, experience, insight, and interest presented here dramatically conveys what a diverse and interesting group biographers are. Gail Porter Mandell Saint Mary's College Notre Dame, Indiana Stevenson as Proto-Modernist Alan Sandison. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism . New York: St. Martin's, 1996. ix + 424 pp. $59.95 THE CORE of Alan Sandison's book is its attention to problematic relationships between fathers and sons (and their surrogates) in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, New Arabian Nights, Prince Otto, Kidnapped, Catriona, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Master ofBallantrae, 332 BOOK REVIEWS The Ebb-Tide, and Weir of Hermiston. According to Sandison, it is largely (but not exclusively) this theme that qualifies Stevenson as an overlooked proto-modernist and even to some degree a postmodernist. Sandison makes this claim in order to demonstrate that Stevenson is not, in the words of the cover blurb, "simply an apologist for the lost world of romance," but rather a complex writer who deserves to be placed beside Conrad, Kafka, Faulkner and Borges in the twentieth century. Sandison wants to show that, even more than most writers of the Transition, Stevenson has one aesthetic foot (in Sandison's view, a larger and more important foot) stretching toward the twentieth century, even as the other is planted in the nineteenth. The biographical germ of Sandison's thesis is contained in his statement that Stevenson "continues to experiment with new forms quite literally to the day of his death. Nonetheless, he shows himself convinced that, however much he may have taken arms against the fathers, and despite his marriage, he himself has still not fully entered manhood, is still not, in his own mind, a paterfamilias. . . . He is, in his own mind, still a youth, still unable to accept the commonest things 'like heredity and procreation.'" Similarly, Stevenson as a writer displays an arrested rebelliousness, according to Sandison: "On the one hand Stevenson is the young, aspiring writer determined to be radically innovative, which, he readily acknowledges, means repudiating or at least distancing himself from his precursors; on the other, he appears greatly troubled at the prospect of exercising the authority which would make his usurpation effective and secure and confirm his newly-asserted independence ." Like author, like characters, and not surprisingly, in Kidnapped , Prince Otto, The Ebb-Tide, and Weir of Hermiston, the young heroes are "trapped in a limbo between adolescence and manhood." Only in Treasure Island does the...