Robert Louis Stevenson

BOOK REVIEWS neglected forward-looking elements in Stevenson, there is at least as much to be said aesthetically for continuing to see him in the company of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle as there is for claiming that he is a proto-Kafka, Joyce, or Faulkner. Finally, although Sandison sensibly rejects some extreme interpretations and unreadable prose, referring for instance to Georges "Van Den Abbeele's somewhat congested account of the imperatives of filial succession," he is himself not immune to the temptations of theoretical pomposity and over-generalization. For no good reason, images sometimes become "chronotypes," fathers and paternity too often metamorphose into wicked "patriarchy," and Sandison succumbs to the totalizing of theory when he claims, for instance, that "there is always [my italics] ... an accompanying, subversive, deconstructive undertow" to Stevenson's apparent moral purposes. But these are less than fatal flaws, for despite its trendiness, Sandison 's superb close reading of the fiction demonstrates once again that, whether we see him as belonging more to the nineteenth century or to the twentieth, Stevenson's psychological insight, complex style, and exciting, highly symbolic plots make him a permanently attractive writer. Stephen E. Tabachnick ________________ The University of Oklahoma Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections. R. C. Terry, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. xxxi + 216 pp. $24.95 WORKS SUCH AS Terry's, selections of reminiscences about famous authors, seem to belong to an earlier, more wide-eyed era, back to the time when even the most casuistical of critics had not yet challenged the notion that books have authors. In Robert Louis Stevenson : Interviews and Recollections, there is no hint of an apology for the fascination with the author that this sort of work presupposes; besides, Terry seems to assume, who cannot be interested in the personality and life of a man as appealing as Stevenson? Indeed, for those who know little about Stevenson, or for Stevensonians who cannot get enough of their Louis, Terry's compilation provides a fund of interesting first-hand accounts about Stevenson from his earliest years to his death. However, for readers already familiar with the heroic story of Stevenson's life hoping to discover new insights into the work or creative processes of the artist, Interviews and Recollections offers only meager rewards. 335 ELT 40:3 1997 The book consists of recollections—only two or three interviews are included—from more than forty different persons, many distinguished in their own right, including Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang and Henry Adams, as well as Stevenson's mother, Margaret, and his wife, Fanny. Margaret Stevenson begins and ends the series of chronological reminiscences , appropriately enough, for she was present at Stevenson's death as well as his birth. Hence we learn from her that on 30 March 1854, "Smout," a baby name for young Robert Louis, "was distressed to hear that sheep and horses did not know about God: Ί think somebody might read the Bible to them.'" The last entry in the book, concerning events forty years later (Stevenson died in December 1894), begins, "How am I to tell the terrible news that my beloved son was suddenly called home last evening." Stevenson, as even those only casually acquainted with his work may know, died in Samoa, where he had lived for four years. Until he finally settled there in 1890, he had led a rover's life, traveling both for adventure and for the sake of his precarious health. In his introduction Terry emphasizes the importance of exile, both in Stevenson's life and as a theme in the selected recollections: "Stevenson's life revolves around the ambiguities of exile." Terry even compares Stevenson to that consummate exile: "Like D. H. Lawrence, a generation or so later, [Stevenson ] soon knew the price of emigration and its meaning." Perhaps Stevenson did, yet that hardly seems a central focus of the reminiscences , though there is some validity to Terry's claim that Stevenson's "phthisic separateness and consciousness of [his] body's exile" forms a recurring theme of the volume. Although a scattering of the recollections concern Stevenson "the exile," many more, by far, memorialize Stevenson the bohemian and adventurer. It...