The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Review Essay

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Review Essay Harold Orel University of Kansas The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, III: August 1879-September 1882 1994 372 pp. $45.00 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, IV: October 1882-June 1884 1994 326 pp. $45.00 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, V: July 1884-August 1887 1995 465 pp. $45.00 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, VI: August 1887-September 1890 1995 443 pp. $45.00 New Haven: Yale University Press Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, editors A REVIEW of the first two volumes of this edition appeared in ELT (38:3,1995). Nothing said in that review about Booth and Mehew's meticulous editing—the handsome appearance of individual volumes (which include photographs and reproductions of RLS's doodles), the liveliness of the entries, the unfailing accuracy and helpfulness of index entries (an index is provided for each volume), and this reviewer's general sense that we are dealing here with a superb memorial to a major writer—needs to be taken back or qualified. Add to all this the 60 OREL : STEVENSON LETTERS generous inclusion of letters by Fanny and Margaret Stevenson, Sir Sidney Colvin, and William Ernest Henley, which elucidate elements of RLS's biography that are elliptically treated in RLS's own letters, and a reviewer may be driven to minor complaints in order to earn his bread (e.g., the inconsistency involved in translating some French sentences, but not all; or the inadequacies of particular footnotes when the reader is aware of the availability of fuller information than the hermetically sealed circle of RLS's acquaintances possesses). So many facts are provided that our understanding of Stevenson the man is inevitably modified, though not radically changed, since we already know so much about his life. The brief essays that head particular sections are especially welcome, since they concentrate on setting the scene for such events as the chartering of the Janet Nicoll. The richness of these materials is such that only a few highlights can be treated in the space of a review. (Eight volumes with 2,800 letters —two-thirds of them never previously published; 3,419 pages of closely-printed text; footnotes that sometimes reach a surprising length, and frequently astonish us by their detail.) The first impression one gains from reading all the volumes is how seriously RLS's health influenced his choices of habitat, his relations with friends and publishers, and his general temper. He was a very sick man most of his life, and the need to escape to a warmer climate much more urgent than most of his friends realized at the time he made his decision to relocate in Samoa. Dozens of entries restate the theme sounded in a typical letter by Colvin (about RLS's illnesses in the U.S., with quotations drawn from a letter he had received from Fanny): Louis has been, and is, dangerously ill.... Doctor had at first thought there could be no hope, but afterwards "said he could save him, though it would be with the greatest difficulty".... "A sea-voyage would simply kill him at once in the present state of his health." In Davos, Switzerland, a few months later (November 1880), RLS's problems were diagnosed as "chronic pneumonia, infiltration and a bronchitic tendency; also spleen enlarged. . . ." (This was by no means the whole explanation of what was going wrong in his body.) The usual caution, and sometimes stern injunction, from members of the medical profession was not to exert himself by writing; but since his expenses were mounting, and since he was not always a wise monitor of his expenditures, he knew that he could not afford to do what was essential if his recovery were to be secured. His efforts to win the History Chair 61 ELT 40 : 1 1997 at Edinburgh University (1881) as the successor to Aeneas J. G. Mackay were strenuous but unavailing; they are best understood as an almost desperate effort to stabilize his income, which at the time—based largely on payments for his writings—was both erratic and inadequate for Fanny's needs, not to mention his own. Though...