Tracking Stevenson

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 between modernism and the postmodern. Meisel has, thus, opened new lines of inquiry into many other modernist works by providing not only a pedagogy of reading but also a pedagogy of criticism. John J. Conlon University of Massachusetts at Boston TRACKING STEVENSON Nicholas Rankin. Dead Man's Chest. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987. $25.00 THIS HIGHLY AGREEABLE BOOK belongs on your shelf of literarytopographic works, next to Dickens' London and Wordsworth's Lake District and the essays in romantic biography of Richard Holmes. Better yet, it belongs on your shelf (should you be so fortunate as to have such a thing) of Stevensoniana, for its subject is the places in the life of that restless wanderer and tireless place-describer Robert Louis Stevenson. From North Sea lighthouses to the famous final resting place on Mount Vaea, the British journalist Nicholas Rankin has followed Stevenson about the world, making occasional concessions to the means of modern travel (jumbo jets rather than tramp steamers, buses rather than trains) but sticking closely to his subject's itinerary. Rankin reports on the narrow passageways of Old Town Edinburgh, which still suggest the dank Presbyterianism Stevenson spent most of his life escaping; on Barbizon where he met his wife-to-be and on Hyères where he lived most happily with her; on Monterey and the Silverado ranch in Northern California; on Bournemouth (an "English hybrid of Scotland and the Mediterranean") and on Saranac in the Adirondacks, where he rested and temporarily got his health back; and then finally on the South Pacific island kingdoms—Hawaii, Samoa—which in the last four years of his life stimulated him to new political interests and a new forthright style. Dead Man's Chest is thus partly biography, partly travel narrative , partly Rezeptionsgeschichte (Rankin visits every Stevenson museum, notes every memorial plaque, and talks to every Stevenson authority he can find), and partly exercise in literary piety—indeed, an exercise in piety to Jorge Luis Borges as well as Stevenson, since Rankin is gratified to find Borges a fellow admirer of RLS and carries a talismanic pebble from the Argentinian writer about with him on his journeys. Perhaps those journeys represent a pilgrimage made vicariously for Borges, or for Graham Greene (another admirer, and Stevenson's first cousin twice removed), or even for Wilfred Owen, 494 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 who while teaching school in Edinburgh took his pupils to a cottage Stevenson liked to get them nearer the writer's "romantic heart." As he travels Rankin notes every conceivable literary connection, including sentimentally appealing if purely coincidental ones: Stevenson canoed along the Sambre-Oise canal for An Inland Voyage and on the same canal Wilfred Owen was killed in combat a week before the end of the Great War. Rankin is good at literary piety. In a devotional mood, he writes about putting flowers on Owen's grave or spending a quiet few hours by Stevenson's on Mount Vaea, and yet he keeps his eyes open to the ironies of his quest. Moreover he records all the detritus modern civilization has scattered over Stevenson's once romantic places—snuff tins and crisp-packets in a Scottish graveyard ("Skinheads' communion "), Japanese wedding-chapels in Hawaii, rock music blaring from buses in Samoa. For all of this, like T. S. Eliot gloomily detecting cardboard boxes and cigarette ends spread over the landscape of European civilization, Rankin feels a fastidious disgust. Unlike Eliot, Rankin has to cope with the particular form of shabbiness associated with tourism. Tourist groups, he notes with effective understatement, are now regularly taken over the route described in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Stevenson has become a commodity. Golfers on the Monterey peninsula play over courses named for locales in Treasure Island. The book has weaknesses. Rankin occasionally indulges in a journalistic-silly generality or obtrudes his political views into the narrative. Predictably, he disapproves of Waikiki high-rises and French nuclear testing. And the book has limits. Readers of Dead Man's Chest will hardly be brought by it to an understanding of the Stevenson who matters most, the professional writer...