Robert Louis Stevenson and THE BEACH OF FALESÁ: A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text by Barry Menikoff (review)

Book Reviews293 But it does not" (131). This is at least a questionable, and to my mind a highly doubtful conclusion. One might cite, for instance, Henry James' well known review: speaking of "the balanced contrast between the two histories of Dorothea and Lydgate" he says, "the mind passes from one to the other with that supreme sense of the vastness and variety of human life, under aspects apparently similar, which it belongs only to the greatest novels to produce" {The House ofFiction, ed. Leon Edel [London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957], 264). The style is flawed by cute diction (Ladislaw's "Peter Pan qualities" [117]) or clichés (an episode "cannot hold a candle" to another scene [66] and "just before Mr. Brooke makes an ass of himself addressing the electors" [67]) and once by a silly and unnecessarily judgmental pun (a reference to "the organic whole of establishment criticism or the black hole of deconstructive criticism" [125]). And the author needed to be more careful about his facts and his proofreading. He refers to Featherstone's having married Mr. Vincy's sister (45) rather than Mrs. Vincy 's, and to Mawnsey the grocer rather than Mawmsey. There are numerous other minor proofreading errors and one major one, the omission of at least a whole line on page 142. The probably rare person-in-the-street who wants to follow up a reading of Middlemarch with a look at the background and can get to a bookshop but not a university librarv might find this book serviceable. For others, I'm not convinced. CAROL A. MARTIN Boise State University BARRY MENIKOFF. Robert Louis Stevenson and THE BEACH OF FALESÁ: A Study in Victorian Publishing with the Original Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. 199 p. Here is a book that deserves the attention of scholars and other readers and fans interested in Robert Louis Stevenson's tangle with adventure and respectability. Barry Menikoff introduces his study by asserting that it is time for adults to reread Stevenson seriously, "as a man who by talent and training was probably the best prepared of his generation to exploit the art of fiction and explore the meaning of his times" (vii). Menikoff thoroughly supports his claim in this interesting and informative book, and he provides as the excellent example of his meaning The Beach of Falesá. Although Stevenson's novels about Scotland were "eulogized," the novels about the New World, with its Pacific shipwrecks, derelict whites, and ungrammatical natives, were taken with "suspicion and distaste" (4), reactions to Stevenson's strong attack upon the nineteenth-century English status quo. In Falesá, Stevenson draws upon the beauty and majesty of the tropics as he writes about "miscegenation , colonialism, the exploitation of brown people, and, indeed, the very idea of the white man's presence in the Pacific" (5). As the critic observes, Falesá was a "startling piece of realism" (96). Stevenson wrote in a letter that Falesá was "nearer what I mean than anything I have ever done — nearer what I mean by fiction . . . ". And, concludes the critic, this novel that ultimately "ran counter to some of the most deeply held political, sexual, and religious convictions of those responsible for its publication" (4) was Stevenson's "most mutilated and corrupted" (5) work. 294Rocky Mountain Review Menikoffbuilds a strong case. The mutilation.ofthe text occurred because, through ignorance or carelessness in matters such as financial fears, domestic crises, artistic problems, editing and publishing practices, Stevenson relinquished control over his art. In the hands, then, of "people for whom books are a business and printing a technology," Stevenson's carefully crafted manuscript was simply "raw material" (95) to be rendered more marketable by certain changes, "stylistic abuse by printers and proofreaders" and "literary abuse by publishers, editors, and friends" (5). Editors and publishers sought to impose an order on Stevenson's work because "Stevenson's realism offended the notions of correctness" (60), so that "anything that even hinted at controversy was editorially deplored and usually expunged" (95). Menikoff writes that "success in publishing had little to do with art, and art was never an issue when it was a matter of the text's acceptability" (94...