Robert Louis Stevenson, by Frank McLynn:
Keen, Suzanne
STEVENSON TRANSMOGRIFIED ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON A Biography Frank McLynn Random House, $30, 567 pp. Suzanne Keen Robert Louis Stevenson had a brief but fascinat-ing life (1850-94). The son of...
...McLynn's analysis operates by means of crudely applied commonplaces: an early love affair "catches fire" despite the woman's attempt to "lower the temperature...
...So he dashed off a letter to Henley...
...Overblown metaphor leads to unintended bathos, and in worse cases McLynn does not sustain his metaphors...
...Twice would be noticeable...
...A tone of ardent defense permeates this biography, but the story McLynn tells does not revolve around the five points he raises in the introduction...
...Sickly from childhood, he spent most of his adult life trying to find a place to live where he would feel well...
...blames her for the extended family who attach themselves to the Stevenson gravy-train...
...and rebukes her for keeping people with colds away from her susceptible husband...
...Despite this disability, Stevenson was remarkably prolific...
...but at this rate the reader only has to be alerted to some change, alteration, turn-about, or shift in the story to know, with grim certainty, that "transmogrification" cannot be far behind...
...Jekyll and Hyde set the pattern for countless sightings of "divisions within" Stevenson...
...McLynn's mystifying hostility toward Fanny becomes most repellent when she succumbs temporarily to mental illness-he blames her not only for her madness, but for inconveniencing his hero...
...Fanny indeed seems to have been a difficult person, but McLynn's treatment of her does not mesh with Stevenson's evident affection for his wife...
...doubts her clairvoyance (though Pacific islanders who have prophetic dreams are treated respectfully...
...McLynn begins with a lucid summary of the reasons Stevenson's reputation has suffered in the century since his death: early hagiographies brought on a backlash of debunking criticism...
...and worst of all, that he was married to a loony American hypochondriac who, contrary to legend, did not nurse him when he was sick, but fell ill herself out of competitive, selfish spite...
...Frank McLynn's biography does make me want to read more Stevenson, and perhaps Stevenson's letters, in order to rescue this fine author from the sticky web of cliche and partisan de-fensiveness with which McLynn coats him...
...In 1888 Stevenson took advantage of this freedom to remove his extended family to the Pacific, where he settled (in Samoa) enjoying somewhat better health until he died of a brain hemorrhage...
...Stevenson deserves better than this...
...a family fight is like a storm...
...When we learn that Stevenson, rebuffed by his first love Fanny Sitwell, "simply converted her from a potential mistress into a mother figure," we await with bated breath "the transmogrification of Fanny from object of desire to sacred mother object...
...According to McLynn, she can do nothing right: he mocks her literary aspirations...
...better than this...
...The costume changes required of the reader hoping to make this sequence coherent-from boxing ring to OK Corral to writing desk-suggest the effort it takes to read McLynn's prose...
...The real arguments of this biography concern Stevenson's personal life...
...Jekyll into Mr...
...In an account of the feud with Henley over Fanny's plagiarism of a story, McLynn writes: "RLS concluded that Henley was refusing to reply to him and that the gloves were off for a bare-knuckle fight...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...Ascertaining the full facts in a case was never Stevenson's strong suit: he liked to shoot from the hip and work through the fine detail later...
...others have imagined that the adventure story Stevenson excelled at writing could not be serious fiction...
...readers have contributed by thinking of Stevenson as an author of stories for boys...
...thrice inadvisable...
...Between 1881 and 1886 he published Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Dr...
...Perhaps McLynn means to allude to the transformation of Dr...
...The son of an eminent light-house engineer, Stevenson was an only child who remained financially dependent upon his father throughout his life...
...One of the best effects reading a biography of a writer can have is to remind us of books we read a long time ago and loved, and to inspire us to find those works that we've never gotten around to reading, such as The Weir of Hermiston, "The Beach of Falesa," The Wrong Box, The Wrecker, and The Ebb-Tide (the last three written in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne...
...McLynn's literary criticism is at best workmanlike, and he perhaps unwittingly contributes to the elevation of the life over the works by investing so much in the description of the Stevensons' sea voyages (nearly half the book-and indeed the better part of the book-focuses on the Pacific wanderings and the brief years in Samoa...
...Not surprisingly, Stevenson suffered from nightmares...
...He had a bronchial condition like tuberculosis which made him choke and hemorrhage, and turned ordinary colds and exhaustion into life-threatening illnesses...
...some critics have objected to Stevenson's stylish prose, as if this demonstrated the emptiness of his fiction...
...His Calvinist nurse "Cummy" terrorized him with tales of hellfire and damnation and dinned into his head the Bible, Scots metrical psalms, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs...
...We read that Stevenson "stonewalled [Fanny Sitwell] with bromides" and "soothed ruffled feathers...
...This is not an easy book to read, despite the unusual life it narrates...
...that his strength and resources were sapped by his extended family, the Osbournes (Stevenson was childless...
...and finally, Stevenson's own adventurous life has overshadowed his works...
...He often misuses words in a puffed-up way ("differential" for "different") and his repetition of one word in particular creates a little drama of its own...
...sneers at her illnesses...
...Despite McLynn's animosity toward her, Stevenson's wife, Fanny Osbourne, is by far the most interesting secondary figure in this biography...
...His copy editor has not done him any favors...
...Hyde, works which made him famous and, along with the financial backing of his father, made it possible for him to live an independent life as a writer...
...Hyde, or perhaps he simply loves the word, but he uses forms of the verb "to transmogrify" eleven times in this book...
...Clearly, McLynn loves Stevenson's fiction, but his tepid Freudianism illuminates neither the life nor the work...
...McLynn argues that Stevenson engaged in an oedi-pal struggle with his father, Thomas Stevenson...
...that his literary reputation suffered through his collaboration with his stepson...
Vol. 122 • May 1995 • No. 9
