A Life Lived to the Full

...on the island of Ape-mama, in the Gilberts, Stevenson became a fast friend of Tembinok, an obese king with a profile, the writer said, like Dante's and a guard of armed women...

...Following a honeymoon in a pine shack among rattlesnakes and under a hot sun, the couple returned to Great Britain and settled rather uneasily...

...Certainly the Stevensons were satisfied...

...In accordance with his wishes, an emergency task force hacked a path through the jungle to the top of Mt...

...Henley, "do you go and bury yourself in that blood country of dollars and spew...

...For he had, as Nigel Nicolson points out in his Introduction, a highly developed sense of atmosphere and surrounding, plus a keen understanding of the influences these have upon people...

...True enough, Stevenson's life scarcely lends itself to dullness in the telling, nor did congenital ill-health ever result in his tiring of it—as he so often tired of his literary projects in their latter stages...

...Come," Stevenson would remark, "let us make a tale, a story of many lands and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilization...

...His father, Thomas, was in the family business of designing and building lighthouses...

...Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh...

...Yet Edmund Gosse wrote to Stevenson that "Since Byron was in Greece, nothing has appealed to the literary man so much as that you should be living in the South Seas...

...Nineteen Europeans and sixty Samoan friends attended the funeral cortege as it slithered and scrambled up the steep aclivity to the mountain peak...

...She fascinated Henry James, who said he had never known an American woman like her...

...Pope Hennessy went about this book the right way...

...To please his father, who thought that a literary man should have a career to fall back on, he passed the bar exam...

...Arriving in London in his 20s, Stevenson joined the Savile Club...

...Stevenson, after many months and an almost killing trip across North America, joined her in San Francisco, where he nearly died of a lung hemorrhage...

...All in all quite a life—as much of a legacy, almost, as the oeuvre it produced...

...Eventually her husband turned up alive, but the reunion was not successful and Fanny battled her way across the continent to New York with her daughter and two sons, then caught a boat to Paris...

...eaglets of glory, the swordsmen of the pen" somebody called its members—and began to contribute essays and reviews to a number of publications, including Sir Leslie Stephen's Cornhill magazine...

...in Samoa, he could "he in bed and think of the universe with a great deal of equanimity...

...Down in Samoa, it is said that Stevenson's ghost peers into the windows of the house at Vailima...

...Fanny was as strongly-colored a personality as Louis...

...As a child (Dr...

...She and Stevenson understood they were in love, and Fanny, being still a married lady, returned to California to file for divorce...

...Happily, too, Pope Hennessy avoided the temptation to write a critical biography: What he has to say about the work, he says mainly in relation to the personality...

...The Stevenson residence on Vail-ima became the island's Big House: Furniture from Edinburgh was shipped there, and Stevenson presided as chieftain over a large "family" that included a variety of people, from his mother to his in-laws to his native retainers and domestics...

...Though a born writer and a born Romantic, he insisted that "I do not go in for literature, I address myself to sensible people rather than to the sensitive...

...In 1887 young Sam McClure, eager to syndicate Stevenson's travel letters, persuaded them to charter a yacht for the South Seas...

...In time Samoa's lassitude and Stevenson's increasing involvement in the factional politics of the area seem to have affected his "engine.' One afternoon in December 1894 he was preparing a mayonnaise when he put his hands to his head and cried "What's that...

...I cannot take myself seriously, as an artist the limitations are so obvious...

...After Osbourne disappeared, supposedly butchered by Indians, she took her children to San Francisco...

...Born in Indiana, she had married a Civil War veteran and gone with him to Virginia City, Nevada, so he could work the Com-stock Lode...

...It was perhaps this conviction that led him near the close of his life to opine: "I am read by journalists, by my fellow-novelists, and by boys...

...but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity...

...were no more pleased that a paragon of the Empire's genius should go to roost in Samoa...

...Stevenson believed that "No man is of any use until he has dared everything...

...He thought the novel "not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude...

...For a while he was himself an editor of London magazine, and to fill up space in it he began writing fiction...

...A teenaged Louis Stevenson, however, paraded about Edinburgh in a rumpled velvet jacket whose collar supported the ends of his long hair, drank in bars with prostitutes, declined to engineer lighthouses, and declared himself both an agnostic and a writer...

...He wished to replace the phrase "art of fiction" with "art of narrative...

...A good biographer, like a good novelist, knows when to stick to the narrative form...

...To have attempted to expound Stevenson's art would have swamped the ship...

...It was there that he met Fanny Osbourne, a young woman from the States studying art who had fled an uncomfortable marriage...

...Vaea, where a grave was dug...

...But Pope Hennessy gives that life meaningful dimension...

...Thomas Stevenson (who had joined them), gave up wearing shoes and stockings...

...In the Marquesas, Mrs...

...Here are no trains, only men pacing barefoot...

...The region appealed to them, and they never cared to come back...

...Johnson would have delighted to note) he watched the trains fleeing south to Civilization...

...he fell to his knees and died three hours later...

...he and his wife were grim old Calvin-ists, and she sewed a tiny sack to the back of one of their son's toy soldiers, exacting a promise that the figure would be made to represent Christian on his Pilgrim's Progress...

...Yet, Pope Hennessy observes, "Louis Stevenson was less influenced by the prospect of a juvenile audience than by his own innate taste for adventure," which he indulged until his death...

...Many of the English literati who had been appalled by Stevenson's sojourn in America?Why the devil," wrote W.E...

...Stevenson also spent much time abroad, mainly in France and frequently at the artist colony of Gretz-sur-Loing (where well-to-do young esthetes wore great numbers of rings that they might enjoy the pleasure of pawning them...

...Contributor, "National Review" Despite a slight drag imposed upon it by a somewhat portentous style, the late James Pope Hennes-sy's posthumously published biography of Robert Louis Stevenson moves like the wind...