Slinger of ink

IN 1885 Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed a “fine boguey tale” that in a matter of weeks had been turned into one of the most famous stories ever published—indeed, so famous, Claire Harman says, that it hardly needs to be read at all. At its heart is not just a shocking story of evil and transformation, but also a crystallisation of man's greatest dilemma, his relationship with himself. “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” exposes, as Dr Jekyll himself says, “the thorough and primitive duality of man”. The strength of Ms Harman's new biography is how it engagingly explores in fresh detail how the conscious warred with the unconscious in Stevenson himself.

Born into a long line of obsessive and successful engineers, Stevenson quickly revolted against such a calling and was determined to be a “slinger of ink”. He spent the first half of his life as a near-invalid, ill and frail and certain he was doomed to an early death, just like Shelley. And, like Shelley, he was “toiling to leave a memory behind”. In the second half of his life—as close friends submitted to one fatal illness after another—Stevenson conceived an unlikely lust for life while touring the South Pacific, submitting to the roughest and most dangerous of conditions, but this time with barely a murmur.

Ms Harman's is the first biography of Stevenson since an eight-volume edition of his collected letters was published by Yale University Press in 1994-96. She uses the wealth of new evidence to examine her subject's extraordinary range of interests, a mercurial side that sometimes verged on unpleasantness, and his ever urgent desire to earn money.

For years, Stevenson allowed himself to be pampered, fussed over and financed by overbearing parents and by “Cummy”, his sainted nanny—while taking every opportunity to escape their influence. He sat in dark rooms with writer's block, depressed and self-pitying. Yet at the Savile Club he was recognised by Henry James and others as a wit, a wag and a bohemian. He took countless trips to spas in search of a cure for his undiagnosed and occasionally hypochondriacal illness. Yet he told J.M. Barrie that he smoked cigarettes “without intermission except when coughing or kissing”. Even after his first alarming experience of spitting blood, he still saw himself as a professional consumptive in search of a cure, blind to his own self-abuse.

When ill himself (tuberculosis was never formally diagnosed), Stevenson showed great compassion to other sufferers, as his friendship with William Henley, a long-hospitalised poet, testifies. Ms Harman has found an unpublished poem by Henley which neatly encapsulates his friend's personality:

An Ariel quick through all his veinsWith sex and temperament and style;All eloquence and balls and brains;Heroic and also infantile.

Stevenson was a fanatical launcher of projects which he rarely finished. In his essays, he laboured over style and ideas, inventing many aphorisms that were quickly adopted by books of quotations (“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”). Yet his most popular, and profitable, works were impulsively tossed off: “Treasure Island” began as a map he painted for his stepson one rainy day, followed within days by chapters serialised in a children's paper, Young Folk. It then lay in a drawer for two years before anyone thought it worth putting out as a book.

For Cummy—who had the most baneful influence on him as a boy, condemning theatre as the mouth of hell, prescribing caffeine for insomnia and instilling a very literal fear of damnation—Stevenson wrote the bucolic “A Child's Garden of Verses”. This is one of his most enduring works, written in a dark, shuttered room when his health was at its worst.

Stevenson's contradictions come to the fore in his relationships with women. Mothered and smothered when young, he later became obsessed with women who seemed to want most to control him. His early manhood was dominated by a largely unrequited love for the married Frances Sitwell, but he eventually transferred his obsession to an American, Fanny Osbourne, another married woman, whom he met in France during one of his bohemian escapades.

In praise of wives

He travelled to and across America to persuade Fanny to leave her husband; when she relented at last, Stevenson found himself married to someone who matched him for hysteria and hypersensitivity. Fanny became his harshest critic, but also his inspiration and a trusted editor. Literary friends of Stevenson's saw her as a gold-digging bore. Yet Stevenson never had a sharp word in public to say against his wife and described himself as “uxorious Billy”. Their relationship only ever showed real signs of strain when his own condition seemed to stabilise and his future look brighter.

As a biographer, Ms Harman feels that subjects become “less knowable the more data accrues around them”, but that through this mess of information there is a glimpse of “real life poking through”. And so it is, for better or worse, that she rarely takes a firm position about her subject. Her complex portrait paints a man whom she finds both admirable and infuriating. Her prose has such narrative force that Stevenson's death from cerebral haemorrhage leaves a genuine sense of shock and loss. Ms Harman's kaleidoscopic light suits a man whose personality seemed in a state of constant flux.