Word: stevensons
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WHETHER ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was more than a writer of wonderful stories for 12-year-old boys is a question settled beyond doubt by this readable and authoritative biography: he was also, at the very least, the jaunty and flamboyant hero of an extraordinary life story. Frank McLynn's Robert Louis Stevenson (Random House; 567 pages; $30) describes a hardworking idler, a Scottish Calvinist who remade himself as a romantic and (four days out of any seven) a convincing bohemian, a smothered son who remained boyish all his short life, and an invalid who lived a life of arduous travel...
...with all such stories, everything can be explained about Stevenson except genius. He was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the precocious, cosseted only child of wealthy parents. R.L.S. got the attention that would have served a dozen siblings, and the enormous coziness and safety of an indulged small boy in an upper-middle-class Victorian household was what he evoked years later in the poems of A Child's Garden of Verses. His father Thomas was a mighty builder of lighthouses and breakwaters, and the future author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped saw more of the sea than most Scottish...
...pattern in Stevenson's life was the presence of a powerful controlling figure -his childhood nurse, his father-despite whose efforts he did more or less what he pleased. R.L.S. disguised the extent of his freethinking from his father, a decent and literate man of burgherlike propriety who increased or shut down financial support according to his opinion of his son's escapades and his view of the moral tone of his literary production. Subsidies were necessary; the young writer produced an astonishing flow of work, especially for a chronic consumptive, but the serialization rights to Treasure Island, for instance...
...time Thomas Stevenson died, in 1887, leaving his son financially independent, R.L.S. had acquired another intrusive minder, his wife Fanny Osbourne. Biographer McLynn clearly despises Fanny and her extensive family-which, at the time R.L.S. met her, included Belle, a spoiled 18-year-old daughter; Lloyd, a rotten 11-year-old son; and a useless, not-quite-divorced husband. Not all biographers have seen things this way, as McLynn admits, but he is persuasive. Fanny was 40 when they met, 10 years older than R.L.S., an artistic poseur given to spiritualism and hypochondria who tried to cut Stevenson off from...
...last dozen years of Stevenson's life saw him wandering with amazing optimism, usually accompanied by his mother, Fanny and her children, and a long-suffering maid whom Fanny abused. The quest was for a climate his bleeding lungs and Fanny's vapors could tolerate. He tried Davos in Switzerland, Saranac Lake in New York State, a deserted mining camp above California's Napa Valley, and finally Hawaii and the South Pacific. His pattern was to write (and drink, converse, hike and sail) to exhaustion and illness; Fanny's was marital chess playing, countering his real collapses with her vividly...