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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey, folks, it's Jack with some exciting news. Are you someone who loves books and loves to travel? We have teamed up with a travel agency to present to you the opportunity to travel through the literary landscape with me, Jack Wilson, and Emma, the show's producer, and your fellow podcast listeners, meeting some of your favorite History of Literature podcast guests along the way. That's right, we're going to England. Eight days of travel in literary London, Oxford and Bath, where we'll follow in the footsteps of Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen and more. This is the last few weeks when you can sign up, so go to John Shores Travel, that's John S H O R S with no e, or to historyofliterature.com and find the itinerary that way. We would love to have you join us for this very special event in May, but you must sign up now. We have to close the signups on March 1st. I hope to see you soon. We heard you. Nine years of bring Back the Snack Wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Hello. He was a man of immense vitality. Mark Twain said his eyes burned with smoldering rich fire, and from his home in Scotland, he developed a taste for adventure. I loved his ship. Robert Louis Stevenson once said, as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak. He also loved telling stories and the things in the world and reading. We talked to critically acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosh about his new book about Robert Louis Stevenson today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome, everyone. I'm so glad you're here today. I'm Jack Wilson, the host. We're going to get straight into our interview in just a moment. We're trying something new. We'll have our interview, part one, and then an interlude with some thoughts about Robert Louis Stevenson that I put together. Then our interview, part two. What do you need to know before we begin? Well, Borges called Stevenson's stories one of the forms of happiness. His works have been loved by millions, especially A Child's Garden of Verses and the Big Three, Kidnapped Treasure island and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson was born in 1850 and died at the early age of 44. And somehow in those 44 years, he not only wrote the four classics I've already named, but many other novels. And stories. And he traveled around the world, living in the South Pacific for a time. And he got married to a free spirited American named Fanny. And he had many other fascinating adventures, all while being in ill health. How did he do it? Well, there was that inner fire which Twain glimpsed in those eyes during a brief meeting. Let's find out more about who Robert Louis Stevenson was and what made him tick. Okay. Joining me now is Leo Damrosch, who is a professor of literature emeritus at Harvard University. His many books include works on Jean Jacques Rousseau, Casanova, Dr. Johnson and his circle, a favorite of mine, and Jonathan Swift. He's here today to discuss his book, the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Leo Demrosch, welcome to the history of literature.
- [03:55]
Leo Damrosch
Thank you for inviting me.
- [03:57]
Jack Wilson
So did you get started with Robert Louis Stevenson as a boy or did you discover him later in life?
- [04:03]
Leo Damrosch
Both. I think many of us probably read Treasure island, at least in my generation. We did when we were young, possibly kidnapped. Another book that's I think, wrongly typed as a boy's book. It's actually a very adult book, but probably didn't get beyond that. Some people may have read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, though more people probably have seen terrible movie versions than the original. And beyond that, most of us probably don't know much. And I didn't either. Stevenson wasn't writing in the period I study academically. I was actually. My wife read a later novel of his called Catriona and was telling me how good it was and I read it and agreed. And she said, why don't you write a biography of Stevenson? And I looked and there are no fewer than 12 biographies, and some of them are good, maybe even most. But I think the idea of a definitive biography is long gone. Each person brings something fresh, some new perspective. And I quote many of the earlier ones with pleasure in my book. And I feel like it's a conversation that I've been having with other people that love Stevenson. And the more I got into it, the more hooked I was.
- [05:11]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, there are a lot of biographies, but yet, and I got the sense from your biography too, that in some ways the popular conception of Stevenson doesn't quite match up with his actual life and his actual writing. And I was wondering if you had the sense that you were correcting some myths and legends or filling in some gaps that people have when it comes to Stevenson. Do you have a view on the popular conception of Stevenson and what this might miss about him and his works?
- [05:44]
Leo Damrosch
Well, I think many biographers and many of Them are British. And perhaps Stevenson was more widely read for longer in England. He died in 1894, a long time ago. I think a lot of biographers assume that we already know the books, so they don't try to explain to us what they're like. And I don't mean literary criticism. I just mean some sense of what makes them distinctive. And Stevenson was a very creative, inventive writer, so he was always trying something new. There's no single thing you can say about his work. So that's one thing. I tried to briefly help readers to understand what's worth knowing about his writing, because he was a great writer. Another thing was that basically the story of his life, although it has been told over and over, needed to be filled with the richness of his correspondence, which is just amazing. He's one of the great letter writers, and it fills eight huge volumes in an edition published in 1995 by Yale University Press. And even though he died at 44, that's a lot of letters. And that edition was only available to the two most recent biographers before. Before me. So letters have been scattered all over the world, and many of them never published. So I have all this rich. Not just letters in his own voice, but correspondence with his friends, many of whom were very good writers, too. And then a lot of reminiscences were left by people who knew him in his own lifetime, and biographers haven't drawn on those. So they're just a rich sense of a personality, a compelling human being, and also, by the way, a very compelling marriage, which many biographers have kind of slighted. So I felt there was a lot to tell in that story.
- [07:27]
Jack Wilson
Let's talk about those reminiscences, because it does seem like there's more to it than just people saying, oh, I met a famous person the other day. But there was something about Stevenson that really popped for them, so to speak. Something about him really fascinated people or impressed people. What was it that they were seeing when they met Rich Robert Louis Stevenson?
- [07:52]
Leo Damrosch
Oh, I don't know that they would have all agreed what it was, but it was a kind of charisma. He had an extraordinary vitality in spite of a very serious health condition that dogged him for most of his life. Probably not tuberculosis that was properly identified not long before his death, but it was some kind of hereditary lung condition that made him cough up pints of blood and have to be bedridden for months, during which he did a good deal of his writing. And yet he had a fantastic love of life. And when he finally got much better and was able to cruise all over the Pacific, he felt like he was really living at last. I could give one sense of his personality that's actually a visual sense. John Singer's Sargent, the great American painter, met him, wanted to paint his portrait, painted a conventional portrait, sitting in a chair. Stevenson hated it. Asked if he could come back and painted a portrait. It's in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In which Stevenson, with his gaunt, frail, but very tall figure, is striding up and down in his living room, talking, leaning forward. And apparently it was a very characteristic pose. He was never at rest. And photographs from that time, you had to sit still. The exposures were very long. And that painting probably captures more than anyone ever else did, what Stevenson was like. Just this life force that you find yourself with.
- [09:15]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And it does seem like people noted the incongruity of it, that he was scrawny and sickly and kind of a bag of bones for a lot of his life. But the way that his energy would come pouring out of him and his eyes, that he seems like he was one of those people who really lights up a room with his eyes.
- [09:37]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah. As to the first point, G.K. chesterton, the turn of the century critic, said, most people who are sick all the time, you know, are limited by that and obsessed with that. And it's just amazing that Stevenson was just so full of joyfulness. And everybody caught that from him. The eyes, you're right to mention those. Everybody who met him noticed it. His eyes were unusually far apart. That sort of caught you when you looked at him. But also he had a kind of penetrating gaze. He was just looking at you with a kind of directness. Mark Twain met him briefly. They sat on a bench in Washington Square in New York and chatted for an afternoon. And Twain said, the thing you carried away was those hypnotic eyes. Right.
- [10:23]
Jack Wilson
That must have been quite a meeting. How much do we know about it? Did they leave detailed reminiscences of that?
- [10:29]
Leo Damrosch
It's very disappointing. Before they met, when they were setting up the meeting, Stevenson wrote to Twain. I've read Huckleberry Finn three times and I'm looking forward to reading it a fourth time. So he was certainly a fan.
- [10:42]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [10:42]
Leo Damrosch
And you would think they would have talked, and maybe they did, about what it was like to have a boy narrator as Huck Finn and Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. Both are, but from a very adult perspective, which is what makes those masterpieces. But they didn't record what they did. Twain Left a couple of paragraphs. And Stevenson didn't write anything down about it.
- [11:04]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. So you note that Stevenson is a writer's writer, and sometimes we use that phrase to mean a writer who is kind of ignored or unappreciated by the public, but admired by fellow writers. But in Stevenson's case, he was also popular with the public, which raised a few questions for me. I guess the first question is, what did the public like about Stevenson's works? I mean, we. I can kind of guess that plot and character and so on would be appealing to them. But was there anything in particular that you found that the public were especially full of praise for Stevenson for?
- [11:44]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah, I think he lived in the Victorian period. He was born in 1850 and died before Queen Victoria did. And I think that Victorian literature, much of which is very great and I admire it deeply, however, is very filled with detail and realistic description and a lot of everyday life trying to find the depths in the ordinary experience that everybody has. And goodness knows that's. That's worth doing. But people were starving for adventure, for danger, for being on a knife edge. What's going to happen next? I called my biography Storyteller. When Stevenson spent his last four years in Samoa, where he bought a mountainside for a plantation, his Samoan friends called him Tusitala. In their language, that means storyteller. And that's what he was, a great narrative writer. And I think he was a writer's writer, not just because of that, but because of the clarity and skill with which he cut out everything unnecessary and made the story just move irresistibly forward. And the Bloomsbury Group hated him. He was not Virginia Woolf or E.M. forster's kind of writer, but very great modernists. Nabokov and Borges and Proust all said, this person is doing what we're trying to do and doing it well.
- [13:10]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So they admired the way he was able to keep his stories moving and keep the reader's attention and kind of have a sort of effortless style that he made it look a lot easier than it was.
- [13:23]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah. In fact, his best work went through endless revisions. And he once said, oh, God, if I could just learn the art to omit. Because, you know, they're all the things you wrote down and you like them because you wrote them and the reader doesn't need them. Simplify, simplify. And he also said, death to the optic nerve. He didn't want any adjectives. He didn't want to always be describing what things look like. He wanted to make you Feel. Feel it as if it was happening to you in the actual moment that you're reading.
- [13:53]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. It seems like the other piece of this is that he's been kind of unfairly tagged as a children's author. Yeah.
- [14:03]
Leo Damrosch
It's even true. Poems are certainly meant for children. They're called A Child's Garden of Verses. And people my age may have had them read to us when we were little, which, by the way, he wrote while he was helpless in bed, told not to move a single limb and scribbling on a scratch pad, remembering childhood when he was in his 30s. But Henry James, who became a close friend, which is fascinating because they're totally different writers, they saw each other as fellow craftsmen. Henry James said, these are the poems a child could have written if a child could see childhood from the outside. And so it's like entering into the experience of childhood from a very adult perspective. And I think that's true of Treasure island, although its narrator is a boy. And it's true of Kidnapped, whose narrator is, I suppose, a teenager. And actually, Italo Calvino, a great modernist, said the reason Stevenson wanted his narrators to be boys is that's a way to not make it look like a parody in a period that thinks adventure is stupid and passe. And you make it real when it's happening to somebody for whom everything is exciting and fresh and dangerous.
- [15:12]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. It is really true that you can almost resurrect his reputation just by the people who admired him with Proust and Nabokov and Calvino. These are some of the most kind of dynamic modernist and postmodernist writers that we have. If he's good enough for them, it tells us something that he's more than just a routine Victorian or somebody to just dismiss as a popular writer or a children's writer. Borges was another one who admired him. What did Borges like about Stevenson?
- [15:49]
Leo Damrosch
Well, I think Borges, in addition to his strange sort of fables, also wrote stories about knife fights in Argentina. And there was a real kind of affinity with the imaginative world of Stevenson.
- [16:03]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Okay, so I've got an example here of his style, and it's a description of Long John Silver, where he says, his eye, a mere pinpoint in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. And an early reviewer commented, an ordinary writer would have said, a bead of glass. How hard was Stevenson working at his style? What was he trying to accomplish with his style, and how much of it came naturally to him?
- [16:36]
Leo Damrosch
I think he was a lifelong passionate reader he cut class all the time at the University of Edinburgh. He didn't really care about academic work, but he was drawn to great stylists, by which I don't mean showing off kind of writing style, but a style that just carries you forward because you just need to turn the page and find out what comes next. And I think his books have lived when a lot of the ones that. That were thought to be masterpieces in his lifetime have been long forgotten. I've always thought in my own days, when I was a young man. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was much condescended to or dismissed by literary scholars and indeed by a lot of novelists. Well, it turns out to be a masterpiece. And many of the Pulitzer Prize winners of its time are long forgotten.
- [17:24]
Jack Wilson
Right, okay. So what do you think motivated him to write? Was it as simple as money or fame, or did he view himself as an artist, or did he just love telling stories, or where did this come from?
- [17:38]
Leo Damrosch
He did love telling stories. That was somehow innate. When he was a little boy, he would make up stories. At one time, his nanny, whom he was devoted to, made him go into a room by himself for 15 minutes, you know, to cool down because of something he'd done that annoyed her. And after 15 minutes, she said, you can come out now. And he said, no, go away. I'm telling myself a story. I mean, that was innate in him. And it wasn't so much fame or money. It was years before he made much money. His family were generous, they were well to do, and they bailed him out whenever he needed it. But it was a vocation, you know, a calling. He just needed to tell stories. It was who he was. That's why I gave the biography the title Storyteller.
- [18:23]
Jack Wilson
Was he patterning himself after any particular writers, or did he view it as he had to tell these stories in his own way that he was going to break new ground?
- [18:33]
Leo Damrosch
It was in his own way. And sometimes he was kind of experimental. But he admired a lot of writers, particularly French ones. He was perfectly fluent in French. He had lived in France off and on. He loved Dumas, but he didn't have models. It was more the story would find its own voice. And some of them are in Scottish dialect. He was born in Edinburgh, but he was in love with the Highlands. And some of them are sort of fables of the supernatural that might have been believable in the Scotland before his time. Totally different kind of writing. You wouldn't guess it's by Stevenson. If you picked up one of those stories, right.
- [19:11]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Leo DeMarache.
- [19:30]
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- [20:09]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're gonna pause our conversation here to celebrate something in particular about Robert Louis Stevenson, which is the argument that he made or arguments that he made for the importance of reality and imagination for keeping both of those things alive. His reality was that he was in poor health, but his mind stayed vital. His mind stayed open and alive. His taste for adventure was always there. He loved imagining things. And he loved the world of imagination, of invention, of creativity, not just for its own sake, but for the way it transformed reality. This is from a child's garden of verses. In particular, it's from a poem called to a reader as from the house your mother sees you playing round the garden trees. So you may see, if you will look through the windows of this book, another child far, far away. And in another garden play be open. Who's grounded in that poem? The mother. The child is out playing, no doubt in a world of imagination. In Stevensonian terms, the child is the one pulling out a sword and attacking pirates on the deck of a ship right there in the garden. But there's more. The child can come inside when it's time to do so and look into the book. And suddenly the child is the fixed point, the replacement for the mother, the one grounded in reality. Except through the book, the windows of the book, the child can see a different child in a different garden playing. Even if it's raining out, even if you're in bed sick, you have this open to you. You can gaze on that child playing. Now, when the mother does look out the window, the mother probably thinks, oh, does he have his jacket on? It's getting cold. Or is he going to hurt himself climbing that tree? Or maybe the mother has some room in her mind to think he's playing pirate again. When he comes inside, I'm going to talk to him in my pirate voice and tell him he needs to walk the plank or. I remember when I was a little girl playing like that out there. It's important for Stevenson to keep all that alive in our minds. And maybe importance, not the right word. He urges us to do it because it makes life better. Here's a quote from Stevenson's essay the Lantern Bearer. There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life. The fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates. For he had been absent 50 years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments with no more apparatus than an evil smelling lantern. I have evoked him on the naked lynx. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us that fills us with such wonder. When we turn to the pages of the Realist, there, to be sure, we find a picture of life insofar as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears. That which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless, whether we forget. But of the note of that time, devouring nightingale, we hear no news. That's the goal. People seek the nightingale, listen to the nightingale, be transported. And when you do regard the things of the universe, the practical things, the scientific, intangible, the rooted in reality things notice their wondrousness. Here's a poem or another excerpt from a poem from a child's Garden of Verses. This is from the poem My Shadow. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me. And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me, from the heels up to the head, and I see him jump before me when I jump into my bed. The funniest things about him is the way he likes to grow not at all like proper children, which is always very slow, for he sometimes shoots up taller like an India rubber ball, and he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all. Okay, I used to roll my eyes at Poems like that. Okay, fine. But where's the meaning? Remember thinking that even when I was a kid, this is all cutesy and the kind of thing that grownups think kids like. And I think, where's the action? Where's the drama? Where's the plot? I want a con man, or a schemer or a challenge. A mountain climber, or, yes, a pirate. A kidnapping. A man drinking a potion and turning into a monster. But you know what I like? My shadow. It's a pause in life. It's noticing just how amazing shadows are. What else can get so long, so fast and so short? And it's all because of something incredible and something ordinary. The incredible ordinary, like the sun or the moon or the lights of a car passing by. And guess what? Guess what, people. Tomorrow, I, Jack Wilson, am not going to climb a mountain. I'm not going to swashbuckle my way across the Caribbean. I'm not going to drink a potion that will turn me into a monster. And God forbid, I'm not going to be kidnapped. But I will cast a shadow. Will I be open enough to the world to notice it, let alone marvel at it? I don't know. But I know that if I am, and if I do, my day will be that much better than it will be if I'm not. And I don't. Here's another one from Stevenson's collection of poems for children. It's about a train, and it has the rhythms of a train. You can imagine yourself on this train as a child, watching the scenery as it flies past. The poem is called From a Railway Carriage. Faster than fairies, faster than witches. Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches and charging along like troops in a battle. All through the meadows, the horses and cattle all of the sights of the hill and the plain Fly as thick as driving rain and ever again in the wink of an eye Painted stations whistle by. Here is a child who clambers and scrambles all by himself and gathering brambles Here is a tramp who stands and gazes and there is the green for stringing the daisies Here is a cart run away in the road Lumping along with man and load and here is a mill and there is a river each a glimpse and gone forever. Each a glimpse and gone forever. It's life itself. Supercharged again. Will you take the time to notice and celebrate? Being on a train is an amazing thing. Kids know this better than adults do. Once I went to work on the train. The Metro subway here in D.C. and the bus I usually took to the train was broken down and my wife had to load the kids up in the car and come and pick me up at the station. And I came up the escalator and I saw my little ones in the backseat of the car. They were five and two. And the five year old lit up like a Christmas tree, waving at me, so happy to see dad. And my two year old burst into tears. The sight of me made him cry. I got in the car, trying not to be offended, thinking, well, I guess you have fun with your mom all day. But hey, I'm not so bad. I can play games too. I'm a source of fun. But naturally, fortunately, my wife was there to interpret his howls, to translate them for me. And she said, oh, he's mad because I said we were going to pick up dad from the train. And I said, well, that's what you did. And she said, yeah, but he thought we were going to get to see the train. He's mad because he didn't get to see the train. That's why he's upset. And when he saw me, that's when it clicked for him. He was sitting there waiting for a train to come roaring past. When he saw me coming up the little, you know, the little railing of the escalator, he realized there's not going to be a big enormous train that's going to pull up. He won't get to see that. It's just going to be this, this little black railing and that will end me and that will be it. I was no longer offended. This was a kid I knew who sprinted to the window and jumped up onto the couch and stared at a garbage truck going past. And a train is even more majestic than that. One should remember what a miracle a train is. And with Stevenson we're reminded what a miracle it is to ride on a train. All those scenes flashing by like stories, each a glimpse and gone forever. Here's more from Stevenson's essay the Lantern Bearer. The ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory like the lantern. It may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It has so little bond with externals that it may even touch them not. And the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy. In such a case, the poetry runs underground. The observer, poor soul, with his documents, is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment. But he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets to climb after him like a squirrel and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets to find out where joy resides and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation that the excuse for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm phantasmagoric chamber of his brain with the painted windows and the storied wall. End quote. That's where we live. That's where we come alive. There's reality and that's where our bodies are. But our minds are interpreting everything. And we can add a big dose of ourselves to the reality we encounter. Our tastes, our desires, our predilections and our imagination. It's where we live in the warm phantasmagoric chamber of the brain with painted windows and the storied wall. Two more items to drive the point home. And they're quick. Here's a two line poem from a child's garden of verses. The poem is called Happy Thought. The world is so full of a number of things. I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. That's the poem. Yes, we all could be. If we embrace the number of things in this world and how magical they all are and can be, we would be as happy as kings. And finally, because this is the history of literature, let's not forget Stevenson's great quote about reading. Reading. He said, quote, should be absorbing and voluptuous. We should gloat over a book be wrapped clean out of ourselves. End quote. There we have it, people. Somebody early on wrote a negative review of this podcast and said something like, oh, it's just. He's just cheerleading for literature. And as with every negative review, I took it straight to heart. It's why I try not to read any reviews, but people send them to me. They think they're being helpful. Email programs, send me review. Hey, you got another review. And I think, delete, delete, delete, delete. I don't want to read the reviews. Here's what people are saying about you, Jack. And I think, no, please stop sending. I don't need to hear from one person that they're tired of interviews with guests and from the next person that they hate. The host talking. I think. Well, what's left? There's only two things we can do. Silence. But anyway, that review kind of cracked me up. He's cheerleading for literature. Do you want a program about literature where the host hates books? Maybe you do, but that's not going to be me. I'll take my books absorbing and voluptuous, thank you very much. I want to be rapped clean out of myself, too. And then I'll join Stevenson. Not sneering, not scoffing, not sniffing, not dismissing with a bored, cynical stance. I'll read my book, be transported and gloat. Let's take our last break and then hear the second half of our talk with Leo Demroche.
- [34:47]
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- [35:18]
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- [36:01]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So, Leo, I. I watched a documentary on Stevenson once and I was struck by just the extent to which his family was involved with the building of lighthouses. So were they. I mean, he really had this as a. I guess a potential path for him in front of him was to continue to be this successful builder of lighthouses. How hard was it for him to break away from that? And was his family supportive of his desire to become a writer?
- [36:34]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah, it's a fascinating story. Let me take a minute to explain it. The Scottish coast, which is rocky and very vulnerable, especially in the days of sailing ships to being swept to your destruction on reefs, had not a single lighthouse. When his family took up that profession, there was only one in the whole of Great Britain. It was the famous Eddystone light on the English Channel. There's a song. My father is the keeper of the Eddystone night Slept with the mermaid one fine night and that was it. So the idea that his family filled the Scottish coast with dozens of lighthouses was an extraordinary achievement of engineering and very difficult. Often the lighthouse would be on a reef that was invisible except at low tide, and very complicated feat of engineering to make it work. And he was fascinated with that. And it was expected he was going to enter the family profession. His grandfather had founded it, his father was active in it, his uncle's work. The main thing was he couldn't do math. Quite extraordinary incompetence at math. He could never do the simplest calculations. And so regretfully, but I think affectionately, his family said, okay, then I guess this is not for you, and you better do something to support yourself, so why don't you become a lawyer? So he dutifully studied the law, passed the bar, and never practiced for one minute. And he was a writer. That's. That's what he had to be. And I think his family were wonderfully supportive. His father, although in many ways a kind of conventional Edinburgh businessman, had a keen imagination. Used to put himself to sleep every night by telling himself stories about highwaymen and pirates. And when his son began Treasure island, his parents happened to be staying with him, and his father just caught fire and started thinking of things that ought to be in the story. So in the end, I think he was very fortunate in the support he had from them.
- [38:32]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. What an interesting thing for someone to do, to tell themselves stories about highwaymen and robbers as they were falling asleep. I mean, I usually think of it as maybe a parent telling stories to their child or something, but he would just lie in bed and think of stories of characters like that. Robert Louis Stevenson's father.
- [38:52]
Leo Damrosch
Yes, he would. It's an escape into a more romantic world than this pragmatic one that he belonged to.
- [39:00]
Jack Wilson
Right. So when did Robert's health issues emerge?
- [39:06]
Leo Damrosch
They emerged, I think, in his very late teens and early twenties. His mother had them quite a few times. One reason he got to know France so well is they would go to places where the climate was supposed to be beneficial. Nobody understood. And specialists today can't tell just from documents exactly what was wrong, but it was some kind of pulmonary problem. It meant that at one point he spent months on end at a place called Davos in Switzerland, which is famous today for the World Economic Forum. Nothing then. Just a health resort for sick people, because that dry Air in the mountains was supposed to be good for you. So it was a burden he bore because he always thought it was going to kill him young. And if his wife, who we'll talk about, had not been wonderfully helpful in getting him through his crises, he probably would have died before he did. And then it was ironic. It's not what he killed him at the age of 44 and some Samoa. He was helping his wife to make a salad. He suddenly said, do I look strange? Fell over backwards. He had suffered a fatal stroke. And what nobody understood at the time was he was a total chain smoker from early adulthood on. And he once said, I always have a cigarette in my mouth, except if I'm coughing or kissing. So that was what killed him, but it also gave him a sense of precariousness, of life. I better work hard and get things done because I may not be here much longer. Yeah.
- [40:36]
Jack Wilson
And also a taste for adventure or a zeal for. I mean, he traveled quite extensively, which, for someone who was as sick as he was, it almost seems like he was trying to pack his days with as much as he could, thinking that he was not long for the world.
- [40:53]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
- [40:56]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so let's talk about Fanny. How did he meet her? Who was she and what kind of relationship did they have?
- [41:02]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah, I could talk about her at length because I think most biographers have not been generous to Fanny. I'm not sure why. Had sort of casual relationships with the Edinburgh girls he grew up with. They were very conventional, very repressed, wouldn't make eye contact because they've been taught not to. They just didn't interest him much. As a very young man. He actually had relationships with prostitutes, by which, I mean, he didn't just. Just visit them for their profession. He got to know them and was very respectful of them as people who were making the best they could of a very bad, you know, hand of cards they'd been dealt. Well, when he was in his 20s, mid-20s, he was visiting artists colony in France, not too far from Paris, where he had friends and had just come home from a kayaking trip with a buddy of his and looked in through the window of the inn where they were all having dinner, and he saw this person and he said at that moment he fell in love. And it was. It was, you know, fate. Her name was Fanny Osborne. She was married to a guy named Sam Osborne, who was a very decent human being, but a hopeless adulterer, and it made her miserable. And she was studying art in France but hadn't decided not to go back to her husband. And when she and Stevenson became lovers, which wasn't immediately, there was still a big question whether they could ever be together for good. And finally she decided, and she had two kids who wanted to go see their father again, that it was time to leave. And she did. Stevenson was brokenhearted. He took a journey on foot in the south of France, in the mountains, all by himself just to kind of get over it. And she seems to have sent him a telegram a bit later saying it's now or never. And he threw caution to the winds, told his parents he was taking a trip to London, but instead took passage on a cheap steamer fetched up in New York, crossed the continent on cheap trains, met her in California and they ended up married. She was a free spirit, person of enormous passion and energy. People who met her when she was in late middle age said that's the one woman I'd be willing to die for. She, she had a powerful personality and she was very, very intelligent. She had lived for years in mining towns in Nevada. She was a crack shot with a pistol. She was his best critic. Tells stories in the biography about how she turned around, stories that he was writing because she saw something that really ought to be doing instead and he would agree with her. And people who knew them said it was a grand passion, it never faded.
- [43:42]
Jack Wilson
Right. And then they, they also went to the Pacific islands.
- [43:46]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah. When he finally started making a lot of money from his books, more than he ever expected to, then it was suddenly possible to charter a hundred foot long sailing yacht with its own captain and crew and just sail the Pacific and they sailed. There's maps of this all over the Pacific. Thousands of miles from one island group to another, making friends wherever they went. They had absolutely no racism at all. They said, how ugly our white skin looks next to these beautiful brown people. Everybody took to him in all these places. And when they got to the Samoan islands which have been changed hands over the centuries from one foreign power to another, part of it is still American Samoa. They're large volcanic islands, not just little antols. And they found out they could buy an estate as I mentioned, and they thought why not? So they settled down there for the turned out to be last four years of his life and learned the language there and became a champion of the Samoan people against the exploitation by America and by European powers. And I think was happier there than he'd ever been.
- [44:58]
Jack Wilson
Right. So as you've gone through his life and read his letters and Everything. Did you feel like we can better understand his works from knowing more about his life and understanding his biography? Or did you see them as kind of separate? That the biography is very interesting and the books stand on their own and it's all kind of interesting because it's from one person. But it's not as if the biography is informing the novels in that sense.
- [45:25]
Leo Damrosch
No, I think that's right. And they're certainly not autobiographical, not in the least, as many very great novels have been. When I was young, the so called new critics, they weren't new anymore at that time, said you mustn't know anything about biography. It's completely irrelevant. The work is totally independent. I don't think that's true. I think if you know a lot about Stevenson, it makes it a richer experience to read his work. But they're certainly not versions of his life experience. Quite the opposite. He's, he's always imagining things that he hasn't personally experienced. So it's not that you need to know the biography. I just think the more you know about the work and the life, the more they resonate together.
- [46:08]
Jack Wilson
One book that, where that seems particularly true is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which seems like it came out of some of his addictions or experiments, I guess.
- [46:22]
Leo Damrosch
No, not so much that, but what it came out of is Scottish Presbyterian Calvinism. There's various, you know, strains of Presbyterianism like any denomination. And the Scottish one, as I understand it, was particularly rigid and tended to inculcate a sense of the threat of eternal damnation. And to make it worse, his nanny, though in many ways a wonderfully loving and imaginative person. And he always admired her and stayed in touch. Still, she inculcated in him this little boy, the sense that you were on the very perilous cliff's edge to be damned to eternity. And he would wake up in the middle of the night sweating and terrified, feeling that he is being judged before the Great White Throne. And that sank deep even though in his early adult life he lost his faith as far as, you know, theology goes. But he never lost that sense of an inner dividedness, of something within ourselves that's threatening to us. And when he wrote Jekyll and Hyde, well, that's interesting. I'll tell you this story briefly. He originally thought of it as the story of an upstanding doctor, that's Dr. Jekyll who puts on a disguise and goes out and commits crimes secretly at nighttime. And it's just the same guy, but wearing a disguise. And his wife Fanny said after he read her part of the first draft, I just don't think you understand your own story. It should be the same person who transforms himself into something evil. It's not just putting on a mask. It's becoming intoxicated with being able to be vicious. And that spoke to Stevenson.
- [48:10]
Jack Wilson
Wow, what a suggestion. I mean, Jekyll and Hyde is. It's basically the work that emblematic of that point. To think that that was Fanny's suggestion is just incredible. Literature really owes her a debt of gratitude.
- [48:26]
Leo Damrosch
Well, absolutely. And of course it's because she knew him so well and she knew very well this is the story you're trying to tell.
- [48:32]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [48:33]
Leo Damrosch
But so he threw the manuscript in the fire, which did kind of shock her and said, there's no point trying to revise that thing, I'm starting over. And what he did and what makes it actually a great story, Nabokov, when he was teaching at Cornell, made it a centerpiece in a history of the novel course he gave and talks about how brilliantly constructed. The thing is, it can't be a movie because only at the very end, and it's not a long novel, do you find out that Jekyll, the upstanding physician, and Hyde, the monstrous, evil alter ego, are the same guy. So his friends see this strange little kind of warped looking person letting himself in with a key into Jekyll's house. They think, who can that be? Maybe he's an illegitimate son that he's ashamed of. I mean, they just don't guess. And so it's like a detective story where only at the very end when Jekyll actually commits suicide because he realizes the evil self is taking over and if he doesn't kill himself, it will become his only self. That's what makes it a great novel.
- [49:41]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, a hard one for us to read. It's become so, I mean, I think even, even small children probably have a sense that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person.
- [49:53]
Leo Damrosch
Yeah, exactly. But it's also, it's just a much greater book than the myth that we sort of vaguely know about, as is true of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's novel. Yeah, because actually the so called monster, I haven't seen this latest movie version, but the, the monster has been constructed incompetently by some horrible mad scientist and he doesn't want to be a monster and he's a kind of tragic being, you know, he's ostracized by the human race. And that's nothing like the movie versions yeah.
- [50:25]
Jack Wilson
Okay. So I think we probably have a lot of listeners who are excited to check out Stevenson's work or return to them. He's easy to recommend because he's so readable and he's so much fun to read. But is there a particular book that. That you recommend to, you know, adults and other people who want to know what they should check out to get a really good sense of Stevenson?
- [50:50]
Leo Damrosch
Well, probably not Treasure island, because we know a little too much about it, or think we do, although I do think it's a great book. I would suggest Kidnapped, which is set 100 years before Stevenson's time in the Scotland, which still was a relatively independent culture and even political system of its own when it was being swallowed up into Great Britain. And Stevenson always identified with the romantic Highlands that had their old traditions and still spoke Gaelic, though he never learned that. A very foreign language. It's not English at all. And Kidnapped, I won't try to describe the plot, but it's a young man plucked out of the comfortable southern Scotland into the turbulent Highlands at a time of great historical stress, finding out who he is and bonding with a romantic Highlander named Alan Brecht, who is everything the upright and conventional young guy from the south of Scotland is not. And yet it's a profound emotional bond between these two people, and when they separate at the end, the hero, David Balfour, has just inherited an estate that's been wrongly taken from him, and it ought to be a happy ending, but in fact, it's a very sad ending, because the most exciting person he's ever been connected with, he's never going to see again. It's a very deep book, a very subtle book, and yet gripping, Absolutely gripping.
- [52:21]
Jack Wilson
Is there a book besides Kidnapped, Treasure island, and Jekyll and Hyde that you think deserves more recognition than it's gotten?
- [52:31]
Leo Damrosch
Well, his range is so various, but I will mention Richard Holmes, a very great biographer, and if he'd ever done a Stevenson biography, I wouldn't have years ago reviewed the Yale edition of the Letters and a very long review and just talked a lot about Stevenson. He mentioned that as a young man, I think Holmes was in his teens, he retraced Stevenson's steps in the book I mentioned that he wrote when he thought he was never going to see Fanny again. And it's called Travels with the Donkey, and it's in the Sevan, a mountainous region in the south of France. And it's just a fascinating, relaxed, but also gripping story of trying to come to terms with who he is at A time of, you know, great emotional stress. And Holmes said it, it made him a fan of Stevenson for life. And I think that's one I would suggest. Right.
- [53:27]
Jack Wilson
So would you say Stevenson was generally happy, and was his literary success a source of pleasure for him, or did it become a burden?
- [53:37]
Leo Damrosch
It was a burden. First of all, he thought he was kind of embarrassed by it because he'd been not dismissed by reviewers in England, but certainly was not a bestseller. And when he got to New York, suddenly he was a celebrity. He said, I think if Jesus Christ came again, they wouldn't make such a big deal out of it as they are about me. And then he found himself under constant pressure to turn books out because publishers wanted to exploit his fame and because he invested in that estate in Samoa, he needed money. And so he did grind out a lot of books that were second rate, and he knew they were second rate, and it just made him sick. And sometimes he would be writing a book in installments and already getting paid for it when it wasn't finished. And that was so not the way he liked to work, which was to brood and think and revise and perfect something. So in a way, he was happier when he was storytelling as a young man, not making money.
- [54:38]
Jack Wilson
Right. So did you have the same. The same view of Stevenson after writing the book that you've had before writing the book, or was there something along the way that changed the way you thought of him?
- [54:51]
Leo Damrosch
Well, I don't think I had much view of him. That's what I was trying to say. So when I got to know him, I was starting from scratch. And certainly the better I knew him, the more I admired him and enjoyed him. And I think that's the experience of all of us who've written biographies of him.
- [55:07]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good thing. That's not always true for a biographer working on his subject.
- [55:12]
Leo Damrosch
Oh, that's right.
- [55:14]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so last question. What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
- [55:20]
Leo Damrosch
I think the sense of a extraordinary personality, whether they do go and read his work or not. Just a person who lived life with all his might, in spite of the handicaps that he had, and who kind of engaged the loyalty and affection of everybody who got to know him, male or female. Just a compelling personality.
- [55:44]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, let's leave things there. The book is called the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Leo Demroche, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [55:57]
Leo Damrosch
It's been my pleasure. Thank you. Foreign.
- [56:05]
Jack Wilson
There we go. A little different today on the History of Literature. My thanks to Leo Demroche for joining me. He's a great, great writer himself. A story champion storyteller too. The book flies by. It's well worth a read. You will love it. And Leo's other books are good too. Don't forget to check out our Patreon account where you can get a low ad version of the podcast@patreon.com literature check us out on Blue Sky Emma is slowly but surely building up our followers through her tireless efforts to deliver interesting news and notes from the world of literature. And you can sign up for Emma's newsletter, which is a free monthly update on the History of Literature podcast news by visiting historyofliterature.com that's also where you can sign up for our first History of Literature Podcast tour as we travel through Literary England in May of this year. But you have to sign up this month. Put that deposit down to secure your spot. March 1st is the deadline for that. Join us for a celebration of Literature and Life. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [57:35]
Kathy Werzer
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