Robert Louis Stevenson - A different view. . - Reviews - Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson - book review

Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Philip Callow. Constable. [pounds sterling]20.00. 336 pages. ISBN 0-094-80180-0.

There are certain men and women who by reason of their genius, eminence, achievement, or idiosyncracy seem to exercise a sort of magnetism on biographers and publishers. There are in my library whole shelves of lives of such 'biography prone' ones as Jane Austen, the Brontes, the Brownings, Dickens, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Wilde, Wells and Shaw. Another such is R.L.S.

From Graham Balfour and H.B. Baildon's lives (1901) through biographical donnees from Leslie Stephen (1903), Eva Blantyre Simpson (1906), Charles Guthrie (1920), Rosaline Masson (1923), Sidney Colvin and John Steuart (1924), G.K. Chesterton (1927), Malcolm Elwin (1950), J.C. Furnas (1952) and Richard Aldington (1957), David Daiches (1973) to Jenni Calder (1980), literally dozens of biographies have appeared between 1900 and 1990. And, most recently, there have been hefty volumes by Ian Bell (1992) and Frank McLynn (1993) and slenderer ones by Bryan Bevan (1993) and Hunter Davies (1994). The new century's first addition to the list is this work by Philip Callow. Obviously, the central biographical facts in all of these volumes must necessarily be identical. The basic story never varies, never palls. Constant images. The lighthouse family tree. Leerie in Heriot Row. The dark Edinburgh world of wynds and closes -- Burke and Hare and Hyde territory. The velvet-jacketed Bohemian at dalliance in the Lothian Road. T he majestic Edinburgh world of the University, the Parliament House and its Courts of Law. The dignified robed and bewigged young advocate. One man and his donkey, the ill-used Modestine, measuring the Cevennes. The Silverado desperado. Sargent's thin man of Bournemouth, sheltering in land-locked 'Skerryvore'. Tusitala and his mamma, complete with Victorian widow's cap, delicate but spirited as any Mary Kingsley or Amelia Edwards, sipping fragrant bohea in her son's exotic Valima household.

Those are the authentic prescribed vignettes, but, like Scrabble's alphabetic squares, there is an infinity of ways in which to range and rearrange them, and the message that they convey. They summon up as many lives as there are biographers to construct and reconstruct them; so that each biography becomes a book about the biographer. With these considerations borne well in mind, I am happy to be able to report that Philip Callow's vision is good, and through his eyes we perceive a different R.L.S. from the one who revealed himself to other biographers.

Mr Callow's man is the victim of his own fragility. It is his bred-in-the-marrow ill-health that drives him. The enchanter is in flight from disease. Romantic, lyrical, he pursues this especial grail. Seeking robust freedom, he finds a fancied protective talisman in a kaleidoscope of successive new locations. Although, in a Joycean sense, he never left Edinburgh, he was to put vast distances between himself and that city of 'rigid sheets and vile weather'. He alternately endured and exulted in self-imposed exile -- France, California, Switzerland, Sydney. He completed, more or less, his allotted tally of books. By sheer strength of will he succeeded in keeping ahead of pursuivant death until his forty-fifth year, when he had an appointment in Samoa.

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