Since any reviewer of a bit of history makes it his own by the mere circumstance of his selective attention, a reviewer trained in clinical observation must account—at least to himself—for his own initial involvement much more systematically than has been the rule in most writing of history.
—ERIK ERIKSON FROM THE PREFACE TO GANDHI’S TRUTH
Robert Louis Stevenson was probably one of the first names I ever learned outside my own family. It was not that we were Scottish or that my parents had a particular reverence for his writing. What I did have (and still have now sitting beside me as I write these words) is A Child’s Book of Poems, a book published by Peter Pauper Press in hard cover with illustrations, the size of a small paperback, and priced at one dollar. It was a compilation of English and American poets—the usual suspects for such a book published in the middle of the twentieth century—Edward Lear, Eugene Field, Felicia Hymans, James Whitcomb Riley, Longfellow, Whitman, Tennyson, and Stevenson. I loved many of the poems—“The Owl and the Pussy Cat,” “Little Orphan Annie,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Paul Revere’s Ride”—but the poem I loved most was Stevenson’s “My Shadow.” Here are some lines from it:
The funniest thing 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.
He hasn’t got a notion of how children
ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every
sort of way,
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward,
you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that
Shadow sticks to me!
By the age of eight, I had read the poem so many times that I memorized it, but these were the stanzas that stuck the most with me. I thought and thought about this boy in the poem who did not understand that his shadow is not real, that it is not another child who misbehaves and hides. I thought about Robert Louis Stevenson, a grown-up who understood that this child was being silly but still wanted to tell me about him and pretend he was that little boy. Now almost a half century, looking back, I believe I see what fascinated me at the time. I loved the idea that the shadow could be a naughty companion to scold. He wasn’t proper; he didn’t know how to play; he’s a coward; and in the last stanza before the sun comes up, he’s a “sleepy-head” who remains “fast asleep in bed.” Yet at the same time, I was filled with a child’s pride that I could tell my parents that I knew better—that there was no separate person—the shadow was really just an image of the boy caught by the sun.
What linked the boy and the shadow was make-believe—imagination. He could make the shadow real and not real at exactly the same time. Robert Louis Stevenson, the poet writing about this boy, understood this and he knew when I read the poem I could understand it, too. It was our shared secret—we could hold the real and the made-up in our head simultaneously—we had power over this trick, and we could start and stop it. Robert Louis Stevenson had punched my ticket to the world of play, and I was off and running.
I doubted I would encounter his name again as I played cops and robbers, army men, cowboys and Indians, and pirates with my friends. Dressed as pirates with patches over our eyes and plastic treasure chests from Captain Crunch cereal boxes, we sang, “Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum” in blissful ignorance of this pirate ditty’s origins. But one day, sitting in front of our black-and-white television set, my brothers and I watched the movie Treasure Island, so ancient and creaky from the 1930s, with Jackie Cooper as Jim Hawkins and Wallace Beery as Long John Silver. The primitiveness of the photography and studio sets only made the story of a boy on a hunt for treasure on a deserted island more mysterious and exotic. It was from some ancient world to me, and yet I cried along with Jim when he recognized his beloved Silver had betrayed him. How could Long John, so funny and charming, be such a dangerous villain, and how could I still care about him even after his wickedness had been revealed? I didn’t have any answers for this at nine years old, but I found the confusion compelling. Imagine my surprise and pleasure when my parents told me that this movie was from a story by none other than my “favorite poet,” Robert Louis Stevenson.
I wish that I could tell you that, as I grew into adolescence and adulthood, Robert Louis Stevenson continued to accompany me—an imaginative shadow guiding my reading through Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and his later novels, The Master of Ballantrae and David Balfour. In truth, we parted company, and I gave little thought to him until I had become a father with two daughters who loved to hear my made-up stories on car trips and before they went to bed. In deference to their gender, I created a character, Jennifer Pirate, a young girl from an English town who took off on a pirate ship for adventure and kept a loyal parrot (like Cap’n Flint) perched upon her shoulder. Our Jennifer Pirate stories led us to an audiobook of Treasure Island and then the actual novel. Reading Stevenson again as an adult and clinical psychologist, I was struck by his rendering of characters—his understanding of the dynamics of friendship and of the essentials of a young adult’s relationship to adult figures that offer both promise and disappointment. I loved his ability to spin an adventure yarn, but even more his capacity to make us care with a psychological depth about the characters he created.
In 2003, I received a Fulbright Research Scholar’s Award to work on studies of memory at Durham University in Northern England. Over the course of my family’s five-month stay, we visited the Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland, which features exhibits on the lives of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Now for the first time, I began to get interested in the life of this writer who had provided some of my most precious childhood memories. Dead at the age of forty-four, an invalid for much of his life, he lived his last six years of life in the South Seas and created a family compound on the island of Samoa. Unnaturally thin, with piercing brown eyes, he wore a drooping scruffy mustache. He had traveled to the United States twice, written travel books about excursions in Belgium and France, pursued rest cures in Switzerland and Southern France, and lived for a period of time in Australia. And, of course (I had almost forgotten), he had written Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
About two years passed and I found myself looking for something to read while at my in-laws’ home during the Christmas holidays. It so happened that their book group had just finished Jekyll and Hyde, and my father-in-law had it lying around. Having renewed my acquaintance with Robert Louis Stevenson at the Writers’ Museum, I now felt like this was an opportune time to get to know him a little better and perhaps consider his more “serious” writing. Luckily, the Norton edition that I picked up (edited by Katherine Linehan) contained more than just the novella; it was filled with biographical material, excerpts from Stevenson’s letters, initial reviews of the story, contemporary literary critics’ analyses, and intriguing annotations. I not only loved the work—its narrative speed, its atmosphere, its allegorical richness—but I was entranced by the Stevensonia, the virtual industry of biographies, annotated bibliographies, collected letters, critical studies, websites, and controversies that have never abated since his death in 1894. I learned that his reputation had ebbed and flowed over the course of these one hundred and twenty plus years, beginning with a Victorian sainthood after his tragic death (“the seraph in chocolate” as his friend and collaborator W. H. Henley derisively put it) to demotion to a minor children’s author in the middle decades of the previous century to a steady revival and renewed respect for his skill and artistry in our more recent era.
As my curiosity about Stevenson was fully piqued, I had the good fortune to see that a new and absolutely first-rate biography had appeared in 2005. I have read and reread Claire Harman’s Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson and heartily recommend it to anyone who desires a thorough and insightful catalogue of his life, works, and times. It has been my go-to source and guide for my research and further reading into Stevenson’s works and writings. I have since read a number of other biographies and numerous critical studies, but I must also mention the standard biography before Harman’s, Voyage to Windward by J. C. Furnas; it cleared up many inaccuracies that had been perpetuated about Stevenson’s “dalliances” as a young man, but more important, it possesses a compelling narrative style, more novelistic and literary in an old-fashioned way than the more straight-ahead and ironic style of Harman.
Beyond all of the writing about Stevenson, there are his letters—all eight volumes of them, collected by Booth and Mehew and finally published as a full set in 1994–1995. I refer to them repeatedly throughout this book; in many ways they are the most potent source in getting to know Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is self-deprecating, witty, loves word play, and seems like a boon companion to his friends. He is also vain, self-aggrandizing, hypochondriacal, money-obsessed, moralistic, and filled with self-loathing. In other words, a three-dimensional, real, live person. His letters reveal the most accessible and human of correspondents—someone impossible not to like or relish as an intimate, but who is also acutely aware of the multiple and differentiated social roles he occupies. Perhaps most interestingly, I learned of his deep struggle to find his identity as a writer, despite his family’s and his own ambivalence about this vocation. My fascination with Stevenson grew not only to be about his work, but it was equally focused on his development as a young man and later adult.
As I became obsessed with all things RLS—reading his other fiction, poetry, essays, and his autobiographical writings (it helped to track down and purchase his collected works—twenty-six volumes—from a bookseller in New Hampshire)—I began to notice something very unusual: his writings and their cultural legacy, now more than one hundred years in the past, were still omnipresent. (And not just in Scotland where it was nothing for the person on the street to know unexpected facts about Stevenson. Along a woodland path to visit the site of Stevenson’s grandfather’s church, I asked a man walking his dog if I was heading in the right direction. He not only knew about the church, but when he learned that I was researching Stevenson’s life, he asked me if I was heading to Samoa next. Or the bed and breakfast owner in Edinburgh, who, learning of my interest, asked me if I intended to visit the Hawes Inn in South Queensferry, where the plot to kidnap David Balfour was hatched.) In fact, his works’ influence across the entire globe remains so pervasive that I could only conclude that they have touched a deep chord in our collective psyche.
There have been over fifty film and television adaptations of Treasure Island, as well as numerous theatrical and radio dramatizations. According to the official Robert Louis Stevenson website and electronic archive, 135 film and television adaptations of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have been made, both serious efforts and loose parodies. The website claims that it is possibly the single work of literature most adapted to film. It has also had countless stage adaptations, including a Broadway musical that continues to appear in regional theaters and summer repertory companies with a recent brief revival on Broadway in the spring of 2013. Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses are still widely read and beloved by both adults and children in many languages and countries. Kidnapped has itself been the subject of eighteen film and television adaptations. A brief visit to Amazon.com reveals a thousand entries for A Child’s Garden of Verses from Kindle to coloring books to audio versions to German and French translations. All told, Index Translationum of the UNESCO Culture Sector lists Stevenson as among the fifty most translated authors in the world, two places below Charles Dickens and two above Karl Marx!
Yet the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous works goes far beyond the realm of books, films, and musicals. What is fascinating is how his characters and themes quickly entered the vernacular of our popular culture and have remained relevant more than one hundred years since his death. As one recent whimsical example, in the comedy film, The Hangover Part II, one of the clueless friends is at a seafood restaurant in a fishing village in Thailand, and he demands to know if there is a “Long John Silver’s” on the island. Long John Silver’s fast food restaurants are not even the only restaurant chain named after a Stevenson character. One of the familiar tourist attractions of Greenwich Village in New York City is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Pub on 7th Avenue near Bleecker Street; there is another one in Midtown, and two others that once operated in Chicago and Dallas.
Numerous phrases and images from Treasure Island have shaped the popular psyche’s images of what the pirate world is like. Just as I did, every child who pretends to be a pirate sings “Yo-Ho-Ho and a Bottle of Rum.” Every pirate’s parrot is imagined to say “Pieces of Eight” just like Cap’n Flint who sat on Long John’s shoulder. Pirates inevitably bury their treasure, and in the image of the wooden-legged Long John, they are depicted as bearing the scars of pirate battles—whether Captain Hook from Peter Pan or the eye-patched pirate who serves as the logo for Pirate’s Booty snack food. The fourth highest grossing film of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men’s Chest (earning over a billion dollars), draws its subtitle, “Dead Men’s Chest,” from the fictional sea shanty RLS created for Treasure Island. In the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Captain Jack Sparrow’s former shipmate and now rival, Hector Barbossa, has a monkey who sits on his shoulder and is named “Jack,” just the way Silver named his parrot after his former captain.
To say that someone is a “Jekyll and Hyde” has become part of the common parlance to capture the conflicting secret aspects of an individual’s personality or behavior. A quick Google search finds column after column and blog after blog that refer to all forms of wrongdoers, caught in unexpected behavior (and especially politicians and celebrities), as “Jekyll and Hydes.”
How is it possible that a Scottish writer who died before the beginning of the twentieth century could still have such staying power in our cultural psyche? There must have been something deeply compelling in his own life and art—such profound pleasures and conflicts—that their resonances are still felt in our lives today. The more that I have learned about Stevenson, the larger the shadow he seems to have cast in my own life and the lives of others. This book is an effort to investigate how a writer could turn his own psychological conflicts and concerns into a universal art.