Stevensoniana!

Our book today is a jam-packed volume from 1903 called Stevensoniana, and it consists, as you might expect, of countless odd bits and pieces relating to the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson. The bits and pieces are assembled by the legendary bookman John Hammerton (whose own book of bits and pieces, Books and Myself, is very much worth your time, if you can find a copy), who right up front offers his justifications:

By far the greater part of the work consists of matter, always interesting and often of high value, which might never have been brought together in one volume, and could have been consulted with great difficulty only, if at all. Perhaps, for this reason alone, 'Stevensoniana' carries its own excuse. The feeling uppermost in the mind of the editor while proceeding with the work of research and collation was one of surprise that a similar undertaking had not been essayed before, so rich and abundant was the material to engage any compiler.

Hammerton was perhaps so busy with his researching and collating that he didn't notice the dozen or so previous examples of Stevensoniana (memoirs, remembrances, tributes, etc) that had cropped up in Scotland and England in the decade since the writer's death, but no matter: this one is the best, the most comprehensive of them all. Those of you who've been reading Stevereads for any time (or who've been unlucky enough to be receiving the "audio version" for lot, these many years!) will know the esteem in which I hold RLS, the sheer joy I take in the huge variety of his literary output. Stevensoniana (like Johnsoniana, Kiplingiana, and Trollopiana!) of virtually any kind is guaranteed to win a smile from me, and a volume like this one - sitting unwanted on a Massachusetts library shelf for a decade, with nobody consulting its treasures until it was dropped from inventory and sold to me - instantly becomes a treasure. Attentive readers can glean many things from such a volume of miscellanies that they might not be shown in a more carefully gardened presentation, as in Charles Lowe's enthusiastic recollection of the rail-thin chain-smoking youth he met at Edinburgh University:

From that single hour's conversation with the embryo author of 'Treasure Island,' I certainly derived more intellectual and personal stimulus than ever was imparted to me by any six months' course of lectures within the walls of 'good King James's College.' He was so perfectly frank and ingenuous, so ebullient and open-hearted, so funny, so sparkling, so confiding, so vaulting in his literary ambitions, and withal so widely read and well-informed - notwithstanding his youth, for he could scarcely have been out of his teens then - that I could not help saying to myself that here was a young man who commended himself more to my approval and emulation than any other of my fellow-students ...

That 'so funny' points squarely at the more ephemeral glimpses that collections like this preserve. And in addition to such things, sometimes reading through this king of volume brings unforeseen patterns to the fore. This is W. E. Henley remembering the great author:

At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call personnel. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson. He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or wretched), never so irresistible, as when he wrote about himself.

And here's S. R. Crockett, writing with far greater skill but striking oddly similar notes:

But when he writes of himself, how supremely excellent is the reading. It is good even when he does it intentionally, as in 'Memories and Portraits.' It is better still when he sings it, as in his 'Child's Garden.' He is irresistible to every lonely child who reads and thrills, and reads again to find his past recovered fro him with effortless ease. It is a book never long out of my hands, for only in it and in my dreams, when I am touched with fever, do I grasp the long, long thoughts of a lonely child and a hill-wandering boy - thoughts I never told to any; yet which Mr. Stevenson tells over again to me as if he read them off a printed page.

All of it - all these tantalizing glimpses - are food for thought, all of it re-ponderable as the reader continues to love the writings of the man himself. The two are inextricably linked in fondess, as Clement Shorter points out in this volume:  "Who could fail to love the man and his books?"

Penguins on Parade: RLS in the South Seas!

Some Penguin Classics stand as reminders of what might have been. Necessarily, the entire shelf of Penguin Classics from ancient Greece and Rome serve this melancholy purpose – imagining the lost works of Sophocles, Euripides, Asinius Pollio, Livy, and the rest all here with us, neatly persevered inside those so-familiar black-spined paperbacks, knowing with that sweet assurance that they’d all have first-rate critical introductions and helpful notes and dorky cover-designs  – it’s almost as pleasant, in its way, as actually having the books would be (and there’s no final curtain here! If truck-sized statues can be unearthed in Egypt in 2010, so can meticulously-preserved Egyptian libraries – plenty of reedy, well-read Romans went there for the salubrious climate, and the Egyptians themselves were quite fond of literature, so you never know what might turn up).

That sweet, sad imagining can happen a lot closer to our own day, of course. Think of reedy, well-read Robert Louis Stevenson, who repaired in 1888 to the South Seas for their salubrious climate (and because the editor of McClure’s – a first-rate literary magazine at the time, run with easy generosity and unquenchable bonhomie by Sam McClure – offered to pay for the trip if he could have the literary gleanings that came from it) and there began to dream about writing not just an account of his travels – a type of literature at which he excelled and in which he’d already written one very good example and one immortal classic – but the book on the South Seas, a massive compendium of the languages, the topographies, the nature, the peoples, the customs, of course the superstitions, of that entire swath of the globe.

It’s the oddest thing about Stevenson as a writer, and it stands eternally to his credit: despite the fact that he had mastered the fine art of capturing the public taste with light, deceptive adventure stories, he was always yearning for new literary forms, for fresh and dangerous challenges. The books he dreamt of writing but never did form one of the most intriguing ghost-canons in all of literature, and in the South Seas, he dreamt big. Probably some of this ambition came from the fact that on some level he knew how sick he was (a frail constitution racked by consumption and tortured almost every hour of every day by tobacco – it’s highly doubtful that any single human being ever smoked more than Robert Louis Stevenson, and certainly no author ever did, even the ones who were famous for it)(although Scott Fitzgerald came close).

Somewhere along the course of the island-hopping that he did with his family – he traveled with his long-suffering mother and his drill sergeant wife, plus a ragged little entourage of servants and cooks – going from the Marquesas to Hiva Oa to Borabora, meeting priestesses and missionaries and drunken, comic kings, the decision sort of crept upon him that he would not, after all, be returning to wet and chilly London. He knew the decision would upset his friends back home – friends like Sidney Colvin at the British Museum , a devoted first-reader and confidante – but he could confess it readily enough to his more literary acquaintances. He wrote to Henry James:

I must tell you plainly – I can't tell Colvin – I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it’ll be to die. Health I enjoy in the tropics; even here [Sydney Australia], which they call sub or semi-tropical, I come only to catch cold.

This wasn’t quite true – Stevenson could always be the most maddening combination of gloomy and optimistic – he never ‘enjoyed’ much health in the tropics, despite intervals of activity and naked sea-bathing. He was almost always sick, sometimes incapacitated, and more than one doctor along the way warned him that his condition was precarious – he could develop a fatal hemorrhage at any moment. He grew more relaxed in the islands, not that precise and proper dress had ever been his forte. No less fastidious a South Seas visitor than Henry Adams could only remark in horror:

Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the baggy legs tucked into coarse knit woolen stockings, one of which was bright brown in color, the other a purplish dark tone.

But sick or no, distracted or no (his wife Fanny could be a handful, to put it mildly), he kept writing. His readers and financial sponsors back home expected it, and he was on fire to do it anyway. He wanted to capture the essence of the South Seas, to write a huge miscellany that would stand as a worthy substitute for actually being there – he wanted to cover every aspect of this hot, beautiful new world he was seeing and bring it all home to readers who would never see it:

No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.

So he investigated every local custom, talked with every Western visitor and every native storyteller. We want our great writers to be more omnivorously curious than we are, we hope they will be – and Stevenson was. He always had been (the one thing his heterogeneous mass of books share in common is their underlying wide-eyed wonder at being in a world of infinite stories), but something about being in the South Seas, perhaps some presentiment that he really never would see England again, only increased his hunger – hence his dreams for the book he wanted to call simply, all-inclusively The South Seas, and hence, too, his frequent pauses to note mortuary rituals:

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why)was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoannu, where the struggle was long centered and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body and the aitu rested.

As Stevenson writes at the beginning of In the South Seas (the truncated, domesticated, and not entirely successful version of the book that was eventually created by Fanny and Colvin), “for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect.” His time-table was premature, but only a little: he had time for this one last adventure, and time enough to write a bit about it. It wasn’t the book he hoped for, but those of us who wish he’d written a thousand books will take this one as it is and count ourselves lucky.

Some Good Open Letters - Part 1!

Our books today comprise a quick tour through that most maligned and rewarding corner of the Kingdom of Good Letters: book criticism.

On one easy level, book criticism has the rare distinction of being one of the only types of writing every single literate person has done at one point or other. We do it first as children - the most honest and most brutal of literary critics - because on its simplest level, book criticism is simply a matter of telling another person whether or not you liked a book in question.

Further refinements accrue. From saying whether or not you liked a book, it's short step to saying why either way. And saying why necessarily entails saying whether or not the stuff the author tries succeeds, and to what extent. And if it doesn't succeed, why doesn't it? Before you know it, you've launched upon that much--vexed subject, the writer's craft. That ultimate refinement might look forbiddingly rarefied, but the best literary critics never forget its incredibly simple origins.

'The best literary critics' covers more territory than this single entry can encompass, of course. I've got no Addison for you this time around, no Johnson, no Coleridge or Arnold or Macaulay, no Lamb - even though they're all great and will all have their entries in due course (we've been on this little literary excursion for roughly 500 entries, so by now I assume you'll all trust me when I say: sooner or later, I'll get around to everything).


No, this time around we'll just dip in quickly to some juicy, delightful passages from some of my personal favorites in the genre - and some of the greatest exponents of the genre that all of us over at Open Letters strive to continue every month. These are writers I return to over and over again - and they're certainly among the literary figures who taught me how to read in the first place, how to think about reading, eventually how to write about books. The furthest back we'll go this time around is Walter Bagehot, who began his 1869 review of the poetry of Henry Crabb Robinson in this irresistible way:

Perhaps I should be ashamed to confess it, but I own I opened the three large volumes of Mr. Robinson's memoirs with much anxiety. Their bulk, in the first place, appalled me; but that was by no means my greatest apprehension. I knew I had a hundred times heard Mr. Robinson say that he hoped something he would leave behind 'would be published and be worth publishing.' I was aware too - for it was no deep secret - that for half a century or more he had kept a diary, and that he had been preserving correspondence besides; and I was dubious what sort of things these would be, and what - to use Carlyle's words - any human editor could make of them. Even when Mr. Robinson used to talk so I used to shudder; for the men who have tried to me memoir-writers and failed, are as numerous, or nearly so, as those who have tried to be poets and failed. A specific talent is as necessary for the one as for the other.

There's a perfect combination there of the pose of humility and the careful seeding of its opposites, and the combination has the effect of placing all your confidence in the reviewer, come what may. Very, very smart writers (and they didn't come much smarter than Bagehot, despite a certain inclination toward tub-thumping) can use this facile admission of fallibility in just this way to attest to their aesthetic purity, although another of my favorite writers on books (also a passably talented writer of books) actually meant his such protestations seriously:

For my part, I have a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem with error. One and all were written with genuine interest in the subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.

That's Robert Louis Stevenson, and those 'disadvantages' he's referring to are a part of the writing school I'm celebrating today: pressing deadlines, deadpan unfamiliarity with your putative subject, obdurate editors - in short, the pitfalls of literary journalism. The best writers who indulge in this kind of writing find ways to get around these pitfalls, ways to turn them into strengths (not to mention how good such writers get at researching their subjects with incredible speed and depth), and Stevenson was one of those writers, half-apologetic, half-defiant of his own results:

Short studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been presented. ... But this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea ...

Those chances can be harsh - most of the best book-writing is resoundingly out of print today. Usually, the occasional essays authors write for cash and recognition (and free review copies) are collected, dolled up with a new Introduction, printed in low numbers, and remaindered almost instantly. We've seen some critics like that, here at Stevereads, and the reverse is also true: famous authors of other kinds of stuff get their book-writings bound and publicized even if those writings are worthless. Luckily, one of the greatest novelists of the last century was also one of the greatest book-critics, so we'll always have the pure, cool pools of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader series to dive into, always sucking in a sharp breath at the clarity of it all, always emerging refreshed:

In her [Jane Austen's] masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable of their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

That of course is genius writing about genius, a rare and stunning combination - but I submit that it happens more often in book-criticism than any other field of writing, for reasons that are pretty obvious once you start thinking of them. Reading is one of the most personal things anyone, including writers, can do - even on deadline and badly hung over, that's a deep well to tap. There are charlatans aplenty, of course, stupid, mulish faux-readers who scan pages for a living only in order to find the shopworn little collection of literary prejudices they haven't changed since high school (the mind recoils in horror at the prospect of a Collected Michiko Kakutani). But there are also entirely wonderful times where even the bagatelle indisciplines of an inveterate autodidact can be brought to a perfect pitch by the fires of reading passion. The best example of this in the 20th century was Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, in which our singingly honest critic tackles the very question of what it is to be a critic - at times obliquely, as in his shouted exhortations to young critics:

Write so as to be of some use to a reader - a reader, that is, of poems and stories, not of criticism. Vary a little, vary a little! Admit what you can't conceal, that criticism is no more than (and no less than) the helpful remarks and the thoughtful and disinterested judgment of a reader, a loving and experienced and able reader, but only a reader. And remember that works of art are never data, raw material, the crude facts that you critics explain and explain away. Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.

And at other times directly, seeking classification:

What is a critic, anyway? So far as I can see, he is an extremely good reader - one who has learned to show others what he saw in what he read. He is always many other things too, but these belong to his accident, not his essence. Of course, it is often the accident and not the essence that we read a critic for: pieces of criticism are frequently, though not necessarily, works of art of an odd anomalous kind, and we can sympathize with someone when he says lovingly about a critic, as Empson says about I. A. Richards, that we get more from him when he's wrong than we do from other people when they're right.

In that first duty of the book-critic, the duty to be out there reading and reporting back, Jarrell is always nothing less than superb - reading him on the heart-breakingly few authors he ever bothered to write about always throws a new and blinding light on those authors and on the process of reading itself.




That process gets its most sensitive, probing, intelligent evaluation from a writer we don't fist think of in this metier: in 1961 C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, and it's an astonishing, humblingly brilliant prolonged meditation on the nature of both reading and writing about reading. I could fill an entry this long simply by quoting the best of Lewis' virtually limitless store of great lines: "We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves." "Forced to talk incessantly about books, what can they [critics] do but try to make books into the sort of things they can talk about?" "I would say that every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can't provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities." "The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good." "The ideally bad book is the one of which a good reading is impossible." "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him." And so on, smiling the whole time.

The 'experiment' in Lewis' book is tongue-in-cheek daring: to read books, to return to a more honest reading of them, to give to each of them that "inner silence" that, Lewis maintains, is the only path to any book's heart. "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender," Lewis writes, and he's alive to the differences between people who read and people who don't:

In that way, the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement that 'This man is not in love', whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like 'This man is in love, but with a frightful woman.'

But his own allegiances couldn't be more clear:

Those of us who have been true readers all of our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

And he reserves his closest approximation of scorn not for the unliterary but for bad critics, who would have no place in the world that resulted from his novel 'experiment':

Thus one result of m system would be to silence the type of critic for whom all the great names in English literature - except for the half dozen protected by the momentary critical 'establishment' - are as so many lamp-posts for a dog. And this I consider a good thing. These dethronements are a great waste of energy. Their acrimony produces heat at the expense of light. They do not improve anyone's capacity for good reading. The real way of mending a man's taste is not to denigrate his present favourites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.

Most book-critics - even the best ones (some of whom I've had the privilege to work with) - never achieve this kind of elevation; Lewis did perfectly what they must often do quickly and as best they can. But there's a real art to be found in those fast-honest appraisals and condemnations, especially if they, too adhere to Lewis' call that they be entertaining. And if you get some insight, a good line or two, and maybe a new discovery in the bargain, well then the gods of shipwreck have been kind.