The Gypsy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson

Summary

The Gypsy Life of Robert Louis Stevenson For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. —Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes With time people become the stories we tell about them. Then, except in the rarest cases, oblivion. Time whittled Sappho down to fragments. Others have not survived at all. If we take the cosmic view, no one will. So what is biography for? What good is its effort to demystify the secretive recesses of human character? The biographer Hermione Lee has said, “I want to penetrate those secret places, find out everything, and be completely ruthless. It’s paradoxical—I wouldn’t want it done to me, yet I’m very keen to do it to other people. And the thing that attracts me to these people is their secret self.” The biographer’s interest is the same as the novelist’s. Both are storytellers. Both deal in facts. And as we know, sometimes facts are make-believe. Sometimes fiction is truer than nonfiction. Novels used to be called histories or lives. Stories are everywhere. Another expert biographer, Richard Holmes, has said, “You spend a lot of time alone with your subject, but in the end you must go out and engage your readers. Readers must be able to imagine this other life as vividly as possible and understand it as personally as possible. I think it has to be an affectionate understanding, too. At least, I find that. I’ve never written about someone I didn’t learn to like, and even to love. I call it ‘a handshake across time.’” The best biographers make happy readers of us, involving us—like novelists, historians, playwrights and poets—in lives other than our own. They enlarge experience. Leo Damrosch’s new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, Storyteller, is a splendid affair because Damrosch writes out of love, not uncritically, and not only for his subject, but also for the grand literary conversation of which he is a part.⁠[1] Author of highly regarded books on Rousseau, Casanova, Jonathan Swift, and the circle of S...