Volume 22, Number 9 · May 29, 1975
The Two Stevensons
By Karl Miller
Robert Louis Stevenson
by James Pope-Hennessy
Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $9.95
One day in the winter of 1889 a small party of strangers was to be seen making its way along the main street of the port of Apia, on the South Sea island of Samoa. Apia was known as 'the Hell of the Pacific,' and it was the rainy season. The street looked out onto a coral reef and a bay: access to the bay, from the reef, was blocked by the hulks of American and German naval craft, sunk by a hurricane. The party included a sallow male scarecrow of about forty, whose ailing look had a kind of charm or promise, a woman in a straw hat, carrying a guitar, and a young man carrying a ukelele and wearing gold earrings and dark-blue glasses. Rovers? Beachcombers? Holy dropouts—who had traveled hopefully to their Katmandu? An Anglican missionary who watched them guessed that they were a variety troupe, come from San Francisco to sing to whatever audience could be gleaned from the island's community of European masters and derelicts and Polynesian chiefs and estate-workers. He was wrong. This was Robert Louis Stevenson, his American wife Fanny, and Fanny's son by a previous marriage, Lloyd Osbourne.
Review, 3379 words
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