Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson

All biographers of writers are faced with the challenge of relevance - what to leave out? Having grinded through three years of research, some will themselves to tell the whole story. I don't mind the warts, even the all, but I'm not sure we need to know that our chap had ham and eggs followed by seed cake on March 19th, or that Lady M had her hair permed on St Swithin's Day.

John Betjeman was a fine poet who lived in interesting times, but unless a paid up fan club member, you would need intravenous Red Bull to cope with the 1100 pages of Hillier's biography. Charles Osborne's 350 page biography of Auden – if not the most authoritative or scholarly - was ample for me. I'm not sure I was up to carrying the bricklike alternatives home from the library.

Well over 100 books have been written about the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and at least 20 of them are full or partial biographies. At present, the definitive RLS biog is reckoned to be Frank McLynn's weighty one from a dozen years back, but lives and memoirs of the great Scottish man of letters began to appear within years of his death. School friend Henry Baildon's book was one of two to appear in 1901, just a few years after RLS's premature but not unexpected death in Samoa.

I wasn't sure what to expect from John Cairney's The Quest for Robert Louis Stevenson, recently re-issued by Luath Press, three years after the original edition. I knew of Cairney as a colourful character from the Scottish theatre. I was surprised to find this is one of fourteen books he has written in the past two decades, including books on Burns (no surprise there), Mackintosh and football's glory days. Although the plentiful RLS literature (there are five pages in the bibliography) may have spared Cairney the painstaking research at source, his retelling of this picaresque and eventful life is crisp, warm and, at 200 pages or so, doesn't outstay its welcome.

Another problem for biographers is the youthful corpse. I once read a biog of Buddy Holly whose author struggled to pad out a sadly short tale. Context is often the answer in these situations – Patrick Humphries' excellent biography of Nick Drake, another singer who died young, and who spent most of his adult life silent, is a fine example. But Louis (pronounced Lewis, not Lou-ie) played to his biographers from the start, it seems, coming as he did from a line of celebrated engineers and clergymen. Then there was the dramatic, sickly childhood, the shadowy backdrop of Victorian Edinburgh, the prodigious beginnings of his writing, dictating a life of Moses to his mother as a small boy, in order to win one pound from a zealous relative.

Two aspects of RLS's young life struck chords with me. First, there was Cairney's description of the foppish, attention-seeking Louis, stomping out of lectures into George Square in velvet jacket and a plaid cloak, with his gaunt face and girlish hair. This brought to mind the dandies of my college days, none of whom seem to have amounted to much (it was the quiet ones who became TV presenters and politicians). RLSs's fellow students were later surprised to find that he was indeed the maestro he grinningly proclaimed to be (he once suggested he was the cleverest person of his age in Europe!).

Then there was Louis's absolute determination to become a writer, which he knew was all darg and no daydreams. It is pleasing to note, in these days of doctors on the dole and when parents are steering their children away from IT, the safe job bet of previous generations, that writing (the teaching of it, at least) is one of the growth areas in the job market. The BBC recently reported that 'there are now more than 600 full-time degree courses in creative writing - with some universities offering more than 20 different types of creative writing degree'.

Louis had slithered his way through engineering courses at the university and his father was horrified to find that the boy was not planning to spend his life adding to his family's count of fine lighthouses around the Scottish coast. Law was an uneasy compromise, though Stevenson stuck to his guns and, despite a few cases as an advocate, clumsy in his gowns, he was drawn to Edinburgh's murky howffs and brothels, leading his father to fund a series of jaunts to England, then Europe, which helped establish Louis's early reputation as a travel essayist.

From there on, despite increasing fame, his life was a two-decade tumble of restless travel and wearying sickness, blighted as he was by consumption and repeated haemorrhages. Another blight was his domineering wife Fanny: older, American and censorious. It would be interesting to see if other RLS biographers have treated her more kindly. Here she seems to be interested in Louis's money as much as anything (and rather too keen on his cousin too). She persuaded RLS to stick to potential money-spinners and one anxious row ended with the burning of The Travelling Companion, the novel about prostitution which might have rescued his reputation from that of children's adventure writer and minor romantic poet.

And in the end, is that all RLS was? More famous than renowned? Those who knew him insist his greatest gift was his tongue, not his pen. Yet certainly, he gave us two most memorable yarns (and most filmed – there are over 30 versions of both Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde). His travel writing is sparked with wit and refreshingly free of the vainglory associated with 19^th century travellers.

He emerges as an empathetic and liberal character, untouched by the steely spirit of Empire, and he managed to rise above the religious proselytising of his childhood. We can only speculate what he might have given us had he not inherited a weak chest from his mother's side, doomed to die young and far from home.