Book review: A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson & JM Barrie, edited by Michael Shaw

This collection of the correspondence between Stevenson and Barrie inevitably contains a certain amount of of mutual back-scratching, but it also shows that both men were perceptive critics of each other’s work, writes Allan Massie

Robert Louis Stevenson. PIC: Creative Commons.

Stevenson rides high. Barrie doesn’t. Peter Pan still holds the stage delightfully, and other plays are occasionally performed (though not by the National Theatre of Scotland), but his novels and short stories, long ago branded as “Kailyard,” are neglected. They are probably little read, even though, picking “A Window in Thrums” casually from the shelf a couple of months ago, I found these stories about a now vanished but once authentic Scotland gave me a few hours of pleasure. Still, a Barrie revival seems as improbable as Stevenson’s work falling into oblivion would be. So it may come as a surprise to many that Stevenson expressed “an exceptional keenness of pleasure” in reading Barrie’s novel The Little Minister and “bracketed” Barrie with himself as “two that the Shirra might have patted on the head”, the Shirra being of course Walter Scott. He told Henry James that there is “genius in Barrie,” though adding that “there’s a journalist at his elbow,” a fair summing-up.

They never met, Stevenson, ten years older, having embarked on his travels which would take him to Samoa, before Barrie’s own career was launched. This correspondence covers the last three years of Stevenson’s life. Stevenson’s letters to Barrie have been published before; Barrie’s to Stevenson haven’t and were long believed to have been lost.

In the correspondence Barrie hovers between admiring disciple and equal. He doesn’t smother Stevenson with praise. The Master of Ballantrae, for instance is “the best thing you have done”, but adds “I mean the Scotch part of it only,” which is fair criticism. Stevenson responds in similar vein, pointing out a flaw in The Little Minister much as he admired it. Both men were good critics of the other’s work, Barrie one of the first to recognize just how good Catriona is, something that even today not all who write about Stevenson have grasped. They discuss their future plans. As always, one thinks with regret about Stevenson’s unfinished projects, not only Weir of Hermiston but the Covenanting novel Heathercat and The Young Chevalier, all three books mentioned in his last letter to Barrie.

Barrie was eager to visit Stevenson in Samoa – one of Stevenson’s letters had given him a lively picture of family life at Vailima. The visit was postponed because of his mother’s health. She had at first been jealous of Stevenson, an author more famous than her son. Barrie amusingly, if whimsically, gives an account of how she was brought to change her mind in his memoir of her, the chapter being reprinted as an appendix here. Also reprinted is a letter he wrote in 1922 to Rosalind Masson who was publishing a collection of reminiscences of Stevenson. In this he invented a meeting that might have happened when he was a student in Edinburgh and met a young man wearing a velvet jacket and then spent an evening with him in Rutherford’s bar.

The letters are delightful, sometimes intelligently perceptive about the Scottish character and about other authors and their books – neither of them liked Hardy’s Tess, for instance. Some will look for a certain amount of mutual back-scratching, and not fail to find it. In extenuation one might remark that friendship between writers often arises from admiration for each other’s work and so expression of this is natural and indeed proper.

The book comes with an excellent introduction by the editor Michael Shaw, lecturer in Scottish Literature at Stirling University, and he also supplies useful and interesting notes. Sandstone Press are also to be congratulated. Not only is the book modestly priced, but it is an unusually handsome and elegant production – unusual for these days anyway.

I doubt if it will add to anyone’s knowledge or understanding of Stevenson, if only because his side of the correspondence has already been published in his Collected Letters, but it may, and indeed should, encourage some to take an interest in Barrie’s work, and do so discarding some of the common prejudices. After all, Stevenson, a good judge of his contemporaries, coupled Barrie with Kipling as stars of the crop of writers ten or 15 years younger than himself.

A Friendship in Letters: Robert Louis Stevenson & JM Barrie, edited by Michael Shaw, Sandstone Press, 245pp, £11.99

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