Book Review: Arthur Ransome’s Long-Lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Kirsty Nichol Findlay

edited by Kirsty Nichol Findlay

The Boydell Press, 214pp, £30

Review by Jenni Calder

In June 1913 the 29-year-old Arthur Ransome was in Finland working on a critical study of Robert Louis Stevenson. Already well established as a writer, though not yet as a novelist, he had published books on Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. The latter had brought an accusation of libel from Alfred Douglas: the ensuing court case, which Douglas lost, attracted plenty of publicity for Ransome’s book.

Ransome was in Finland to escape an unhappy marriage as well as to write on Stevenson, whose books he had greatly enjoyed as a boy. They helped to set him on his own track to becoming a hugely popular writer of fiction. In due course Ransome’s marriage came to an end, but the Stevenson book was never completed. In 1990 a brown paper parcel, which had somehow found its way to a London solicitors’ office, was discovered and opened. It contained a bundle of manuscript – Ransome’s work in progress on Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Study. The text has been reconstructed and edited by Kirsty Nichol Findlay, and now published along with some of Ransome’s original notes and other contextual material.

Stevenson’s death in 1894 was followed by a spate of studies and reminiscences of his life and work, much of it by friends, family and others who wanted a slice of the extraordinarily popular writer’s life. Sidney Colvin’s heavily edited collection of letters had come out in 1899, and an “authorised” biography by Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour in 1901. Twenty years after the world had mourned RLS’s sudden passing, in Samoa of a brain haemorrhage, seemed a good moment to publish a reassessment of his achievement. A reassessment did indeed appear in 1914, but it wasn’t Arthur Ransome’s. Frank Swinnerton’s barbed debunking of the much-loved author came out before Ransome’s study was finished.

In recent years there has been another spate of biographical and critical work and Stevenson studies have blossomed after many decades when he was rarely taken seriously as a writer for adults. What attracts attentive readers now is the striking modernity of his voice and his complex and unconventional moral outlook. Ransome was himself alert to both modernity and morality, and a hundred years later his appraisal of Stevenson has more than historical value. He read Stevenson with care and commented with perception and freshness. He examines enthusiastically the interconnectedness of life and work. In both, he felt, Stevenson’s “pleasure…was to be on the way” – he experimented in life as he did in his writing, often not sure of his destination.

Ransome writes with a vivid idiosyncrasy that often echoes Stevenson’s own. He finds David Balfour in Kidnapped “intolerable”, but David in Catriona “more actual than the story in which he takes a part”. He goes on to say: “more than once in Stevenson’s books a character seems to stand before us like a reveller the morning after a masquerade, an unimpeachable reality, with remnants of the story hanging about him, the rags and tatters of a fancy dress, pale in the morning light.” This captures beautifully St Ives, for example. He admires Weir of Hermiston as “a work in words nearly resembling the work of his father in stones against the beating of the seas’. He equally admires The Ebb-Tide, a novel that wasn’t much in favour at the time. He recognises the strength of Stevenson’s writing in Scots, in particular Thrawn Janet and Tod Lapraik: “The dialect seems to knit the words together so that there are no interstices to allow reality to slip out.”

Ransome was impressed and intrigued by Stevenson’s craft and his ability to engage the reader, and writes about technique as if he is feeling his way towards the fiction he himself would write. And this is perhaps the real value of what is a brave publishing venture. To be invited to eavesdrop on the way an adventurous writer responds to a pioneer of an earlier generation at a time when the world was about to change is illuminating on many levels. It tells us a great deal about Arthur Ransome, a man who as war correspondent for the Daily News was about to become embroiled in the upheavals that engulfed Russia. It highlights parallels between the lives of two men who defied convention in their lives and their work. And it takes us back to an early and fascinating period of Stevenson critique, when appreciation of his books was nearly swamped by sentimental adulation and distorted by dismissive censure.

Perhaps if Ransome’s sympathetic but balanced study had indeed been published in 1914 it would not have taken so long to reinstate RLS to his deserved position as one of the 19th-century’s most challenging writers. In bringing Ransome’s study to light Kirsty Nichol Findlay has done us a real service.