RLS First Tries Writing Fiction

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 266-267:

Robert Louis Stevenson is best remembered as a novelist, but until his thirties he found the scope of a novel daunting and was reluctant to attempt one. By the end of 1879 he did have three works of nonfiction in print, the two travel narratives and Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. In addition he had published twelve essays and fourteen short stories, many of them in Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill Magazine. A historian explains that a demand for such work had been created by a proliferation of new periodicals that needed “to fill columns of white space with agreeable reading matter.” They brought in some income, but not nearly enough to live on.

The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short. Matthews emphasized the excellence of Poe and Hawthorne in this genre; Louis admired and consciously emulated them. Late in life he gave a penetrating description of the new aesthetic: “The dénouement of a long story is nothing; it is just a ‘full close,’ which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning.”

The early stories are interesting as first steps in the storyteller’s art, but are completely overshadowed by Louis’s later achievements. One collection, published later in book form as New Arabian Nights, was admired for its experimentalism. In it a prince of Bohemia seeks out adventures in London in imitation of the caliph in the original Arabian Nights, which Louis had read and enjoyed as a boy. The critic George Saintsbury praised “the fertility of extravagant incident, grim or amusing or simply bizarre, with the quiet play of the author’s humour in the construction of character, the neatness of his phrase, the skill of his description, the thoroughly literary character of his apparently childish burlesque.”

Some reviewers thought that the author must have been laughing at the reader, others that he was laughing at himself. A writer in the Century Magazine suggested that it might be both:

The stories are linked together by the adventures of one central character, who is half Monte Cristo and half Haroun al Raschid up to the last page, where in an unexpected fashion he leaves you laughing at him, laughing at yourself, and wondering how long his inventor has been laughing at you both. This is the book on the face of it. But then, in fact, you cannot speak of the book on the face of it, for under the face is a fascinating depth of subtleties, of ingenuities, of satiric deviltries, of weird and elusive forms of humour, in which the analytic mind loses itself.

Scholars have taken these efforts seriously as harbingers of modernism, but Louis didn’t. Instead he turned to a now-unfashionable narrative mode that he had always loved—romance, in the old sense of action and adventure, not love affairs. By the time New Arabian Nights came out as a single volume in 1882, he had moved far beyond it with his classic Scottish tales “Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men,” and with Treasure Island in its first serialized form.