THE FABULOUS INVALID

By John Skow

WHETHER ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was more than a writer of wonderful stories for 12-year-old boys is a question settled beyond doubt by this readable and authoritative biography: he was also, at the very least, the jaunty and flamboyant hero of an extraordinary life story. Frank McLynn's Robert Louis Stevenson (Random House; 567 pages; $30) describes a hardworking idler, a Scottish Calvinist who remade himself as a romantic and (four days out of any seven) a convincing bohemian, a smothered son who remained boyish all his short life, and an invalid who lived a life of arduous travel and physical adventure. (Another frail, literary, boyish adventurer of the time comes to mind, and though R.L.S. and Theodore Roosevelt seem never to have met, they probably would have enjoyed each other's company.)

As with all such stories, everything can be explained about Stevenson except genius. He was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the precocious, cosseted only child of wealthy parents. R.L.S. got the attention that would have served a dozen siblings, and the enormous coziness and safety of an indulged small boy in an upper-middle-class Victorian household was what he evoked years later in the poems of A Child's Garden of Verses. His father Thomas was a mighty builder of lighthouses and breakwaters, and the future author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped saw more of the sea than most Scottish boys. His mother Maggie was a beloved invalid herself, and most of the boy's care was taken over by a kindly but ferociously religious nurse.

Adolescence had not yet been invented when R.L.S. reached his late teens, but he seems to have been a prototype. In college he took the pose of dilettantism to extremes, reacting to parental strictness (his father fined him a penny for each slang word he uttered) by rarely showing up for classes. When law exams loomed, he persuaded a friendly doctor to say he was too ill to face them and should be sent off on vacation. In both Edinburgh and London he prowled the seedier neighborhoods late at night, sometimes dressed as a gentleman, sometimes as a ruffian, noting the differences in how he was treated. He appears to have had at least one serious affair with a prostitute, probably broken off by parental pressure.

A pattern in Stevenson's life was the presence of a powerful controlling figure -his childhood nurse, his father-despite whose efforts he did more or less what he pleased. R.L.S. disguised the extent of his freethinking from his father, a decent and literate man of burgherlike propriety who increased or shut down financial support according to his opinion of his son's escapades and his view of the moral tone of his literary production. Subsidies were necessary; the young writer produced an astonishing flow of work, especially for a chronic consumptive, but the serialization rights to Treasure Island, for instance, paid only about -L-30, and although Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a huge seller in 1886, some 250,000 of the sales-four-fifths of the total-were of pirated copies in the U.S.

By the time Thomas Stevenson died, in 1887, leaving his son financially independent, R.L.S. had acquired another intrusive minder, his wife Fanny Osbourne. Biographer McLynn clearly despises Fanny and her extensive family-which, at the time R.L.S. met her, included Belle, a spoiled 18-year-old daughter; Lloyd, a rotten 11-year-old son; and a useless, not-quite-divorced husband. Not all biographers have seen things this way, as McLynn admits, but he is persuasive. Fanny was 40 when they met, 10 years older than R.L.S., an artistic poseur given to spiritualism and hypochondria who tried to cut Stevenson off from his wide circle of literary friends and often acted as censor; she successfully bulldozed him into burning an offensive first draft of Dr. Jekyll.

The last dozen years of Stevenson's life saw him wandering with amazing optimism, usually accompanied by his mother, Fanny and her children, and a long-suffering maid whom Fanny abused. The quest was for a climate his bleeding lungs and Fanny's vapors could tolerate. He tried Davos in Switzerland, Saranac Lake in New York State, a deserted mining camp above California's Napa Valley, and finally Hawaii and the South Pacific. His pattern was to write (and drink, converse, hike and sail) to exhaustion and illness; Fanny's was marital chess playing, countering his real collapses with her vividly enacted imaginary ones.

When he settled for good, it was in Samoa, in a grand plantation house designed for large-scale entertaining. He wrote steadily, made more and more money, and happily or resignedly spent all of it keeping his deadbeat in-laws afloat. He died at 44, in 1894, having written his own requiem: "Under the wide and starry sky/ Dig the grave and let me lie/ Glad did I live and gladly die ..." McLynn tells his story with grace and skill, and only a dull reader will finish this biography without heading for the library to search out a complete edition of Stevenson's marvelous but now mostly unread short tales.