Claire Harman’s Myself and the Other Fellow has enough ribald anecdote and irreverent detail to do her subject proud, though she includes too much Fanny for polite company. Fortunately, when Harman is not busy lauding Stevenson’s wife, she spends scant moments speculating on Stevenson’s sexuality and the “crushes” of Henry James and other would-be admirers. She is even kind enough to spare us the oh-so-typical post-colonial readings of his time in the Pacific. Recounting a delightful episode where a Samoan servant is introduced to the wonders of staircases, Harman shares Stevenson’s merriment: “He found it so novel that for two or three days he did nothing but run up and down, ‘chuckling and crowing in an ecstasy of joy.’”
Because Harman concentrates the bulk of her efforts on Stevenson’s Samoan adventures with Fanny and Company, the dismalness of his hypochondriac “invalid” years fades as he learns pidgins, takes to wearing cotton sarongs, nestles tropical buds behind his ears, and battles jungle growth with his bare hands. In short, Harman notes, “Stevenson had gone native.”
Fame and fortune, which had eluded Stevenson in his “rovings” about the Continent, finally found him on the shores of the West—much to the chagrin of his British colleagues and friends. But soon Stevenson confesses:
The whole celebrity business was particularly characteristic; the Captain has certainly never read a word of mine; and as for the Jew with the Kodak, he had never heard of me till he came on board. There was a third admirer who sent messages in to the Captain’s cabin asking if the Lion would accept a gift of Webster’s Unabridged. I went out to him and signified a manly willingness to accept a gift of anything.
By the end of the biography, we are left to wonder at how Harman is able to make the death of a man whose entire life was leading toward the grave so jarring, so abrupt. And just as his novel Weir of Hermiston ends—mid-thought—the brain hemorrhage which attacked while Stevenson helped Fanny make mayonnaise “seemed unprovoked, a willful convulsion of brute nature.”