Insights into RLS at last delivered

(eds), Yale University Press, #29.95 each (pp 525 and 352 respectively).

Stevenson's posterity is a messy affair. Manuscripts are scattered

across the globe, texts have been bowdlerised, and previous editors,

careless or censorious, have left scars. As Ernest Mehew points out,

some letters have even been split, with half the text now to be found in

one library, the remainder in another. Assembling these volumes, the

first of eight, must have been a gargantuan task.

Facing Booth and Mehew there was a secondary problem, simple yet huge.

RLS was mad for words, addicted to language, and in his brief life he

wrote incessantly, treating letter-writing as casually as others would

treat conversation. With many letters still missing, this new and

beautiful edition brings together 2800 items from 40 years of, as Louis

would have said, ''scribbling''. Some idea of the scale of the editors'

achievement can be gleaned from the fact that Bradford Booth, who died

in 1968, started work on the letters in the 1950s.

Long awaited, this collection was also badly needed. Typical of their

time, Stevenson's family and friends took it upon themselves to censor

many letters while destroying others they thought to be ''unsuitable''.

Such editions as there have been have, in effect, lied by omission. The

1895 Vailima Letters published by Stevenson's friend Sidney Colvin were,

as Mehew tactfully puts it, ''expurgated''. The 1899 Letters of Robert

Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends were little better. Hitherto,

only 1100 or so items from the vast corpus have appeared in print.

It is fair to say, however, that recent biographers of Stevenson have

lived in something like dread of the appearance of this new edition. For

several years we were warned that anyone lacking access to the Yale

edition could not possibly produce a true portrait of this mercurial

figure. These two volumes cover Stevenson's life from the age of four

(when, via dictation to his mother, he told his father that ''I do want

you to come home very soon very'') to the age of 29. At that point he

had just returned from his trek across the Cevennes with the donkey

Modestine (''a love: price, 65 francs and a glass of brandy'') and had

barely begun his brief career.

Thus far, however, there is no real evidence of a need to revise our

opinions. These letters give, if anything, a fuller version of what was

already known but they do not add substantially to our knowledge. That

may come later -- in accounts of the mental breakdown suffered by

Stevenson's wife on Samoa, for example -- here we meet a familiar, still

delightful, figure.

It is, for example, confirmed that Stevenson's parents were devout but

loving; that Thomas Stevenson was not entirely, or even mainly, a

Presbyterian patriarch. We have proof, should it be needed, that the

childhood of RLS was a happy one, despite his many illnesses. And there

is evidence aplenty that his wonderful sense of place, his profound

sensitivity to atmosphere and landscape, was present at an early age.

In other words, even those familiar with RLS will find these books a

delight. He was, quite simply, a masterly letter writer, full of energy

and wit, whose relationship with the page was like a drunkard's

relationship with the bottle. Take this random example from December,

1874, to his ''madonna'' Frances Sitwell:

''Fifteen degrees of frost last night; and half an hour ago (10.30)

ten degrees in the thermometer at our drawing room window; such a

ringing jolly morning. I had to cover my nose and mouth as I went up to

College this morning, the air caught in my nose so shrewdly and tasted

of frost -- that sick, heavy, cold taste of frost -- so badly after it

was down.''

The taste of frost: you can sense his pleasure in the description,

feel his eagerness to convey the nature of a simple physical experience.

But then physicality is at the heart of Stevenson's prose style, the

style over which he laboured for so long. In one way these early letters

were part of his apprenticeship. Even when, in illness, he was less than

precise he still managed to convey how the world felt. This, again at

random, from Avignon in the winter of 1873, after he had been ''ordered

south'': ''The whole air was filled with sunset and the sound of bells .

. .''

There is much more that could be said. It is sufficient only to add

that the publication of these volumes is, for this reviewer, the most

significant of the many events that will mark the centenary of

Stevenson's death. Some of these marvellous letters have been in the

post for decades. Booth and Mehew are entitled to our gratitude for at

last ensuring their delivery.