David Balfour: The Original Text by Robert Louis Stevenson

Huntington Library Press, $35

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

IN common with countless other writers, Robert Louis Stevenson started as many books, perhaps more, as he ever finished. His wonderful letters, meticulously edited by Ernest Mehew, are replete with ideas for new works that often came to naught. For instance, there was The Adventures of Henry Shovel, a romance of the Peninsular War, which Stevenson appears to have abandoned after completing three chapters. Fighting the Ring, which he was writing with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, was another fiction which failed to fly, as didn’t Jerry Abershaw, The Great North Road, Sophia Scarlett and goodness knows how many more.

One other that stalled at the starting gate was to be called The Young Chevalier, which, says Frank McLynn, one of RLS’s several biographers, was intended to be a Jacobite novel. Based on the “limbo” period between 1749 and 1750, it featured “reappearances” by both Alan Breck and the Master of Ballantrae. “Only one chapter survives, with a portion of another,” mourns McLynn, “but what remains is a fragment of brilliant promise, making all lovers of Stevenson and Jacobite lore regret that he did not see fit to press on with it.”

The year was 1892. It seems that Stevenson, who was then 42 and living in Samoa, suffered a block and, as was his wont, abandoned his stillborn book. Instead, he turned to another project set in the Jacobite era. Working feverishly, he wrote in little more than four months the novel we in the UK now know as Catriona and what was retitled for an American audience as David Balfour, one of the finest works in an opus that is not short of them. Corresponding with his friend Sidney Colvin, Stevenson – styling Catriona with a K – referred to the book as David Balfour. “I think it’s pretty good; there’s a blooming maiden that costs anxiety – she’s as virginal as a billy [Scots for a pal]...Why did I take up David Balfour? I don’t know. A sudden passion...”

This new edition, which is based on the final manuscript held in the Houghton Library at Harvard, has been edited by the Stevenson scholar Barry Menikoff. As he acknowledges in his prefatory notes, David Balfour is a sequel to Kidnapped, which ended not with a bang but with a whimper. The reason for this, Menikoff explains, was that Kidnapped had “reached the end of its serial limit” in the magazine for children in which it first appeared. Readers of this newspaper will surely not need to be reminded that the novel halts gauchely in mid-scene after which its ‘editor’ says farewell to its hero “for the time”. Whether the further adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck “may be some day set forth”, he adds, “is a thing...that hinges on the public fancy”.

The success of Kidnapped, first published in 1886, ensured that assuming its author lived long enough he would eventually get round to picking up the story where he had left off. But David Balfour is very different in tone to its more playful, rambunctious and – dare one suggest it – less serious predecessor. It is among other things a remembrance of times past, of the places of Stevenson’s youthful meanderings, and the work of a man nearing the end of his precarious life. It is as if, like Joyce in Trieste memorialising Dublin, Stevenson wanted to recreate the Edinburgh and Lothians of his early years before ill-health and wanderlust encouraged him to seek more clement climes. He was never happier than when on the move, a sentiment his principal characters share. His use of Scots is likewise symptomatic of his homesickness, of his yearning to remember. For while he editorialises in English, he has Alan and David speak in the tongue-twisting, pungent argot of his forebears.

Stevenson, Menikoff relates, was “punctilious and very eager” to ensure that what he wrote was what appeared in print. Nevertheless, distance from printers and publishers, whether of magazines or books, complicated a process that has a history of going awry at every juncture. This “original text” attempts to put into print what Stevenson wrote and what he wished to see put between boards. Occasionally, and absurdly, the author’s words were censored; ‘naked’, for instance, was excised in earlier editions, which took their cue from the magazine in which David Balfour first appeared, even though it patently meant ‘plain’. Stevenson also liked usages such as ‘dwellt’ and ‘smellt’ which Menikoff has carefully “regularized”; he preferred, too, to spell words such as ‘neighbour’ and ‘weigh’ as ‘nieghbour’ and ‘wiegh’, which his latest editor has not tolerated. However, he has bowed to Stevenson’s wishes by not capitalising ‘gaelic’, ‘latin’, ‘christian’ and ‘dutch’.

By and large, therefore, David Balfour appears as RLS hoped it would. Though the effort must have pained him, he wrote out the 100,000-word manuscript twice. When he got cramp in his right hand he shifted his pen to his left. He was especially proud of the chapter titled The Tale of Tod Lapraik, “a piece of living Scots” as he described it. “If I had never writ anything but that and Thrawn Janet,” he told Colvin, “still I’d have been a writer.” That was in 1893. A year later, Stevenson, the teller of indelible tales, was no more. “He had just finished a morning’s writing, and he was preparing a salad for lunch with his wife,” reports Menikoff. “It was a very good death.”