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They never met, yet JM Barrie and RL Stevenson became soul mates
A FRIENDSHIP IN LETTERS Robert Louis Stevenson
& JM Barrie
Edited by Michael Shaw
Sandstone Press, £11.99
REVIEW BY ROSEMARY GORING
SUPERFICIALLY, it is hard to think of two more different writers than Robert Louis Stevenson and JM Barrie. One was a louche bohemian, ending his days in the South Seas, the other the douce writer of Peter Pan, who kept one foot in childhood, the other in his hometown of Kirriemuir. Yet as a short but intense correspondence between them shows, they had a great deal more in common that their nationality. In outlook and artistic beliefs they were most simpatico. In some respects, they could be called soul mates.
The full correspondence between the pair has never been published like this before. Michael Shaw, an English lecturer at Stirling University, has gathered all their letters to each other over the period February 1892 to October 1894, while RLS was in Samoa.
To these he has added an introduction that outlines their careers and personal affairs, along with an appendix of Barrie’s public tributes after his death to the man the Samoans called Tusitala, the Teller of Tales. Although Shaw’s tone is academic, this is a useful guide to the background to this unique correspondence, made all the most interesting because, while the pair frequently professed the hope to one day meet, they never did. Also helpful – indeed essential in places – are Shaw’s concise footnotes.
After his death, in December 1894, Stevenson’s widow, Fanny Van de
Grift, said that his letters to Barrie were among the gayest he ever wrote. This slim volume bears out that vivacity. Beginning with RLS writing to Barrie to applaud his work, and answer speculation over a possible sequel to Kidnapped, it quickly moved from the friendly formality of admiring strangers to frank and even confessional exchanges that illuminate many private corners of their lives. Among them, though hard to interpret at this distance, is the comment from Barrie that: “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman –”.
In his opening letter, RLS writes that he believes they are both probably “rather Scotty Scots”, adding: “No place so brands a man.” On a later occasion he reflects: “It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so striking and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come.”
Part of his eagerness to embrace
Barrie might have been homesickness. Yet the immediate bond they made, leaping so swiftly into the teasing mockery, outspoken criticism and openly expressed affection that is the mark of true friendship, suggests a deeper connection.
Initially, RLS is the more renowned of the two; Barrie’s play, Peter Pan, was not staged until 1904. But while Stevenson is by this time famous for Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Barrie’s most acclaimed works include Auld Licht Idylls and A Window on Thrums. Yet Stevenson soon drops his faintly mentorish tone: “I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius.”
The pictures each paints of their home life are valuable. Stevenson’s noisy menage at Vailima on the Pacific island of Vanuatu included his wife, stepchildren and mother. As he conjures up the household, its occupants feel vividly present. Where he describes what