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Return to Davos, and to ‘Treasure Island’

Robert Louis Stevenson arrived at Davos, in the Swiss Alps, on Oct. 18, 1881. The invalid Scottish author hated the place but had lost the war of wills with his family and Dr. Reudi, his doctor in Davos, who insisted he return there to pass another winter. The logic was simple. He had a better chance of surviving an Alpine winter than a Scottish one.

Davos was a mountain health resort that catered to victims of consumption, that is, tuberculosis. It is the setting for Thomas Mann’s acclaimed novel on the subject “The Magic Mountain” (1924). Stevenson and his circle still believed that he, too, suffered from the so-called “white death.” They would believe it for six more years until Dr. Trudeau set them straight in Saranac Lake.

Thomas Stevenson, the author’s father, financed this operation designed to keep his only son alive. This time, instead of rooms at the Hotel Belvedere, Louis and his wife Fanny and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, 13, would have more privacy in a rented chalet called Villa am Stein. It was higher up the slope and not far from the hotel where his literary friend John Addington Symonds was staying.

Once settled in, Louis turned his attention to unfinished business. His first adventure novel, “Treasure Island,” was already happening in serial form in Young Folks magazine. Unfortunately, less than half of it was on paper when Stevenson’s inspiration all of a sudden went south while he was still in Scotland. Said Louis in “My First Book”: “Fifteen days I stuck to it and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was empty; there was not one more word of ‘Island’ …”

This was a familiar situation. Finishing a real book had so far eluded RLS, who kind of shrank before the task.

“It is the length that kills,” he said. “Anybody can write a short story — a bad one, I mean — who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. … Although I had attempted the thing with rigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. … Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of ‘Rathillet,’ the ‘Pentland Rising,’ the ‘King’s Pardon,’ ‘Edward Darren,’ ‘A Country Dance,’ and a ‘Vendetta in the West’ … these reams are now all ashes and have been received again into the soil.”

So why did “Treasure Island” not end up like its predecessors? Possibly a moral obligation to James Henderson and a deadline to meet in the latter’s weekly magazine, Young Folks, had something to do with it. And so it was. Said RLS: “Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale, and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at the rate of a chapter a day, I finished “Treasure Island” … what was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had finished a tale and written ‘The End.'”

And that was just the beginning. But Robert Louis Stevenson’s first big hit wasn’t an overnight sensation. “Treasure Island,” he said, “appeared duly in the story paper, where it figured in the ignoble midst without woodcuts and attracted the least attention. I did not care.” Think of a nuclear-powered locomotive starting at zero miles per hour and gradually gathering steam and momentum until it is unstoppable. That is “Treasure Island,” still in print.

What makes a story like this a timeless classic? Style must be a factor, or else you wouldn’t hear the word so much. No one worked harder at perfecting his style than RLS, and he said so himself in Saranac Lake to George Iles from Montreal: “No one ever had such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it, day in, day out, and I frankly believe, thanks to my dire industry, I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world.” By the time Long John Silver came into focus, his creator had invented a style that gave his writing a cinematic touch before there was cinema. Bertolt Brecht, German poet and playwright, said that Stevenson’s writing was the closest thing at the time to an action movie and cited chapter 9 of “The Master of Ballantrae,” written in Saranac Lake, as an example. Julian MacLaren Ross and Dylan Thomas agreed. G.K. Chesterton observed this quality, too, and wrote in “Robert Louis Stevenson” that his “images stand out in very sharp outline; and are, as it were, all edges.” Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie fantasy is a direct descendent of “Treasure Island.”

What about escapism? Islands are good for that, and English literature is full of them: e.g. Moore’s “Utopia,” Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Dafoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Wyss’s “The Swiss Family Robinson,” Ballantyne’s “Coral Island” and its 20th-century counterpart, Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” Marrymat’s “Masterman Ready,” Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” Huxley’s “Island,” Verne’s “Mysterious Island” — the list could go on, but “Treasure Island” still sits at the top of the heap for recognition and popularity.

The escapism in Stevenson’s first book involves the single most damning trait of Western civilized man — his obsession to acquire wealth at someone else’s expense, which requires debasement of self. For some final views on the author’s first book, Nicholas Rankin, a living author and current British representative of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake, gets the last word from his first book “Dead Man’s Chest — Travels After Robert Louis Stevenson” (1987).

“Treasure Island is a day-dream with some of the brutal qualities of a nightmare; scarred, soiled, deformed pirates curse and murder. Blind Pew’s tap-tapping stick has real terror and, as RLS said, it includes ‘stunning violence.’ … Whatever its critics may have thought, all over the world ‘Island’ has been abridged, adapted, cartooned, dramatized, edited, filmed, illustrated, musicalized, parodied … and endlessly translated. … Stevenson would write richer and subtler books, but ‘Island’ appeals to me because it has all the speed and exhilaration and terror of the most brilliant cartoon film. It is entirely absorbing and yet pleasantly removed from the greyer complexities of real life. Its completion in just over a month of work was a marvel, but its survival a century later as a popular classic is a mark of genius.”

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