Travels with a Donkey, Robert Louis Stevenson, Folio Society, 1967 (9th pr.)

Description: Another classic from the Folio Society! Illustrated beautifully by Edward Ardizzone. Ninth printing (1990). From the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Travels with a Donkey (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Travels-with-a-Donkey-in-the-Cevennes): "Recovering on the French Riviera from a respiratory ailment, Stevenson spent 12 days walking 120 miles from the town of Le Monastier to Saint-Jean-du-Gard in the Cévennes mountain range, accompanied only by his donkey, Modestine. A classic of travel literature, Travels gives a humorous account of Modestine’s idiosyncrasies and the mutual adjustments of author and donkey. The account is enlivened by Stevenson’s fresh, vivid descriptions of the landscape and its inhabitants, his detailed record of his travel preparations, and his depiction of his visit to a Trappist monastery." While looking for an interesting review of the book, I came across two gems in the search results: In Conde Nast (https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2013-04-19/pinterest-travel-quote-robert-louis-stevenson): Just when you start feeling cynical about the world and the way we travel, let Stevenson remind you about the ancient art of wandering: "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign." And a wonderful literary/critical review of Stevenson's life in the New Criterion by Joseph Epstein (https://newcriterion.com/article/the-short-happy-life-of-robert-louis-stevenson/): Stevenson’s was one of those large, flowing talents of the kind that always seem to leave lots of spillage in the form of unfinished books and finished books that probably ought never to have been begun. (He claimed to have made ten or twelve serious runs at writing a novel before completing his first, at age thirty-one, Treasure Island.) I mention the spillage only because Stevenson was working from a cracked glass to begin with, by which I mean that his health was wretched. From early childhood he suffered upper respiratory ailments—even today it is not completely certain that it was tuberculosis—that left him wracked by coughs and ruined by fevers; he grew up bone thin and slightly bug-eyed, perpetually susceptible to illness, disease, and every physical disaster. In Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s memorial medallion of Stevenson, the subject is working, characteristically, in bed, a blanket over his propped up knees, a pad on his lap, a cigarette in hand. While Stevenson was still alive, Henry James, in an essay in the Century Magazine, did not scruple to remark that “it adds immensely to the interest of volumes through which there draws so strong a current of life to know that they are not only the work of an invalid, but have largely been written in bed, in dreary ‘health resorts,’ in the intervals of sharp attacks.” In “Aes Triplex,” one of Stevenson’s best essays, he said, well knowing whereof he spoke, that the human body, viewed pathologically, is “a mere bag of petards.” In the same essay, written when he was twenty-eight, Stevenson wrote that “it is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser . . . better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom.” He himself died, after putting in a morning’s writing, giving a French lesson to his step-grandchild, and helping his wife prepare a mayonnaise, in Samoa, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of forty-four. Stevenson loved life, and with an intensity perhaps granted only to those who are denied full participation in it. He took life not as a struggle but as an adventure. Although he might from time to time complain of one or another of his many maladies “unhorsing” him, he always rode on, viewing himself, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, one of “freedom’s athletes.” A literary man to the tips of his long and emaciated fingers, he nonetheless despised all that he thought deadening in literary culture. He disliked realism of the kind made famous by Zola for its heavy emphasis on technique, and of it wrote: “Those who like death have their innings today with art that is like mahogany and horsehair furniture, solid, true, serious and dead as Caesar.” A good part of his enthusiasm for Whitman was owing to the fact that the American poet struck “the brave, vivacious note,” building courage in his readers and defeating indifference. Again and again the appetite for life, with its small but regular pleasures, comes through in Stevenson. Let theologians and philosophers argue whether life gives preparation for death or death gives meaning to life, as far as Stevenson was concerned, “a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question.” How explain this inexorably cheerful view of life on the part of a man whose early years supplied the perfect conditions to breed a prince of grievance and gloom? As a first datum, take the city of Edinburgh. In a brief essay on Edinburgh, the city of his birth and upbringing, Stevenson noted that “the weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring.” In Edinburgh, Stevenson adds, “the delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been some times tempted to envy them their fate.” To grow up in fragile health—and Stevenson’s respiratory ailments were discovered when he was but two years old—in a city of tempests, lashing rain, and perpetual damp was an early indication that life’s blessings are not evenly distributed at birth. Stevenson’s parents, in their odd differences of temperament, were themselves a mixed blessing. Owing to his mother’s poor health—his illness is said to have been inherited from her—he was an only child in a house that sometimes took on the air of a sickroom. He probably also inherited his cheerful disposition from his mother, for she was intrepidly optimistic, to the point of sailing off to the South Seas with her son and his family when she was well along in life. His father offset his mother’s jolly optimism with regular plunges into a deep melancholia that biographers tend to chalk up to the grim pessimism found at the heart of Calvinism. An engineer specializing in lighthouses, as his father before him had been, Thomas Stevenson was known for his work in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination. The Stevensons never bothered to patent any of their inventions; holding government appointments, they felt that in good conscience these patents were owed to the nation. But then conscience was ever of concern to Stevenson’s father, whose sense of his own unworthiness his son called “morbid.” Stevenson loved his father, and remarked upon his droll humor and the charm of his talk. When the small boy Louis, as Stevenson was called, would wake from one of his many nightmares, it was his father who would arrive to soothe him with tales of adventure of his own invention... ES0/8bjw5

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