The young American, Silas Q Scuddamore, is in a spot. In his bedroom at a hotel in Paris, he has discovered a corpse. Luckly, a doctor is lodging in the next room, and the doctor comes up with a plan. The plan is smooth but all the same somewhat hard to believe. Scuddamore protests:

“Alas!” said Silas, “I have every wish to believe you; but how is it possible? You open up to me a bright prospect, but, I ask you, is my mind capable of receiving so unlikely a solution? Be more generous, and let me further understand your meaning.”

I had to put down the book at this point — Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights — to savor this extraordinary passage. Not so long ago, I would have joined the rest of the world in dismissing Silas’s outburst as overwritten Victorian mush — or gush, if you prefer. In my old age, however, I am reduced to raptures as ridiculous as the prose, which begs, begs on its knees, to be translated into Italian and set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. In doing so, I mean to laugh with, not at, Stevenson, whose eyes twinkle through the words. Com’è possibile? indeed.

I am not here to recommend reading the tales in this collection, which comprises Stevenson’s earliest fiction, but I will say that they all have the effervescence of virtuoso improvisation. You can feel Stevenson making things up as he goes along, gambling that he’ll be able to tie things up at the end. Indeed, this is what saves the tales from camp. And if his tying things up at the end is a bit brisk and even rough-edged, you don’t mind, because he is already bundling you off to the next tale, which will if nothing else recount the further adventures of Florizel, Prince of Bohemia and his faithful companion, Colonel Geraldine, knights of derring-do and virtue in the London of Jack the Ripper.

I don’t think that I should ever have come across the New Arabian Nights if I hadn’t read about them in Camille Peri’s new book about Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Van De Grift, an American from Indianapolis. Their improbable attachment, which involved literary collaboration in a second collection of tales, the New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, began outside of Paris and ended, as I think most people know, in Samoa. They married when Fanny was 40 and Louis (as Peri calls him) ten years younger. Louis’s writer friends were not keen on Fanny, to say the least, and she has come down to us as a headstrong drag on Stevenson’s already precarious health. In John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the two of them, she can easily be mistaken for a heap of carpet in the background. Sargent was obviously attracted to Stevenson, and Peri’s description sparkles with innuendo:

Louis, in his customary velvet jacket, paces away from [Fanny] in long strides, twisting his mustache and looking at the viewer as if suddenly caught in midthought. Between them, a door opens onto a dark hallway, suggesting tension. One senses that Sargent would have liked Louis to continue walking off the canvas and out of the domestic scene. (282)

The picture was painted at Skerryvore, the country house that the Stevensons rented outside of Bournemouth. Bournemouth was something of a seaside spa and it was hoped that the air would be good for Louis’s health. He was thought to be tubercular; in fact, he seems to have suffered from bronchiectasis. No big difference, given that his particular treatment for pulmonary hemorrhaging was relentless chain smoking. I’d always supposed that it was his respiratory affliction that killed him, but in fact he died of stroke. One way or another, the cigarettes got him. The amazing thing is that he lived to be 44.

Stevenson grew up in the prosperous New Town of Edinburgh, the only child of a lighthouse engineer who hoped to be followed in his profession by his son. All that came of this was the fictional shipwreck near Erraid, an islet off the Isle of Mull, in Kidnapped, an event that occurred more than a century before the erection of an actual lighthouse there by the Stevenson firm. Louis appears to have been a born writer, but of what was the question. His early inclination was to journalism, and if his work in this line did not contribute to his immortality, it honed his penchant for calling spades spades; his account of crossing the Atlantic in the company of Scottish emigrants in steerage was deemed to be unpublishably frank. Nonetheless, as the little excerpt quote above shows, Stevenson was writing at a time when literary English was suffering from paroxysms of theatricality. Stripping the language of Victorian grandiosity would become the true subject matter of most advanced English prose, particularly that of American fiction, throughout the following century. What saved Louis from unreadability was his choosing boys as his target audience. Treasure Island, begun in 1883, is told in a style that derives its power from undercurrents instead of eruptions; the preposterous indulgences of the New Arabian Nights (1877-80) have been put on a serious diet. The first draft was read to Lloyd Osbourne, the surviving son of Fanny’s first marriage.

While the adventures in Stevenson’s life were mostly imaginary, Fanny’s were all too real. She married Sam Osbourne, a bounder in the making, as a teenager, and followed him to the silver mines of Nevada, where the living was not easy; among other achievements, Fanny learned to make her own furniture. When Sam gave up silver for the law, the couple moved with their children, Belle and Lloyd, to San Francisco, where Sam continued to move around on his own. After about twenty years of his feckless infidelity, Fanny decided to take her children, of whom there were now three, to Europe, so that she could study art. (This voyage entailed a second traversing of the Isthmus of Panama; only upon her return to San Francisco could she avail herself of the new transcontinental railroad). She returned to California, although she had met and fallen in love with Louis in France — their meeting at Grez-sur-Loing, in the Fontainebleau forest outside of Paris, was as unlikely as any Western exploit — because Sam would not give her a divorce. Louis eventually followed her there. When Sam finally changed his mind, Fanny and Louis married, and spent their honeymoon at a mining camp in Silverado.

Peri argues that Fanny devoted her life to taking care of Louis, and her case is persuasive; what made it seem unlikely at the time must have been Fanny’s resemblance to Annie Oakley, the Girl of the Golden West, and Barbara Stanwyck all rolled into one little woman. Although petite, Fanny was basically, a tough broad, and even if she liked nice things, she never had the patience for ladylike airs. She and her second husband had formidable tempers and engaged in a good deal of basically companionate shouting.

The architecture of A Wilder Shore is superb, and the long, copious tale is well told. But there is a great deal of unimportant speculation: “The desolate Nevada wilderness that Fannie saw from the stagecoach must have seemed almost unearthly, with its dry lake beds and desert seas dotted by sagebrush and squat piñon pines.” (18) Amid these must-haves there is the occasional purple patch, not nearly as lovable as Stevenson’s:

But his strength had lifted her from the emptiness that must have felt like it would last a lifetime. She could not let him die now. She was guided not only by love, but by her firm belief that the world had not seen all that Robert Louis Stevenson had to give. (166)

Aside from A Child’s Garden of Verses — I was lucky enough to grow up with the delightful Golden Books edition, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen — I read no Stevenson until I was in my seventies. I had no buckles to swash in. I gasped for the air of consciousness, which was not to be found in the company of men. I read the Hardy Boys but would have preferred the Nancy Drews. I found happiness with Jane Austen in my teens. Austen would teach me that, regardless of the marriage plots, it is that quality of the  writing that determines the excitement. A lifetime of following her advice (via the enormous respect that Henry James had for the creator of Jekyll and Hyde, would finally take me to Stevenson, whom I would discover to be a surprisingly great writer, and not just a raconteur anticipating Conan Doyle or Joseph Conrad. I am grateful, however, to Camille Peri, for having introduced me to the New Arabian Nights, in which the ghost of Bugs Bunny lurking in the shadow of Stevenson’s muse has free play.