He had passed from the mists of Scotland where he had seen the light in 1850 to the colors of the Samoa Islands which he had chosen to live and where he died on 3 December 1894. He also wrote about himself, in the epitaph, speaking of a happy life and death happy, like the sailor who returns home from his journey or the hunter who returns home coming down the hill. Robert Louis Stevenson in reality did not have a life like this, except in the last part, but literature was certainly happy for having received as an inheritance his works which belong to the universal heritage. The titles “Treasure Island”, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, “The Black Arrow” alone would be enough to recognize him as one of the most popular and significant authors of the nineteenth century, with a authoritative place among the classics of all time.
Poor health and an imagination sparked by the nanny’s stories
His life, which he defines as happy, was immediately marked by health problems of probable hereditary origin, on the part of his mother of French blood, but also by an imagination sparked from early childhood by the stories he heard from the governess-nurse Alison Cunningham whom he familiarly called Cunny. If it had been according to family tradition, he would have become an engineer, but despite enrolling at the University of Edinburgh, this was not his path; in the end he will fall back on law studies, without ever even thinking about practicing law.
His vocation was in fact to write, while his immediate objective in order to do so was to avoid those respiratory problems and physical frailty that afflicted him by seeking and finding locations with milder climates than those of his native Scotland, such as southern France. In his early twenties he began writing and publishing his first essays, from which a natural talent for literature emerged. Just as it was with his studies, also from a sentimental point of view he had entered into a collision course with his family because he had become infatuated with the American Fanny Vandegrift, divorced and with two children, who he married in San Francisco at the age of thirty. before returning to Europe.
The journey on the South Seas and the landing on the island he called Vailima
Three years after the marriage, in 1883, he published one of his masterpiece novels, “Treasure Island”, and in 1886 the absolute masterpiece “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, written in less than a week. . Just as he had exalted the spirit of adventure with the world of pirates, Stevenson investigated the dark folds of the human soul, anticipating the themes of psychoanalysis and providing a disturbing fresco of the struggle between good and evil. Even though it wasn’t his thing, he had agreed to write a work on commission, not even being able to imagine that the publisher’s invitation would completely change his life, which was always in the balance due to health problems.
Together with his family he had therefore undertaken a journey lasting several months in the exotic atmospheres of the South Seas, French Polynesia, Tahiti and Hawaii (at the time the Sandwich Islands): the work did not proceed as quickly as it should have, but his delicate health had recorded an incredible improvement from the Pacific climates, so much so that he decided to settle in 1890 on an island in the Samoan archipelago which he himself renamed Vailima.
Here he soon became a character loved by the local populations who called him Tusitala in their language, for his ability as a storyteller. Stevenson told and knew how to tell, elevating his experiences as a perpetually ill child capable of processing the suggestions of childhood, dreams and adult passion for history and adventure into an art form. He was writing a story on the Scottish frontier, so different from the exotic landscapes that surrounded him, when he died, probably due to a brain haemorrhage. He was 44 years old. As per his wish, he was buried on Mount Vaea and his verses intended to be his epitaph were reported on the tomb. Today the house where he lived happily is a museum.
The great season of Rai TV dramas: Majano and Albertazzi
“”The Black Arrow” has a very particular place in the Italian collective imagination thanks to the television adaptation which in the 1960s made him the extraordinary director who popularized literary masterpieces in the formula of the drama called Anton Giulio Majano. He summarized in installments the Stevenson’s novel and kept tens of millions of viewers glued to the TV between December 1968 and February 1969 with seven highly anticipated weekly events.
In the black and white of Rai at the time, all the colors of Stevenson’s creative vein were seen, with a very young Loretta Goggi (she was not even 18 and her parents’ consent was necessary) destined for an extraordinary career, in the role of Joan Sedley, Aldo Reggiani who played Dick Shelton, an extraordinary Arnoldo Foà as the “bad” Sir Daniel Brackley. Riz Ortolani signed the splendid soundtrack and the theme song was known to everyone. Maybe a coincidence, or maybe not, but while “The Black Arrow” was on air, Giorgio Albertazzi conceived, wrote the script and directed a miniseries that Rai would broadcast immediately afterwards, from 16 February to 9 March 1969: “Jekyll” .
Anton Giulio Majano himself had adapted “Treasure Island” for children in 1959. The novel had been faithfully summarized in five episodes which exalted the little Italians fascinated by the story of pirates which they then reinterpreted in courtyard games, with the 15 men on the dead man’s chest and a bottle of rum (the theme song) and the adventures of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver with Captain Flint’s map. It was all shot in the studio but what was missing was filled in by imagination, with perfect Stevensonian spirit.