New Angles

It's hard to believe But there are some . . .

On Rls

And Samoa

COUNTLESS people usually wearisome folk, trying to show erudition or an acquaintance with iterary greatness—h av e written >ooks about Robert Louis Stevenson, tfost are buried deep in the mouldy itore-rooms of forgotten libraries.

Here is a new one, that deserves i better fate.

Stevenson was notable for two or hree unusual things. He probably /as the thinnest man ever to chieve literary greatness—he did ome of his finest work when, bviously, he should have been dead, iinong a thousand writers, he was he man who presented the Poly lesian in his most lovable light, nth great kindness and under fcanding. And he spent the last few ears of his life on a property he ought, named Vailima, in Upolu, Western Samoa, and his tomb now i a famous place, on top of a steep ill near Vailima, outside of Apia.

RLS lived at Vailima with a uriously mixed bag of a family r hich comprised his wife, Fanny, ho was Mrs. Osborne before she as divorced and married Steven m; his mother, a stern old Calvin - ;tic Scotchwoman, who seems to ave imposed a rigid moral code pon Vailima; his two step-children, >obel and Lloyd Osborne, both of horn achieved some fame, after LS died in December, 1894; and a right boy who was Isobel’s son by er first marriage.

Isobel acted as secretary to RLS i the later years of his life, and as very closely associated with le Vailima household. She married man named Strong early in her fe, but the marriage failed, and l 1914 she married Edward Salis iry Field, an American oil magnate, be always was intensely interested l South Pacific Islands affairs.

Fought Over Samoans Isobel Field carried on a lively, iteresting correspondence with the abhsher of the Pacific Islands onthhj, mostly about Samoa. Before le died, in 1953, at the great age 95, she wrote a book, This Life ve Loved, which gave many in mate glimpses of RLS, as she had sen him in the last few years of is life.

Oyer 30 years ago, Mrs. Else Noble aldwell, an American writer, fol ding a wander in the South acific, wrote for Los Angeles Times i article about the Samoan Mau. his came under the notice of Mrs

Isobel Field, and she sharply challenged Mrs. Caldwell s conclusions.

The two women then met and verbally fought on the subject of the Samoans. Out of this arose an enduring friendship.

In her later years, Teuila (as Mrs, Field was known to her close friends) made available to Mrs. Caldwell a great deal of new and hitherto unpublished material about RLS and his wife Fanny, and their life together, especially in the Polynesian Islands. Mrs. Caldwell and Mrs.

Field decided to put it all into a book; but Teuila died before the book was finished. Mrs. Caldwell completed it. „ T i We now have the finished volume,

Last Witness for Robert Louis Stevenson. Not only does it round out the domestic history of the famous author—it also is a lively, well-written account of conditions in Hawaii, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the Marquesas, on the little ships between the archipelagoes, and ir * Samoa, as seen by Stevenson and hi s family group, Students of Stevensonia and their name is legion—cannot afford to be without this book. But, apart altogether from Stevenson, it is well worth reading, because of what it tells about the Islands.—R. (last witness for Robert louis STEVENSON, by Elsie Noble Caldwell.

University of Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma usa. us price, $5.) ’