BYU-Idaho professor appointed director of New York museum
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REXBURG — Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” are familiar titles to readers of classic literature. Trenton Olsen was aware of these books for years, but when he was introduced to the author’s personal essays as a graduate student, he became a lifelong fan.
The 39-year-old Brigham Young University-Idaho English professor is the editor of “The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson” — the first complete edition of Stevenson’s essays ever published. He’s now the president of the Stevenson Society of America, which owns and operates the Robert Louis Stevenson Cottage Museum in Saranac Lake, New York. Olsen was named the museum’s director last November.
“Being the volunteer director of a museum 2,000 miles away wasn’t on my to-do list,” Olsen tells EastIdahoNews.com. “But I’m really honored to be involved, and it feels like really important work to pour my energy into.”
Not only does it allow him to be involved in a project he’s passionate about, but Olsen says it also provides “remarkable” professional experience for BYU-I students, who help with everything from designing the museum’s website, brochures and other promotional materials to doing archival research.
The museum is the site of a cottage Stevenson lived in for six months before traveling across the U.S. It’s the first site in the world dedicated to the famous author.
Olsen visited the museum for the first time last summer. He was both impressed and dismayed with what he saw.
“It had the most impressive collection of artifacts from his life I had ever seen,” says Olsen. But there was “no funding for essential building repairs” and “no plan in place for what would happen” when the 73-year-old caretaker retired.
That motivated Olsen to get involved and later led to his appointment as the museum’s director.
The thing that sets Stevenson apart from other literary figures, according to Olsen, is his devotion to “the art of living.”
“A lot of writers spend their time at a desk and what’s interesting is what’s going on internally,” Olsen explains. “Stevenson, early on, decided he would devote himself to what he called ‘the art of living.’ He only lived 44 years, but he seemed to pack several lifetimes of experience into that time. His life is a remarkable story.”
Highlights of Stevenson’s life
The Scottish-born author lived in seven places around the globe throughout his life, including England, France, Switzerland, New York, California, Hawaii and Samoa.
“He canoed across France and Belgium, he went on a 120-mile backpacking trip through a French Mountain range and he was once arrested in France on suspicions of being a German spy,” Olsen says.
Later, he met Fanny Osbourne in France. She was from California and had come there to study painting. They fell in love, despite the fact that she was 11 years older than him, and eventually married. She’d been married to another man for 22 years when Stevenson first proposed, but that didn’t stop him.
He traveled across the country to get her, despite the disapproval of his parents.
Stevenson also “inadvertently started a forest fire in Monterey, California,” which he writes about in one of his essays.
“I wished to be certain whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree,” Stevenson wrote. “Instead of plucking off a piece for my experiment, what should I do but walk up to a great pine tree … strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels.”
The tree erupted in flames “like a rocket,” Stevenson writes, and “in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire.” Stevenson ran away as a wagon arrived to battle the blaze.
Given that Stevenson was “dangerously ill” with symptoms similar to tuberculosis for most of his life, Olsen says the number of books he wrote — a total of 13 novels and dozens more short stories, poems and essays, according to the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum — is impressive.
And the possibility of death as a result of his illness made him particularly thoughtful about what it means to live, which is what Olsen finds most interesting about Stevenson’s life.
Olsen shares a passage from one of Stevenson’s essays that he feels captures the overall message of his work for readers today.
“A man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all,” Stevenson wrote. “Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read.”
Olsen will be speaking later this month at an event called “Facing death and embracing life with Robert Louis Stevenson: A talk and book signing with Trenton B. Olsen.”
It’s happening Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. in room 147 of the Ricks Building on the BYU-Idaho campus. It’s free and open to the public.
