Claire Harman - Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography

Once, to their amazement, Louis and Bob were caught out by a jeweller in whose shop they had been attempting to act out ‘some piece of vaulting absurdity’. 26 The shopman’s eyes lit up when he realised what was going on: ‘“I know who you are,” he cried; “you’re the two Stevensons.”’ The man said that his colleague would be vexed; he’d been dying to see them in action. Would the young men come back later for tea? And thus, bested by one of their own victims and astonished that their real names were known to anyone, the cousins beat a hasty retreat. Just as Libbelism anticipates some of the fantastic plots of Stevenson’s New ArabianNights , so this scene in the jeweller’s is like a comic version of his story ‘Markheim’. ‘Jink’ was an imaginative release in more ways than one.

At this date, Bob was living at home in the Portobello district of Edinburgh with his widowed mother and sisters and studying at the city’s School of Art. He was going to be an artist, and had been travelling in France for the past few summers with other painter-friends. He had always been a hero-figure to Louis, and now seemed more fortunate than ever: of the two youths, Bob was by far the more attractive, with his fine tall figure and well-grown moustaches (Louis’s weedy lip-hair was the butt of jokes for years). Women all fell for him at a glance, and men loved him for his exuberant erudition and excitable character. The word ‘genius’ was often applied, especially with regard to his talk, though Louis’s characterisation of it perhaps better suggests the description ‘manic’: ‘the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell [ … ] the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination’. 27 But this sort of wild verbal exhibitionism had another charm for Louis; as he said in the same essay, ‘there are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress”.’ 28 In other words, impromptu, collaborative, and always To be continued.

Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had less reason to delight in their nephew’s return to Edinburgh. With his flagrant pursuit of something that hardly had a name yet – la vie bohème – his art studies, his affectations of dress and his insolent wordiness, Bob must have looked like the least appropriate companion possible for their son. The parents didn’t know, of course, about the long drinking sessions in Advocates’ Close, the excesses of Libbelism or the long walks on which Louis and Bob behaved like a couple of mad tramps, singing and dancing on the moonlit roads out of sheer high spirits. They also, presumably, hadn’t heard the story which went about a few years later, that Bob had divided his patrimony into ten equal parts and was going to allot himself one part a year for a decade, at the end of which he would commit suicide. 29 But they knew enough to be worried, and when Thomas Stevenson, snooping among his son’s papers, came upon the comically-intended ‘constitution’ of the LJR – beginning ‘Ignore everything that our parents have taught us’ – he was thrown into a state of angry panic. This was presumably before the evening (31 January 1873) when Thomas decided to challenge his son with some straight questions about his beliefs.

The timing of the interview was unfortunate. Louis had been ill for weeks with diphtheria, and was freshly impressed with the fragility of life and a sense of carpe diem. In the spirit of honest dealing, he decided not. to temporise as usual but to answer his father’s questions as truthfully as he could, saying to Thomas’s face that he no longer believed in the established Church or the Christian religion. ‘If I had foreseen the real Hell of everything since,’ he wrote miserably to Baxter after this spontaneous outburst, ‘I think I should have lied as I have done so often before.’ 30 For what began as an attempt at family openness turned into as traumatic an act of ‘coming out’ as can be imagined: a thunderbolt to the bewildered parents, to whom confirmation of Louis’s atheism was of course much more than a devastating personal rebuke or act of filial aggression; to believers like them, it meant the eternal damnation of their only child’s soul, and the possible contamination of other souls. The chagrin they felt when he abandoned the family profession was nothing to him turning his back on salvation. ‘And now!’ Louis continued in his outpouring to Baxter,

they are both ill, both silent, both as down in the mouth as if – I can find no simile. You may fancy how happy it is for me. If it were not too late, I think I could almost find it in my heart to retract; but it is too late; and again, am I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than Hell upon my father; but can I help it? They don’t see either that my game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a careless infidel: I believe as much as they do, only generally in the inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold.

[ … ] Now, what is to take place? What a damned curse I am to my parents! As my father said, ‘You have rendered my whole life a failure.’ As my mother said, ‘This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.’ And, O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world. 31

The household became eerily quiet, like ‘a house in which somebody is still waiting burial’. His parents went into a state of hushed emergency, Margaret pathetically suggesting that her son join the minister’s youth classes, Thomas locked in his study, reading up Bishop Butler’s Analogy of Religion in order to rejoin the fray. ‘What am I to do?’ Stevenson wrote despairingly to his friend. ‘If all that I hold true and most desire to spread, is to be such death and worse than death, in the eyes of my father and mother, what the devil am I to do?’ 32

The fallout from Louis’s confession continued for months, his father’s anger and his mother’s distress erupting uncontrollably all through the spring and summer of 1873. Margaret wept at church, Thomas was full of dark threats and despairing glances, and condemned his son’s attempts at cheerfulness as ‘heartless levity’. 33 When Bob went off to Antwerp to study art in the spring, Louis felt his misery at home even more sharply, and by the summer was almost prostrated by illness. This was one area where the youth could still count on a sympathetic response from his parents. They agreed that he should have a holiday, somewhere quiet in the countryside, with friendly, trustworthy people. Their choice was Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of Margaret’s niece Maud and her husband, Professor Churchill Babington.

Frances Sitwell was lying on a sofa near a window at her friend Maud Babington’s home when she saw a young man approach up the drive. He was wearing a straw hat and velvet jacket, carried a knapsack and looked hot, having just walked from Bury St Edmunds, a good eight miles away. ‘Here is your cousin,’ she remarked to Maud, who went out through the french window to meet him. The young man – very boyish, and with a strong Scottish accent – seemed shy to begin with, and jumped at the chance to go and visit the moat in the company of Mrs Sitwell’s ten-year-old son, Bertie. But by the end of the day, when he and she began to talk seriously to each other, ‘an instantaneous understanding’ sprang up between them, 34 and strong mutual attraction. ‘Laughter, and tears, too, followed hard upon each other till late into the night,’ Mrs Sitwell wrote, ‘and his talk was like nothing I had ever heard before, though I knew some of our best talkers and writers.’ 35