Nevertheless, levels of fearfulness ran high in the household, and on hearing that her son wished to spend the summer of 1872 in Germany improving his knowledge of the language, Margaret Stevenson went into hysterics, saying she might never see him again. The plan was duly modified, and when Louis set out for Frankfurt that July in the company of Walter Simpson, it was for a three-week holiday, made over into another invalid tour by a rendezvous with his parents afterwards at Baden-Baden. Margaret’s fears seem to have been much more to do with Louis becoming independent than becoming ill.
This tightening of parental concern may have been a response to the new friendships that Louis was enjoying, mostly with lively law students like Baxter, and people in the Jenkin circle, from which his parents were excluded. Added to this was the return to Edinburgh from Cambridge of Bob Stevenson in the summer of 1871. Bob’s aimless brilliance and energy were a tonic to his younger cousin, who immediately drew him into the group of friends – Louis, Baxter, Simpson and Ferrier – who together formed a society called ‘LJR’. The initials stood for ‘Liberty – Justice – Reverence’, fervent discussion of which – over many rounds of drinks in Advocates’ Close – was one of their raisons d’être. (A manuscript note by Stevenson links ‘LJR’ with ‘Whitman: humanity: [ … ] love of mankind: sense of inequality: justification of art: decline of religion’.) More often, though, the members of LJR were to be found planning elaborate practical jokes, and devised a term, ‘Jink’, to describe their activities: ‘as a rule of conduct, Jink consisted in doing the most absurd acts for the sake of their absurdity and the consequent laughter’.24 They invented a character called John Libbel in whose name they carried out fake correspondences with prominent Edinburgh citizens, and for whom they printed calling cards: ‘I have spent whole days going from lodging-house to lodging-house inquiring anxiously, “If Mr Libbel had come yet?”’, Stevenson related, ‘and when the servant or a landlady had told us “No”, assuring her that he would come soon, and leaving a mysterious message.’25 On another occasion, they started a rumour that Libbel had inherited a fortune and that they were agents of the estate. ‘Libbelism’ was really a form of subversive performance art, and ‘Jink’ a kind of Dadaism avant la lettre, set in 1870s Edinburgh. Stevenson’s own remarks corroborate this, with their echo of ‘art for art’s sake’: ‘we were disinterested, we required none of the encouragement of success, we pursued our joke, our mystification, our blague for its own sake’.
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?