The problem of identity is thus a project for psychosocial reconciliation at a particular moment in the life course and entails not just a proximal concern with one’s family or community but rather an entire historical moment—an era in which youth are compelled to either reproduce or repudiate a status quo.
Stevenson’s adolescence and early adulthood offer as great exemplars as Erikson could have imagined for the struggle between identity formation versus role confusion. In both the personal and social realms of identity, and within ideological, political, and occupational domains, Stevenson battled to find himself. He felt at odds with his predestined fate to join his family of engineers; increasingly, he came to question the religious dogmas that had defined his upbringing. The only commitment that seemed unambiguous to him was his desire to write. At the societal level of identity, Stevenson felt acutely the inequity that his privilege afforded him and soon began to identify with a new generation of rebellious offspring who challenged the materialism and conformity of their prosperous “bourgeois” parents. They chose instead to embrace the “bohemian” life of art and travel. In reading Stevenson’s letters and essays from this period in his life, there are uncanny resonances to the rhetoric of the 1960s counterculture and the current concerns of millennial hipsters.
Considering the looming crisis with his father, it is ironic that Thomas privately printed Stevenson’s first published writing, The Pentland Rising, when Louis was age sixteen. He hoped this support could channel Louis’s writing interests in pious directions while he guided Louis toward an engineering career. Both Thomas and Margaret had already grasped the fact that their sickly only child lived and breathed romantic literature. Absurdly thin, with feverish brown eyes, a long narrow face with broad forehead, eyes far apart, loquacious, bristling with energy, arms and hands in constant motion to underline his impassioned talk, Louis was hardly the model of a future engineer. Thomas no doubt registered how Louis had inherited some of his own artistic and emotional tendencies, tendencies that he himself had done his best to subdue in the service of the family business. Perhaps Louis could maintain this amateur vocation as an outlet, but not lose sight of the “real work” of Stevenson and Sons.
Yet though he constrained himself to topics grounded in religion, Louis could not suppress his writer’s voice. Interspersed with quotations from ministers and devotees to the Presbyterian cause, purple prose flowed,
Those who sacrificed themselves for the peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value of their winding-sheets! (The Pentland Rising)
Perhaps passages like this were the reason Thomas bought up all the copies he had printed and withdrew the book from circulation before friends and family members could get wind of what Louis had wrought. Still, no one could deny the boy could write!
By the time Louis, age seventeen, entered the University of Edinburgh to take up his course in engineering, he had given both Thomas and Margaret continual cause for worry. He had drifted in and out of schools in Edinburgh and England. His attendance and performance had been extremely uneven due both to his chronic ill health and lack of interest in conventional instruction (not unlike his own father). In fact, he had called his schooling, “a mangle through which I was being slowly and unwillingly dragged.”
He had shown no particular aptitude in mathematics (also not his father’s strength) and little capacity for concentration on the sort of scientific detail required for his future profession. On the other hand, Louis, when accompanying his father on site visits to lighthouse projects, showed an extraordinary eye for the aesthetic features of the land and seascapes. His tasks of geological notation and measurement were a burdensome price for the thrill of the scenery he experienced. He wrote about this time of apprenticeship:
From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other. (“The Education of an Engineer”)
We only need to compare this account of the “drudgery of engineering” with his description of his more circumspect apprenticeship to literature at the same time:
All through my boyhood and youth, I was pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in… . Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality… . I have played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.” (“A College Magazine”)
A storm was clearly gathering. Raised by doting parents, the nineteenth-century equivalent of “helicopter” parents, not to mention under the eagle-eyed attention of Cummy, Louis entered his young adulthood years with a deep commitment to doing right by both his family and his religion. Thus far, his rebellion had manifested itself mostly in his imagination. Through his reading of novels, his own creative stories, and his elaborate fantasies of adventure and romance, he had lived entire lifetimes of heroism and daredevil exploits, but done very little to subvert the wishes of his imposing father and gentle encouraging mother. He had tilted at windmills most often from the comfort of his third-floor bedroom.
Now he was about to be a university student. Having adopted quite readily many of his parents’ religious, moral, and social values, he had superficially followed Erikson’s path of “foreclosed identity.” He had dutifully attended their church and enrolled in a course of study that would align him with the family tradition. Other than in his own fantasies, there had been minimal actual exploration of alternatives to his parental designs. But Louis was clearly too complicated intellectually and emotionally to fit neatly into a foreclosed box. On the surface, he was going along with his father’s wishes for his career. He continued to attend church with his parents and participated in a conservative political club that aligned with his parents’ politics. Yet his letters during this time, especially those to his cousin, Bob, then a student at Cambridge, revealed what was churning within. Bob, the artist and fellow lover of literature, was an outlet for Louis to pour out his private ambition. What he wanted was to be a writer and no ordinary one.
Becoming great, becoming great, becoming great. A heart burned out with the lust of this world’s approbation: a hideous disease to have, even though shielded, as it is in my case, with a certain imperturbable something—self-consciousness or common sense, I cannot tell which—that would prevent me poisoning myself like Chatterton or drinking like Burns on the failure of my ambitious hopes. My nature is at once sanguine and ambitious; but I do not think I am so great a fool as to become my own dupe … (Letter 56)
As Louis vented in letter after letter to Bob, he mixed suggestions for plays and stories they could write together with condemnations of his self-centered desires. He felt that he was turning his back on his parents and the education and livelihood that they sought for him. In one letter, he might extol the virtues of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and in the next write, “What an egotistical brute I am! self! self! self! That is the tune, the burthen, the fable, the moral. Self! self!” In another: “… Literature, Nature, Imagination, pretty gewgaws to spend a life upon, with an eternal hell below; yet so I do. God grant that I may awake.”
It is hard not to hear the echoes of “Escape from Shame” here, and of the frightened boy under his covers who, having indulged in a Scottish bogey tale, then asks God for forgiveness for his sinful indulgence. As distant and quaint as it might seem to us in the twenty-first century that a young man might fear his passion for reading and writing stories, these letters convey how wrenching the stakes really were. The nineteenth century was the first century in which the reading of novels and stories became a widespread recreation among the middle classes. There were still many pious families and even educated elite who saw the practice as degenerate and unworthy of any serious and morally responsible individual. Louis felt an acute fear of disappointing and shaming his parents. Harman quotes from an unfinished essay by Stevenson:
It is the particular cross of parents that when the child grows up and becomes himself instead of that pale ideal they had preconceived, they must accuse their own harshness or indulgence for this natural result… . They have been like the duck and hatched swan’s eggs, or the other way about; yet they tell themselves with miserable penitence that the blame lies with them; and had they sat more closely, the swan would have been a duck, and home-keeping, in spite of all. (“Essays, Reflections and Remarks on Human Life”)
On the other hand, even though Louis was miserable in his engineering studies at the university, they did afford him something he never quite had before: freedom from the watchful eyes of Cummy and his parents. Still living at home, he could leave in the morning for class and not return until evening. And although he left for classes, he seldom attended them. Describing his routine of that time in a later essay, he “acted upon an extensive and highly rational system of truancy which cost him a great deal of trouble to put into exercise” and “no one ever played truant with more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education.” What did Louis do during the hours away from home? A denizen of the New Town of Edinburgh, he became an honorary citizen of the Old Town. Frequenting the tobacco shops, public houses, and later on, houses of prostitution, he embraced a side of life that he had previously glimpsed only from a distance and through the dim light of his parents’ and nurse’s judgments. He now found his way to the roughest areas of Edinburgh’s outskirts at Leith Walk and the Lothian Road.
His biographers are united in describing this period of Louis’s life as a dark and lonely one. He was most certainly in the throes of an identity crisis—one that could throw him into the dissipation and aimlessness of identity diffusion or push him into a period of intensive exploration of identity moratorium. In the early years of his university education, he hovered between these two uncommitted poles.
He had little in common with the farmers’ sons and taciturn technicians who were his classmates in his engineering course. He felt ashamed to see them scraping together their meager funds, dressed in shabby clothes, and banking on the university degree as their only hope to escape their parents’ hardscrabble lives. Here he was, wealthy and pampered, squandering his education, unmotivated and listless in his efforts. At the same time, he resented his parents for having forced him to study at the university in Edinburgh. He had briefly tried to convince them to send him to England, but Thomas knew that he would have lost Louis for certain if he had let him have that long a leash. So he wandered the befogged city streets of Auld Reekie, hanging over the North Bridge and watching with wistful regret the whistling trains head south without him. He wrote to Bob that his life was “one repression from beginning to end” (Letter 72).
For a while, it seemed that diffusion and its recipe of momentary amusement, alcohol, drugs, sleep, and numbing depression would win out. Louis wrote Bob about his crushed spirits—his desire to buy hashish or get drunk—his morbid bouts of sitting in the gloomy setting of Greyfriars churchyard with its blackened headstones and carved skulls and skeletons. He bemoaned his “… feverish regret for things not done, feverish longings to do things that cannot then (or perhaps ever) be accomplished, the feverish unrests and damnable indecisions, that it takes all my easy-going spirits to come comfortably through.”
Here indeed was a Hamlet in the making! He had taken to reading Baudelaire and was self-consciously identified with the lost and dissolute youth of his time. What magnified all of this despair was the fact that Louis truly had few friends. In and out of schools growing up, traveling frequently, incapacitated for long stretches by illness, unusual in both appearance and demeanor, he had seldom fit in or found his way into a reliable circle of mates. If he had not had Colinton and Swanston Cottage, the country refuges for his posse of cousins, he would have grown up a frighteningly isolated child. With his cousins, his natural exuberance, his abundant imagination, and his love of games and stories could all pour forth. Now inside the deadening walls of the lecture rooms, that radiance was barely an ember. He was experiencing a depth of loneliness he had never known before. Combined with his alienation from his vocation and his repressed artistic calling, the solitude was sinking him deeper into depression.
Salvation came in the form of the very social privilege that had frequently shamed him with his engineering peers. Due to the societal standing of the Stevenson family, not to mention the even tonier pedigree of the Balfour line from his mother’s side, Louis was tapped to join a gentlemen’s literary and debate club, The Speculative Society. The Scottish parallel to the Ivy League secret societies and eating clubs, such as Skull and Bones or Scroll and Key, the “Spec” is a private club that has traditionally been a center of networking for future barristers, politicians, bankers, and industrialists. To this day, it proudly displays on its walls the minutes kept by Walter Scott from a meeting at the end of the eighteenth century.
Over the first months of his membership, Stevenson began to socialize with other students outside the engineering circle, students of law and literature from socially prominent families. Three of these students became powerful influences in his life. James Walter Ferrier was a wealthy and handsome law student, who was a fellow writer. He was charismatic and sybaritic, and died at age thirty-three of complications from his alcoholism. Walter Simpson, the son of a baronet (Sir James Young Simpson, who had been the first surgeon to use chloroform), was a steady and laconic comrade. Stevenson said he presented “… with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation.” Simpson was Stevenson’s companion on his first full-length travel book, An Inland Voyage (1878), an account of their canoe trip from Antwerp by canals to Northern France. He was an athletic outdoorsman, who eventually wrote a classic book on the “art of golf.”
Finally, and most important, there was Charles Baxter, Stevenson’s closest friend, lifelong confidant and personal lawyer. Baxter was tall and more thickly built than Stevenson. He had a supercilious air about him, a sardonic wit, and a penchant for pleasure. He was Louis’s willing partner in crime as they explored the dives and drinking holes of Leith Walk and the Lothian Road. They each took on alter egos—Louis was also known as Johnstone, a corrupt and drunken church deacon, and Baxter was Thomson, an equally lecherous father of the church. They would speak to each other in exaggerated Scots about their misdeeds and the injustices of the sanctimonious sober world, and their letters continued this running joke for the next twenty years.
As in any life story, the characters that become the fixtures of one’s narrative are inevitably projections of different aspects of oneself. These friends who persisted in Stevenson’s internal world and in the literal world of his letters and essays were three extensions of dimensions of his identity that he was just beginning to formulate at that time. Ferrier, the charming but dissolute writer, was a cautionary tale to Stevenson. His decline over the years reinforced the genuine consequences of abandonment to bacchanalian pleasure. Simpson, his aristocratic companion over river and mountaintop, spoke to his vision of a carefree and virile gentleman with means to explore the natural world—eventually this would be the Stevenson who perched barefoot on riggings as the Casco sailed the Pacific waters. Baxter was a promise of middle-aged stolidity—the pragmatic compromise that one might eventually settle into a prosperous life, still keeping wit and humor, but freed of endless worries about finances and independence (ironically, however, alcoholism would also plague him in later life). Baxter also increasingly became for Stevenson, as Louis ultimately approached middle age, a repository of memories of youthful irreverence. They had played pranks on shopkeepers, written phony letters, frequented a pub with a bartender named Brash, and generally engaged in what they called Jink. All of these escapades would surface in Stevenson’s memoirs, essays, letters, and poetry—he even a composed a sonnet sequence called “Brasheana” that commemorated those days.
As Louis embraced this second world of his, his “Old Town” alter ego, he needed the garment to go with it. This was the impetus for his trademark “velvet coat.” Pushed by his parents to replenish his fraying wardrobe, he chose to have a black velvet smoking jacket tailored for him. In contrast to the waistcoats of his bourgeois peers, his velvet coat pointed to an artistic and even European bent. It was certainly a statement of individuality and independence from both his parents’ and Edinburgh society’s mores. Whatever elegance it might have possessed, Louis wore the jacket day in and day out until it reached a degree of shabbiness that fit quite effectively with his long limp hair and wispy efforts at a mustache. “Velvet coat” became his nickname among the Old Town prostitutes, and he so relished its connotations that he continued to have new velvet (or velveteen) coats fashioned for him for the rest of his life.
Given these various diversions, Louis was making little progress in his engineering studies. In the spring of 1871, he gave his one and only formal paper on lighthouse engineering, concerning a proposal for creating more effective intermittent light as a warning signal for approaching ships. It was short, broke little new ground, and was possibly even edited (no doubt in desperation) by his father. In early April of the same year, the older and younger Stevenson had the first of what would be two fateful conversations. Their mutual conclusion was that Louis had no future in an engineering career. It was a deep wound for Thomas—most likely a personal indictment as much as a perception of shortcoming in his son. Wedded in their psyches by temperament and moral earnestness, Thomas could never stop refracting his son’s behavior through his own personal psychology.
What did it mean for him that he could not help his son tame his excessive emotional nature? How much did he see his own weakness in the fact that his brother’s son would move forward in the family’s business, but not his own? What fears did he have for his Louis’s ultimate salvation? Would the Lord’s condemnation turn on the father as well? The one thing Thomas knew for sure was that he would not allow the path away from engineering to take Louis to literature. Father and son settled on law, and Louis suddenly had a new career.
With the companionship of his mates from the Spec, Louis was certainly a lot less morose than when he started his engineering course, but he was not necessarily any closer to finding a meaningful path out of his identity confusion. There still seemed no obvious way of extricating himself from the conflict at the core of his psychology at this time. To realize his most authentic expression of himself—to become a writer—was to give into selfish desire and shame his well-intentioned parents. Simultaneously, his emerging social conscience confronted the hard facts of poverty—the imposed squalor, hunger, and humiliation of old, young, and infirm, witnessed on his daily rambles of the Old Town streets. As any thinking, idealistic young person might respond, he could not make sense of the elegant world of the Victorian New Town and its hypocritical piety in the face of this degradation. In a letter to Bob, he wrote,
And yet, my God, here am I, well suppered, well clothed, with the white bed at my elbow, warm and soft, for me to lie down when once I am so minded—educated—having little thought for the morrow—and a whole lot of poor devils outside, whoreson paupers, empty bellies, sleepers in common stairs … (Letter 112)
He goes on to castigate himself for his lack of direction and his unwillingness to confront his father and pursue a more honest truth, both with regard to an authentic vision of Christianity and his own artistic calling.
Oh, God, I am not the man for work like this. It needs a tougher fibre to handle such perilous stuff in such a shower of fire and brimstone; and I am so anxious to be happy and have blue skies about me and good wine … that I fear I shall not find enough nerve and patience and determination in my heart to carry it to an end. (Letter 112)
The “end” that he means is to find a way of breaking with the social and religious expectations of the bourgeois society in which he had been raised and in which he continued to live. As his letter implies, he still took his wholesome suppers at home, still afforded himself the luxury and privilege of his parents’ home, even as his heart and mind moved further and further away from the values and lifestyle they held dear. The end was to define a new identity that would free him from the bonds of his family’s expectations without weighing him down with burdens of self-loathing and guilt.
He was now reading the works of Darwin and Spencer, in part under the guidance of a beloved professor and mentor, Fleeming Jenkin. Jenkin, an engineering professor, had given Louis a hard time about his poor attendance, but he had still welcomed Louis into his home and made him part of his amateur theatricals and lively social gatherings. This polymath, with expertise in electrical engineering, natural history, and literature, was constantly open to new ideas and inventions, quite a contrast to the conservative rigidity of Thomas. Roughly fifteen years older than Louis, Jenkin presented an alternative older male figure to him at a time when Louis was desperate to find someone who could guide him to a vision of adulthood different from his father’s. The character of an older benevolent male explicitly not his father was to become a significant recurring archetype in Stevenson’s life story. Sidney Colvin was soon to take on this role for him as well.
The momentum of Stevenson’s schism with his father escalated when Bob returned from Cambridge to live in Edinburgh. Bob now aspired to become an artist and was studying at the city’s School of Art. To conjure up what Bob was like at this point, it might be helpful to think of Louis as Jack Kerouac and Bob as Neal Cassady, or their respective literary doppelgangers, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty from Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Bob was definitely more advanced along the bohemian road than Louis. He had already spent a number of summers hanging out with artist friends in the artist colonies of Barbizon and Grez, roughly thirty to fifty miles south of Paris. He felt less encumbered by the religious compunctions torturing Louis. He was handsome, magnetic, and a nonstop talker, mixing tall tales with philosophic and artistic musings along with extravagant proposals of travel and adventures. In short, he was everything that Neal was to Jack or Dean was to Sal—the projection of the uninhibited id—the way out from the straightjacket of convention. And just as Neal came to symbolize a social movement among youth—the apogee of the beat generation—Bob brought the essence of the bohemian movement to Louis’s Heriot Row doorstep.
The original bohemians of the early part of the nineteeth century, borrowing their name from the actual Romani gypsies who had traveled to France via Bohemia (what is now the Czech Republic), were artists and writers who lived among the gypsies in the low-rent neighborhoods of Paris. In addition to their physical proximity to gypsies, their peripatetic lifestyle, lack of material belongings, and marginalization from the mainstream made their bohemian label a perfect fit. Soon any group of impoverished artists devoted to their muse and amusements rather than the pursuit of “filthy lucre” was dubbed bohemian and many of these souls willing avowed their devotion to “La Vie Boheme.” Colonies of bohemians sprung up in the south of France, in New York City, and San Francisco (where the Bohemian Club was formed in 1872, exactly at the time that Bob and Louis were acquiring their chops in bohemian pursuit. Ironically, this club, started by journalists called “bohemians” as a slang term, slowly became a private club for San Francisco’s most elite society, devoted more to social posturing and drinking than any higher calling). During the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, there emerged a romantic connotation to the bohemian world, nicely captured by the American humorist and early Bohemian Club member, Gelett Burgess:
To take the world as one finds it, the bad with the good, making the best of the present moment—to laugh at Fortune alike whether she be generous or unkind—to spend freely when one has money, and to hope gaily when one has none—to fleet the time carelessly, living for love and art—this is the temper and spirit of the modern Bohemian in his outward and visible aspect. It is a light and graceful philosophy, but it is the Gospel of the Moment, this exoteric phase of the Bohemian religion; and if, in some noble natures, it rises to a bold simplicity and naturalness, it may also lend its butterfly precepts to some very pretty vices and lovable faults, for in Bohemia one may find almost every sin save that of Hypocrisy… . (Burgess 1902)
Although all sounds light and carefree in these phrases, this commitment to freedom from hypocrisy implies an underlying seriousness of purpose that would allow young people to live in impoverished circumstances for the sake of their art. Puccini’s La Bohème or our modern-day Rent conveys the potential deprivations associated with devotion to a bohemian ethos.
Louis, seeking a language and lifestyle to justify his desire to be a writer, and fueled by Bob’s endorsement of this alternative world, found himself drawn further and further toward declaring himself a bohemian. As part of this new rebellious identity, Louis had created with Ferrier, Simpson, and Baxter a fraternal drinking club that they called LJR for Liberty-Justice-Reverence. Truth be told, it was more about being libertines, justifying their outrageous pranks, and showing as much irreverence as possible to the stodgy values and religious pieties of their parents. The headquarters of this “society” was at one of their local drinking spots, and Bob was quickly inducted as an honorary member.
The LJR could have gone down as just another of the Jinks that Louis and his friends perpetrated, except that its “constitution” was discovered by Thomas, and its declarations against accepted doctrines, especially established religion, shocked him to the core. This led to the second pivotal conversation between the elder and younger Stevenson on January 31, 1873. Perhaps emboldened by the months of Bob’s company, and also having reached a point of exhaustion with living a double life of Sunday churchgoing and night-time carousing, Louis came clean to his father and declared his rejection of the organized church and its hypocrisy.
The amount of trauma that this declaration brought to the Stevenson household was immense. For Thomas and Margaret, their son’s disavowal of loyalty to the Church was akin to a sentence of eternal damnation. Even worse, if he chose to promulgate his views, he was then willfully putting other souls at risk. Weeping and deathly silences ensued for months. Louis bore the scorn and dark glances of his father, and even worse, a sense that his mother was torn in loyalty between her two men and was pulling back from her beloved son in confusion and hurt. Yet ever the proper pirate, Louis could not make a clean break. Just as they brooded and prayed over their son, whom Thomas dubbed “the careless infidel,” Louis fretted and condemned himself for the hurt that he had inflicted. He could not meet the rage from his father with an equal measure of aggression back.
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. (Letter 123)
Substituting depression for retaliation, what did Louis do next? He followed the nuclear script of “Escape from Shame” that by now had grown deeply embedded in his life story. He fell ill. By mid-summer, fearing for his health (which was easier than fearing for his soul), his parents approved his retreat to the bucolic setting of Cockfield Rectory, in Suffolk, southeast England, the home of Margaret’s niece Maude and her husband, Professor Churchill Babington. There, fortuitously, he was to meet a refined married woman who would become a crucial influence in his solidifying vision of himself as a writer.
Even though their time in Suffolk only overlapped for roughly five weeks, Stevenson would write regular and voluminous letters to Frances Sitwell over the next few years. Biographers have spilled a great deal of ink about the nature of these letters—their hidden meanings and the true nature of Louis’s and Fanny Sitwell’s relationship (his first Fanny, but not the Fanny that he married). These questions, as fascinating as they are, are not the main focus of my particular concerns with Stevenson. It is enough to say that he fell for this eloquent estranged wife of a minister, who had taken refuge with her good friend, Maude. There is little evidence that Frances ever reciprocated a romantic love, but she certainly cultivated a deep intimacy with Louis over their time together and in subsequent letters. She served both to catalyze his first exposure to romantic and idealized love, but perhaps equally important, as a muse to his artistic aspirations. Interestingly, in tracing the letters over the next few years, Louis shifts from addressing Mrs. Sitwell in the most blatant romantic terms to more idealized and even maternal allusions. Once Louis accepted they would not become actual lovers, he slowly morphed his correspondent into an idealized maternal muse. If his own parents could not approve of his artistic aspirations, this angelic and “Madonna”-like spirit could give him the necessary encouragement he required. As Cummy had done before, and Fanny would do in the future, Mrs. Sitwell fulfilled the role in Stevenson’s script of an older female figure who provided a nurturing and protective comfort. On a more practical level, Mrs. Sitwell initiated a friendship between Louis and the man that was most likely her chosen love at that time and whom she would finally marry three decades later, Sidney Colvin.
Colvin, five years Louis’s senior, but far more advanced in career and social connection, had gone to Trinity College, Cambridge University, and developed a reputation for art and literary criticism. He had just been named the Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge and was a cofounder of the influential Savile Club in London, a lightning rod for literary luminaries. He would later become the keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum. Colvin championed Louis throughout his life, serving as the editor of volumes of his letters and early editions of his collected works. The epitome of a Victorian gentleman, Colvin was reserved and stuffy, but he relished Louis’s creative energy and romantic zeal, describing him in those years as “rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and unearthly, an Ariel.” At the same time, Colvin could see how much Louis struggled to break from his parents’ expectations for him:
There lay a troubled spirit, in grave risk from the perils of youth, from a constitution naturally frail and already heavily overstrained, from self-distrust and uncertainty as to his own powers and purposes, and above all from the misery of bitter, heart- and soul-rending disagreements with a father to whom he was devotedly attached. (Colvin 1920)
Hoping to launch Louis in his writing career, Colvin encouraged him to submit a magazine piece that he could sponsor for publication. After many false starts, the result was “Roads,” Stevenson’s first nonfiction essay, published in Portfolio in December 1873. It was a brief meditation on the pleasures of walking the open road and was the first step in establishing Stevenson’s early reputation as a bohemian travel essayist—a young man with a romantic heart lured to routes away from the conventional path of the middle class.
In reality, Louis felt as constricted as ever upon his return to Edinburgh. He wrote ardent letters to Fanny Sitwell, bemoaning his “imprisonment” and seeing her as the key to his spiritual freedom and artistic triumph. During these months at home, Thomas had confronted and denounced Bob for “corrupting his son” and told Louis in the heat of an argument, “I would ten times sooner have seen you lying in your grave than that you should be shaking the faith of other young men and bringing such ruin on other houses, as you have brought already upon this.” Louis responded by growing weaker and thinner and seeking further escape. He headed to London, ostensibly to prepare for the bar, but with the help of Fanny found his way to a Dr. Clark, who ordered him south in no uncertain terms.
Although Louis took refuge in Menton on the south coast of France, the sunshine did not initially raise his spirits. He was drained emotionally and felt himself a listless invalid. He was smoking opium and developing a pattern of inactivity, talking and lounging about, but not writing. He met two older Russian women who were vacationing and amused himself by playing with one of the women’s young child and flirting with them both. He described himself as a “holy terror for all action and inaction equally—a sort of shuddering revulsion from the necessary responsibilities of life.” Equally stifled in his romance with Mrs. Sitwell that only existed in epistolary fantasy, Louis was going nowhere. He was rapidly becoming a parody of the aesthetic young man of the time, dressed in foppish outfits and sponging off his parents’ money. Writing of himself at that time, in his essay “Ordered South” (1874), he says disparagingly, “… [H]e suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner.” As his first biographer, his cousin, Graham Balfour summed up this period,
When a young man with all the impetuosity of youth is involved in doubts as to the truth of religion, the constitution of society, and the contending claims of different duties, and further is bound to the service of a profession to which he is indifferent, while eagerly yearning after the practice of an art absorbing his whole powers, it is at once impossible he should be happy, and highly improbable that he should satisfy his parents. (Balfour 1901, Vol. 1)
Once again, Louis was in danger of drifting into identity diffusion and languishing in his effort to carve out his new identity as a writer. Nevertheless, when he returned to Edinburgh to finish up his law studies, he pushed himself to start up several writing projects—planned biographies of Scottish icons John Knox and Robert Burns, short stories, and literary essays. Despite this work, his letters to Mrs. Sitwell are filled with self-contempt and paralysis: “I find myself face to face with the weak, inefficacious personality that I knew before. I am unfit I fear for much; but don’t be afraid—I have promised, and I will—I shall do something yet, if I have to tear myself in three to do it” (Letter 140). He also makes clear how humiliating his lack of financial independence is, “… I fear that I am unfit as yet to make any money by my pen; and until I make money, you know, I can get no farther forward in my own difficulties” (Letter 140).
The images of a fatal rift with his father became more and more explicit. He wrote to Colvin, “… [my father] had told me that he is a weak man and that I am driving him too far, and that I know not what I am doing. O dear God, this is bad work… . I say, my dear friend, I am killing my father—he told me tonight (by the way) that I alienated utterly my mother—and this is the result of my attempt to start fresh and fair and do my best for all of them” (Letter 143). And again to Fanny Sitwell, “O you do not know how much this money question begins to take more and more importance in my eyes every day” (Letter 176).
In these passages (and there are many more similar to these in his letters), we hear Stevenson’s fundamental anguish and self-contempt. To become the person that he most yearned to be, that he envisioned and sculpted in long rhapsodic letters to Frances Sitwell—to be a romantic artist in its full-flowered conception—was an anathema to his father, and in significant ways, to give into a decadent impulse within his own heart. This was the trap that the nuclear script of his early years had sprung upon him. The lessons he had learned from Cummy were seared deep—to covet fantasy, to indulge in imaginative art was a selfishness that strayed toward sin. In a letter to his parents from this period, he wrote, “I have a bad character, and that makes me behave ill to you; but my heart is what you would wish.”
The full force of the script paralyzed him. Outwardly, the jovial talker, pacing the room, engaging in gesticulations to punctuate his tales, the velvet-coated Ariel and bohemian; inwardly he was “dazed and confused”—the epitome of a young man in the throes of an identity crisis. Out of this psychic anguish emerged his most original and interesting writing from this time period. Brief allegoric stories, some no longer than a couple of paragraphs, he called them Fables; they accumulated over the years and were only published after his death in 1896. They are powerful windows into his struggles with religious doubt, questions regarding authority and social convention, speculations about the nature of meaning in life, and the relation of a writer to his work. The Argentinian writer Borges counted them as a great influence on his own allegorical and enigmatic tales. One of the most relevant to our understanding of Stevenson’s identity struggles at this point in his development is “The House of Eld.”
This story begins, “So soon as the child began to speak, the gyve was riveted; and the boys and girls limped about their play like convicts.” A “gyve” is a shackle and all of the residents of this village bore these chains on their right ankles along with the accompanying ulcers that emerged from years of wear. The particular child’s name is Jack and he soon notices that there are strangers who would pass through the village that moved unfettered, and he asked his uncle why they should have this freedom.
“My dear boy,” said his uncle, the catechist, “do not complain about your fetter, for it is the only thing that makes life worth living. None are happy, none are good, none are respectable, that are not gyved like us. And I must tell you, besides, it is very dangerous talk. If you grumble of your iron, you will have no luck; if ever you take it off, you will be instantly smitten by a thunderbolt.”
Jack understandably asks why the strangers were not smitten by thunderbolts. His uncle curtly explains that the Lord has patience for the ignorant heathen and that he pities them, “… for what is a man without a fetter?”
As the story continues, Jack eventually discovers that there are other young boys and girls who secretly remove their fetters and dance and sing at night in the woods. His growing doubt about the purpose of the fetters now leads him to question the strangers about their beliefs; they tell him that the wearing of gyves was simply a spell cast by a sorcerer who has enchanted the village. If he can be unmasked and vanquished three times, then the spell will be broken, the fetters will vanish, and all the villagers shall be free to dance and sing again. Any time the sorcerer’s trickery is resisted, he will reveal himself by gobbling like a turkey.
Jack takes it upon himself to confront this sorcerer and brings an enchanted sword (“beaten upon Vulcan’s anvil”) to battle. He enters the Wood of Eld and finds the house of sorcery. Taking food and drink, he meets someone who appears to be his uncle. This man begs him to come home and return to the fettered village. When Jack resists, the uncle suddenly gobbles like a turkey, and Jack slays the sorcerer for the first time. Leaving the house, he next confronts a man with the appearance of his father. This man too begs him to return back to the village and all will be forgiven. Jack refuses and the father gobbles like a turkey. Once again, Jack ends the sorcerer’s life. Now one more figure stops him on the road and it appears to be his mother. She cries out, “What have you done?,” referring to the murder of his uncle and father. Jack explains that he has not slain them, but only their sorcerer shapes, and even if he had taken their lives, he still could no longer live in a fettered world. At this, the mother gobbles like a turkey and Jack smites her to bring the third life of the sorcerer to an end.
Now returning to the village, Jack tells himself that all will finally be liberated from the sorcerer’s enchantment and no gyves will remain. Instead, he finds each of the villagers wears a gyve on their left ankle instead of their right. Astonished, he asks why and the villagers explain that the previous practice has been revealed to be a superstition and now they have found the true way. Crushed, Jack retreats to his home to seek comfort from his family. When he arrives, he finds the cloven bodies of his uncle, father, and mother. He sits alone in his home and weeps.
Stevenson attached the following moral to the story:
Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother’s heart, your father’s bones;
And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Louis truly felt himself to be living in a House of Eld (from the Old English, “eald” for old). He could seek to repudiate the shackling doctrines of his parents, but he had no confidence that any alternate system would bring him true freedom. And whatever efforts he made at liberation, he was likely to wound his parents in the process. As the legend goes, you cannot cut the mandrake’s roots without unleashing the agonizing screams of its captured spirits. And even if you cut the roots, what will become of the good fruit it has borne?
In writing this fable and the others that accompanied it in those early years of his art, Stevenson was clearly expressing the futility of adhering to any belief system—any doctrine is likely to give way to another dogma of equal limitations. At the same time, in creating this audacious fable, he was inching toward a new frame of mind—one that would slowly appear in his published writings over the next twenty years. He was seeking a way of presenting the complexity of finding truth—of holding competing and even contradictory ideas and desires in the same mind simultaneously—of acknowledging the multiplicity rather than the rigid singularity of consciousness. In this emerging vision of truth’s complexity, he was slowly evolving a new script—what Tomkins would call a “commitment script,” connecting courage to an adherence to honest truths in the face of hypocrisies (what I call his “Honor in Honesty” script).
For the time being, Stevenson soldiered on in his law course. His parents, fearing that he would soon falter on this path, came up with a rather outrageous bribe—1000 pounds (equivalent of approximately $80,000 today) if he passed the bar. He reluctantly prepared, while continuing to write short essays, reviews, and abortive efforts at fiction. Resignation to his immediate fate and the promise of the money combined to pull him over the finish line, and he passed the bar on July 14, 1875. In his typical fashion, he parlayed this victory into series of vacation trips and holidays to Bob’s artist colony in Barbizon, France; a walking tour with Simpson; and a trip with his parents to Germany.
Although Stevenson’s conscience pushed him to write as much as he could to earn additional money, there was always the fact that, as the only child of well-off parents, he instinctively knew that he could fall back on their generosity. His letters and essays of this time convey a deep ambivalence about this persisting dependence on them. On the one hand, he took up the bohemian call to be the flaneur, the idle aesthete who watches the world and cares little for practical matters, while finding contentment in extracting trenchant observations from what he witnesses. On the other hand, his Calvinist roots caused him to curse himself for his idleness, while acknowledging genuine pride in his father’s and forefathers’ work ethic and professional attention to their engineering trade. He was nothing if not a contradiction at this point in his life.
Stevenson managed roughly one year as an advocate and in that year made exactly one court appearance. It was a bit of circus when he was called to the court unexpectedly, most likely hung over from the night before, and greeted by a bevy of jeering friends in the gallery. By the following summer, August of 1876, he had embarked on a canoe trip with Simpson that he would chronicle in An Inland Voyage.
The full flowering of his bohemian worldview emerges in this piece and in his other essays from that time. In his private letters he may have been fretting over the fruitless direction his life seemed to be taking, but in print he opined (as he floated along the canal’s drifting waters):
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive… . He may be a man, in short acting on his own instincts, keeping in his own shape that God made him in; and not a mere crank in the social engine-house, welded on principles that he does not understand, and for purposes that he does not care for.
Or even starker (and perhaps leaning toward the hypocrisy that he abhorred, given that his father was ultimately bankrolling the trip):
There should be nothing so much a man’s business as his amusements. Nothing but money-grabbing can be put forward to the contrary.
In addition to these musings on his freedom from the drudgery of working for a living, he also wrote about a moment of psychological freedom. The monotony of the paddling induced in him a kind of “flow” or loss of awareness of self that he found extraordinarily liberating.
There was less me and more not me than I was accustomed to expect. I looked on upon someone else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else’s feet against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate relation to me than the canoe, or the river, or the river branches… . Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly some one else’s; and I considered them like a part of the landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I make the Buddhists my sincere compliments …
Here was Stevenson anticipating our contemporary fascination with “mindfulness”—the capacity to observe and release one’s thoughts—to give up ownership of the self. For him, as a fledgling bohemian—this was his greatest freedom, not from material constraints, but from the mental shackles of future-thinking, of responsibility and the agenda of intention. As his self dissipated, like a ripple in the water, he secured momentary respite from accountability to his father, from anxiety over making a living, from the hovering cloud of shameful inefficacy that followed him.
In contrast, toward the end of An Inland Voyage, he returns to a more positive vision of selfhood based in his art and goes beyond the seductive wish for negation of being. He recounts meeting a traveling actor and, quoting this troubadour, he lays out his hope for his own incipient career,
“I have known what pleasure was, what it was to do a thing well, what it was to be an artist. And to know what art is, is to have an interest forever, such as no burgess can find in his petty concerns.”
Stevenson recognizes that it is not the travel itself, but what we do in our own heads at the end of the day—what we forge within our imagination after such voyages end—that matters for the artist.
You may paddle all your day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
In these lines, we begin to see an elevation of the psychological and imaginative world—what matters is not simply the life we live, but the art that we can create from it. With the increasing skill he was gaining as a writer, he had a path out of the self-condemning script that weighed him down with shame for engaging in imaginative acts. Perhaps he could indeed find a craftman’s substance in the writing profession. It would become his “work”—his writer’s pen, no less weighty than the draftsman’s tool. Yet if it yielded no income of substance, the cloud of shame was likely to return.
In September, he rejoined Bob at Grez. It was there in that same month of 1876 that he met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, a married woman, ten years his senior, and who would nearly four years later become Louis’s wife. Still buoyant with his love of literature and dreams of making it as a writer, but with two failed careers and the unsuccessful courtship of Frances Sitwell hovering below the surface, Louis was closer to capsizing than he would have cared to admit. It is not surprising then that he fell back upon his familiar script and at a moment of crisis found comfort in another older woman.