An
obsessive stalker, an impotent husband, a lover of young boys... to
some, the
creator of 'Peter Pan' was an evil genius; to others, a misunderstood
ingenue. Ever mindful of the J.M. Barrie 'curse', Justine Picardie
investigates 'May
God blast anyone who writes a biography of me,' declared J.M. Barrie,
in a
curse scrawled across the pages of one of his last notebooks. Since
his death
in 1937, this dire warning has not prevented a slew of writers taking
him on,
the latest of which is Piers Dudgeon, whose book Captivated is
subtitled The
Dark Side of Never Never Land, and examines what he believes to be
Barrie's
sinister influence over the du Maurier family.
Dudgeon's
portrait of Barrie - as a man who filled the vacuum of his own sexual
impotence by a compulsive desire to possess the family who inspired
his most
famous creation, Peter Pan - is entirely at odds with the Hollywood
version,
Finding Neverland, in which Johnny Depp portrayed the author as a
charming
hero, devoted to large dogs and small children. Here was the quirky
little
man who had already been celebrated by his contemporaries as a genius
with a
great heart, not least for his bequest of the copyright of Peter Pan
to Great
Ormond Street Hospital for Children, thus ensuring that the golden
fairy-dust
of his writing was liberally sprinkled over those in
need. But
where does the truth lie about J.M. Barrie (an author who explored the
shadowy borderlands where truth and lies mingle and breed)? At this
point, I
should confess to having become absorbed in Barrie's life while I was
researching Daphne, a novel about Daphne du Maurier and her family;
although
I tried to keep Barrie on the very outer edges of my book (?let him
come any
closer, and he would have dominated the action, for his story is so
extraordinary that it would push everyone else's aside). From the
beginning,
his life was marked by tragedy: born in Kirriemuir in 1860, the child
of a
Scottish weaver, he grew up in the shadow of an older brother, David,
his
mother's adored golden boy, who was killed on the eve of his 14th
birthday in
a skating accident. Dudgeon
makes the startling suggestion that Barrie was involved in his
brother's
death, and whether or not this accusation is true, the calamity
shaped him as
a writer, for as an author he brought to life the myth of the perfect
boy who
never grows up, who can fly out of danger, and yet for whom death
would be
'an awfully big adventure'. If
I'm honest, I was also spooked by Barrie's curse, after hearing what
had
happened to the writer Andrew Birkin. In his updated introduction to
the most
recent edition of J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, Birkin wrote, 'I feel
somewhat felled by Barrie's curse', for his son had been killed in a
car
crash, one month before his 21st birthday, the same age that Barrie's
adopted
son, Daphne's cousin Michael, had drowned. Sceptics will doubtless
scoff at
my superstition, but as the mother of two
teenage sons, I didn't want to incur the posthumous wrath of
Barrie. |
Thus Dudgeon's interpretation of
Barrie's
adoption of Sylvia's boys, who were orphaned after their mother died of
cancer
in 1910, three years after their father succumbed to the disease, is an
entirely dark one. And taking his cue from D.H. Lawrence's
observation, 'J.M.
Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die', Dudgeon sees
Barrie as
being eerily associated with the tragedies that befell the family after
he
befriended them: first Arthur and Sylvia's early deaths, followed by
that of
George, as a young soldier in the First World War in 1915, then
Michael's
drowning (widely held to have been a suicide) as an undergraduate at
Oxford in
1921; Daphne's breakdown in 1957; Jack's death from lung disease in
1959; and
Peter's suicide in 1960. (Only Nico escapes the shadow of Barrie,
according to
Dudgeon's account, by virtue of his unusually sunny personality.)
It's an imaginative theory, which draws
on some
circumstantial evidence in Daphne du Maurier's own writing (including
her
macabre short stories, which Dudgeon reads as revealing Barrie's
crimes), and
will be of interest to anyone, like me, who has followed the twists of
the du
Maurier family history. Indeed, Kits Browning, Daphne's son, declares
Dudgeon's
book to be 'absolutely fascinating, though somewhat alarming about the
extent
of Barrie's sinister influence on my family'. Inevitably, there are
detractors:
Jack Llewelyn Davies's granddaughter, Henrietta, bristles at the
mention of
Dudgeon's book. 'It's far too simplistic to cast Barrie as an evil
genius,' she
says. 'My grandparents used to describe him as a sympathetic and
sensitive
soul. The bottom line is that he was a lonely man who did everything
for the
boys he'd adopted, who he adored. He was a human being who did his best
by
them...'
Similarly, Nico's daughter, Laura
Duguid - also
Barrie's godchild - is more affectionate than damning in her
recollections of
him. Now 80, she remembers being taken to spend an afternoon with her
godfather
(by then a baronet) at his flat on the top floor of Adelphi Terrace
House,
overlooking the Thames. 'Usually I was a feeble little girl,' she
says, 'who
needed Mummy or Nanny. But I remember having a wonderful afternoon with
Barrie
- and being surprised at myself for not minding being left alone with
him. He
told me stories and chased me around the dining table. And, of course,
my
father thought Barrie was the most marvellous person with children -
hence him
asking him to be my godfather, and being happy to leave me alone with
him.'
She also quotes me her father's view on
Barrie's sexuality (or lack of it): 'I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever
experienced what one might call a stirring in the undergrowth for
anyone - man,
woman, adult or child. He was an innocent...' This is a view shared by
Andrew
Birkin, who has probably studied more of Barrie's letters and notebooks
than
anyone else alive (he was given complete access to them by Nico, who
died in
1980): 'Yes, of course Barrie was a lover of childhood, but was not in
any sexual
sense the paedophile that some claim him to have
been.'
And yet, as Duguid acknowledges, there
are
passages in Barrie's writing that induce a sense of unease. 'I'm
certain that
there was nothing paedophiliac about him,' she says, 'but he did write
some creepy
things in The Little White Bird.' She is referring to Barrie's novel,
which
contains the original story of Peter Pan, while also apparently
chronicling his
relationship with the young George Llewelyn Davies, for whom Barrie had
invented Peter Pan. According to Birkin, 'The book is narrated in the
first
person by Barrie', thinly disguised as Captain W, who also happens to
be a
writer, given to long walks in Kensington Gardens with his St Bernard
dog,
Porthos. George is transformed into David (the name of Barrie's dead
brother),
while his fictional mother, Mary (the name of Barrie's wife), is closely
modelled on Sylvia. Meanwhile, the Captain seeks to assuage his thwarted
paternal yearnings by winning the boy for himself: 'It was a scheme
conceived
in a flash, and ever since relentlessly pursued - to burrow under Mary's
influence with the boy, expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him
utterly
from her.' Mary, however, remains 'culpably obtuse to my sinister
design'. All
of which may give some insight into why Barrie's original title for the
story
of Peter Pan was The Boy Who Hated Mothers.
When The Little White Bird was
published in
1902, it was hailed by The Times Literary Supplement as 'an exquisite
piece of
work' and 'one of the most charming books ever written'. The same
review also
declared, 'If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love
of
children, we do not know it.' But a modern reader might feel less
straightforwardly celebratory. Take, for example, the following
passage, when
the narrator describes his night alone with the child: 'David and I had
a
tremendous adventure. It was this - he passed the night with me... I
took [his
boots] off with all the coolness of an old hand, and then I placed him
on my
knee, and removed his blouse. This was a delightful experience, but I
think I
remained wonderfully calm until I came somewhat too suddenly to his
little
braces, which agitated me profoundly... I cannot proceed in public with
the
disrobing of David.'
fter some time, David climbs into bed
with the
narrator. 'For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and
sometimes
his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but
he
always retained possession of my finger...' Meanwhile, the adult lies
awake,
thinking of 'this little boy, who in the midst of his play while I
undressed
him, had suddenly buried his head on my knee' and of his 'dripping
little form
in the bath, and how when I essayed to catch him he had slipped from my
arms
like a trout.'
Gerald du Maurier's biographer, James
Harding,
was made decidedly uncomfortable by this scene, though veered away from
any
accusation of impropriety. 'One needs a tough stomach to put up with
Barrie in
this mood,' he wrote, in 1989. 'No writer today would publish such an
account
without inviting accusations of paedophilia or worse. Yet Barrie, in
the manner
of Lewis Carroll and his nude photographs of little girls, was
consciously
innocent. His snapshots of the tiny lads [the Llewelyn Davies boys]
frolicking
bare-bottomed on the beach, the cowboy and Indian adventures he made up
for
them... were a means to enjoy the pleasures of fatherhood with none of
the
pains. In Sylvia du Maurier's children he discovered the ideal outlet
for the
frustrations which obsessed him.'
Dudgeon is unconvinced by Harding's
phrasing -
'How did he know that Barrie's innocence was conscious?'- but there is
still no
evidence to settle the argument. Having read Dudgeon's book, and re-read
Birkin's, and then returned to my own research notes from the du Maurier
archive and elsewhere, I remain just as uncertain about J.M. Barrie,
whose
chief aim seemed to be not to corrupt boys into adult desire, but for
himself
to rejoin them in the innocence of eternal boyhood, a Neverland where
children
fly away from their mothers and no one need grow
old.
True, there are letters of his that are
odd,
such as the one he wrote to Michael on the eve of his eighth birthday,
in June
1908: 'I wish I could be with you and your candles. You can look on me
as one
of your candles, the one that burns badly - the greasy one that is bent
in the
middle. But still, hurray, I am Michael's candle. I wish I could see you
putting on the redskin's clothes for the first time... Dear Michael, I
am very
fond of you, but don't tell anybody.'
This is one of the few letters that have
survived - Peter Llewelyn Davies destroyed nearly all of Barrie's vast
correspondence with Michael in the melancholic period before he killed
himself
by diving under a Tube train at Sloane Square station. ('They were too
much,'
was his only comment on the letters between Barrie and Michael.)
Elsewhere, there are moments when
Barrie seems
to display an unsettling streak of casual sadism (not dissimilar to
Peter Pan,
whose capacity for cruelty was eradicated in the Disney version). For
example,
in The Little White Bird, the narrator declares, 'I once had a
photograph taken
of David being hanged on a tree', which he sends to the child's
mother: 'You
can't think of all the subtle ways of grieving her I
have.'
Given that Barrie's fame coincided with
Freud's, it is surprising that no one analysed his motives at the time.
Yet
Sylvia, like the parents of the other children befriended by Barrie,
welcomed
him as a kind of benign fairy godfather, even when he adopted the
persona of
the pirate Captain Swarthy (an early incarnation of Hook), and forced a
four-year-old Peter to walk the plank into the murky waters of Black
Lake, in
the forested grounds of the Barries' holiday retreat in Surrey. Perhaps
Arthur
was less keen on Barrie - though he seems to have accepted the author's
presence within his family as he grew closer to death - and Sylvia's
true
feelings at the end of her life remain unclear. Barrie, by then
divorced, told
her son Jack that Sylvia had agreed to marry him on her deathbed; a
story that
neither Jack nor Peter believed. He also - and this is the most damning
piece
of evidence against him - rewrote Sylvia's will to make it appear that
she had
wanted him to care for her orphaned boys. In reality, Sylvia had left a
handwritten
document, which said: 'What I wd like wd be if Jenny wd come to Mary &
that
the two together wd be looking after the boys & the house.' Mary was the
boys' longstanding nanny, whom Sylvia trusted above all others, and
Jenny was
Mary's sister. But after the will was found, Barrie transcribed it
himself and
sent it to the boys' maternal grandmother, having altered Jenny to
Jimmy, so it
appeared that Sylvia wished him to become the boys' guardian. Birkin
observes
that the 'transcription was no doubt unintentional'; Dudgeon sees the
alteration as an indication that 'Barrie's strategy was predatory.'
Whatever
the reason, the boys became Barrie's own.
Many years later, in 1946, Peter wrote
a letter
suggesting that in the wake of his parents' deaths, he and his brothers
were
'spirited away, as children, from my mother's and father's friends...
the whole
business, as I look back on it, was almost unbelievably queer and
pathetic and
ludicrous and even macabre in a kind of way...' ?Yet he also admired
Barrie, and
the creation that was his namesake, describing Peter Pan as 'that
terrible
masterpiece'. There is a faint echo in his words of those previously
put into
his mouth by Barrie, who had whimsically named him as the four-year-old
'author' of an early version of Peter Pan, The Boy Castaways of Black
Lake
Island, a privately printed edition which included Barrie's photographs
of
George, Jack and Peter's adventures with Captain Swarthy in August
1901, 'that
strange and terrible summer...' Barrie kept one copy for himself, and
gave the
other to the boys' father, Arthur, who promptly mislaid it on a train
(an act
which was, observed Peter in adulthood, 'doubtless his own way of
commenting on
the whole fantastic affair').
In his dedication to Peter Pan, written
over a
quarter of a century afterwards, when two of the Boy Castaways were
dead, along
with their parents, Barrie referred to that early book as 'the rarest
of my
printed works... for the only edition was limited to two copies, of
which one
(there was always some devilry in any matter connected with Peter [Pan])
instantly lost itself in a railway carriage.'
In the end, perhaps the last word
should go to
J.M. Barrie, who remains as tantalisingly elusive as Peter Pan himself,
and
perhaps as devilish, and also as expressive of childhood innocence (the
two are
not mutually exclusive, particularly in a writer of genius). In that
same
dedication, he referred to someone who might be Peter Pan, or possibly
his
creator; or maybe the two combined: 'that sly one, the chief figure,
who draws
farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him. He so
dislikes being
tracked, as if there were something odd about him, that when he dies he
means
to get up and blow away the particle that will be his
ashes.'
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