What does Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, published in 1938, have in common with
the suicide, 21 years later, of a 63-year-old man called Peter Llewelyn
Davies, and with the death of Captain Scott in the Antarctic in 1912? The
answer, according to Piers Dudgeon in this wonderfully batty book, is JM
Barrie.
The pocket-sized author of Peter Pan, who died in 1941, was the self-appointed
guardian of Peter and his four brothers, George, Jack, Michael and Nico, the
original lost boys of Neverland. The Llewelyn Davies family were cousins to
the du Mauriers, and Barrie was known to the young Daphne as “uncle Jim”.
Nobody has ever suggested that Barrie's relationship to the Davies boys and
their mother, Sylvia, was healthy, but Dudgeon rejects the traditional line
(that Barrie was an innocent homosexual paedophilic fantasist) and argues
instead that he was a demonic “mind-controlling” hypnotist who held them
all, and the du Mauriers, too, in his “possession”, playing them like
puppets even from beyond the grave.
As for Scott, who was Barrie's friend, had he not fallen under the fatal spell
of his “controller” he would never have believed himself a hero and tried to
reach the South Pole. “Where can this dangerous fantasy persona have come
from, if not from Jim?” Dudgeon asks. Captivated contains more question
marks than a police interrogation and is as portentous as a B movie.
“May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me,” Barrie warned and his
curse was surely aimed at Dudgeon, who goes further than any other
biographer in his attempt to traverse that gloomy terrain known fondly to
Barrie fans as “Barriness”. The problem for his biographers is that while
Barrie displays the material of his unconscious like washing on a line (his
dreams, disappointments and desires all fuelled his writing), we understand
him so little. What on earth was it all about, this obsession with boys,
immortality, islands, dreaming and perfect mothers? Dudgeon argues that we
understand him so little because of his “secret”, the gripping nature of
which propels the narrative of Captivated with the force of a turbo engine.
Without giving too much away, it has to do with Barrie as the source of all
evil: it was Barrie, after all, who on seeing that the statue of Peter Pan
in Kensington Gardens was not modelled, as he had wanted, on photographs of
his beloved Michael, complained that it “doesn't show the devil in Peter”.
Barrie had, it seems, lots of devilish secrets and Dudgeon sets out to uncover
them all. The first involves the death of his elder brother David, aged 13,
in a skating accident, as a result of which Margaret, Barrie's mother, sank
into a grief from which she refused to recover. For Dudgeon, this maternal
rejection suggests that Barrie was the child who “accidentally” knocked
David down on the ice. So Barrie's first secret was that he killed his
brother.
As for the famous meeting between Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies boys in
Kensington Gardens (so important in the Barrie mythology), this was no
chance occurrence. Barrie, it seems, had long been obsessed by Trilby, the
bestselling novel by George du Maurier, which tells the story of Svengali's
hypnotic control of a young artist's model - and the Llewelyn Davies boys
were George's grandchildren. Barrie, childless and impotent, wanted to
belong to the du Maurier/Davies clan because they were happy and he was not,
and because they shared “the du Maurier secret [which] promised the eternal
youth that Barrie had been denied”.
His “invasion” of the family was aided by the early deaths of the boys'
parents. Barrie, notoriously, then doctored their mother's will so her
stated wish that “Jenny” (Nanny's sister) should help to look after the
boys, became “Jimmy”. While Dudgeon doesn't actually suggest that Barrie
inflicted the cancer that killed the parents, he treats each death as a
willed event. As DHLawrence observed, “JM Barrie has a fatal touch for those
he loves. They die.”
His favourite Llewelyn Davies boys, George and Michael, also died young:
George in the first world war, Michael in what looks like a suicide pact
with a fellow Oxford student. “There is a programmed inevitability about
Michael's death,” Dudgeon argues, “and the programmer is Uncle Jim...‘to be
a real boy' was to pass over to the other side by drowning.” Barrie's
programming was also responsible, Dudgeon concludes, for the suicide of
Peter in 1960.
All this makes for a rattling grisly read, but we need some chapter and verse.
Did Barrie actually sit the boys down and swing a watch in front on them?
Well, not quite. “Jim was concocting a hypnotic environment of sensuousness
within which to woo his young collaborators.” Nor is hypnosis “necessarily a
state of trance”. It can arise out of “a cognitive social context in which
the roles of hypnotist and subject are constantly reinforced...There is a
control figure (Jim) and a subject. Each is aware of his role and prepared
to reinforce the other by his performance”. Dudgeon suggests that a note
pushed by Nanny under Jack's bedroom door saying, “Things have been going on
in this room of which your father would not have approved”, refers not to
the bed squeaking but to Barrie's exercise of his hypnotic powers.
Dudgeon's rewriting of Barrie's relationship with his doomed adopted family is
entertaining if not persuasive, but when he moves on to discuss Barrie's
influence on Daphne du Maurier, the argument veers way off course and
becomes mired in silliness. In his hands, Rebecca is not, as du Maurier
herself said, about her jealousy of her husband's former lover, Jan Ricardo.
This was a smoke screen disguising her real purpose, “writing Jim's demon
boy into her life”. The drive of this “demon boy” in du Maurier also,
Dudgeon explains, accounts for her two lesbian relationships - as if one has
to be male to desire a woman.
Du Maurier's appearance as a witness in a lawsuit claiming she had plagiarised
the plot of Rebecca from a little-known story she had never read was a
critical moment for her. “She was asked to expound on the genesis of
Rebecca. How could she? She could not even explain to herself how she had
come to write it,” cries Dudgeon. Du Maurier could, of course, and did
explain to herself how she had come to write it, but her problem in court
was that of “most victims of possession when they are told to name their
controller: they cannot see they are being controlled. None of Jim's victims
ever had anything bad to say about him”.
Dudgeon, who has nothing good to say about Jim, frames his book with an
account of how he once met du Maurier and knew her son, who “let slip” that
his mother had “placed a 50-year moratorium on pulication of her adolescent
diaries”. What, wondered Dudgeon, had the author been so desperate to keep
under wraps until 2039? This question proves to be the germ of his research:
perhaps she is his “dark controller”.
It was Barrie's belief, Dudgeon says, that “people are pegs on which we hang
our emotions”. The same might be said of Dudgeon's own approach to
biography: people are pegs on which to hang our theories. With its cast of
one- dimensional characters and its theme of good v evil, Captivated is more
pantomime than scholarship, but while few will agree with Dudgeon's
findings, I defy you not to be...captivated.
Captivated by Piers Dudgeon
Chatto £18.99 pp320 Buy
the book from Books First £17.09 including free delivery
