THE PATHOLOGY OF THE ARTIST – the motivations, temperament, clashes between public and private behaviour – is the real subject of Dudgeon's meticulous and highly provocative study of three writers: the creators of Peter Pan, Trilby and Rebecca. Thre
e disturbing studies in human behaviour; three authors connected by a pathological need to control others.
Dudgeon almost sounds as if he's trying to court trouble and outrage with his contentions here that JM Barrie was not only responsible for the death of his brother, David, as a child, but had a hand in the apparent suicide of his adolescent ward, Michael Llewellyn Davies, drove Michael's elder brother Peter (who many mistakenly believed was the original inspiration for Peter Pan) to suicide later in life, corrupted the young Daphne du Maurier and encouraged his close friend, the explorer Captain Scott, to head off for the Antarctic on what was, almost certainly, a suicide mission.
It's quite a charge to lay at someone's door, but Dudgeon knows what he's doing and builds his case with precision and coolness. JM Barrie, as many fans of his work know well, befriended the five Llewellyn Davies boys at the beginning of the 20th century in Kensington Park, where he and they used to go walking. Something of a literary star by this point, Barrie met the children's mother, Sylvia, and her husband Arthur, at an exclusive dinner party one evening, and thus began an extraordinary friendship.
The boys adored Barrie, it is said, and when first Arthur, then Sylvia, died, both from cancer and within a short time of each other, it was Barrie who took them into his own home to care for them. His wife, Mary Ansell, had left him for Gerard Canaan at this point.
But the Llewellyn Davieses seemed to be tarred with tragedy – a student at Oxford, Michael, the "favourite" of the boys, drowned in a lake along with a close male friend, and many years later, his elder brother, Peter, leaped in front of a train. Both of these deaths are linked by Dudgeon, in his book, to the tragic early loss of Barrie's own brother, David.
It's always been assumed that David died after a day out with a friend skating – he fell after a scuffle between them and hurt his head, dying shortly after. What Dudgeon unearths here is a counter report about the circumstances of the boy's death, disputing Barrie's claims about where he was at the time. Perhaps, Dudgeon poses, the friend accompanying David was, in fact, his younger brother James. It would explain, he argues further, some of Barrie's extraordinarily close relationship with his mother thereafter, and his interest in getting to know young boys.
Because it's Barrie's relationship with the five Llewellyn Davies boys that has caused so much controversy, Dudgeon has to take time exploring his own theory: that Barrie wasn't sexually interested in the boys so much as pathologically. That is to say, he wasn't interested in sexually abusing them, but he was hell bent on corrupting them irrevocably. It's an extraordinary charge to make, but Dudgeon builds his case by reference to comments to family members, by reading through the novels, and, most crucially, by making connections to the Llewellyn Davies cousins, the du Mauriers.
Daphne du Maurier's grandfather, George, or "Kicky" as he was known, was credited with writing the first modern bestseller, Trilby, about a man called Svengali who corrupts and destroys a young woman called Trilby, by making her into a singing star. Kicky was fascinated by the new science of mesmerism, and the power of hypnosis, experimenting frequently with young women, most often to their detriment, as the model for Trilby, a young girl called Carrie, showed. His ability to hypnotise was, Dudgeon argues, the "family secret" and he handed it down to his grand-daughter, Daphne. Of course, the power of the writer is the power to "hypnotise" to a certain extent – it's what all storytellers try to do, convince us of another world, a world that the storytellers themselves have total control over.
Daphne would write her own spellbinding, bestselling story about a controlling individual who could even influence events from beyond the grave, in her novel, Rebecca. But she was also influenced in her youth by the attentions of a family visitor – "Uncle Jim", or JM Barrie, who even wrote a play about Daphne's own very close, some even say, incestuous, relationship with her father.
Feeding on other's experiences for material for a novel is one thing (and the master of that art, Henry James, gets a few mentions here too). But directing and manipulating other people for material for a novel, for the enjoyment of power, for the sake of corrupting those individuals – that belongs to characters like Svengali and Rebecca, and in real life, to Barrie.
It was when both Daphne herself, and her cousin Peter Llewellyn Davies, finally understood what good old Uncle Jim had been doing to them all these years, that she had her nervous breakdown and he killed himself.
As I said, it's quite a set of charges to lay at anyone's door and in the absence of hard evidence, Dudgeon can only rely on hearsay, fiction, and of course, the tragic ends in themselves of so many members of the same family. It's a gripping read that exposes the dark side to two seemingly innocent activities, writing and loving children, which many will doubtless find offensive. But whether he is right about Barrie or not, he has exposed, in quite a magnificent way, the power and potential for abuse in both.
The full article contains 967 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
