BIOGRAPHY

Lost heroes

PHIL BAKER
 Piers Dudgeon

CAPTIVATED
J. M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers and the dark side of Neverland

333pp. Chatto and Windus. £18.99. 97807011 82168 

It is not a revelation that there was something a little creepy about J. M. Barrie, but no one has previously unearthed the monster Piers Dudgeon purports to identify in this remarkable new study. Dudgeon, who has previously written biographies of Catherine Cookson and Barbara Taylor Bradford, presents a Barrie who not only stole the "Lost Boys" of the Llewelyn Davies family but killed his own elder brother, sealed Daphne Du Maurier into an incestuous relationship with her father, caused the suicide of the publisher Peter Davies, and was responsible for the death of Scott of the Antarctic.

 The main element of the story has been responsibly explored by Andrew Birkin in his classic book J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979). In 1897, Barrie encountered the young Llewelyn Davies boys in Kensington Gardens with their nanny, and soon had them entranced with the odd tricks he could perform, such as moving his eyebrows separately. Not long afterwards he wormed his way into the affections of their mother, Sylvia, the daughter of George Du Maurier, and became the family's "Uncle Jim". Their father, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, a barrister, died from cancer in 1907, and Sylvia followed him in 1910. Barrie then adopted the five sons, three of whom came to sad ends. George was killed in the First World War, Michael drowned with another young man at Oxford (in what may have been a suicide pact, or an accident, or what Dudgeon sees as an attempt to escape "the nightmare world [and] Satanic dark side of J. M. Barrie") and Peter Llewelyn Davies committed suicide in 1960, suffering from financial worries and depression.

Peter is sometimes said to have given his name to Peter Pan, which caused him grief at Eton, but the boy and Barrie's character were apparently both named after George Du Maurier's novel Peter Ibbetson (1891), and Dudgeon's book pivots on the Du Maurier link. Barrie's spellbinding powers are attributed to an immersion in Du Maurier's work, combining Svengali-style hypnotism as depicted in Trilby (1894) and Peter Ibbetson-style "dreaming true". One of Dudgeon' s interesting if unorthodox ideas is the "alchemical text", a phrase he uses repeatedly and very idiosyncratically, which he takes from the idea of alchemy as transmutation. For Dudgeon "alchemical texts" are novels and plays which change and control the lives of the real people their characters are pegged on. After Barrie's 1917 play Dear Brutus, for example, Gerald Du Maurier and his daughter Daphne allegedly "followed to the letter the suggestively incestuous relationship prescribed by Jim in Dear Brutus. Dudgeon's Barrie seems to have had evil designs on the whole Du Maurier tribe, and Dudgeon is not short of a theory about this. There is no evidence that George Du Maurier and Barrie ever met, which, curiously, suggests to Dudgeon that they did but got on badly, and that Barrie aimed to ensnare Du Maurier's descendants out of revenge for his rejection.

There is also no evidence that Barrie abused the boys, but Dudgeon finds him guilty of larger, vaguer crimes such as mind-control and soul-stealing, leading to the eventual suicide of Peter Davies, because, Dudgeon explains: "the pain of the mind control victim is the hopeless pain of the abused". It seems at least as likely that a tendency to depression in the boys was related to the horrifying death of their father, with his jaw and palate removed, and the death of their mother a couple of years later. The fact that the youngest boy, Nico, was relatively unaffected may be due not to his having somehow escaped Barrie's influence but to his being only four when his father died, whereas the older boys - aged around ten or eleven - were more traumatized.

Dudgeon argues that Barrie's own pathology came from rejection by his mother after he caused the death of his elder brother (usually believed to have cracked his skull in an innocent skating accident), although only a few pages later Dudgeon has mother and son in cahoots again, with further sinister implications, as cynical co-conspirators in a Faustian pact. At any rate, by the time Barrie grew up he seems to have been a menace to all around him, including his friend Captain Scott, whose suicidally heroic tendencies were allegedly implanted by Barrie, "the greatest fantasy streamer of them all, whose reverence for the heroic ideal was driven by a psychosis". Built on endless innuendo and monomaniacal, Pale Fire-type reading, Captivated has a vulgarity of style which is inseparable from the quality of thinking and argument. It is a pity, because much of the material is interesting. Barrie seems to have suffered as much as the boys, broken by bereavement after the deaths of Michael and George and finally sustained by heroin. Perhaps the last, incontrovertible word belongs to Peter Llewelyn Davies: "the whole business . . . was almost unbelievably queer and pathetic and ludicrous and even macabre in a kind of way".