Book World: Michael Dirda on 'Neverland' by Piers Dudgeon

NEVERLAND

J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers,

and the Dark Side of "Peter Pan"

By Piers Dudgeon

Pegasus. 333 pp. $26.95

There might be scarier books this Halloween season, but it's unlikely that any will be as luridly creepy as "Neverland." Even if you already know a little about the sinister background of J.M. Barrie's classic play, "Peter Pan," you will be in for a shock. In these pages Piers Dudgeon presents a multi-generational history of psychological domination and submission, unnatural family relations, predatory abuse and suicide.

He also connects three great works of the popular imagination: George du Maurier's late-19th-century bestseller "Trilby" -- the novel in which the evil Svengali, through hypnosis, transforms a beautiful tone-deaf girl into a singing sensation but in the process destroys her soul; J.M. Barrie's death-haunted "Peter Pan," once titled "The Boy Who Hated Mothers"; and Daphne du Maurier's Gothic romance about spiritual possession, "Rebecca."

Dudgeon's biographic thesis is that George du Maurier, while an art student in Paris, learned hypnosis, first sending his mistress into submissive trances and later using mind-control to focus his own imagination. Through intense concentration, he suggested in his first novel, "Peter Ibbetson," a person could actually escape the bounds of time and space: That book's imprisoned hero, by "dreaming true," achieves blissfully ecstatic reunions with his beloved while his body remains locked in his cell. As it turns out, the young Scots writer J.M. Barrie extravagantly admired "Peter Ibbetson" -- he later gave his "demon boy" Peter Pan its hero's first name -- as well as the later "Trilby." According to Dudgeon, he then grew obsessed with du Maurier and his children, and in due course came to mesmerize and manipulate two generations of the family.

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A mama's boy, only a little over 5 feet tall, and almost certainly impotent, Barrie, in Dudgeon's view, found a virtually sexual pleasure in manipulating others. First, he inveigled his way into the good graces of George du Maurier's daughter Sylvia and her lawyer husband, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, then he gradually captivated Sylvia's spirit so fully that she would choose to spend her Christmas holidays with him rather than with her husband. Barrie, says Dudgeon, "lived for the power-play dynamics of the relationship. That was his sex. His thrills came, for example, from the tension between the way the new Sylvia rose to the almost supernatural influence he seemed to exert over their lives, and the guilt and shame the old Sylvia felt about leaving Arthur and going abroad with him." Later, after the conveniently early deaths of both husband and wife, "Uncle Jim" boldly assumed the guardianship of the couple's five sons, the original Lost Boys of "Peter Pan."

The three eldest never wholly escaped Barrie's Svengali-like influence. "All the du Mauriers captivated by Jim lived their lives within his imagination, losing their souls to him thereby." George, whom Barrie morbidly adored and psychologically abused (he essentially relates one of their nights together in his autobiographical novel "The Little White Bird"), was killed during the Great War; Barrie always credited him for Peter Pan's famous line: "To die will be an awfully big adventure." Michael, the most beautiful, drowned himself at 20, and, to Dudgeon, "there is a programmed inevitability about Michael's death, and the programmer is Uncle Jim." Finally, Peter, a lifelong melancholiac, eventually threw himself under a train.

Surprisingly, Barrie repeatedly seems to reveal the truth about his secret self throughout his many autobiographical fictions and fantasies: "In the house of Mr. and Mrs. Darling," he writes, "there never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan." He then adds, even more explicitly: "Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all. . . . 'I forget [people] after I kill them.' " As D.H. Lawrence acidly observed after the death of Michael, "J.M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die."