Private parts
Benny Green
Barrie and the Lost Boys Andrew Birkin (Constable £6.95) There was something vaguely unsavoury about Barrie, something distasteful which impelled characters as disparate as John Buchan and Bernard Shaw to ease away from his art. It was this hint of something broken, or misshapen, which made Hesketh Pearson turn down a commission to write Barrie's biography. Thanks to the engines of literary scholarship which have been rumbling away ever since Peter Pan died, we can nail the mystery as an emotional parasitism which caused Barrie to feed off the loves of others. The best book on the subject remains Janet Dunbar's biography of 1970, but even Miss Dunbar, whose study of the relevant documents left her with a persistent nightmare image of her subject, once confessed to me that there were moments in the story when Barrie's emotional ruthlessness bewildered her.
And yet none of the posthumous revelations have really been revelatory at all; no major writer of the century has more liberally displayed his own flaws and obsessions in his published work, and none has more relentlessly made creative capital out of the most private tragedies. Barrie, the most vivid case of arrested emotional development since the Reverend Dodgson, preferred the state of childhood to all others. The irony of such lives is that by the very nature of their neurosis, the victims can never father children of their own. Barrie therefore felt the need to kidnap the children of others, which he did with a cold application of winsome charm which chills the blood. Andrew Birkin believes that Barrie was able to do this because, being a child himself, Barrie knew how to charm other children. What is more to the point is that parents allowed the crime to proceed because of the money in Barrie's dusty coffers.
Looking back on it, one wonders why a clear image of the man did not emerge sooner, if only through the astonishing candour of the scenes which persistently emerged in the plays. There was the phantom daughter of Dear Brutus, the little girl-mummy of Peter Pan, above all the extraordinary manipulation of the timescale in Mary Rose for the purpose of getting the son to dandle his own nubile mother on his knee, the most comically blatant oedipal fantasy of its day. Barrie, Who tried unsuccessfully to console his mother for the death of an elder child, grew up besotted with one or another aspect of Childhood, and one of the most valuable perceptions in Birkin's book is that it was not his own childhood but his mother's which Barrie coveted. The Auld Licht Idylls were his mother's glimpse of paradise, not her son's.
Predictably Barrie matured physically but in no other way, proving unable to consummate his marriage to one of the several actresses with whom he became besotted. There is nothing remarkable about any of this; pathetic perhaps, tragic even, but hardly remarkable. What makes Barrie's case so hypnotic to the literary detective is the brazen commercial brigandage of his professional approach. Nothing was too private to shove into a play or book. Nothing was so painful that it could not be milked for royalties. With Barrie's career, Joyce's dictum about the detachment of the artist paring his finger nails is transformed into self-mutilation of a far more alarming kind.
Mr Birkin's book, which is what the trade calls with Barriesque mercenary frankness a `spin-off' from a brilliant television series, is especially praiseworthy in its attention to the Tommy and Grizel novels which have now been buried in neglect for half a century.
Sentimental Tommy and its sequel Tommy and Grizel comprise the most hairraising confessional by any English Victorian author. The Tommy who loves Grizel but cannot make love to her rises out of Barrie's diaries and private notebooks more or less word for word, thought for thought; Birkin conjectures what Mrs Barrie must have made of the texts, with their forlorn wish for eternal boylpod and the unacceptable demands of the marriage bed. Barrie's annexation of the Davies family, and particularly of the five small sons, was almost an emotional afterthought, the supplying of a deficiency which Barrie, by his very nature was powerless to remedy in any other way.
It is a story of mingled ruthlessness and saintly generosity, but at the end of it all the reader feels a shiver creeping down the small of his back at the contemplation of such parasitism.
There is little new in Birkin's book except the photographs, which are plentiful and often poignant, in a book which has been most beautifully produced. The biographical approach may be described as conventional and for the most part accurate, although Miss Dunbar's book is the better written.
One extraordinary lapse of judgment occurs with Birkin's statement that 'Several biographers have laid the blame for Barrie's inhibitions at his mother's feet, suggesting that she was excessively prudish and repressive in her views on sex . .. but there is little to suggest that she was unduly puritanical'. It is interesting to sit and wonder what Mr Birkin means by little'; other Barrie biographers have recorded the fact that Barrie's mother told him that while mother-son was the most wonderful of relationships, man-wife was 'necessary but regrettable; a wife must faithfully submit to her husband'.
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