Posted on 07/18/2008 3:12:37 PM PDT by forkinsocket
An obsessive stalker, an impotent husband, a lover of young boys... to some, the creator of 'Peter Pan' was an evil genius; to others, a misunderstood ingenue. Ever mindful of the J.M. Barrie 'curse', Justine Picardie investigates
'May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me,' declared J.M. Barrie, in a curse scrawled across the pages of one of his last notebooks. Since his death in 1937, this dire warning has not prevented a slew of writers taking him on, the latest of which is Piers Dudgeon, whose book Captivated is subtitled The Dark Side of Never Never Land, and examines what he believes to be Barrie's sinister influence over the du Maurier family.
Dudgeon's portrait of Barrie - as a man who filled the vacuum of his own sexual impotence by a compulsive desire to possess the family who inspired his most famous creation, Peter Pan - is entirely at odds with the Hollywood version, Finding Neverland, in which Johnny Depp portrayed the author as a charming hero, devoted to large dogs and small children. Here was the quirky little man who had already been celebrated by his contemporaries as a genius with a great heart, not least for his bequest of the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, thus ensuring that the golden fairy-dust of his writing was liberally sprinkled over those in need.
But where does the truth lie about J.M. Barrie (an author who explored the shadowy borderlands where truth and lies mingle and breed)?
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
It seems to be absolutely de rigeuer to trash famous people after they are dead.
Since practically everybody is now accused of being homosexual (e.g. Lincoln), I guess they had to step up the scandal a little bit and accuse Barrie of being a pedophile.
Of course they did the same thing to Lewis Carroll.
In the post-Freudian age, everything is suspect.
Like Barack Obama, I don't speak French. Not well enough to spell it without stopping to check.
But, unlike the Messiah, at least I do speak a(nother) foreign language.
....sounds like they’re talking about Michael Jackson..........
“sounds like they’re talking about Michael Jackson..”
What was the name of his “ranch?”
Oh, yeah! Now I remember,,,,,,,,,
Was'nt There some critic at the first peter pan play who said "Oh for a hour of King Herod?"
He meant to be an enigma, that much is clear. Whether that was the simple insecurity of someone who didn't know who he was or the darker conviction of one who did and knew that others would disapprove for good reason, is impossible to tell from the evidence at hand. But even when couched as an act of love, altering someone's will to take possession of her children is highly alarming and simply not the action of a well-adjusted individual.
I'll leave it, as this author did, with Barrie's own words: ...that sly one, the chief figure, who draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him. He so dislikes being tracked, as if there were something odd about him, that when he dies he means to get up and blow away the particle that will be his ashes.
No wonder why Johnny Depp portrayed him in “Finding Neverland”! Johnny Depp portrays eccentricity very well.
No question he was a strange bird. I think the severe social restrictions of Victorian Britain made folks break out in odd ways -- hence the famous tradition of the English eccentric. But, on the other hand, those strict rules probably kept a lot of borderline folks from running off the rails.
But it's a bit much to treat Barrie's fiction as autobiography. What then do we make of horror stories? of romantic bodice-rippers? or murder mysteries?
And these "revisionist" biographies always have to come up with scandal, or they don't sell. Otherwise, why should anyone buy a new biography when they have a perfectly good one already, and the subject, like Generalissimo Franco, is still dead?
C.S. Lewis had some hard words for critics who try to analyze authors through their fiction, and gave examples of why it doesn't work.
Actually, Barrie wrote some very good fiction and a couple of 'slice of life' plays that were far better than Peter Pan. Some people think of his Scottish fiction as too sentimental, but I never thought so.
Apparently in Sylvia Davies' will, he was made a trustee and guardian of the children.
Nevertheless, Barrie tapped into a vein of something very interesting in the relationship between childhood and adulthood and indirectly between adults and children. I personally found aspects of Peter Pan quite uncomfortable well before I was aware of Barrie's personal life at all. That's both subjective and anecdotal and so I can't draw anything much more from it, but it's a fact.
And I agree with you completely that to take that discomfort as far as accusation of pedophilia would be a superficial analysis and grossly abusive. I doubt it was anything quite so straightforward. All IMHO, of course.
He had a pretty traumatic childhood, and that certainly cropped out in his fiction. But I think that he was asexual, if anything. (These types don't crop up very much anymore, what with modern society's constant and overwhelming focus on sex, but they do exist. I've known two. They just really don't care about it. I think that Lewis Carroll may well have been the same.)
I can understand him cursing any future biographer though -- Barrie was a very private and in some ways very unhappy person, and he would have writhed in agony to see his private life spread out in print for the curious to gawk.
LOL - yeah, sorta like we’re doing now. Well, if I end up pushin’ up the daisies tonight of a sudden attack of apoplexy, consumption, dropsy, or the ague, we’ll know about the curse...
Electrons are ephemeral.
Besides, I don't believe in King Tut's Curse, so I sure don't put much credence in J.M. Barrie's Curse.
The DuMauriers were plenty odd on their own, without any help from Barrie. That artistic temperament, you know. As Sherlock Holmes said about his French grandfather, "Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms."
Not to add any fuel to the Curse story or anything, but Barrie's producer, Charles Frohman, died in May 1915. He died when the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk.
Objection No. 2: Pretty powerful curse to get the Huns to torpedo the Lusitania in order to get one guy.
But not Jane!
Jane lies in Winchester -- blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love, and honour unto England's Jane!
- Rudyard Kipling
Next in interest is [Carroll’s] love for little girls. It is hard to see anything perverse in this. Today we acknowledge quite casually the existence of a large minority of oversexed people. We tend to forget that by the simple law of averages there must exist a similarly large minority of undersexed people. But they are not so visible. Most of them surrender to social conformity, get married, and cause vast amounts of silent misery. I think Carroll was undersexed, but also honest, decent, and courageous about it. His love of little girls was not a sexual release, for he didn’t need any. It was a perfectly pure, proper passion of a kind more common in his day than in ours and therefore less comprehensible to us.— Clifton Fadiman, The Maze in the Snow, collected in Party of One.
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