Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  The business of the fists is that Kicky liked to keep fit by boxing and had very fast hands. Daphne wrote that the strongest quality in his nature ‘was his love of beauty’, and that his interest in the human form was part of an intensely emotional quest to apprehend and express beauty wherever it might lie. Armstrong observed that his apprehension of beauty was never stronger than in his appreciation of music:

  Music was a powerful influence in du Maurier’s life. He used to say that literature, painting and sculpture evoked no emotion which could be compared with that felt by a sensitive person on hearing a well-trained voice or a violin. In those days he spent much more time at our hired piano than he did before an easel.

  Forty years later, Kicky, Lamont and Armstrong would feature in Trilby as Little Billee, the Laird and Taffy, ‘the three musketeers of the brush’ who are Trilby’s friends, and music would be the ultimate expression of beauty in the story, in which Svengali, a musician, hypnotises and enslaves Trilby, a young bohemian artist’s model, who has all the potentiality of a singer, but is tone deaf. In repeated practice sessions under his hypnotic power, Svengali transforms her singing voice until she sings as no human being has ever sung – but in the process he destroys her.

  There is much in the novel that is redolent of Paris of the late 1850s and early ’60s, in particular the place and rue Saint-André des Arts, the rue Gît-le-Coeur (the ‘place St Anatole des Arts’ and the ‘rue du Puits d’Amour’ of the novel), and their adjacent congeries of blind alleys, winding passages and narrow streets. ‘Nearly every stone of that locale furnished the elegant record of a phase in the life of the city which Little Billee and the Laird and Taffy and Trilby loved so well and not altogether unwisely.’4

  Among other of Kicky’s Paris friends who also made an appearance in Trilby were James McNeill Whistler, who became Joe Sibley, ‘the idle apprentice’,5 and Alexander (Alecco) Ionides, a boy Kicky describes as ‘only sixteen, but six feet high, and looking ten years older than he was’, the son of a wealthy Greek merchant living in London.

  Alecco is introduced in the novel simply as ‘the Greek’ and recommended for his ability ‘to smoke even stronger tobacco than Taffy’. Smoking was all the rage; many of du Maurier’s illustrations of the 1850s are of young men falling into reverie in clouds of smoke. It clearly wasn’t tobacco in the pipes.

  After Kicky arrived in London in 1860, he and his friends would gravitate to Alecco’s house to continue to enjoy certain aspects of the Paris bohemian lifestyle. Alecco was a linchpin, as Kicky recorded: ‘When his Paris friends transferred their Bohemia to London, were they ever made happier and more at home than in his lordly parental abode or fed with nicer things?’6

  In time, the Greek became a grey-bearded, millionaire city magnate. He was ever ‘as genial, as jolly, and as hospitable as in the old Paris days, but he no longer colours pipes’.

  Dashing, cosmopolitan Alecco Ionides was procurer to this band of artists, just as Jean-Jacques Moreau de Tours had been supplier of hashish in the form of a green paste to Le Club des Haschischins, frequented earlier by similarly euphoric Romantics: Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, de Nerval and Baudelaire.

  Kicky’s special interest, however, was not drugs but something else that was on tap on the left bank. It was the very art in which Svengali excelled.

  The heroine of Trilby is an artist’s model. These girls were often lovers and in a way mothers to the hopelessly disorganised artists, who lived on their dreams and not a little of the money the young women made by modelling. As Albert Vandam wrote:

  Astonishing though it may seem to those who are not familiar with the inner life of the French artists’ models... the susceptibility of a great many of them to hypnotic influence, especially among the female members, is an ascertained fact. What Svengali did in such terrible earnestness and with such terrible results to poor Trilby is done out of sheer fun almost every day by the pupils at the ‘Beaux Arts’, at private drawing-schools, and the academies libres.

  Normally, a model would pose for four hours, with ten minutes’ interval between each forty minutes. However, hypnotism was all the rage in Paris at this time, and many a mischievous student artist learnt how to improve on this schedule by hypnotising these models, ensuring absolute rigidity in whatever pose was desired and for whatever length of time.

  Unfortunately many of those youngsters have that power, and a few of them exercised it to such a purpose that there was an outcry, and the authorities had to interfere. The chief culprit was a young fellow who for some considerable time had attended the lectures of the late Dr Charcot [the famous hypnotist and doctor]... Our amateur Charcot continued to experimentalise, and finally selected for his subject a girl of great plastic beauty, perhaps one of the most perfect specimens of the human form the world has ever seen, the well-known Élise Duval, the favourite model of M Gérôme and Benjamin Constant. Of a highly strung, nervous temperament and very playful disposition, Élise Duval showed even a greater tendency to become ‘sport’ for the hypnotiser, whether amateur or professional, than the majority of her sister-models, and one day, at the beginning of a séance, she was thrown into a trance which lasted for four hours, at the end of which she was awakened more dead than alive. She was suffering from a violent headache, her legs refused to carry her, every one of her limbs felt sore, and she had to be carried home and put to bed. But the hypnotisers still refused to relinquish their favourite amusement, and they got Élise Duval once more under the spell, of course with equally distressing results.7

  Vandam puts the Duval scandal as occurring around 1880. But it is clear from the record of Felix Moscheles, who was an art student in Paris and friend of Kicky, that mesmerism was as popular in the 1850s, if not more so:

  In Paris I had had opportunities of attending some most interesting séances, in consequence of which I soon proceeded to investigate the mesmeric phenomena on my own account. Now I have not [indulged] for some thirty years; I swore off because it was taking too much out of me; but I look back with pleasure on my earlier experiments, successes I may say, for I was fortunate enough to come across several exceptional subjects. Du Maurier was particularly interested in one of these, Virginie Marsaudon, and had a way of putting puzzling questions concerning her faculties and my mesmeric influence... I was not yet eighteen when I first went to Paris, to study under my cousin, the eminent painter, Henri Lehmann. At his studio I found Virginie installed as the presiding genius of the establishment, using in turn broom or tub, needle, grill or frying-pan as the occasion might require; the wide range of her powers I further extended by making a truly remarkable mesmeric subject of her... It needed but little to lead her on from a state of docile and genial dependence to one of unconscious mesmeric subjection, and so, a few passes shaping her course, I willed her across the boundary line that separates us from the unknown, a line which, thanks to science, is daily being extended. Madame Marsaudon was herself an incorrigible disbeliever in the phenomena of mesmerism, but as a subject her faculties were such as to surprise and convert many a scoffer.

  At the séances, to which I invited my friends and a few scientific outsiders, I always courted the fullest investigation, taking it as the first duty of the mesmerist to show cause why he should not be put down as a charlatan... It was doubly satisfactory, then, that the good faith of subject and mesmerist could be conclusively proved.

  One of these séances led to a rather amusing incident. One night I was awakened from first slumbers by a sharp ring at my bell, and when, after some parleying, I opened the door, I found myself confronted by two individuals. One I recognised as an ‘inquirer’ who had been brought to my rooms some time previously; the other was a lad I had not seen before. The inquirer, I ascertained, having carefully watched my modus operandi on the occasion of his visit, had next tried experiments of his own. In this instance he had succeeded in mesmerising a lad, but had found it impossible to recall him to his normal condition. So, securing him by a leather strap fastened roun
d his waist, he led him through the streets of Paris to my rooms. There we both tried our powers upon him, the result being very unsatisfactory. The youth, feeling himself freed from one operator and not subjected by the other, refused allegiance to either, and, being of a pugnacious temperament, he squared up and commenced striking out at both of us. It was not without considerable difficulty that I re-mesmerised him completely, and then, having previously prepared his mind to account naturally for his presence in my rooms, I succeeded in awakening him, and all ended happily. The inquirer was duly grateful, the youth went home strapless and none the worse for the adventure, and I proceeded to do some very sound sleeping on my own account.

  The practice of mesmerism had changed greatly since the eighteenth century when Franz Anton Mesmer first claimed that a universal fluid infusing both matter and spirit with its vital force could be pressed into service to medicine with the aid of magnets.

  In 1831 the French Academy of Medicine had published a detailed report on five years’ research into clinical experiments in hypnosis conducted at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, confirming that mesmerism could induce a state of semi-consciousness in which subjects became ‘complete strangers to the external world’ and ‘new faculties: clairvoyance, intuition, internal pre-vision’ were awakened.

  That these practices were already held to be dangerous was clear from scientific research being undertaken long before Moscheles arrived in Paris. In 1841 Dr James Braid attended a demonstration of hypnotism in Manchester by a man named La Fontaine, a Swiss ‘magnetist’.† He saw at once that what he had witnessed involved ‘physiological modifications of the nervous system’. If hypnotists were intervening in the workings of the nervous system, there was the possibility, with misuse, of nervous deterioration, even nervous breakdown. Braid warned of ‘nervous lassitude and innumerable other dangers’, particularly if hypnosis was undertaken by ‘the unscrupulous or unskilful’. Moscheles’s decision to ‘swear off being hypnotised because ‘it was taking too much out of me’ suggests he was right.

  One other danger being discussed in medical circles in the mid-nineteenth century concerned the relationship of the hypnotised subject to the hypnotiser. The former becomes subservient to the will of the latter and therefore vulnerable to exploitation. Braid reported that ‘some persons are so deeply influenced that they become entirely obedient to the hypnotist’. It is interesting that Felix Moscheles slips easily into the language of domination when discussing his subject moving from ‘docile and genial dependence’ to a state of ‘unconscious mesmeric subjection’. In Kicky’s novel this is of course exactly what happens to Trilby as she falls under Svengali’s power.

  Felix Moscheles entered Kicky’s life after he left Paris and transferred to the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts, a leading European school of painting, where he had, as he liked to point out, ‘no less a person than Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student’.* Here Kicky and Felix shared a studio, and one day –

  I was drawing from a model, when suddenly the girl’s head seemed to me to dwindle to the size of a walnut. I clapped my hand over my left eye. Had I been mistaken? I could see as well as ever. But when in its turn I covered my right eye, I learned what had happened. My left eye had failed me; it might be altogether lost... That was the most tragic event of my life. It has poisoned all my existence.8

  For a time it was feared Kicky might lose the sight of both eyes. Wrote Daphne:

  He moved from Antwerp to the little town of Malines and for a while he felt he would never recover from the blow and even had dark thoughts of suicide. His mother, who came out to be with him, could not comfort him. For though he made light of the tragedy in public and laughed and joked about it when his friends came to Malines to see him, showing them his dark glasses and saying he was an aveugle [blind man], she knew and they suspected what the suffering must be.9

  Kicky had suffered what would now be diagnosed as a detached retina. He had to give up any idea of becoming an artist. However, one could get from Antwerp to Malines in about an hour, and Felix became a regular visitor at weekends, delighted to discover that all was not quite as bleak in Malines as he had anticipated:

  There were pretty girls about, and I need not say that, as both of us were studying art and devoting our best energies to the cult of the beautiful, we considered it our duty to take special notice of these pretty girls wherever we came across them. It is probably the conscientious performance of his duty in that direction which enabled du Maurier to evolve those ever-attractive and sympathetic types of female beauty we are all so familiar with. Nor would it have been becoming in me, who had everything to learn, to lag behind, or to show less ardour in the pursuit of my studies.

  Kicky and Felix befriended a pretty 17-year-old girl called Octavia, whom they nicknamed ‘Carry’ and who had ‘a rich crop of brown curly hair, very blue inquisitive eyes, and a figure of peculiar elasticity’. Carry was the daughter of an organist who had recently died. Her mother had set up a tobacconist’s store with a small inheritance. Carry was clearly hopelessly vulnerable to the two older boys. They persuaded her to sit for them in the nude, and then hypnotised her, Kicky absorbing her and the game of mesmerism at the same time.

  A mesmeric séance in Mrs L’s back parlour (1858)

  Before long Kicky and Felix were getting subjects off the street and hypnotising them in ‘the back parlour of Mrs L.’s tobacco store’. Felix relates (and Kicky illustrates) one such session:

  There I am operating on a boy – such a stupid little Flemish boy that no amount of fluid could ever make him clever. How I came to treat him to passes I don’t remember; probably I used him as an object-lesson to amuse Carry. All I recollect is that I gave him a key to hold, and made him believe that it was red-hot and burnt his fingers, or that it was a piece of pudding to be eaten presently, thereby making him howl and grin alternately.

  Carry became besotted with the two young men* – ‘not without cause,’ boasted Felix; ‘du Maurier could draw and I could paint; he could sing and I could mesmerise, and couldn’t we just talk beautifully! We neither of us encourage hero-worship now, but then we were “bons princes”, and graciously accepted Carry’s homage as due to our superior merits.’

  If this seems to imply that it was only Felix who hypnotised Carry, Daphne is clear on this point: ‘Both Felix and Kicky practised mesmerism at that time.’10 And Felix himself writes:

  The truth of the matter is that we shared fraternally in the enjoyment of [Carry’s] good graces, he having the pull of me the greater part of the week, and only suspending operations in my favour when I came to Malines on a Saturday to Monday visit . . .

  There was a subtle quality in Carry, well worthy of appreciation, a faculty of charming and being charmed, of giving and taking, of free and easiness, coupled with ladylike reserve. She seemed to be born with the intuitive knowledge that there was only one life worth living, that of the Bohemian, and to be at the same time well protected by a pretty reluctance to admit as much. In fact, to give a correct idea of her I need but say her soul was steeped in the very essence of Trilbyism.

  Carry was unconventional, free and easy, a disciple of truth and beauty, but transformed into the artists’ plaything was enslaved and exploited by them. Her story, as Kicky confessed to his close friends, was the root of his novel, Trilby. He and Felix ‘get Carry’s soul’, as Felix describes the process, just as Svengali gets Trilby’s. When the two art students first hypnotised the 17-year-old, she had just lost her father. When Svengali first hypnotises Trilby, it is to relieve the pain and loneliness of losing her parents.

  Years later George du Maurier was weighed down with feelings of guilt, but at the time he could not have been more turned on by the devilry of hypnotism. In one drawing he depicts Felix as Mephistopheles playing a piano, on top of which a cat is hissing at him. Kicky’s caption reads: ‘Felix or Mephistopheles, which?’ Felix wrote that the music he was playing emanated from some sort of ‘untrained inner consciousn
ess’.

  The next drawing shows a vision of Carry emerging in clouds of smoke from what looks like a cigar Felix is smoking. The caption reads: ‘Inspiration papillotique’, which means something like ‘inspiration gift-wrapped’.

  Deeper in the du Maurier archive I discovered an excerpt from an undated letter in French to Carry, which reads: ‘At night George’s imagination takes on the shape of an ancient hunter over which he puts on a pair of breeches so as not to hinder his movements. Decked out in this manner he goes hunting for memories in the dead forests of his mind, which are his exclusively... These huge forests are peopled by fantastic beings and singular trees; amongst which he meets the elegant shadows of . . .’

  There the letter runs on to another sheet, which is missing. ‘George’ is of course Kicky, and as usual his letter is illustrated. The drawing depicts a pipe-smoking satyr carrying a bow and arrow ‘on the hunt’ approaching a ‘cabin’ made out of tree trunks and festooned with a leafy canopy. Carry has her arm around a tree trunk and is looking down upon a third figure, the artist, whose hair is standing on end, as if it were electrified, which in Kicky’s cartoons means that a hypnotism is in progress.

  Commenting on a drawing of Kicky in a trance on a chaise-longue, Felix writes, ‘No wonder if he depicts himself, with fixed gaze and hair erect, sitting bolt upright on my hospital sofa, thrilled and overawed by the midnight presence of the uncanny, which I had evoked for his benefit.’