Your loving
M.Ll.D
While these letters ‘show very clearly the strong affection which at once developed between Sylvia and her future mother-in-law’, as Peter Llewelyn Davies observed, it was Dolly in her diary who caught the developing relationship between Arthur and Sylvia.
On Saturday, 10 October 1891, Sylvia and Arthur joined Dolly on holiday at Rustington-on-Sea on the Sussex coast where the Parry family owned a holiday home:
Saturday 10th: Arthur and Sylvia arrive. Sunday 11th: Arthur spent this morning cutting down trees. We have never seen such a pair of undemonstrative lovers as Sylvia and Arthur. They hardly ever speak to each other even when in a room by themselves. Sylvia is a delightful thing... She is always dancing about the room. And she and I are always imitating Julia and Fred Terry.*
Monday 12th: Arthur cut down trees again... Sylvia and I sat down on the beach in the morning. Spent the afternoon in the music room with Sylvia, and humbugged to any extent. S being Fred Terry, and I Julia. Took Sylvia to see the Macfarlanes. We were ushered into the awful drawing room, and S nearly burst with laughing at the extraordinary furniture. The Humbug said to Flora ‘What a pretty house,’ and then made a face to me.
She is great friends with Father, and says he is a ‘sweet man’. Arthur says he can’t bear women to like men better than their own sex, it always means there is something horrid in their characters. Love was always blind!
How fascinated Dolly was by the silent, secretive, dreamy way Sylvia conducted her relationship with Arthur, even checking the show was for real when they went off into a room by themselves, and how different from the funny, mocking, engaging Sylvia. Her double-persona won the teenager over and had her swooning with admiration.
But what of Arthur’s odd comment that he ‘can’t bear women to like men better than their own sex, it always means there is something horrid in their characters’? Was it a spontaneous revelation of jealous feelings because men paid Sylvia so much attention?
By 1892, doubts about the compatibility of Arthur and Sylvia were creeping into Dolly’s diary, though always voiced by others, never by Dolly herself. She quotes a girl called Sue: ‘Sylvia is a hundred thousand times too good for him.’ Dolly’s sister Gwen was also beginning to have misgivings: Arthur is ‘too dull, too commonplace, and oh his voice, and above all his Merriman jokes!’
Moreover, it is clear that the du Maurier clan were lukewarm about the engagement. Letters were few and not nearly as affectionate as the Llewelyn Davies letters. Kicky was loath to let Sylvia go; Emma insisted on a two-year engagement.
Kicky found the Davieses kind, sweet people. He had nothing against them personally. But he kept them at arm’s length.
When Nico sent Daphne The Morgue to read in 1963, three years after Peter’s suicide, she felt bound to comment rather apologetically about her family’s reticence. Groping for a way to explain the cool response to the infusion of ‘foreign’ blood, she wrote:
I think Grandpapa and Granny would have liked to have kept their brood intact, but since they chose to marry, then son-in-laws must come into the tribe on du M terms, or keep out. The mocking critical tolerance of poor Charlie Millar [Trixy’s husband], and the acceptance of Coley [Edward Coles, May’s husband], suited tribal law, but your father [Arthur] was of different calibre, as were his parents, and his brothers and sister.
I understand now the expression I was brought up on, ‘in and out of Kirkby Lonsdale’, meaning that Sylvia wore a different façade at KL from the one she wore at home, and when she came home with too much KL about her, she was presumably soon mocked out of it. In fact, I can imagine those moving letters your grandmother [Mary Llewelyn Davies] wrote to her, welcoming her as a daughter, possibly gave offence at New Grove House, if they were shown to the tribe. The attitude would be, ‘Just because you are going to marry Arthur, it doesn’t mean you are no longer one of us.’
But there was much more to it than that. In the late nineteenth century many Christians were hostile to the psychic arts and to the emerging science of psychology, which put Man at the centre of things and reduced the battle between God and the Devil to a conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind. The language of truth was in transition, altering with the spirit of the times.
Kicky was so anti-Christian that ‘the mere sight of a clergyman’s collar was liable to antagonise him’.2 His granddaughter Angela observed: ‘All my father’s family were allergic to church and the clergy.’ There was simply no place for religion in Kicky’s conception, no place for it in the du Maurier dream world.* He made his statement plain in Trilby –
It is very wicked and most immoral to believe, or affect to believe, that the unseen, unspeakable, unthinking Immensity we’re all part and parcel of, source of eternal, infinite, indestructible life and light and might, is a kind of wrathful, glorified, and self-glorifying ogre in human shape, with human passions, and most inhuman hates . . .
Equally, there was no place in the Reverend John LlD’s mind for Kicky’s conviction that enlightenment comes not from an authoritative source of religion, but from an altered state of consciousness, particularly as trance had links to Satanism.
It seemed like only yesterday that Kicky had been making a pen and ink drawing of Moscheles and captioning it, ‘Felix or Mephistopheles, which?’ Now, just as Kicky had called his secret ability ‘a gift from the Devil’, so in the Rabelais stories there is always a demonic dark side to what is going on.
Faustian pacts with the Devil abound, as do archetypal tricksters ‘tormenting men and discomfiting them’, references to the occult, to Cazotte’s interviews with the mysteriously cloaked Illuminati,* to cabbalists and sorcerers who would sweep their victims to their doom. A wholehearted embrace of the Devil, the feeling that ‘the Devil had come among us’, a compulsion to fly away with him – ‘a curious longing to sign my name’ in the Devil’s book – is a defining aspect of these stories, which reach back into the mists of time and seem to recognise, with a weird sort of glee –
Part am I of that Part that once was Everything;
Part of the Darkness, whence the Light did spring . . .
Reading them, one’s mind turns to the Hellfire clubs of the eighteenth century, to Sir Francis Dashwood’s notorious Monks of Medmenham Abbey, with their strange rituals and initiation rites, their members drawn from the professional classes.
Two leading members of the Rabelais were responsible, in 1886, for the most stirring evocations of the Devil ever to be put before the general public – Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Henry Irving’s revival of Goethe’s Faust at the Lyceum, both hugely successful and influential. The New York Times called Irving’s offering ‘the most daring and at the same time most admirable thing he has yet put on’, which was a telling kind of acceptance.
Faust was the source myth of the Rabelais stories, and Faust spills over from Kicky’s world into Barrie’s. For Faust’s little problem, and the reason for his pact with Mephistopheles, was the same as Barrie’s, namely a lack of sensual experience – not only sex, but that too. In the story, Faust makes a blood pact with Mephistopheles and flies away with him through the window, like Peter Pan and the lost boys to Neverland – ‘No bulky bundle must thou take. A little inflammable air will waft us, sure and speedy.’ Faust’s first temptation is a girl called Margaret, ‘with cheeks by childhood softly rounded’, who is thrilled by Faust’s dark side, thrilled ‘with secret horror’. Faust has sex with her and leaves her to die, along with the baby they conceive together.
Faust is at heart a Satanist text, which is for and about all those who desire to make the Devil their servant. It is why allusions to Faust crop up time and again in Daphne’s stories about Barrie,* and why Barrie draws on Faust in Peter Pan.
An alignment with Faust had other connotations, not the least of which was with alchemy, a pseudo-science reputedly dedicated to ‘transmuting’ base metals into gold, but widely s
uspected to have as its true purpose the transformation of the human psyche, which was about to become the purpose of the new science of psychology.
For Goethe, alchemy was the ultimate lore. At the end of the play Faust’s soul is ‘transmuted’ (a word indelibly associated with the black art) within a choir of boys, where, ‘in the highest, purest cell’, sits Doctor Marianus, an old alchemical authority.
In 1886 Freud visited Paris and watched Jean-Martin Charcot’s displays of hypnotism at the Salpêtrière Hospital,† where down-and-out patients were put into a hypnotic trance and made to ‘drop on all fours and bark like dogs, or flap their arms when told they were birds, or even eat a lump of charcoal with relish when told it was chocolate’.3 Freud saw immediately the therapeutic potential of such a hypnotic relationship.† He returned to Vienna and from 1867 began to hypnotise his patients and make helpful cathartic suggestions to their unconscious minds. It was the first step towards his theory of the conscious/unconscious mind, and in the design and implementation of the science of psychoanalysis.
It was left to his student, Carl Jung, to make the connections with what had gone before. Jung, born in 1875, first read Faust as a teenager at his mother’s suggestion. His step forward came in recognising that the drama is undertaken within the mind. Mephistopheles was (as Goethe states in the play) one of ‘the two souls’ housed within – Faust’s dark side, his unconscious mind.
Now, the purpose of psychology was to face Man with his unconscious mind – his Mephistopheles – and to analyse and resolve conflicts between it and his conscious mind. For Jung, embracing the Devil, something that the Church could never condone, was not Satanism, it was the first step to a balanced state of mind. He wrote that when he first read Faust it poured into his soul ‘like a miraculous balm. “Here at last,” I thought, “is someone who takes the Devil seriously.”’
As for the alchemist Doctor Marianus ‘in the purest, highest cell’, Jung discovered, via an incredibly detailed study of its symbols, that alchemy was the original transformational science, and as such the very seat of psychoanalysis.* ‘The alchemic transformation is to man’s innate psychic disposition, a reunion with the unconscious, his inherited, instinctive makeup, which goes down into the subhuman.’
This reunification of the civilised man with the primitive was of course at the heart of Romanticism too, and the point where Kicky stood firm.
Studying the trajectory of Kicky’s life, it seems that first he is a Romantic, next a Satanist, then an alchemist, and finally he has the mind of a modern psychoanalyst. In this he reflected the rapidly changing intellectual climate of his times. Kicky saw the unconscious mind as a photographic plate of suppressed memories and emotions, and hypnosis as the means to release them, as he wrote in Peter Ibbetson:
Evidently our brain contains something akin both to a photographic plate and a phonographic cylinder... not a sight or a sound or a smell is lost; not a taste or a feeling or an emotion. Unconscious memory records them all... Night after night I saw reacted before me scenes not only fairly remembered, but scenes utterly forgotten, and yet as sinisterly true as the remembered ones, and all bathed in that ineffable light, the light of other days – the light that never was on sea or land, and yet the light of absolute truth . . .
A Jungian might read Peter Ibbetson as a fascinating psychological adventure. Once Peter is in prison, Mary has no existence outside Peter’s mind. Her role is that of his anima. The female genes in a man can produce a contra-sexual character known as the anima in dreams and fantasies (‘the dream girl or dream lover’). In dreams, this character leads a man into his unconscious, exactly as Mary leads Peter into his unconscious memories, and into his libido.
Daphne read Jung in the 1950s and described the rapturous dream environment of Peter Ibbetson as the place where ‘man found his heart’s desire, or, if a psychological word is more easily understood, his anima’.4
In the early years of the twentieth century, Jung harvested many of the ideas that had previously been associated with Romanticism, the psychic arts, alchemy, the occult, Goethe’s Faust, and the philosophy of Kant, Von Schelling, Carus and Schopenhauer, for reinterpretation in the new science. And he read George du Maurier: in The Cambridge Companion to Jung Claire Douglas lists du Maurier among writers who spread ‘the Romantic fascination with altered states’ and influenced Jung as a student.5
Kicky kept the Christian Llewelyn Davieses at arm’s length. He did not have the objectivity of Jung, who lived until 1961 and could look back a long way and see that it is only ever the language in which we express truth that changes, not truth itself: ‘Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times... Only in a new form can eternal truth be understood anew.’ Jung saw this and held no lasting hope for psychology over Romanticism, Satanism or alchemy.
But there was, in fact, a very good reason for Kicky to regret the transition of Romanticism into the science of psychology. For while psychology rescued him from Satanism by redefining the Devil as the unconscious, the new understanding of how hypnotism works offered ordinary people a handle on the Devil and the potential for misuse soared, especially in the area of child abuse.
When, from 1887, Freud began tinkering with the unconscious, he soon discovered that the process gave him powerful control over his patients. Under hypnosis the conscious, inhibiting, protective control-tower of a patient’s thinking (the conscious mind) is put out of action and its function ceded to the hypnotist. Because control of a patient’s unconscious passes to the hypnotist, the relationship between patient and doctor is one that involves massive trust, for in hypnosis a patient’s whole interpretation of life may be changed.
What was clear to Kicky in 1893, as he finally set about writing Trilby, was that hypnosis was not only an agency for recapturing forgotten memory or engendering a Romantic mystical high. It would not be enough to write a story about a hypnotist called Svengali who made a beautiful but tone-deaf artist’s model called Trilby sing more beautifully than the world had ever heard a girl sing. He also has to destroy her.
For, with its redefinition as a psychological tool, hypnosis was henceforth a powerful instrument of mind control.
* Parry is famous for his setting of William Blake’s poem, Jerusalem, the Coronation anthem, I was glad, and anthems and settings for Anglican services, which remain a feature of English cathedral repertoires today.
* The following letters appear in The Morgue.
* Julia Neilson and Fred Terry were famous actors of the day.
* To his aversion to clerics, there was one exception, one case where personality overcame prejudice. Alfred Ainger, at one time a Canon of Bristol and Master of the Temple, was quite a character. One memorable morning, after passing du Maurier’s house, Charles Hoyer Millar recalled, ‘I came across the du Maurier children highly entertained by the sight of Alfred Ainger swinging round and round the bar of some railings, with his hat on the ground and his coat tails flying in the air as he revolved... His individuality was very strongly marked – snow white hair and a colourless face with very keen eyes, ascetic in general appearance, of delicate build and beloved of all the Hampstead old maids in particular and by everyone who knew him.’
Ainger was the source of the most famous du Maurier’s cartoons – the curate’s bad egg that was ‘good in parts’. He was very unhappy to learn about Kicky’s interest in psychic phenomena and advised him to have nothing to do with them.
* Jacques Cazotte was the author of Diable amoureux (1772), in which the hero raises the Devil.
* For example in ‘The Alibi’, ‘The Little Photographer’, and ‘Monte Verita’.
† Charcot was not in fact trying to prove anything about hypnosis, his interest was diagnostic. Medicine was still a physical-cause-and-effect science and his purpose was to show that the sometimes bizarre physical symptoms of hysteria, a blanket term for mental distress that presents symptoms such as paralysis or phantom pregnancy, were in fact the re
sult of mental trauma – some powerful shock in the past, or memory of it held in a part of the brain normally inaccessible to the conscious patient. He used the lectures to demonstrate the existence of this ‘unconscious’ part of the brain, which on stage under hypnosis could be made to produce all kinds of bizarre symptoms, including ones associated with hysteria.
‡ When Freud arrived from Vienna to study under Charcot, he realised that, if patients could be made to do these bizarre things by accessing this obviously hugely powerful ‘unconscious’ side of the brain, what extraordinary results might be achieved by making therapeutic suggestions to it. Freud’s visit led directly to his psychoanalytical theory of the conscious/unconscious mind.
* Jung began this study in the 1920s, but a psychological view of alchemy was abroad before that, thanks to Herbert Silberer (1882–1922). Jung’s idea of the archetypes of the collective unconscious – fundamental forms or ideas that shape or characterise our thinking – resonated with the elaborate symbolic language of alchemical texts, and provided scholars with a new way to examine alchemical material.
PART IV
1894–1910
Sylvia, the Lost Boys and Uncle Jim: the Peter Pan inheritance
Svengali hypothesis Trilby: ‘Et maintenant dors, ma mignonne!’
CHAPTER ONE
Slipping into madness
In 1894 George du Maurier’s second novel, Trilby, was published. It appeared first as a serial illustrated by the author in Harper’s Monthly, then in book form, and subsequently as a play, the English rights going to the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a friend of Kicky, for £100.
The play was so successful that Tree built a new theatre, Her Majesty’s, on the proceeds. The book, which was published first in America, became the number one bestseller in 1894, and by the end of the year had sold 300,000 copies.1 That was only the beginning. It was 1900 before a reporter in New York declared that the Trilby craze was over. It was ‘probably the biggest selling novel of all time,’ according to its publisher, McIlvaine at Harper. ‘Not even Dickens had attracted such a wide and devoted audience.’ It was ‘the first modern bestseller’,2 the first to use a sophisticated marketing strategy. In its marketing, as well as in its embrace of modern psychology, Trilby was a turning point.
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