The narrative returns George du Maurier to the bohemian Paris of his student days, to the romantic milieu of the Left Bank, ‘to happy days and happy nights... happy times of careless impecuniosity, and youth and hope and health and strength and freedom’, and to the ‘three musketeers of the brush’ – the Laird, Taffy, and Little Billee.*
No ‘killjoy complications of love’ interfere, until one day into their lives bursts artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall. Smoking roll-up cigarettes, living for freedom, truth and beauty, and on precious little else, Trilby is the very image of bohemianism and innocence, without a sly or nasty cell in her body. Hers is an unusual beauty, subtle, hidden from the casual eye, one that Little Billee considers needs discovering by a consummate artist, until he catches sight of her foot and is overcome. It is as if the very essence of her has been revealed to him.
The episode recalled the time Jimmy Whistler drew a foot on the wall of Gleyre’s studio as a symbol of the very essence of beauty, though in reality it was not the foot of a woman, but of Alecco Ionides, and his excitement was probably inspired by a pipe of opium.
But for Little Billee there is no opium; he has a strong aesthetic sense, more refined than that of either of his older artist friends. He is as sensitive to beauty as du Maurier was when in a trance. He is indeed the quintessence of Kicky’s Romantic vision, which seems to draw on the ideas of his friend Henry James.
Outwardly, Little Billee’s artistic sensitivity finds expression in a certain boyishness, which goes with ‘a quickness, a keenness, a delicacy of perception in matters of form and colour, a mysterious facility and felicity of execution, a sense of all that was sweet and beautiful in nature, and a ready power of expressing it’.
To be a boy was, in the Romantic sense, irrespective of age or gender, ‘the secret of eternal youth’, to be liberated from ‘the regular action of the world’, to be a true-dreamer like Kicky himself.
When Kicky writes that Trilby ‘would have made a singularly handsome boy’, and ‘it was a real pity she wasn’t a boy, she would have made a jolly nice one’, the reader realises that she and Little Billee are made for each other.
Trilby has, however, one imperfection. She is incapable of appreciating music, as the three artists discover when a German-Polish musician called Svengali arrives and plays ‘some of his grandest music’, which passes Trilby by. When she herself sings, she reveals a full voice, but, alas, it is excruciatingly out of tune. Rather embarrassingly, because of course she cannot hear it, Trilby is completely tone-deaf.
Svengali is fascinated by her. In threatening contrast to childlike Billee, he is a dark Satanic figure possessed of a controlling personality –
A tall bony individual of any age between thirty and forty-five, of Jewish aspect, well-featured but sinister... His thick, heavy, languid, lustreless black hair fell down behind his ears to his shoulders... He had bold, brilliant black eyes, with long, heavy lids, a thin, sallow face, and a beard of burnt-up black, which grew almost from under his eyelids; and over it his moustache, a shade lighter, fell in two long spiral twists.
He fancies he can bring Trilby to self-expression beyond her wildest dreams. First he hypnotises her therapeutically, to cure her neuralgia. Thereafter, time and again he invades and dominates her mind, and she worships his hypnotic power over her by releasing from her lips the most heavenly music the world has ever known.
Henceforth there are two Trilbys, the one Little Billee knew, who could not sing one single note in tune and was ‘an angel in paradise’, and the one Svengali turns her into. He only had to say, ‘Dors!’ and Trilby ‘became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sound... and love him at his bidding’.
Svengali’s method is that of post-hypnotic suggestion. Trilby has been put into a deep hypnotic trance and then primed with the information that a trigger word, or indeed a sign, will return her to it, but she will remain alert and apparently normal:
With one wave of his hand over her – with one look of his eye – with a word – Svengali could turn her into another Trilby, his Trilby – and make her do whatever he liked... you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it.
In deep hypnosis but alert to the world, Trilby holds audiences in thrall with her singing. But she is constantly in Svengali’s power: it only takes a word or a sign from him to return her to deep hypnosis.* Hers is a continuing nightmare existence not because she is unhappy – dressed in sables, rouged and pearl powdered, she is, and causes, a sensation – but because her mind has been commandeered. Svengali is in occupation of the control-tower of her thinking. In religious terms, he has her soul; in occult terms, it is a case of possession; in legal terms, it is the ultimate form of psychological abuse.
Her desertion breaks Little Billee’s heart. On one occasion he catches sight of her in a carriage with Svengali and she looks down at him ‘with a cold stare of disdain’. As they pass he hears them both snigger – ‘she with a little high-pitched flippant snigger worthy of a London barmaid.’
Trilby’s whole personality and interpretation of the world has been transformed by her hypnotist.
But then Svengali dies from a heart attack, and Trilby awakes as if from a dream, unaware of what has been going on and unable to sing at all. Exhausted from years as Svengali’s puppet, she dies and Little Billee, utterly destroyed, dies shortly afterwards.
The publisher’s marketing department caught on to both ‘Trilbyism’ and ‘Svengalism’.
‘Trilby turned bohemianism into a style,’ wrote Jon Savage.3 ‘It was particularly attractive to young women, who, according to Luc Sante, “derived from it the courage to call themselves artists and bachelor girls, to smoke cigarettes and drink Chianti.”’ Bohemianism swept Britain and America. Kicky received thousands of letters, both from women identifying with Trilby and from men lusting after her, such that the offer to Kicky of $10,000 for a signed drawing of Trilby in the nude, proposed by David Lodge in Author, Author, seems hardly an embellishment of the truth. John Masefield recalled: ‘I well remember hats, boots, shoes, collars, toothpastes, coats, soaps, songs and dances named after Trilby . . . For many years, the Trilby hat was known to men. It persists still as a hat, but it is no longer known as the Trilby. Even the human foot is now called a foot.’4
Equally, the marketing men promoted ‘Svengalism’, appealing to the public fascination with mind control. Within a year, there appeared a parody – Drilby Re-Versed – in which Leopold Jordan wrote what many were thinking:
Let this story be a warning
It’s written in that plan
Don’t introduce your sweetheart to
A hypnotising man.
After Trilby, abuse would never be understood again as a term relating only to physical violence. Svengali makes licentious capital of his relationship with Trilby, and Kicky’s novel promoted awareness of the sexual nature of hypnosis.
While the Trilby craze raged, Freud was discovering in a clinical context what Kicky had known for years, that ‘sexuality works above all at the level of fantasy’:5
After responding quite normally to hypnosis, one of his more submissive patients suddenly awoke and threw her arms around the doctor’s neck. Freud was ‘modest enough’ not to ascribe the patient’s impetuous behaviour to his own ‘irresistible personal attraction’, and he resolved henceforth to refrain from using hypnotism Otherwise he would never be able to eliminate or at least control a ‘mysterious element’ operating in the rapport between his patients and himself.6
Partly as a result of his experience, partly because under hypnosis patients proved to be so suggestible, Freud abandoned hypnosis altogether.
The success of Trilby put Henry James’s nose out of joint because – while the writing was wonderfully evocative of Kicky’s personality – it was not, he adjudged, great art. Also, he was appalled by the marketing strategy. ‘The American frenzy was naturally the loudest,’ he wrote, ‘and seemed to reveal monstrosit
ies of organisation.’ But he stuck by Kicky through all the consequences – including Jimmy Whistler threatening to sue him. As for Kicky, he was deeply disturbed. ‘It’s not just a success – it’s a “boom”,’ he cried, and he wasn’t happy about it, calling it ‘freakish... unnatural’.
Henry James became concerned about his friend’s health. ‘He found himself sunk in a landslide of obsessions, of inane, incongruous letters, of interviewers, intruders, invaders... Kicky seemed to recoil from all the “botheration” (as he called it) in a terror of the temper of the many-headed monster.’
Was it the commercialism that precipitated his decline, which certainly dated from publication of Trilby, or did he suffer guilt at what he had unleashed? He had been Carry’s Svengali, and now he was making a great deal of money out of it.
Poor Carry! [wrote Felix Moscheles] Yes, she had a story. Sad. Bright. Then sad again. First she gave to Amor what was Amor’s, and then to Hymen what was Hymen’s. She tasted of the apple her friend the serpent had told her so much about. Then... she tried another; such a bad one unfortunately. It was a wonder it didn’t poison her, body and soul, but it didn’t. There was a moment when the Angel with the flaming sword threatened to cast her adrift, and it would have fared badly with her had not a helping hand come to save her.7
The helping hand had come from a young doctor, who fell in love with her and to whom she clung as to a raft in a stormy sea. Her saviour saw to it that she relinquished all contact with Moscheles and Kicky. They married, and Carry gave birth to a daughter, the only occasion that she broke her husband’s rule and wrote to her Svengalis.
But then tragedy struck. Her husband developed septicaemia from a patient and died in Carry’s arms. ‘It was a case of self-sacrifice in the cause of science, of heroic devotion to a fellow-creature,’ wrote the sentimental and insincere Moscheles. ‘What can have become of Carry once more cast adrift? We never knew.’
Kicky had been close to Carry and had treated her shabbily. In August 1862 he had been visiting his mother and sister in Düsseldorf. Dropping off to see some friends in Antwerp, he had caught sight of her on a train and ignored her.
But Kicky’s brain was deteriorating, and guilt about Carry cannot have been the only reason. He had seen his Romantic metaphysical vision replaced by the emerging science of psychology, with its propensity not only to free the mind, but to control it. The irony cannot have escaped him.*
There had been warnings about nervous impairment and breakdown if one indulged in hypnosis repeatedly. Kicky knew the score. Trilby had burned out in the end. In 1895, Robert Sherard interviewed Kicky and was shocked at his decline. He struck him as ‘a man who has suffered greatly, haunted by some evil dream or disturbing apprehension’. The following autumn Kicky returned from holiday in Whitby and felt very ill, as Tom Armstrong recorded:
It was found that his head, in which weakness had been discovered some time ago, was much amiss and it was supposed that he had injured it by walking too much or too far in a hilly country. He was ordered to bed for three weeks so that his head might have complete rest... During the last fortnight of his life I saw him twice and on the latter occasion he was talkative and apparently not much depressed although he said it was ‘all over with him’. Henry James was with him when I went to his bed room . . .
Soon after my last interview with him the doctors gave instructions that no more persons than were necessary should be admitted to his sick room. His breathing became difficult and he had shivering fits and, afterwards, attacks of cardiac asthma which exhausted him much . . .
On 6 October 1896, Kicky died. He was only 62. The post-mortem revealed growths in his chest on which, it was said, it would have been impossible to operate. Henry James remained unconvinced:
They said it was matter around the heart, but it was Trilby that was the matter.
Before his death Kicky had taken the unusual step of making arrangements to be cremated, which was illegal at the time, or at least unaccounted for by Act of Parliament.
The pioneer of cremation was an eccentric doctor called William Price, who was a Druid. At 83, on 18 January 1884, he had cremated his five-month-old son, Iesu Grist Price (Jesus Christ Price). There ensued a court case, which Price won, a result that prepared the way for the Cremation Act of 1902. Price himself died in 1893. His body was cremated, as instructed, atop two tons of coal.
It is unknown whether Kicky had any dealings with Price, or was in sympathy with Druidism, an ancient religion which took the Devil seriously. The Anglican Canon Ainger, ‘good in parts’, conducted the funeral service, but the cremation took place in Woking, and was attended by Kicky’s sons Guy and Gerald and sons-in-law Arthur Llewelyn Davies and Charles Hoyer Millar.
A report in the Hampstead and Highgate Express reassured its readers that ‘there is nothing repulsive or gloomy in the aspect of the crematorium. It is well lit and the furnace is in the centre. The body or coffined corpse is pushed from a large table along a broad sheet of iron into the burning chamber.’
Hoyer Millar was less sanguine in his appraisal. ‘After being admitted into the furnace-room, [we] saw – much to our horror though it was too late to go back – the swathed body lifted from the coffin and put on a steel cradle which was pushed into the furnace. At that time the process was a lengthy one; we had brought our lunch with us and stood in the damp, cold autumn weather leaning against the neighbouring fir trees. We were all too miserable, mentally and physically, to talk.’ All, that is, save Gerald, who, ‘unable to restrain himself, burst out with, “At all events we won’t have to play rounders after lunch”’ – an allusion apparently to Kicky’s love of the game, though his descendants today insist he said ‘cricket’.8
* Little Billee is based on George du Maurier himself.
* This is the ‘trigger’ methodology already met in its context of dreaming true, and is perfectly feasible. I have watched Paul McKenna perform this hypnotic experiment.
* An added irony was that the marketing strategies for selling Trilby called on the new manipulative techniques of psychology.
CHAPTER TWO
Predator and victim
In 1894, as Trilby was published, Barrie was working on an autobiographical novel. He had intended to feature himself as an adult, but had come to the conclusion that he should start with his childhood, as Kicky had in Peter Ibbetson, and so one novel became two. Sentimental Tommy was published in 1896, and Tommy and Grizel in 1900.
These two novels were a world away from anything he had written before. Tommy, like Peter Ibbetson, ‘passes between dreams and reality as though through tissue paper’. They are fantasies but not for the amusement of children. Introspective excursions, analytical of their author, they are autobiographical psycho-novels, a new genre created by George du Maurier at a time when introspection and analysis, and (since Trilby) mind control, were the thing.
It is of course unsafe to assume that autobiographical fiction tells the whole truth. But W. A. Darlington thought that in this case it did. ‘The confessions which Barrie makes in The Greenwood Hat [his non-fiction autobiographical writings] agree too exactly with his description of Tommy Sandys to allow much doubt that Tommy is a projection of those traits in his own character which he most feared and disliked.’
The Tommy novels are darkly analytical of Barrie’s mind, as we would expect from an author whose own personality is a constant concern.
Control is Tommy’s purpose. Childhood deprivation, lack of love, a worrying absence of true feeling about anyone, and low self-esteem, result in a compensatory drive to control other people’s lives.
It is psychological power he seeks, a subtle form of control that at once reveals and exploits the weaknesses of others. Finding a way to it turns Tommy on, and it is his mother, a bitter, manipulative woman, who first shows him the thrill that can be gained from the dynamics of domination versus passivity. Barrie could not have been more acutely self-analytical.
Tommy gets the children of
Thrums playing his games in the imaginary Jacobite Siege of Thrums, with him as their leader. His immersion in the fantasy is compulsive, and it troubles his faithful lieutenant, Corp Shiach, ‘that in his enthusiasm Tommy had more than once drawn blood from himself. “When you take it a’ so real as that,” Corp said uncomfortably, “I near think we should give it up.”’
Not content with having his young friends in the palm of his hand, Tommy begins to manipulate the entire town, dreaming up stratagems that exploit the Presbyterian morality and thrifty Scots attitude, to line his own pockets. He sees his little world with an objectivity alarming for his age. Money is never his principal purpose. He does it for the pleasure of the thing, to rest a hand on the wheel of the fate of the citizens of Thrums.
Writing immediately after publication of Trilby, Barrie declares Tommy ‘to be the boy incarnate’, but this is a different sort of boy from Little Billee, the boy he had just been reading about. Wild spirits master Tommy. Innocence is not his suit. He doesn’t believe people truly feel. There is no such thing as true (as in disinterested) feeling or emotion. People use their feelings to get where they want to be. Tommy exploits this deceit mercilessly to gain advantage.
It is a bitter indictment of the du Maurier dream world of feeling. Tommy’s genius is that of the psychological manipulator. Getting inside people and working on them from within is his speciality. At night he lies awake, until he ‘finds a way’.
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