Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  In the 1880s Kicky was rejected for the editorial chair at Punch, and Henry James failed to emulate his own success with Portrait of a Lady (1881). Disillusioned and depressed, the two men turned for consolation to art and music and to each other on their ‘bench of confidences’.

  That hypnosis was a subject of their conversations is certain. We know that they discussed Trilby. Moreover, in 1885–6 Henry James wrote a novel concerned with hypnotism – The Bostonians, similar to Trilby in that it hinges on the erotic issues of the hypnotic relationship. In both works, an older man mesmerises a young woman (in The Bostonians, Selah Tarrant hypnotises his own daughter, Verena) and uses his ‘psychic energy’ to bring his female subject to glorious expression, and in both cases the man derives a vicarious sexual satisfaction from doing so. ‘As Tarrant achieved through Verena, Svengali, the frustrated singer, obtained his dream through Trilby.’8

  Sex had for some time been an issue for Henry James. In his thirties, he had made a decision to remain celibate. We are told that he felt disgust for the anatomical process of sex, but preferred to see his vow as a celibate dedication to the vocation of authorship.9

  But could an aesthete who has not known passion bring it to the page? Was this perhaps the reason why the novels and plays of Henry James’s middle age were not successful? Was he languishing in an emotional prison of his own making?

  Kicky, as an experienced practitioner of hypnosis as an instrument of euphoria, and a loyal and admiring friend, would have had a ready-made therapeutic answer for him. Had Kicky been cooking up a personal solution for Henry James? And had the sum of his efforts been transformed into the plot line of The Bostonians?

  Both men were thinking and writing about hypnosis at the same time. According to Henry James’s notes on the outline of Trilby given to him by Kicky, the musician Svengali had ‘no organ (save as accompanist) of his own. She [Trilby] had had the glorious voice, but no talent – he had had the sacred fire, the rare musical organisation, and had played into her and through her’.10 The imagery speaks clearly, and in the novel Svengali derives his sexual satisfaction from hypnotising Trilby.

  That Kicky was tempting Henry James to dabble in hypnosis to awaken his passions and lift his fading career is a speculation that gains credibility when one looks at a short story written by James around this time. It concerns an ailing novelist who, while sitting on a bench gazing out to sea, meets a doctor who is an ardent fan and who offers to find a cure for what is wrong with him.

  A ‘sense of ebbing time, of shrinking opportunity’, a failing author who yearns for ‘a second chance’, for ‘another strain of eloquence’ which would prove ‘the citadel of his reputation’, a bench, a fan who comes to the rescue... There are echoes here of the relationship between Henry James and George du Maurier.

  Henry James, however, came down on the side of art and rejected what he referred to as ‘the fairy-tales of science’. While Kicky dabbled in hypnotic fantasy games, art was the only way for Henry: the mystical, revelatory moments of trance were illusory. For true artists, doubt and the longing desire ‘to know’ were all that was possible in this world:

  We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our work. The rest is the madness of art.11

  By the time Henry James wrote this in 1892, Kicky was once again completely committed to living out the fairy tales of science.

  In 1888–9 he had uprooted for Bayswater, letting the family’s Hampstead home and taking a furnished house at 15 Bayswater Terrace, W2.* The picture is of a man who had found release from something of a straitjacket existence in Hampstead. Now that the family was growing up he was no longer obliged to keep his promise to Emma. Eldest son Guy, 25 in 1890, had, after Marlborough and Sandhurst, joined the Royal Fusiliers. Trixy (27) was married. Youngest son Gerald (17) was at Harrow, though he wouldn’t be for much longer. Sylvia and May were 24 and 22 respectively, and found it easier to enjoy a social life from a base in central London.

  In du Maurier terminology, the move meant new ‘routes’, a whole new lifestyle for Kicky. Bayswater was his coming out. The Mr Hyde side of his personality was liberated to walk the streets of foggy London. ‘Du Maurier was out late most evenings,’ as his biographer Leonée Ormond writes.12

  It was on the night of 24 March 1889, while walking with Kicky down what was then Queen Street and is now Queensway, that Henry James complained he could never think of plots, and Kicky offered him the plot of Trilby to turn into a novel of his own. When his friend declined the offer, saying ‘it was too valuable a present and that I must write the story myself’, Kicky hastened home, ‘when it occurred to me that it would be worthwhile trying to write, after all. So on an impulse I sat down and began to work . . .’13

  But he did not begin writing Trilby. Instead he embarked on Peter Ibbetson. Much more clearly than Trilby, this first novel confirms the ascendancy of hypnotic ecstasy over physical sex. It does so in a telepathic series of peak experiences, conducted within a hypnotic excursion into the author’s past, which result in an orgasm of ineffable proportions with his lover. The experiences are telepathic because Peter is in prison; he cannot enjoy physical sex with his lover.

  Kicky claimed he rushed home from Henry James and wrote the entire first quarter of the story the same night. It would have been impossible to write 25,000 words of a novel in a few hours, and it is likely that Kicky ‘dreamt it true’, after which the words poured on to the page so fluidly that, as he said, he felt almost guilty about how easily the book had been written.

  ‘Dreaming true’ was Kicky’s little secret. ‘My Grandpapa George developed the ability to “visit” the past by dreaming true,’ wrote Daphne. ‘He would lie back and in his mind’s eye become the child he once was, and he wrote about this “psychic” ability too, in Peter Ibbetson.’14 Kicky had the ability to switch himself into a trance state, to access long-forgotten memories and experience the euphoric moments of his youth.

  When John Masefield read Peter Ibbetson he immediately suspected that the hero’s hypnotic excursions came from the author’s personal knowledge: ‘I think that du Maurier must have met some such experience . . .’15

  Kate Greenaway, who thought she knew Kicky well, but had got to know him only after he married Emma, and therefore knew only the artist, not the dreamer, was amazed by what she saw as his hidden depths:

  I have always liked Mr du Maurier, but to think there was all this, and one didn’t know it. I feel as if I had all this time been doing him an injustice – not to know.16

  Dreaming true is a process of self-induced, hypnotic concentration and relaxation, or self-hypnosis, which, as Professor F. L. Marcuse of Washington State University describes, can be made possible on a regular basis by post-hypnotic suggestion, in the form of a trigger word:

  One technique for the induction of self-hypnosis is to give a post-hypnotic suggestion to the effect that the subject, on self-command, will go into a deep hypnotic state, but in every other respect will remain alert and in full contact with the environment.17

  More recently, however, Dr Theodore Barber, chief psychologist at the Cushing Hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts, sampled the American population and found that 2–4 per cent of people are naturally capable of this sort of auto-hypnosis, i.e. they can slip into a trance without being hypnotically prepared with a trigger word. Barber discovered that these ‘somnambules’, as he called them, were all ‘gifted fantasisers’. They could slip into their dream world with ease while yet coping with tasks in the real world, as if on auto-pilot. None spent less than 50 per cent of the time in a dream world, and most spent as much as 90 per cent, while often simultaneously holding down jobs. Moreover, ‘the rich joys’ of their hypnoid world could be ‘savoured in reality’. Most had experienced sexual orgasm by means of fantasising, and eleven of the fourteen females who were asked the question had had phantom pregnancies.18

  The first somnambule ever to be stu
died by the medical profession, Bertha Pappenheim, code-named Anna O, was a subject of intense interest in Switzerland just a few years before Kicky was writing. Freud’s friend and mentor, Joseph Breuer, was her doctor. Anna, who could hypnotise herself, used the term ‘clouds’ to describe her trances, and the term ‘chimney sweeping’ to describe the work Breuer did on her unconscious while she was hypnotised.

  Kicky was like a somnambule in that he was able to switch into this hypnotic state at will. But in Peter Ibbetson we sense that there has been a certain amount of preparation of Peter before he dreams true for the first time. At a party in London he is entranced by the alluring Mary, Duchess of Towers, a woman capable of ‘mesmerising’ people ‘into feeling and intelligence’. She holds his eyes from across the room. ‘It was hard to look away from her; her face drew my eyes, and through them all my heart.’

  Thereafter, his auto-hypnotic ability is a matter of concentration, relaxation and an exercise of the will:

  Lie on your back with your arms above your head, your hands clasped under it and your feet crossed... and you must never for a moment cease thinking of where you want to be in your dream till you are asleep and you get there; and you must never forget in your dream where and what you were when awake. You must join the dream on to reality . . .You have only to will it, and think of yourself as awake, and it will come . . .

  Peter practises and practises, ‘as one practises a fine art’, and finally it works:

  I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my memory... at the same time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson, architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, ‘Ce n’est que le première pas qui coûte;’ and finally one night, instead of dreaming the ordinary dreams... I had the rapture of waking up, the minute I was fairly asleep, by the avenue gate, and of seeing [myself as a child] sitting on one of the stone posts and looking up the snowy street for the major . . .

  The transition was not as dramatic as one might think, and the feeling that anyone could do it was an ingredient in the novel’s success. The science is that there is a spectrum of consciousness, along which brain waves, measured on an electroencephalogram, vary in frequency. Within a certain band of frequencies the brain is in a light to deep hypnotic trance.* At the ‘light’ end, you are daydreaming; at the ‘deep’ end you are hypnotised, a stranger to the real world, yet not asleep.

  Kicky’s psychic ability was different from the normal imaginative process only in that it fell at a point further along the spectrum – beyond light trance, at the point where deep trance becomes a fully-fledged alternative reality, complete and as realisable as a normal ‘waking’ day.

  Marcuse, who conducted experiments with some 1,000 subjects, noted how close the daydreaming state is to the hypnotic:

  From time immemorial, people have probably brought on some form of a self-induced hypnotic state by sitting quietly beside a murmuring stream, listening to the monotonous rhythm of a chant, staring at some bright object, or possibly at their own navels.19

  How often do we lie in bed, on the borderline of consciousness and sleep, and induce just such a state by imagining what is happening at just that minute in a place we know well? Daphne played this game, and shared it with her friend, Oriel Malet. Take, say, ‘a bit of Paris, a street corner – say the Rond Point. I lie in bed and try and “see” exactly what stream of cars are passing at that moment, and the faces of the people passing by. Then I’ll switch to Red Square... I’ll think of silence, and snow falling, and suddenly a dark saloon car, and perhaps an old crossing-sweeper woman . . .’

  Again: ‘If I pass a place I once lived (like at Hampstead), I often do a Gondal,† where I go into it just as if it was still mine, and take my coat off, and somehow settle down, and then try to imagine the amazed surprise of the new owner coming in, and how one would behave in the Gondal just as if they were not there, and one was still in possession.’20

  This is the method of Daphne’s fiction. ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ is the opening sentence of Rebecca. Daphne was writing in the heat of Alexandria in Egypt. But she had the ability to dream her way back into her first trespass, as a young woman, up the twisting and turning path to Menabilly. Now, ‘like all dreamers’, she wrote, ‘I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers’.

  Something dreamlike touches all her fiction. In Frenchman’s Creek, one night in midsummer, a solitary yachtsman in his dinghy leaves civilisation behind and goes exploring up the mysterious Helford River, the trees crowding thick and darkly to the water’s edge. Again, it is a remembered scene, revisited in imagination, but with a spell upon Daphne it becomes ‘fascinating, strange, a thing of queer excitement not fully understood’.

  Concentration alerts the brain to every little item of the scene she wishes to revisit in her dream, in this case ‘the shadows of the trees... the rustle of the leaves and the stir of a sleeping bird’ – which take her deeper, calling up the dreamer’s ‘sixth sense’, setting the creative unconscious free, entering that place in which past and present are no longer separated by time. It is Peter Ibbetson all over again: a matter of concentration, deep relaxation, and practice.

  Suppose one night you were playing the game and instead of going to sleep, all of a sudden it did become real, you were there, literally in it, a little further along the spectrum of trance than you have been before. That is ‘dreaming true’. And when you come to those peak experiences, entrancing moments when the world seems renewed, revealing itself in all its mystery and beauty, moments which Kicky had in real life and Peter Ibbetson has in the novel, you are not surprised to find Daphne had these experiences too.

  Suddenly I had the house to myself, and it gave me such a feeling of freedom! I took the old rug and went to the grass just above the wall and lay down, staring at those trees overhead – the mysterious ones like a Rackham picture from a fairy tale – and then sideways to the sea, with about ten ships anchored off. It was very sunny, about six o’clock, the warm aftermath of a summer’s day. Then suddenly a plane, like a Comet, went high, high overhead, a tiny white arrow, no noise even, and a trail behind, and there was only sky, and the plane, and the mysterious trees, and I had a sudden feeling of absolute bliss – it was quite spiritual! It seemed to me that what I was seeing was Life. The Comet streak, the sky, the trees, the sea below, it all added up to a great Main Goodness. And if this was Life, so was Death, and everything was in harmony, and one ought to be grateful, all the time for every moment, instead of getting irritated and put out by the stupid things of the day.21

  Kicky would have empathised with his granddaughter’s peak experience* and recognised it too as a brief moment of clarity amidst ‘the stupid things of the day’.

  Daphne called the experience an ‘other-world intimacy’, ‘the secret of the elixir of youth’.22 It was enough to make you never want to grow up.

  For Kicky that night of 24 March 1889, writing Peter Ibbetson, it was as though he was back again in his childhood home ‘in the Rue de la Pompe, his father and mother living, his mother’s sad and very beautiful sister Mary coming to visit them, leading her little boy by the hand, and they were all of them setting forth for a walk in the Bois, he, Kicky, running ahead with his small cousin. It was strange – he had only to shut his eyes, and the figures were real, as living as Emma and May.† He could smell the old scents of Passy, hear the long-dead voices, conjure the old ideals, the laughter, and the tears . . .’

  But he based the alluring Duchess of Towers, Peter Ibbetson’s tantric temptress, on his own daughter, Sylvia, who was no longer the fifteen-year-old ‘blizzard’.

  Her thick, heavy hair was of a dark coppery brown; her complexion clear and pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes black, her eyes a dar
k-bluish gray. Her nose was short and sharp and rather tilted at the tip, and her red mouth large and very mobile... She seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once, and genial... When she laughed, she showed both top and bottom teeth, which were perfect, and her eyes nearly closed, so that they could no longer be seen for the thick lashes that fringed both upper and under eyelids; at which time the expression of her face was so keenly, cruelly sweet that it went through one like a knife. And then the laugh would suddenly cease, her full lips would meet, and her eyes beam out again like two mild gray suns, benevolently humorous and kindly inquisitive, and full of interest in everything and everybody around her... She was much surrounded and made up to.

  The fictional Peter Ibbetson uses his natural talent for drawing to become an architect. He owns a dog, a St Bernard like Chang, which he calls Porthos. Like Kicky, he has become disillusioned and depressed with his essentially soulless life, and decides to visit Paris in search of the self he had left behind as a child.

  On the way to his hotel he is convinced he catches sight of Mary in a passing carriage, the first time he has seen her since the London party, where she hypnotised him. She looks at him again. Afterwards he has a dream, which at first is just like an ordinary dream, a mass of images ‘distorted and exaggerated and jumbled together after the usual manner of dreams’. Then Mary appears in the dream and tells Peter to stop, for he is not ‘dreaming true’. She takes him by the hand and leads him on . . .