Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Runaway success came with The Little Minister (1891). A physically diminutive, but passionate, Presbyterian minister, Gavin Dishart, falls in love with a beautiful ‘Egyptian’ (i.e. gypsy girl), Babbie, to the indignation of his Thrums congregation – Israelitish to the core. At the highpoint of the narrative, Gavin deserts his pulpit to attend a pagan marriage ceremony in the forest, while a storm of biblical violence rages, as an obbligato to the terrible things happening on earth.

  The rain increased in violence, appalling even those who heard it from under cover. However rain may storm, though it be an army of archers battering roofs and windows, it is only terrifying when the noise swells every instant. In those hours of darkness it again and again grew in force and doubled its fury, and was louder, louder, and louder, until its next attack was to be more than men and women could listen to. They held each other’s hands and stood waiting. Then abruptly it abated, and people could speak. I believe a rain that became heavier every second for ten minutes would drive many listeners mad. Gavin was in it on a night that tried us repeatedly for quite half that time.

  Thrums meets sex – the encounter is apocalyptic. The Little Minister (a dramatic version of which had run successfully on Broadway) was filmed in 1934, with Katharine Hepburn as a ravishing Babbie with an uncertain Scottish accent.

  Barrie’s mind was now turning to marriage – imprudent marriage by Auld Licht’s stern standards. His choice was a young actress, no taller than himself, Mary Ansell. The Barries’ marriage proved childless and wretched, and manifestly embittered his later fiction. The couple divorced in 1909. It is suggested he was impotent, although this did not come up in the proceedings, the grounds being her adultery. The balance of biographical opinion is that if there were a sexual relationship between the married couple it was not passionate.

  Barrie’s maturity as a novelist came with the linked Bildungsromane Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), which chronicle the progress of a raw Thrums lad, Tommy Sandys. The first volume deals with Tommy’s early days in working-class London and his return, tail between his legs, to Scotland. The second volume describes his return to London and a tragic end – defeated by cosmopolitan corruption. He dies on the railings of the house of an aristocrat who has seduced him. ‘His last reflection before he passed into unconsciousness was – serves me right!’

  As the century turned, Barrie abandoned fiction for the more lucrative prospects offered by the London and New York stage. His dramatic adaptation of The Little Minister would earn him £90,000 in British and American box office receipts – fabulous by the standards of the time. But even this stream of gold was dwarfed by the income from Peter Pan, the copyright that never grows old (it is still, thanks to a special act of Parliament, yielding income for Barrie’s beloved Great Ormond Street Hospital for children, in London). Conceived in 1904 as a play, the story of the boy who never grew up was extended by Barrie into a novel, Peter and Wendy, two years later and further extended, fictionally, as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens in 1911.

  His last decades were loaded with public honours. He was created a baronet in 1913, given the Order of Merit in 1922, and elected Chancellor of Edinburgh University in 1930. At his own wish he was buried alongside his mother in Kirriemuir. The Barries’ spirits, one suspects, must have been troubled over the last few years by raging speculation: was he a paedophile? The question is given extra force by Michael Jackson’s choosing to name his Southern Californian Edenic playground ‘Neverland’. Suspicion centres on an ostensibly philanthropic act on Barrie’s part. In the 1890s he regularly ran across a clutch of five little boys in Kensington Gardens, where he himself walked his massive St Bernard dog, Porthos (Barrie was tiny enough to have ridden the beast, like the horses in Rotten Row). He formed an avuncular relationship with the children. Their father, Arthur Llewelyn Davies (who had not entirely approved of ‘Uncle’ Jimmy’s attentions to his children) was a lawyer. Their mother, Sylvia (née du Maurier, a daughter of George du Maurier, novelist and artist) was more favourably disposed.

  A parent might well be slightly put out by the novel, The Little White Bird, which Barrie published in 1902. It transparently allegorises his relationship with the children. In one dubious scene, ‘Captain W’, a childless writer, with a dog called Porthos, describes a ‘tremendous adventure’ – namely that little David (clearly based on Barrie’s favourite among the children) asks to spend the night with the ‘Captain’:

  ‘Why, David,’ said I, sitting up, ‘do you want to come into my bed?’

  ‘Mother said I wasn’t to want it unless you wanted it first,’ he squeaked.

  ‘It is what I have been wanting all the time,’ said I, and then without more ado the little white figure rose and flung itself at me. For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and sometimes his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but he always retained possession of my finger, and occasionally he woke me to say that he was sleeping with me.

  It was out of his increasingly intense relationship with the children that Barrie wrote the play Peter Pan: or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. It was first put on during the pantomime season, in late December 1904, with a young actress, Nina Boucicault, playing Peter and much visual gimmickry (flying children, for example). The largely adult audience was charmed. The dedication, as later printed in the expanded novel version, Peter and Wendy, was ‘To Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies and their boys (my boys)’. As he later told the children, I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.’

  The boys would soon become even more ‘his’. Arthur died in 1907, prematurely, and Sylvia followed him in 1910. Barrie adopted the boys a year later, following their mother’s express wish. The future careers of the boys, despite Barrie’s now paternal solicitude, was interspersed with tragedy: one died in 1915, in the Great War; another was drowned at Oxford in 1921 (it may have been suicide – and he may have been gay). Peter Llewelyn Davies, who had suffered under the shadow of his namesake, Pan, a creature he hated, threw himself under a train in 1960, having destroyed all Barrie’s intimate correspondence with him. One of Peter’s publicly expressed resentments was that when he died in 1937, ‘Uncle Jim’ left his huge wealth not to his surviving boys, but to his secretary, Lady Cynthia Asquith. The copyright of Peter Pan had been made over separately to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1929.

  Was Barrie a paedophile? The longest surviving of the boys, ‘Nico’, who lived until 1980, recorded: ‘I don’t believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call “a stirring in the undergrowth” for anyone – man, woman, or child … I never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophilia: had he had either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware … He was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan.’

  FN

  (Sir) James Matthew Barrie

  MRT

  The Little Minister

  Biog

  A. Birkin, J. M. Barrie & The Lost Boys (1979)

  94. Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860–1935

  There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.

  Charlotte Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of a man of letters, Frederic Beecher Perkins. The Perkinses were a cultivated family, rooted in a cultivated community. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a distant relative. Political energy – fuelled by abolitionism – was instilled into Charlotte at birth, but the family was fractured irredeemably when, shortly after her birth, Frederic Perkins left them. The reasons are not clear, although a doctor’s opinion that if his wife Mary (‘loyal as a spaniel’) had another child she would die, may have been a factor. Thereafter her father played no part in Charlotte’s life. She recalled meeting him, aged fifteen, in the Boston Public Library – ‘not having seen him for years’ – and kissing him. He ignored her thereafter.

  Charl
otte’s mother, severe by nature, forbade the reading of novels. She was physically vital as an adolescent, visiting a gymnasium twice a week and running a mile every day. She disdained corsets and the trivial enthusiasms of American girlhood. On leaving school she studied at the Rhode School of Design, leaving without any formal qualifications, but with the skills to design greeting cards and tutor young people in art.

  Her biographer speculates that she had a quasi-lesbian relationship (‘Boston marriages’, as they were called) in her early twenties. In 1884, however, she married the artist, Charles Walter Stetson, destined to be an unhappy union. After the birth of their first child, a daughter, Charlotte was plunged into post-natal depression. There was a history of depression in the Beecher family and Harriet Beecher Stowe had also suffered from it. But marriage itself was clearly another factor. In 1887, the advice of S. Weir Mitchell, a specialist in ‘women’s disorders’, was called on. A believer in the ‘rest cure’ (i.e. solitary confinement and sensory deprivation), he prescribed the regime described, horrifically, in Gilman’s most famous story, ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, where the cure is portrayed as patriarchal sadism. The unnamed heroine in the story is, for her own good, locked up in the attic of a house, after the birth of her daughter, Mary. Her husband John, and his sister Jennie, have incarcerated her on the advice of ‘a physician of high standing’. Personally, the heroine confides, ‘I disagree with their ideas … I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?’ What she does is fixate on the yellow wallpaper and go completely mad.

  In a late-life essay, ‘Why I wrote “The Yellow Wall-paper”’, Gilman described her own, therapy-induced breakdown, and her escape. The story was written to help other women so afflicted by ‘treatment’. As she drily noted, ‘I sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.’ With the growth of American feminism in the 1960s her short story was adopted as prescribed reading in schools and colleges. Charlotte escaped the ‘rest cure’ by fleeing to Pasadena, California, from where she divorced her husband. They remained, none the less, on amicable terms. He married her best friend (for whom, it is speculated, Charlotte’s feelings had been overtly erotic) and took over the care of their child. In California Charlotte (still ‘Stetson’), and now genuinely ‘cured’, began to write and lecture on feminist subjects.

  She was, by nature and intellectual conviction, utopian, believing in the possibility not merely of equality, but of gynocracy, a theme pursued in her novel, Herland: A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel (1915; the subtitle was added later for modern readers), which foresees a woman-dominated world. Androcracy, she firmly believed, could be overset. Her most influential non-fiction work was Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Relations (1898). The major element in her thinking was that circumstances, and with them societies, were eminently changeable – if sufficient pressure were applied. To that end she wrote a body of fiction of which only ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ (first published in magazine form in 1892) has ‘lasted’. But her books, the magazine she edited (The Forerunner) and her hundreds of articles, had a palpable impact on the thinking, and social reforms, of her time – notably women’s suffrage.

  In 1900 she married a cousin, George Houghton Gilman, an attorney of passive character and seven years younger (her sexual interests, in her early Pasadena years, seem to have been principally lesbian). The Gilmans lived contentedly, by all accounts, in Southern California, until his death, in 1934. Gilman, afflicted with breast cancer and a believer in euthanasia, killed herself with chloroform, which she had methodically stored, a year later, leaving an autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935) and a suicide note of Roman stoicism, stating: ‘When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.’ She also believed in ‘neatness’ in suicide, leaving something easy to clear up (not the ‘debris of the battlefield’) for the woman who would, inevitably, have to tidy up afterwards.

  FN

  Charlotte Anna Gilman (née Perkins; first married name ‘Stetson’)

  MRT

  ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’

  Biog

  A. J. Lane, To “Herland” and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1990)

  POSTSCRIPT

  95. S. Weir Mitchell 1828–1914

  I sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, about her story ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’

  Mitchell is notorious to fiction readers of the late twentieth century as the physician who invented and popularised the ‘rest cure’ therapy for neurotic (‘neurasthenic’, ‘hysterical’) women. He has been thoroughly demonised by feminist literary criticism since the 1960s. The iniquities of the Mitchell rest cure are immortalised in two classic ‘rediscovered’ works of feminist fiction, ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899).

  Mitchell was born in Philadelphia, the son of a professor of medicine. He had a difficult relationship with his father, a surgeon, and in his youth suffered the chronic depression he later took it on himself to cure. A phobic aversion to blood made it impossible for him to follow his father’s line of medical work. None the less he had a brilliant academic career, finishing his studies in Paris – then the centre of neurological research. He returned in the mid-1850s, to take up partnership with his father. On his father’s death in 1858 he took over the family practice. In the same year he married. His wife died, four years (and two children) later, of diphtheria. Mitchell served, gallantly, as a surgeon in the Union Army in the Civil War.

  During his war years, Mitchell was particularly concerned with the treatment of head wounds and what would later be called ‘shell shock’ – nervous trauma. He had always been fascinated by the brain and its disorders, and ‘paralysis’ – stillness (‘peace’, to draw an obvious analogy) – he believed, was curative for the organ’s disorders (he had an utter disdain for sexual explanations of psychic disorder). He considered (something that Charlotte Perkins Gilman fiercely refuted) that men’s and women’s brains were different. By the mid-1860s he had established himself as the country’s leading expert on nervous complaints. He remarried in 1874 and his second wife furnished him an entry to Philadelphia’s social elite. It was at this period that Mitchell devised his ‘rest cure’ as a therapy particularly appropriate for women. Women who underwent it, such as Gilman and Chopin, were less convinced of its efficacy.

  Sigmund Freud admired him, but for his part, Mitchell did not admire Freud – on coming across a volume by the ‘sex-mad’ Viennese psychoanalyst, he threw the ‘filthy thing’ into the fire. Mitchell had, from youth onwards, tried his hand at poetry and short stories. His first full-length novel, In War Time, serialised in the Atlantic Magazine in 1884, drew on his own war experiences twenty years before. It was well received, as were its successors. Fame, bestsellerdom and a doctorate of letters from Harvard, came with Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker in 1897. Reportedly, Mitchell spent seven years working on Hugh Wynne, which was then written in six weeks. Its publication was cannily timed to coincide with the centenary of 1796, whose main celebrations were held in Philadelphia. The war theme of the novel chimed with the recent American victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay and the surge of patriotism which accompanied it. Mitchell’s novel runs slightly against this grain by examining the tricky issues of pacifism and ‘cowardice’.

  Mitchell had Quaker family connections. ‘Free Quakers’ were those dissidents who believed in the idea of a ‘just war’ and they were firmly disowned by the main body of the Society of Friends. In the novel Hugh Wynne, a born Quaker turned ‘free Quaker’ tells his story autobiographically. The narrative revolves around a lengthy description of the Revolution and its changing fortunes. Hugh, having escaped captivity and joined the Revolut
ionary army, rises to the rank of captain in the Pennsylvania Foot, and eventually to Colonel on the staff of the Commander in Chief, Washington. A subplot narrates the dastardly treachery of Benedict Arnold, in whose machinations Hugh is unwittingly and unwillingly caught up. Hugh sees Arnold years later in London, a wasted man: ‘There is a God who punishes the traitor,’ he complacently observes.

  Is there any connection between the diabolic evangelist of the ‘rest cure’ and the bestselling novelist? There conceivably is. Mitchell’s therapy was, manifestly, an extension of the curative tranquillity of the Quaker service, the silence that puts one in connection with God. Anyone asked the question in 1900, ‘Who is the more important writer of fiction, S. Weir Mitchell or Charlotte Perkins Gilman?’ would probably have replied, ‘Who is she?’ He, in his heyday, was regarded as the ‘new Ben Franklin’. Now that they have both gone to their final rest cure it is he, not her, who is the forgotten author. Is that a peal of woman’s laughter one hears?