Barrie found his only solace in his work and in the Davies family. But one year later, in 1910, Sylvia died. The 50-year-old Barrie legally adopted the five boys. George and Peter were then at Eton, Jack was in the navy, and Michael and Nico were 10 and 6, respectively. All the boys felt well loved by “Uncle Jim,” though George and Michael were the favorites. Michael, particularly, had much in common with Barrie; he was sensitive, poetic, and brilliant. In 1914 George went to war in France; in March, 1915, he was killed.
Barrie’s grief was terrible. But an even greater grief was waiting. In May, 1921, Michael died. He drowned with a friend in a pool at Oxford. Because he could not swim and was terrified of water, his death was thought by many to be a suicide. It was the greatest and the cruelest blow Barrie had ever received. He never fully recovered. A year after Michael’s death, Barrie wrote to Michael’s Oxford tutor, “What happened was in a way the end of me.”
The question has often been asked: Was Barrie homosexually in love with the boys? It is a difficult question to answer, for J. M. Barrie was not a simple man. In many ways his love for the boys was an odd mixture of a father’s, a mother’s, and a lover’s. Nico, the last Davies boy alive, does not feel it was a sexual love. He once said, “Of all the men I have ever known, Barrie was the wittiest, and the best company. He was also the least interested in sex. He was a darling man. He was an innocent; which is why he could write Peter Pan.”
HIS THOUGHTS: From Tommy and Grizel: “He was a boy only. She knew that, despite all he had gone through, he was still a boy. And boys cannot love. Oh, is it not cruel to ask a boy to love?”
“What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.”
“Nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much.”
—A. W.
Lecherous Bozzy
JAMES BOSWELL (Oct. 29, 1740-May 19, 1795)
HIS FAME: James Boswell had long been known for his Life of Samuel Johnson, but the discovery of Boswell’s papers in the 1920s made him the “best-self-documented man in all history.” Entering the pages of Boswell’s private journals, the armchair voyeur is propelled into the ribald life of 18th-century London, where the all-too-human Boswell, with a wink, leads his reader into the most licentious and fleshly of pleasures.
HIS PERSON: Boswell’s mother was a Calvinist, his father a stern Whig. He grew up in Scotland on the family estate, abnormally afraid of sin and hellfire. Throughout his life, he suffered from episodic depression. At 16 he was laid low by a “terrible Hypochondria” and became a Methodist vegetarian, which, like a later fling with Catholicism, did not last.
Boswell at age 25
After graduating from the University of Edinburgh at 18, he hoped to become a military man, but his father insisted he study law. Boswell capitulated and began his practice in Edinburgh in 1766. Meanwhile, he pursued a literary career and spent as much time in London as he could. It was in London, in 1763, that he met the ponderous and morally wise Dr. Johnson—then 53 years old while Boswell was only 22—in the back room of a bookstore.
Boswell hunted throughout Europe for a dowried wife, recording the yearly income of various women in his journal along with their other attributes. But in 1769 he married his penniless first cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, when he suddenly realized he loved her while he was on his way to court an Irish heiress. Margaret was a buxom, witty, patient woman with beautiful eyes. Her life with Boswell was stormy. He would debauch and reform, debauch and reform. Grand gestures, hedged with prudence, were typical of him, and he would promise “from henceforth I shall be a perfect man; at least I hope so.” In 1789 his wife died of tuberculosis, leaving him to raise five children, who adored him in spite of his failings. His last decade was spent in public disgrace and private remorse because of his dissolute lifestyle.
SEX LIFE: The story of Boswell’s sex life is littered with a multiplicity of characters—innumerable whores, several mistresses, uncountable partners in casual sex, and many rich ladies unsuccessfully pursued with marriage in mind. Even in the context of his time he was a male chauvinist, with a great need for women and a great need to consider the opposite sex inferior.
The urge to copulate came over him strongly in times of heightened emotion. In church he lay “plans for having a woman” while having “the most sincere feelings of religion”; after seeing a notice of his mother’s death in a newspaper, he assuaged his shock in a Paris brothel. He was likely to hunt for prostitutes after drinking, and often had more than one in a night. One evening, he got soused toasting a woman he was courting, then spent the rest of the night with a “whore worthy of Boswell if Boswell must have a whore.”
His treatment of whores was often abominable. When a prostitute in a park complained loudly that the sixpence he had offered her was not enough for her services, Boswell told the crowd that had gathered that he was an officer on half pay and could afford no more. He then forced himself on her and “abused her in blackguard style,” his euphemism for rape.
Intercourse was best for him if it was done hurriedly, while standing up, and in public places—in parks and dark spots, once on a bridge accompanied by the sound of the water gurgling below. Though often filled with remorse, he also bragged of dipping “my machine into the Canal” and performing “most manfully.” He claimed that “licentious love” made him “humane, polite, generous” (generous, that is, with compliments—but not financial rewards—to prostitutes who performed well).
After his marriage he was faithful to Margaret for nearly three years, but she was often “adverse to hymeneal rites,” so he told her he “must have a concubine,” and she agreed. He called his practice of having many women “Asiatic multiplicity” and kept it up until the end of his life.
SEX PARTNERS: In his preteen years his partners were trees, which he assaulted by masturbating against their trunks, something he thought of as a “small sin.” But by age 13 he so feared the “larger sin” of fornication that he briefly considered self-castration. He put that thought behind him when he discovered that women were attracted to him. Though short and somewhat fleshy, he was handsome, with black hair and eyes and a complex, alert expression.
It was a prostitute, Sally Forrester, who introduced him to the “melting and transporting rites of love.” She was only one in a long line of whores, many of whom infected and reinfected him with gonorrhea from the age of 19 on. His short-term affairs included those with the highborn, like Girolama Piccolomini, whom he met in Siena in 1765. Though she was crazy about him, he courted another while pursuing her; he would send a valet out with a letter for Girolama in one pocket and a letter for his second signorina in another pocket. Even though their affair didn’t last long, she wrote to him after he returned to England. And in addition there were a pregnant soldier’s wife who came to his rooms in Berlin selling chocolate (with her it was “in a minute—over”); Annie Cunninghame, his wife’s orphaned, teenaged niece, from whom he “snatched a little romping pleasure”; Thérèse le Vasseur, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s mistress, as he was escorting her to meet Rousseau in England; and Peggy Doig, a servant girl, who bore him a son who died in infancy.
In 1762 he planned on a “winter’s safe copulation” with Mrs. Anne Lewis, his first “real” mistress. They consummated their love at the Black Lion Inn, where he performed with vigor—five climaxes in one night—at a total cost, he boasted, of only 18 shillings for bed and food. It was no bargain, as he discovered six days later. “Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhea.” In a fury, he wrote her demanding repayment of a small loan, and the affair was over. His affair with a Mrs. Dodds, a lady “admirably formed for amorous dalliance” who was “quite a rompish girl,” though “ill-bred,” lasted longer. She had a daughter by him, who died soon after birth.
The upshot of his relationships was not always seduction. Off and on, for six years, he pursued Zélide (Isabella van Tuyll), a Dutch aristocrat and writer. “She is much my superior. One does not like that.” She refused his conditional marri
age proposals (he demanded the right to approve whatever she wrote). They insulted each other with exquisite hostility; he suggested she turn to embroidery rather than speculate about metaphysics, and she called him “a fatuous fool” with “the arrogant rigidity of an old Cato.”
Rigidity was something Boswell seldom worried about, but with Margaret, his “valuable spouse,” he suffered at least one bout of impotence. He recorded only five such incidents in his entire diary. Margaret hated these logs in which he chronicled his sexual escapades by means of a Greek-letter code, which, unfortunately for her, she could decipher.
MEDICAL REPORT: In Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays, using Boswell’s detailed journals, Dr. William B. Ober has compiled a comprehensive medical chart of Boswell’s 19 bouts of urethritis due to gonorrhea, from his first infection at age 19 to his last at age 50. Though Boswell often used “armour” (condoms made of dried animal intestines), his sexual drives were such that he constantly took chances. By the time he was 22, when he suffered his third infection, he recognized the symptoms and described them as “an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil; a little heat in the members of my body sacred to Cupid, very like a symptom of that distemper with which Venus, when cross, takes it into her head to plague her votaries.” He also suffered from prostatitis (inflammation of the prostate gland), epididymitis (inflammation of the testicles), and crab lice. And he suffered through the treatments as well—irrigation of the urinary tract with medicines, bloodletting, cauterization of the sores, and even something called Kennedy’s Lisbon Diet Drink (a concoction of sarsaparilla, sassafras, licorice, and guaiac wood). Boswell died at age 54 of complications arising from his gonorrhea.
—A.E.
Sexual Savant
SIR RICHARD BURTON (Mar. 19, 1821-Oct. 20, 1890)
HIS FAME: Explorer, linguist, and anthropologist, Sir Richard Burton had a thirst for adventure and a disregard for sexual convention which made him one of the most famous and controversial figures in Victorian England.
HIS PERSON: Burton was born in Devonshire, the son of a handsome Irish-man and a homely English girl. The elder Burton’s lack of success kept the family on the move throughout Richard’s childhood. Growing up in France and Italy with a great deal of freedom, Richard and his brother Edward educated themselves on the streets, where Richard early showed both a great talent for languages—“one of them pornography,” it was later said—and a taste for seamy adventures. Sent to Oxford in 1840, he was expelled two years later, at which time he became an ensign in the Bombay Infantry. He was so fascinated by exotic India that he stayed for eight years. During this time he learned at least nine more languages, immersing himself in Muslim and Hindu culture and living like a native. Recalled because his investigation of homosexual brothels resulted in an outcry against him, he proceeded to write four books on India while living in France with his mother and sister. In 1853 he traveled to the Middle East, disguising himself as a Muslim so that he could secretly enter Mecca. In 1857-1859 he explored Central Africa with John Speke, and the two men became the first Europeans to discover Lake Tanganyika. Burton then traveled across the U.S. by stagecoach to Salt Lake City, where he observed the Mormon colony with great interest. He married Isabel Arundell in 1861 and spent the next four years as consul on the West African island of Fernando Po. By 1865 he was off to Brazil, which he hated. He escaped Brazil when he was appointed consul in Damascus. As a result of his own political indiscretions and Isabel’s misplaced missionary zeal, he was dismissed from this post in 1871, and he left his beloved Middle East for Trieste. There he lived comfortably until his death, having gained financial success with his translation of The Arabian Nights. To the end of his life, Burton held that nothing could be called obscene because tastes and taboos differed throughout the world. Burton liked to tell a story about a group of Englishmen who went to visit a Muslim sultan in the desert. As the Englishmen watched, the sultan’s wife tumbled off her camel. As she did so, her dress slipped up and her private parts were revealed to all. “Was the sultan embarrassed?” asked Burton. “Oh, quite the opposite; he was pleased, because his wife had kept her face covered during her accident.”
Burton in 1861
SEX LIFE: Although Burton was a virtual encyclopedia of sexual knowledge, there is little evidence that he applied this expertise to his personal life. “I’m no hot amorist,” he once admitted. Despite his posturing and his satanic appearance, his life was full of overtones of homosexuality, impotence, and castration complexes. As a young man he seems to have enjoyed a riotous sex life—orgies with the prostitutes of Naples, a “roystering and rackety life” among the women of Bombay, and even an attempt to kidnap and seduce a nun. (However, he complained that his Hindu bubu (“mistress”), who was skilled at prolonging the act of love, “cannot be satisfied … with less than 20 minutes.”) On the other hand, when Sir Charles Napier sent him to investigate a homosexual brothel in Karachi, Burton’s report was so detailed and graphic as to smack of participation.
It was in his relationship with his wife that Burton’s sexual vagueness was most apparent. Isabel, a beautiful girl from a titled family, set her sights on the explorer at the time of their first meeting, when his “gypsy” eyes “completely magnetized” her. It took five years of courtship—during which time Burton made protracted trips to observe sexual customs in East Africa and Mormon Utah—before the couple became engaged. Believing celibacy to be “an unmitigated evil” and polygamy the “instinctive law of nature,” Burton admitted to a fascination with Brigham Young’s Mormons which caused Isabel great discomfort. Nonetheless, she finally snared him, later saying, “I wish I were a man: if I were I would be Richard Burton. But as I am a woman, I would be Richard Burton’s wife.”
Although before her marriage Isabel had promised herself to “keep up the honeymoon romance, whether at home or in the desert,” the newlyweds’ bliss was shortlived. Apparently sublimating his sexual drive in his constant quest for adventure, Burton seems never to have generated much passion for his wife. He preferred to view her as a “brother,” saying, “I am a spoilt twin and she is the missing fragment.” What little lust he felt after his marriage was shared not with Isabel but with cronies such as Richard Monckton Milnes, an eccentric who had a world-famous library replete with the best collection of erotica in England. Always particularly intrigued by flagellation and sexual mutilation, Burton found ready material in Milnes’ library.
Regardless of her frustrations as his wife, Isabel admired Burton fiercely, participating vicariously in his adventures and in his fame. Yet at the same time it was important to her to tame the man who claimed to have committed “every sin in the Decalogue.” Ultimately, she was successful in binding to her the outer man, who seldom left his wife’s side in their later years, but she was never able to subdue Burton’s spirit.
SEX PARTNERS: After his initiation at the hands of the prostitutes of Naples, Burton’s first real affair was with an unnamed Hindu woman he kept as a bubu. Soon afterward he met a beautiful Persian girl in a caravan near Karachi, and the memory of this girl “with features carved in marble like a Greek’s” remained with him for the rest of his life. After his return from India in 1849, he fell in love with his cousin Elizabeth Stisted, but her parents would not allow a marriage. At the time he met Isabel he was carrying on “a very serious flirtation” with another cousin, Louisa. Although he was somewhat tight-lipped about his involvements with native women, he did write that the Wagogo women of East Africa were “well-disposed towards strangers of fair complexion, apparently with the permission of their husbands.”
BURTON’S NIGHTS: One of Isabel’s greatest unrealized desires was to convert her husband to Catholicism. She fooled herself into believing that he was a secret Catholic, but he in fact remained unattached to any religious faith. Unlike her, he was obsessed with man, not God, and his ceaseless study resulted in more than 50 volumes of observations on native life. By far the most famous of these works is his 16-volume translati
on of The Arabian Nights. In voluminous footnotes he presented much of the vast amount of material he had collected over the years on such subjects as childbirth, circumcision, defloration, hermaphroditism, castration, birth control, and aphrodisiacs (including recipes for hashish).
Although some reviewers considered The Arabian Nights a marvel of psychological insight presented in an incomparable literary style, others called it “garbage of the brothels.” Singled out for special indignation was the collection’s
“Terminal Essay,” in which Burton dealt with sex education for women and devoted over 18,000 words to a study of homosexuality. A “household edition” of The Arabian Nights—throughout which Isabel had judiciously substituted “assistant wife” for “concubine”—sold dismally, but the unexpurgated work netted Burton 10,000 guineas, the first appreciable sum he had ever received for any of his writings. He reflected, “Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money.”
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 17
