Mad about the Boys
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While Mavor doesn’t state as much, this book is most reminiscent of the unexpected juxtapositions of the five subjects of Barthes’ own hard-to-classify study in rhetoric, Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Barthes and novelist Proust are already intimates. Proust was a huge influence on Barthes, who wrote about Lost Time and was to some degree influenced by it when writing Roland Barthes. But Mavor considers them together for the specific reason that “like Proust, Barthes was a boyish man, forever tied to his mother in both his writings and his day-to-day life.” It’s surely too simple, though, to conclude from the fact that Barthes and his mother remained close all their lives, often traveling and vacationing together, that “Henriette was Barthes’s bliss, his jouissance,” a key term in the Barthesian lexicon. More persuasive is Mavor’s reading of his posthumous, revelatory Incidents, in which “Barthes writes himself and his lover as a mother-child couple.” In A Lover’s Discourse, already, he had shown how he feared his mother’s absence.

Of course, being a boy isn’t merely a state of mind; it’s also about a period of life where a young male is sexually capable but physically underdeveloped. Historically, this period, often short, has been in the foreground of cultural celebrations of the beauty of the male form, from Apollo on. Mavor’s subjects tend to celebrate the gamin in others, while regretting the loss of it in themselves. In Roland Barthes, Barthes mourned the loss of his physical boyishness, the “sudden mutation of the body… changing (or appearing to change) from slender to plump.”

Eating is key here, seeming to precipitate the process of aging, the flight from youthful promise, in several relevant works. Peter Pan, for one, pecks birdlike at odd crumbs, nothing more. Proust’s housemaid Celeste Albaret described her master as “living on the shadows of foods he’d known and loved in the past.” Rather than eating them, he’d recall them. Such it was with every sensual pleasure—notwithstanding indecent doses of coffee—as Proust got on with the ascetic practice of writing. As Mavor puts it, there is “a strong biographical connection between Proust’s dwindling appetite, when writing the Search, and a taste for words that grew and grew, nearly replacing food altogether.”

J. M. Barrie wrote what may be the most frequently performed play of the 20th century, Peter Pan, but it’s not exactly a populist work. Mavor accurately describes it as “sadistic” in intent. This pæan to perpetual youth has routinely been interpreted in the light of its author’s complex and precarious relations with the five Llewellyn Davies boys. Barrie had, you might say, a serial fixation upon boys, and one which lasted until his death in 1937. It is evident starting with 1901’s privately printed The Boy Castaways, an account of Barrie’s high jinx with the quintet on holiday, to his last play, based upon the biblical story The Boy David. The awkwardness of Barrie’s relationship with these boys is pithily summarized in the stumbling dedication of the later novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: “To Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies and Their Boys (My Boys).” Both parents were long dead by then, and Barrie had adopted their five sons, then between the ages of seven and seventeen, not without some contrivance (involving altering their mother’s will).

Peter Llewelyn Davies’ misery subsequent to the success of Peter Pan has been well studied—most comprehensively by Andrew Birkin’s J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979), the basis for the film Finding Neverland. Still, it makes for disturbing reading to find among Peter’s private papers, as quoted by Mavor, this dire reflection: “What’s in a name. My God, what isn’t? If that perennially juvenile lad, if that boy so fatally committed to an arrestation of his development, had only been dubbed George, or Jack, or Michael, or Nicholas [his brothers’ names], what miseries would have been spared me.” Barrie’s sadism, conscious or otherwise, can be found in the proposition that “all children, except one, grow up.” Peter Llewelyn Davies—Barrie’s hero’s namesake—lived on, dogged by the knowledge of his inevitable failure to embody perpetual youthfulness, to “escape from being a human,” as The Little White Bird, Barrie’s first textual source for the Peter Pan myth, had put it. Peter’s fate is all the more poignant in that Peter Pan may well have been meant as a tribute to Barrie’s brother David, who died at a young age and thus literally “never grew up.”

Jacques Henri Lartigue found fame as a photographer as an adult, but Mavor cleverly interrogates his juvenilia, both visual and written material, which were kept in a series of (annual) notebooks. The justification for this is that “modern childhood and the photographic print were born of the 19th century. They are a couple.” Lartigue’s archive contains images dating back to the first camera he owned, in 1902, at age eight. Intriguingly, while Lartigue later archived his work by year of composition, he did not do so with these early pictures, which had been pasted into his schoolbooks by his mother.

The role of the mother is pivotal to Reading Boyishly, and Mavor makes much of her own three sons. In the works of all five subjects, she argues, there “is a place prolonged through (what some have anxiously labeled as) an overattachment to the mother.” That may be true, though one could readily cite other adopters of the “boyish” whose relationship with “the mother”—real or imaginary—was far from close or easy: Christopher Isherwood, for example. Her study concentrates on the maternal fixations of her chosen subjects in relation to their obsessive, enduring boyishness. Yet she concedes that Barrie’s narrator—in the novel version, Peter and Wendy (1911)—wrote of Peter Pan: “Not only had he no mother, he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them very overrated persons.” It is fascinating that commentators have called all five of her subjects “agèd children” or something like it. Lartigue used the epithet “ancient little boy.”

The broad focus on the early decades of the 20th century seems apt, though it’s not sustained. Psychoanalysis, after all, insisted upon the potency of childhood experience and adolescent responsiveness—to such a degree that its prominence in the Edwardian period did, in hindsight, amount to a kind of enthronement of pre-adult life. Mavor claims that “the Edwardian era itself was boyish,” a time when little boys were worshipped. But the focus is partial, in the sense that some obvious sources aren’t here: Thomas Mann’s œuvre; or André Gide’s pæan to adolescent irresponsibility, The Counterfeiters (1926), and of course his extraordinary defense of pederasty, Corydon (1924). Likewise, cultural context means a lot in this period. I began to wonder how Mavor might interpret girlish stories that flourished around the same time. Peter Pan may be able to liberate himself from the travails of the parental and the domestic, but remember that Frank Baum’s Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the novel of 1900) found, conversely, that “there’s no place like home.”

Mavor’s study is often dizzyingly obscure. There are sudden references to Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, to James Joyce, to scores of contemporary artists such as Rachel Whiteread, to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, to surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp, to William Blake, to filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, to Melanie Klein’s study of Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (The Bewitched Child), with its book by Colette, to David Hockney’s 1980 staging of the same, to Gothic artists Simone Martini, Jan van Eyck, and Robert Campin, to Oscar Wilde (“The Happy Prince,” of course), to Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, to Francisco de Goya, to Chardin, to Walter Benjamin, to Whistler, to Joseph Cornell, to English filmmaker Derek Jarman, to Italian Renaissance painter Baldovinetti’s Madonna and Child, and to Sigmund Freud’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci.

The effect can be dazzling; the illustrations often are. One paragraph alone shifts from Barrie to Charles Baudelaire, Vincent van Gogh, and Gaston Bachelard (which I had to look up). It’s often fascinating, as when Leonardo’s longing for flight—which Freud in 1910 associated with an eroticized childish wish—is boldly compared to Barrie’s Peter Pan. Indeed both works appeared at the dawn of aviation as a modern reality. In her gathering of recondite sources, Mavor may regard Proust’s comprehensiveness as a model. As Jean-Yves Tadié noted, “Proust made use of everything he experienced or thought about during his lifetime.” But fiction works differently upon a reader than critical prose. In any case, Proust found the space to animate, to dramatize the æsthetic interests he wanted to include. Sometimes Reading Boyishly is an inspired gathering; at other times it has the feel of an adolescent high-speed shopping trip. Sometimes the supposed subject of a chapter has simply vanished by its end. In the chapter “Splitting,” Mavor finally asks: “But where in this unmaking does Lartigue fit?” Where indeed?

The role of homosexuality in relation to “boyishness” proves central in many cases, since “our cultural imagination of the gay man, even in supposedly gay affirmative revisionist psychoanalysis, is a boy who … does not grow out of his boyishness.” Winnicott’s writings too convey a culturally ubiquitous fear of the effeminate boy and/or man. But not all. Lartigue’s lifelong boyishness—captured in his journal entry at the age of six when he writes, “Dear Jesus, please make me stay small”—has nothing to do with homosexuality, or even with effeminacy. As a man, he escaped combat in the Great War and refused to serve as a photographer, serving instead as a chauffeur. But he was also a content, confident lover of women.

Nonetheless, if each of these four figures (excepting Winnicott) revealed longings to be perpetually a boy, or boyish, this tendency is inevitably associated with pedophilia, according to Mavor. Barthes, for one, “as a boy, wants to be loved by boys.” Of the indifference of one late consort, Olivier, the sage noted: “A sort of despair came over me, I felt like crying. How clearly I saw that I would have to give up boys, because none of them felt any desire for me, and I was either too scrupulous or too clumsy to impose my desire upon them.” Barthes saw that his role as instigator, demander of boys, required him, as a male client, to ask favors of them, which he (mentally still boy-like) simply could not consider doing. J. M. Barrie had his character Grizel in Tommy and Grizel (1900) regret that “boys cannot love.”

Conversely, however, Barrie’s adoption of the five Llewelyn Davies boys in 1910 left his life positively “transformed,” as Jackie Wullschlager puts it. “[F]rom an unhappily married oddball looking onto other lives, he became a single, boyish man in charge of five lost boys—as close to a live, adult version of Peter Pan as could be imagined.” Even if boys are incapable of love, they want to be loved. Peter Pan himself melancholically sleeps with a lost kite, a “pathetic and pretty” gesture, we are told, “for the reason he loved it was because it had belonged to a real boy.”

In a century of warfare and revolution, there were nonetheless grounds for preferring girlhood. Movingly, the Llewelyn Davies boy Barrie loved the best, George, was killed in the trenches in 1915. The final letter Barrie wrote to him in France reads: “I do seem today to be sadder than ever, and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart. … I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.” Later that year, Peter Pan’s famous line, “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” was removed from the revival of the play for obvious reasons. A few years later, Michael Llewelyn Davies would also die—apparently in a suicide pact with his male lover at Oxford. In 1960, Peter Llewelyn Davies threw himself under a London underground train, albeit at the unboyish age of 63.

Mavor’s prose can be self-indulgent: “[Lartigue] becomes an eye that I can stage, if only temporarily. I speak Lartiguish. I become the boy, the boy Lartigue.” She then “becomes” Lartigue by conflating his own journal recollections, her conjectural expressions of his adolescent temperament, and the thoughts of her students, sons, and others along the way. Alas, hindsight can offer too much temptation to the critic. The link between Lartigue and Proust, for example, requires Mavor to mention that Lartigue’s journals reveal that he only got around to reading Swann’s Way in 1970 at age 76. She’s reduced to insisting nonetheless that Lartigue’s life “was nevertheless always already Proustified.” Likewise, what are we to make of the following interjection into the consciousness of the young Lartigue? “I have no idea that by the time of my death at age 92, I will have taken over 280,000 pictures of my happy French life.” There’s also one howler among so much erudition, a reference to Chartres Cathedral as “the most famous of late Gothic churches.” Late?

Brassaï has winningly written on the importance of photography to Proust as the novelist (in Proust and the Power of Photography, 1997). Proust’s own Celeste recalled the author’s “fabulous powers of observation” and “tenacious memory,” noting that his recollections of those he encountered struck her as “better than a camera could do it,” since with Proust a character judgment could be made on the basis of a simple gesture or expression. But comparing Celeste and Proust to Barrie’s Wendy and Peter struck me as far-fetched.

In the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust quoted Victor Hugo thus: “Grass must grow and children must die.” Or, as Germaine Greer has it in The Boy (2003), the tragedy of boys’ ineffably superior beauty lies in its brevity: “a boy is a boy for only a very brief space.” Part of the joy and beauty of boys is their uselessness. In modern times, the sense of boyhood as risk-bearing and fragile may have been adjusted in its details, but it has not receded. As Greer put it: “Boys are volatile, unpredictable and vulnerable. A male teenager is more likely to attempt suicide than not, more likely than anyone else to ride off a motor vehicle, almost certain to experiment with drug experiences of one kind or another, and at greater risk of committing and/or suffering an act of violence than any grown man or female. His vulnerability is made more acute by his own recklessness and spontaneity.”

Still, boys are potent now in Western cultures—arguably more so than ever. And, if Mavor has complicated our understanding of their appeal rather than clarified it, the effort is nevertheless to much interesting effect.

Richard Canning, editor of the recently published Between Men and Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction and author of Oscar Wilde: a Brief Life, teaches at the University of Sheffield, England.