I have sent the following letter to Chatto & Windus, publishers of Piers Dudgeon's ridiculous book:
Dear Sirs,
Captivated, by Piers Dudgeon
I have only just caught up with this book, which you published last year. Back in 2005, Piers Dudgeon contacted me, asking for my help in a book he was writing about J M Barrie and the du Mauriers. I told him that everything I had to offer in the way of research was on my website, www.jmbarrie.co.uk, and that he was free to use the extensive database, providing he gave due credit. This he did in his acknowledgements, although I had little idea that he would quote (not to mention misquote) from my material quite so extensively.
On page 23, Dudgeon writes that I offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove that Barrie was a paedophile, in response to having read an article by Alison Lurie in the New York Times Review of Books on 6 February 1975. He goes on to say that this was “possibly an over- reaction, as Lurie had suggested not sexual abuse but that, as the boys grew older, they had become ‘embarrassed’ by ‘this odd little man who looked like an aged child.’” This is typical of Dudgeon’s sloppy research. My offer (to donate $10K to GOSH, not to the prover) was in response to an article in the New York Post in 2004, claiming that Barrie was a paedophile. It was Nico, not me, who was so incensed by Alison Lurie’s “bollox” – which Dudgeon must have read for himself since it comes from one of Nico’s letters to me on my website, from which he quotes so freely. I would ask him/you to kindly correct this in future editions of the book.
I would also ask you to correct the source of several of the illustrations. The photograph of Michael dressed as Peter Pan is not to be found in the “du Maurier Archive, Special Collections, University of Exeter” (as credited on page viii), nor the photo of “his eldest brother George” next to it (the photo is in fact of Michael, not George at all); nor indeed is the photo of “Jim Barrie with his St Bernard” from Exeter – all three have either been ripped from my book or taken from the database on my website. Having bought the originals from Nico in 1979, I donated them to GOSH in 2004, to whom a reproduction fee should have been paid.
Piers Dudgeon is of course entitled to his own opinion, but his book is so full of errors, distortions, half-truths, and his own opinion passed off as fact, that I personally regard it as worthless.
Sincerely,
Andrew Birkin
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