Mommie dearest …

… Mary-Kay Wilmers reviews ‘Holding On Upside Down’ by Linda Leavell — LRB 3 December 2015. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Mary didn’t worry that her children would one day grow up and leave her: she determined early on that there would be no growing up. In the summer of 1911, she visited Europe for the first time (London and Paris principally), accompanied by Marianne. The high point of the trip, she told Warner, was a visit to Kensington Gardens to pay homage to Peter Pan. ‘Since I am very indulgent to my childhood romances, and keep holiday with them almost religiously,’ she wrote, ‘I just bowed the knee and worshipped like the Oriental or the Romanist at the sound of prayer bells.’ It was another role she’d assigned herself in the family fairy tale. ‘Be a little child again,’ she repeatedly advised Marianne, and with that in mind did her best to ensure that neither of her children, though both by now were college students, had interests that weren’t communal, friends who weren’t ‘our kind’, likes that weren’t hers, thoughts she couldn’t share. ‘Remember how well Peter Pan flew, till he began to consider the manner of his flying,’ she wrote to Warner: ‘Oh! don’t be introspective!’ What she meant, I imagine, was ‘don’t keep anything from me.’ Warner by then was 18.