The Real Peter Pan (13 page)

George took advice from housemaster Macnaghten at Eton and the message came home that the boys would need ‘a knickerbocker change suit (a good warm one), sweaters and thick stockings’. No expense would be spared. Mary Ansell would come too and so would Gilbert Cannan.

On the train, while Barrie was learning from a sporting-work how
to ski by crossing his right leg along the line A.B. and his left along C.D. (as in diagrams), Michael filled out a page in Barrie’s ‘Querist’s Album’, a book the like of which Barrie had himself been given by his mother when he was seventeen, a sort of confession as to what he was thinking at a particular moment in time, and signed at the bottom under the words, ‘My Confession’.

It provides a sort of self-analytical snapshot of the eight-year-old Michael. We learn that in his view ‘the highest characteristic in man’ is ‘Fun’ and in a woman, ‘Kindness’; that ‘Decency’ is Michael’s own most esteemed virtue and ‘Sylvia’ is his most lovable name. That his favourite novelist is J. M. Barrie and his happiest employment reading; that Longfellow is his most admired poet, and Hereward the Wake and Joan of Arc his favourite historical heroes, while Peter Pan was his favourite fictional hero, fishing his favourite amusement, while his greatest misery continued to be – ‘Nightmares’.

Fun, kindness and decency, Sylvia and J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and fishing, yet the nightmares continued to invade his dreams.

How different were the five boys becoming now that they were growing up, even if as Nico, the youngest, pointed out in terms of ‘fun to be with’, they were ‘dead level’.

Peter observed that George had a romantic character of mind, a fair share of du Maurier charm and ‘a good leavening of sound, kind, sterling Davies’ too; but also that he had a ‘
simplicity
which Barrie and Macnaghten saw in Arthur’, which meant ‘straightforward’, ultimately ‘limited’, not the elegant simplicity of a seeking and discerning mind, which became Michael’s.

Daphne remembered Jack as the one ‘who could climb nearly to the top of the great cedar tree on the lawn of Slyfield House, near Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey, where her family was staying one summer, and she was down in awe of him: ‘Had I known, at the age of
five, six, seven, how the Greeks felt about their Olympian gods,’ she recalled in
Myself When Young
(1977), ‘I would have shared their sentiments.’ An attractive combination of adventurousness and sensitivity made him a favourite of Sylvia, more or less equally with Michael. He was her white knight and would become something of a womaniser, as Nico recalled in interview with Andrew Birkin in the 1970s.

‘He used to take me to such places as The Palace Theatre and thrill me to the quick at his getting glorious smiles from the chorus girls.’

Intellectually sound Peter, as a child pale and indifferent, was Dolly’s favourite, while Nico was the practical one, the odd one out. He didn’t really like to see into things, and was lost in the face of the artistic, spiritual or psychological. Although no fool, he was occasionally the clown – ‘the complete extrovert, completely happy’, as Jack’s wife described him to Birkin.

Marching into the lobby of the Grand Hôtel, Caux, aged five, one of the female guests caught sight of Nico and exclaimed: ‘My word, you
are
a lovely boy!’ – ‘So he was,’ recalled Peter, ‘but this was the last way to curry favour with a young Davies, and Nico duly retaliated with a face of fury and the comprehensive nursery repartee: “Oh, ditto!”’

Caux was wonderful, deep in snow. The train had been hot and stifling, but Barrie remembered how frozen with ice was the mountain train on their arrival. Then they drove from the station in an open sledge and arrived exhilarated.

‘The world here is given over to lugeing [
sic
],’ wrote Barrie to the Duchess of Sutherland on 9 January – he had almost a fetish for duchesses now that he was successful enough to be able to handle any company he wanted to handle. And where better to indulge a bit of harmless snobbism than from a swish Swiss ski resort? ‘I don’t
know whether you have a luge, you have everything else. It’s a little toboggan, and they glide down on it for ever and ever.’

What he didn’t tell her was that when he fell, skiing, having crossed his right leg along the line A.B. and his left along C.D. he had lain on the snow helpless until he remembered how to rise ‘by doing things with E, F and G’.

This was before the winter sports business had really got going, but luging was more of a success, ‘We tobogganed often down to Glion from Caux and even all the way down to Montreux,’ wrote Barrie.

But the real sport during the holiday was interpersonal. Included in the party were Mary Ansell and Barrie’s Secretary to the Anti-Censor campaign, the young barrister and budding novelist Gilbert Cannan, now more often than not working with Ansell on the Censor business out of Black Lake Cottage. And they were having an affair.

Barrie, it seemed to everyone, was the only one not to be aware that something was going on. As usual, Jack among the boys was the one to wonder. ‘Why is Mr Cannan always with Mrs Barrie?’ he asked meaningfully.

Diana Farr wrote in her biography of Cannan that ‘Sylvia encouraged and abetted Cannan’s affair with Mary Barrie, making it easy for them to see each other unknown to Barrie.’
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Farr’s biography was published in 1978. Almost certainly she took the prompt from Denis Mackail’s official biography of Barrie, which was published in 1941 and suggests that Sylvia saw how the situation could play into her hands – by clearing Mary out of the way and making her financially secure after Arthur’s death, writing: ‘Temptation here, as well as elsewhere. The money again.’

This is conjecture, as Mackail admits, and seems to overlook the complexity of Sylvia’s situation. She didn’t need to take a begging bowl to Barrie and had indeed managed not to see him very much throughout the previous year. What’s more, Sylvia already had her line into Barrie’s bank account and there was never a danger that it would be stopped. Michael was too important to him.

No doubt Sylvia did encourage the relationship between Cannan and Ansell, but only because to do so was absolutely in character. She would have thought the affair a real hoot. When Lady Ottoline Morrell met Ansell and Cannan not long after Caux she wrote of Cannan as

I certainly don’t believe that Sylvia wanted to make her relationship
legal with Barrie for the security of herself and her boys. It is more likely that Barrie would rather have had her boys to himself without Sylvia (which is what he ended up with). Sylvia knew that he would never withdraw from her boys. Granted, she would have been bound to imagine at some stage the possibility of becoming Barrie’s wife. What woman would not turn it over in their mind given her situation, his involvement with her and her sons and the material ease with which they would henceforth live life. But Sylvia was never one to have found satisfaction in basic repulsion. Beauty was her star.

On reflection, it also seems unlikely that Barrie didn’t know what was going on between his wife and Cannan. He, the great playwright, had set the scene in Caux, invited everyone along and was enjoying the ‘play’ into which he had cast them, as it promised some interesting turns. He would later write a play a bit like this called
Shall We Join The Ladies?
in which the cast were invited to dinner. Barrie was not himself part of the main plot at Caux, however, whereas he was the host in that. Instead, he and the boys starred in the fun-loving, low-life
sub
-plot, luging down the slopes, ‘pranging’ Nico’s ‘little bum’ in a tobogganing accident, and (the crowning glory in this secondary narrative), Peter having the wool pulled over his eyes in a case of mistaken identity.

One evening at dusk Barrie invited eleven-year-old Peter up to his room. When he knocked at the door, Barrie’s voice commanded him in a high-pitched Scottish wail to come in. Peter opened the door and saw Barrie sitting at the far end of the bedroom in semi-darkness. He made his way across the room towards him as Barrie, apparently in great discomfort, whined, ‘Peter, something dreadful has happened to my feet.’ Glancing down, Peter saw to his horror ‘that his feet were bare and swollen to four or five times their natural size. For several seconds I was deceived, and have never since
forgotten the terror that filled me, until I realised that the feet were artificial.’ Barrie had bought the pink, waxy monstrosities at Hamleys, the famous toyshop on Regent’s Street in London.

Aside from the sub-plot, in which Barrie alone of the adults was participant, there was, so Mackail wrote, ‘something dreadfully ominous … Something behind the laughter as cold and relentless as the Alps.’

There was, but it had nothing to do with Gilbert Cannan and Mary Ansell. Sylvia fell ill. She collapsed complaining of a terrible pain around her heart. The hotel staff informed Barrie that there was an English doctor among the guests, but he appears to have been as unhelpful as he could be, claiming invisibility because he was on holiday.

S
YLVIA’S RECOVERY WAS
slow but it allowed her to return to London and her bed at Campden Hill Square. There were two reports of her fainting – in the hall of No. 23 and on the stairs between her bedroom and the lavatory up the next flight of stairs. X-ray images were taken, but showed nothing.

Barrie was a constant visitor – ‘No jarring or suspected criticism here,’ writes Mackail. It should be said that Mackail was writing his biography after Barrie’s death in 1937 but under the fierce and eagle eye of Lady Cynthia Asquith, who had ended up with most of his money and power as executor over his works. She kept him on a tight rein. Any criticism was frowned upon, which is why one
gets from Mackail these simpering phrases like ‘No jarring or suspected criticism here.’ Why should we think there is any criticism in Barrie visiting Sylvia constantly unless it was something Sylvia found too much? The sentence ends: ‘though the boys scarcely knew what had happened and would sometimes start a fresh silence with a thoughtless word’.

There were clearly tensions at No. 23 in January 1909, a year in which Sylvia would spend a great deal of time with her mother in Ramsgate, where she knew Barrie would not follow. For Emma du Maurier made no bones about not liking the little man.

Why this should have been is not immediately clear. It is possible that Emma simply viewed Barrie’s friendship with Sylvia’s family as an intrusion. But it is also possible that there was a little animosity between Barrie and the du Mauriers even before he met Sylvia.

Mackail writes that her husband George du Maurier and Barrie must have met in the years leading up to du Maurier’s death in 1896, seeing as they had so many personal friends in common. Henry James, du Maurier’s closest friend, knew Barrie well. Other close friends included the writers Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, actors Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree and J. L. Toole, editors W. D. Nichols and W. E. Henley, and the artists Alma-Tadema, J. L. Toole, Edwin Abbey, and the landscape painter Alfred Parsons, who knew du Maurier intimately and was a member of Barrie’s Allahakbarries.

In any case, du Maurier was the bestselling author of the day and Barrie the rising star, who had been so smitten by
Peter Ibbetson
that he changed the focus of his writing completely to follow du Maurier’s line. Everyone knew everyone in literary London. There were but half a dozen salons where such people met. How could it be that these two literary lions did not meet? The answer, which is the same conclusion that Mackail reached, is that they did.

The bedrock of Barrie’s story is the collection of his notebooks, but uniquely the notebooks from June 1896, when he would have known du Maurier, to June 1898, by which time he had met Sylvia and the boys, are missing.

It is highly likely that the two men didn’t get on. On the surface they had much in common, both diminutive and boyish, both with the same dry sense of humour and lugubrious way of expressing it, both satirical in their work. Yet beneath the surface no two men could have been more dissimilar. While du Maurier’s satire was upbeat and palpably sincere, Barrie’s, according to the writer Sir Walter Raleigh, chair of English Literature at Oxford, goes under the guise of sentimentality, often has a cruel side and doesn’t quite come off. The critic Desmond MacCarthy agreed. Barrie’s genius ‘is a coquettish thing, with just a benevolent drop of acid in it sometimes’.

Also, du Maurier was a Romantic, he worshipped beauty;
feeling
was what he was all about, while Barrie confessed he was incapable of ‘even a genuine feeling that wasn’t merely sentiment’, actively disliked music – (‘I have no ear for it,’ he admitted), and had no interest in art. According to Mackail, Barrie’s insensitivity to art was the reason he ‘could never, even spiritually, be one of the real or esoteric Broadway gang’ – a reference to the cricket-playing artistic community in Worcestershire, where many of du Maurier’s literary and artistic friends, including Henry James (who wrote about it), used to gather.

This difference is especially important when sensitivity to art, and music in particular, is the
sine qua non
of true existence in
Trilby
, for Trilby herself is tone deaf until Svengali hypnotises her, activating her sixth sense. So, Barrie is absolutely blind, deaf and dumb when it comes to the important things, as far as du Maurier is concerned.

Even the boys, Peter and Michael especially, noted and rued this
state of affairs, Peter conceding that while Barrie ‘gallantly accompanied’ him to the opera…

We will see that this artistic, even spiritual, insensitivity is what ultimately lost him Michael. For while Michael, with a poet’s eye, came to discern a spiritual dimension in the Scottish landscape, Barrie remained stuck in his gloomy supernatural heritage and in the ‘Kailyard’, or Cabbage-patch, school of cosy sentimentality to which his novels about Thrums (his name for Kirriemuir),
Auld Licht Idylls, A Window in Thrums
and
The Little Minister,
adhere.

Du Maurier would have scorned Barrie’s lack of Romantic vision and excluded him for it, if for no other reason. It was something he was good at when a face didn’t fit. And this was just the moment in Barrie’s career when he would have benefited from being
in
rather than
out
. It makes his pursuit of du Maurier’s daughter and her boys look rather strange, purposeful, anything but mere chance. In 1922, after it was all over, he admitted, as if it had been of critical significance to the direction his life took: ‘I think an individual may have done me harm by thinking too little of me.’

Emma would have had no difficulty in recalling the period in the mid-to late 1890s when her husband would have met Barrie and when, much to her chagrin, du Maurier returned to a preoccupation
with the occult and took a house in Bayswater, entertaining his friends and writing
Peter Ibbetson
, while still keeping the family home in Hampstead.

All might well have been revealed in Emma’s very full correspondence with Sylvia in subsequent years after Barrie became a fixture in her life, for mother and daughter wrote to one another ‘almost daily’.
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But, again, the papers were destroyed, this correspondence was nowhere to be found among Barrie’s effects after he died, which included everything else that Sylvia left.

The3rd of April 1909 found Barrie in Edinburgh receiving an honorary degree from his alma mater. All he could think of was Michael. ‘If Michael had met me in a wood,’ he wrote to Sylvia about his red and blue ceremonial gown, ‘he would have tried to net me as a Scarlet Emperor.’

Barrie was dying to get together with Michael at Easter, eight days later, but Sylvia denied him. So, on the 11th, Barrie was spending Easter at Black Lake Cottage with Mason and other guests, including the actress Hilda Trevelyan (Wendy in
Peter Pan
), who was looking out of her bedroom window one morning when a vision appeared beneath the window of Barrie walking slowly down the garden in deep thought, apparently oblivious to the fact that Luath was following hard on his heels on two legs, his forepaws up on Barrie’s shoulders. Trevelyan shook her head in disbelief and the vision passed on.

Probably Barrie had been composing his letter to Sylvia, written that day, in which he referred to a statue of Peter Pan modelled on Michael which he had commissioned from Sir George Frampton for display in due course in Kensington Gardens. He had given Frampton
the photographs of Michael dressed in the Peter Pan costume that Barrie had given to the boy on his sixth birthday. ‘Frampton was very taken with Mick’s pictures,’ he wrote, ‘& I had to leave them with him. He prefers the Peter clothes to a nude child … I don’t feel gay, so no more at present, dear Jocelyn.’

No doubt Sylvia was relieved that Michael would not be appearing in Kensington Gardens in the nude. But still, by June he had not seen him and was driven to write:

Clearly it is Michael that he is missing, but it is perfectly true that all of them, except Jack, did indeed love Uncle Jim with that natural, no-strings-love that children reserve for close family, Michael in particular. Barrie and Jack were poles apart, but as Jack’s wife,
Geraldine Gibb, told Andrew Birkin later, ‘Michael and Barrie spent so much time together. They were there with each other. It was almost bound to happen.’

Nor was the boys’ love at root self-seeking, as the loving and respectful letters of George and Peter from the Front in the First World War will show. Barrie was always a favourite with them for his own sake, and now that Arthur was dead he did in many ways already play the role of father in their lives.

But that is where the problem lay for Sylvia. The relationship had started out almost as if he had been a second nanny, which is why Nanny Hodgson’s nose was originally put out of joint. Barrie admitted there were ‘many coldnesses and even bickerings between us … We were rivals.’ Sylvia, with three sons under five, had been only too happy to have him take them off her hands. Barrie enjoyed being dominated by her, as Peter pointed out, and she rose to his wit and sense of humour, and, yes, increasingly to the money. Barrie was a year-on-year earning millionaire.
Peter Pan
had taken over and they all now lived within the Peter Pan cult. At school, George, Peter and Michael were ragged about it, and Peter of course suffered more in this way than the others on account of his name, so that even as a sixty-year-old he was bitter about it. Again, like the children at Norland Place, people pointed at Sylvia as the friend of J. M. Barrie and mother of Peter Pan.

Now, since Arthur’s death, the
mènage à trois
had become a
mènage à deux,
yet the dynamic between Sylvia and Barrie was nowhere near being a ‘partner’ relationship. When Arthur was dying he was her ‘fairy prince’ and immediately afterwards he was ‘the best friend in the whole world’ because the need was there. Sylvia had been closest to Barrie when the chips were down. The need was still there for his financial support and, yes, the boys would miss him, but by
now it was clear to both parties that there would be no marriage between the mother of all mothers and the fairy prince.

In July the second summer presentation of
Peter Pan
opened in Paris and somehow or other Barrie – there is no explanation of how he was conveyed – had managed to get Michael to join the party already there, which, besides Barrie, included Mary Ansell, Charles Frohman, Paulene Chase, who had replaced Dion Boucicault as Peter Pan in England, and Lord Esher’s younger daughter.

There is a photograph of Michael driving a miniature electric hire car in Le Grand Trianons at Versailles, and there was some sort of row in which Frohman refused to participate in the fun at either of the Trianons and eventually insisted that ‘his man’ Herbert get the boy home to England.

No good would come of this potentially explosive state of affairs. Nor did it. Sylvia was dying. First Arthur, then Sylvia, both in their early forties, leaving Barrie with the family he wanted above all else. You couldn’t write it. Except as a horror story. And that is what it was, a horror story. Which is why Michael was still having nightmares. No jarring or suspected criticism here.

If, during 1909, in which she spent a great deal of time with her mother, Sylvia kept her distance from Barrie, she was helped in this by events. Barrie was drawn into the affair between his wife and Gilbert Cannan when Mary Ansell’s infidelity was officially made known to him by the gardener at Black Lake Cottage, a Mr Hunt. He had informed on Ansell in retaliation for her criticism of his gardening skills, we are to believe.

Barrie’s lawyer, Sir George Lewis, advised him to avoid too much contact with Sylvia in case the prosecution implicated her in any way. The shame of divorce was one thing. To be named in a divorce could destroy your reputation.

So that summer of 1909 Barrie went to Switzerland with Gilmour and Mason, while Sylvia had a holiday with the boys at Postbridge, a far more ancient hamlet than the road of Roman origin that strikes through it, situated in the centre of Dartmoor in Devon beside the East River Dart, forded by a medieval clapper bridge. Here in summer purple shadows leap the rivers and chase across the heathered hills, while in winter Conan Doyle’s hound of the Baskervilles can easily be imagined to break upon one out of a wall of fog.

How much the boys must have missed Barrie to bring it alive for them. Instead, he was writing a letter from Mason’s London apartment in Stratton Street off Piccadilly, where he had taken refuge away from Leinster Corner, which ‘it is always so painful to me to go to now’.

The letter, dated 12 August, is addressed to: