The Real Peter Pan (23 page)

D
EAR BRUTUS
OPENED
at Wyndham's Theatre in the West End on 17 October 1917. It ran for 365 performances, almost to the end of the war. Five years later, it ran again at the same theatre for 258 performances.

Its theme was one that Barrie had already raised in
The Little White Bird
and was ubiquitous in his notebook thereafter. The context in the 1902 novel is Peter Pan being locked out of his mother's love, calling,

His mother has been crying, ‘and he knew what was the great thing she cried for, and that a hug from her splendid Peter would quickly make her to smile. Oh! He felt sure of it…' But the ‘great thing she cried for' was ‘the great mistake', which Peter had made and we are never told about, so big a mistake that a hug is not going to be enough.

What locked Barrie out of his mother's love, as he describes in his biography of her, is the death at thirteen of her favourite son David in a skating accident, after another boy bumped into him and he fell and hit his head on the ice. Her exclusion of David's six-year-old brother Jamie was catastrophic, it probably crippled him emotionally for life. It is possible that little Jamie Barrie was involved in his brother's accident, which is why his mother was so hard on him – ‘Ah, Peter! we who have made the great mistake, how differently we should all act at the second chance.' But, whatever is the truth, it is enough to know that while we all believe there are no second chances in this world, no way back from our great regrets, Barrie thought that he had found a way by opting for a life of fantasy and illusion, and that is the burden of
Dear Brutus.

Dear Brutus
dramatises what happens when a cast of characters, all of whom long for a second chance in life, enter an enchanted wood on Midsummer Eve and go back in time to re-shape their lives. Barrie's technical mastery is superb – how he convinces the audience that there can be such a thing as a magic wood into which we, the audience, might find our way. As is the stagecraft, in convincing us
that the wood has crept right up to the house in the eerie moonlight and is suddenly visible through the windows of the drawing room – all this is pure genius and completely convinced audiences in 1917.

It is the plot, however, that is so troubling, now that we know so much more about Barrie than the 1917 audience did. One character, Will Dearth (played by Sylvia's brother, Gerald) finds himself in the magic wood with a fantasy daughter (clearly based on Gerald's favourite daughter Daphne du Maurier). The scene imitates and embellishes Gerald's special love for Daphne with titillating, even erotic and incestuous undertones, all delivered so smoothly in Barrie's trademark style that it is easy to allow it as simply the whimsy we expect from him (indeed the play is actually billed as a comedy).

But it isn't quite like that. Will Dearth possesses his daughter utterly. Absent is any notion of the disinterested love a father usually feels for his daughter. In particular the girl's approaching independence of her father is anathema to him, and appears to him to cheat him of what is, by rights, his.

The best time in a father's life is the year before his daughter ‘puts her hair up', when a girl turns eighteen. The girl counters that there is one time better, ‘The year she does put up her hair.' She then puts her hair up and asks him, ‘What do you think? Will I do?' Dearth's eyes fall on ‘the young woman that is to be', with ‘the change in his voice falling clammy on her', as Barrie's stage direction reads.

Smitten, Dearth speaks ‘with an odd tremor' in his voice, and his daughter manhandles him, ‘bumping into him and round him and over him', saying he will be sick of her with her hair up before he has done with her. Then she teases and tantalises him with the thought of one day being in love with a boy.

Their dialogue has a quasi-erotic ring. Daddy is controlling; he has taught her all she knows, like a master teaches his dog how to catch
a biscuit in its mouth. He even takes credit for her beauty: ‘I wore out the point of my little finger over that dimple.' Daphne's dimple on her chin was a feature as a child. His rights over his daughter are repressive. There is nothing about the girl that Daddy does not regard as his, and he holds ultimate power over her.

Afterwards, as the child recedes from his imagination, he, despite all that she does to dissuade him, leaves her in the wood on her own, and she cries: ‘Daddy, come back; I don't want to be a might-have-been.'

With her dismissal as a might-have-been, the playwright gives the girl no more reality than the fading colours on the artist's easel, because of course she is just a figment of Dearth's imagination, alive only in the magic wood.

The effect on ten-year-old Daphne du Maurier, who was no stranger to her father's first nights, was devastating. She fled from the theatre in floods of tears because she recognised herself and her relationship with Gerald immediately.

Years later, John Gielgud revived the play and admitted,

Again, as Noël Coward put it, in
Dear Brutus
, ‘Gerald tore your heart out.'

Perhaps no playwright other than Barrie
could
have had Gerald play it as he did. Gerald was already having a relationship with his favourite daughter very like the one between Will Dearth and
his dream-child daughter. As Daphne admitted, she became engaged in ‘a sort of incest' with her father, her feelings ‘tragic' because they never would be fulfilled. It was as if Gerald had brought Dearth home into their relationship. There was even an estrangement between Daphne and her mother (as was also predicated in the play).

Dear Brutus
and all that followed gave Daphne what she called a ‘Daddy complex', which muddled her sexuality, and in time developed into a serious inner conflict which infected her work and finally brought her to breakdown.

In the play the theme is put to positive use – after Dearth's experience in the magic wood he and his wife Alice emerge as the two characters in the play capable of learning from their adventures, and as the critic W. A. Darlington wrote, ‘There is a hint that they will come together, and that the dream-daughter will no longer be a might-have-been.'

But in reality the intensity of the relationships between Gerald and Daphne and of course in parallel between Barrie and Michael was less easy to square. Where did it leave the dream-child who was being used and might be disposed of at will? There was this pornographic notion of disposability, which disturbed Daphne so deeply at ten years of age that she ran from her seat in tears, and showed that Barrie simply didn't understand what parental love is.

As Nico, who'd always been immune to resurgent Pan, saw it, Barrie had been ‘in love with' George originally and was now in love with Michael, ‘as he was in love with my mother [Sylvia]', while Barrie's feelings for Nico himself, Peter and Jack ‘came nearer to normal deep affection'.

The difficulty of Barrie's love for Michael, loaded as it was with his own needs, was already causing some concern, both from Nanny Hodgson and, in the autumn of 1916, from Jack's fiancée, Geraldine
‘Gerrie' Gibb, who provided a new, sensitive and objective view of the relationship.

Nico was right. Barrie was in love with Michael in the only way he could be. When Michael was younger that probably meant he had to suppress feelings towards him of a sort which, in 1917, he couldn't help but expose in the whimsically erotic parent–child relationship of
Dear Brutus.

To Andrew Birkin, Gerrie described Barrie's love for Michael as

But to be fair, Barrie did give the boys real affection, which was clearly reciprocated – George and Peter's letters from the front exemplify this. And there was another amazing dimension to his love for them. Barrie paid for, educated and entertained Michael and his brothers like no other could have done.

Nevertheless, Barrie was becoming aware that Michael was ‘building seven walls around him'. In ‘Tintinnabulum' he described him as receding ‘farther from my ken down the road which hurries him from me … he no longer needs me as [he] did, and he will go on needing me less… On the last night of the holidays he was specially gruff, but he slipped beneath my door a paper containing the words “I hereby solemnly promise never to give you cause for moral anxiety.”'

Senhouse, still the closest of Michael's friends, will have been of particular concern to Barrie and was possibly the reason Michael put that paper under Barrie's door. Senhouse described how, on
a weekend spent at Barrie's London flat in 1918, Barrie had not addressed one word to him from first to last. But he was the same with other of Michael's friends. It was the behaviour of a man who wanted Michael to himself.

Barrie decided to reignite the spirit of his relationship with Michael with a holiday in Scotland, not visited since 1915. He, Michael and Nico went first to Edinburgh, where they were due to meet Jack and his fiancée Gerrie. All five met on a platform at Edinburgh station and then went off for dinner, an event Barrie later wrote up as a spoof in a letter to Lady Juliet Duff, the humour harbouring truths about each character just below the surface, and Barrie pretending that the whole thing went off at the Trossachs Hotel in Loch Katrine, where in fact they gravitated to later on.

As he wrote it to Lady Juliet on 14 August:

Transferring to Loch Katrine, the boys had two weeks' fishing and on 17 August, Barrie wrote to Nan Herbert: