The Real Peter Pan (26 page)

O
N 22 NOVEMBER
, Barrie wrote to Eveline at Glan Hafren:

At the Sunday meeting at Eton, Michael, who was so thrilled to be speaking about any kind of future, was persuaded to go to university.

Eiluned saw the folly of his bending to Barrie’s will, believing that Barrie should have allowed him to go to Paris. She could see that Michael’s artistic talent was something of his own, un-seeded and un-moulded by Barrie, who had no appreciation of art.

Had Michael been firm, a bohemian existence in Paris might have been the making of him, as it had been in the case of his grandfather. But Michael conceded his life to Barrie, in return for which Barrie would buy him a car and, indeed, a cottage, which he would never take up. His adopted father’s largesse knew no bounds. Michael would have £5,000 in his bank account in 1921, the equivalent of £170,000 today, and he hadn’t worked one day in his life.

However, Michael did not get a scholarship or an exhibition to Cambridge. On 20 December 1918, Barrie wrote to the Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford: ‘[Michael] went in for the Cambridge Trinity Scholarships this year [and] just failed to get an Exhibitionship. But in any case his wish was to go to Oxford…’

Michael matriculated from Christ Church, as the expression goes, on 23 January 1919. From Hilary term (January–March) 1919 through Trinity term (April–June) 1920 he resided in college at what is known as Peck 1:5, short for Peckwater Quad, Staircase 1, Room 5; a second floor apartment, quiet, wood-panelled, fairly dark. The living room overlooks the quad – the college library to the south.

On 17 January, Barrie wrote to Elizabeth Lucas:

The following month Barrie sent Michael some small dining room chairs and a sideboard and sofa from No. 23, the rest of the furniture being put into storage and the house let to an artist called Speed.

Michael took Mods – the first public examinations in Latin and Greek, in Hilary term 1920. Mods, or Moderations, are the first part of the Classics degree course known as Literae Humaniores or, colloquially, Greats. Honours Mods for Classics students have been called the hardest examinations in the world. They lead to Second Public Examinations – Finals.

Macnaghten, who saw Michael occasionally when he visited Eton, noted in his book that for a year and a half he was still very restless: more than once he made up his mind to leave.

That may have been the case, but he also had some fine times too. Among his friends were a number of Old Etonians, among them Roger Senhouse and Bob Boothby, who was interviewed at length in the 1970s by Andrew Birkin.

Boothby, a Magdalen College man, was the only son of Sir Robert Tuite Boothby, a banker from Edinburgh. The aristocratic, moneyed, Scottish and Etonian background would have pleased Barrie, who did appear initially to have been happy that Michael was invited by Boothby’s parents to stay at the family home in Scotland.

Boothby, who was bisexual, described Michael as ‘a very desirable undergraduate’ and classed him as a brilliant scholar who read widely – ‘he’d have got a First in anything’.

Boothby did not have an affair with him. He described Michael as ‘introverted and moody’, ‘very emotional’, a young man who concealed his emotions, but if there was one word that described
him best, it was ‘Romantic’. Sebastian Earl, another contemporary Etonian, who rowed for Oxford in the 1920 Boat Race, agreed: ‘He was someone who cared for poetry and I would have thought music, though music didn’t mean
much
to my generation. Nothing like it does today.’
55

Michael did have an interest in music. Nico told a defining story about Michael’s taste when a large wind-up gramophone appeared at the flat in Adelphi Terrace at some point after he and Michael began living there. Barrie gave them each a ten-shilling note to buy some records. Nico’s choice was
Japanese Sandman
and
Whispering
by Paul Whiting, which became a number one hit in 1920, while Michael chose Rimsky Korsakov’s
Scheherazade
. He said to Nico, ‘You bloody fool. You’ll want to throw yours away in half a minute.’ (Nico told Andrew Birkin this in January 1976 – and he still had his copy of
Whispering
.)

But Michael came out of his shell with Boothby and there was laughter. There developed a little group of them: four young men – Boothby, Michael, Senhouse and Clive Burt – ‘all tremendous friends, and frightfully gay’.

Of course, Boothby knew about Michael’s affair with Senhouse, but said that Michael wasn’t physically homosexual. ‘He had emotional relationships with a great many people.’

There was nothing unusual or particularly homosexual in this. It was quite normal for two men at Oxford at this time to enjoy a casual, free-and-easy friendship that was intimate intellectually, spiritually and emotionally, yet singularly pure by nature.

Nico said of his brother that he had ‘a number of friends who were girls, rather than that he had a number of girlfriends’. He wondered
whether Michael’s inability to get a girl, ‘as a presumed more normal friend would have been doing in Oxford days’, was the reason for his restlessness.

Boothby thought not. He himself made love to a woman for the first time at twenty-five. In those days at Oxford, it wasn’t natural to have a girlfriend. ‘Occasionally undergraduates would go up to London, have a woman and come back in “the fornicator”, but the idea of having anything to do with any woman in Oxford – it wasn’t on.’ No change from Eton, then.

In July of 1919, the four young men went to France for a holiday together. They went to Tour Solidor, near St Malo in Brittany, and stayed at a pension. It was then that Boothby realised Michael was afraid of water.

In fact, that summer Michael went home and announced that he was going to learn to swim properly, because they had a punt the following term.

In Brittany Boothby watched Michael gamble for the first time. They played boule, a game similar to roulette. Michael won and ‘was terribly excited. We had a marvellous month in France, drinking green chartreuse.’

From there they travelled to Paris for a peace procession, where Michael tried to trade on his relationship with Barrie for a suite for all of them at the Meurice. It didn’t work out. Instead, they trawled the bistros, climbed into a tree in the Champs-Elysées and sat in it until the peace procession came by.

After it all broke up Boothby took Michael and Senhouse to stay with him in Scotland, where they drove all over the place in a Ford car.

Boothby had no idea that Michael was dissatisfied with Oxford, only that he felt pressured about what he should do with his life.
He described Michael as ‘brilliant with his pen – painting people. What he would have done, God alone knows.’

Barrie was on his case, as usual. When Michael heard that Violet Bonham Carter had heard what a brilliant mind he had and that she wanted him to join the Liberal Party and go into politics at Oxford, he was furious – ‘Who is this bloody Mrs Carter who thinks I’m clever and wants me to go into politics?’ he bawled. The answer was that she was the daughter of Herbert Henry Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister up until 1916, and Barrie’s secretary Lady Cynthia Asquith’s sister-in-law.

Politics would never have been for Michael, for whom opposition of any kind was anathema. He also understood that the moment he defined a goal or ambition, he would be trapped in it. He wanted his freedom, not only from Barrie, but partly as a result of the pressure he was under, from the whole world of time and space – freedom simply to
be
.

When Boothby met Barrie, he saw at once, without Michael saying anything, precisely where his problems lay. ‘It was an unhealthy relationship. He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie, you know? I mean in a mental sense.’

As Boothby saw it, Barrie pulled Michael down into his own black moods; also that he was the only one who could get Barrie out of them. ‘It was morbid,’ he said.

Boothby spoke of going to the apartment in Adelphi Terrace one day and being overwhelmed by the atmosphere. When they left, intending to drive to Oxford, Michael had been furious and slammed the door of the car as they got in. Boothby said what a relief it was to get away, and Michael agreed with him. But he never spoke to Boothby about getting away from Barrie. It was a complex relationship indeed: ‘Sir Jazz-Band Barrie, he used to call him. He loved
him. It was a great love. He was very grateful to Barrie. Barrie did do a tremendous amount for them all.’

L
ESS SUCCESSFUL THAN
his friendships with Boothby and the others was Michael’s foray into the so-called Bloomsbury Group, members of which Michael had links with on both sides of his family, one might even say on all three sides.

The group formed around 1905 in conscious revolt against the repressively male ethos of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. It was time now for courage to live one’s life in broad daylight with integrity and truth, a time to champion the freedom of the individual and denounce the unquestioned authority of institutions, particularly that of the Church. It was a time for free love, too, which the group exercised with particular commitment and imagination.

Although Barrie was to fall to the new post-war writers, led by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and
T. S. Eliot, most of whom were part of the Bloomsbury Group, he might claim to have been in some ways quite modern. The war had diluted his child-like adoration of the heroic and shaken his views about pacifism, for example, and he had never been religious in the conventional sense.

But he was in one important way precisely what the group abhorred. He lived a double life, his public life was a model of morality, while, as with the Calvinists back home, it concealed what really consumed him. Barrie did not live his life in broad daylight; he was a master of illusion. As on stage, so in life, it was second nature to him to create an illusion around him, hence the scene in the flat with Neville Cardus. When Cynthia Asquith, daughter-in-law of the Prime Minister who led Britain into the war, became his secretary in 1918, he was, according to Mackail, who was writing his biography of Barrie under Cynthia’s direction, ‘completely successful for a long time at representing himself in several very false lights’. Then would come ‘a burst of frankness and truth, and the observant secretary found another impression to discard’. It was impossible for Barrie to be straight with anyone. Quite a few of the group knew of Michael before he came upon them. First, they knew him as the grandson of du Maurier, a great friend of Leslie Stephen, whose children Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and Thoby Stephen were all Bloomsbury participants.

Again, Michael’s uncles Crompton and Theodore Llewelyn Davies had both been Apostles at Cambridge – members of the secret society that originally spawned some of the most impressive members of Bloomsbury such as the philosopher G. E. Moore, the poet Rupert Brooke, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the political theorist and author Leonard Woolf, and the strange author and ideological anarchist Lytton Strachey.

Lady Ottoline Morrell also had connections with Michael’s family. The Morrell house at 44 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, London, gave the Group their name, but the Morrells’ estate at Garsington, seven miles south-east of Oxford, was the base from which she extended her patronage to writers such as Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and T. S. Eliot, and artists Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.

Ottoline was the sister-in-law of the daughter of the local grande dame at Kirkby Lonsdale (Lady Bective). Margaret Llewelyn Davies knew her well, as did Crompton, who kept up his friendship with Ottoline to the end of his life. As a result, Michael’s brother Peter recalled visiting Ottoline at Bedford Square, and the same connection ensured Michael of a welcome at Garsington Manor.

The third side of the family to have connections with the Bloomsbury Group turns out to have been Michael’s adoptive side. For Barrie’s ex-wife Mary Ansell had married the writer Gilbert Cannan (the man who cuckolded the author of
Peter Pan
), and he had become something of a catalyst in the development of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1913, after reading his novel
Round the Corner,
Ottoline Morrell invited both Cannan and Mary to visit her at Bedford Square. ‘The poor fellow,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘[he] must have a dim time of it with his wife who’s years older than him and very distressing.’

Through this association, Cannan became friendly with Lytton Strachey. Then, in 1914 and quite separately, he met and became closely involved with the writers D. H. Lawrence, Middleton Murry, Murry’s wife Katherine Mansfield, and the artist Mark Gertler, who were living within a few miles of Cannan in the countryside around Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire. They took to having dinner together, and Cannan threw a celebrated Christmas party where Gertler and Katherine Mansfield enacted a play in which they were
supposed to pretend to be in love and Gertler made it all rather too realistic.

During the war, Cannan was a pacifist and conscientious objector, and was involved in the National Council Against Conscription. He and his new friends shared a deepening hatred for the First World War and began to see it as their responsibility to make it a watershed between the old world and the new.

Lawrence was then writing
Women in Love
(completed in 1916, though no publisher could be found for it until 1920), which denounced the heroic values that he saw at the heart of Victorian imperialism and identified the same values within the collective unconscious of Germany – hence the war.

Cannan introduced Lawrence and Gertler to Ottoline Morrell. Gertler he knew especially well. Cannan’s novel
Mendel
was based on his early life (Mendel being his Yiddish given name), and Gertler painted a picture of Cannan, ‘Gilbert Cannan and His Mill’, with reference to the mill at Cholesbury where he was living. The picture also shows the Cannans’ two Newfoundland dogs, Sammy and Luath, the latter the inspiration for Nana of course, the Darling children’s nurse in
Peter Pan.

Mary Ansell, who was still seeing her ex-husband occasionally, brokered a meeting for Barrie with D. H. Lawrence. Barrie claimed not have liked the amount of sex in Lawrence’s novels, but regarded
Sons and Lovers
(1913) as ‘the best novel that he had read by any of the younger men’, while Lawrence said that Barrie’s autobiographical novels,
Sentimental Tommy
(1896) and
Tommy and Grizel
(1900), had had a profound effect upon him. There was a correspondence between the two men before the war, but the letters were lost, generally a sign of something of interest in the more secret aspects of Barrie’s life.

They finally met in London in 1915 – the year that George Llewelyn Davies was killed and Barrie began to question the heroic values on which he, as boy and adult, had based many a personal friendship, the values which Lawrence, as I have said, was at that moment decrying in
Women in Love
.
56

If that suggests some common ground, it appears that they did not, after all, get on. Certainly no further meetings took place, even though Lawrence became a friend of his secretary, Cynthia Asquith. In 1921, Lawrence wrote to Cynthia, telling her that he had arranged for her to receive a copy of
Women in Love
, and added in a postscript – ‘Tell J. M. [Barrie] what I think of him.’

It is fair to assume that what Lawrence thought of Barrie had been influenced by what Mary Ansell, who ‘knew where the bodies were buried’, had told him. To meet the character Herr Loerke in
Women in Love
is to see what Lawrence made of Barrie –

Gudrun is spellbound by him, just as Sylvia had been, and the psychology of Loerke in the narrative does not disappoint in his kinship to Barrie, any more than the physiology does.

What all these connections meant was that Michael was not only welcome, but that he arrived at Garsington raising no small amount of interest. There is a picture of him, looking rather uneasy, with Dora Carrington (who lived with the bisexual Lytton Strachey) and Julian Morrell (Ottoline’s politician husband).

Usually Michael took Senhouse to Garsington Manor with him. Senhouse was for some time after Michael’s death Strachey’s boyfriend, famously engaging in a sado-masochistic role-play of the crucifixion of Christ, even to the point of making the cut with the centurion Longinus’s spear. Strachey of course was the one playing Christ. Blasphemy gave him a rise. Afterwards, he wrote to Senhouse:

Strachey liked Michael very much, saying of him that he was ‘the only young man at either Oxford or Cambridge with real brains’ – hyperbole in anyone else’s mouth, but he had wide experience of young men at Oxford and Cambridge. Writing to Ottoline after Michael’s death: ‘I am sure if he had lived he would have been one of the remarkable people of his generation.’

Dora Carrington found him ‘so lovable and rather a rare character’, and Michael was perhaps a prime example of someone who might make good use of the freedom-loving Bloomsbury group, in order to break free from Barrie and be his own man. However, Michael couldn’t relax at Garsington. When the parties got going, he became impassive. Carrington put it down to ‘the gloom of finding Barrie one’s keeper for life’. Certainly, he was to a significant degree what Barrie had made him. Artistic and intellectual by nature, but so influenced by Barrie that, as his friend Sebastian Earl said of him, he was ‘quite a conservative member of the bourgeoisie – continuation of the Victorian bourgeoisie into Edward VII’s time’.

Given that Strachey drove a stake through the heart of Victorian hypocrisy in his trail-blazing biography
Eminent Victorians
(1918), and dismissed said Victorians in a letter to Virginia Woolf as ‘a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites’, perhaps Michael was after all better off back at college.