The Real Peter Pan (32 page)

This book is not principally about Barrie, of whom I have written at length elsewhere. A struggle as it is to withdraw from this extraordinary figure as the chief focus, when we begin to look at his favourite boy we seem to move beyond the age-old question of whether they were having sex and see that Michael was the medium for something which Barrie desired even more, and watch as the boy brings it to such delicacy of interpretation that the coarser methods of love-making seem rarely, if ever, to be used.

For Michael not only led Barrie in his pursuit of what really interested him (as being a du Maurier he knew he would), he left him standing. It was Michael who clarified that being a little half-and-half meant more than remaining a little boy for life and having fun, that actually the Peter Pan in us has nothing to with escapism, playing at fairies or pirates and American Indians when you were an old man of sixty-three and hoping that no one will turn up and compel you to face reality. It has to do with lapsing out, as Michael did so
successfully in the Scottish Highlands, and his grandfather did by dreaming true. It has to do with discovering the spiritual half of the betwixt-and-between in you in whatever way it takes you.

The reason our lives become trivial, and we find ourselves and our lives so boring, is simply that we do not pay enough attention to the half that makes Peter Pan special, the half that has nothing to do with Walt Disney or the Peter Pan bus company or that peanut butter company or Hummingbird candy.

To begin with, it involves the dying of the human half so that we may taste the half of Peter that transcends this, the spiritual dimension that returns us to the magical state of childhood, a time when we do not do much live life as are lived by forces outside us – the half which sometimes, as Barrie also indicated, can lead to ecstasy.

But then to carry that experience, that inspirational quality back into the hurly-burly of life, so that the human half benefits. This, Barrie did not allow Michael to do, because he didn’t see it. On the contrary, as Boothby said, Michael felt pressured to do what would have been anathema for him to do. Barrie failed to realise that if you love someone the first thing you do is set them free. Eiluned was right; Michael should have been allowed to go to Paris. It was as simple as that.

So Rupert and Michael met. There was immediate empathy, but zeal got the better of them. ‘There glowed in them with unusual warmth a Promethean fire,’ wrote
The Harrovian.
They became high on the
effect
of their transcendence, so self-centred that attention to what they were really about declined and its essential value escaped them.

They went to their deaths either wildly gay or very serious, believing that only our mortality offers us the promise of our beliefs and intuitions. When in reality our beliefs can act upon the substance of the universe and shape it.

S
INCE MY FIRST
foray into the world of J. M. Barrie,
Captivated: J. M. Barrie, the du Mauriers & the Dark Side of Neverland
(Chatto & Windus, 2008), it is no longer possible to examine Barrie without reference to the du Mauriers, any more than it is possible to examine one of the du Mauriers without reference to Barrie. No surprise therefore that the tragic story of Michael Llewelyn Davies, whose mother was Sylvia du Maurier, puts
Peter Ibbetson
at its very core.

Since 2008, George du Maurier’s
Peter Ibbetson
(the du Maurier family myth) has appeared in various paper and ebook editions. However, if you can get hold of a copy of the 1947 Pilot Press edition you will have the additional joy of John Masefield’s reminiscence of what it meant to be a teenager when du Maurier’s novel first appeared in 1894. Having said this,
The Real Peter Pan
depends
ultimately, as did
Captivated
, on research undertaken by others into the lives of Barrie and the du Mauriers, albeit as virtually distinct biographical entities.

Notable in the Barrie camp are W. A. Darlington’s biography,
J. M. Barrie
(1938), for its analysis of the plays, and the official biography by Denis Mackail,
The Story of J. M. B.
(1941), for its painstaking analysis of Barrie’s notebooks. But the work of these is dwarfed by that of writer and film-maker Andrew Birkin, who, in the 1970s, drew together the thoughts of so many about Barrie for his film and book,
J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys
(1979) – a vast archive which he now generously shares through the website
jmbarrie.co.uk
, and which includes letters of the Llewelyn Davies family by courtesy of Laura Duguid.

In the du Maurier camp, thanks go particularly to Kits Browning, Daphne du Maurier’s son and literary executor, for his long-term support, and to Margaret Forster, whose official biography,
Daphne du Maurier
, was published in 1993.

The one source in which Barrie and the du Mauriers were never separate entities is the archive of Dorothea ‘Dolly’ Parry, later Lady Ponsonby of Shulbrede. Dolly was a close friend of Barrie, the Llewelyn Davies family and most especially Sylvia du Maurier. I am very grateful to the Hon. Laura Ponsonby of Shulbrede Priory for making her mother’s many diaries and letters available.

Tracing the trajectory of Michael’s short life also brings many other sources into focus, in particular the poetry of P. B. Shelley, notably ‘Alastor’, and the work of other poets, such as George Meredith, James Hogg and William Johnson Corey. I would like to thank Katrina Burnett for access to the work of her mother, Janet ‘Eiluned’ Lewis, including the poem ‘Birthright’ and novel
Dew on the Grass
(1934),
which is finding a new audience today, and to Powys County Archives, where the family archive is lodged.

Thanks also to the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library for access to the Roger Senhouse archive and to Judith Curthoys at Christ Church College Library, and Oxford University and Bodleian libraries for consultation and access to material relating to Rupert Buxton and Michael Llewelyn Davies. I am also grateful to Timothy Young, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and Dolores Colón, who processed the photographs of and by J. M. Barrie from the Llewelyn Davies and Barrie collections held there, as well as Eleanor Cracknell, the archivist at Eton College. Also, thanks are due to Mark Barrington-Ward, nephew of one of the jurors at the inquest into the drowning at Sandford Pool in 1921 (and acquaintance of three others).

Field research took me to Scotland and was greatly facilitated by many generous people met along the way, including Hans and Antonia de Gier and Colin Strang Steel at Edgerston; Neil and Rosie Hooper at Fortingall; Rhoda Robertson at Killiekrankie; Ken Brown and Roy and Cecilia Dyckhoff at Tomdoun; Wendy Harpe and John Szarkiewicz at Beauly; Gerald and Penny Klein, Patrick and Judy Price and Dorothy Dick at Scourie; Innes Morrison and Heather Mitchell at Amhuinnsuidhe; Vanessa Branson, Paul Waddington, Jon Easton and Jo O’Brien at Eilean Shona; Yvonne O’Shea at the Cuilfel, Kilmelford; and Graham and Moira Jackson on the Auch Estate. I am indebted also to Zilla Oddy at the Archive and Local History Service of the Scottish Borders Council for articles about, and photographs of, J. M. Barrie in Jedburgh.

Special thanks go to Neil Hooper, Ken Brown and Dr Henry Kaye
for their careful editorial advice on various aspects of the landscape and fly-fishing in the book, and to the editor and author of two inspirational books:
Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life
(ed.) Jeremy Paxman (Penguin, 1995) and
The Fly Caster Who Tried to Make Peace with the World
by Randy Kadish (Saw Mill River Press, 2007).

I am grateful also to Faber & Faber for permission to quote from Neville Cardus’s
Autobiography
(1984) and to all the publishers and authors of works quoted (see Sources). While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, I would be grateful to hear from any unacknowledged sources.

Unless otherwise indicated, the illustrations in the plate sections are reproduced by kind permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, USA. The landscape photographs were taken by the author, except for those connected to Amhuinnsuidhe, all of which are reproduced by kind permission of Amhuinnsuidhe and the North Harris Trust.

Finally I would like to thank my publisher Jeremy Robson of the Robson Press for giving me the opportunity to write this book, to my editors Olivia Beattie and Victoria Godden, and to the whole team at the Robson Press for engaging with it with enthusiasm.