Mary Ansell was suggesting that Barrie was impotent with women and that his relationship with the boys – his ‘sentimental philanderings’ – had been a form of compensation, an astonishingly frank allegation from someone who, according to Mackail, ‘had refused to cooperate with the writing of the biography in any way, on the grounds that “Barrie would not have wished any biography to be written at all.”’
Mary Ansell would have been aware of Barrie’s curse – ‘May God blast any one who writes a biography of me’ – and had certainly known him well enough to believe that he was unlikely to conspire with God in any matter, but might yet call on powers from darker quarters.
Gossip and sexual innuendo about Barrie and the boys had been rife. A friend of Peter’s had been at a literary cocktail party where (‘as so often’) the talk had got on to homosexuality among authors:
‘Anyone in particular?’ she asked.
‘Well, think of Barrie!’
‘Good Lord, surely not J. M. Barrie?’
‘Heavens, yes! Don’t you know about him and his five wards?’14
Nico had not been impressed by this anecdote.
All I can say is that I, who lived with him off and on for more than 20 years: who lived alone with him in his flat for five of these years: never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophiliacy [sic] – had he had either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware. He was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan!
Nico had been born too late to participate in the Peter Pan years – the play had not been made ‘streaky’ with the youngest of the Davies boys. He had been too young to appreciate much about Barrie’s relationship with Sylvia, but at least he was not ‘clouded over’ like Peter and Jack, and was clear that he himself had not been interfered with by Uncle Jim.
He was, however, aware that Barrie had a special interest in two of his brothers. ‘In due course, we all knew that George and Michael were “The Ones”,’ he wrote to Andrew Birkin, but he could not say that Uncle Jim was sexually abusing them. ‘I haven’t the skill – or gift, or whatever – to judge your comment about JMB being “in love” with George and Michael. Roughly, yes – I would agree: he was in love with each of them, as he was in love with my mother [Sylvia]... For myself, Peter and Jack at our different times different again – nearer to normal deep affection.’
It was possible for Barrie to have sexually abused George, Jack and Peter without Nico being aware of it, as he was ten years younger than George, nine years younger than Jack, and six years younger than Peter. But Nico had lived with Barrie and Michael alone for the last three years of Michael’s short life, and as he was only three years younger than Michael, it has to count for something that he professed himself ‘200% certain there was never a desire [on the part of Uncle Jim] to kiss (other than the cheek!).’ As for Barrie being homosexual, when it came to captivating children, wrote Nico, ‘he had just the same success with girl children and I cannot conceive for a moment that in fact there was an important difference’.15
His comment that Barrie ‘was an innocent – which is why he could write Peter Pan’ is interesting, because there is much to identify Barrie with Peter Pan, perhaps not least that Peter, like Barrie, according to Mary Ansell, did not know what a kiss is. But whether an innocent did write Peter Pan, or indeed The Little White Bird, the book that first introduced Peter Pan to the reading public, is not as clear as might at first seem.
It is a feature of all the so-called fictional works (plays and novels) on which our story turns that they carry a strong autobiographical content. I am not the first to claim this. One of the most interesting books about Barrie, W. A. Darlington’s J. M. Barrie, published a year after his death, in 1938, scores because the author is of Barrie’s era and knows Barrie’s novels, plays and journalism inside out. Darlington was indeed a critic, but he was also the first person to point to the autobiographical nature of Barrie’s work.
As for The Little White Bird, Barrie’s own notes make it clear that David, the leading boy in the ‘novel’, is based on George, who was ten and had been introduced to Kensington Gardens by Barrie just as David is introduced to them by the narrator (‘the Captain’) in the ‘fiction’. So clear is it that the whole book is autobiography that Mackail was able to write without attracting Lady Cynthia’s blue pencil that there was ‘a complete breakdown of any pretence that this was a novel’.
Yet, any such notion is extremely damaging to Barrie. For even convinced Barrie supporters throw their hands in the air when they read his description of the night the Captain spent with young David:
David and I had a tremendous adventure. It was this – he passed the night with me... at last Mary [his mother, a dead ringer for Sylvia] consented to our having it . . .
We were both so excited that, at the moment of greeting, neither of us could be apposite to the occasion in words, so we communicated our feelings by signs; as thus: David half sat down in a place where there was no chair, which is his favourite preparation for being emphatic, and is borrowed I think from the frogs, and we then made the extraordinary faces that mean, ‘What a tremendous adventure!’
. . . Then [soon after half-past six] I placed my hand carelessly on his shoulder, like one a trifle bored by the dull routine of putting my little boys to bed, and conducted him to the night nursery, which had lately been my private chamber. There was an extra bed in it tonight, very near my own, but differently shaped, and scarcely less conspicuous was the new mantelshelf ornament: a tumbler of milk, with a biscuit on top of it, and a chocolate riding on the biscuit. To enter the room without seeing the tumbler at once was impossible. I had tried it several times, and David saw and promptly did his frog business, the while, with an indescribable emotion, I produced a night-light from my pocket and planted it in a saucer on the washstand.
David watched my preparations with distasteful levity, but anon made a noble amend by abruptly offering me his foot as if he had no longer use for it, and I knew by intuition that he expected me to take off his boots. I took them off with all the coolness of an old hand, and then I placed him on my knee and removed his blouse. This was a delightful experience, but I think I remained wonderfully calm until I came somewhat too suddenly to his little braces, which agitated me profoundly.
I cannot proceed in public with the disrobing of David.
Soon the night nursery was in darkness but for the glimmer from the night-light, and very still save when the door creaked as a man peered in at the little figure on the bed. However softly I opened the door, an inch at a time, his bright eyes turned to me at once, and he always made the face which means, ‘What a tremendous adventure.’
‘Are you never to fall asleep, David?’ I always said.
‘When are you coming to bed?’ he always replied, very brave but in a whisper, as if he feared the bears and wolves might have him. When little boys are in bed there is nothing between them and bears and wolves but the night-light.
I returned to my chair to think, and at last he fell asleep with his face to the wall, but even then I stood many times at the door, listening.
Long after I had gone to bed a sudden silence filled the chamber, and I knew that David had awaked. I lay motionless, and, after what seemed a long time waiting, a little far-away voice said in a cautious whisper, ‘Irene!’*
‘You are sleeping with me tonight, you know, David,’ I said.
‘I didn’t know,’ he replied, a little troubled, but trying not to be a nuisance.
‘You remember you are with me?’ I asked.
After a moment’s hesitation he replied, ‘I nearly remember,’ and presently he added very gratefully, as if to some angel who had whispered to him, ‘I remember now.’
I think he had nigh fallen asleep again when he stirred and said, ‘Is it going on now?’
‘What?’
‘The adventure.’
‘Yes, David.’
>
Perhaps this disturbed him, for by and by I had to inquire, ‘You are not frightened, are you?’
‘I am not frightened now,’ he whispered,
‘And there is nothing else that you want?’
‘Is there not?’ he again asked politely. ‘Are you sure there’s not?’ he added.
‘What can it be, David?’
‘I don’t take up very much room,’ the far-away voice said.
‘Why, David,’ said I, sitting up; ‘do you want to come into my bed?’
‘Mother said I wasn’t to want it unless you wanted it first,’ he squeaked.
‘It is what I have been wanting all the time,’ said I, and then without more ado the little white figure rose and flung itself at me. For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and sometimes his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but he always retained possession of my finger, and occasionally he woke me to say that he was sleeping with me. I had not a good night. I lay thinking.
Of this little boy, who, in the midst of his play while I undressed him, had suddenly buried his head on my knee.
Of the woman who had been for him who could be sufficiently daring.
Of David’s dripping little form in the bath, and how when I essayed to catch him he had slipped from my arms like a trout.
Of how I had stood by the open door listening to his sweet breathing, had stood so long that I forgot his name and called him Timothy.
Timothy is the name the Captain gives to the child he longed to have fathered, but for whatever reason could not. Timothy is called upon to effect a technique often used by Barrie – to defuse with sentimentality anything cruel, sadistic or possibly paedophiliac. At the end of the novel Barrie tells us to think of the whole experience as a wonderful expression of thwarted fatherly love. He gives David’s fictional mother Mary the manuscript to read. So, in the novel, Mary is reading the novel she is in. This is Barrie staking a claim to the territory on the borders of illusion and reality that he regarded as exclusively his own. When Mary finishes reading it, he finds her ‘laughing and crying, which was no surprise, for all of us would laugh and cry over a book about such an interesting subject as ourselves; but said she, “How wrong you are in thinking this book is about me and mine, it is really all about Timothy.”’
The Times fell over itself to think what it was told to think: ‘If a book exists which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do not know it,’ the critic wrote. And one can indeed read Barrie’s story and The Times review in full and feel one has wandered into a production of The Emperor’s New Clothes.* For in The Little White Bird, while there is evidence to suggest that Barrie was sexually aroused by little boys, he is so frank that we find ourselves thinking that if we cannot see his innocence, the problem must be ours, not his. Otherwise, how could he have got away with it?
Many a critic and biographer has come forward to claim that Barrie’s love of small boys was not sexual. Andrew Birkin was so convinced of it that when Alison Lurie wrote an article in the New York Review of Books (6 February 1975), he is supposed to have offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove that Barrie was a paedophile. Safe money, one might say, after more than half a century, and possibly an over-reaction, as Lurie had suggested not sexual abuse but that, as the boys grew older, they had become ‘embarrassed’ by ‘this odd little man who looked like an aged child’.
In 1989, Gerald du Maurier’s biographer, James Harding wrote, ‘Barrie, in the manner of Lewis Carroll and his nude photographs of little girls, was consciously innocent.’16
But how did he know that Barrie’s innocence was conscious? And if he did not know, where does his desire to vindicate or protect Barrie come from?
Harding developed his theme, alluding to many of the issues that concern Barrie’s accusers: ‘His snapshots of the tiny lads frolicking bare-bottomed on the beach, the cowboy and Indian adventures he made up for them, the coy letters he wrote and the amateur dramatics he organised were a means to enjoy the pleasures of fatherhood with none of the pains. In Sylvia du Maurier’s children he discovered an ideal outlet for the frustration which obsessed him.’
One might consider that his phrase ‘consciously innocent’ would not send the British judicial system into meltdown, and that a barrister may yet be found to argue against the notion that it is acceptable to use another person’s family as an outlet for one’s obsessive frustrations.
In the end, even Harding found the scene in the night-nursery a step too far.
One needs a tough stomach to put up with Barrie in this mood. No writer today would publish such an account without inviting accusations of paedophilia and worse.
There were many letters between Barrie and the boys when they were young. One of the few that survive was written to Michael (3) and Peter (6) in 1903:
Dear Petermikle, i thank u 2 very much 4 your birth day presents and i have putt your portraitgrafs on mi wall and yourselves in my hart and your honey lower down, i am your friend, J.M.B.
Five years later Barrie wrote to Michael on the eve of his eighth birthday, just as he was becoming ‘The One’:
I wish I could be with you and your candles. You can look upon me as one of your candles, the one that burns badly, the greasy one, that is, bent in the middle, but still, hurray, I am Michael’s candle. I wish I could see you putting on the Redskin’s clothes for the first time... I am very fond of you, but don’t tell anybody.
Peter was out of the family – at the Front and living with Vera Willoughby – while the relationship between Barrie and Michael had been at its most profound. Michael’s story is desperately tragic. In 1921 when he was only 20 he drowned in Sandford Pool, just outside Oxford, in the arms of his friend, Rupert Buxton. One has to wonder what, in a non-tidal pool, could lead to two fit lads drowning? A man bore witness that the pool had been glassy calm. Suicide was widely suggested. Fellow student Robert Boothby,* a homosexual and friend of both young men, stated categorically that they were not lovers, but that both had had their reasons for suicide.
Michael’s reason was clear to Jack’s wife, Gerrie: ‘It was very bad for Michael to be so much the centre of Barrie’s world.’ Boothby agreed. To him and Gerrie, Michael’s death was definitely suicide, and in the end Nico came round to the same view.
When Peter researched The Morgue he found no fewer than 2,000 letters between Barrie and Michael. The intensity must have come as a shock. Peter destroyed these letters. ‘They were too much,’ was all he said to Nanny.
Letters to George, who earlier had been ‘The One’, were less plentiful, though Barrie corresponded regularly with him when George was serving at the Front during the First World War. The last he wrote is indeed extraordinary – and extraordinarily ironic and tragic, as George was killed shortly afterwards. Having informed George of the death in action of his uncle Guy (Sylvia’s elder brother), he said:
Of course I don’t need this to bring home to me the danger you are always in more or less, but I do seem to be sadder today than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart. For four years I have been waiting for you to become 21 & a little more, so that we could get closer and closer to each other, without any words needed. I don’t have any little iota of desire for you to get military glory. I do not care a farthing for anything of the kind, but I have one passionate desire that we may all be together again once at least. You would not mean a featherweight more to me tho’ you come back a General. I just want yourself. There may be some moments when a knowledge of all you are to me will make you a little more careful, and so I can’t help going on saying these things.
It was terrible that man being killed next to you, but don’t be afraid to tell me such things. You see it at night I fear with painful vividness. I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.
Loving,
Barrie revered manly valour and encouraging George not to engage in heroics was, in the context of his peculiar vision of the world, a huge admission of how fiercely he felt for George personally. It could have been written by George’s mother – or by his lover.
That is what Peter concluded, describing Uncle Jim’s feelings for George as ‘a dash of the paternal, a lot of the maternal, and much, too, of the lover – at this stage Sylvia’s lover still imperfectly merged into the lover of her son’. Peter was ‘very British’ and fair as the British system of justice is fair. A man is innocent until proven guilty. Believing this brought him out, at this stage, on Barrie’s side:
Surely no soldier in France or Flanders ever had more moving words from home than those in this tragic, desperately apprehensive letter... taking all the circumstances into consideration, I think it must be one of the great letters of the world. Its poignancy is so dreadfully enhanced, too, by the realisation that... far, far the most pathetic figure in all the world was the poor little genius who wrote these words.
Peter’s mature comments are not those of someone who felt tarnished or diminished by Barrie’s sexual appetites. The revelation of just how intense was Barrie’s love for the boys, and the discovery that Barrie had opened a rift between his parents, had made Peter, by his own admission, sad and depressed. But, while working on The Morgue, he had other intimations, and that is why, in 1949, he approached his cousin Daphne.
* Andrew Birkin, writer and film-maker, carried out extensive interviews with surviving members of the family. He wrote the script for The Lost Boys (BBC TV, 1978) and published a book with the same title in 1979.
Neverland Page 4
