Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Incapable of love, they maimed each other. There was nothing left now, but to destroy. Fed up with his sentimental turn of mind, Jamie wrote: ‘If only I could write something harmful.’19

  When Margaret died, Jamie deliberately avoided it, but recorded what he was told had happened as if he had been there: ‘On the last day my mother insisted on rising from bed and going through the house... there seemed to be something that she wanted . . .’ No one could guess what it was. ‘They followed her through the house in some apprehension, and after she returned to bed they saw that she was becoming very weak. Once she said eagerly, “Is that you, David?”’ Barrie, retelling the story that was told to him, assumes that Margaret was calling for her husband, David, but perhaps it was her dead son, for those that were attending her suddenly realise the purpose of her expedition through the house – ‘what she wanted was the old christening robe’, the robe she had called for to feel and hold after David died. ‘It was brought to her, and she unfolded it with trembling, exultant hands, and... her arms went round it adoringly, and upon her face there was the ineffable mysterious glow of motherhood. Suddenly she said, “Wha’s bairn’s dead? Is a bairn of mine dead?” but those watching dared not speak.’20

  David’s death, and Margaret’s rejection of Jamie, lie at the bottom of everything. Typically, a boy may deal with maternal rejection by withdrawing from heterosexual interaction, or becoming a bookworm, or by engaging in fantasy heroics. Barrie did all of these. But if the boy comes to hate his mother, there is the threat of a serious neurotic conflict, possibly with very dark consequences indeed.

  It is not commonly known that an early title of Peter Pan was The Boy Who Hated Mothers.

  * In his biography of his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, written in 1896, thirty years after the events he describes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nervous breakdown

  When he arrived in London, in May 1860, Kicky got in touch with Alecco Ionides and his brother Luke. The Ionides family lived in Tulse Hill, Norwood, and put their immense wealth to good use, providing a meeting place, a sort of regeneration for the imagination, for some of the most gifted artists and writers of the day. They also helped some of them financially. ‘My uncle Leonidas seems to have known all the literary celebrities of his time,’ wrote Luke.1 ‘He used to stay with George Sand, knew Balzac and nearly all the great French authors as well as the German... he was a lawyer.’

  At one time or another the family supported C. G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, G. F. Watts, Alphonse Legros, and Fantin-Latour, and soon Alecco would buy sixteen plates of Whistler’s etchings of the lower Thames. Watts once proposed that they should give him £300 a year for life in exchange for all his works. Luke’s father ‘answered that he would let him have any money he wanted, so that he should not be troubled with the menace of want, but he would enter into no pact of that sort, as the time would soon come when Watts’ earnings would be in thousands – a prophecy which came true.’ That was the timbre of the scene, and Kicky loved it, especially the Ionides girls who typified the relaxed bohemian atmosphere of their home, which was furnished with traditional Greek artefacts and festooned with splendid embroidered materials. It was an opportunity to enjoy the life that Kicky had left behind in Europe. He describes how these dark mysterious beauties ‘will sometimes take one’s hands when talking to one, or put their arm around the back of the chair at dinner’. With all this ‘ease and tutoiement’, he would leave their company feeling ‘very virtuous’.2

  Kicky wrote to his mother:

  Last Sunday I went with Jimmie [Whistler] to the Greek’s, such a charming house and such charming people. Seem to have quite cut out Jemmie [sic] there in one séance. There were about twenty people, and after dinner, being in tremendous voice and spirits I quite delighted them; Jemmie behaved me well, trotted me out to perfection – Jemmie was adored. I appeared to be idolised there, and they are very useful acquaintances.

  So there were séances at Tulse Hill and also at Newman Street, where Kicky shared a studio with James Whistler. Luke Ionides recalled that ‘we often had table-turning at Jimmy’s, but no very important results. He had an idea that Jo* was a bit of a medium; certainly the raps were more frequent when she was at the table, but I cannot recall any message worth repeating . . .’

  One of the artists Kicky met at Tulse Hill was Edward Burne-Jones, who was frequently to be found there and was at that time a pupil of Rossetti. Luke used to read to Burne-Jones from The Arabian Nights, in 1860 still unpublished in a complete English edition. The work captivated those artists who were focused on spiritualism, hypnotism and extending the frontiers of human consciousness.

  By January 1861 Kicky shared a house with Alecco and an artist called Lionel Charles Henley (but known as Bill) whom Kicky had met in Düsseldorf. He wrote to his mother:

  Bill and I have got the house pretty much to ourselves and make uncommonly bon menage. He has the first floor, I the second. I have two bedrooms, one of which Alecco pays 6 bob a week for and a drawing room or studio faut voir. So far two luxurious armchairs and a very first rate piano, a subscription affair, which Bill is now strumming, for there is an evening at home and by and by Keene and Jimmie and co will come in... What splendid people these Greeks are. I never met any people like them... There is a great deal of goings on with these Greeks.

  Felix Moscheles had been writing from Belgium, but it was some time before Kicky replied. When he did, he gave him the impression that the London scene far surpassed Malines, even Paris:

  I’m leading the merriest of lives, and only hope it will last. Living with Henley, No. 85, Newman Street; very jolly and comfortable. Chumming with all the old Paris fellows again, all of them going ahead. Whistler is already one of the great celebrities here –

  Poynter* is getting on. This is a very jolly little village, and I wish you were over here.

  They do make such a fuss with an agreeable fellow like you or me, for instance. But I suppose Paris is just as jolly in its way. My ideas of Paris are all Bohème, quartier latin, &c, et si c’ était à recommencer, ma foi je crois que je dirais ‘zut.’ This is a hurried and absurd letter to write to an old pal like you, but I hardly ever have time for a line – out late every night . . .

  Kicky finished with an invitation he later had cause to regret, ‘Jimmy Whistler and I go “tumbling” together, as Thackeray says. Would you were here to tumble with us! Enfin, mon bon, écris moi vite.’ By May 1861 his old friend was in London sniffing the air, and Kicky was biting his tongue: ‘Felix is a poor little posing Frenchman among a lot of heroes here. I am afraid they will not get on very well with him as the grand thing among all my fellows is the complete and utter absence of all humbug of any kind,’ Kicky wrote to his mother.

  Felix in fact adapted readily to the scene in London. Before long, he had a class teaching young ladies painting, no doubt hypnotising some of them. According to Kicky, Felix was bringing in ‘nearly £300 a year and has himself lots of orders for cheap portraits, which he paints very quick. Whereas Jimmie, the great genius of the day... isn’t making a sou and borrowed a shilling of me yesterday.’

  From the time of Felix’s arrival, Kicky began to show signs of strain. He wrote to his mother: ‘I have passed a very very anxious month, but I am better now; I would give anything to go and have a fortnight’s chat with you. Such a lot to pour out that I have never written... I am in very good health but very thin; lost an inch and a half round the neck from rage and vexation.’

  As we chart Kicky’s decline, it is as well to remember that Felix cut out his hypnotic ‘excursions’ in 1865, because it ‘was taking too much out of him. Kicky was burning the candle at both ends, too. Indeed they all were. Tom Armstrong, who invariably accompanied him to the Greeks’ on a Sunday, had suffered some sort of bad trip and was fast fading from the scene, never to return: ‘I am very sorry to hear of these relapses, which must be a wretched bore,’ Kicky wrote to him, ‘– alas that ill-fated Sunday, that [ill
egible] devil!’

  During this time, separate from his rackety encounters with the Greeks and his artist friends, Kicky had been wooing Emma Wightwick, his sister Isabel’s friend in whose company he had travelled to London.*

  The attraction was mutual, and it was understood that they would marry when Kicky had carved himself out a career. But finding work had been more difficult than he’d imagined it would be. In fact, he was so poor he couldn’t afford the lotion he needed for his eyes, and as his letters to his mother show, he was sleeping badly.

  He got his first commission from a magazine called Once a Week. Luke Ionides had sat for him cross-legged, dressed as a Turk, the illustration for an article entitled ‘Faristan and Fatima’. Once a Week was ‘perhaps more important than any other in furthering the new movement in drawing on wood’, according to Armstrong.3 But a series in Punch was Kicky’s principal target. Even a year later when he was drawing for quite a range of magazines, including Cornhill, London Society and the Illustrated London News, it was Punch he wanted.

  Punch was in its heyday and known internationally for its witty take on the world. As Daphne recorded, ‘People waited impatiently for the weekly Punch to appear as today they wait for – nothing. If you did not read Punch you were a Philistine, you were finished, you did not exist. And very soon those graceful drawings with “du M” in the lower left-hand corner became the best known page in the paper.’4

  He began illustrating the magazine’s ‘English Society at Home’ series in 1861. Perhaps it was his very Frenchness, the essential du Maurier duality, that gave him the objectivity needed to caricature the English, or maybe it was the gently satirical nature of his humour, which George Besant had noticed a decade earlier in Cambridge. Whatever it was, it worked. In September, an article published in the Spectator about John Tenniel and Charles Keene, two famous Punch illustrators, wound up with ‘a very pretty compliment to me, speaking of my rapid progress & “gentlemanly feeling” and saying Punch will find a great acquisition in Mr du Maurier – I fancy this will do me much good.’

  When he received a commission his spirits would rise tremendously, and he’d be back to his old self, singing and dancing and partying, and begging Emma to save him from the dissolute life: ‘I awoke with seedy eyes & weary back & parched mouth; dooced familiar sensation, yet seems quite forgotten; brought back all sorts of recollections which I hate with the whole strength of my affection for you, recollections of so many nights with Whistler & Tom A, & Tom J, & lots of fellows, years ago & even lately; & in which a great deal too much wine & smoke have been taken in, & too much wild talk let out, for happiness. So Miss Salvation (as T.J’s friend, Watson said) you had better not lose your nose or your life in a collision.’

  In December 1861, he tried to sell his Carry novel to the Cornhill magazine – ‘24 pages of closely written foolscap . . .’ – and wrote to Armstrong, ‘Lamont is there as the wise and facetious Jerry, you as the bullnecked & sagacious Tim; the street is Our Lady of the Bohemians. I shall idealise in the illustrations... make us all bigger, and develop you into strong muscularity... If this does succeed, I shall write lots more on the same theme and try and embody the rather peculiar opinion of our set on art itself and artists; and which I feel very strongly . . .’

  A month later he took rejection on the chin: ‘My MS was refused by the Cornhill; embêtant, mais nous y serons un jour.’* But it was not all bad news: he was already making over £400 a year, and a house in Regent’s Park could be rented for £60 p.a.

  There was, however, much more involved in a commitment to Emma than cash. She ‘felt Paris had induced bad ways in him, which he must correct’, wrote Daphne, ‘and his tendency to think of himself as a Frenchman and a bohemian was something it would be better for him to forget. He must learn to become an Englishman and a respectable one at that.’

  With Emma on his tail he began going to bed at twelve and getting up at eight and taking quinine, all of which ‘is gradually making an improvement in my health’. As Felix saw it, Emma was weighing Kicky down, and he drew a cartoon to illustrate the point. Using their Antwerp Academy nicknames – Kicky had been Rag, and Felix Bobtail, because they had had another friend called T A G Sprenk† – the two friends, Rag and Bobtail, are climbing a rope. ‘I am climbing with fiendish energy,’ wrote Felix beneath. ‘Rag follows, steadily ascending, weighted as he is with a treasure, a box marked “Mrs Rag, with care.”’

  Mrs Rag was principally concerned about Mr Rag’s experimentation, the ‘excursions’ – the ‘illusion that enervates! Feverish dream of excitement magnetic, inspired, supreme’, and the ‘opium-benumbing performances’, which, ‘in their sad wild unresting irregular flow’5 seemed to be expressly concocted for Kicky.

  Complicating his situation further, but greatly enlivening it, in 1862 a new face appeared on the scene. ‘I’ve been fraternising most extensively with Val Prinsep,’ Kicky wrote to Armstrong early that year. ‘[He] is such a stunning fellow – six foot 1, 23 of age, not an ounce of fat – but weighs 16 stone 6! Such a murderous looking arm of more than 14 inches! And a very jolly fellow... proeRaphaelite [sic] pupil of Watts, who lives at the [Prinseps’] parental home in Kensington, Little Holland House. I’ve dined there 2 or 3 times... Val, who is a stunner in every way, has introduced me to Burn Jones [sic], who is simply an angel and what a colourist . . .’*

  Here, at Little Holland House, the cream of literary and artistic London convened. ‘Three beautiful women – sisters – form a nucleus round which gather all that there is of swell; the nobilitee, the gentree, the litherathure, politithics and art of the counthree, by jasus! It is a nest of proeraphalites... where Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Watts, Leighton, etc., Tennyson, the Brownings and Thackeray, etc. and tutti quanti receive dinners and incense, and cups of tea handed to them by these women almost kneeling.’

  The three sisters, née Prattle, were Val’s mother, Sara, and two aunts (Lady Somers and Mrs Dalrymple), famous in their day, cultural snobs all of them, but the saviour of many needy artists. There were altogether seven Prattle sisters including the pioneering photographer Julia Cameron. G. F. Watts found a taker for his proposition for patronage here. He was said to have arrived one evening in 1850 and stayed for twenty years. He did not impress Kicky much, but Val Prinsep did. ‘I confess that after the first half hour, women’s society bores me pas mal,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘and the jolliest part of the evening was with Val P in Charlotte Street.’ Val had taken Kicky to his studio and they had read poems of Browning till 5 a.m.

  Val’s impressive physique exemplified the ‘strong muscularity’, which would pass into many of Kicky’s characters in illustration and fiction. Kicky himself said that Val measured up to ‘an aesthetic ideal I had always felt’. He had already announced to Armstrong that he was going to make the male characters of ‘the Carry novel’ heroic in size. So, we are to think of his admiration in terms of his rapture on a visit to the Elgin Marbles: ‘I knew that people ought to be built like that.’

  The connection between Kicky and Prinsep brought the Little Holland House crew together with the Tulse Hill gang, and considerably heightened the level of consciousness-raising activity.

  In July 1862 Kicky dined at Little Holland House with Millais, and in the same year, according to Luke Ionides, Dante Gabriel Rossetti first visited Tulse Hill. Rossetti’s base at this time was an old Elizabethan house, 16 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. He had a menagerie of animals, including a wombat. It was, wrote Luke lonides, a house where ‘one met all sorts of people . . .’

  One evening after dinner we went into a tent he had raised in the garden, and Bergheim, a powerful mesmerist, was asked if he could mesmerise any stranger, and as he said, ‘Yes,’ Rossetti sent out into the street to find two stray women, who would not mind submitting to the experiment. Both Jimmy and [his brother] Willy Whistler were there, Edward Dannreuther, the musician, and Lord Lindsay, and each one was asked to tell Bergheim what he wanted each woman to do.

  Ji
mmy Whistler suggested that one should think that she had a fleabite on her knee; and without words, from the other side of the table, Bergheim made passes and the girl proceeded to scratch her knee. I suggested that I should like one of them to come up to the table, drink a glass of claret and think it was milk, upon which she came up, drank the wine, and when asked what she was drinking said, ‘Why, don’t you see it’s milk?’

  Dannreuther put them both to the severest test. When Bergheim had made passes over them, Dannreuther asked him to start one of them singing and to stop her at a certain note, then to start the other, and stop her in the same way, Dannreuther noting the note on which each had left off. Then after a few minutes’ interval Bergheim restarted the first girl, and she went on exactly where she had left off, and the second girl also restarted on the note on which she had left off; a feat which Dannreuther declared was impossible to the most accomplished singers.

  In the index to Alecco’s book, Ion: A Grandfather’s Tale (1927), there are five references to Bergheim, who was a famous hypnotist of the day, and all of them have been stripped out of the main body of the text, so that there is in fact no mention of him beyond the index, which suggests that they had been taken out hurriedly just prior to printing, perhaps on legal advice. One of the references directs the reader to a page otherwise wholly devoted to Trilby, implying that history might be missing an interesting connection to du Maurier. Clearly psychic activity among these artists was at a high. Luke describes Rossetti turning up at Whistler’s while another séance was in progress, and breaking it up, saying, ‘You’d better stop that, otherwise you will go mad.’

  In April that year, 1862, Kicky did indeed almost go mad. He wrote to his mother that the first ‘four or five days’ of the ‘strange illness’ – after which he believed he had recovered – ‘seem to have absorbed quite an age and without giving me the slightest bodily pain or weakness have inflicted on me suffering I have never dreamt of and which now I can’t realise . . .’