Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Don’t let this alarming debut frighten you but you must know that without noticing any symptoms of disease whatever in my old carcase I have been slightly disinclined to work lately, and irritable in my temper without due cause – and figure to yourself that on Friday evening as I was sitting with my dearest and most beloved of Perns* I felt all my affection for her, you, Isabel, and my friends cease as by enchantment; yet my powers of reasoning strange to say were by no means impaired; indeed remarkably clear and active. Well, as you may fancy I went home and to bed but in such despair I cannot realise it. I awoke early to the same fearful state, feeling myself utterly lost for ever and ever, dead to all natural affection, and resolving hard to lead henceforth a life of martyrdom to duty – at length a faint glimmer suggested itself to me that perhaps some internal derangement of which I was unaware was the cause of this hideous state of mind – and catching at the straw of hope I went off to Haden’s (may his name be forever blessed and his shadow never grow less!). He explained to me that my liver was altogether in a disturbed state . . .

  Such a diagnosis was typical of the times. Kicky was prescribed a medicine, which appears to have done him no good at all, and he longed for some symptoms that would confirm that it was indeed a physical disease.

  The attacks came in waves, so that one moment, ‘I was as hard to Pem and as insensible as a flint’, and the next he believed that ‘the neck of the disease broke and I buried myself in my dear Pem’s arms in a passion of hysterical sobbing, which I can scarcely dare to think of. I had two or three relapses after, rather less violent and shorter... How I longed for frightful bodily pain and revelled in the notion of death.’

  On doctor’s orders he left Emma for Brighton in order to recuperate. On 21 April he wrote to Emma:

  You will be pleased to hear that relief has come to me at last and that today I am much better. Indeed I have been quite myself for a little while, feeling only that I have been most fearfully shaken; and of course my native facetiousness has been frightened out of me for a little while. I received your dear affectionate letter... I have not yet made up my mind about how long to stay . . .

  But his condition was in fact far from stable. On 23 April he wrote:

  Today I am a good deal better – a sort of languid, lucid interval – yesterday was miserable.

  On 26 April:

  I have had a few hours relief and then dropping down again into wretchedness. God knows when and how it will end... Darling, I shall remember Brighton as the place where the most unhappy hours of my life have been spent. I wonder if I shall get really well again and once more have confidence in myself and self respect and courage to struggle and work?

  On the 27th:

  I have just come in from a long ride over the hills. I am constantly fluctuating between the blues and the other thing, but am beginning to acquire more command over myself rather . . .

  In May he wrote to his mother Ellen, summing up the whole experience and describing it not so much as an illness as the discovery of a dark side of himself:

  It suddenly came across me that the original badness of my nature was just going to break out at last... temptation suddenly to break loose and to indulge in every riotous excess, drink, opium, and the most shameless intrigues, for I felt that come over me (as it seemed you know) that no woman in the world could resist and that when I felt downright madness reach me, as it would inevitably have done according to my theory at the time, I would kill myself and escape the asylum... I felt I hated Emma, you, and all those of my friends I admire the most for being so naturally and easily possessed of qualities which were denied to me, and envied you all to an extent... it was a downright anguish.

  He had clearly suffered some sort of breakdown associated with his dabbling in psychic and possibly drug-related activities. Daphne pointed to ‘his evenings at Little Holland House without Emma, the guardian angel... a sore temptation to what he believed to be his better nature’. Possibly she was right, although just before he fell ill he had also been on a number of excursions to ‘the dear Tulse Hill people’, the Greeks, who had done for Armstrong.

  An especially interesting aspect of the symptoms he describes is his disdain for Emma and everyone in the ‘straight’ world. This feeling of superiority and contempt for those around is a cultist feature that gets the hypnotic subject coming back for more. It is also a characteristic of Trilby after she has been hypnotised regularly by Svengali. It would have broken Emma’s heart to have met Kicky’s entranced personality.

  Emma made it clear that, if they were to be married, Kicky must give up what she saw as his bohemian activities. Of course she didn’t understand that in this otherworld of imagination lay the centre from which he was living.

  Kicky understood that Mrs Rag would never know this world, and on account of his love for her, Mr Rag would now bury his No. 2 self, and be ‘full of honest ambition and good purpose’, the person she wanted to marry and the person everyone recognised.

  In December 1862 he wrote to his mother, ‘Emma and I are getting married on the third of January, we are going to live on the second floor, 36 Great Russell Street,* 25 shillings a week, and I have taken a small studio in the same house, ground floor, £25 a year. It has a splendid light, all the ceiling in glass, and in time we shall be able to make it very comfortable, I have no doubt . . .’

  It was a capitulation. But a capitulation that Kicky never regretted making. Nor would it be for ever.

  * Joanna, the model for Whistler’s At the Piano, The White Girl and later for Little White Girl and Symphony in White.

  * Edward Poynter had also studied with George du Maurier at the Gleyre studio in Paris, and later became President of the Royal Academy.

  * Their quiet courting would be recorded years later in George du Maurier’s third novel, The Martian (1897).

  * As his granddaughter Daphne commented ninety years later, ‘Et comment!’ The Carry novel appeared as Trilby in 1894.

  † Rag, Tag and Bobtail was in fact a 1950s TV programme in Britain based on stories by Louise Cochrane about a hedgehog, a mouse and a rabbit. However, in the nineteenth century the phrase ‘rag-tag and bobtail’ meant ‘common’ or ‘vulgar’.

  * Valentine Prinsep trained at Gleyre’s studio in Paris and exhibited many historical, classical and biblical paintings at the Royal Academy between 1862 and 1904. He was considered less successful as a classical artist than du Maurier’s other friends, Poynter and Alma-Tadema.

  * Emma’s nickname was Pem.

  * By June 1863 they were living at 91 Great Russell Street.

  PART III

  1885–1894

  Kicky, Barrie and Svengali: the secret

  DELICATE CONSIDERATION

  Mamma. “What a din you’re making Chicks! What are you playing at!”

  Trixy. “O, Mamma, we’re playing at railway trains. I’m the engine, and Guy’s a first-class carriage, and Sylvia’s a second-class carriage, and May’s a third-class carriage, and Gerald, he’s a third-class carriage, too – that is, he’s really only a truck, you know, only you mustn’t tell him so, as it would offend him!”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Impotent and ambitious

  It was the Auld Lichts that first brought Barrie to London. On 8 November 1884, he sold an article with the title ‘An Auld Licht Community’ to Frederick Greenwood, editor of the prestigious St James’s Gazette. Greenwood, although complimentary, cautioned him about uprooting and coming to the capital. But Barrie was already packing his box and in March 1885 he booked a one-way ticket to London, having meanwhile penned another article on spec for Greenwood, entitled ‘The Rooks begin to Build’.

  Let us survey our hero as he sits awake in a corner of his railway compartment... He has a suspicious eye, poor gomeril, for any fellow-traveller, who is civil to him. He is gauche and inarticulate... Expression an uncomfortable blank... Ladies have decided that he is of no account, and he already knows this and has private anguish thereanent [sic] . . .
Only asset, except a pecuniary one, is a certain grimness about not being beaten. Pecuniary asset, twelve pounds in a secret pocket which he sometimes presses, as if it were his heart . . .

  Having reached London for the great adventure, he was hauling his box to the left-luggage shed at St Pancras when his eyes fell upon what was to him the most warming sight in literature. It was the placard of the ‘St James’s Gazette’ of the previous evening with printed on it in noble letters ‘The Rooks begin to Build’... In other dazzling words, having been a minute or so in London, he had made two guineas. This may not seem a great thrill to you, but try it in his circumstances . . .

  Forty-five years have elapsed since this event, the romance of my life, I myself can now regard it with comparative calm, but I still hold that it was almost as if Greenwood had met me at the station.1

  Immediately, there followed a period of intense activity lasting four years, during which time around 140 articles were accepted by Greenwood, while ‘far more than twice that number had the sadder fate of rejection’; over 200 also went to other journals, with Barrie reckoning that some 800 were declined. He also wrote five books, which presented two distinct faces: ‘the grave author of Thrums’, who was based on his mother’s tales of old Kirriemuir, examples of a regional genre made popular by Thomas Hardy,* and ‘the pipe-smoking freelance journalist of Fleet Street’, who appeared in the autobiographical When a Man’s Single (1888) and My Lady Nicotine (1890). Otherwise, for the time being, he preferred to write his articles anonymously. ‘He was a humble atom was Mr Anon,’ wrote Barrie with characteristic objectivity, ‘but I am glad he worked as hard.’2

  He was not in fact humble at all. He seemed shy, but there was also the almost aggressive sense of his own importance that Hibbert, the sub-editor on the Nottingham Journal, had observed, and this made him a bit ‘touchy’, according to the comic writer, Jerome K. Jerome.

  Jerome, the ex-railway clerk who found fame with Three Men in a Boat (1889), was writing for the novelist F. W. Robinson’s monthly magazine, Home Chimes, which operated from a tiny office up two flights of stairs in a narrow lane off Paternoster Row in the City. Before arriving in London Barrie had written an article for Robinson entitled ‘A Night in a Provincial Newspaper Office’, and through the magazine he found himself in the company of a group of writers dining once a fortnight at Pagani’s, a small, first-floor Italian restaurant in Great Portland Street. The group grew to include the poet Swinburne, and the rump of it later formed a club called the Vagabonds. ‘We were an odd collection of about a dozen,’ Jerome recalled. ‘We dined together... at the fixed price of two shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence the half flask.’3

  Often, however, Barrie spent his evenings alone, confronting his devils:

  I am never in my element until I reach deep water. The unfathomable sea of thought seems to buoy me up... I lie awake with the problems of my personality... My moods are as changeable as a hoary ocean. There are times when I am the best of company, when my wit sparkles and cuts. At other times I walk in the shadows... ruminating with the mighty dead.4

  His was an objective, tricksy, cynical, often funny, but sometimes deeply morose perception of the world. As Jerome commented, ‘The natural solemnity of his face is a little startling to one who has come out to dine... It was as if he tugged the strings that work the organs of risibility, but either the strings were broken or he had forgotten to bring the organs.’5 Revelling in a Faustian tendency to plumb the depths of his psyche, Barrie shared the purblind scholar’s problem – no form with the ladies. He wrote of himself:

  If you could dig deep enough into him you would find first his Rotherschildian ambition, which is to earn a pound a day; beneath that is a desire to reach some little niche in literature; but in the marrow you find him vainly weltering to be a favourite of the ladies. All the other cravings he would toss aside for that; he is only striving hard for numbers one and two because he knows with an everlasting sinking that number three can never be for him.

  Self-exposure came naturally to Barrie and won him his readers’ sympathy. You never quite knew when the comedian would suddenly vanish and the darker, deeper self take over, but at least, as his biographer Darlington asserted, ‘Though Barrie sometimes took an impish delight in decorating or even fantasticating his own portrait, he never falsified it.’

  His problems with the ladies, Jerome knew well:

  He could easily be the most silent man I have ever met. Sometimes he would sit through the whole of a dinner without ever speaking. Then, when all but the last one or two guests had gone – or even later – he would put his hands behind his back and, bummeling up and down the room, talk for maybe an hour straight on end. Once a beautiful but nervous young lady was handed over to his care. With the sole au gratin Barrie broke the silence:

  ‘Have you ever been to Egypt?’

  The young lady was too startled to answer immediately. It was necessary for her to collect herself. While waiting for the entrée she turned to him.

  ‘No,’ she answered.

  Barrie made no comment. He went on with his dinner. At the end of the chicken en casserole, curiosity overcoming her awe, she turned to him again.

  ‘Have you?’ she asked.

  A far-away expression came into Barrie’s great deep eyes.

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  After that they both lapsed into silence.6

  Barrie was most at ease in the company of children, for, if his childhood had left him in a mess, it had certainly not left him.

  One of the earliest of his young conquests shared the same name as his mother. Margaret Henley was the daughter of W. E. Henley, editor of the National (Scots) Observer, to which Barrie contributed. Henley used a crutch and was ‘a splendidly ironic, bearded man... When he thundered a red light came into his eye, which so entranced you that you forgot it might be a danger signal. He thundered at all of us,’ Barrie explained. ‘It was Kipling, I think, who presented him with a punching ball, after first writing all our names on it. . . this W.G. [Grace] of letters.’7 Robert Louis Stevenson modelled Long John Silver on Henley. Fond as Barrie was of the father, he was besotted with the daughter. As Henley played the piano, the little girl ‘fell into his lap, and sometimes danced round the instrument and under it and over me’. She called Barrie ‘my friendy’, but because she couldn’t pronounce her R’s, it sounded like ‘my fwendy’, which at length became ‘Wendy’ in Peter Pan (though the girl in the play was actually based on Margaret, Barrie’s mother). Margaret Henley was so sweet that she became the subject of a painting by Charles Furze, but ‘she died when she was about five’, Barrie wrote, adding with the heartless innocence that was always there, just beneath the surface, ‘one might call it a sudden idea that came to her in the middle of her romping.’

  He also enjoyed the company of his brother Alick’s son, Charlie, whom he wrote about as Peterkin in the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. Barrie, in his role as Peterkin’s uncle, reprimanded the boy for hitting him with a hammer and threatened to kick him around the room if he didn’t make himself scarce. Later, the boy returned –

  He came and stood by my side, offering himself mutely for slaughter . . .

  ‘What is the matter now?’ I demanded fiercely.

  ‘You said you would kick me round the room,’ he moaned.

  ‘Well, I won’t do it,’ I said, ‘if you are a good boy.’

  ‘But you said you would do it.’

  ‘You don’t mean that you want it?’

  ‘Ay, I want it. You said you would do’t.’

  Wondering, I arose and kicked him.

  ‘Is that the way?’ he cried in rapture.

  ‘That’s the way,’ I said, returning to my chair.

  ‘But,’ he complained, ‘you said you would kick me round the room.’

  I got up again, and made a point of kicking him round the room.

  ‘Kick harder!’ he shouted, and so I kicked
him into the lobby.

  However desirous of gratifying Peterkin, I could not be always kicking him... and for the sake of peace I bribed quietness from him with the promise that I would kick him hard at eight o’clock . . .

  Most people keep their distance from me, regarding me as morose and unsociable; but Peterkin thought he had found the key to me, and was convinced I would not kick him so heartily if I did not consider him rather nice. He said that eight o’clock was longer in coming round than any other time of the day, and he frequently offered me chocolate to kick him in advance . . .

  He also thoroughly enjoys being tied with strings that leave their mark on him for days . . .

  Friendships between adult males and children outside the family were not uncommon in late Victorian England. For example, John Millais, with what the newspapers called ‘his schoolboy manner’, had in the late 1870s developed a warm relationship with Beatrix Potter, when she was a little girl. Millais was one of a group of adult males, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s husband and Quaker politician John Bright, who came alive in the company of young Beatrix, with her innocence, beauty and shy contemplative manner.

  The fact that such Romantic relationships were inspirational presumably put parents at their ease; but there were many examples of less innocent conduct. Earlier, for instance, the critic John Ruskin had divorced amidst rumours of a suspect attraction to young girls. Ruskin’s ex-wife then married Millais. Ruskin also had a bizarre relationship with the artist Kate Greenaway, who liked ‘to play child’ with him and indulge in baby talk. All this came in the wake of Lewis Carroll’s perhaps questionable friendship with Alice Liddell* and is the historical context for Barrie’s relationships with children.