Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Barrie also had a special friendship with Bevil Quiller-Couch – ‘my favourite boy in the wide wide world,’ the son of the writer and academic Arthur Quiller-Couch,† known as Q. Barrie captivated Bevil, and engaged him in adventures not unlike those he later undertook with the Llewelyn Davies boys. He took photographs of their adventures and made them into a book, a forerunner of The Boy Castaways.

  Meanwhile, filling his leisure time and keeping him away from introspection and loveless lament, was village cricket. One summer’s day in 1887, Barrie was walking with his friend Thomas Gilmour and a New Zealand writer, H. B. Marriott Watson,* in an old-world Surrey village called Shere. Observing a game of cricket in progress, the trio stopped to watch and, encouraged by the great age of some of the players, Barrie challenged the home team to a game. A fixture was booked.

  ‘Barrie got us together,’ recalled Jerome. ‘He was a good captain. It was to have been Married v. Single, but the wife of one of the Marrieds had run away with one of the Singles a few days before. So to keep our minds off a painful subject, we called it Literature v. Journalism.’8

  On the way down to Shere from London in the train, realising that they hadn’t much hope of winning, Barrie asked his friend the explorer Joseph Thomson what the ‘African’ for ‘Heaven help us’ was. The answer came, ‘Allahakbar’, so the club became the Allahakbars and later the Allahakbarries. Against Shere they were all out for eleven runs, but the Allahakbarries became a famous institution, with village and country house fixtures and an annual game with the artistic community in the Worcestershire village of Broadway, where they would put up at the Lygon Arms.

  At his happiest at boyish games, Barrie’s widening knowledge of the world included no tangible knowledge of young women until he began to work them out on the page:

  Mr Anon, that man of secret sorrows, found it useless to love, because, after a look at the length and breadth of him, none would listen. Unable to get a hearing in person... he wrote many articles on the subject of love and the passions that purported to come from perturbed undergraduates or haughty lieutenants, by whom readers, assuming them to be of the proper dimension, were variously stirred. These young gentlemen wrote as authorities of what love should be and in the case of women was not; so that they roused many intelligent damsels to the frenzy of reply. Mr Anon had the elation of feeling that Woman listened to him at last, if only at second hand.9

  The real breakthrough came when he, ‘who was only able to speak to ladies when they were not there’, began drawing and re-drawing and enlivening two-dimensional ladies on the pages of his fiction, and ‘fiction became reality’. His maxim was: ‘Without concentration you are lost; concentrate though your coat-tails be on fire’ –

  He would think and think, until concentration (which is a pair of blazing eyes) seemed to draw her out of the pages to his side, and then he and she sported in a way forbidden in the tale. While he sat there with eyes riveted he had her to dinner at a restaurant, and took her up the river and called her ‘little woman’, and when she held up her mouth he said, tantalisingly, that she must wait until he had finished his cigar.10

  It was on this terrifyingly sad notion, that Barrie did in fact tackle his deeply repressed sexuality and found himself a wife. Only, in reality, it was not from the pages of his fiction that the creature of his dreams originally arose, but from George du Maurier’s.

  * The Thrums novels were Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891).

  * The inspiration tor Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871).

  † Arthur Quiller Couch, three years younger than Barrie, was a novelist, critic, poet and literary journalist, and the first editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse. He was knighted in 1910 and took the chair of English at Cambridge University in 1912.

  * Richard Savage, Barrie’s first play, was co-authored with H. B. Marriott Watson, and opened in 1891 at the Criterion. It was not a success.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Gateway to Neverland

  After Kicky had married Emma in 1863, he put away ‘the dreamer’ and became a very successful artist. His wife had insisted that he cleaned himself up, dropped his Paris bohemian persona and became a true Englishman, as this fitted him perfectly for the position he desired on Punch magazine.

  Witty, satirical but not maliciously so, Punch by the 1860s was more supportive of the Establishment than of the underdog. Successful and international, it spoke for the rising middle class and the British Empire.

  Becoming so much the aspirational Englishman that he took up cricket, Kicky began to venerate and model himself on the magazine’s most famous illustrator, John Leech, writing of him in Social Pictorial Satire (1898):

  In dress, bearing, manner, and aspect, Leech was the very type of the well-bred English gentleman and man of the world and good society; I never met anyone to beat him in that peculiar distinction of form, which, I think, has reached its highest European development in this country... He was John Bull himself, but John Bull refined and civilised – John Bull polite, modest, gentle – full of self-respect and self-restraint [and] by nature aristocratic; he liked the society of those who were well dressed, well bred and refined like himself, and perhaps a trifle conventional; he conformed quite spontaneously and without effort to the upper-class British ideal of his time . . .

  In the autumn of 1864, while in Whitby making woodcuts for Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers, a novel set in the Napoleonic Wars in which the Yorkshire whaling port is thinly disguised as Monkshaven, Kicky happened to bump into Leech, on holiday with his family.

  The two men walked and talked and dined, and their time together appears to have raised Kicky’s chances of a regular position on Punch. Then, as fate would have it, Leech suddenly died, at only 46, and Kicky stepped into his shoes, first as illustrator of the Punch Almanack. He then took Leech’s empty chair at the weekly Punch dinner, and with all the gravitas he could muster cut his initials on the table next to those of his late mentor. By the following July he could write to his mother: ‘I am regularly on the staff of Punch now.’

  Not quite six years had passed since that summer day in 1860 when he had borrowed £10 from his mother and left Düsseldorf for London – and he was now the perfect Englishman.

  His work on the series, ‘English Society at Home’, caught the essence of Imperial Britain, and George du Maurier became something of a monument to the national pride of his country, which he could justifiably call his England. He also amused his new audience in a series called ‘The Legend of Camelot’, which mocked the art scene he had left behind.* So well known did Kicky become that by the time he came to illustrate Thomas Hardy’s novel The Hand of Ethelberta for the Cornhill magazine in the mid-1870s, ‘he and not the novelist was the more significant figure in the eyes of the reading public.’1

  By then, five children had been born to George and Emma: Beatrice (known as Trixy), Guy, Sylvia, Marie Louise (May) and Gerald, and they too were becoming famous, illustrated by their artist father in the pages of Punch as the perfect upper-middle-class English family, dressed quaintly to perfection in Kate Greenaway frills, hats and pinafores. Readers followed their exploits, thinly disguised as those of ‘the Brown family’. Especially popular was the family dog, Chang, a St Bernard which got its name from an eight-foot-tall Chinese giant, who had been on exhibition at the old Egyptian Hall in the British Museum in the early 1860s. The four-legged Chang sat at Kicky’s feet as he worked. His fans were stricken when he died in 1883.

  One cartoon springs to mind. It is set in the du Maurier garden and shows the five children in line, according to height and age, each chugging after the next, playing at railway trains. ‘I’m the engine,’ confides Trixy, the oldest, by way of explanation to her mother, Emma, ‘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, it would offend him!’

  The drawing was undertaken in 1875, the year after Kicky took a long lease on a large house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, a move which confirmed that the du Mauriers had arrived. Known as New Grove House, ‘the studio of his home became the centre of his world,’ wrote Daphne. ‘Here Kicky would blink away at his easel, smoking his innumerable black cigars, with Chang stretched at his feet beside him; his devoted wife hovered at his elbow, a couple of daughters practised at the piano, singing the French songs he had taught them, a son stood on the dais as model, and the two youngest children dressed up as black minstrels to “make Pappa laugh”.’2

  It was at New Grove House, four years later, that American writer Henry James walked through the door and greeted the entire family as he might long-lost friends, which in a way they were, for everyone who read Punch felt they knew the du Mauriers, ‘two-dimensionally as it were’.3

  Henry James first met Kicky at one of the 107 social engagements he had attended in the winter of 1878.* They became the greatest of friends. Henry James was nine years the younger man, but you wouldn’t know it, for du Maurier was so much the smaller, slighter and more boyish figure.

  Immediately they had two things in common. Both were émigrés and Henry James knew Kicky’s homeland intimately, having lived in Paris from 1875 as a correspondent for the New York Tribune.

  There was also great mutual respect. Kicky revered Henry James’s stylistic purity and meticulous approach to his art.† James warmed to Kicky’s sincerity and passion, as well as to his amusing repartee, and he asked him to illustrate his novel Washington Square (1881), despite his principled aversion to illustrated novels. Inevitably, Kicky invited Henry to meet the family he felt he knew so well.

  By 1881, the Kicky menagerie en famille was quite a handful, not at all the demure English family paraded in Punch six years earlier. But Henry James could not have resisted them if he had tried. Here was 15-year-old Sylvia, so fiery and uncontrollable that she was nicknamed ‘the blizzard’, and 8-year-old Gerald, whose tomfoolery and practical joking were the fresh young shavings of Kicky’s own nature, and 18-year-old Trixy, who had just ‘come out’, and whose beauty found a surprise response in the dedicated bachelor’s breast. Also, the du Mauriers were of course a musical household – Guy (16) played piano, as did the girls. May (13) sang like a bird, and Kicky’s tenor voice, not yet quite destroyed by his cigar-smoking, was a revelation as it rang out to Thackeray’s ‘Song of Little Billee’, one of his favourites at the time.

  The children insisted Henry James join in the family fun and games. No one had ever invited him to do such a thing before, and indeed he was the last person one might think would have enjoyed himself. Another friend, the writer Edmund Gosse, once described him as ‘benign, indulgent but grave, and not often unbending beyond a genial chuckle.’ But with the du Mauriers, he came alive.

  The wholehearted welcome was the most personal of all the compliments Kicky paid Henry James, for there was a clannishness about the du Mauriers which might just as easily have been designed to freeze one out.

  A talent for mockery, which served Kicky so well on Punch, was shared by his daughter Sylvia and youngest son, Gerald, a tremendous mimic, and later by Daphne, and by others in the family since. ‘Doing someone’s day’ was a particular form of it, which reduced Daphne and her son Kits to fits of laughter, as they made fun of the routine activities of some poor soul who had found his way into their lives. Daphne refused to see it as cruel. ‘If I mock,’ she said, ‘it does not mean any more than that mockery is in my nature... they are far from chucked.’ Kicky, who hated hurting people’s feelings, and for whom cruelty in any form was the worst sin, would have felt the same. It was the du Maurier way. Anyone who found it intimidating was not for them. Henry James appears to have gone along with it and probably topped it. Certainly there was no room for taking offence. The household was full of beauty and humour, and determinedly up-tempo. ‘One must never be au sérieux about anything,’ observed Charles Hoyer Millar, who married Trixy and wrote a biography of his father-in-law. ‘The family in general had a rooted dislike to serious topics of any kind, at all events in the presence of each other.’4

  This qualification – ‘at all events in the presence of each other’ – was significant. Serious topics were not avoided by Kicky; just kept to himself. Upon marriage to Emma, anything serious had gone the way of his hypnotic excursions and Romantic, otherworldly ideas. Habits died hard in the du Maurier family. And even two generations down the line Daphne also avoided serious topics, mocking them as ‘main talks’ or ‘psychological polities’, but in the right company she loved nothing better than discussing them.

  Deep thoughts were, in fact, at the heart of what both Daphne and her grandfather were about, and from the moment Henry James stepped across the threshold of New Grove House, they were back on the agenda for Kicky after Emma’s lengthy ban. A private walk became an essential part of a Sunday routine for the two men. It took them on to the Heath and into each other’s innermost being.

  Kicky began by telling Henry about his Parisian childhood, pointing to the trees on the Heath that grew close together like those in the Bois de Boulogne, and nodding to the Leg of Mutton pond, so like the mare d’Auteuil where he had fished and listened to the fairy tales of Le Major Duquesnois. At length, the two men would come to a secluded bench, dubbed by David Lodge in his novel Author, Author (2004) ‘the bench of confidences’.

  Henry’s presence on a Sunday at New Grove House became a weekly ritual, and this bench the principal destination of their perambulations. Here the two men opened up to each other about their lives, their dreams and their disappointments, and shared their secrets.

  Shortly after they met, the novelist Walter Besant invited Kicky to join a club he was setting up, to be named ‘The Rabelais’ after the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Its name raised certain expectations (of bawdiness, obscenity and reckless living), which were not in fact delivered, as was noted at the time. Henry Ashbee, a successful City businessman with a passion for pornography, and reputed to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s model for the two sides of his most famous creation, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, denounced its members as ‘very slow and un-Rabelaisian’, and there is a story that Thomas Hardy, a member for a time, objected to the attendance of Henry James on account of his lack of virility.

  Virility was not the issue, however. The members of the Rabelais were interested in other worlds. Charles Leland was an expert in fairy lore and voodoo. Robert Louis Stevenson was the author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) which epitomised the club’s psychological/occult preoccupations. Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, was a dedicated spiritualist from 1916. In their company, Henry James was probably more at home than Hardy, for both his private secretary Theodora Bosanquet, and brother William, the philosopher, were members of the Psychical Society.

  In many ways, the Rabelais was a celebration that Kicky’s time had come. Parapsychological phenomena and the occult were becoming valid subjects for rigorous study. There was a strong feeling that the whole psychic scene would at any moment be authenticated by scientific explanation. In 1947, the poet laureate John Masefield recalled the excitement of growing up in the era:

  Men were seeking to discover what limitations there were to the personal intellect; how far it could travel from its home, the personal brain; how deeply it could influence other minds at a distance from it, or near it; what limit, if any, there might be to an intense mental sympathy. This enquiry occupied many doctors and scientists in various ways. It interested many millions of men and women. It stirred George du Maurier... to speculations which deeply delighted his generation.5

  While séances challenged the Christian definition of the afterlife, scientists, such as Sir William Crookes, working on invisible forces were expected at any moment to identify and explain the
force harnessed by mediums.* In 1886, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote in The Psychical Wave:

  The force which makes a parlour table rise half way to the ceiling, with a child on top of it, or the mystery which qualifies a stranger in a back street to tell you at first sight the name of your dead, or the secret of your heart, is no longer relegated to the logic of the medium, or the oratory of the strolling charlatan. It is lifted to the desk of the scholar; and the scholar has accepted the trust. Believers in what are called spiritualistic phenomena – an army estimated at from two to ten millions in this country [North America] alone – are building from their end, and in their way, about a volume of mysterious facts which, at the other end, and from another fashion of approach, commands the attention of liberal scientific men on both sides of the Atlantic sea. The thing has overflowed the culvert of superstition; it has gone above the level of what we call a craze or a fashion. It has reached the dignity of an intellectual current.

  Between 1875 and 1883, a young physiologist and future professor, Charles Richet, published a series of ground-breaking studies in hypnotic phenomena in two French journals.6 From 1882, there appeared new scientific journals exclusively devoted to hypnotism, and all medical journals, philosophic and literary journals, as well as the daily press, carried articles about the science

  Between 1881 and 1889 three volumes of stories were published by the Rabelais in members-only editions limited to 100 copies.7 They delineate elements of the club’s core interest in the psychic and supernatural, and are alive with the spirit of Kicky’s formative experience of hypnosis in Europe. Central is the idea that enlightenment comes not from an authoritative source of religion, but from an altered state of consciousness, a state of trance. The stories are Romantic, revelatory, ecstatic. The narrator of one is hypnotised and sent ‘into an ecstasy with his vision’, which is far superior to sex. A character is ‘borne away out of the window... carried away in an ecstasy of rapture... so that he took no heed when the daintiest girls in the village passed singing down the street’. Here are intense, euphoric, sometimes mystical exploits of the mind, a sixth-sense perception of the universal connectedness of things. The stories remind us of the peak experiences which were once Kicky’s regular Saturday night fare.