Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  And I felt that this was no longer a dream, but something else – some strange thing that had happened to me, some new life that I had woken up to... I was conscious that my real body... now lay fast asleep in a small room on the fourth floor of an hotel garni in the Rue de la Michodière... and yet here was my body too, just as substantial... With my disengaged hand I felt in my trousers pocket; there were my London latchkey, my purse, my penknife... I looked at my watch; it was going and marked eleven. I pinched myself, I coughed, I did all one usually does under the pressure of some immense surprise, to assure myself that I was awake; and I was, and yet here I stood.

  Thereafter, Peter’s dream is bound up intimately with his beautiful guide, through whose hand he feels he is ‘drawing all her life into mine... I felt there was about me the unspeakable elation which can come to us only in our waking moments when we are at our very best... I was still holding the Duchess’s hand, and felt the warmth of it through her glove; it stole up my arm like a magnetic current. I was in Elysium . . .

  “Now you are dreaming true,” she said.’

  They visit the scene of Peter’s childhood together – the rue de la Pompe, the house with green shutters and Mansard roofs, the memorable back garden with its beautiful roses, nasturtiums and convolvulus, the old tool shed full of tools and lumber, the magical mare d’Auteuil in the Bois de Boulogne, ‘that pond of ponds, the only pond’, which Peter (nicknamed Gogo as a child) now glimpses through a gap in a hedge.

  Also returned is a long-forgotten childhood friendship with a little girl called Mimsie. Peter and Mary watch as the two children play happily together, Mimsie a sweet, but ‘sick, ungainly child’, full of gratitude and love that Gogo should play with her, and Gogo touchingly unaware that her little heart is so full of him that ‘she would like to be Gogo’s slave – she would die for Gogo . . .’

  There is a boyishness about Mimsie. When we first meet her, she wears ‘her thick hair cropped like a boy’. There is also an ethereal, fanciful side to her. She believes she can see ‘a pair of invisible beings, “La fée Tarapatapoum” and “La Prince Charmont” always in attendance upon us... who watched over us and would protect us through life’.

  Gogo is a keen artist. He copies woodcuts for Mimsie, one in particular from an edition of Byron, a drawing illustrating a poem called ‘The Island’, actually a steel engraving which represented ‘two beautiful beings of either sex, walking hand in hand through a dark cavern. The man was in sailor’s garb; the lady, who went barefoot and lightly clad, held a torch; and underneath was written –

  And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,

  And waved along the vaults her flaming brand.

  I spent hours copying it for her, and she preferred the copy to the original, and would have it that the two figures were excellent copies of her Prince and Fairy.’

  Awakened and back in London, Peter longs to meet Mary in real life. He takes to walking in Kensington Gardens, just to ‘see beautiful, well-dressed women, and hear their sweet, refined voices and happy laughter; and a longing would come into my heart more passionate than my longing for the sea and France and distant lands, and quite as unutterable’.

  Later, he meets her by chance socially, tells her of his dream and is shocked to discover that she dreamed it too. Mary then tells him that she is the Mimsie of his childhood, ‘the one survivor of that sweet time’, and that dreaming true – which is what he has been doing – is a skill her father taught her. She shows him how to do it of his own free will, but warns him that as she is married (to an alcoholic), they never can dream true together again.

  We can ‘never, never dream. That will not do,’ she says, for ‘never never dreamland’ – the world of hypnotic trance – is an environment given to rapturous sensuality.

  Peter and Mary’s situation changes when Peter accidentally kills his guardian, Colonel Ibbetson, after he discovers he was the architect of his father’s death. Peter is sentenced to hang, but the sentence is later commuted to life. In prison his need to dream true with Mary becomes urgent. Mary disentangles herself from her husband and her ‘affair’ with Peter begins. Physical sex is impossible, but their union is consummated ecstatically in the mutual process of dreaming true.

  The never never dreamland becomes Peter’s principal reality. He is ‘half crying with joy to reach the land of my true dreams again’, the prison day a ‘much needed daily mental rest after the tumultuous emotions of each night’. The union offers pure rapture, as Peter feels Mary’s ‘warm life-current mixing’ with his. ‘Was there ever... ever since the world began, such ecstasy as I feel now?’

  Thus were Prince Charming and the fairy Tarapatapoum together at last.

  Mary leads Peter to her childhood home in Passy, Parva sed Apta, leads him into her ‘little lumber-room’ and thence into rooms ‘that never could have been there before’, i.e. rooms she had not entered when she was an innocent child.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’ I asked.

  She laughed and said – ‘Open the door in the wall opposite.’

  Then she took my hand, and lo! There was a door! And she pushed, and we entered another suite of apartments that never could have been there before; there had never been room for them, nor ever could have been, in all Passy!

  ‘Come,’ she said, laughing and blushing at once; for she seemed nervous and excited and shy – ‘do you remember –

  And Neuha led her Torquil by the hand,

  And waved along the vaults her flaming brand.

  – do you remember your little drawing out of The Island, in the green morocco Byron?’

  These are rooms that Mimsie hadn’t known. They belong to the grown-up Mary, and she is inviting Peter to explore them. The sexual symbolism is explicit, as she leads him in, ‘laughing and blushing’, at once ‘nervous and excited and shy’. The Romantic focus – ‘The Island’ – is apt because Byron’s South Sea coral island was an earthly paradise capable of transporting Torquil and Neuha, children of Nature, to flights of unbridled ecstasy.

  A sense of the past in the present, the notion of a timeless ‘other world’ just out of reach, the idea that our terrestrial, mundane life is a mere front for true mystical existence – an exalted state of bliss outside time, but within our grasp – is at the heart of a myth, seeded in Peter Ibbetson, which captivated three generations of the du Maurier family. It is the essence of Romanticism, Daphne regarded it as ‘the secret of eternal youth’.23 Kicky had found a way into this other order of things – not just imaginatively, but a way actually to live it: by dreaming true.

  ‘He affected us all greatly,’ Daphne admitted in understatement, for she owed her success to dreaming true.

  * Besides Rossetti, William Morris and others, Oscar Wilde and Swinburne came in for a caning, the latter in a clever parody, ‘A Ballad of Blunders’, which gave special attention to Swinburne’s taste for flagellation.

  * Henry James’s novel The American had just been published to great acclaim and would be followed by the even more successful Daisy Miller (1879) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). All turn on the impact of European culture on American life, which made him a popular choice among hostesses of soirées in the London of the late nineteenth century.

  † Barrie would write in The Greenwood Hat (1930) of Henry’s exactitude: ‘It is worth losing a train (and sometimes you had to do that) while he rummaged for the right word... I remember once meeting him in the street and asking how he liked a lecture we had both lately attended. I did not specially want to know nor he to tell, and as he sought for the right words it began to rain, and by and by it was raining heavily. In this predicament he signed to a passing growler and we got in and it remained there stationary until he reached the triumphant conclusion, which was that no one could have delivered a lecture with less offence.’

  * Sir William Crookes, a member of the British Society for Psychical Research, invented a radiometer that led to the cathode ray tube and television.


  * Biographers have said that this was for only the winter months, but letters are written from there by Kicky with a handwritten address at other times of the year. It seems to have been his preferred abode at this time.

  * Across the whole spectrum of consciousness, brain waves measured on an electroencephalogram vary in frequency between 1 and 30 hertz. In a light to deep hypnotic trance electrical activity from the cerebral cortex occurs in the region of 8–12 hertz, which means that you are in a relaxed, conscious state, but not asleep. At the ‘light’ end of the hypnotic spectrum, you are daydreaming.

  † Gondal and Angria were the imaginary worlds created by the Brontë children.

  * In March 1970, Colin Wilson, biographer of Robert Maslow, who coined the phrase ‘peak experiences’, met Daphne for tea on the Menabilly Estate and talked almost exclusively about them: ‘He came at one, and stayed till six, and talked and talked, very brilliant and interesting talk . . .’ she wrote to Oriel Malet, and credited Wilson with giving her ‘the final impetus’ to write possibly her best-known psychic short story, ‘Don’t Look Now’: ‘I suddenly became inspired to begin one of the short stories I had been brewing upon. The rather nanny one about Venice – it’s been on my mind for years!’

  † George du Maurier’s wife (Emma) and youngest daughter (May).

  CHAPTER THREE

  Purloining the key

  The year 1891 was the end of the beginning for J.M. Barrie.

  It saw the last of the Thrums novels1 serialised in Good Words – and the start of his career as a playwright. Richard Savage was followed by the one-act Ibsen’s Ghost, produced by J. L. Toole at his theatre in King William Street. On the opening night a man in the pit found it so funny that he had hysterics and had to be removed.

  Published in the same year, Peter Ibbetson became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. As John Masefield wrote, ‘The effect of it upon that generation was profound. Even now, after fifty years, I can think of no book which so startled and delighted the questing mind.’

  After Barrie read it, more or less everything he wrote was touched by Peter’s ‘other world’. He made Kicky’s novel a source myth for his life.

  He called Peter Pan after Peter Ibbetson, not after Peter Llewelyn Davies.* Ibbetson’s never never land, the ‘other world’ forbidden because it is one of unbridled ecstasy, became the Neverland in which Barrie as Peter Pan would lose himself with the boys. And the magic of Peter Ibbetson’s Bois de Boulogne and mare d’Auteuil made an easy transition to Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond. Barrie even bought a St Bernard and called him Porthos after Peter Ibbetson’s dog.

  In his writing, Barrie leant heavily on Ibbetson’s ‘Peter Pan-ish’ childhood with Mimsie and the fairy Tarapatapoum, called Tippy, not Tinkerbell, in the original screenplay of Peter Pan. And he himself slipped into the role of Le Major Duquesnois, who lived on the edge of the park and captivated Gogo with his fairy tales, both in Kicky’s novel and in reality.

  After Peter Ibbetson, Barrie lived within and wrote about the cusp between fiction and fact, between Peter’s dream world and reality. This strange cross-over point became his territory. He followed Kicky into the genre of autobiographically based psycho-fiction* and dabbled in the supernatural in both novels and plays.† But he never experienced the ‘other-world intimacy’ that Kicky did. Without knowing the bliss of peak experience, he never could evoke it in his work. In that sense, he never did ‘get’ Kicky’s secret, as Daphne crows in her story, ‘The Archduchess’, in which the fictional Markoi tries to steal the secret dream formula and she, the Archduchess, keeps it a family secret.

  The first sign of change came as 1891 yielded to the New Year. Suddenly, Barrie was writing about Kicky’s special area of interest, hypnosis. He called the piece Jane Annie, or The Good Conduct Prize. The eponymous heroine is a schoolgirl, named after Barrie’s elder sister of course. She has a gimlet eye and a hypnotic power that grows as she grows. Jane Annie hypnotises fellow pupils, her family and her teacher to get what she wants, and finally she hypnotises the boy of her dreams, Jack, who had wanted nothing to do with her.

  Barrie chose to write it as a musical, although, as he admitted, ‘I have no ear for music. I have only once been to the opera. It was one of the great operas, magnificently done, with Melba in it... I still shudder at its tedium.’† He wrote Jane Annie for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy Theatre.

  This conflagration of oddities – Barrie writing a musical, Barrie writing a musical about hypnosis, Barrie writing a musical about hypnosis for the D’Oyly Carte – points to a gap in the story that could – just possibly – be filled by Kicky coming into Barrie’s life at this time.

  There is no record that they ever met, but as Denis Mackail wrote in Barrie’s official biography, ‘It seems likely if not certain that Kicky must have at least encountered J.M.B.’ We know that the two men by this time had many friends in common,* including Kicky’s intimate friend, Henry James, and that now, according to W. A. Darlington, ‘Barrie found it at times both easy and pleasant to come out of his shell.’

  Certainly, Kicky’s involvement would explain the otherwise inexplicable, for his obsessions were of course hypnosis and music, and he had been involved with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy. Moreover, he knew what few others knew: that Arthur Sullivan had an interest in hypnosis.

  Since the 1860s, Kicky had been invited to musical evenings hosted by a man called Arthur Lewis, which became the talk of the town. Lewis had a high-class drapery store, Lewis and Allenby, but his home was a centre to which artistic and theatrical London gravitated, and he was himself an artist and regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy. He was also the husband of the actress, Kate Terry, famous, but not as famous as her younger sister, Ellen.

  At Lewis’s, Kicky sang musical duologues and one evening someone suggested that Sullivan write something. The result was Box and Cox, a comic operetta based on a farce by John Maddison Morton, the libretto written by Francis Burnand, who for twenty-six years from 1880 was editor of Punch and another regular at Lewis’s. Kicky, with his fine tenor voice, was invited to take a lead role in the operetta for charity. The first performance was at Burnand’s house, but so successful was it that it found its way to the public in a performance at the Adelphi Theatre in May 1887, again with Kicky in it.† Subsequently, long after Kicky ceased his connection with it, Box and Cox became a staple of the D’Oyly Carte.

  Also, Kicky knew that both Gilbert and Sullivan were involved with the Ionides set. Luke had been present at Arthur Lewis’s when Box and Cox had been performed by Kicky and Sullivan’s brother, but more significantly he attended a party with a clairvoyant when ‘Gilbert enclosed a five-pound note which nobody else had seen, in an envelope and told the clairvoyant he should have it if he could tell the number on the note. The man placed the envelope against his forehead for a short time and then said: “I can see 1, 4, 3, but no further.” Afterwards Gilbert said to me that those were the only three numbers of the note that he remembered himself, there having been five in all, and that gave me the impression that it was thought reading.’2

  That Barrie was at least on the fringe of Kicky’s inner circle at this time – a friend, perhaps, of Felix Moscheles who could have answered his breathless enquiries about Kicky and hypnotism – is further suggested by one or two rather telling similarities between Barrie’s operetta, Jane Annie, and Kicky’s as yet unpublished novel, Trilby.

  The version Kicky gave to Henry James in 1889 described the work as ‘the history of a servant girl’. At that stage, Trilby was not an artist’s model, she was a servant girl, perhaps to disguise the fact that she was based on the real-life model, Carry. Few people apart from Henry James and Felix Moscheles knew about Carry. Was it mere coincidence, therefore, that, in Barrie’s operetta, the hypnotist Jane Annie mesmerises a character called Caddie, who is a servant boy?

  Meanwhile, Barrie was pursuing another strategy with links to Peter Ibbetson.
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br />   Knowing that he was looking for a woman to fill a role in his new play Walker, London, Barrie’s close friend, the humorist Jerome K. Jerome, introduced him to a pretty actress called Mary Ansell. Barrie cast her in his play and began torturously to court her over the following two years, while Walker, London ran for an incredible 497 performances.*

  So, Barrie was not only writing a play about hypnosis but actually courting a woman, for the first time. Moreover, the woman had the same name as Peter Ibbetson’s tantric lover, and when Barrie eventually wrote about the affair in his autobiographical novel, Tommy and Grizel, he made the connection with Peter Ibbetson clear by having the couple make love not physically, but as Peter Ibbetson and Mary Duchess of Towers make love, ‘by taking thought’.

  It is possible that the whole thing began as a joke, for Jerome knew well enough Barrie’s hopeless craving ‘in the marrow’ for the ladies. Barrie had written about his frustration and talked openly about it with his friends. It was ‘the curse of his life that he had never had a woman’.3

  Jerome also knew about his friend’s fanatical appreciation of Kicky’s novel, and was instrumental not only in introducing Barrie to Mary Ansell, but also to an expert in psychic matters, who was soon advising Barrie about his new interest.

  The psychic expert was the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, whose book, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, had just been published. Doyle and Barrie were Scottish, of course; both had attended Edinburgh University and both loved cricket, Doyle eventually becoming the highest-scoring batsman in the Allahakbarries. But unlike Barrie, Doyle was a member of the Rabelais and had a strong personal interest in hypnosis, and had even submitted himself to one Professor Milo de Meyer in 1891 as a candidate for hypnosis on stage.

  In due course, Conan Doyle helped Barrie with the writing of Jane Annie, but only when, ‘during the course of the libretto’s preparation, Barrie suffered the first of what was to be a series of nervous breakdowns’.4