Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  The cause of the first breakdown is unknown, nor has it been connected with Barrie’s new obsession with matters of the mind; but it is a fact that it occurred during a period of intense interest in hypnosis on the part of both Barrie and Conan Doyle, and immediately after a visit Doyle made to Barrie at his home in Kirriemuir, during Barrie’s research for Jane Annie.

  Conan Doyle remarked in his autobiography that he couldn’t understand why Barrie had decided to write about hypnosis – it seemed so alien a subject to him at that time ‘unless, like Alexander, he wanted fresh worlds to conquer . . .’5

  Doyle then agreed to meet him at the family home in Kirriemuir, presumably to instruct him. After a few days Doyle left Kirriemuir, but was called back urgently when Barrie had the first of his ‘nervous breakdowns’.

  Had Barrie taken his researches for Jane Annie a step too far? Had he attempted to emulate du Maurier’s hands-on research methods, and come badly unstuck? That Barrie had sent for Doyle after his collapse, rather than calling for a doctor, suggests that their mutual interest in hypnosis was somehow implicated in his collapse.

  In spite of Doyle’s contributions, in the spring of 1893 Jane Annie was an abysmal failure,* as Barrie recalled:

  Conan Doyle wrote some good songs, I thought... but mine were worthless and I had no musical sense. Also he was so good-natured that if we lost him at rehearsals he was sure to be found in a shrouded box writing a new song for some obscure member of the company... On the first night at the end a youthful friend came into our box, and Doyle expressed my feelings in saying to him reprovingly, ‘Why didn’t you cheer?’ but I also sympathised with our visitor when he answered plaintively, ‘I didn’t like to, when no one else was doing it.’

  Barrie had had his fingers burned badly with his first practical association with Peter Ibbetson’s world, and in the meantime he had been finding it pretty hard going with Mary Ansell too. According to the author Marie Belloc-Lowndes in a letter to Thomas Hardy, Mary ‘refused to marry Barrie many times, [but in 1894] his mother telegraphed to Mary, who came and they were married on what was supposed to be his deathbed.’

  ‘The first time I went to Kirriemuir was when J.M. was dangerously ill,’ Mary wrote to Peter Llewelyn Davies in 1941. ‘His sister Maggie, whom I had previously met, sent me an urgent telegram to come, and I started for Scotland the same night. I arrived at the house the next morning and was taken at once to his room where I found two trained nurses in attendance. He was only half conscious, but managed to smile feebly as he said, “So you’ve got to Thrums.”’

  What on earth would Mary have made of Margaret Ogilvy and Kirriemuir? What emotional pressure was exerted on her to consent to marrying Barrie ‘on what was supposed to be his deathbed’? One can just about imagine the scene, with the real Jane Anne managing to keep things on an even keel in the face of the dual threat of hypochondria and drink, which ‘only the very strongest’ in Margaret Ogilvy’s family could by this time resist. Whatever and however it happened, on 9 July Barrie made a miraculous recovery and they were married in the house by Margaret Ogilvy’s brother David, the minister.

  After the ceremony, the couple left Kirriemuir straight away for London. Barrie avoided any practical difficulties on his wedding night by conveniently falling ill again, but once on honeymoon in Lucerne, there was no escape.

  The honeymoon was a disaster. Years later, Mary told Peter Davies that her marriage was never consummated, that her husband was ‘a failure as a man... love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced’. To her friend Hilda Trevelyan, an actress who later played Wendy in Peter Pan, she confided that the honeymoon had come as ‘a shock’.6

  Barrie subsequently wrote about it in his autobiographical novel, Tommy and Grizel:

  Tommy trying to become a lover by taking thought, and Grizel not letting on that it could not be done in that way. She thought it was very sweet of him to try so hard; sweeter of him than if he really had loved her, though not of course quite so sweet to her. He was a boy only. She knew that, despite all he had gone through, he was still a boy. And boys cannot love. Oh, is it not cruel to ask a boy to love?

  . . . After some sadness to which she could not help giving way she put all vain longings aside. She folded them up and put them away like the beautiful linen, so that she might see more clearly what was left to her and how best to turn it to account... He was a boy who could not grow up. ‘He would love me if he could.’

  It seems that Barrie could not make love in the physical way, and that his attempts to make love in the Peter Ibbetson way – ‘by taking thought’ – also failed.

  Still, as if announcing his continuing resolve to give Peter Ibbetson’s way a chance, Barrie chose this moment to buy Porthos for Mary, who fell in love with him: ‘He was a baby when I first saw him: a fat little round young thing. The dearest of all in a lovely litter of St Bernards, away there in Switzerland. My heart burnt hot for love of him.’7

  On returning to England, Barrie dashed down to Cornwall to see his friend, Q, a man with gravitas who might restore normality and balance to Barrie’s self-image. And there too, of course, was young Bevil.

  Thereafter, Barrie and his wife settled at 133 Gloucester Road, on the south side of Kensington Gardens in London, just across the park from Kicky’s house at 15 Bayswater Terrace.

  * Equally, Peter Llewelyn Davies was named after Peter Ibbetson.

  * Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900).

  † The Little White Bird (1902), Peter Pan (1904), Dear Brutus (1917), A Well-Remembered Voice (1918), Mary Rose (1920).

  ‡ Dame Nellie Melba’s parents lived in Kirriemuir before leaving for Australia shortly before she was born. In the 1920s, finding himself in the same London nursing home, Barrie sent a message that he would like to meet her ‘if she would promise not to sing’. She sent a message back saying that she would love to ‘if I promised not to read any of my works to her. On that understanding we had a happy time.’

  * Thomas Hardy and George Meredith were friends of both George du Maurier and J.M. Barrie, as were Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree, the editor W. D. Nichols, R. L. Stevenson, Alma-Tadema, J. L. Toole, W. E. Henley and the American artist Edwin Abbey. Landscape painter Alfred Parsons knew Kicky intimately and was a member of Barrie’s Allahakbarries.

  † Felix Moscheles writes that ‘Kicky was “Box,” Harold Power “Cox,” and John Foster “Sergeant Bouncer.” Kicky’s rendering of “Hush-a-by, Bacon,” was so sympathetic and tender that one’s heart went out to the contents of the frying-pan, wishing them pleasant dreams.’

  * Walker, London was a farce set on a houseboat off Tagg’s Island at Moseley on Thames, which Barrie and Gilmour had hired for a month and which had already figured in When A Man’s Single. The enigmatic title was, in fact, a telegraphic address, ‘Walker’, a Cockney catch-word, which you shouted if you thought you were having your leg pulled.

  * Jane Annie was performed once only, in 1893.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The corruption of Neverland

  Kicky and Sylvia had a special relationship, and their love was bound up in the euphoria of Peter Ibbetson, in which father and daughter were the models for Peter and Mary.

  Peter Llewelyn Davies, Sylvia’s third son, treasured the copy of the novel Kicky gave to her:

  I have loved very few books in my life as much as I loved Peter Ibbetson when I was young, and though I don’t read it with half so much pleasure now, I like to think that I got my name from it, and I cherish the copy which Grandpapa gave to S., with its charming inscription: ‘To Sylvia du Maurier, from the author of her being (and of this book), George du Maurier, 1892’.

  However, in 1889, the very year of the novel’s conception, Sylvia had fallen in love on her own account. She met Arthur Llewlyn Davies at a dinner party given by a society hostess called Mrs Rawlinson. Among the guests were the fairy-book illustrator H. J. Ford and two writers, Andrew Lang and Anthony Hawkins. Arthur
Llewelyn Davies was a young lawyer who had just been called to the Bar and was working at the chambers of Joseph Walton, QC, later Mr Justice Walton.

  Ford is supposed to have led Sylvia into dinner and asked her a rather silly riddle – What did she have in common with a hinge?

  ‘Some pretty deep thinking led to no solution of the problem,’ Ford wrote to Peter Llewelyn Davies in February 1938. ‘So I had to give the answer (not without a burning blush): “Because you are a thing to a door.” Miss S shouted out this wantonness to the assembly, especially addressing Andrew Lang, who admitted himself still puzzled, but by the time soup was finished proclaimed that “the operation is accomplished, and if you cut open my head you will find that my brain sees it, but with pain.” Arthur Davies roared and the ice was fairly broken.’

  Sylvia had begun to make an impact on London society. ‘In a ballroom she was always a most noticeable figure, with her crooked smile and general allure,’ wrote her brother-in-law Charles Hoyer Millar. ‘No portrait could ever do justice to her radiating charm and sweetness of disposition.’1

  She was extremely popular with men, and liked men about her. She was fun, flirtatious and had her father’s eye for beauty and his mocking humour, but again like the Duchess, there was a mysterious side to her – ‘she seemed both thoughtful and mirthful at once’.

  According to the diary of 15-year-old Dorothea Parry: ‘Without being strictly speaking pretty [she had] one of the most delightful, brilliantly sparkly faces I have ever seen. Her nose turns round the corner, also turns right up. Her mouth is quite crooked. She is much too fat. Now for her virtues. Her eyes are very pretty, hazel and very mischievous. She has pretty black fluffy hair, but her expression is what gives that wonderful charm and her low voice... Sylvia would be able to manage any man, so it wouldn’t much matter who she marries.’

  Dorothea Parry, or Dolly as she was known, was the daughter of the composer Sir Hubert Parry,* who knew both the ‘du Ms’ and ‘the LlDs’ and observed a ‘strange contrast’ between them, regarding the du Mauriers as ‘easy-going, happy, more or less Bohemian’, while the Llewelyn Davieses were out of a more traditional mould. Indeed, Mary Millais, daughter of Kicky’s old friend the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais, warned Sylvia that ‘the LlDs’ were ‘rather formidable at first when you don’t know them’.

  Arthur was the second son of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies, a Cambridge scholar, ex-President of the Cambridge Union and Honorary Chaplain to Queen Victoria. But the weight of this baggage was relieved by a progressive mix of liberalism and eccentricity.

  In fact, shortly before Arthur met Sylvia in 1889, John Llewelyn Davies had been exiled from the Court and put out to pasture, expelled from his high position and moved to the tiny village of Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland, his crime lambasting imperialism from the pulpit when the Queen was in the congregation. ‘It was regarded as a sort of banishment,’ Dolly wrote to Peter half a century later, although ‘Mr. Davies himself was never in the least bitter, and grew to love Kirkby and his walks over the Fells.’

  At ‘KL’, as Kirkby Lonsdale became known in family letters, John Davies turned the vicarage into a hive of reform. He was a supporter of women’s rights, workers’ rights, and a champion of trade unionism; his sister Emily had founded Girton College in Cambridge in 1869, for no years a college exclusively for women.

  Dolly first stayed with the Llewelyn Davieses at Kirkby in 1890, when she was 14, and wrote in her diary:

  Mrs. Llewelyn Davies was not only a perfect housewife, but a woman with a remarkable brain, and great knowledge and love of literature and poetry. She was remarkably independent in thought and I expect you know that she never went to her husband’s church, and he never asked her to. As a friend rightly said, ‘Creditable to both.’ To me she transmuted what had hitherto appeared rather dry and difficult poems into things of interest and excitement and beauty – reading aloud so well and naturally, explaining any difficult parts or words so simply. I especially remember being thrilled by her reading after tea in the drawing-room, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Sohrab and Rustum’.

  I have often thought of her splendid life with her six sons and one daughter. At that period it was accepted as a matter of course that a daughter would help her mother. But so advanced and so unselfish was Margaret’s mother, that I am sure she hardly breathed it to herself that she would have liked the feminine companionship of a daughter and her help. Margaret would attend meetings and Co-op. parties nearly every evening – and her sitting-room downstairs was swamped with pamphlets on various progressive questions of the day.

  Margaret Davies was a founder member of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, a pacifist, and renowned for her humanitarian and feminist views. Dolly loved the LlDs and the du Ms equally, but commented in her teenage diary: ‘I can’t imagine Sylvia with Margaret D at all – with [Sylvia’s] love for pretty dresses, and the stage’.

  Margaret’s brother, Arthur, a scholar at Marlborough, had taken a First in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge University in 1884, and a law scholarship five years later at the Inner Temple. He was all set to live in Liverpool, considered an easier place to get started in the law than London; but it soon falls from mention in anyone’s letters. Industrial Liverpool of the 1890s would not have appealed to a du Maurier, and the change in plan was a sure sign of who was to wear the trousers in the Davies–du Maurier family.

  Dolly recognised that the young du Mauriers were a fun-loving lot. Sylvia’s brother Guy sang ‘delicious comic songs in a soft, low voice, and accompaniments, in the minor keys, made up by himself... a little dear, one of the cleverest and most delightful of human beings. He is like Sylvia and has her crooked mouth which is a great attraction.’ Gerald, only three years older than Dolly, exercised his particular talent in the love-making department, moving into action to crush any possibility of Dolly fancying the much older Philip Burne-Jones (artist son of Edward, one of Kicky’s Pre-Raphaelite friends) by whisking her off to ‘the Urlins garden party’ and exclaiming, ‘I say, what is the matter with Burne-Jones, he does look seedy.’

  ‘Gerald is a dear, dear thing,’ Dolly wrote, ‘so sweet to have in the house. Always happy, singing at the piano, or sitting in the garden... His spirits sank lower & lower as we drove to the station. He was anxious to know if I cared for Phil, whether he was coming again, and that he couldn’t bear for me to like him, which I assured him I didn’t. He begged me to go on the stage, as then he should not hesitate to go too, as at present he has no profession, and is trying to make up his mind what to do.’

  In September 1891 Dolly’s diary reads: ‘Went to Phil’s party at the New Gallery. We invited Arthur and Sylvia to go with us. The latter looked so pretty and was delightful. She was very wicked, and coughed and winked her eyes when Kenneth got hold of us. I gave K such a snub that he left off talking to us for a little.’

  Dolly first describes Arthur in 1889, the year he and Sylvia met:

  Arthur Davies arrived – he is very handsome and nice, with a great deal of sense of humour. In the morning at breakfast, Mother said that if anyone was starving it would be quite right to steal, and I’m sure I agree with her. We then said that if one person had several bracelets and another none, it would be quite right for the poor person without the bracelets to steal some. Then we all stole each other’s things – Arthur Davies stealing my beads and Mother Mrs. Rate’s blue china.

  In March 1890 Kicky received a letter from Arthur containing a formal proposal of marriage, to which Kicky’s reply, written in March 1890, refers* :

  15, Bayswater Terrace, W.

  Tuesday

  My Dear Davies,

  Will 9.30 do tomorrow morning?

  In haste

  I remain yours

  G. du Maurier

  Arthur’s mother in Westmorland was immediately welcoming to Sylvia and wrote at far greater length and in far warmer terms.

  The inevitable first visit of Sylvia to Kirkby – a distance of some 300 mile
s – lasted a fortnight, at the end of which she returned to the du Maurier abode in Bayswater:

  15, Bayswater Terrace.

  April 15th [1890]

  Dearest Mrs Davies,

  I feel I must just write a few lines to you, to thank you with all my heart for being so very kind and sweet to me.

  The journey to Kirkby was rather painful, but the sweetness at the end of it, and the dear ones waiting to meet me, was worth going through much, much more for.

  The recollection of my first visit to Kirkby will be very dear to me, and I shall never be able to thank you enough. I am very, very fond of you. I was, I think, the moment I saw you.

  I had a letter from Arthur this morning, and I’m going to write to him now.

  It was dreadful saying goodbye to him at Preston.

  Good bye, with fond love to you all, and hoping Margaret is better.

  Always affectionately yours,

  Sylvia du Maurier

  Mary Llewelyn Davies replied the following day:

  . . . It is delightful to think that your visit to us has established an intimacy and affection which will, I hope, go on always increasing.

  I have missed you so since you went away! It quite surprised me how you have got into my heart in so short a time! The little red room looks sadly desolate – no dear couple there when I look-in – not even the two chairs standing before the fire – and in the evening that corner of the sofa is empty and I don’t know how the little white shawl is getting on . . .

  Cold and very blowy still. Margt sends you her dear love. My little photo is better than nothing, but make haste and send us something more really like you – and eschew a head rest.

  Good bye, darling. Write as often as you feel inclined. Kindest regards to yr father and mother and Mary.