The little nurse was ever a threatening shadow in the background. Irene, in short, did not improve with acquaintance. I found her to be high and mighty.
Barrie’s ‘methods’ had certainly advanced since he was kicking Peterkin around the room and slapping the cheeks of the pretty boy. There was no denying his empathy with the boys, and soon Sylvia was instructing Nanny to share the children with him.
He put the fantasy light in George’s eye, so we are to believe, by telling him that he had originally come across him as a missel-thrush on the sward behind the Baby’s Walk in Kensington Gardens, ‘a missel-thrush, attracted thither that hot day by a hose which lay on the ground sending forth a gay trickle of water’. He was lying on his back in the water, kicking up his legs. ‘And gradually it all came back to him [i.e. George], with a number of other incidents that had escaped my memory . . .’
With stories like this Barrie entranced each of the boys. He also did magic tricks, having received a few simple lessons in conjuring. He had a magic egg-cup which he usually carried with him, and he ‘did some astonishing things with pennies’. Suddenly, too, he was an expert in fairy lore. Another child he knew then, Pamela Maude, the daughter of the stars of The Little Minister, Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, recalled his way with them, writing with delicacy in Worlds Away (1964):
In the evening, when the strange morning light had begun to change, Mr Barrie held out a hand to each of us in silence, and we slipped our own into his and walked, still silently, into the beechwood. We shuffled our feet through the leaves and listened, with Mr Barrie, for sudden sound, made by birds and rabbits. One evening we saw a peapod lying in the hollow of a great tree-trunk, and we brought it to Mr Barrie. There, inside, was a tiny letter, folded inside the pod, that a fairy had written. Mr Barrie said he could read fairy writing and read it to us. We received several more, in peapods, before the end of our visit.
But George was Barrie’s favourite, as he wrote in The Little White Bird, in which George was lightly disguised as ‘David’.
There never was a cockier boy... It is difficult to believe that he walks to the Kensington Gardens; he always seems to have alighted there... One day I had been over-friendly to another boy, and, after enduring it for some time [he] up and struck him... I knew its meaning at once; it was [his] first public intimation that he knew I belonged to him.
Irene scolded him for striking that boy, and made him stand in disgrace at the corner of a seat in the Broad Walk. The seat at the corner of which David stood suffering for love of me is the one nearest to the Round Pond to persons coming from the north . . .
I asked him in a low voice whether he would give me a kiss. He shook his head about six times, and I was in despair. Then the smile came, and I knew that he was teasing me only. He now nodded his head about six times.
This was the prettiest of all his exploits.
For his part, George’s father, with his solid Victorian image of himself as head of the family and his notion that wives should make friends with women not with men once they were married, was not impressed with the almost daily appearance of the strange little man who lived on the other side of the park. Arthur worked hard all day, looked forward to spending time with his boys in the evening, and found it irksome that he almost always found them at play with ‘Uncle Jim’. But could he complain, so happy were they in his company?
Jim meanwhile worked his magic on Sylvia by praising her as the quintessence of motherliness. He would, for example, empathise with her love for her boys, and then imagine her hugging baby Peter ‘with such sudden vehemence that I am sure he wondered whether you were up to anything’. So bald the innuendo, so wittily twisted, that one had to laugh, and Sylvia – used to Arthur’s more prosaic style – did.
Venerating motherliness had also worked for the English artists who turned Trilby into a maternal figure as a defence against her threatening sexuality. It won her favour. We may guess what Jim’s reverence for the maternal meant to Sylvia, who had given birth to three sons in four years and would soon have two more.
A genius with words, Barrie left marks of his quirky, tangential personality wherever he went, as on this sign in the garden at Black Lake Cottage: ‘Persons who come to steal the fruit are requested not to walk on the flower beds.’
Even when Uncle Jim’s humour was not very clever, which was just as often, it beat Arthur’s ‘Merriman jokes’ as far as the boys were concerned. Like one night when Michael, Nico and Uncle Jim stayed at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. Recalled Nico: ‘Scene: my bedroom on, say, the third or fourth floor – Uncle Jim looking out of the window. “This reminds me, I was looking out of a hotel window once when to my horror I saw a man come falling past me – I was on the third floor like this – and as he went by I heard him saying, ‘Ach michty, what a clink I’ll get!’”’ It was ‘Uncle Jim’s slightly Scottish accent, and his slightly melancholic countenance’ that did it: ‘Michael and I were screaming with laughter, and his own eyes would start an ineffable twinkle.’1
Another favourite was Barrie’s ‘Mind That Post!’ story:
A relatively poorly-off couple had been married for thirty or more years in happy times together. The time came when the wife died – all solemnity and customary mourning – undertaker – put in coffin – gently carried downstairs and out through the front garden towards the hearse. Taking the coffin out of the garden it struck a post of the garden gate. This seemed to stir the dead lady as there was suddenly a knocking inside the coffin. They opened the lid – she’d ‘come round’ – was helped out – and they had another good year or two together. Then she died again and all as above until – as the coffin was going through the gate the husband said ‘Eh, mind that post.’2
Much of the time, at first, Jim was just another boy, and, as Peter wrote, ‘Sylvia, a strong character, couldn’t help dominating him.’ She would use him ‘as a kind of extra nurse, extremely useful fairy-godmother, or sometimes even errand-boy,’ according to Denis Mackail.
Another effective if not decisive factor in Jim’s insinuation into the family was his financial leverage. ‘In August 1897 JMB was 37 years old, and one of the most talked of figures in the literary world, with money already pouring in from books and plays, including the enormously successful Little Minister’,3 which alone earned him £80,000. And while Sylvia was very good at making do, she once said to Arthur’s sister Margaret that she longed to be able to buy ‘gold stays and scented bedlinen and real lace pillows’ – she said it deliberately to appal Margaret, a socialist and far more self-disciplined than she, but it was nonetheless a valid pointer to part of her character.
Sylvia had been born into a privileged world, but one in which money still had to be earned. When her father died in 1896, four years into her marriage, there was the promise of a financial fillip from the massive royalties on the sales of Trilby, but there were other dependants with claims. Kicky had been supporting his brother Eugene and sister Isobel, and although both had died in 1890, they left children. Eugene’s widow, a Frenchwoman by the name of Marie Espinasse, lived until 1917 and appears to have been wholly dependent on the du Mauriers, the dressmaking business with Mrs Nettleship, for which Marie worked as well as Sylvia, having been set up to help defray that cost. Equally, if not more to the point, Kicky had left a widow. Emma lived on until 1914. Sylvia’s four siblings could also be expected to share in any inheritance. Funds were also put in trust for Kicky’s grandchildren.
In 1897, Arthur’s career had yet to take off and he struggled to get briefs. Jim, in contrast, drew £8,000 in 1897, and £12,000 in 1898; and soon four times that annually.
The riches that Jim could give Sylvia meant motor cars and holidays abroad, hotels and no-holds-barred expenses. What’s more, caring little for money made Jim free with it, particularly when he saw how Sylvia delighted in his largesse. Peter was dumbfounded when he discovered, while researching The Morgue, that Sylvia had taken no fewer than four maids with her to Tilford for
the first Black Lake holiday with Uncle Jim. Before long, Jim would finance the entire family.
During that first holiday at Black Lake Cottage Arthur saw virtually nothing of his children, who were off playing Castaway games at the lake. There was something of a ‘them and us’ scenario, with Jim definitely one of the boys, and Arthur behind some sort of boring, adult protest about Jim equipping them not only with bows and arrows but with knives.
Wrote Peter, ‘It is clear enough that father didn’t like him . . .’ When Jim made up two copies of The Boy Castaways into books and diplomatically gave one to Arthur, he promptly lost it on a train, ‘doubtless his own way of commenting on the whole fantastic affair’. But Arthur was a gentleman and loyal to his wife. He knew that Sylvia would never upbraid Jim. As Jim wrote of Mrs Darling: ‘There was something in the right-hand corner of her mouth that wanted her not to call Peter Pan names.’ 3
Jim’s kinship with the boys, his financial utility and his humour endeared him to Sylvia. But it was his empathy with her inner life that captivated her. Jim saw at once that by flattering the inner woman he would fulfil a need in her that stiff, unimaginative Arthur could not. He recognised her need to dream.
Soon Jim began addressing Sylvia by her second name, Jocelyn, which no one else used and which marked her out as heir to the du Maurier family secret. She began signing her letters to him, ‘Your Jocelyn’. And there is always a suggestion in Jim’s letters that he has got something special of Sylvia. Arthur was like Mr Darling, who had all of Mrs Darling, ‘except the innermost box... Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more.’4
In Sylvia’s ‘innermost box’, she was a boy. ‘You are so good at boys,’ Jim wrote to her, ‘and this you know is the age of specialists. And you were very very nearly being a boy yourself.’
This was straight out of Trilby, and now, to develop her new identity, Jim wrote Sylvia into the manuscript of Tommy and Grizel, on which he was working: he gave Grizel, Tommy’s lover, the same ‘boyish’ persona. ‘There were times when she [Grizel] looked like a boy. Her almost gallant bearing, the poise of her head, her noble frankness, they all had something in them of a princely boy who had never known fear.’ And, ‘She was least able to resist Tommy when he was most a boy.’
Tommy and Grizel were ‘pegged’ on Jim and Sylvia. It was the first occasion that Barrie transferred a du Maurier on to the page. Grizel in both the Tommy novels had started out as Mary Ansell, but now that Mary was receding from the scene Grizel became Sylvia. He used Sylvia’s ‘tilted nose’ to identify her, just as Kicky had in Peter Ibbetson. He also picked up on Sylvia’s ‘crooked mouth’, the feature that Dolly so enjoyed, writing that Grizel’s mouth ‘screwed up provokingly at one side, as when she smiled’, and her grey eyes, ‘unusually far apart, [which] let you look straight into them and never quivered, they were such clear, gray, searching eyes, they seemed always to be asking for the truth’.
With this identification, Jim and Sylvia first became intertwined and Arthur slunk further back into his kennel, like Mr Darling after Peter Pan came on the scene.
But all was not quite as it seemed, for as we know, Tommy (Jim’s ‘boy’), is not like Little Billee (Kicky’s ‘boy’). Tommy is not pure, innocent, Romantic. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing:
‘If they knew what I really am,’ he cried, with splendid bitterness, ‘how they would run from me... There has been nothing like it since Red Riding Hood and the wolf.’
Tommy was Grizel’s Svengali, just as Jim became Sylvia’s. Should we now expect Jim to hypnotise her? To change her personality and interpretation of the world so that, like Trilby, Sylvia would take on his cynical view and be a slave to his whims, until he dies and she follows him to an early grave? Jim had no intention of dying, but the rest ran pretty much to plan.
He rehearsed his captivation of Sylvia in Tommy and Grizel, and floated the idea that this would rewrite her fate, exploring the possibility that the fantasy might intrude on reality, ‘as a wheel may revolve for a moment after the spring breaks’.
There was precedent in the annals of magic and the supernatural. Altering the state of a human psyche by ‘pegging’ a fictional character on a real person and rewriting his destiny is an instance of Sympathetic (or Imitative) Magic, as described in Sir James Frazer’s famous study of magic and ancient religion, The Golden Bough. The idea is to create ‘a secret sympathy’ with a life and then manipulate it in the text, a more primitive instance being the moulding of an effigy of an enemy and sticking pins in it. Is it so different to the way myths, many of which were picked up in our reading, affect the way we behave?
Daphne wrote of Jim doing this as if he was an artist putting first a woman (Sylvia) and then her son (George) on canvas, saying ‘that it gave him a tremendous sense of power... the fact that a live person, and that person a woman, could be transmuted by him on a blank canvas’.5
There is a suggestion that Jim came to his alchemic method after Sylvia got fed up with being treated like a child by him with his fantasy stories. Tommy winces at Grizel’s ability to see through him, ‘“Don’t you think this is all rather silly,” she said, when he addressed her as the Lady Griselda, and it broke the melancholy pilgrimage of what had once been an enchanted land.’ Tommy then switches with consummate ease to the more serious business.
Ah, Grizel, what a delicious book you are, and how I wish I had written you.
Sylvia, of course, was no stranger to being featured in fiction, and in her father’s drawings for Punch. According to Daphne, once Jim came up with the idea of putting her and her boys into his alchemical texts, Sylvia almost bullied him into it.6
Whether she noticed that Jim had put his customary bowler aside in favour of a trilby is not known, but he did, and if she had, they would have laughed about it together. For Jim’s plan was now a conspiracy in which Sylvia was an accomplice. From this time, the new Sylvia, the Sylvia who caused Arthur heartache, began to emerge.
Henceforth, as with Trilby, there were two Sylvias – the one her husband knew, the mother of his children – and the other Sylvia, the one Jim turned her into, who left Arthur to look after her children when they were ill, who from 1902 went on expensive holidays with Jim without her husband, who handed Jim her children on a plate, and who, once the texts in which Jim transmuted them became famous, ‘wore her children as other women wear pearls or fox-furs’.
So similar to Trilby – who, wearing ‘sables, rouged and pearl-powdered, and her eyes blackened underneath’, reached out of her carriage and looked with disdain at Little Billee standing there, relic of her boring old life.
Said Peter, years later: ‘I think Sylvia’s attitude to Barrie was a special and peculiar one, not very representative of her true self.’
Jim had had to ask himself how to satisfy a woman like Sylvia. He possessed neither good looks nor a passionate nature. Perhaps money would help? But Jim’s creative genius knew a secret beyond such things. In his siege of the teasing beautiful Sylvia, he engaged ‘a broken fellow’ for her to take pity on, ‘a good-natured cynic’ for her to laugh at, ‘a haughty boy’ for her to mother, ‘a grave author’ and of course ‘a little photographer’.7
Did Jim’s dreamy photographs of Sylvia fix the new persona in her mind? He took photograph after photograph of her, poking his camera at her, dancing around her like Rumpelstiltskin, while she sat on the soft earth and let him get on with it. There may have been sensuality in his actions, but physical contact, we are led to believe, once only. While her eyes were shut to the sunshine, she felt him caress her lips with his, like the touch of a butterfly wing. ‘One flicker round the lips and it is done,’ said Mephistopheles, who used the same ploy to seduce an angel.
But Jim was not interested in physical sex. Like his fictional creation Tommy, he was without desire, without feeling of any kind – so he said himself. He lived for the power-play dynamics o
f the relationship. That was his sex. His thrills came, for example, from the tension between the way the new Sylvia rose to the almost supernatural influence he seemed to exert over their lives, and the guilt and shame the old Sylvia felt about leaving Arthur and going abroad with him. Never had he ‘thought to read shame’ in Sylvia’s ‘sweet face’, but it is what he wanted from her: it is what Tommy wants from Grizel.
The dynamic of psychology, which may be therapeutic or exploitative, is the dynamic of sex. Invasion and domination – the intensity of Sylvia’s response and level of her transformation – were Jim’s great satisfaction.
What was it, after all, that a woman wanted? Was it mere social effect... a union of love and goodness... Did she want goodness?... This was the street view of her wants. Cross the threshold and you found her completely, completely cynical about the social world and its advantages. Once inside the house of her soul, and there was a pungent atmosphere of corrosion, an inflamed darkness of sensation, and a vivid, subtle, critical consciousness, that saw the world distorted, horrific.
What then, what next? Was it sheer blind force of passion that would satisfy her now? Not this, but the subtle thrills of extreme sensation in reduction. It was an unbroken will reacting against her unbroken will in a myriad subtle thrills of reduction, the last subtle activities of analysis and breaking down, carried out in the darkness of her, while the outside form, the individual, was utterly unchanged, even sentimental in its poses.*
Tommy is the fantasist who dispenses with the illusion of truth. People are ‘pegs’ on which we hang our emotions. ‘In love’, the whole thing is a complete illusion. ‘Nearly all women feel it in their hearts, though they keep it locked up till they die,’ he has Grizel admit at last. ‘A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be,’ says Tommy. We invest people with the qualities we want them to have, ignoring whether they do actually possess them.
Neverland Page 20
