Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  It is the nature of the poet and the writer of fiction that he or she stands on this boundary between two worlds. Daphne’s optimism and faith in the power of texts, to reveal a sense of what both she and her grandfather believed exists just beyond the bounds of human perception, remained undimmed to the end, even as she made her own preparations for death.

  The day before she died, she telephoned Oriel, herself a writer. It was a short call.

  ‘Are you writing?’ she asked.

  As Oriel hesitated, Daphne insisted: ‘You must, it’s the only way!’

  Image Gallery

  George du Maurier (Kicky), as an art student in the 1850s in Paris, where he first learned about hypnotism.

  George du Maurier’s depiction of life with Felix Moscheles in his room at the Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The following morning du Maurier wrote: ‘May thy room be always as jolly, thy coffee ever so sweet... and may I never be blinder!’

  The Midnight Presence of the Uncanny. George du Maurier and Felix Moscheles ‘made frequent inroads into the boundless land where unknown forces dwell’. Whenever du Maurier depicts himself ‘with fixed gaze and hair erect, sitting bolt upright’, it is a sure sign that hypnotism is in progress. Wrote Moscheles: ‘It was on one of these excursions that du Maurier was inoculated with the germs that were eventually to develop into Svengalism.’

  Excerpt from an illustrated letter written in French by George du Maurier to Carry, who was hypnotised by both him and Moscheles.

  ‘Moscheles, or Mephistopheles? which’ du Maurier queries, as he depicts his hypnotist at the piano, and demonstrates the devilry he perceives in the psychic games they played together.

  George du Maurier with his wife Emma and their daughter May, in 1874. Emma made it a condition of their marriage that he gave up hypnotism and other possibly drug-related activities.

  George du Maurier in the 1880s, established in London as a successful illustrator. He Drew regularly for Punch and illustrated novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

  Sketch by George di Maurier of his daughter, Sylvia, with whom he shared an exceptionally close relationship, and who was his model for the hypnotic temptress Mary, Duchess of Towers, in his novel Peter Ibbetson.

  Henry James, After lunch of Sundays, he and George du Maurier would take a walk across Hampstead Heath to their ‘bench of confidences’. Both had a strong interest in hypnosis, and both wrote novels that hinge on the erotic issues of the hypnotic relationship.

  Dolly (Dorothea) Parry with her parents, the composer Hubert and his wife Maude. Dolly’s teenage diaries give a vivid picture of the traditional Arther Llewelyn Davies in love with the easy-going, bohemian Sylvia du Maurier.

  Sylvia du Maurier: she ‘had an inner life of her own, which is what gave her her great interest’.

  Arthur Llewelyn Davies: ‘joli garçon’ and ‘a young warrier in an Italian picture’.

  Sylvia with George, the first-born of her five sons, named after her father.

  Jane Annie, who hypnotises everyone to get her own way, was named after Barrie’s eldest sister, Jane Ann (above left), a spinster who dedicated her life to caring for their redoubtable mother, Margaret Ogilvy (above right). But it was the younger sister Maggie, with whom Barrie was closest, who was the medium.

  Jamie Barrie, in 1882 when a student at Edinburgh University, where Robert Galloway described him as ‘exceedingly shy and diffident, and I do not remember ever to have seen him enter or leave a classroom with any companion’.

  Arthur Conan Doyle. A dedicated spiritualist, he helped with Barrie’s most unusual and least successful play, Jane Annie, a musical about hypnosis, which Barrie undertook after reading George du Maurier’s novel Peter Ibbetson.

  Mary Ansell, Barrie’s actress wife, who wrote ‘that love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced’. She ‘knew all about Jim’s enthusiasms’, and helped pave the way for his relationship with Sylvia.

  Jim Barrie with his St Bernard, whose antics entertained children in Kensington Gardens. Barrie named the dog Porthos, after Peter Ibbetson’s dog in George du Maurier’s fiction.

  Mary Hodgson, loyal nanny to Sylvia’s five sons, in 1897, the year Barrie met the boys ‘by chance’ in Kensington Gardens.

  Daphne du Maurier, as a small child, with ‘hypnotic eyes’.

  George du Maurier’s illustration of the artists’ model Trilby, originally modelled on Carry,the girl he hypnotised and loved when he was young.

  Daphne looking like Trilby (above) and (below) dressed as Marty, who would inherit the du Maurier secret. Acting out her fantasies, Daphne found her way naturally into the 'other order of things', believing that enlightenment comes from an altered state of consciousness, a state of trance. This was what drew Barrie in.

  The five Llewelyn Davies brothers and the three du Maurier sisters:

  George, the first of the boys to be captivated by Barrie, developed ‘almost what the Germans called Weltschmerz – a sadness of the world’. Killed in France in 1915, he had with him a copy of The Little White Bird, Barrie’s novel in which George himself featured alongside Peter Pan.

  Jack, wary of Barrie’s influence, descended into depression and died in his early sixties.

  Peter, whose mind, like Jack’s, was ‘clouded over a good deal’ about the Barrie years, committed suicide months after Jack died.

  Michael, who could not break free from Barrie, drowned in what appeared to be a suicide pact, aged 20.

  Nico, mentally and physically different from the others, and the youngest, was the least influenced by Barrie. ‘Of course when one – I at any rate – gets on to dreams, one is in a world of lovely non-comprehension.’

  The du Maurier sisters: Angela (older than Daphne by three years) and Jeanne (younger by four) and Daphne with their mother. It was Daphne who was captivated by Barrie and liked to lose herself ‘in that silent shadow-land that marches a hand’s breadth from our own’. She became close to her cousin Peter in the 1950s, suffered a nervous breakdown, and later herself attempted suicide.

  Michael and Nico with Uncle Jim, on Eilean Shona on the west coast of Scotland, the summer before Michael died.

  Michael on the river at Oxford, with friends. Robert Boothby is holding the pole.

  Sandford Pool, where Michael drowned. Said Peter: ‘The place is too calm, and the distance from bank to bank too small, for the question of swimming capacity to enter into it at all.’

  Barrie, still impish in 1920, before Michael’s death.

  Barrie inconsolable a year later. He is wearing the trilby hat which – in Daphne’s stories – is the symbol of Svengali’s hypnotic power, its appropriator the personification of evil.

  Barrie, 1930, looking out over the Thames from the top floor of Adelphi Terrace House, as it were from the Captain’s bridge.

  Daphne with Gerald in 1925, when she was 18. She referred to her relationship with him as her ‘Daddy complex’. Gerald’s interference in her childhood had a strange affinity with Barrie’s interference in the lives of George and Michael as boys.

  Daphne rowing from Fowey to Ferryside in Bodinnick. ‘Here was the freedom I desired, long sought-for, not yet known.’

  ‘Tommy’ Browning, Major in the Grenadier Guards.

  Daphne in 1932, the year she married Major Browning, anything but an army wife.

  Daphne dreaming in the ‘writing hut’ at Menabilly. The locals believed ‘she would call up the spirits and get them to write her books. She was always in a trance, they used to say’

  Daphne in 1948, in the Aldwych Theatre with Gertrude Lawrence, discussing her play September Tide, in which Gertie starred.

  Daphne in old age. ‘I have been right down into the depth of horro, but I am coming out now.’

  Sylvia with Barrie’s first favourite among her sons, George.

  Barrie, ‘the little photographer’, took this picture of Peter on the beach at Rustington-on-Sea.

  Black Lake Cottage
in Surrey, where Barrie engaged the boys in games of pirates and redskins, enacting scenes which in 1904 transferred to Neverland in Peter Pan.

  We set out to be wrecked. George, Jack and Peter at Black Lake Cottage: ‘One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge,’ wrote Barrie.

  Uncle Jim, who analysed himself as ‘that sly one, the chief figure, who draws further and further into the wood as we advance upon him’.

  Michael was one year old during the first Black Lake holiday, ‘an honorary member of the band, waving his foot to you for luck . . .’ In his novel The Little White Bird, Barrie has Nanny say of the boy’s captivator: ‘If he takes off your socks, my pretty, may he be blasted for evermore.’

  Michael Llewelyn Davies (left) and his eldest brother George (right).

  ‘We all knew that George and Michael were “The Ones” ... [Barrie] was in love with each of them.’

  Jim Barrie in 1904, the year that Peter Pan was first staged. Its success accorded him extraordinary charisma. Thereafter, many people perceieved him to live within a Peter Pan world, and some ‘were rather disturbed... There was something sinister about him, rather shivery.’

  Sylvia, inexpressibly sad, after Arthur died of cancer of the jaw at the age of 44.

  Sylvia during her last illness. She died at the same age as her husband. ‘44’ became the du Mauriers’ unlucky number.

  Sylvia’s Will, which set out in her own hand who should inherit her money and who should look after her orphaned children. (Above) concerning the boys: ‘what I wd like wd be if Jenny wd come to Mary & that the two together wd be looking after the boys & the house . . .’ Mary was Nanny Hodgson and Jenny was her sister. (Below) M. Barrie wilfully changed ‘Jenny’ to his own name, ‘Jimmy’, in the transcription of the Will he sent to the boys’ grandmother, telling her it was ‘an exact copy’. In his handwriting: ‘what I would like would be if Jimmy would come to Mary’. In this way, he made himself guardian of Sylvia’s five sons.

  The boys fly fishing, their favourite pastime with Uncle Jim.

  Uncle Jim in the Penthouse flat at Adelphi Terrace House, the house on the strand to which he moved Michael and Nico in 1918, after engineering Nanny Hodgson’s resignation.

  Daphne’s father Gerald du Maurier, actor, actor-manager, and matinée idol. Barrie launched Gerald’s career on the London stage and wrote parts for him in many of his plays. Whenever family problems intervened, Barrie made certain that jobs, finance and even a knighthood came Gerald’s way.

  Daphne’s mother ‘Mo’ Beaumont fell in love with Gerald when Barrie cast her opposite him in The Admirable Crichton. From the start, Daphne’s life was written and produced by Uncle Jim.

  Scott of the Antarctic. He fulfilled Barrie’s ideal of the heroic explorer.: ‘Having found the entrancing man, I was unable to leave him.’

  Lady Cynthia Asquith, secretary to Barrie and principal legalee on his death.

  Appendix

  On Women in Love

  Before he met Mary Cannan, D. H. Lawrence had an interest in J. M. Barrie. Barrie’s Tommy novels had a profound effect on him. Equally, Barrie regarded Sons and Lovers (1913) as ‘the best novel that he had read by any of the younger men’.1 Lawrence must have been fascinated to get the low-down on Barrie from his ex-wife. And he might also have questioned her on Captain Scott. For Women in Love* so significant in the movement of ideas in the twentieth century, denounced the heroic values that Scott embodied, and Mary knew at first hand all about Barrie’s relationship with the explorer.

  I discovered Lawrence’s interest in Scott from Lawrence scholar Peter Fjågesund, whom I happened to meet in 2005 while he was writing an article about Women in Love. When I realised that Mary had been close to Lawrence from the time he was writing this novel, it got me reading it again and marvelling at certain parallels with the story of Barrie which I was researching.

  Women in Love analyses Britain at a pivotal point in its history, and Lawrence was no different from any writer in being on the lookout for real characters and relationships and images that would stimulate the expression of his ideas. Immediately I was struck by the similarity between the central relationship between Gerald Crick and Rupert Birkin, described by Lawrence as a ‘blood brotherhood’, and that of Gerald du Maurier and Jim Barrie – both relationships oddly inimical. There is a ‘strange enmity between the two men, that was very near to love . . .They burned with each other, inwardly. This they would never admit. They intended to keep their relationship a casual free-and-easy friendship, they were not going to be so unmanly and unnatural as to allow any heart- burning between them. They had not the faintest belief in deep relationship between men and men, and their disbelief prevented any development of their powerful but suppressed friendliness.’

  I am not saying that Lawrence ‘pegged’ the fictional relationship on the real one, only that something like the same strange balance attended both, which Lawrence expresses beautifully.

  At the same time, Gerald Crick bears a physical resemblance to Captain Scott – his beauty is ‘a northern kind... like light refracted from snow’, his hair ‘was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice’. The polar imagery, as Fjågesund pointed out to me, suggested a link with Scott rather than Gerald du Maurier. But that was as it should be. For any reference to a real relationship was unimportant to Lawrence, except as a stimulus. No exactness was required, as it was by Barrie in his psycho-fiction and alchemic texts. There is a discussion in Women in Love about whether art can have a relation to anything outside, and Lawrence, I am sure, went with the character who says: ‘You must not confuse the relative work of action with the absolute world of art. That you must not do.’ Lawrence’s italics, and one in the eye for Jim. If Lawrence and Frieda, and Mary and Cannan, ever spoke about Barrie, which they must have, such themes were bound to have been a point of discussion, for Barrie’s art was soon to fall to that of the new post-war writers, led by Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Pound and Eliot.

  Nevertheless, much that was of deep interest to Barrie appears in Women in Love. The central ‘otherworldly’ image of Willey Water in Women in Love has the same function as the mermaids’ lagoon in Peter Pan. There is also a significant death in Lawrence’s novel, and there is the same idea that death is an awfully big adventure – ‘To die is... a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known; namely, the pure unknown,’ writes Lawrence.

  More broadly, Barrie’s longing for sensual knowledge is Lawrence’s notion of ‘knowledge... not in your head but in the blood... when the mind and the known world is drowned in darkness – everything must go... Then you find yourself in a palpable body of darkness, a demon.’ Rupert Birkin, who is held by many critics to be speaking largely for Lawrence in the novel, is called ‘a dreadful Satanist’ for believing this. His is the sensuous, hypnoid absenteeism from conscious life, which so characterised Barrie’s relationship with the boys when they were very young. ‘You’ve got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into being,’ says Birkin. ‘You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition.’ This was what Jim ‘achieved’ with young George, or vice versa. For Birkin, ‘the will, the ego, is what is between us and the otherworld’, and hypnosis is of course the best way to remove the will in order to facilitate the transition to ‘the otherworld’. The fictional ideas are not borrowed, but they are sympathetic.

  Again, in line with these ideas and the du Maurier myth, Birkin wants sex ‘to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as fulfilment. He wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.’

  But there is one character who enters towards the end of the novel, and who puts all these parallels in the shade, b
ecause he is so obviously ‘pegged’ on Barrie. Crick and his girlfriend Gudrun, and Birkin and Gudrun’s sister, Ursula, go on holiday together to a hotel at Innsbruck and meet ‘a short, energetic-looking man with large moustaches’, Herr Loerke, the very image of Barrie, a kind of Austrian version of him attired in loden suit with knee breeches (a nice comical twist – what would he have looked like!) –

  The little man with the boyish figure and the round, full, sensitive-looking head, and the quick, full eyes, like a mouse’s [who] held himself aloof... His body was slight and unformed, like a boy’s, but his voice was mature, sardonic, its movement had the flexibility of essential energy, and of a mocking penetrating understanding . . .

  Loerke, like Barrie, keeps to himself, but can also be irrepressibly playful, as Barrie was in games with the boys. He is a mischievous trickster, ‘a maker of disturbing jokes, with the blank look of inorganic misery behind his buffoonery’, as Joyce Carol Oates described him (exactly like Barrie), then suddenly silent again.2