J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  Mary Ansell at the time of her marriage

  This hauntingly vivid premonition hardly boded well for marital bliss; yet despite his better judgement Barrie proposed to Mary Ansell, and she accepted. In his notebook he wrote:

  — Morning after engagement, a startling thing to waken up & remember you're tied for life.

  Barrie travelled up to Kirriemuir to break the news to his mother, but on his arrival he was almost immediately struck down with pleurisy and pneumonia, which left him with a permanent cough for the rest of his life. His illness was of national concern while his life hung in the balance. Mary Ansell quit the cast of Walker, London, and headed north to nurse her fiancé back to health. If Margaret Ogilvy harboured any doubts about her son marrying an actress, they were now swept aside by the spectacle of Mary's love and devotion. On July 1st, Barrie was able to write to Quiller-Couch:

  ‘My lungs are quite right again, and I have only to pick up strength now. Miss Ansell, who has an extraordinary stock of untrustworthy information on diseases of the human frame, knows all about quinsy and says she can sympathise in full. Yes, it is all true though it was in the papers. … We have worked hard to get married unbeknown to the lady journalists but vainly. In about a week it will be,—up here, so that we can go off together straight away, she to take charge. We go across the channel first for a month and fully mean to come your way soon thereafter.’

  A rather different account of the prelude to the marriage was given by Hilaire Belloc's sister, the writer Marie Belloc Lowndes, in a letter to Mrs Thomas Hardy dated June 21st, 1937—two days after Barrie's death:

  I was very intimate with a young woman, now long dead, who was Mary Ansell's beloved friend. As of course you know, all that about her nursing Barrie is rubbish. She refused to marry him many times. Then he fell ill at Kirriemuir, and his mother telegraphed to Mary who came and they were married on what was supposed to be his deathbed. He told all this to Mrs Oliphant who told me and my mother, just after she had seen him.’

  Barrie at the time of his marriage

  Whatever the truth, Mary Ansell accepted James Matthew Barrie as her husband on Monday July 9th, 1894. The ceremony was a simple affair, performed by a local minister in his parents' home, according to Scottish custom. After it was over, the newly-married couple left for their honeymoon in Switzerland. The ubiquitous notebooks went with them. Two days before the wedding, Barrie had jotted down in one of them:

  — Our love has brought me nothing but misery.

  — Boy all nerves. ‘You are very ignorant.’

  — How? Must we instruct you in the mysteries of love-making?

  3

  1894–1897

  In rounding off an interview with the ‘bewitchingly flirtatious’ Miss Mary Ansell, the Sketch noted that Barrie had ‘not long ago declared to an American interviewer that he quite intended to marry, if only to have the convenience of using his wife's hair-pins to clean his pipes’.1 The truth of the jest soon became apparent to Mary, and she later confided to Hilda Trevelyan that the honeymoon had been a shock to her. She did not elaborate, but Barrie's Swiss notebook makes an oblique reference to his dilemma:

  —Scene in Play. Wife—Have you given me up? Have nothing to do with me? Husband calmly kind, no passion &c. (à la self)

  While in Lucerne, Mary embarked on what was to become a lifelong passion: her love for dogs. She saw a litter of St Bernard puppies in a pet-shop window, and Barrie bought her one as a wedding present. She later wrote in Dogs and Men:

  ‘Perhaps my love for dogs, in the beginning, was a sort of mother-love. Porthos 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. …

  ‘I have never been really happy with people. Some constraint tightens me up when I am with them. They seem so inside themselves, so unwilling to reveal their real selves. I am always asking for something they won't give me; I try to pierce into their reserves; sometimes I feel I am succeeding, but they close in again, and I am left outside.

  ‘But with animals it is different. An animal is so helplessly itself. … I become one with them. I, too, become helplessly myself. They never withhold themselves from me as men withhold themselves. When the dogs loved me, they did it without forethought or afterthought, because they couldn't help it. But men didn't love me unless they wanted to; unless I fitted in with their idea of me. The dogs didn't have an idea of me. They just loved me—me—me—with passion and warmth, without thinking about it.

  ‘I only loved clever men. And clever men, it seems to me, are made up of reserves. It is out of their reserves they bring their clever things.

  ‘You think they will one day open their reserves, and that you will be the favoured one who is admitted to the cupboards where they keep their cleverness. But that is an illusion. The reserves of men are as helpless as a dog's lack of reserve is helpless. A man had to be clever, really clever, to please me. And I loved my dogs so passionately because they could never, never be clever in that way. They could never be complicated as the men were complicated.’

  Although Porthos had been a wedding present to Mary, Barrie soon won the dog's affection for himself. The method of capture held good for both dogs and children:

  ‘[Porthos] passionately loved his master. He really loved him more than he did me. It was a case of Mary and Martha. I gave him medicine, and kept him clean, and generally looked after him, but his master played with him. And he was a genius at games. They had fearful wrestling matches. These went on until both were exhausted. And they ran races, in and out of the rooms, up and down the stairs, out of the front door, in by the back, over and over and over again. … When it was all over I went round collecting the debris.’2

  Porthos, named after the St Bernard in George du Maurier's novel Peter Ibbetson

  And Barrie went back to the silence of his study. He once told a correspondent that the ‘taking of myriads of notes first has always been my way, and occupied me longer than the actual writing’.3 For the past five years he had been filling notebooks with notes for a novel provisionally entitled ‘The Sentimentalist’. Most of these notes concerned the adult life of the central character, Tommy Sandys, which inevitably related to his own. He had already decided to make Tommy a writer, and his intention had been to write a single book about the adult Tommy under the title Sentimental Tommy. But as he set to work on the actual text, he found himself becoming increasingly preoccupied with Tommy's childhood. He later explained in the introduction to the American edition:

  ‘This is not in the smallest degree the book I meant it to be. Tommy ran away with the author. When we meet a man who interests us, and is perhaps something of an enigma, we may fall a-wondering what sort of boyhood he had; and so it is with writers who become inquisitive about their own creations. It was Sentimental Tommy the man that I intended to write here; I had thought him out as carefully as was possible to me; but when I sat down to make a start I felt that I could not really know him at one and twenty unless I could picture him at fifteen, and one's character is so fixed at fifteen that I saw I must go farther back for him, and so I journeyed to his childhood. Even then I meant merely to summarize his early days, but I was loath to leave him, or perhaps it was he who was loath to grow up.’

  Notebook entry for ‘The Sentimentalist’, slightly smaller than actual size. The second paragraph reads: ‘Treat man really loving, yet not wanting to marry – effect on woman (M.A.)’ Presumably ‘M.A.’ refers to Mary Ansell

  The major part of the novel explores Tommy's character against a setting of boyhood episodes and adventures. Tommy is a boy who is in love with himself. He is a born actor, who ‘passes between dreams and reality as through tissue-paper’ and has the faculty of ‘stepping into other people's shoes and remaining there until he became someone else’. There is little that is ‘sentimental’ about Tommy in the sense of mawkish; Barrie used the word in its artistic mean
ing of sympathetic insight. It is Tommy's schoolmaster, Cathro, who brands him ‘Sentimental Tommy’, for reasons explained to one of Tommy's adult admirers:

  ‘“Tommy Sandys has taken from me the most precious possession a teacher can have—my sense of humour.”

  ‘“He strikes me as having a considerable sense of humour himself.”

  ‘“Well, he may, Mr McLean, for he has gone off with all mine. … But I think I like your young friend worst when he is deadly serious. He is constantly playing some new part—playing is hardly the word though, for into each part he puts an earnestness that cheats even himself, until he takes to another. I suppose you want me to give you some idea of his character, and I could tell you what it is at any particular moment; but it changes, sir, I do assure you, almost as quickly as the circus-rider flings off his layers of waistcoats. A single puff of wind blows him from one character to another, and he may be noble and vicious, and a tyrant and a slave, and hard as granite and melting as butter in the sun, all in one forenoon. All you can be sure of is that whatever he is he will be it in excess. … Sometimes his emotion masters him completely, at other times he can step aside, as it were, and take an approving look at it. That is a characteristic of him, and not the least maddening one. … He baffles me; one day I think him a perfect numbskull, and the next he makes such a show of the small drop of scholarship he has that I'm not sure but what he may be a genius.”

  ‘“That sounds better. Does he study hard?”

  ‘“Study! He is the most careless whelp that ever— … I don't think he could study, in the big meaning of the word. I daresay I'm wrong, but I have a feeling that whatever knowledge that boy acquires he will dig out of himself. There is something inside him, or so I think at times, that is his master, and rebels against book-learning. No, I can't tell what it is; when we know that, we shall know the real Tommy.”’

  Title page and two photographs of Bevil Quiller-Couch (‘The Pippa’) and Porthos from ‘The Pippa & Porthos’

  Although Sentimental Tommy was to be largely based on his own boyhood in Kirriemuir, Barrie found that the companionship of a real boy helped to bring the memories swinging back. Such a boy was Arthur Quiller-Couch's son, Bevil. Barrie wrote to ‘Q.’ on November 7th: ‘Being at present without any home in particular, liking your quarter of the world, eager to see yourselves, and itching to smash that there boy, we propose a descent on Fowey.’ Barrie duly descended on the Quiller-Couches in December, bringing with him his wife, his dog, his notebooks—and his camera. This camera had been bought in Switzerland, and it was now put to use on New Year's Day 1895, to record the exploits of Bevil (nicknamed ‘The Pippa’) and Porthos. He later compiled twenty-four of the photographs into a hand-written story for Bevil, entitled ‘The Pippa & Porthos’ – ‘Dedicated to Mrs Quiller-Couch (without her permission). The Literary Matter by J. M. Barrie. The drudgery by Mary Barrie.’4

  133 Gloucester Road, South Kensington

  By early March, the Barries were back in London and moving into their first house, 133 Gloucester Road—one of the capital's more hideous examples of late Victorian architecture. There was, however, a consolation. Kensington Gardens was only a short distance from the house, and its proximity afforded Porthos the luxury of a daily walk.

  The Gardens were wild territory in those days, a rustic sanctuary from the bustle and roar of London's horse-drawn traffic. Sheep grazed in the long grass, wildfowl inhabited the inlets along the edge of the Serpentine lake and the island in its middle. Barrie and his wife could wander undisturbed for hours if they wished, with only Porthos for company. But the Broad Walk was another matter. ‘All perambulators lead to the Kensington Gardens' wrote Barrie in The Little White Bird, and between the hours of two and four the Broad Walk became the domain of that vanished race, nursemaids. Here they would congregate every afternoon, busily airing their views on the business of babies, while their elder charges raced hoops or sailed boats on the near-by Round Pond.

  Kensington Gardens and the Round Pond in 1897. In The Little White Bird, Barrie wrote, ‘There are men who sail boats on the Round Pond, such big boats that they bring them in barrows, and sometimes in perambulators, and then the baby has to walk. … But the sweetest craft that slips her moorings in the Round Pond is what is called a stick-boat, because she is rather like a stick until she is in the water and you are holding the string. Then as you walk round, pulling her, you see little men running about her deck, and sails rise magically and catch the breeze, and you put in on dirty nights at snug harbours which are unknown to the lordly yachts. … You are a solitary boy while all this is taking place, for two boys together cannot adventure far upon the Round Pond, and though you may talk to yourself throughout the voyage, … you know not, when it is time to go home, where you have been or what swelled your sails; your treasure-trove is all locked away in your hold, so to speak, which will be opened, perhaps, by another little boy many years afterwards.’

  Portrait of Barrie by William Nicholson

  The Barries and Porthos soon became familiar figures to the regular patrons of the Gardens. They made an incongruous spectacle: Barrie minute, in a bowler hat and an overcoat several sizes too big for him, accompanied by his cough, his pipe, his minute wife and their vast St Bernard, who had a habit of standing on his hind legs and dwarfing them both. Porthos and Barrie could perform a number of tricks and games together, from simple hide-and-seek to a full-blooded boxing match. Sometimes smaller children ran screaming from the noble Porthos, which horrified their nursemaids, distressed Mary Barrie, and on the whole left her husband smiling. Like many childless women, Mary adored all children, and wanted to be loved by them. Barrie, on the other hand, feigned indifference to the breed. He could afford to; he had total confidence in his ability to fascinate any child he cared to ensnare.

  The Barries decided to spend their first wedding anniversary in Switzerland again, but before going, they paid their regular visit north to Kirriemuir. Although weak and frail, Margaret Ogilvy seemed to be in reasonable health; Barrie's elder sister, Jane Ann, had long ago sacrificed her own ambitions so that she might nurse their mother in her old age. The manuscript of Sentimental Tommy was at last finished, and Barrie read the story to his mother, as he had done with all his stories.

  The book appears to have met with her full approval and he now began to make notes for an introduction, requested by his American publisher, Charles Scribner. Since there could be no disguising that the book was about his boyhood, he decided that the introduction should be about his mother. Sitting by her bedside, Barrie started to jot down his observations of her:

  — Mother. Her love for her father—In old age she thinks she is young again, & he is alive. She thinks her son (self) is him, & he pretends he is, & says the kind of things her father wd have said, & she is happy—yet it is pathetic to think that she has forgotten son who has been so good to her. The whole thing a proof how the people & events of our own childhood impress us. As we die, all else vanishes, & we use the words (like mother) that we have not used for sixty years & see the old furniture & faces & seem to live the old life.

  — Her thoughts on death—secret feelings, wistful 1/2 afraid, wandering mind, ‘Is this my bed?’ ‘Is that you? You're my son, aren't you?’ Using words of childhood.

  Despite the ominous ring evident in these notes, Barrie felt it safe to leave Kirriemuir and travel to Switzerland with Mary. ‘I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my hands. I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours before, saying that all was well at home. The telegram said in five words that she [Jane Ann] had died suddenly the previous night. There was no mention of my mother, and I was three days' journey from home. The news I got on reaching London was this: my mother did not understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for me to tell her.’5

  Margaret Ogilvy's grave

  At about the same time as the Barries were catching the night train to Kirriemuir, Margaret Ogilvy was drifting about her
home, vaguely intimating that she knew her daughter was dead. More than once she whispered eagerly, ‘Is that you, David?’, then asked that she might hold the old robe in which all her children had been christened. ‘It was brought to her, and she unfolded it with trembling, exultant hands, and when she had made sure that it was still of virgin fairness her old arms went round it adoringly, and upon her face there was the ineffable mysterious glow of motherhood.’6

  By the time Barrie arrived the next morning, Margaret Ogilvy had been dead for twelve hours. She was buried with Jane Ann in the same grave that held her beloved son David. The date was September 6th, 1895—Margaret Ogilvy's seventy-sixth birthday.

  Two weeks later Barrie was back in London, writing to his friend W. E. Henley, whose own daughter Margaret had died some months before at the age of six:

  133 Gloucester Road, S.W.

  17 Sept '95.

  My dear Henley,

  It is all as you say. My mother died full of years and honours, and the debt of nature was paid with the simplicity in which she always lived. She was always the glory of my life, and now I sit thinking and thinking, but I cannot think of one little thing I cd have done for her that was left undone. That leaves me with a kind of gladness even now. What saddens me most is the loss of my sister, who had given a whole life's devotion to her.