J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  It is very pathetic to me, your visit to that little grave. I shall go there too some day. She flits thro' the opening of my story, which is now in America.*

  Yours ever,

  J. M. Barrie.

  The frontispiece to Margaret Ogilvy

  In reviewing A Window in Thrums, The Scotsman had observed that Barrie was ‘a man who could make copy out of the bones of his grandmother’. No one knew this better than Barrie himself. In When A Man's Single, a semi-autobiographical account of his journalist days, he wrote: ‘My God! … I would write an article, I think, on my mother's coffin.’ He was now poised to do just that. The introduction to Sentimental Tommy about his mother had grown beyond the scope of a preface, and he decided to expand it into a full-length book: ‘Margaret Ogilvy, by her son, J. M. Barrie’. It was, in every sense, an extra-ordinary book, a memoir of an unknown woman, which revealed far more about the author than it did about her. It was a first of its kind, and it caught the public's imagination like a whirlwind when it appeared on the bookstalls in December 1896. The British Weekly review took up the whole of its front page: ‘Margaret Ogilvy is a book which it is almost sacrilegious to criticise. … It stands unmatched in literature as an idyll of the divinest of human feelings—a mother's love. … This is Mr Barrie's finest and noblest book. … It has been so written that no book of the generation is so likely to outlive us all as this.’

  The praise was not universal. Many Scottish critics felt that family privacy had been violated, while Barrie's own family—in particular his elder brother Alexander—alleged that Barrie had exaggerated his humble origins, fabricated a number of incidents, and portrayed Margaret Ogilvy as a ‘simple-minded’ woman. The literary critic George Blake later echoed their indignation in Barrie and the Kailyard School:

  ‘One may very well wonder why Margaret Ogilvy was ever written, except for private circulation, but Barrie threw the portrait of his mother into the whirlpool of commerce: in cold fact, cashing in on his own popularity. Not many men would deliberately expose their own domestic affairs in this fashion, but Barrie was one of the few; and we can only conclude that commercial success, after a chilly boyhood, had turned his head. On the other hand, it is difficult to determine whether or not Margaret Ogilvy is true to the facts of the woman's life.

  ‘You never know where you are with Barrie. He could lie like a trooper to get the wanted, decisive effect; he made a world to suit his own fancy. For all his reputation for the understanding of women and children, we have to deal here with what seems to be a case of refined sadism.’

  Whether Margaret Ogilvy is true to the facts of the woman's life is largely a matter of speculation; Barrie was writing as an artist, not as an historian, and the result was a portrait of a relationship, not an objective biography. If the facts are in doubt (and they have never been seriously challenged), one essential truth pervades every page: that Barrie's lifelong quest for the Land of Lost Content, which so often seemed to manifest itself in his affinity with children, was no nostalgic desire to return to his own boyhood. It was, rather, a craving to experience a childhood he had never personally known: the childhood of Margaret Ogilvy. The book concludes:

  ‘And now I am left without them [Margaret Ogilvy and Jane Ann], I trust my memory will ever go back to those happy days, not to rush through them, but dallying here and there, even as my mother wanders through my books. And if I also live to a time when age must dim my mind and the past comes sweeping back like the shades of night over the bare road of the present it will not, I believe, be my youth I shall see but hers, not a boy clinging to his mother's skirt and crying, “Wait till I'm a man, and you'll lie on feathers,” but a little girl in a magenta frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me through the long parks, singing to herself, and carrying her father's dinner in a flagon.’

  * * *

  In September 1896, while awaiting the publication of Margaret Ogilvy, the Barries made their first trip to America in the company of the British Weekly's editor, W. Robertson Nicoll—‘one of the few men I think I could travel with without wanting to push him over a cliff’.7 The trip had been arranged by Barrie's newly acquired theatrical agent, Addison Bright, with a view to engineering a meeting between his client and the legendary Broadway producer, Charles Frohman. Barrie had half-completed a stage adaptation of his novel, The Little Minister, and Bright knew that Frohman was looking for a suitable vehicle for his latest discovery, a young actress named Maude Adams. Barrie had misgivings about the enterprise—‘when a man dramatises his troubles begin’;8 moreover the female role of Babbie was infinitely inferior to the title role of the Little Minister. Bright knew of Barrie's reservations; but he also knew his client's susceptibility to pretty young actresses, particularly when viewed across the footlights. Maude Adams was appearing in Rosemary at Frohman's Empire Theater, and Bright arranged for a box to be placed at Barrie's disposal for his first night in New York. He declined the box, and instead sat in the back row with Mary. Within minutes of Maude Adams's appearance on stage, Barrie turned to his wife and announced, ‘Behold, my Babbie.’

  Maude Adams

  Barrie's enthusiasm for Charles Frohman was no less than his admiration for Maude Adams. The two men were exact contemporaries; both had sprung from humble origins and conquered their chosen professions; both men worshipped mothers and children, yet both were childless themselves. Barrie later described Frohman as ‘the man who never broke his word’:

  Charles Frohman, known to some as the Beaming Buddha of Broadway

  ‘His energy … was like a force of nature, so that if he had ever “retired” from the work he loved (a thing incredible) companies might have been formed … for exploiting the vitality of this Niagara of a man. They could have lit a city with it.

  ‘He loved his schemes. They were a succession of many-colored romances to him, and were issued to the world not without the accompaniment of the drum, but you would never find him saying anything of himself. He pushed them in front of him, always taking care that they were big enough to hide him. … A sense of humor sat with him through every vicissitude like a faithful consort. … I have never known any one more modest and no one quite so shy. … Because we were the two shyest men in the world, we got on so well and understood each other so perfectly.’9

  Gareth Hughes as Tommy Sandys and Mary McAvey as Grizel in Paramount's 1921 film, Sentimental Tommy

  Little wonder that, with so much in common, these two men joined forces and formed such a close, lasting and profitable relationship. Barrie later claimed to have had only one real quarrel with Frohman—‘but it lasted all the sixteen years I knew him. He wanted me to be a playwright and I wanted to be a novelist.’10 Although Frohman was soon to have his way, Barrie continued, for the time being, to be both. He returned to England, finished the dramatization of The Little Minister, then set to work on the sequel to Sentimental Tommy – Tommy and Grizel. This novel, Barrie's longest—and, in the opinion of many critics, his finest—work, was to become over the next four years the repository for all his innermost thoughts and feelings. It was to prove not so much a labour of love as a labour of ruthless self-analysis and self-criticism. In his notebook he had vowed: ‘T & G. This book to contain what ordinary biographies omit.’ Barrie was true to his pledge. No one reading the book, either then or now, could be left in any doubt that the central character of Tommy was once again drawn from himself, but this time unsparingly so. The storyline continues from where Sentimental Tommy ended. Tommy has left Scotland and come to London, where he becomes a fashionable writer. His childhood friend, Grizel, is now a grown woman, with a woman's passions, but Tommy has remained a boy at heart. He is still Sentimental Tommy. Like his creator, Tommy uses his sentimentalism—‘escapism’ would be a better word—to full advantage in his writings, but in his relationship with Grizel it ultimately leads to emotional ruin. It remains one of the more extraordinary facets of Barrie's highly complex personality that he could lay bare his own private anguish on
the printed page, could analyse the failure of his marriage even as it was failing, without any apparent restraint or inhibition:

  ‘“Grizel, I seem to be different from all other men; there seems to be some curse upon me. I want to love you, … you are the only woman I ever wanted to love, but apparently I can't. I have decided to go on with this thing because it seems best for you, but is it? … I think I love you in my own way, but I thought I loved you in their way, and it is the only way that counts in this world of theirs. It does not seem to be my world. …”

  ‘If we could love by trying, no one would ever have been more loved than Grizel. … He knew it was tragic that such love as hers should be given to him; but what more could he do than he was doing? Ah, if only it could have been a world of boys and girls! … He could not make himself anew. They say we can do it, so I suppose he did not try hard enough. But God knows how hard he tried.

  ‘He went on trying. In those first days [of marriage] she sometimes asked him, “Did you do it out of love or was it pity only?” And he always said it was love. He said it adoringly. He told her all that love meant to him, and it meant everything that he thought Grizel would like it to mean. … They had a honeymoon by the sea …, Tommy trying to become a lover by taking thought, and Grizel not letting on that it could not be done in that way. … 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? … He did not love her. “Not as I love him,” she said to herself. “Not as married people ought to love, but in the other way he loves me dearly.” By the other way she meant that he loved her as he loved Elspeth [his sister], and loved them both just as he had loved them when all three played in the den. He was a boy who could not grow up. … He gave her all his affection, but his passion, like an outlaw, had ever to hunt alone.’

  Whatever Mary's thoughts might have been as she read her husband's work, they have not been recorded. Much of the original text was deleted before it went to press, possibly at her instigation. One such deletion appears on the last page of the manuscript (the deleted sentence in italics):

  ‘She lived so long after Tommy that she was almost a middle-aged woman when she died. What God will find hardest to forgive in him, I think, is that Grizel never had a child.’11

  After three years of marriage, the Barries were still childless. Mary desperately wanted to have children, yet was left with little alternative but to direct her maternal instincts towards Porthos. For Barrie, however, there was a very real alternative: other people's children. To his close circle of child friends he now added the writer Maurice Hewlett's two children, Cecco and Pia. The Hewletts lived near Kensington Gardens, and the four-year-old Cecco often accompanied him on his walks with Porthos. Presently two other boys made Barrie's acquaintance: a spectacularly attractive five-year-old named George and his four-year-old brother Jack. The pair wore blue blouses and bright red tam-o'-shanters, and took regular walks in Kensington Gardens in the company of their nurse, Mary, and their baby brother Peter—still in his perambulator. George was a remarkably forthright individual, and he made it his business to cultivate Barrie's friendship. To him he was not J. M. Barrie the celebrated writer, but a small man with a cough who could wiggle his ears and perform magic feats with his eyebrows. Moreover he seemed to be singularly well-informed on the subject of cricket, fairies, murders, pirates, hangings, desert islands and verbs that take the dative. George had never met anyone quite like him; he was old, but he was not grown up. He was one of them. His unpredictable moods made him all the more intriguing. Some days he would be in the giving vein, and could be relied upon to tell an endless supply of stories, while at other times he would be steeped in silence. These silences, so disconcerting to his wife, who invariably took them personally, were accepted by George as an integral part of his character. Like most children, he was far too arrogant and self-centred to take offence. Another child friend of Barrie's at this time was eight-year-old Pamela Maude, whose father, the actor Cyril Maude, had just begun rehearsing The Little Minister in the title role. Pamela later recalled the spell that Barrie cast over her as a child:

  George. ‘I could forgive him everything’ wrote Barrie of George in The Little White Bird – ‘Save his youth’. (JMB)*

  ‘He was a tiny man, and he had a pale face and large eyes with shadows round them. We only stayed with him once, in Scotland, but he had always been in our lives. … Our parents called him “Jimmy”. He was unlike anyone we had ever met, or would meet in the future. He looked fragile, but he was strong when he wrestled with Porthos, his St Bernard dog. …

  ‘Mr Barrie talked a great deal about cricket and wanted Margery [her sister] to like it and to be boyish, but the next moment he was telling us about fairies as though he knew all about them. He was made of silences, but we did not find these strange; they were so much part of him that they expressed him more than anything he could say.

  ‘“Jimmy didn't say one word the whole of lunch,” we heard Mam say to our father, … but it seemed to us that his silences spoke loudly. … We came to look on Mr Barrie as our friend; he did not seem to belong to the theatre like other playwrights; when he and our parents talked together he told jokes that had nothing to do with the play, and he looked shy with the actors and actresses. He and Papa liked to talk about fishing. We never saw him without his pipe. …

  ‘Mrs Barrie was lovely, … but we could not feel at ease with her. She did not talk to us and she never smiled when we were with her. Mr Barrie did not talk and she did not smile, and yet he was our companion. When we were away from him he seemed to be with us; he was more present than our parents or Mrs Barrie who were beside us.

  ‘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 leaves and listened, with Mr Barrie, for sudden sound, made by birds and rabbits. One evening we saw a pea-pod 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 pea-pods, before the end of our visit.’12

  Barrie had known many children, but none of them so captivated him as the boy in the red tam-o'-shanter. George seemed to combine all the finest qualities of boyhood in rare abundance. ‘There never was a cockier boy’, he later wrote of him in The Little White Bird, a fictional account of his relationship with George, in which the boy is thinly disguised as ‘David’:

  George: ‘He strikes a hundred gallant poses in a day’ (JMB)

  ‘It is difficult to believe that he walks to the Kensington Gardens; he always seems to have alighted there: and were I to scatter crumbs I opine he would come and peck. … He strikes a hundred gallant poses in a day; when he tumbles, which is often, he comes to the ground like a Greek god. … One day I had been over-friendly to another boy, and, after enduring it for some time David up and struck him. It was exactly as Porthos does when I favour other dogs … so I knew its meaning at once; it was David's first public intimation that he knew I belonged to him.

  ‘[His nurse] 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 returned to David, and 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.’

  Barrie was rarely accompanied by his wife on these afternoon strolls through Kensington Gardens. He preferred to walk alone with Porthos, meeting up with George and Jack for another round of stories before retiring to a shad
y bench by the Round Pond to continue his work on Tommy and Grizel:

  ‘Poor Tommy! he was still a boy, he was ever a boy, trying sometimes, as now, to be a man, [but] always when he looked round he ran back to his boyhood as if he saw it holding out its arms to him and inviting him to come back and play. He was so fond of being a boy that he could not grow up. In a younger world, where there were only boys and girls, he might have been a gallant figure. … Oh, who by striving could make himself a boy again as Tommy could! I tell you he was always irresistible then. What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will. When I think of him flinging off the years and whistling childhood back, … when to recall him in those wild moods is to myself to grasp for a moment at the dear dead days that were so much the best, I cannot wonder that Grizel loved him. I am his slave myself, I see that all that was wrong with Tommy was that he could not always be a boy.’

  Barrie rehearsing Winifred Emery as Babbie in The Little Minister

  On September 27th, 1897, Maude Adams opened in The Little Minister at Frohman's Empire Theater, New York. Despite cautious reviews, the play ran for over three hundred performances, breaking all Broadway records. The London production was due to open in November, with Pamela Maude's parents playing the leads—Cyril Maude as Gavin Ogilvy (the Little Minister of the title), and his wife Winifred Emery as the gypsy girl Babbie. Barrie attended every rehearsal, and once again fell in love across the footlights with his leading lady. He made a habit of paying Winifred lavish compliments from the wings, despite the presence on stage of her husband (who was also the producer) and of his own wife sitting in the otherwise empty stalls. Mary Barrie's acting career now consisted largely of disguising her feelings in front of others; if Barrie wished to flirt with his leading lady, she was not going to make an issue of it. She understood her husband's sentimental weakness for pretty young actresses; she also knew, for the most bitter and private of reasons, the limitations of a sentimentalist's ardour.