J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  Nico being held aloft by Barrie's chauffeur, ‘the splendid Alphonse’ (JMB)

  ‘One afternoon George and I, making for home towards the end of a day's pursuit of White Admirals and Fritillaries, encountered a company of Highlanders on the march along one of the dusty forest roads. … They halted and fell out for a few minutes, unbuckling their equipment and sprawling by the roadside in the relaxed attitudes of tired men, and George and I got into conversation with a sergeant and one or two of the privates at the rear of the little column. When they moved on again after their halt, we followed close behind them, enjoying the rhythm of the marching feet, and moved obscurely by a sense of unity with the sweating, swearing, back-chatting soldiers. … Somehow this scene has always remained vividly in my mind: rather like a piece of a silent film, for I have long forgotten what we talked about. It was a queer little romantic presage of the real marchings of six years later, for which the Highlanders were more or less consciously preparing themselves, [though] nothing could then have seemed more remote from the destiny of two small boys.’

  After visiting Sylvia and the Five for their Bournemouth expedition, Barrie drove across country to Black Lake, calling in on Dolly Ponsonby at Shulbrede Priory:

  ‘Aug 12 [1908]. Mr Barrie arrived in the evening. He was quite talkative at dinner. Discussed Galsworthy whom he admires tremendously both as a man & a writer. … He says he thinks he is a man of very strong passions kept well under control. He was good about L[illah] Granville B[arker] too – said she had no sense of humour. … We talked a great deal of Sylvia's boys & it is extraordinary to see how they fill his life & supply all his human interest. Of course J.M.B. does alarm me. I feel he absolutely sees right through one & sees just how stupid I am – but I hope also that he sees my good intentions. The things he says about people so absolutely knock the right nail on the head that though they are not in the least unkind they are almost cruel.’

  Captain Robert Falcon Scott

  Captain Scott's mild flirtation with Pauline Chase had ended the previous year when he had met a young sculptress, Kathleen Bruce, at a luncheon party given by Aubrey Beardsley's sister, Mabel. ‘I … sat between Max Beerbohm and J. M. Barrie’, Kathleen later wrote in her Autobiography. ‘Far down the other side of the table was a naval officer, Captain Scott … and I glowed rather foolishly and suddenly when I clearly saw him ask his neighbour who I was.’ Kathleen was, at that time, being courted by an ardent admirer, a young law student with ‘corn coloured hair and a crooked smile’ named Gilbert Cannan. For the next twelve months she managed to string both men along, unbeknown to Barrie, who rather enjoyed choreographing other people's romances, and was decidedly piqued when he heard through A. E. W. Mason that she had accepted a proposal of marriage from Scott. Also wounded was Gilbert Cannan, who had, in the meantime, become secretary to Barrie's Committee campaigning for the abolition of the Censor. When Kathleen heard that Barrie had taken offence, she hurriedly wrote to Scott: ‘We must not hurt so sensitive and dear a person. Please write [to him] quite by return of post. … As nice a letter as ever you can think of.’ The apology evidently smoothed things over, and on August 5th, Barrie was passing on the information as one in the know to Pauline Chase: ‘Capt. Scott wrote me that he is to be married to Miss Bruce shortly, so there!’ Cannan, however, was less easily mollified, and looked to the Barries for comfort. Barrie liked the young man: he was impetuous and rather naïve, but he burned with ambition to become a writer, and Barrie was flattered by Cannan's admiration for him. Mary Barrie also responded to his outpourings of woe over his unrequited love for Kathleen Bruce. Cannan wrote to Kathleen: ‘Yesterday Lillah [McCarthy] and Mrs Barrie came and had tea – Mrs Barrie suddenly began to talk to me like a mother. She really is a dear thing, and she seems to need a good deal of me – I feel the need and give – gladly.’5

  On September 3rd, 1908, What Every Woman Knows opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in lavish, Frohmanesque style. In addition to the prodigious cast (the only unknown being Barrie's niece, Madge Murray), the election scene at the end of Act Two was amplified by a hundred extras crammed onto the stage. The play received unanimous praise from the critics: even Max Beerbohm enjoyed it, discerning that the characters ‘are creatures of real flesh and blood, winged by Mr Barrie's whim; an immense relief from the sawdust-stuffed figures that the average playwright dresses up’.6

  On September 2nd, the day before the opening of What Every Woman Knows, Captain Robert Falcon Scott married Miss Kathleen Bruce at Hampton Court Palace. Gilbert Cannan accepted defeat, and turned to Mary Barrie for consolation.

  Gilbert Cannan

  * Eugen Millington-Drake: George's fag-master, and head of Hugh Macnaghten's House, Captain of Boats, President of Pop, known at Eton as Millington-Drake K.C.M.G. (Kindly Call Me God), later became Sir Eugen Millington-Drake, K.C.M.G. (Knight Commander of St Michael & St George).

  * Utilized by Barrie in his one-act play, The Will: ‘Harry is at Eton, you know, the most fashionable school in the country. … We have the most gratifying letters from him. Last Saturday he was caught smoking cigarettes with a lord. (With pardonable pride) They were sick together.’

  12

  1908–1910

  Barrie had seen little of Sylvia and the boys during the summer of 1908, but he now made amends by announcing his Christmas present to them: a three-week ski-ing holiday in Switzerland, staying at the Grand Hotel, Caux. George wrote to Sylvia from Eton on hearing the news:

  Sunday, December 13th, 1908.

  Dearest Mother,

  I have asked my tutor about clothes for Switzerland. He said you have to have a knickerbocker change suit (a good warm one), sweaters and thick stockings. … From what he said about it it sounded topping fun to be in Switzerland. … The journey will be pretty exciting, I expect. I expect to be ill going from Dover to Calais, or wherever you cross the Channel. It will be rather funny travelling on Christmas Day. … Is Mrs Barrie coming? Perhaps she'll prefer to go Motor Touring or something else. We shall be a whacking party. It is kind of Uncle Jim to do it all. I hope Alphonse'll come! [Barrie's chauffeur]

  Your loving son,

  George

  George tobogganing at Caux. The faceless rider behind him is Gilbert Cannan: his face has been blotted out from the negative with paint (JMB)

  Mary was indeed included on the holiday; so was Gilbert Cannan, at Barrie's invitation. ‘A rather odd party,’ wrote Denis Mackail with a touch of understatement. ‘Yet Cannan not only had an intense admiration for the host's genius and attainments, but was extremely popular with the boys.’ Mackail went on to state that Barrie was too unobservant and preoccupied to notice his wife's growing infatuation with Cannan. Nico later remarked on ‘how astonishingly simple/ignorant = un-knowing Barrie was about what went on around him in the so-to-speak dirty things of the world. … He frequently employed a safety-curtain which he would pull down between his own mind and the facts of life in the world around him.’ Nico's argument seems at odds with Barrie's remarkable perception evidenced in so much of his writing, particularly in his notebook observations. That Mary Barrie and Gilbert Cannan were fond of each other's company was obvious enough to contemporaries. ‘If Sylvia saw,’ wrote Mackail evasively, ‘then either it wasn't her business or else she also saw – one has to admit this – how the situation was playing into her hands. Temptation here, as well as elsewhere. The money again.’ According to Diana Farr's Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy, Cannan later alleged that ‘Sylvia encouraged and abetted his affair with Mary Barrie, making it easy for them to meet and see each other unknown to Barrie’. Even Jack, at thirteen, was aware of their growing relationship, asking Barrie at Caux, ‘Why is Mr Cannan always with Mrs Barrie?’1 The reply is unrecorded. Perhaps he did not see; perhaps he did not see because, like many people in the same situation, he did not want to see; or perhaps he viewed what he saw as being no less innocent than his own flirtations with other women. While at Caux, he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherlan
d:

  Nico lugeing at Caux (JMB)

  January 9th, 1909.

  My dear Milly,

  … The world here is given over to lugeing. I don't know if you have a luge, you have everything else. It's a little toboggan, and they glide down on it for ever and ever. And evidently man needs little here below except his little luge. Age annihilated. We are simply ants with luges. I say we, but by great good luck I hurt myself at once, and so I am debarred. …

  I hope … that I am to see you soon and explain you to yourself.

  Yours always,

  J. M. Barrie.

  Michael's December 1908 entry in Barrie's Querist's Album

  Nico's own memory of Caux was restricted to a tobogganing collision in which a pair of steel-pronged boots ‘pranged my little bum’. Peter was equally oblivious to the soap-opera activities of Gilbert and Mary:

  One evening at dusk I was summoned to J.M.B.'s room, to find him sitting, in a somehow dejected attitude, at the far end of the room, in the half-light. As I entered he looked up, and, in a flat, lugubrious voice said: “Peter, something dreadful has happened to my feet,” and glancing down I saw to my horror that his feet were bare and swollen to four or five times their natural size. For several seconds I was deceived, and have never since forgotten the terror that filled me, until I realised that the feet were artificial (bought at Hamley's), made of the waxed linen masks are made of, and that I had been most successfully hoaxed. … To that winter also belongs the story which J.M.B. used sometimes to tell in after years, of how Nico, then aged five, attracted the admiring attention of one of the lady guests at the hotel, who exclaimed: “My word, you are a lovely boy!” So he was, too, … but this was the last way to curry favour with a young Davies, and Nico duly retaliated with a face of fury and the comprehensive nursery repartee: “Oh, ditto!” …

  ‘Near the end of the stay at Caux, Sylvia became alarmingly unwell, suffering great pain (I think close to the heart). … An English doctor who happened to be staying in the hotel was approached, and either refused outright to advise, or at any rate made himself as unhelpful as he could, on the grounds that he was on holiday. … From this time forward Sylvia, though sometimes better for shorter or longer periods, was never completely well.’

  Guy and Gerald du Maurier in their youth

  On his return to London, Barrie gave Gerald considerable help in producing a play written by Sylvia's brother Guy under the pseudonym of ‘A Patriot’. Entitled An Englishman s Home, the play warned Britain of the threat posed by the expansion of Germany's navy, predicted an invasion, highlighted the average Englishman's indifference to the situation, and suggested that in all probability he would not respond to a call to arms until the invading Germans were trampling over his prized garden blooms and battering down his own back door. It was hailed by Lord Roberts as being the finest piece of propaganda he had ever seen, and the play's phenomenal success brought a measure of comfort to the ailing Sylvia. ‘My beloved Guy,’ she wrote from Campden Hill Square, ‘the world is writing and talking of nothing else but your play. I am, alas, in bed, and cannot go, but I think of you all day. … Mummie tells people the author's name is a profound secret, but in my heart I know she tells everyone she meets!’ George wrote to Sylvia on his return to Eton: ‘The chap in my carriage had been to “An Englishman's Home” on Saturday night. He thought all but the ending* very good. Of course the ending does rather spoil the lesson – it makes one think that even if the Germans did have a high old time for a bit, England would win in the end all right. I suppose it had to be put in to please the average public.’ A fortnight later George himself was playing at war games with the Eton school corps: ‘The Field Day on Thursday was rather fun. … I shouldn't think my firing would be very dangerous in actual warfare! It's rather fun seeing an enemy skulking along about 500 yds off, and potting at him. After about 30 minutes' engagement we retired at a double until we fell in with the rest of our company and marched back to Aldershot Station where we had lunch (rather a good one). We had a topping rag in the train coming back to Eton.’

  The Eton College O.T.C. on a Field Day exercise in 1909. George is in the front line, extreme right

  In April 1909, Barrie revisited Edinburgh University, the scene of so much loneliness in his youth, to receive his second honorary LL.D. (St Andrews University had given him an honorary degree in 1898). The function lasted for over six hours, with Barrie dressed in an elaborate ceremonial gown – ‘the gayest affair,’ he wrote to Sylvia, ‘all red and blue, and if Michael had met me in a wood he would have tried to net me as a Scarlet Emperor. … The five missed the chance of their lives in not encountering me in the streets arrayed in my glory.’2 By Easter, Sylvia had recovered enough to take the boys down to Ramsgate to stay with their grandmother. Nico wrote impatiently to Barrie: ‘Dear James … You are a big swank not to come sooner Come hurry up the train is coming From NICO THE END.’ Doubtless Barrie was eager to join them, but he was working at Black Lake with Gilbert Cannan, who had recently been appointed to the newly formed Dramatic League, of which Barrie was a founder member, dedicated to the setting up of a National Theatre in England. Cannan was also still performing his duties as Secretary to the Committee seeking the abolition of the Censor, and Mary Barrie, after years of exclusion from her husband's work, had learnt to use a typewriter and was proving an invaluable help to both men.

  Nico, aged 4

  birthday card from Nico to Barrie

  Barrie's plans for a Peter Pan statue had also been making progress; he had commissioned the sculptor Sir George Frampton, R.A., to carry out the work, and had given him the photographs of Michael taken at Rustington to serve as a model. Barrie wrote to Sylvia from Black Lake on April 11th: ‘Frampton was very taken with Mick's pictures & I had to leave them with him. He prefers the Peter clothes to a nude child. It will take him at least two years. George's wife can unveil it. I don't feel gay, so no more at present, dear Jocelyn.’ Barrie's dejection persisted throughout the early summer; he was offered a knighthood, but, despite Sylvia's urgings to accept, he turned it down. He wrote to her again at Ramsgate on June 17th, the day after Michael's ninth birthday:

  Dearest Jocelyn,

  …How I wish I were going down to see Michael and Nicholas. All the donkey boys and the fishermen and sailors see them but I don't. I feel they are growing up without my looking on, when I grudge any blank day without them. I can't picture a summer day that does not have Michael skipping on in front. That is summer to me. And all the five know me as nobody else does. The bland indifference with which they accept my tantrums is the most engaging thing in the world to me. They are quite sure that despite appearances I am all right. To be able to help them and you, that is my dear ambition, to do the best I can always and always, and my greatest pride is that you let me do it. I wish I did it so much better. … I am so sorry about those pains in your head.

  Your affectionate

  J.M.B.

  The only heartening piece of news received by Barrie this month was that George had been given his ‘Sixpenny’ – colours awarded to the best eleven cricketers under sixteen. ‘Perhaps no one who has never got a colour of some sort at Eton can comprehend the satisfaction it gives,’ wrote Peter later; ‘a successful love affair is possibly the only comparable triumph in after life.’

  Michael aged 9, in Paris for the second season of Peter Pan

  Peter Pan was revived for a second season in Paris at the beginning of July, and Barrie went over to spend two weeks with Frohman, then returned to London for another series of Censorship Committee meetings. By July 25th he was back at Black Lake Cottage, writing in low spirits to his old friend Quiller-Couch, who had written congratulating him on What Every Woman Knows and giving him news of his son, the Pippa:

  ‘I'm glad you got some entertainment out of What Every Woman Knows. The first act I always thought really good … [but] the rest is rather of the theatre somehow, ingenious enough but not dug out of myself. It isn't really the s
ort of man I am. I fancy I try to create an artificial world to myself because the one I really inhabit, the only one I could do any good in, becomes too sombre. How doggedly my pen searches for gaiety. …

  ‘The Boy! To think he is leaving Winchester instead of putting on his pinafore. To-morrow he will be leaving Oxford. An English boy has almost too good a time. Who would grudge him it, and yet he knows too well that the best is past by the time he is three and twenty.’

  Barrie continued to work alone at Black Lake, preparing a speech he was due to give before a Government Committee set up to investigate the censorship issue. Mary Barrie was in London, and intended travelling down to the cottage on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 28th – the last day of the run of What Every Woman Knows. On Wednesday morning, however, the Black Lake gardener, Mr Hunt, chose to cripple Barrie's life by exposing him to the reality of Mary's relationship with Gilbert Cannan. The cottage staff had known about it since the previous November, when Gilbert and Mary had stayed at Black Lake in Barrie's absence; Hunt had held his tongue for eight months, and might well have remained silent altogether had Mary not irritated him by criticizing his gardening skills. The essence of Hunt's revelation and its inevitable result were later recounted by Barrie in the Divorce Court, in answer to questions from his barrister, Mr Barnard, K.C.: