J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  Mary Barrie with Luath at Black Lake

  BARNARD. Towards the end of July this year Mr Hunt made a communication to you as to what happened the previous November?

  BARRIE. Yes.

  BARNARD. What did he tell you?

  BARRIE. He said his wife took up tea in the morning to Mr Cannan, and he was not in his room. She then went with tea to my wife's room and knocked and heard my wife saying, ‘Gilbert, Gilbert!’ She then returned to Mr Cannan's room and entered it. He was not there and the bed had not been slept in.

  BARNARD. What did you do [after hearing Hunt's communication]?

  BARRIE. On the same day I went to London and telegraphed my wife to meet me. She was going to come down that afternoon, but I telegraphed her to wait until she had seen me.

  BARNARD. Did you tell your wife what Mr Hunt had said?

  BARRIE. I told her and she said, ‘It is all quite true.’ I said, ‘If it is all quite true, we must go and see Sir George Lewis about it.’

  BARNARD. Sir George was not only your solicitor, but the friend of both of you?

  BARRIE. Yes. …

  BARNARD. What took place at the interview?

  BARRIE. My wife said it was the only time it had ever taken place, and they had both been in a state about it. I said, ‘If you will come back I will forgive you. No one would ever know anything about it.’ She said it would all be pretence. I should be thinking of her all the time, but he was the only person in the world——[Here Barrie hesitated, and was prompted by the President of the Court, Sir John Bigham]

  PRESIDENT. That she loved?

  BARRIE. Yes. That he was the only person in the world to her.

  PRESIDENT. She meant that she was in love with him?

  BARRIE. Yes. She said that it would be a much more ignoble thing to go back to me in those circumstances.

  BARNARD. Did you then offer to separate by deed if she would promise to have nothing more to do with him?

  BARRIE. Yes.

  BARNARD. And she refused.

  BARRIE. Yes.3

  The court transcript indicated little of the anguish suffered by all concerned in the two-month period between Hunt's revelation and the divorce case in October. Divorce was a scandalous business, but Mary was determined to cling to her one glimpse of happiness and marry Cannan. A number of Barrie's friends supported her, including H. G. Wells. Mary wrote to him in early August:

  Postscript doodle from H. G. Wells to Mary Barrie

  ‘He seems to have developed the most ardent passion for me now that he has lost me; that frightens me. … Poor thing, he is distracted and I am dreadfully sorry; he says he knows I would be happier with G.C. and that we ought to marry, one moment, and the next clamours for me. Anyhow I am to have money and that will help things somewhat, but I have no fear for my happiness, none at all.’ Cannan himself was well aware of the damaging effect that his involvement as co-respondent in a divorce case would have on his literary career, particularly when the petitioner happened to be the most successful writer in the country. He hoped, somewhat naïvely, that Barrie would see his way to allowing him to ‘share’ Mary, thus avoiding an actual divorce. Even Maurice Hewlett, one of Barrie's oldest friends, seemed to think that Barrie was being unreasonable in insisting that Mary should put aside Cannan altogether as an alternative to divorce. He wrote to her in August:

  Mary Barrie at the time of her divorce. She later wrote to Peter Davies: ‘J.M.'s tragedy was that he knew that as a man he was a failure and that love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced, and it was this knowledge that led to his sentimental philanderings. One could almost hear him, like Peter Pan, crowing triumphantly, but his heart was sick all the time.’

  ‘I think J. is behaving very badly – impossibly, according to my way of looking at things. He must have been talked over by old [Sir George] Lewis – a loathsome Jew. … I envy Cannan the chance he has of making life good for you. I don't see how I can meet J. after all this. It amazes me that Mason hasn't made him more of a gentleman.’

  Barrie took refuge in A. E. W. Mason's London flat shortly after the storm broke, where, Mason later told Peter Davies, ‘he would walk up and down, up and down all night in his heavy boots until the sound of it drove everyone within hearing almost as frantic as the miserable little figure itself’.

  Sir George Lewis doubtless advised Barrie to restrain his friendship with Sylvia until the divorce was over, since there was a not unreasonable chance that her name might be dragged into the proceedings by Mary Barrie. To Mary's credit, she never once cited her husband's long association with Sylvia, and made no public defence of her infidelity. Nevertheless, Barrie acted on Lewis's advice and went with Mason to Switzerland, while Sylvia took the boys away for a summer holiday at Postbridge in Devon. Sylvia's own reaction to the collapse in Barrie's marriage is unrecorded. Peter Davies wrote:

  ‘Whether Sylvia regarded the divorce as, ultimately, a simplification of the relation in which she stood to him, or the exact reverse, who can say? … That [she] found him a comforter of infinite sympathy and tact, and a mighty convenient slave, and that she thankfully accepted his money as a gift from the gods to herself and her children – all that is clear enough. I think that she laughed at him a little, too, and was a little sorry for him, with all his success, as anyone who knew him well and liked him was more or less bound to be. I mean sorry for him in a general way, quite apart from the pity which his misery over the fact and machinery and publicity of divorce must have stirred in any generous breast.’

  Barrie wrote to Sylvia from Switzerland, asking her to send him news of the boys and her own health. Sylvia replied evasively, ‘I wish I could walk more, … but the hills try me now’, then added that ‘Michael (Saint) is going to Wilkinson's with Peter [next term] – you will think of me when I have to cut his hair – he is longing and longing for the moment’. Peter Davies commented:

  ‘I can't clearly remember Michael's hair unshorn; but photographs show that he had the most entrancing curls, so that Sylvia's anguish and his own delight at the idea of losing them are equally understandable. … I have pretty clear recollections of the Postbridge holiday, … George and I worm-fished insatiably in the Dart. … Jack, I think, was less easily amused (more adult, perhaps), and occasionally sought the company of a neighbouring farmer's daughter. … It must have been dreadfully boring for Sylvia, but no doubt it was very healthy for all of us. To counteract that we stole an occasional Egyptian cigarette (Nestor) from the pink cardboard packets which Sylvia used, and smoked it surreptitiously behind the hedge that bounded the garden. … I think it was this summer, too, that George began to shock me to the core by strange locutions picked up at Eton. Obscenity and profanity would mingle horrifically and fortissimo in impassioned oaths when a big quarter-pound trout escaped after being hauled out of the water, wriggling irresistibly. Many public school boys acquire a certain eloquence in this kind of language, though by no means all; and George, in no sense a dissolute or ill-living boy, had unquestionably a marked talent for it, which he was from the age of sixteen at all times ready to display in suitable surroundings. … I may record that I soon discarded the youthful blush of shame, and became my brother's apt pupil. Of Sylvia herself at Postbridge I remember very little. I think she rarely went more than a few hundred yards from the house.’

  Sylvia fishing the River Dart near Postbridge, Devon

  Barrie continued to write to Sylvia from Switzerland, but his letters made no mention of his impending divorce. ‘I can't write of it,’4 he wrote to Pauline Chase, and Peter Davies commented: ‘I doubt if he exposed his wounds much to anyone, being in most ways an exceedingly reserved character himself.’ There remained one outlet for his anguish, however. While in Switzerland he wrote a one-act play, The Twelve-Pound Look, in which he portrayed himself as Harry Sims, a successful ‘what-you-will’ who is about to receive the honour of a knighthood. He engages a typist to answer his letters of congratulation, but when she arriv
es, he finds that she is none other than his ex-wife, Kate. Recovering from his surprise, Harry (‘strictly speaking, you know, I am not Sir Harry until Thursday’) is intrigued to learn the identity of the lover who caused the break-up of their marriage, and is crushed at the discovery that there was no such glamorous person:

  KATE. There was no one, Harry; no one at all. … You were a good husband according to your lights. …

  SIR HARRY (stoutly). I think so. … I swaddled you in luxury.

  KATE (making her great revelation). That was it. … How you beamed at me when I sat at the head of your fat dinners in my fat jewellery, surrounded by our fat friends. …

  SIR HARRY. … We had all the most interesting society of the day. … There were politicians, painters, writers——

  KATE. Only the glorious, dazzling successes. Oh, the fat talk while we ate too much – about who had made a hit and who was slipping back, and what the noo house cost and the noo motor and the gold soup-plates, and who was to be the noo knight. … One's religion is whatever he is most interested in, and yours is Success. … I couldn't endure it. If a failure had come now and then – but your success was suffocating me. … The passionate craving I had to be done with it, to find myself among people who had not got on.

  SIR HARRY (with proper spirit). There are plenty of them.

  KATE. There were none in our set. When they began to go downhill they rolled out of our sight.

  SIR HARRY (clinching it). I tell you I am worth a quarter of a million.

  KATE (unabashed). That is what you are worth to yourself. I'll tell you what you are worth to me: exactly twelve pounds. … (She presses her hand on the typewriter as lovingly as many a woman has pressed a rose.) I learned this. I hired it and taught myself. … and with my first twelve pounds I paid for my machine. Then I considered I was free to go, and I went.

  The critic W. A. Darlington wrote: ‘Just as in Tommy and Grizel [Barrie] made the worst of himself into a sentimentalist, so now he made the worst of himself into Sir Harry Sims, the successful man in every worldly respect and yet a failure in his private life.’5 The play is not, however, as autobiographical as it might seem, for Mary, unlike Kate, relished her husband's success to the full. The real cause of the break-up of their marriage was perceived by Meredith's son, Will, who wrote to Charles Scribner, Barrie's American publisher, in an effort to ‘contradict false rumours’:

  ‘The whole truth is that Mrs B is a woman – with a woman's desires – which for many years she had controlled (& she had no children, which made it harder). Barrie is a son born to a mother – long after the rest of her family – & as so often is the case – with genius but with little virility. Now – people are now saying that Mrs Barrie had many lovers. This is false – I am certain of it – I have good authority.* … She was, as it happens, overcome by this man for whom she has left Barrie. She loves the man, as a young woman loves a man – & still loves Barrie as a mother loves a helpless child. Barrie urged her to return to him & give up the other – she, having at length after long battling against it, given in to the longing of her heart after a virile man, & no doubt the secret woman's longing for the birth of a child, would not.’6

  Barrie's impotence was much rumoured in his lifetime, some wag dubbing him ‘the boy who couldn't go up’, but it remains a matter of speculation. Mary later confided to Hilda Trevelyan that she had enjoyed ‘normal marital relations’7 with her husband in the early days of their marriage, but Diana Farr, in her 1978 biography of Cannan, quotes an entry from John Middleton Murry's journal, written in 1955: ‘What we were given to understand by Gilbert and Mary was that Barrie was guilty of unmentionable sex behaviour towards Mary. Knowing Mary I should say that any sexual approach towards her would have come into such a category for her. And I am pretty certain that Gilbert had no sex-relation with Mary at any time.’ Diana Farr qualifies this provocative statement by pointing out that Middleton Murry was a surprisingly poor judge of character, and that he did not know either Mary or Cannan until many years later.

  Barrie returned from Switzerland towards the end of September, in time to escort Michael to his first day at Wilkinson's preparatory school:

  ‘When he was nine I took him to his preparatory, he prancing in the glories of the unknown until the hour came for me to go, “the hour between the dog and the wolf”, and then he was afraid. I said that in the holidays all would be just as it had been before, but the newly-wise one shook his head; and on my return home, when I wandered out unmanned to his tool-shed, I found these smashing words in his writing pinned to the door:

  Michael, aged 9 (JMB)

  THIS ESTABLISHMENT IS NOW PERMANENTLY CLOSED

  ‘I went white as I saw that [he] already understood life better than I did.’8

  Another boy being jostled forward for Barrie's attention was Captain Scott's son, who was to be christened Peter, after Peter Pan. Scott had written to Barrie while the latter was in Switzerland, asking him if he would be Peter's godfather, and Barrie readily accepted. However, the date of the christening, October 13th, conflicted with another appointment – Barrie's own divorce case. A number of fellow writers had banded together and written a private letter to every editor in Fleet Street, reminding them that Barrie himself had been a journalist, and requesting them, ‘as a mark of respect and gratitude to a writer of genius’,9 to abstain from exploiting the news value of the case since he is ‘a man for whom the inevitable pain of these proceedings would be greatly increased by publicity’. Among the signatories to the letter were Henry James, A. E. W. Mason, Maurice Hewlett, Arthur Wing Pinero, William Archer, H. G. Wells and Beerbohm Tree. The Press responded generously, with only The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror covering it in any detail. The undefended suit was soon over, Mrs Hunt's rambling evidence about taking cups of tea in and out of bedrooms at Black Lake being interrupted by the Court President with a curt ‘That is quite enough.’ Mary Barrie claimed in a letter to H. G. Wells that Barrie ‘came out badly in court. 3 lies. First, never said it was the only time. 2nd. It is my cottage, lease is in my name and I bought it with my money. 3rd.* It is seven years since we separated and that does not spell happiness until 18 months ago’. 10 The matter of the ownership of Black Lake was academic: Barrie had no further desire to visit it. ‘Never go back on happy footsteps,’ he told the Duchess of Sutherland; ‘be brave in your farewell – as you were brave in your crucifixion.’11 Nor did he wish to go on living at Leinster Corner. At present he was installed in A. E. W. Mason's flat, but presently Sir George Lewis's wife found him one of his own in Adelphi Terrace House, between the Strand and the Thames. The flat was on the third floor, overlooking Bernard Shaw's residence, but this was more than compensated by a fine view of the river. Lady Lewis and E. V. Lucas's wife, Elizabeth, set to work on Barrie's behalf, organizing the move, while Barrie turned to the only life that was now left to him: Sylvia and her boys – ‘my boys’.

  End of Mary's letter to H. G. Wells: … ‘does not spell happiness until 18 months ago. This has damaged us a lot in the eyes of the public but with our friends, well, they all knew better. My love to you both, Mary Barrie’

  Barrie and Henry James on their way to the Censorship Committee hearings on August 6th, 1909 – nine days after Hunt's revelation about Mary Barrie's affair with Cannan

  Two days after the divorce case was over, Sylvia collapsed on the stairs at Campden Hill Square. Peter was in the house at the time: ‘I happened to be about … and Mary Hodgson, red-faced and agitated, tended her and shooed me away, not before I had received an impression of direness and fatality, and a sense of shocked misery and half-comprehending desolation, which has remained with me ever since.’ Doctor Rendel, who had been the family doctor for many years, was called and gave Sylvia an examination. Mary Hodgson asked if she could do anything, and he replied, ‘It is a grave matter – say nothing to the family.’ A specialist was consulted, who diagnosed cancer – ‘too close to the heart to operate’ – but once a
gain, Mary Hodgson was sworn to secrecy. She later wrote to Peter Davies:

  ‘It was impressed on me that your Mother – on no account – was to talk about her illness to me & that at all costs she must not know how ill she was. Life was to go on as usual and the Boys were just to be told Mother had to stay in bed and rest for a long time. … Nurse Loosemore came, an excellent nurse – who not unnaturally resented my presence in her domain. Occasionally there was a duel of words – your mother insisting that her children should come into her bedroom at all times and that their noise & chatter cheered her.’

  The secret was well kept for a time: Sylvia's elder sister Trixie wrote to her sister May a few days later, still giving Barrie's divorce precedence as the main topic of interest:

  Felden, Boxmoor.

  [October 17th, 1909]

  Darling May,

  …I am so distressed about Sylvia & shall go and see her soon. But I am not surprised, she never seemed to rest at all, & I expect when holidays come is quite tired out – at her age and after all she went through with Arthur it was bound to come to something, but I hope a rest will show improvement. As regards Mrs Barrie I think you have endlessly mistaken what I said to you, & what has now happened is only after all a perfectly natural sequence. It is a pity the man is so young, but those things do happen & I hear from Sylvia that he is very much in love with her & I sincerely hope there may be a baby or two. I do think she deserves something to make up for what she has probably suffered in seeing J. entirely wrapped up in someone else's children when it was very obviously his fault that she had none – Human nature is human nature after all & will out. … I was surprised that my most straight-laced friend Mabel wrote & said she was so glad that Mrs B. had someone to be fond of her now – & that if J. was unhappy he deserved it – tho' poor little man one knows well he is simply the victim of circumstance & of his own kindness.