The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  The relationship reached its peak with Barrie’s hit play What Every Woman Knows, which opened on 3 September, the day after Scott’s wedding, and is a lightly camouflaged representation of their relationship. It ran for 384 performances – for the actor a dreadful experience. Afterwards he decided on a long and complete break – Gerald did not act in another Barrie play until 1916.

  Rejection for Barrie again. There was more to come.

  During the same period he had seen little of Michael. Sylvia had opted to take the boys to the New Forest for their summer holiday. Barrie managed only ‘a grand motor expedition to Bournemouth’ part way through the New Forest trip, after which he dropped in on Dolly at Shulbrede Priory.

  Barrie wasn’t in the habit of dropping in on the Ponsonbys unless he had Sylvia and the boys with him. He was not on a one-to-one relationship with either Dolly or her husband Arthur. It must have been quite a surprise. Dolly noted a stiffening of his attitude, an ever-keener focus on the boys, and a hardening of resolve. On 12 August 1908, she wrote in her diary: ‘Mr Barrie arrived in the evening … We talked a great deal of Sylvia’s boys.’ Dolly remarked particularly on his talkativeness and on his trenchant opinions about ‘boys education and of the political world’. Arthur Ponsonby noted this in his diary too. It was almost as if Barrie was trying to impress Arthur with a serious side to what he was doing with Michael. But something about him triggered a wariness in Dolly: ‘JMB does alarm me. I feel he absolutely sees right through one & just how stupid I am – but I hope also he sees my good intentions.’

  But were Dolly’s intentions ‘good’ from Barrie’s point of view? It seems pretty clear whose side Dolly would be on – at no point did she recommend Barrie to Sylvia as a solution to her woes. And Barrie will have known her feelings, which is perhaps why he dropped round on the way back from speaking to Sylvia, and ‘seen right through’ her.

  This was the other side to the game-playing, avuncular Barrie that the children loved. Mackail recalled that he would meet your conversation with an expression ‘horribly like a sneer … Oh, yes, we have suffered. No, don’t let’s remember … the faint, Caledonian grunt with which our desperate observations are received.’

  But what really got to people was a sense they had of something dark about him. Interviewd by Andrew Birkin in 1978, George and Jack’s friend, Norma Douglas Henry, had this to say: ‘I think one or two people were rather disturbed about Barrie, though of course it was never talked about openly. There was something sinister about him, rather shivery.’

  Of course people in the family could feel intimidated and concerned about his relationship with Michael and stop short of talking about it openly because he was a phenomenally rich and generous man, and many owed a great deal to him, not least Sylvia.

  It was now more than a year since Arthur Llewelyn Davies had died and if Barrie was to keep his hand on the tiller, the situation needed his attention.

  His theatrical imagination took over. He invited everyone to Switzerland for Christmas at the Grand Hôtel in the Alpine resort of Caux, situated on the east side of Lake Geneva not far from Montreux, with wonderful views over the lake. The plan was to travel on Christmas Day – the ferry across the English Channel, then by train across Europe, to arrive on Boxing Day.

  George took advice from housemaster Macnaghten at Eton and the message came home that the boys would need ‘a knickerbocker change suit (a good warm one), sweaters and thick stockings’. No expense would be spared. Mary Ansell would come too and so would Gilbert Cannan.

  On the train, while Barrie was learning from a sporting-work how to ski by crossing his right leg along the line A.B. and his left along C.D. (as in diagrams), Michael filled out a page in Barrie’s ‘Querist’s Album’, a book the like of which Barrie had himself been given by his mother when he was seventeen, a sort of confession as to what he was thinking at a particular moment in time, and signed at the bottom under the words, ‘My Confession’.

  It provides a sort of self-analytical snapshot of the eight-year-old Michael. We learn that in his view ‘the highest characteristic in man’ is ‘Fun’ and in a woman, ‘Kindness’; that ‘Decency’ is Michael’s own most esteemed virtue and ‘Sylvia’ is his most lovable name. That his favourite novelist is J. M. Barrie and his happiest employment reading; that Longfellow is his most admired poet, and Hereward the Wake and Joan of Arc his favourite historical heroes, while Peter Pan was his favourite fictional hero, fishing his favourite amusement, while his greatest misery continued to be – ‘Nightmares’.

  Fun, kindness and decency, Sylvia and J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and fishing, yet the nightmares continued to invade his dreams.

  How different were the five boys becoming now that they were growing up, even if as Nico, the youngest, pointed out in terms of ‘fun to be with’, they were ‘dead level’.

  Peter observed that George had a romantic character of mind, a fair share of du Maurier charm and ‘a good leavening of sound, kind, sterling Davies’ too; but also that he had a ‘simplicity which Barrie and Macnaghten saw in Arthur’, which meant ‘straightforward’, ultimately ‘limited’, not the elegant simplicity of a seeking and discerning mind, which became Michael’s.

  Daphne remembered Jack as the one ‘who could climb nearly to the top of the great cedar tree on the lawn of Slyfield House, near Stoke d’Abernon in Surrey, where her family was staying one summer, and she was down in awe of him: ‘Had I known, at the age of five, six, seven, how the Greeks felt about their Olympian gods,’ she recalled in Myself When Young (1977), ‘I would have shared their sentiments.’ An attractive combination of adventurousness and sensitivity made him a favourite of Sylvia, more or less equally with Michael. He was her white knight and would become something of a womaniser, as Nico recalled in interview with Andrew Birkin in the 1970s.

  ‘He used to take me to such places as The Palace Theatre and thrill me to the quick at his getting glorious smiles from the chorus girls.’

  Intellectually sound Peter, as a child pale and indifferent, was Dolly’s favourite, while Nico was the practical one, the odd one out. He didn’t really like to see into things, and was lost in the face of the artistic, spiritual or psychological. Although no fool, he was occasionally the clown – ‘the complete extrovert, completely happy’, as Jack’s wife described him to Birkin.

  Marching into the lobby of the Grand Hôtel, Caux, aged five, one of the female guests caught sight of Nico and exclaimed: ‘My word, you are a lovely boy!’ – ‘So he was,’ recalled Peter, ‘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!”’

  Caux was wonderful, deep in snow. The train had been hot and stifling, but Barrie remembered how frozen with ice was the mountain train on their arrival. Then they drove from the station in an open sledge and arrived exhilarated.

  ‘The world here is given over to lugeing [sic],’ wrote Barrie to the Duchess of Sutherland on 9 January – he had almost a fetish for duchesses now that he was successful enough to be able to handle any company he wanted to handle. And where better to indulge a bit of harmless snobbism than from a swish Swiss ski resort? ‘I don’t know whether you have a luge, you have everything else. It’s a little toboggan, and they glide down on it for ever and ever.’

  What he didn’t tell her was that when he fell, skiing, having crossed his right leg along the line A.B. and his left along C.D. he had lain on the snow helpless until he remembered how to rise ‘by doing things with E, F and G’.

  This was before the winter sports business had really got going, but luging was more of a success, ‘We tobogganed often down to Glion from Caux and even all the way down to Montreux,’ wrote Barrie.

  But the real sport during the holiday was interpersonal. Included in the party were Mary Ansell and Barrie’s Secretary to the Anti-Censor campaign, the young barrister and budding novelist Gilbert Cannan, now more often than not working with Ansell on
the Censor business out of Black Lake Cottage. And they were having an affair.

  Barrie, it seemed to everyone, was the only one not to be aware that something was going on. As usual, Jack among the boys was the one to wonder. ‘Why is Mr Cannan always with Mrs Barrie?’ he asked meaningfully.

  Diana Farr wrote in her biography of Cannan that ‘Sylvia encouraged and abetted Cannan’s affair with Mary Barrie, making it easy for them to see each other unknown to Barrie.’34 Farr’s biography was published in 1978. Almost certainly she took the prompt from Denis Mackail’s official biography of Barrie, which was published in 1941 and suggests that Sylvia saw how the situation could play into her hands – by clearing Mary out of the way and making her financially secure after Arthur’s death, writing: ‘Temptation here, as well as elsewhere. The money again.’

  This is conjecture, as Mackail admits, and seems to overlook the complexity of Sylvia’s situation. She didn’t need to take a begging bowl to Barrie and had indeed managed not to see him very much throughout the previous year. What’s more, Sylvia already had her line into Barrie’s bank account and there was never a danger that it would be stopped. Michael was too important to him.

  No doubt Sylvia did encourage the relationship between Cannan and Ansell, but only because to do so was absolutely in character. She would have thought the affair a real hoot. When Lady Ottoline Morrell met Ansell and Cannan not long after Caux she wrote of Cannan as

  that rather charming and gifted, but conceited novelist of whom we saw a great deal … He had recently run off with Sir35 James Barrie’s wife, and perhaps I felt that people would be prejudiced against him on this account, and certainly on the outside it did not appear very honourable, as he had been one of Barrie’s protégés. I believe Mary Ansell, however, had not found Barrie very satisfactory as a husband and she had become entranced with this young man, who indeed had the appearance of a rather vacant Sir Galahad, and whose mind was prolific, poetic and romantic. I never could understand why he could be tempted to run away with this lady, for she was double his age, and devoid of any atmosphere of romance, and certainly unable to run very far or very fast. But how can one divine the reasons for such foolish acts?

  I certainly don’t believe that Sylvia wanted to make her relationship legal with Barrie for the security of herself and her boys. It is more likely that Barrie would rather have had her boys to himself without Sylvia (which is what he ended up with). Sylvia knew that he would never withdraw from her boys. Granted, she would have been bound to imagine at some stage the possibility of becoming Barrie’s wife. What woman would not turn it over in their mind given her situation, his involvement with her and her sons and the material ease with which they would henceforth live life. But Sylvia was never one to have found satisfaction in basic repulsion. Beauty was her star.

  On reflection, it also seems unlikely that Barrie didn’t know what was going on between his wife and Cannan. He, the great playwright, had set the scene in Caux, invited everyone along and was enjoying the ‘play’ into which he had cast them, as it promised some interesting turns. He would later write a play a bit like this called Shall We Join The Ladies? in which the cast were invited to dinner. Barrie was not himself part of the main plot at Caux, however, whereas he was the host in that. Instead, he and the boys starred in the fun-loving, low-life sub-plot, luging down the slopes, ‘pranging’ Nico’s ‘little bum’ in a tobogganing accident, and (the crowning glory in this secondary narrative), Peter having the wool pulled over his eyes in a case of mistaken identity.

  One evening at dusk Barrie invited eleven-year-old Peter up to his room. When he knocked at the door, Barrie’s voice commanded him in a high-pitched Scottish wail to come in. Peter opened the door and saw Barrie sitting at the far end of the bedroom in semi-darkness. He made his way across the room towards him as Barrie, apparently in great discomfort, whined, ‘Peter, something dreadful has happened to my feet.’ Glancing down, Peter saw to his 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.’ Barrie had bought the pink, waxy monstrosities at Hamleys, the famous toyshop on Regent’s Street in London.

  Aside from the sub-plot, in which Barrie alone of the adults was participant, there was, so Mackail wrote, ‘something dreadfully ominous … Something behind the laughter as cold and relentless as the Alps.’

  There was, but it had nothing to do with Gilbert Cannan and Mary Ansell. Sylvia fell ill. She collapsed complaining of a terrible pain around her heart. The hotel staff informed Barrie that there was an English doctor among the guests, but he appears to have been as unhelpful as he could be, claiming invisibility because he was on holiday.

  34 Diana Farr, Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy (1978).

  35 Morrell is writing some time into the future. Barrie wasn’t a knight of the realm in 1909. In fact he always claimed he had turned down a knighthood that very year, but did accept a baronetcy in 1913.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1909: Mind Games and Manoeuvres

  SYLVIA’S RECOVERY WAS slow but it allowed her to return to London and her bed at Campden Hill Square. There were two reports of her fainting – in the hall of No. 23 and on the stairs between her bedroom and the lavatory up the next flight of stairs. X-ray images were taken, but showed nothing.

  Barrie was a constant visitor – ‘No jarring or suspected criticism here,’ writes Mackail. It should be said that Mackail was writing his biography after Barrie’s death in 1937 but under the fierce and eagle eye of Lady Cynthia Asquith, who had ended up with most of his money and power as executor over his works. She kept him on a tight rein. Any criticism was frowned upon, which is why one gets from Mackail these simpering phrases like ‘No jarring or suspected criticism here.’ Why should we think there is any criticism in Barrie visiting Sylvia constantly unless it was something Sylvia found too much? The sentence ends: ‘though the boys scarcely knew what had happened and would sometimes start a fresh silence with a thoughtless word’.

  There were clearly tensions at No. 23 in January 1909, a year in which Sylvia would spend a great deal of time with her mother in Ramsgate, where she knew Barrie would not follow. For Emma du Maurier made no bones about not liking the little man.

  Why this should have been is not immediately clear. It is possible that Emma simply viewed Barrie’s friendship with Sylvia’s family as an intrusion. But it is also possible that there was a little animosity between Barrie and the du Mauriers even before he met Sylvia.

  Mackail writes that her husband George du Maurier and Barrie must have met in the years leading up to du Maurier’s death in 1896, seeing as they had so many personal friends in common. Henry James, du Maurier’s closest friend, knew Barrie well. Other close friends included the writers Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, actors Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree and J. L. Toole, editors W. D. Nichols and W. E. Henley, and the artists Alma-Tadema, J. L. Toole, Edwin Abbey, and the landscape painter Alfred Parsons, who knew du Maurier intimately and was a member of Barrie’s Allahakbarries.

  In any case, du Maurier was the bestselling author of the day and Barrie the rising star, who had been so smitten by Peter Ibbetson that he changed the focus of his writing completely to follow du Maurier’s line. Everyone knew everyone in literary London. There were but half a dozen salons where such people met. How could it be that these two literary lions did not meet? The answer, which is the same conclusion that Mackail reached, is that they did.

  The bedrock of Barrie’s story is the collection of his notebooks, but uniquely the notebooks from June 1896, when he would have known du Maurier, to June 1898, by which time he had met Sylvia and the boys, are missing.

  It is highly likely that the two men didn’t get on. On the surface they had much in common, both diminutive and boyish, both with the same dry sense of humour and lugubrious way of expressing it, both satirical in their wo
rk. Yet beneath the surface no two men could have been more dissimilar. While du Maurier’s satire was upbeat and palpably sincere, Barrie’s, according to the writer Sir Walter Raleigh, chair of English Literature at Oxford, goes under the guise of sentimentality, often has a cruel side and doesn’t quite come off. The critic Desmond MacCarthy agreed. Barrie’s genius ‘is a coquettish thing, with just a benevolent drop of acid in it sometimes’.

  Also, du Maurier was a Romantic, he worshipped beauty; feeling was what he was all about, while Barrie confessed he was incapable of ‘even a genuine feeling that wasn’t merely sentiment’, actively disliked music – (‘I have no ear for it,’ he admitted), and had no interest in art. According to Mackail, Barrie’s insensitivity to art was the reason he ‘could never, even spiritually, be one of the real or esoteric Broadway gang’ – a reference to the cricket-playing artistic community in Worcestershire, where many of du Maurier’s literary and artistic friends, including Henry James (who wrote about it), used to gather.

  This difference is especially important when sensitivity to art, and music in particular, is the sine qua non of true existence in Trilby, for Trilby herself is tone deaf until Svengali hypnotises her, activating her sixth sense. So, Barrie is absolutely blind, deaf and dumb when it comes to the important things, as far as du Maurier is concerned.

  Even the boys, Peter and Michael especially, noted and rued this state of affairs, Peter conceding that while Barrie ‘gallantly accompanied’ him to the opera…

  Being himself totally unmusical, he not only did not encourage such leanings, but in one way and another could not help discouraging them … One had also at the time a calf-love for the Russian ballet [Diaghilev], then an exciting novelty, and that was still more emphatically frowned on and ridiculed … The fact is that music and painting and poetry, and the part they may be supposed to play in making a civilised being, had a curiously small place in JMB’s view of things.