The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  But he was in one important way precisely what the group abhorred. He lived a double life, his public life was a model of morality, while, as with the Calvinists back home, it concealed what really consumed him. Barrie did not live his life in broad daylight; he was a master of illusion. As on stage, so in life, it was second nature to him to create an illusion around him, hence the scene in the flat with Neville Cardus. When Cynthia Asquith, daughter-in-law of the Prime Minister who led Britain into the war, became his secretary in 1918, he was, according to Mackail, who was writing his biography of Barrie under Cynthia’s direction, ‘completely successful for a long time at representing himself in several very false lights’. Then would come ‘a burst of frankness and truth, and the observant secretary found another impression to discard’. It was impossible for Barrie to be straight with anyone. Quite a few of the group knew of Michael before he came upon them. First, they knew him as the grandson of du Maurier, a great friend of Leslie Stephen, whose children Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and Thoby Stephen were all Bloomsbury participants.

  Again, Michael’s uncles Crompton and Theodore Llewelyn Davies had both been Apostles at Cambridge – members of the secret society that originally spawned some of the most impressive members of Bloomsbury such as the philosopher G. E. Moore, the poet Rupert Brooke, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the political theorist and author Leonard Woolf, and the strange author and ideological anarchist Lytton Strachey.

  Lady Ottoline Morrell also had connections with Michael’s family. The Morrell house at 44 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury, London, gave the Group their name, but the Morrells’ estate at Garsington, seven miles south-east of Oxford, was the base from which she extended her patronage to writers such as Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon and T. S. Eliot, and artists Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.

  Ottoline was the sister-in-law of the daughter of the local grande dame at Kirkby Lonsdale (Lady Bective). Margaret Llewelyn Davies knew her well, as did Crompton, who kept up his friendship with Ottoline to the end of his life. As a result, Michael’s brother Peter recalled visiting Ottoline at Bedford Square, and the same connection ensured Michael of a welcome at Garsington Manor.

  The third side of the family to have connections with the Bloomsbury Group turns out to have been Michael’s adoptive side. For Barrie’s ex-wife Mary Ansell had married the writer Gilbert Cannan (the man who cuckolded the author of Peter Pan), and he had become something of a catalyst in the development of the Bloomsbury Group.

  In 1913, after reading his novel Round the Corner, Ottoline Morrell invited both Cannan and Mary to visit her at Bedford Square. ‘The poor fellow,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘[he] must have a dim time of it with his wife who’s years older than him and very distressing.’

  Through this association, Cannan became friendly with Lytton Strachey. Then, in 1914 and quite separately, he met and became closely involved with the writers D. H. Lawrence, Middleton Murry, Murry’s wife Katherine Mansfield, and the artist Mark Gertler, who were living within a few miles of Cannan in the countryside around Cholesbury in Buckinghamshire. They took to having dinner together, and Cannan threw a celebrated Christmas party where Gertler and Katherine Mansfield enacted a play in which they were supposed to pretend to be in love and Gertler made it all rather too realistic.

  During the war, Cannan was a pacifist and conscientious objector, and was involved in the National Council Against Conscription. He and his new friends shared a deepening hatred for the First World War and began to see it as their responsibility to make it a watershed between the old world and the new.

  Lawrence was then writing Women in Love (completed in 1916, though no publisher could be found for it until 1920), which denounced the heroic values that he saw at the heart of Victorian imperialism and identified the same values within the collective unconscious of Germany – hence the war.

  Cannan introduced Lawrence and Gertler to Ottoline Morrell. Gertler he knew especially well. Cannan’s novel Mendel was based on his early life (Mendel being his Yiddish given name), and Gertler painted a picture of Cannan, ‘Gilbert Cannan and His Mill’, with reference to the mill at Cholesbury where he was living. The picture also shows the Cannans’ two Newfoundland dogs, Sammy and Luath, the latter the inspiration for Nana of course, the Darling children’s nurse in Peter Pan.

  Mary Ansell, who was still seeing her ex-husband occasionally, brokered a meeting for Barrie with D. H. Lawrence. Barrie claimed not have liked the amount of sex in Lawrence’s novels, but regarded Sons and Lovers (1913) as ‘the best novel that he had read by any of the younger men’, while Lawrence said that Barrie’s autobiographical novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), had had a profound effect upon him. There was a correspondence between the two men before the war, but the letters were lost, generally a sign of something of interest in the more secret aspects of Barrie’s life.

  They finally met in London in 1915 – the year that George Llewelyn Davies was killed and Barrie began to question the heroic values on which he, as boy and adult, had based many a personal friendship, the values which Lawrence, as I have said, was at that moment decrying in Women in Love.56

  If that suggests some common ground, it appears that they did not, after all, get on. Certainly no further meetings took place, even though Lawrence became a friend of his secretary, Cynthia Asquith. In 1921, Lawrence wrote to Cynthia, telling her that he had arranged for her to receive a copy of Women in Love, and added in a postscript – ‘Tell J. M. [Barrie] what I think of him.’

  It is fair to assume that what Lawrence thought of Barrie had been influenced by what Mary Ansell, who ‘knew where the bodies were buried’, had told him. To meet the character Herr Loerke in Women in Love is to see what Lawrence made of Barrie –

  the little man with the boyish figure and the round, full, sensitive-looking head, and the quick full eyes, like a mouse’s [who] held himself aloof … His body was slight and unformed, like a boy’s, but his voice was mature, sardonic, its movement had the flexibility of essential energy, and of a mocking penetrating understanding.

  Gudrun is spellbound by him, just as Sylvia had been, and the psychology of Loerke in the narrative does not disappoint in his kinship to Barrie, any more than the physiology does.

  What all these connections meant was that Michael was not only welcome, but that he arrived at Garsington raising no small amount of interest. There is a picture of him, looking rather uneasy, with Dora Carrington (who lived with the bisexual Lytton Strachey) and Julian Morrell (Ottoline’s politician husband).

  Usually Michael took Senhouse to Garsington Manor with him. Senhouse was for some time after Michael’s death Strachey’s boyfriend, famously engaging in a sado-masochistic role-play of the crucifixion of Christ, even to the point of making the cut with the centurion Longinus’s spear. Strachey of course was the one playing Christ. Blasphemy gave him a rise. Afterwards, he wrote to Senhouse:

  My own dearest creature. Such a very extraordinary night! The physical symptoms quite outweighed the mental and spiritual ones – partly because they persisted in my consciousness through an unsettled but none the less very satisfactory sleep. First there was the clearly defined pain of the cut (a ticklish business applying the lanoline – but your orders had to be carried out) and then the much vaguer after pangs of crucifixion – curious stiffnesses moving about over my arms and torso, very odd – and at the same time so warm and comfortable – the circulation, I must presume, fairly humming – and vitality bulking large … where it usually does – all through the night, so it seemed. But now these excitements have calmed down – the cut has quite healed up and only hurts when touched, and some faint numbnesses occasionally flit through my hands – voilà tout, just bringing to the memory some supreme highlights of sensation…

  Strachey liked Michael very much, saying of him that he was ‘the only young man at either Oxford or Cambridge with real brains’ – hyperbole in anyone else’s mouth, but he had wide experience of young
men at Oxford and Cambridge. Writing to Ottoline after Michael’s death: ‘I am sure if he had lived he would have been one of the remarkable people of his generation.’

  Dora Carrington found him ‘so lovable and rather a rare character’, and Michael was perhaps a prime example of someone who might make good use of the freedom-loving Bloomsbury group, in order to break free from Barrie and be his own man. However, Michael couldn’t relax at Garsington. When the parties got going, he became impassive. Carrington put it down to ‘the gloom of finding Barrie one’s keeper for life’. Certainly, he was to a significant degree what Barrie had made him. Artistic and intellectual by nature, but so influenced by Barrie that, as his friend Sebastian Earl said of him, he was ‘quite a conservative member of the bourgeoisie – continuation of the Victorian bourgeoisie into Edward VII’s time’.

  Given that Strachey drove a stake through the heart of Victorian hypocrisy in his trail-blazing biography Eminent Victorians (1918), and dismissed said Victorians in a letter to Virginia Woolf as ‘a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites’, perhaps Michael was after all better off back at college.

  56 Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (1980).

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  1920: Romance

  FIRST A ROMANTIC, second a Victorian, it wasn’t clear that he was going to find his way in the turmoil of a revolution that was gathering not only in Bloomsbury – especially as an artist, which Michael now planned to be.

  The Romantics, and beauty per se, were out. In the 1850s, when Michael’s grandfather was studying to become an artist in the Swiss painter M. Gléyre’s studio in Paris, nothing could have been further from the case, what with the Impressionists and soon the Pre-Raphaelites finding their way. But in 1900, the year Michael was born, Picasso had pitched up in Montmartre and with Georges Braques forged Cubism, their purpose to ditch Impressionism and make an abrupt break with the past: ‘We were trying to move in a direction opposite to [it],’ Picasso said.

  That was the reason we abandoned colour, emotion, sensation, and everything that had been introduced into painting by the Impressionists, to search again for an architectonic basis in the composition, trying to make an order of it … I hate the aesthetic game of the eye and the mind played by those connoisseurs, those mandarins who ‘appreciate’ beauty. What is beauty anyway? There’s no such thing.57

  However, one boy who pitched up at Christ Church in October 1919 was deeply sympathetic to Michael’s natural Romantic bent.

  Rupert Erroll Victor Buxton was born on 10 May 1900, just one month before Michael, the youngest of seven children – one sister and five brothers – of Sir Thomas Fowell Victor Buxton, the 4th Baronet Buxton, who had died in the year Rupert arrived at Oxford.

  The family was at that stage wealthy. Rupert’s grandfather, 3rd Baronet Sir Thomas Fowell (1837–1915), Governor of South Australia, had bought Warlies, a country house near Waltham Abbey in Essex, and built another house close by at Woodredon.

  Before he arrived at Oxford, Rupert was for six months at Cambridge University. No record remains as to why the transfer took place. He had been Head Boy at Harrow School in north-west London, and before that attended Summer Fields prep school in Oxford.

  He was an unusual and enlightened boy who had been writing poetry since he was eight. He was also musical. He had belonged to the Choral Society at school and written with verve to his mother about such as Chopin’s Études, Mendelssohn’s ‘Messiah’ and the German composer of opera, Christoph Willibald Gluck.

  He arrived at Oxford with the highest references. His headmaster wrote:

  He was one of the best boy-examples and boy-influences I have ever known at school: the protector of the young, the friend of all, even those with whose opinions he was least akin. His own opinions were, and I expect still are unsettled – but they were all built on the foundation of love and service to others.

  His housemaster Archer Vassall concurred – Buxton was ‘a charming boy of the highest ideals, taking a great interest in philanthropic and social work, and a “minor poet” of some competence’.

  Buxton’s consideration for others had extended at school to never using his privilege as Harrow Head Boy of beating other boys. This was unheard of in any English public school at the time. His social conscience also led him to make friends with people outside his own class, ‘strange, out-of-the-way people such as pavement artists and street hawkers’, as one Harrovian put it, and to go into London for days at a time on philanthropic quests.

  Rupert’s letters to his family, particularly to his mother Anne, Lady Buxton (née O’Rorke), whom he addresses at first as ‘My dearest Mother’, then ‘My own darling mother’, are deeply loving. It is through his letters to Anne that we can draw a detailed portrait of Rupert.

  He hadn’t liked the idea of going to Harrow and it isn’t clear why it was chosen for him, as at least two of his brothers went to Eton. One of them, Maurice, a year and a half older, Michael certainly will have known. After taking the scholarship exam at fourteen, Rupert wrote to his mother, ‘I’m not sure that I’m frightfully impressed with Harrow, although I suppose I shall get to like it.’ However, by December he wrote to his brother Roden, ‘I am enjoying myself like anything at Harrow and am awfully glad I went there after all.’

  Like Michael, he loved Scotland and fishing. On 3 July 1915, he wrote to his mother envious of her going to Scotland to see Roden, who was based there. Mother and son embarked on a fishing expedition together – ‘I can imagine how glorious the scenes must have been up there, as I think Scotland is easily the prettiest and most magnificent country I have ever seen.’

  Being a boarder at Harrow, any opportunity to see his mother had been a great bonus, but frequently she seems to accept his invitations to attend concerts and the like. He took to sending his poems to his grandmother – Mrs O’Rorke of St Mark’s Square, Regent’s Park, asking for criticism. But by 14 November 1915 (aged fifteen), he was sending his mother three books of his poetry –

  I should like you to keep [these], they were mostly written when I was in bed. I have been reading a good deal of Shelley while in bed … he has written some marvellous things … I have been made a member of the Literary Society – whatever that is! I believe you write a paper on a given subject and at the next meeting read it out, when it is discussed … that will be certain agony!

  The boy was intensely affected by Nature’s beauty. On 20 February 1916, he wrote:

  I woke up this morning to see the most lovely sunrise – I wonder whether you saw it? The whole of the Eastern sky was one great block of crimson – no fur clouds – but just this flawless sheen! And the dew was heavenly. Next holidays we must have some nocturnal expeditions – do you remember that blissful morning last Easter, when we all went – that is to say, all at home – to the badgers’ holes? How we saw lots of cubs, badgers, foxes, but far best – a perfect forest sunrise – as though veils of boiling gold were thrown over the trees – it was gorgeous! You must come down here (Harrow) as soon as you can – if possible on a fine day…

  Your Devoted son Rupert.

  His mother wasn’t able to visit, owing to a bad cold. She sent Aunt Lulu instead.

  On 12 March, Rupert wrote again:

  My darling Mother, We had a most gorgeous concert last night – Plunket Green, Louise Dale, Ida Kiddus and the Russian singer Boris Lansky. It was absolutely glorious! Plunket Green of course was perfectly marvellous, but I think I liked the Russian the best. He sang in Russian, which is a lovely language to hear. And we had Maud Valerie White accompanying her own songs.

  The boy was of course also interested in politics and like everything else he was interested in, he wanted to share it with his mother: ‘I’m sending you Wells’ book. I should advise you to read the chapter called “The Labour Market”. I think it’s awfully good. Yes, you must come down for the concert.’

  But again – 19 March 1916 – Anne disappoints him; she is in bed with flu. Rupert,
a Signaller in the school army corps, then turns to a subject that was particularly exercising his young mind:

  I wonder what you think about conscientious objectors to the war? I think theirs is the most appalling position that any one could be put into … and as for the childish fury of those brave English people who brand them as cowards – well – it’s merely mad!

  … (At Harrow) there was a young temporary master who was both medically unfit for the war and a conscientious objector: he had the moral courage (which was, it is true, unnecessary) to say out, what he thought about it – and the school in body, with that particularly babyish inconsistency which forgets the facts and remembers only impressions, branded him a coward, refused to be taught by him, wrote a petition to the headmaster (which was received!) that he should be sacked, with the result that he was sacked! … This is Harrow’s latest achievement and in spite of my being an Harrovian, I think it perfectly loathsome. Please don’t tell anyone about it.

  On 26 March 1916:

  I am awfully glad you are better again. Today is an absolutely perfect day. I woke up this morning to a sudden freshness in the bluest of skies and softness of early morning [air]. At last Spring is here in earnest. I went round my form-master’s garden this morning; he is a very enthusiastic gardener; and the daffodils were perfectly gorgeous! And the anemones, croci … were all looking their best in the glow of a real Spring morning; he had some lovely little irises out – tiny little purple flecks, with splendid gold centres. I do love a garden.

  At Oxford, Rupert lodged in the Christ Church Deanery with a family friend later to become the Bishop of Ripon. In due course he would take rooms in college at Peck 6:8, across the quad from Michael. He passed his First Public Examination in Holy Scripture in Hilary term 1920. He then passed the preliminary examination of Second Public Examination in Modern History in Trinity term