The Real Peter Pan
Page 29
By the time Rupert arrived in Oxford he was understandably in quite a distressed state. His landlord at the Christ Church Deanery commented on this in a letter to Lady Buxton:
I wish I had helped him more when he was with me. But I have always had a horror of forcing any man’s confidence and though I think that this is an error on the right side, I have always felt that I have missed many opportunities. It haunts me rather, that he was often depressed and unhappy when he was with me, and I never succeeded in doing anything for him.
But then Rupert had met Michael and the depression had lifted. Rupert’s thoughts about death were the thoughts of the Romantic poets he loved. Michael read Keats and Shelley as deeply as did his new friend. He empathised with glorious Shelley in particular, the poet touched by the maddening hand of the supernatural who searches restlessly for reconciliation with his lost vision of a world free of decay and change, through ultimate union with Nature.
None of this was strange to Michael. The only difference now was that together both young men’s spirits soared to new heights by sharing the knowledge and looking at the vain world outside, and laughing.
There was very soon an intimacy between them that was near to love. Their talk brought them into a deadly nearness of contact. Reginald Colquhoun wrote that they were ‘inseparable … a peerless couple, and everyone who knew either of them loved them’. They burned with each other inwardly and in public now they could be ‘arrogant and egotistical,’ as another friend wrote after their death.60 They
did not go out of their way to please others, and they were by no means exceptionally useful members of Society in a material sense; but whoever came into contact with them recognised that they had in more than normal abundance the gift of personality. There glowed in them with unusual warmth a Promethean fire more valuable than words can describe. Either of them might have become an immortal genius or a martyr.
In April 1920, Michael had honoured an arrangement to visit the Welsh Lewises without Barrie, who was attending to the opening of Mary Rose. He and Nico went together and were back in time to see the play. As for Glan Hafren, well, suddenly it seemed an epoch distant from the world he shared with Rupert, as Michael indicated to Nanny Hodgson in a letter written from Wales on 18 April:
Dear Mary,
We return from this our native land tomorrow, so you may glimpse me before Oxford claims me on the Friday. The weather has not been brilliant, but we’ve got along all right, Nico naturally I with an adjusted hypocrisy [OOOOH]. They must think yr humble servant a bit conceited, as many others do, but they’re so outrageously Victorian at times, with all their charm, so utterly a family out of a book, that it’s hard not to let an occasional gasp of remonstrance escape you.
On Wednesday I shall pursue my arrogant way to Ipswich, to see about buying a 60H[orse] P[owered] motor-car, of Italian origin, which should be very fine except that it is seven years old…
Au revoir,
Michael
Michael then wrote an apologetic thank-you letter to Eveline.
Dear Mrs Lewis,
Back again at Oxford, and it’s looking lovely.
You know Mary Rose was a great success, and is likely to run well. I hope to see it again, and you must certainly go to it, and take Glan Hafren with you.
Nico and I have no complaints to make on our stay – we loved it thoroughly. I was angry to see I wasn’t behaving very well occasionally. Nineteen is a tremendous age you know, and one at which self-satisfaction will out. I’ll be more tolerable at thirty, p’raps a bit more at the 1923 Eisteddford. Very many thanks to you and Mr Lewis, & love to all –
Yrs Michael
Michael hadn’t known how to love Eiluned. He had been looking not to love but for someone to love him. Rupert and he were like Narcissus, transfixed by the reflections of ‘their own wan light’ in each other’s eyes. Each gave the other a reason to love himself. They could be arrogant and egotistical and cock a snook at earth’s vanity, secure in the knowledge that ‘God’s infinity lay all around them’.
Inevitably the affair had a negative effect on their work: ‘I am afraid I have not been at all comfortable in the [exam] papers,’ wrote Rupert to his grandmother, ‘and seriously consider it doubtful if I have passed. One must face the situation – still it is not very important, I find, to pass this time.’
However, the new self-confidence that their love gave Michael set his mind free to make his own choices. Busily he set about hatching a plan to leave Oxford and register with the Sorbonne in Paris to study art, and in July gave his notice to the University authorities.
Michael was drawing away from Barrie, but Barrie wasn’t going to give up without a fight. To please him Barrie made great, even desperate and finally unsuccessful efforts to finish the murder mystery, Shall We Join the Ladies?, over which Michael had enthused. Also to please Michael he had discarded his idea for a novella entitled Mrs Lapraik, about an actress who is taken over by the character she has created on stage.
But Michael couldn’t have been less interested. As Mackail observed: ‘[Michael] was conscious of an oppression in all his guardian’s care and love.’ Barrie became increasingly desperate and out of the blue bought Michael a cottage in Sussex, with the idea that he could be there with his friends. Again, Michael wasn’t interested, and it cost Barrie a lot of money to get the cottage off his hands.
The solution, he felt, would be a holiday in Scotland, one to remember. He rented an entire island.
60 Their obituary in The Harrovian.
Chapter Thirty-One
1920: Between Earth and Paradise
EILEAN SHONA IN tidal Loch Moidart is situated on the west coast of Argyle, not far south of the Isle of Skye. ‘A wild rocky romantic island it is too’, Barrie wrote enthusiastically to Cynthia Asquith on 13 August 1920:
It almost taketh the breath away to find so perfectly appointed a retreat on these wild shores … Superb as is the scene from the door, Michael, who has already been to the top of things, says it’s nought to what is revealed there – all the western isles of Scotland lying at our feet. A good spying-ground for discovering what really became of Mary Rose.
Shona is remote, exquisitely beautiful, located somewhere ‘between Earth and Paradise’ according to the writer and naturalist Mike Tomkies, who knew the island intimately half a century later and wrote a book about surviving on it living rough in the lap of Nature.
Being Scotland there is of course also history on its doorstep. A ruined castle – Tioram – guards the south-eastern approach. Built to control access to Loch Moidart and Loch Shiel in the thirteenth century, Tioram played a significant role in the many feuds between the kings of Scotland and the lords of the Western Isles. It fell to ruin when its chief left to become embroiled in the 1715 Jacobite Rising and ordered it burned. No more fanciful folly could possibly have been arranged.
Barrie was the guest of Thomas Evelyn Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, a prominent patron of the arts who, along with others, including G. K. Chesterton, Barrie had invited to join a film shoot six years earlier in Hertfordshire, the film something to do with a Revue he was preparing. ‘Cowboy suits had been provided from a beer-barrel,’ Mackail tells us, and we may imagine Barrie at his playful best.
Nothing came of the film, but de Walden responded some years later with an invitation to bring Michael on a fishing holiday at his thirteenth-century home Chirk Castle, near Wrexham, on their way to visit Glan Hafren.
Lord Howard de Walden was a rich man. He had inherited 100-odd acres of central London, the Marylebone Estate between Oxford Street and Marylebone Road, from his great-grandmother, Lady Lucy Cavendish-Bentinck (same family as Otto-line Morrell) – along with 8,000 acres in Ayrshire, various African and North American holdings, and the island of Shona.
On 15 August, Barrie had written to the Countess of Lytton:
We came up here three or four days ago and have got settled down for a month. It is the wildest sort of an island �
�� 10 miles round with only this house on it, which Lord Howard de Walden has lent us in a grand spirit of generosity. Nothing could be more beautiful – in the heart of the Prince Charlie country. You blow horns from miles away when you want anything – an engaging way of telephoning that would please Davina [daughter]. We have mountains and lochs and boats and tennis and billiards, and most of the Western islands of Scotland lying at our feet.
Lovely weather till today when it is coming down in blankets.
Barrie had arrived with Michael and Nico and a number of their friends – Roger Senhouse and a puppy included (but not Rupert Buxton) – after an overnight train journey from London on 11 August. They had left the train at Glenfinnan and embarked on a steamer which took them on an unforgettable trip through Loch Shiel, which Barrie described to Lady Cynthia Asquith as
an inland loch as calm as the Serpentine and not much wider though there were a score or so of miles, and we had to stop now and again to get a bottle of milk from a rowing boat or give a sack of flour to another. All through the Pretender’s country – we lunched where he raised his standard and round about here he hid in caves when his sun went so quickly down … This is a lovely spot, almost painfully so.
From Loch Shiel they took a single-track road to Doilinn, where they were met by a motor boat, which conveyed them across Loch Moidart, past Tioram – ‘an aged keep where the last of the clan Ronald said farewell to his last acre’ – to the island itself.
Eilean Shona House – ‘The Ritz could not do us better. Such bathrooms!’ – is spacious and interesting, beautifully appointed, set within gardens just a short walk from the jetty at this side of the island – banks of rhododendrons and trees facing south across a pond in those days, and a tennis court.
‘That tennis court,’ wrote Barrie to Lady Cynthia,
as to which you seem to have doubts is I assure you a good deal played on and I myself have not only performed on it but have been reading the Badminton book on how to become a dab at it. I am now a dab, except for (a) my service, (b) my difficulty in taking other people’s services, (c) the net bars my finest efforts. If Michael is not playing (he is extraordinarily energetic up here) he is drawing such oil-portraits of me that if I believed they did me justice I would throw myself from our highest peak. I have an uncomfortable feeling that his portraits of other persons are rather like them.
By this time, Rupert had met Barrie. He – ‘sublime in mauve waistcoat’, as Barrie observed, ‘but otherwise commendable’ – had accompanied Michael to the Adelphi Terrace apartment before the annual Eton–Harrow match in July. He may have blotted his copybook a little as he and Michael went to a dance and Rupert took the key of Barrie’s desk instead of the key to the door, so that Michael had to sit in the lift at the foot of the stairs from midnight until 3 a.m. awaiting his return – ‘with claret and a loaf’. Well, that was their story anyway.
It had been in Rupert’s mind for some time to get Barrie on his own, and though the date is uncertain he did take him to dinner, just the two of them, in London, which would have required more courage than any other of Michael’s friends had. The dialogue at that dinner – if it could be heard above the silences – would have been extremely interesting.
Rupert would surely not have invited him out alone unless he wanted to say things, or get Barrie to say things, that he didn’t want Michael to hear. Whether this had anything to do with the young man’s absence from Shona, or whether Rupert’s simultaneous trip down the Nile with his mother had already been arranged before Barrie took Shona, there is no record. But in Barrie’s increasingly desperate attempts to bring Michael back on side, Rupert’s absence will have suited him.
Roger Senhouse, by comparison, was easy to handle. By 7 September, Barrie was writing:
We are a very Etonian household and there is endless shop talked, during which I am expected to be merely the ladler out of food. If I speak to the owner of the puppy he shudders but answers politely and then edges away. Our longest conversation will be when he goes:
He (with dry lips but facing the situation in the bull-dog way): Thank you very much for having me. Awfully good of you.
Me: Nice to have you here. (Exeunt in opposite directions).
Do my letters seem aged? I certainly feel so here. I have a conviction that they secretly think it indecent of me to play tennis, which however I am only suffered to do as a rare treat. They run about and gather the balls for me and in their politeness almost offer to hold me up when it is my turn to serve. By the way, what an extraordinarily polite game tennis is. The chief word in it seems to be ‘sorry’ and admiration of each other’s play crosses the net as frequently as the ball. I fancy this is all part of the ‘something’ you get at public schools and can’t get anywhere else. I feel sure that when any English public school boy shot a Boche he called out ‘Sorry’. If he was hit himself he cried, ‘Oh, well shot.’
Increasingly, Barrie found himself alone.
This island has changed from sun to rain, and we have now had about 60 hours of it so wet that you get soaked if you dart across the lawn. It’s dry for a moment and anon I will be observed – or rather I won’t be, for there is no one to observe me playing clock golf by my lonely self. I am mostly by my lonely self; and a little island is not the best place for strenuous exercise in wet weather, the roads – or rather the road – ending as soon as it sets off and the heather so wet and slippery that as you ascend you suddenly disappear from view. The others are out sea-fishing with Jock Oliver and Audrey Lucas who have arrived, and the party is merrier without me.
The fishing was good. Thanks to the confluence of rivers and the sea, salmon, sea trout, pollock, mackerel and even cod are available – but the party had become infected by the stand-off between Michael and Barrie; Michael’s desire to get away, and Barrie’s response, which was always to try to please him and return to the old ways.
It was not going to happen, and the young men especially were torn between their loyalty to Michael and their wish not to hurt their host. It was better that they stayed apart. But an island is not the best place to accommodate so difficult a situation, for there is no escaping it.
With Mary Rose playing to packed houses in London and due to open in New York early in 1921, Barrie turned to new work:
The publishers clamour for more plays and I have brought Kiss for Cinderella with me in the pious hope of preparing it for them. It seems trumpery work … I am not naturally an idler, it was always a glory to me to be at work, but I can get hooked on to nothing that seems worth playing.
To make matters worse, his decision to pursue his art had found a highly personal way to get further under Barrie’s skin. Michael had begun to draw sketches of him and ‘he has the diabolic aptitude for finding my worst attributes, so bad that I indignantly deny them, then I furtively examine myself in the privacy of my chamber, and lo, there they are’.
Some of the other guests had been trying to get Barrie to walk more – ‘Of course I ought to bound up the hills like Robinson Crusoe after goats, but though I do climb a bit it isn’t a daily joy.’ And when, on 26 August, he took
a prodigious walk over mountains whose very names call for stout climbers – was cheered all the way by thoughts of modest boasting about it over the tea-cups; but all is vain – it is flouted by Michael as a thing of nought and a mere beginning of his excursions. I am chastened and reminded of a Swiss mount I left with the same pleasant sensation, to be told at the hotel that it was the local cleric’s favourite morning stroll and that he had done it 250 times.
Michael was preparing for his independence at Shona and in Rupert’s absence loved nothing better than scrambling alone to the top of the mountain which, rising directly out of the sea, is the island. The highest point is marked by a permanent trig point and cairn. There is no path to it, but the climb is not arduous. Once up there, in good weather, there is an astonishing view across the Western Isles, the nearest of them Muck, Eigg and Rùm.
Her
e Michael wrote his two surviving poems, for which he had no great regard, but which are nonetheless a statement. At least one more was written on Shona, but was lost.
‘Eilean Shona’
Throned on a cliff, secure, Man saw the sun
hold a red torch above the farthest seas,
and the fierce island pinnacles put on
in his defence their sombre panoplies;
Foremost the white mists eddied, trailed and spun
like seekers, emulous to clasp his knees,
till all the Duty of the scene seemed one,
led by the secret whispers of the breeze.
The sun’s torch suddenly flashed upon his face
and died; and he sat content in subject night
and dreamed of an old dead foe that had sought and found him;
a beast stirred boldly in his resting place;
and the cold came; Man rose to his master-height,
shivered, and turned away; but the mists were round him.
Nico recalled Michael showing him the poem –
And my saying words to the effect that I liked it but I hadn’t a clue what it was all about! Which I remember rather disappointed him as he thought it was ‘so simple’. I’ve never tried to think who was his ‘old dead foe’, just taken it to be imaginary.
The old dead foe is the ‘the same nameless enemy’, a Mephistophelean spirit, that pursued Michael in his nightmares as a boy. The ‘seekers’ are Barrie’s ‘little gods’, also already met. Barrie was convinced that Michael was attended by a malignant devil. Speaking to an uncomprehending gathering of students at St Andrew’s University in 1922, he said: