The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  When one looks at his autobiographical novel The Little White Bird, even hardened Barrie supporters throw up their hands when they read his description of the night he spent with young David, purportedly Michael’s elder brother, George. The episode is pages long, but this is typical:

  ‘Mother said I wasn’t to want it unless you wanted it first,’ he squeaked.

  ‘It is what I have been wanting all the time,’ said I, and then without more ado the little white figure rose and flung itself at me. For the rest of the night he lay on me and across me, and sometimes his feet were at the bottom of the bed and sometimes on the pillow, but he always retained possession of my finger, and occasionally he woke me to say that he was sleeping with me. I had not a good night. I lay thinking.

  Of this little boy, who, in the midst of his play while I undressed him, had suddenly buried his head on my knee.

  Of David’s dripping little form in the bath, and how when I essayed to catch him he had slipped from my arms like a trout.

  Of how I had stood by the open door listening to his sweet breathing, had stood so long that I forgot his name and called him Timothy.

  In the book, Timothy is the name Barrie gives to the child he longs to have fathered and many readers at the time felt not outraged but sorry for him. Self-exposure beneath a veil of whimsy and sentimentality worked for Barrie and won him many a reader’s sympathy. But you never knew where the whimsy ended and the darker self took over. Critics gave him the benefit of the doubt: ‘Barrie, in the manner of Lewis Carroll and his nude photographs of little girls, was consciously innocent,’65 wrote James Harding in the 1980s.

  There were indeed plenty of relationships with children other than the Llewelyn Davies boys, clearly innocent. One very special one was with Bevil – ‘my favourite boy in the wide wide world’ – the son of the writer and academic Arthur Quiller-Couch. Barrie engaged Bevil in adventures, taking photographs of them and making them into a book, exactly as he did with the Davies boys.

  And long after Michael, his great love, passed from his life, Barrie was to be seen with a boy close to hand, sometimes friends’ children, but also sometimes a boy with just a name and very little pack drill. One of these was Dick Rowe, ‘a little boy’ who appeared in his company on a holiday to Scotland as late as 1933 and was still his consort two years later – brought along with him ‘from the flat’.

  In time, Barrie had a baronetcy and a great deal of power. He was also of course a celebrity, and the Peter Pan association ensured constant homage from parents who desperately wanted their children to meet him. So much so that when, in August 1933, he was staying at Balnaboth, just north of Kirriemuir in Scotland where he was born, and was giving one of his regular young friends (his secretary’s son, Simon Asquith) a birthday tea party, who should come over from nearby Glamis Castle but their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of York with their children, Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, our future Queen who was seven. ‘Crackers on the table, and games in the garden afterwards,’ were the order of the day, led by the very artist of children’s games, Sir James M. Barrie himself.

  He liked to be with children. They made him the child he once was.

  So successful was the birthday party that he was invited to Glamis the following day, for Princess Margaret’s birthday, and was chosen to sit next to the birthday girl at tea. He recalled later that observing some of her presents on the table, they

  seemed to be simple things that might have come from sixpenny shops, but she was in a frenzy of glee about them, especially about one to which she had given the place of honour by her plate. I said to her astounded: ‘Is that really your very own?’ And she saw how I envied her and immediately placed it between us with the words: ‘It is yours and mine.’

  Whatever little secrets passed between them thereafter, Margaret clearly fell under his spell. Barrie was told that when later his name had been mentioned, she had responded immediately: ‘I know that man. He is my greatest friend, and I am his greatest friend.’

  Barrie would see Margaret again, in London, when she was five. In a house in Regent’s Park there were more games in which Barrie once again played a leading role, before confessing to her that he had taken the generous words she had uttered about her favourite present being ‘yours and mine’, and those about each being one another’s ‘greatest friend’, and put them in his play, The Boy David – his final play as it turned out. By way of compensation, he told her, she would receive a penny for every utterance of her two phrases on stage. She didn’t forgot this and in due course he received a letter from her father, by then King George VI, to the effect that if Barrie didn’t pay up he’d be hearing from His Majesty’s solicitors. Barrie responded to the effect that a proper Agreement would be drawn up by his solicitor, Sir Reginald Poole, and a ceremony was planned for the signing by himself and Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace, when a bag of pennies would be handed over. But it never happened, because Barrie died before it could.

  For the weaver’s son from Kirriemuir this latter-day conjugation with royalty must have seemed a climax of sorts. But it is also instructive because, as in the case of the Llewelyn Davies boys and like most writers, life was for him the ground of his art and he lived life principally for his work, living it to invigorate and inspire his plays and novels. Theory was no good to him at all.

  Also, to be fair, any judgement should be undertaken in the context of the time, not of our time. The Child was of special interest to late Victorian and Edwardian writers. Industrialisation had led to exploitation of children in the cotton mills of the north, and in 1839, almost half the funerals in London were for children under ten years of age. The Romantic ideal of the Child – the innocent soul untrammelled by ‘the regular action of the world’ – celebrated by Wordsworth and earlier by Rousseau, had given way to nineteenth-century exploitation, guilt and sentimentalism.

  Dickens had mourned the loss of the idyll in Oliver Twist, in Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop and in Johnny’s death in Great Ormond Street Hospital (to whom Barrie gave the Peter Pan copyright) in Our Mutual Friend. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Child had come to represent something deep in us that had been sacrificed to materialism. As never before the symbol of the Child fascinated and gripped people dimly conscious that if what had been sacrificed were to be lost for good it would be Man’s undoing.

  In England, a number of adult males besides Barrie formed friendships with children outside the family that were inspirational and remained sexually pure. For example, John Millais, with what the newspapers called ‘his schoolboy manner’, had a relationship with Beatrix Potter when she was a little girl. Millais was one of a group of adult males, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s husband and Quaker politician John Bright, who came alive in the company of young Beatrix, with her innocence, beauty and shy contemplative manner.

  But there was also speculation about unscrupulous males turning the Cult of Child to lascivious advantage. The critic John Ruskin was divorced after he began a bizarre relationship with the artist Kate Greenaway, who liked ‘to play child’ with him and indulge in baby talk. The reason Ruskin (sixty-four) contacted Greenaway (twenty-nine) in the first place was that he found her drawings of pubescent girls irresistible. Likewise, the reason the Reverend Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll’s friendship with the young Alice Liddell and her two sisters, famously the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, came to an abrupt end was that he began taking plainly provocative photographs of them.

  To begin with, the fact that such relationships were creatively inspirational put parents at their ease, as no doubt Barrie’s creative intentions put the Llewelyn Davies boys’ mother, Sylvia, at her ease.

  We watch as Sylvia falls over herself to facilitate his plan, while others (her husband Arthur, sister Trixy, mother Emma, the boys’ Nanny Mary Hodgson, and Sylvia’s close friend Dolly) become exasperated at how compliant she is.

  We watch, too, as B
arrie appears to derive a tremendous sense of power from the process of capturing Sylvia and the boys on the pages of his novels and plays.

  And we listen to those who knew Barrie and Michael at the time, including in particular Denis Mackail, who was in a unique position to know and made the point, that while Michael and Barrie drew closer and closer, ‘perhaps it isn’t always Barrie who leads or steers’.

  This book is not principally about Barrie, of whom I have written at length elsewhere. A struggle as it is to withdraw from this extraordinary figure as the chief focus, when we begin to look at his favourite boy we seem to move beyond the age-old question of whether they were having sex and see that Michael was the medium for something which Barrie desired even more, and watch as the boy brings it to such delicacy of interpretation that the coarser methods of love-making seem rarely, if ever, to be used.

  For Michael not only led Barrie in his pursuit of what really interested him (as being a du Maurier he knew he would), he left him standing. It was Michael who clarified that being a little half-and-half meant more than remaining a little boy for life and having fun, that actually the Peter Pan in us has nothing to with escapism, playing at fairies or pirates and American Indians when you were an old man of sixty-three and hoping that no one will turn up and compel you to face reality. It has to do with lapsing out, as Michael did so successfully in the Scottish Highlands, and his grandfather did by dreaming true. It has to do with discovering the spiritual half of the betwixt-and-between in you in whatever way it takes you.

  The reason our lives become trivial, and we find ourselves and our lives so boring, is simply that we do not pay enough attention to the half that makes Peter Pan special, the half that has nothing to do with Walt Disney or the Peter Pan bus company or that peanut butter company or Hummingbird candy.

  To begin with, it involves the dying of the human half so that we may taste the half of Peter that transcends this, the spiritual dimension that returns us to the magical state of childhood, a time when we do not do much live life as are lived by forces outside us – the half which sometimes, as Barrie also indicated, can lead to ecstasy.

  But then to carry that experience, that inspirational quality back into the hurly-burly of life, so that the human half benefits. This, Barrie did not allow Michael to do, because he didn’t see it. On the contrary, as Boothby said, Michael felt pressured to do what would have been anathema for him to do. Barrie failed to realise that if you love someone the first thing you do is set them free. Eiluned was right; Michael should have been allowed to go to Paris. It was as simple as that.

  So Rupert and Michael met. There was immediate empathy, but zeal got the better of them. ‘There glowed in them with unusual warmth a Promethean fire,’ wrote The Harrovian. They became high on the effect of their transcendence, so self-centred that attention to what they were really about declined and its essential value escaped them.

  They went to their deaths either wildly gay or very serious, believing that only our mortality offers us the promise of our beliefs and intuitions. When in reality our beliefs can act upon the substance of the universe and shape it.

  63 Letter from Nicholas Llewelyn Davies to Andrew Birkin, 29 December 1975.

  64 The Seekers (1921).

  65 James Harding, Gerald du Maurier (1989).

  Acknowledgements

  SINCE MY FIRST foray into the world of J. M. Barrie, Captivated: J. M. Barrie, the du Mauriers & the Dark Side of Neverland (Chatto & Windus, 2008), it is no longer possible to examine Barrie without reference to the du Mauriers, any more than it is possible to examine one of the du Mauriers without reference to Barrie. No surprise therefore that the tragic story of Michael Llewelyn Davies, whose mother was Sylvia du Maurier, puts Peter Ibbetson at its very core.

  Since 2008, George du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson (the du Maurier family myth) has appeared in various paper and ebook editions. However, if you can get hold of a copy of the 1947 Pilot Press edition you will have the additional joy of John Masefield’s reminiscence of what it meant to be a teenager when du Maurier’s novel first appeared in 1894. Having said this, The Real Peter Pan depends ultimately, as did Captivated, on research undertaken by others into the lives of Barrie and the du Mauriers, albeit as virtually distinct biographical entities.

  Notable in the Barrie camp are W. A. Darlington’s biography, J. M. Barrie (1938), for its analysis of the plays, and the official biography by Denis Mackail, The Story of J. M. B. (1941), for its painstaking analysis of Barrie’s notebooks. But the work of these is dwarfed by that of writer and film-maker Andrew Birkin, who, in the 1970s, drew together the thoughts of so many about Barrie for his film and book, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979) – a vast archive which he now generously shares through the website jmbarrie.co.uk, and which includes letters of the Llewelyn Davies family by courtesy of Laura Duguid.

  In the du Maurier camp, thanks go particularly to Kits Browning, Daphne du Maurier’s son and literary executor, for his long-term support, and to Margaret Forster, whose official biography, Daphne du Maurier, was published in 1993.

  The one source in which Barrie and the du Mauriers were never separate entities is the archive of Dorothea ‘Dolly’ Parry, later Lady Ponsonby of Shulbrede. Dolly was a close friend of Barrie, the Llewelyn Davies family and most especially Sylvia du Maurier. I am very grateful to the Hon. Laura Ponsonby of Shulbrede Priory for making her mother’s many diaries and letters available.

  Tracing the trajectory of Michael’s short life also brings many other sources into focus, in particular the poetry of P. B. Shelley, notably ‘Alastor’, and the work of other poets, such as George Meredith, James Hogg and William Johnson Corey. I would like to thank Katrina Burnett for access to the work of her mother, Janet ‘Eiluned’ Lewis, including the poem ‘Birthright’ and novel Dew on the Grass (1934), which is finding a new audience today, and to Powys County Archives, where the family archive is lodged.

  Thanks also to the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library for access to the Roger Senhouse archive and to Judith Curthoys at Christ Church College Library, and Oxford University and Bodleian libraries for consultation and access to material relating to Rupert Buxton and Michael Llewelyn Davies. I am also grateful to Timothy Young, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and Dolores Colón, who processed the photographs of and by J. M. Barrie from the Llewelyn Davies and Barrie collections held there, as well as Eleanor Cracknell, the archivist at Eton College. Also, thanks are due to Mark Barrington-Ward, nephew of one of the jurors at the inquest into the drowning at Sandford Pool in 1921 (and acquaintance of three others).

  Field research took me to Scotland and was greatly facilitated by many generous people met along the way, including Hans and Antonia de Gier and Colin Strang Steel at Edgerston; Neil and Rosie Hooper at Fortingall; Rhoda Robertson at Killiekrankie; Ken Brown and Roy and Cecilia Dyckhoff at Tomdoun; Wendy Harpe and John Szarkiewicz at Beauly; Gerald and Penny Klein, Patrick and Judy Price and Dorothy Dick at Scourie; Innes Morrison and Heather Mitchell at Amhuinnsuidhe; Vanessa Branson, Paul Waddington, Jon Easton and Jo O’Brien at Eilean Shona; Yvonne O’Shea at the Cuilfel, Kilmelford; and Graham and Moira Jackson on the Auch Estate. I am indebted also to Zilla Oddy at the Archive and Local History Service of the Scottish Borders Council for articles about, and photographs of, J. M. Barrie in Jedburgh.

  Special thanks go to Neil Hooper, Ken Brown and Dr Henry Kaye for their careful editorial advice on various aspects of the landscape and fly-fishing in the book, and to the editor and author of two inspirational books: Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life (ed.) Jeremy Paxman (Penguin, 1995) and The Fly Caster Who Tried to Make Peace with the World by Randy Kadish (Saw Mill River Press, 2007).

  I am grateful also to Faber & Faber for permission to quote from Neville Cardus’s Autobiography (1984) and to all the publishers and authors of works quoted (see Sources). While every effort has been made to trace cop
yright holders, I would be grateful to hear from any unacknowledged sources.

  Unless otherwise indicated, the illustrations in the plate sections are reproduced by kind permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, USA. The landscape photographs were taken by the author, except for those connected to Amhuinnsuidhe, all of which are reproduced by kind permission of Amhuinnsuidhe and the North Harris Trust.

  Finally I would like to thank my publisher Jeremy Robson of the Robson Press for giving me the opportunity to write this book, to my editors Olivia Beattie and Victoria Godden, and to the whole team at the Robson Press for engaging with it with enthusiasm.

  Sources

  Asquith, Cynthia (ed.), The Flying Carpet (Partridge, 1926).

  _ _, Lady Cynthia Asquith Diaries, 1915–1918 (Hutchinson, 1968).

  Barrie, J. M., the Works. Those referred to are listed in Index under Barrie: Works by

  Birkin, Andrew, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (Constable, 1979; Yale UP, 2003).

  Blake, George, Barrie and the Kailyard School (Barker, 1951).

  Boothby, Robert, My Yesterday. Your Tomorrow (Hutchinson, 1962).

  Braithwaite, Geoffrey G., Fine Feathers and Fish (T. & A. Constable, 1971).

  Campbell, Duncan, The Lairds of Glenlyon (Cowan, 1886).

  Cardus, Neville, Autobiography (Collins, 1947; Faber & Faber, 2008).

  Carrington, Dora, Letters and Diaries, edited by David Garnett (Cape, 1975).

  Connolly, Joseph, Jerome K. Jerome (Orbis, 1982).

  Crane, David, Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the

  Extreme South (HarperCollins, 2005).

  Darlington, William Aubrey, J. M. Barrie (Blackie, 1938).

  Day Lewis, Cecil, The Buried Day (Chatto & Windus, 1960).

  Derwent, Lavinia, A Breath of Border Air (Hutchinson, 1975).