Complete Works of J. M. Barrie

by Unknown

  THE END

  THE GREENWOOD HAT

  BEING A MEMOIR OF JAMES ANON 1885-1887

  Fifty copies of this memoir were privately printed by Barrie in 1930 and it was not until after the author’s death that it was reprinted for the general public. It is a revealing account, which in part undergoes an explanation of the genesis of Peter Pan, though some critics have since complained of Barrie’s tendency to distort facts and misrepresent some events.

  The first public edition

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER I

  APOLOGY FOR FINDING AN OLD HAT-BOX

  CHAPTER II

  “THE ROOKS BEGIN TO BUILD” — EXTRAORDINARY AFFAIR AT ST. PANCRAS STATION — PURCHASE OF THE HAT

  CHAPTER III

  “BETTER DEAD” — ANON AS A SANDWICH-BOARD MAN, AN M.P., AN EXPLORER, A MOTHER, A CHILD, A GRANDSIRE, A DOG, A PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY — EPISODE OF AN ARCHBISHOP

  CHAPTER IV

  “A SMALL LATH” — CARLYLE AND THE CARLYLES

  CHAPTER V

  “LOVE ME NEVER OR FOR EVER” — LITERARY VAGRANTS IN HOLYWELL STREET

  CHAPTER VI

  “THE SMALLEST THEATRE” — THE BOY IN THE CORNER SEAT — BEHIND THE SCENES

  CHAPTER VII

  “OLD HYPHEN” — GREENWOOD’S WEAKNESS — GUNPOWDER — ENGLISH SCHOOLS AS CONCEIVED IN SCOTTISH HOMES

  CHAPTER VIII

  “LADIES AT CRICKET” — THE ALLAHAKBARRIE C.C.

  CHAPTER IX

  “THE CAPTAIN OF THE HOUSE” — EXPOSURE OF ANON

  CHAPTER X

  “THE TRUTH ABOUT W. S.” — HOW SHAKESPEARE GOT ME ON TO THE PRESS

  CHAPTER XI

  “THE SADDEST WORD” — DARK PASSAGES IN ANON’S HISTORY

  CHAPTER XII

  “THE BLUE AND WHITE ROOM” — CONTINUATION OF THE DARK PASSAGES

  CHAPTER XIII

  “A RAG OF PAPER” — DREAM OF A POUND A DAY — ISUNDERSTOOD

  CHAPTER XIV

  “EDUCATIONAL NURSERIES” — HOW A CHILD DROVE ME INTO THE WILDERNESS

  CHAPTER XV

  “THE BIOGRAPHER AT BAY” — GEORGE MEREDITH

  CHAPTER XVI

  “WAS HE A GENIUS?” — CONAN DOYLE, MELBA, MRS. D’OYLY CARTE — WRITING IN COLLABORATION

  CHAPTER XVII

  “SANDFORD AND MERTON” — MEREDITH AGAIN — THE ‘SCOTS OBSERVER’ — W. E. HENLEY AND CHARLES WHIBLEY — OSCAR WILDE AND JOHN SILVER’S CRUTCH

  CHAPTER XVIII

  “MR. BARRIE IN THE CHAIR” — OTHER DISCREDITABLE EPISODES — ROOSEVELT

  CHAPTER XIX

  “OF SHORTER HEROES AND HEROINES WHO ROLL” — ANON’S FINAL WAIL ABOUT HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE

  CHAPTER XX

  “A LOVELETTER” — THE COW-WOMAN

  CHAPTER XXI

  “MY HUSBAND’S PLAY” — HANDWRITING WITH THE RIGHT OR LEFT AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES TO AN AUTHOR

  CHAPTER XXII

  “THE CLUB GHOST” — WHAT DOES ONE DO IN CLUBS? — HENRY JAMES — THE ADELPHI BY NIGHT

  CHAPTER XXIII

  “ANON AND I”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  “FROM ST. PANCRAS TO THE BANK.”

  ENVOI

  THE GREENWOOD HAT BEING

  A MEMOIR OF JAMES ANON 1885-1887

  BY

  J. M. BARRIE

  WITH A PREFACE BY

  THE EARL BALDWIN OF BEWDLEY, K.G.

  PREFACE

  THIS little book was printed privately a few years ago for some of Barrie’s friends, and I rejoice that it is now being given to the world for the delight of those who love the man and his work.

  It is an autobiography of early days and early struggles, clear, sharply clear, yet fairy-like and mellowed in that soft autumn light in which Seventy looks back on Twentyfive.

  And what treasure is to be found in it! What riddles to be solved!

  The happy reader will learn what was the Hat and why he bought it.

  He will know why Barrie took to smoking. Where else is told the story of the Allahakbarries and who was their dear enemy?

  There was only one writer whom Barrie tried to imitate. Who was he?

  Who got Barrie on to the Press? You will never guess, so I will tell you. Shakespeare. Yes, but how? And that too you will learn.

  Not to weary you, only two or three more questions.

  Why at one dinner would Barrie be comparatively bright and at another drearier than ever?

  And lastly: with which hand was Dear Brutus written, and why? and with which hand Quality Street? and what happened to the beautiful copperplate hand of his boyhood? All these things, and “aye lots more,” as the old country song has it, are to be found in these pages.

  But the Adelphi Ghosts are gone.

  The real Bohemia begins in Adelphi Terrace, Barrie tells us, after the last member of the Savage Club has departed for the night. The only club whose ways he really knew was the club of the Adelphi Ghosts: Davy Garrick, Mrs. Bracegirdle, Dr. Johnson, Bozzie, Peter the Great, Pepys, the brothers Adam, Mr. Micawber, the Fat Boy, Charles Lamb, Gibbon and Emma Hart. He knew them all.

  Adelphi Terrace is gone: the Ghosts are gone. To those who knew Barrie in his eyry above the Terrace it seemed unthinkable that he would survive the destruction of the Adelphi.

  But wherever the Adelphi Ghosts are fled, he will have found Charles Lamb.

  BALDWIN OF BEWDLEY.

  CHAPTER I

  APOLOGY FOR FINDING AN OLD HAT-BOX

  THIS book consists merely of some old newspaper articles tied together with a string of memories which the re-reading of them has evoked. They are samples of hundreds I wrote (as Mr. Anon) in my first two years in London in the late ‘eighties. The newspapers containing them I used to drop in Bloomsbury, leaving them to lie where they fell. They usually fell in Red Lion Street or Lamb’s Conduit Street, where I bought the evening journal on which I did precariously subsist, make sure that another article had been at last accepted, and then (as I had no interest in Affairs) drop the journal in any doorway and pass on, suddenly looking not quite so thin.

  To be more candid, I question whether I make this memoir of Anon to uplift my friends so much as in idleness to recall myself. I am yielding to sentiment; not as the gentle reader may say (with I hope a tolerant smile) for the first time. I wish it had been left out of me, but there it is. When I was a very small boy, another as small was woeful because he could not join in our rough play lest he damaged the ‘mourning blacks’ in which he was attired. So I nobly exchanged clothing with him for an hour, and in mine he disported forgetfully while I sat on a stone in his and lamented with tears, though I knew not for whom. It is a recent discovery that is making me, maybe, similarly sentimental over these writings of the past. I don’t mean that I have been searching the doorways of Red Lion Street or Lamb’s Conduit Street, which are all no doubt now put to other uses. What I mean is that I found a bundle of withered articles unexpectedly in an old hat-box, which was itself a still more sentimental discovery. This led to a search by a friend in the British Museum, where even the lowliest printed matter is preserved. Other old articles found there were photographed, and finally reached me in white lettering on black paper, looking as if they were in mourning for themselves. That boy could have dressed in them and wept again.

  I have, alas, never been in the British Museum (except long ago to dine with Sidney Colvin), though I took my first lodgings in Bloomsbury to be near it. I was told, rightly or wrongly, that I must have two householders to guarantee my respectability, and though my landlady was willing to be one, it was not at the time ‘convenient’ to the solitary to find another. This difficulty and, curiously enough, John Morley, were responsible between them for driving me for ever from certain heavy intentions.

  My emotional discovery, as I have said, was less that first bundle of pages than the receptacle that contained them. It was an old leather hat-box, which was second-hand when it came into my
possession, and before that had gone through many years of Scottish funerals. To me it was forwarded soon after I got my first silk hat, my lum hat as we used to call them, and it was with this hat that I made my assault on London. Had it failed me I suppose I should have had to go back and be a clerk. How it conducted me through the fray and why I call it the Greenwood Hat will soon be obvious to the patient reader. When I rediscovered the hat-box the hat was no longer in it, nor do I know what ultimately became of it, but I shall tell in my last pages of the great event in which we two parted with mutual goodwill. This, if properly done, should be as exciting as the end of a novel.

  Out of respect for the hat-box I re-read the articles to see ‘how time with every time is knit,’ or to catch up on Mr. Anon and guess whether if he and I were now to meet in the street I should be more displeased with him or he with me. I must admit that he has it in appearance, judged by the sketch of him which forms the frontispiece to this volume. It was made in an inspired hour by the celebrated artist, T. L. Gilmour, at that time secretary to Lord Rosebery, in 1886 or 1887 at our lodgings in Grenville Street, hard by Brunswick Square. This is my favourite portrait of Anon, and it is sad to think that T. L. G., the master-hand, so far as I know never made another; he possibly there and then destroyed his tools in a noble selfconsciousness that with the first effort he had reached his pinnacle. One regrets, however, that he has omitted the Hat.

  Having decided to put this sheaf together in memory of Mr. Anon I may be asked why I have chosen to represent his output by this score or so out of the many hundred contributions he made to the Press in his brief existence. One reason is that most of them have gone beyond easy recall; another is that now that I have tinkered at them extensively, sometimes changing their names, and edited them, these are not, I assure you, the worst ones. They are also more personal to myself; indeed sometimes as autobiographical as the notes I add to them, and thus vaguely they make a story. However inadequate I am to the task of writing a memoir of any one, there may be said to be some excuse for my writing about Anon, for I knew him in the long ago as no one else knew him; we were so close to each other that in this record you will never find him having occasion, to tighten his belt for instance, without my still feeling a similar sinking in the same part of my person. We dwelt inside each other. I once thought of calling the book in a sub-title ‘Memories and Fancies,’ the fancies (in larger type) being the old articles, and the memories my comments on them. I abandoned the idea, not being always certain, despite the best intentions, where the memories became fancies and the fancies memories. That word, sub-title, is itself a memory to me. Anon began to use sub-titles (now removed) as soon as he discovered that they were worth another sixpence; and long afterwards I learned that Greenwood, our beloved editor, had understood from the first what the hungry Scot was up to and never let on.

  In one marked way I must fail completely as a biographer, for I can offer no letters, which, of course, are the staple of such a work as this ought to be. Anon seems unfortunately never to have fallen so low as to preserve private letters for publication. In these circumstances I crave forgiveness for offering articles in lieu of them. They do, I think, often become a little biographical if instead of saying, ‘Being somewhat lonely, Anon was glad to get the following letter,’ I am conceived as saying, ‘Being somewhat hungry, Anon sat down to write the following article.’

  He has been called by the misunderstanding a whimsical fellow, and it may be that he fell to being that, but such was never his intention before he graduated at Edinburgh University nor for some time afterwards. Locked up within him was a worthy craving to be the heaviest writer of his time. You have heard how the British Museum slammed their doors on that, but he did not altogether surrender hope until (with a letter of introduction) he met with John Morley. I had the honour of Morley’s friendship in later years, but Anon only met him on that dreadful occasion. What sort of things did he propose to write? Morley who was then an editor asked, and Anon gave him a choice of three, The History of Universities, A Life of William Cobbett, and The Early British Satirists, with Some Account of their Influence on the Period and the Manner in which they Illustrate History. I have in my possession still Anon’s notes about these and still weightier projected works; but Morley, who was all for brightness, decided that the young man was too grave a character to make a living out of literature, and urged him to try first for a competency in his rugged native land.

  Anon (though this was not as yet his name) had begun to send articles to London to Greenwood of the ‘St. James’s Gazette,’ after a year’s leader-writing on a Nottingham paper. Most of them came back, but a few were used, and on one of the rejected the glorious man had scribbled, ‘But I liked that Scotch thing — any more of those?’ It was Anon’s first paper on the Auld Lichts, and the terrific date of its appearance was November 17, 1884. In dispatching that article he thought he had exhausted the subject, but in no time thereafter he sent off ‘An Auld Licht Funeral’ (accepted), which led promptly to ‘An Auld Licht Courtship’ (accepted), and henceforth I tell you he was frequently at his loom weaving Auld Lichts. There are none of these papers here, as like a series of smoking ones and others they afterwards became parts of books. All of Anon’s articles were unsigned during the two years of writing with which this small volume is to deal; but that was well for him, as otherwise it would have been more difficult (as now) to obtain an entry. Greenwood, always famous for liking to give the young a chance, enjoyed, when an anonymous article in his paper was ascribed to some swell, being able to reply, ‘No, it was by Bob or Bill or Thomas Anon.’

  I was not as yet, however, as I have said, one of his Anons, though an ardent candidate. After he had passed a dozen or so of my offerings I wrote to him from Dumfries, where I was then staying with my brother, of my ambition to hie London-wards and my Scottish confidence that I could live on a pound a week. I did not ask for a place on the paper, and indeed, except for that year at Nottingham, I have been a ‘freelance’ all my days. I did, however, promise to abide by his decision. It came promptly, telling me to stay where I was till he saw more of my work. So, to put it bluntly, I set off for London next week, on the night of March 28, 1885.

  Strange that I cannot remember what the weather was like that night, I who have made so much use of weather in the first pages of less moving tales. Let us survey our hero as he sits awake in a corner of his railway compartment, well aware that the end of it must be to perch, or to let go, like a bat in the darkness behind the shutter. He has a suspicious eye, poor gomeril, for any fellow-traveller who is civil to him. He is gauche and inarticulate, and as thin as a pencil but not so long (and is going to be thinner). Expression, an uncomfortable blank. Wears thick boots (with nails in them), which he will polish specially for social functions. Carries on his person a silver watch bought for him by his father from a pedlar on fourteenth birthday (that was a day). Carries it still, No. 57841. Has no complete dress-suit in his wooden box, but can look every inch as if attired in such when backed against a wall. Manners, full of nails like his boots. Ladies have decided that he is of no account, and he already knows this and has private anguish there anent. Hates sentiment as a slave may hate his master. Only asset, except a pecuniary one, is a certain grimness about not being beaten. Pecuniary asset, twelve pounds in a secret pocket which he sometimes presses, as if it were his heart. He can hear, as you may, the hopes and fears that are thumping inside him. That bigger thump means that the train has reached St. Pancras station.

  Now we come to our first article, which is about the rooks of Dumfriesshire.

  CHAPTER II

  “THE ROOKS BEGIN TO BUILD” — EXTRAORDINARY AFFAIR AT ST. PANCRAS STATION — PURCHASE OF THE HAT

  ( The method followed throughout the book is to begin each chapter with an old article, and to follow it with a commentary of recent date. )

  “MY morning walk is under the Rookery when the green buds are still in danger of being strangled in a scarf of rime. The
air is not then alive with cawing busybodies; but I have ceased to be such a coxcomb as to think that I have caught them sleeping. I meet them in straggling parties in the open, where they are poking their beaks among grassy tufts by the ditch in quest of dew-worms. In the proverb about leaving our couch betimes, the Rook is the early bird and the dew-worms are the laggards. In these frosty mornings he has often a careworn bill. As a delicacy he prefers the succulent grub to the sweetest seed that was ever sown, but when a hard crust of earth forms between him and his breakfast he becomes a vegetarian. Starvation drives him from field to street, where, with his heart very near that bill, he flutters into a granary and is off with a whole seed before the deftest throw can get him. He clutters over his thefts, admitting his guilt, and looks so wicked in his suit of rusty black that he is generally esteemed the most impudent of thieves. Yet one sparrow popping from street to street may be of lower morals than a whole Rookery. Except among themselves, theft is a rarity with Rooks and is looked down on in the home circle, while sparrows enjoy nothing so much as police surveillance.