Introduction
‘May God blast any one who writes a biography of me’ warned J. M. Barrie in one of his last notebooks. The curse, scrawled across the page like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb, seems as good a reason as any to state at the outset that this is not a biography of Barrie; nor is it a critical assessment of his works; nor a psychological dissection of his mind – ‘an attempt to dig up the dead and twist a finger in their sockets’, as he put it. It is, rather, a love story told through the words and images of the dramatis personae concerned. Unlike The Lost Boys, a trilogy I wrote for BBC television, this is a documentary account, and I have tried to limit my role to that of an editor, allowing the letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, photographs, and Barrie's own works, to unfold the narrative with a minimum of editorial interference. There is, of course, no such thing as a totally objective documentary, for were I to withhold my opinion throughout, a degree of subjectivity would still be evidenced by what I had chosen to include or omit. Indeed, my selection of material has not been particularly objective: I have quoted certain items of questionable merit simply because they appealed to me, while other things of more possible value have been discarded.
Much of the material here has never appeared before in print, with one main exception: Barrie's novels and plays. I make no apology for this, since his works – many of them long out of print – are inextricably bound up with his own private world. Moreover I am fond of them. It has become fashionable to dismiss Barrie as being sentimental or ‘whimsical’; neither adjective describes him fully, a fact recognized by contemporary critics who were obliged to resort to such neologisms as ‘Barrieish’, ‘Barriesque’, and ‘J.-M.-Barrieness’. When Barrie died in 1937, The Daily Telegraph wrote of him, ‘A romantic, indeed, he never was. … Whether one liked his work or not, he owed nothing to anybody or any school. … He was not so much a great artist – though the sanest critic knew he was that, too – as a man who could see visions.’ I hope this book may prompt some to rediscover those visions for themselves.
Notwithstanding my own evident partiality for Barrie's writing, I have endeavoured to leave this account tolerably free of opinion and judgement. It is not a scholarly work, though I have striven to ensure the accuracy of its content, and have supplied references for sources not identified in the text.
Barrie's father, on the other hand, appears to have had little influence on his son's character and development. He is scarcely mentioned in any of Barrie's autobiographical writings, beyond a cursory reference to him in Margaret Ogilvy as ‘a man I am very proud to be able to call my father’, and it was left to his mother to fire the boy with an enthusiasm for literature:
‘We read many books together when I was a boy, “Robinson Crusoe” being the first (and the second), and the “Arabian Nights” should have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since. … Besides reading every book we could hire or borrow I also bought one now and again, and while buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read, standing at the counter, most of the other books in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite way of reading.’
**
‘The horror of my boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I also must give up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not (this agony still returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing marbles, and look on with cold displeasure); I felt that I must continue playing in secret.’
For a man seemingly convinced that the end of boyhood is the end of life worth living—‘nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much’—it comes as something of a surprise to find that he recalled his five years spent at Dumfries Academy as being the happiest of his life. But Barrie had Found a Way; moreover, there was no need for him to play in secret, for on the very first day at school he met another boy who shared his own appetite for high adventure.
**
Unlike Kingsley, Carroll and Wordsworth, Barrie rarely perceived children as trailing clouds of glory; he saw them as ‘gay and innocent and heartless’7 creatures, inspired as much by the devil as by God. He exulted in their contradictions: their wayward appetites, their lack of morals, their conceit, their ingratitude, their cruelty, juxtaposed with gaiety, warmth, tenderness, and the sudden floods of emotion that come without warning and are as soon forgotten. Their unpredictable nature was a source of constant fascination and delight to him. Barrie knew exactly how to win a boy's affection: flatter his insatiable ego, treat him as an equal, and play him at his own game. When Charlie teased and flirted, his uncle would respond with the same tactics; when he hurt his feelings, Barrie would hurt back with equal relish.
**
Whatever the truth, Mary Ansell accepted James Matthew Barrie as her husband on Monday July 9th, 1894. The ceremony was a simple affair, performed by a local minister in his parents' home, according to Scottish custom. After it was over, the newly-married couple left for their honeymoon in Switzerland. The ubiquitous notebooks went with them. Two days before the wedding, Barrie had jotted down in one of them:
— Our love has brought me nothing but misery.
— Boy all nerves. ‘You are very ignorant.’
— How? Must we instruct you in the mysteries of love-making?
1894–1897
In rounding off an interview with the ‘bewitchingly flirtatious’ Miss Mary Ansell, the Sketch noted that Barrie had ‘not long ago declared to an American interviewer that he quite intended to marry, if only to have the convenience of using his wife's hair-pins to clean his pipes’.1 The truth of the jest soon became apparent to Mary, and she later confided to Hilda Trevelyan that the honeymoon had been a shock to her. She did not elaborate, but Barrie's Swiss notebook makes an oblique reference to his dilemma:
—Scene in Play. Wife—Have you given me up? Have nothing to do with me? Husband calmly kind, no passion &c. (à la self)
While in Lucerne, Mary embarked on what was to become a lifelong passion: her love for dogs. She saw a litter of St Bernard puppies in a pet-shop window, and Barrie bought her one as a wedding present. She later wrote in Dogs and Men:
‘Perhaps my love for dogs, in the beginning, was a sort of mother-love. Porthos was a baby when I first saw him: a fat little round young thing. The dearest of all in a lovely litter of St Bernards, away there in Switzerland. My heart burnt hot for love of him. …
‘I have never been really happy with people. Some constraint tightens me up when I am with them. They seem so inside themselves, so unwilling to reveal their real selves. I am always asking for something they won't give me; I try to pierce into their reserves; sometimes I feel I am succeeding, but they close in again, and I am left outside. (...)
**
Tommy is a boy who is in love with himself. He is a born actor, who ‘passes between dreams and reality as through tissue-paper’ and has the faculty of ‘stepping into other people's shoes and remaining there until he became someone else’. There is little that is ‘sentimental’ about Tommy in the sense of mawkish; Barrie used the word in its artistic meaning of sympathetic insight. It is Tommy's schoolmaster, Cathro, who brands him ‘Sentimental Tommy’, for reasons explained to one of Tommy's adult admirers:
‘“Tommy Sandys has taken from me the most precious possession a teacher can have—my sense of humour.”
‘“He strikes me as having a considerable sense of humour himself.”
‘“Well, he may, Mr McLean, for he has gone off with all mine. … But I think I like your young friend worst when he is deadly serious. He is constantly playing some new part—playing is hardly the word though, for into each part he puts an earnestness that cheats even himself, until he takes to another. I suppose you want me to give you some idea of his character, and I could tell you what it is at any particular moment; but it changes, sir, I do assure you, almost as quickly as the circus-rider flings off his layers of waistcoats. A single puff of wind blows him from one character to another, and he may be noble and vicious, and a tyrant and a slave, and hard as granite and melting as butter in the sun, all in one forenoon. All you can be sure of is that whatever he is he will be it in excess. … Sometimes his emotion masters him completely, at other times he can step aside, as it were, and take an approving look at it. That is a characteristic of him, and not the least maddening one. … He baffles me; one day I think him a perfect numbskull, and the next he makes such a show of the small drop of scholarship he has that I'm not sure but what he may be a genius.”
‘“That sounds better. Does he study hard?”
‘“Study! He is the most careless whelp that ever— … I don't think he could study, in the big meaning of the word. I daresay I'm wrong, but I have a feeling that whatever knowledge that boy acquires he will dig out of himself. There is something inside him, or so I think at times, that is his master, and rebels against book-learning. No, I can't tell what it is; when we know that, we shall know the real Tommy.”’
**
Tommy has left Scotland and come to London, where he becomes a fashionable writer. His childhood friend, Grizel, is now a grown woman, with a woman's passions, but Tommy has remained a boy at heart. He is still Sentimental Tommy. Like his creator, Tommy uses his sentimentalism—‘escapism’ would be a better word—to full advantage in his writings, but in his relationship with Grizel it ultimately leads to emotional ruin. It remains one of the more extraordinary facets of Barrie's highly complex personality that he could lay bare his own private anguish on the printed page, could analyse the failure of his marriage even as it was failing, without any apparent restraint or inhibition:
‘“Grizel, I seem to be different from all other men; there seems to be some curse upon me. I want to love you, … you are the only woman I ever wanted to love, but apparently I can't. I have decided to go on with this thing because it seems best for you, but is it? … I think I love you in my own way, but I thought I loved you in their way, and it is the only way that counts in this world of theirs. It does not seem to be my world. …”
‘If we could love by trying, no one would ever have been more loved than Grizel. … He knew it was tragic that such love as hers should be given to him; but what more could he do than he was doing? Ah, if only it could have been a world of boys and girls! … He could not make himself anew. They say we can do it, so I suppose he did not try hard enough. But God knows how hard he tried.
‘He went on trying. In those first days [of marriage] she sometimes asked him, “Did you do it out of love or was it pity only?” And he always said it was love. He said it adoringly. He told her all that love meant to him, and it meant everything that he thought Grizel would like it to mean. …
**
The London production was due to open in November, with Pamela Maude's parents playing the leads—Cyril Maude as Gavin Ogilvy (the Little Minister of the title), and his wife Winifred Emery as the gypsy girl Babbie. Barrie attended every rehearsal, and once again fell in love across the footlights with his leading lady. He made a habit of paying Winifred lavish compliments from the wings, despite the presence on stage of her husband (who was also the producer) and of his own wife sitting in the otherwise empty stalls. Mary Barrie's acting career now consisted largely of disguising her feelings in front of others; if Barrie wished to flirt with his leading lady, she was not going to make an issue of it. She understood her husband's sentimental weakness for pretty young actresses; she also knew, for the most bitter and private of reasons, the limitations of a sentimentalist's ardour.
**
Unfortunately for Arthur, the real-life J. M. Barrie took precisely the opposite attitude towards George's mother. Far from declining invitations to visit her and the boys at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, he availed himself of every opportunity—regardless of whether an invitation had been extended or not. In the Davies family he had found what he had been searching for all his adult life—a beautiful woman who embodied motherhood, a brood of boys who epitomized boyhood—and he did not mean to let them go. What objection could Arthur offer to the intrusive little Scotsman? He knew well enough that he presented no threat to their marriage, that he was ‘quite harmless’. Sylvia was devoted to Arthur, and in a curious way Barrie also found himself devoted to their mutual devotion. He could flatter Sylvia, even flirt with her, yet feel secure in the knowledge that she would never put him to the test.
**
When school ended in early December, Sylvia brought her boys up to London to visit Peter Pan in rehearsal. Barrie treated them like royalty, holding up the proceedings to let the boys fly about the stage, and introducing them to all concerned as being the real authors of the play. Their Uncle Gerald's first child, Angela, had been born earlier in the year, and Barrie celebrated her arrival by changing Wendy's third name to Angela. Further honours were extended to Michael: Alexander Darling became Michael Darling, with Nicholas added as a middle name so that all five boys should be represented among the Dramatis Personae.
The success of the production, however, was by no means assured; indeed, quite the reverse: most of the company were expecting a mild disaster. According to Barrie, ‘During the rehearsals of Peter [Pan] … a depressed man in overalls, carrying a mug of tea or a paint-box, used often to appear by my side in the shadowy stalls and say to me, “The gallery boys won't stand it.” He then mysteriously faded away as if he were the theatre ghost.’6 The cause for concern was not merely the bizarre nature of the play, so unlike anything that had ever been presented before; the opening night had been announced for December 22nd, but by mid-December the mechanical gear required for many of the special effects had not yet been installed, let alone rehearsed.
**
Barrie and Mary rarely communicated with each other these days, and any reflections that Barrie might have had on the triumph of Peter Pan were kept to himself. What was his mood, as he paced up and down his study, contemplating his success? Was he, like Frohman, elated? Perhaps his own description of Captain Hook best described him:
‘Hook trod the deck in thought. O man unfathomable. It was his hour of triumph, … and knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised if he [was] … bellied out by the winds of his success? But there was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the action of his sombre mind. Hook was profoundly dejected. He was often thus when communing with himself … in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone.’12
**
THE TRAGEDY OF PETER PAN
SIR J. M. BARRIE'S LOSS OF AN ADOPTED SON
‘There is something of the wistful pathos of some of his own imaginings in the tragedy which has darkened the home of Sir James Barrie. Almost the first remark of friends, on hearing of the death of the adopted son of the dramatist to-day … was: “What a terrible blow for Sir James !” The young men, Mr Michael Llewelyn Davies and Mr Rupert E. V. Buxton … were drowned near Sandford bathing pool, Oxford, yesterday. The two undergraduates were almost inseparable companions. Mr Davies was only 20 and Mr Buxton 22. … The “original” of Peter Pan was named George, [who] was killed in action in March 1915. … Now both boys who are most closely associated with the fashioning of Peter Pan are dead. One recalls the words of Peter himself: “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”’
The two bodies were not recovered until Friday afternoon, and an inquest was held at Oxford the following day. It was established that the pool, or weir, was a known danger spot: a large memorial overlooked it, commemorating two students who had been drowned there in 1843. The men who had witnessed Michael's death testified that the pool was ‘as still as a mill-pond’ at the time of the tragedy. ‘I heard a shout’, stated one. ‘I looked in the direction and saw two men bathing in the pool in difficulties. … Their heads were close together: they were sort of standing in the water and not struggling.’ ‘Did you form the impression that they were clasped?’ ‘Yes, that was my impression.’22 Since it was known that Michael could not swim, the jury returned a verdict of accidental drowning and ‘expressed the opinion that Mr Buxton lost his life in his endeavour to save his friend. The Dean [of Michael's College] in making this communication to the Coroner completely broke down with emotion.’23 It was rumoured among some that the accident had been suicide. Boothby was ‘convinced that it was a mutual suicide pact’. ‘Perfectly possible,’ wrote Peter in his notes for the family Morgue, ‘but entirely unproven.’ Nico commented, ‘I've always had something of a hunch that Michael's death was suicide. He was in a way the “type” – exceptionally clever, subject to long fits of depression. I'm apt to think – stressing think – that he was going through something of a homosexual phase and maybe let this get a bigger hold on his thinking than it need: I have no knowledge of Rupert's leanings in this direction, but I would guess they preferred each other's company to anyone else's.’ Barrie himself mentioned suicide in later years to Josephine Mitchell-Innes as the possible cause of Michael's death; yet a part of him refused to accept any such notion. Had not Sylvia entrusted him to his care? ‘I do not want my Michael to be pressed at all at work – he is at present not very strong but very keen and intelligent: great care must be taken not to overwork him. Mary understands and of course J.M.B. knows & will be careful & watch.’
Following the inquest, Michael's body was brought back to Adelphi Terrace, where it remained until the funeral. Barrie had not slept for two days and nights: he ‘looked like a man in a nightmare’, wrote Cynthia in her diary. She called in his doctor, Sir Douglas Shields, who persuaded him to take a sleeping draught. For the rest of the time he remained shut away in his bedroom, refusing to see anyone. ‘No praise or gratitude can possibly be too great for Cynthia during these days’, wrote Denis Mackail. ‘It may be said … that it was she who preserved his reason, for throughout that almost unimaginable week-end there were moments of terrible danger.’ The ‘terrible danger’ was Barrie's overwhelming desire to end his own life – a life rendered utterly pointless without Michael.
On Monday, May 23rd, 1921, Michael was buried in Hampstead Churchyard, close to the graves of his mother and father. A few weeks before, Barrie had written in his notebook:
Death. One who died is only a little ahead of procession all moving that way. When we round the corner we'll see him again. We have only lost him for a moment because we fell behind, stopping to tie a shoe-lace.
**
Another Eton contemporary who had joined him was Robert (later Lord) Boothby:
‘Michael was the most remarkable person I ever met, and the only one of my generation to be touched by genius. He was very sensitive and emotional, but he concealed both to a large extent. He had a profound effect on virtually everyone who came into contact with him – particularly Roger Senhouse, who was also a great friend of mine. I don't think Michael had any girl-friends, but our friendship wasn't homosexual; I believe it was – fleetingly – between him and Senhouse, yet I think Michael would have come out of it. Michael took me back to Barrie's flat a number of times, but I always felt uncomfortable there. There was a morbid atmosphere about it. I remember going there one day and it almost overwhelmed me, and I was glad to get away. We were going back to Oxford in Michael's car, and I said, “It's a relief to get away from that flat”, and he said, “Yes it is.” But next day he'd be writing to Barrie as usual. … It was an extraordinary relationship between them – an unhealthy relationship. I don't mean homosexual, I mean in a mental sense. It was morbid, and it went beyond the bounds of ordinary affection. Barrie was always charming to me, but I thought there was something twisted about him. Michael was very prone to melancholy, and when Barrie was in a dark mood, he tended to pull Michael down with him. … I remember once coming back to the flat with Michael and going into the study, which was empty. We stood around talking for about five minutes, and then I heard someone cough: I turned round and saw Barrie sitting in the ingle-nook, almost out of sight. He'd been there all the time, just watching us. … He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie; and when all is said and done, I think Michael and his brothers would have been better off living in poverty than with that odd, morbid little genius.● Yet there's no doubt that Michael loved him; he was grateful to him, but he also had an affinity with him that ran very deep.’
● Nico disagreed with this view. He wrote, ‘I am quite unable to admit that J.M.B.'s influence was “unhealthy”: oppressive maybe and over-constant – and I can believe that Michael was relieved to get away from the flat, as many many undergraduates have felt as they were speeding from their home with a friend back to Oxford. But so far as I am concerned, speaking as the fifth brother, I'm glad I lived with that odd little man rather than living in poverty, or, for that matter, with virtually any other person I have ever known.’
Andrew Birkin
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