Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  It is clear that mesmerism became more to Kicky than incidental amusement. Yet another ink drawing from this period shows him and Felix looking from the left of the picture on to a dreamscape composed of Kicky’s ancestors. Hypnosis has become a visionary vehicle into his past, as it would thirty years later for the pioneer psychiatrists. In the picture Kicky is again in a trance, living in his own wholly absorbing fantasy world. Soon he would also begin to see the visionary possibilities of hypnosis in a Romantic-mystical-metaphysical sense, ‘to expand his consciousness’. Nor was he alone in this.

  Kicky was the complete Romantic. As a child, unlike his scientific father who ‘despised all books, I... was enthusiastic about Byron, and used to read out “The Giaour” and “Don Juan” to my mother for hours together. I knew the shipwreck scene in “Don Juan” by heart, and recited it again and again... Then came Shelley, for whom my love has lasted, and then Tennyson, for whom my admiration has never wavered... though I now qualify him with Browning. Swinburne was a revelation to me.’

  But now Romantics were alive to the scientific reality of invisible forces, and were beginning to see hypnosis as a trigger that would enable anyone to become a divine visionary like William Blake.

  What is one to make of the electrical energy vibrating through Kleist’s dramas, the ‘streams of magnetic fluid’ coursing through Balzac’s novels, the ‘electrical heat’ radiating from gures in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales, and the ‘magnetic chain of humanity’ joining together the characters in Hawthorne’s novels? And why is it that Rodolphe woos Emma Bovary by entertaining her with ‘dreams, forebodings, magnetism’? Why does Charles Bovary, distraught by his wife’s death, recall stories about the ‘miracles of animal magnetism’ and imagine that, by ‘straining his will’, he can resuscitate his wife?... The trances induced by these latter-day mesmerists represented a state in which the medium’s body remained fixed on earth while his soul escaped its corporeal prison to roam through another world. No longer merely a palliative for physical ills... mesmerism now promised to endow man with a sixth sense that would expand his cognitive consciousness.11

  From personal experience Kicky agreed with the French Academy of Medicine that hypnosis was a vehicle for clairvoyance and pre-vision; and also for ‘a mystical feeling, half rapture, half pain... so sweetly profound’, as he wrote to his artist friend Armstrong. He had found a way, through hypnotism, to replicate ‘such as moves in sweet melodies, such as entrances in Chopin’s Etudes, and in Schubert’s Romances’. He discovered what a hundred years later the American psychologist Abraham H. Maslow called ‘peak experiences’ – non-religious, quasi-mystical and mystical experiences, sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, and sometimes a mystical sense of ‘ultimate truth’, the unity of all things.

  The experience fills the individual with wonder and awe. He feels at one with the world and is pleased with it; he or she has seen the ultimate truth or the essence of all things.12 That the route to this highly tuned emotional state was via neither art nor religion did not trouble Kicky, nor did it diminish art in his judgement (he had no time for religion anyway, having inherited a dislike for black-robed priests from his father and rejected God after he lost the sight of his eye). His experience of hypnosis had taken him from a ‘Romantic’ view of the world towards a ‘modern scientific’ view, which not only allowed for the existence of a supernatural ‘other world’, but made it the more real. It seemed to him that hypnosis awakened a sixth sense, which he described as having long been ‘etiolated by disuse’.

  Meanwhile, his mother Ellen was becoming concerned about his hypnotic excursions, and in his heart Kicky knew they had become an addiction. Like Felix, he sensed that they would bring him down in the end.

  Fortunately, practical matters intervened. His sister Isabel wrote from London, where she was staying with a school friend, Emma Wightwick, to say that Emma’s mother had heard of ‘an oculist at Gräfrath, near Düsseldorf, who had cured hundreds of people near to blindness and who was said in fact to be the finest oculist in Europe. What was more, there was a school for painting in Düsseldorf itself. Why did not Kicky and her mother leave Malines and Belgium and try their luck in Germany?’

  In the spring of 1859 Kicky left Felix and travelled with his mother to Düsseldorf, where he discovered that while the oculist could not restore the sight of his left eye, with care the right one would remain sound till the end of his days. His mind at once reverted to more enjoyable things. He wrote to Felix:

  Spent yesterday in Gräfrath; jolly place, lots of beauties, plenty of singing and sketching and that sort of thing, you know. Long walks in beautiful valleys, most delightful. The fact is, I’m so beastly merry since I’ve been here that I don’t think I’m quite sane, and altogether only want your periodical visits and permission to have my fling on Saturday nights to be in heaven... Carry novel, of course, adjourned sine die; haven’t got time just now – you know what a fellow I am. Just got her letter; very naïve and amusing – but don’t tell her so, or else she will pose for that and spoil it.

  Felix decided to drop in on Kicky on his way to Paris. ‘We sat into the small hours of the morning, talking of the past, present, and future, a long-necked Rhine-wine bottle and two green glasses beside us, our hopes and aspirations rising with the cloud that curled from my ever-glowing cigar.’13

  Both boys looked back fondly on their mutually successful psychically empowered conquests, which appear to have continued during Felix’s short stay – ‘Damask was another beauty whom we appreciated, perhaps all the more because we knew she was dying of consumption.’

  Money meanwhile was becoming scarce. As Daphne recorded, the family ‘had nothing to live upon but the annuity that Kicky’s mother had inherited from Mary Anne Clarke, the original hush money from the Duke of York. His brother, Eugene, was a constant source of worry, always in debt as his father had been. And his sister Isabel, now a pretty girl of nineteen, must also be supported . . .’ Kicky had hoped to be the main prop of the family. It was time for him to move on, but he knew not where, now that his ambition to be a painter had been quashed by semi-blindness. It took a visit from his friend Tom Armstrong to fix it, as Daphne recorded:

  Armstrong came to stay in the Spring of 1860 and told him frankly that he was doing no good and allowing himself to drift... Kicky took stock of himself. Tom was perfectly right. He was doing no good. He was living on his mother, he was selling no pictures and he was getting himself entangled with girls.

  But what could he do? Armstrong told him that in London magazines were crying out for illustrators. He showed him a copy of Punch’s Almanack, pointed out the drawings of Charles Keene and John Leech and insisted that if Kicky chose to do so he could draw as well as they. He promised he could get Kicky introductions to Punch and to other illustrated magazines. Several of their friends had moved from Paris to London . . .

  It was true that engraving was a highly regarded medium in London at this time. Even important artists like John Millais were drawing on wood, and being well paid for it. So it was that, in May 1860, young George du Maurier borrowed £10 from his mother’s annuity and set forth from Düsseldorf for London, travelling with Tom Armstrong and Isabel’s friends, the Wightwicks.

  On his arrival he settled at number 70 Newman Street, just north of Oxford Street in Bloomsbury, which, although he was unaware of it, was practically next door to the house in Cleveland Row where his grandfather, Robert Busson du Maurier, had lived some sixty years earlier.

  He shared the premises, which doubled as a studio, with Jimmy Whistler, who was causing a few tremors in society with his picture, At the Piano. Kicky quickly immersed himself in the London scene, writing to his mother:

  Tonight I am going with an old friend, Ormsby, to Munroe’s, the sculptor’s, where I will perhaps meet Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Ruskin and the Deuce knows who.

  The members of the original brotherhood of Pre-Raphaelites were like heroes to Kicky, but his warmest wel
come meanwhile came from another quarter.

  † James Braid would give Mesmer’s magnetism the name hypnotism – the Greek root meaning sleep – in order to highlight the developments of the science since Mesmer’s day, although hypnosis is not in fact a sleeping state.

  * The Dutch artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was one of the most famous artists of the late nineteenth century, his subject matter mainly classical antiquity. He looked very similar to du Maurier and had a reputation as quite a bon viveur. Years later in London, every Tuesday evening he was At Home to his friends in his magnificent studio in Grove End Road. ‘I don’t know how it is,’ du Maurier is reported to have said one afternoon, ‘but people always seem to mistake me for Tadema. Enthusiastic women come up to me at parties and say, “Oh, Mr Tadema! I really must tell you! I do so adore your pictures! The way you represent marble! Oh and the roses – and everything! Too, too wonderful!”’

  ‘And what do you do?’ he was asked.

  ‘Always the same thing,’ he said with an impish twinkle. ‘I press their hands warmly and say, “Gom to me on my Chewsdays.” I don’t know if they do.’

  * The fascinating record of their time together was published immediately after Kicky’s death on 6 October 1896. Entitled In Bohemia with Du Maurier, it was illustrated with a large number of Kicky’s drawings. Felix wrote the ‘few introductory words’ in the month that Kicky died, which may suggest that du Maurier had not wanted it published at all, although Felix writes that his friend ‘had here and there lent a helpful hand even to the correcting of the proofs’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The boy who hated mothers

  On the ninth day of the same month in 1860 that Kicky arrived in London, a boy was born in Kirriemuir in eastern Scotland. The penultimate of ten siblings, he was christened James Matthew, and known at home as Jamie.

  His parents, a fundamentalist Presbyterian couple, had married nineteen years earlier. Stern, burly David Barrie was a weaver or ‘warper’ by trade, tiny Margaret Ogilvy (she cannot have been more than five feet tall), the daughter of a local stonemason, and six years younger.

  Margaret was a member of a fiercely puritanical Protestant sect known as the Auld Lichts, ‘the keenest heresy hunters’ in the Presbyterian Church, according to the critic W. A. Darlington.1 It was tradition for a Scottish wife in those days to keep her surname, which is why Jamie’s mother was known as Margaret Ogilvy rather than Margaret Barrie. It was also tradition upon marriage to convert to the husband’s Church, which in the case of Jamie’s father was the less extreme Free Church of Scotland.

  The weaving industry of Kirriemuir was a well-organised, commercial operation. It sprang in the 1760s from the development locally of a double-thickness cloth, which proved ideal for the manufacture of ladies’ corsets, all the rage in the fashionable cities of Europe, and an ironic undercurrent in the Barrie house, where Margaret’s fierce puritanism ran to disguising her daughters’ underwear when hanging it out to dry.

  Of the couple’s ten children, seven were girls and three boys. Two of the girls died in infancy. Of the surviving eight children, the eldest was Alexander, known as Alick, born in 1841, a bright and hard-working boy who won a bursary to Aberdeen University from a school at Forfar, six miles away from Kirriemuir. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in Classics in 1862. Next came Mary (1843) who kept house for Alick when subsequently he started a private school – the Bothwell Academy – in Lanarkshire.

  Second daughter Jane Ann was born in 1847. She grew up plain and was the austere, self-sacrificing one who dedicated her life to caring for her mother. Margaret Ogilvy, a difficult, demanding woman, outlived Jane Ann, who died an old maid at just 48.

  In 1853 the Barries’ second son David was born. He showed exceptional promise and much was expected of him. There was only one position higher than teacher in the mind of Margaret Ogilvy – and that was minister; nothing less would be good enough for David, who was the apple of her eye. Margaret’s hopes for him turned him into something of a legend. No doubt Jamie was fed up with hearing about him.

  The tenth child, Margaret, known as Maggie, was born three years after Jamie, in 1863 – she was Jamie’s favourite and doted on him.

  At first, the Barries lived in a two-up, two-down cottage, with one of the downstairs rooms housing a hand loom and little else. But the family never knew poverty. Local industry was healthy and David was a mover and shaker in it. By 1860 there were 1,500 hand-loom weavers in the town, and 500 more in the surrounding area. Kirriemuir weavers were producing over nine million yards of linen a year, and before long the Barries took an adjacent cottage and employed weavers on their own account.

  Then, in 1867, something happened that would fix Jamie’s life. His brother, David, who was being schooled a hundred miles away at Alick’s Bothwell Academy, was injured in a skating accident. Wrote Barrie:*

  When he was thirteen and I was half his age the terrible news came, and I have been told the face of my mother was awful in its calmness as she set off between Death and her boy. We trooped with her down the brae to the wooden station, and I think I was envying her the journey in the mysterious wagons; I know we played around her, proud of our right to be there, but I do not recall it, I only speak from hearsay.

  Her ticket was taken, she had bidden us goodbye with that fighting face which I cannot see, and then my father came out of the telegraph-office and said huskily, ‘He’s gone!’ Then we turned very quietly and went home again up the little brae. But I speak from hearsay no longer; I knew my mother for ever now... for many months she was very ill. I have heard that the first thing she expressed a wish to see was the christening robe, and she looked long at it and then turned her face to the wall . . .

  My mother lay in bed with the christening robe beside her, and I peeped in many times at the door and then went to the stair and sat on it and sobbed. I know not if it was that first day, or many days afterwards, that there came to me my sister, the daughter my mother loved the best [Jane Ann];... This sister, who was then passing out of her ’teens, came to me with a very anxious face and wringing her hands, and she told me to go ben [in] to my mother and say to her that she still had another boy. I went ben excitedly, but the room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless before say, ‘Is that you?’ I think the tone hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously, ‘Is that you?’ again. I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, ‘No, it’s no him, it’s just me . . .’

  Many a time she fell asleep speaking to him, and even while she slept her lips moved and she smiled as if he had come back to her, and when she woke he might vanish so suddenly that she started up bewildered and looked about her, and then said slowly, ‘My David’s dead!’

  Nothing Jamie could do would make her forget David. But how he tried.

  After that I sat a great deal in her bed trying to make her forget him... and if I saw any one out of doors do something that made others laugh I immediately hastened to that dark room and did it before her. I suppose I was an odd little figure; I have been told that my anxiety to brighten her gave my face a strained look and put a tremor into the joke. I would stand on my head in the bed, my feet against the wall, and then cry excitedly, ‘Are you laughing, mother?’... I remember once only making her laugh before witnesses. I kept a record of her laughs on a piece of paper, a stroke for each, and it was my custom to show this proudly to the doctor every morning . . .

  It was doubtless [Jane Ann] who told me not to sulk when my mother lay thinking of him, but to try instead to get her to talk about him... At first, they say, I was often jealous, stopping her fond memories with the cry, ‘Do you mind nothing about me?’ but that did not last... He had such a cheery way of whistling, she had told me, it had always brightened her
at her work to hear him whistling, and when he whistled he stood with his legs apart, and his hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers... I had learned his whistle... from boys who had been his comrades, I secretly put on a suit of his clothes... and thus disguised I slipped, unknown to the others into my mother’s room . . .

  After this crushing simulation, in which he surrendered to David an exclusive claim on his mother’s love, and swallowed her rejection of him, 7-year-old Jamie switched the focus from himself and David, and persuaded his mother to tell him about her own childhood.

  He then began to feature the child his mother had once been in sentimental made-up stories, and ‘this girl in a blue dress and bonnet with white ribbons’ was reborn in tales ‘of desert islands and enchanted gardens, with knights on leaping chargers’.

  Margaret, ‘a wonder at making-believe’ – and astonishingly self-centred – rose to the fantasy which became the basis of their relationship. Throughout his boyhood she would tell Jamie about old Kirriemuir and the Auld Lichts, the extreme religious sect to which she had belonged. And the stories continued in turn to pour out from Jamie, eventually to become, in his thirties, whole novels. Always there was a character in them pegged on Margaret. ‘I soon grow tired of writing tales unless I can see a little girl, of whom my mother has told me, wandering confidently through the pages.’

  He would bring the manuscript of a new novel from London, and sit on her bed (for Margaret was often in bed, with Jane Ann in attendance), while she looked for herself in its pages. When she found the character, she would cackle excitedly, and all would be well.

  Margaret never recovered from the loss of David, and her relationship with Jamie was never a loving one in any normal sense. In 1868, a year after the accident, she sent him away to live with his brother Alexander.