Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Nevertheless, the fantasy world, which had bridged the gulf between himself and his mother, ‘clicked’ in Jamie’s mind, and as a boy he went on to win the approbation of other boys in similar fashion, first as their self-appointed fantasy leader, Captain Stroke, in Jacobite games played out in a Kirriemuir den, ‘the spot chosen by the ill-fated Stuart and his gallant remnant for their last desperate enterprise’, and then 170 miles away at the Dumfries Academy, where at 12 years of age he was sent to school after Alick had taken a job in the town as a Schools Inspector.

  Soon after he arrived at the Academy, Jamie and a boy named Stuart Gordon discovered they were both fans of Fenimore Cooper, and on the strength of it, Stuart invited Jamie to join his gang.

  Stuart’s father was Sheriff Clerk of Dumfries. He lived in a house with a large garden on the banks of the Nith; and here night by night the gang enacted a sort of Odyssey that was long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan.

  In the riverside garden, Jamie came into his own. The Odyssey may have started out as derivative of Fenimore Cooper’s stories, but soon Jamie had his friends re-enacting adventures based on his own favourite book, R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, which tells of three ship’s boys – Ralph, Jack and Peterkin – wrecked on a South Sea coral island. They build their own house, make fires, gather fruits, build boats to explore neighbouring islands, and settle down to an idyllic life, until the war canoes arrive full of cannibals . . .

  We had a sufficiently mysterious cave, that had not been a cave until we named it, and here we grimly ate cocoa-nuts stoned from trees which not even Jack nor Ralph nor Peterkin would have recognised as likely to bear them. And more or less bravely we suffered for the same, the cocoa-nuts not being of the season that yielded Peterkin his lemonade. Here too we had a fire, lit as Jack used to light his, by rubbing two sticks together.2

  It was a time of friendship, blood brotherhood, high adventure and noble action. Jamie was soon calling himself and Stuart after heroes of blood-and-thunder penny pulp magazines – Dare Devil Dick and Sixteen-String Jack. Meanwhile, The Coral Island ‘egged me on, not merely to being wrecked every Saturday for many months in a long-suffering garden, but to my first work of fiction, a record of our adventures, the “Log-Book”’. The log book was the prototype for The Boy Castaways, the log he kept for Sylvia’s boys nearly forty years later.

  The comradeship Jamie found here was the supreme antidote to the emotional hiatus at home, and the happiest time of his life, he wrote. Jamie also enjoyed playing football and cricket, took an active part in the debating and literary societies, and at 16 got his first taste of journalism, when a fellow pupil, Wellwood ‘Wedd’ Anderson, the son of a Dumfries bookseller, started up a school journal, The Clown. But his real forte was in theatre, where he soon gained a degree of notoriety.

  A local minister, who was also a member of the local School Board, publicly (and quite inexplicably) criticised Jamie’s first play, Bandelero the Bandit, as ‘grossly immoral’. Happily a critic from the Dumfries Herald had also been present and came to the rescue: ‘Two awful villains, Gamp and Banshaw, were characters in Barrie’s play... They were no worse, and no better, than the average stage villain of the “penny plain and tuppence coloured” and were probably based on Deadwood Dick, Spring-Heeled Jack, a Fenimore Cooper pirate, or the cruel robbers of the Babes in the Wood.’

  In one of the two other plays that evening, a comedy called Paul Pry by J. L. Toole, a London actor and regular player himself at the Dumfries Theatre Royal, Jamie starred as Phoebe, a girl with her hair attached to her hat. When a copy of the Herald article was sent to Toole in London he, ‘being the kindliest gentleman in the world’, as Barrie recalled, ‘replied at once, and said facetiously that he hoped one of us would write a play for him some day. That amused us very much.’3 By 1893 Toole had appeared in two of Barrie’s plays in the West End of London, and another actor at the Dumfries theatre, George Shelton, played the pirate Smee in Peter Pan.

  Jamie had discovered a real talent at 17. Letters written to a lad called Peter Irving, who had recently left the Academy and taken a job in Edinburgh, show him brimming with confidence and, though he was not regarded, nor regarded himself, as in the scholar class, he won at least one prize, for ‘Excellence in English Composition’.

  Then came the first downturn in his life at the Academy. His friends started talking about girls, and he found that girls were not interested in him very much, or even at all. Jamie’s physical development was not so much slow as stunted. At 17 he had the tiny body of a much younger boy, with an oddly proportioned head. He had stopped growing at just over five foot, his chin was smooth and, worst of all, he was only ever picked to play female parts in the theatre. Throughout his life, he blamed his physical appearance for his lack of appeal to the opposite sex, and there is no doubt that it lowered his self-esteem yet further.

  Six feet three inches... If I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life. I would not have bothered turning out reels of printed matter. My one aim would have been to become a favourite of the ladies which between you and me has always been my sorrowful ambition. The things I could have said to them if my legs had been longer.4

  The girls in the Academy, according to Jamie himself, held a plebiscite to decide which boy had the sweetest smile, and he headed the poll. That they found him cute seemed to make matters worse. Had they disliked him or feared him it would be something, ‘but it is crushing to be just harmless’, he wrote.

  Further alienation occurred during the holidays in Kirriemuir. When he went home he was turned away from the imposing new villa, Strathview, which his father’s success as an administrator in the new power-loom industry had bought the family, and was billeted out instead at Pathhead Farm, on the outskirts of the town. No convincing explanation has been offered, or found, for this exile. His biographer Darlington wrote: ‘Evidently because now that his home was with his brother at Dumfries, there was no bed for him at Strathview.’ But after all the time away, and given his desperate need to be loved, it must have seemed like rejection.

  In between fishing and walking, which became his best-loved pastimes, he did nevertheless keep up the storytelling sessions with his mother, and cottoned on to her interest in explorers, the glittering heroes of the day. Gallant tales of the search for the Northwest Passage, expeditions to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the exotic Orient and the dark continent of Africa, provided a steady stream of adventure that thrilled British society at every level throughout the nineteenth century, at once capturing the imagination and stoking the Imperialist dream. In Margaret’s case, it was an absolute obsession. As for Jamie, the heroic was already a dimension of his fantasy world, and identifying with her heroes gave his tarnished self-image a shine.

  My mother liked the explorers to be alive so that she could shudder at the thought of their venturing forth again; but though she expressed a hope that they would have the sense to stay at home henceforth, she gleamed with admiration when they disappointed her. In later days I had a friend [Joseph Thomson] who was an African explorer, and she was in two minds about him; he was one of the most engrossing of mortals to her, she admired him prodigiously, pictured him at the head of his caravan, now attacked by savages, now by wild beasts, and adored him for the uneasy hours he gave her, but she was also afraid that he wanted to take me with him... The newspaper reports would be about the explorer, but my mother’s comment was ‘His mother’s a proud woman this night.’

  Margaret revered not only the adventurers but also those who wrote about them:

  Her delight in Carlyle was so well known that various good people would send her books that contained a page about him... There were times, she said, when Carlyle must have made his wife a glorious woman.

  ‘As when?’ I might inquire.

  ‘When she keeked in at his study door and said to herself, “The whole world is ringing with his fame, and he is my man! . . .”’

  All Ma
rgaret’s heroes evinced the ideals that Thomas Carlyle had written about in his series of lectures, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), the ideological backbone of the British Empire as it extended its power over a quarter of the entire globe. And of course Carlyle was Scottish, and lived in Dumfries. Jamie was soon fan enough to stalk him:

  When I was at school in Dumfries I often saw Carlyle in cloak, sombrero and staff, mooning along our country roads, a tortured mind painfully alone even to the eyes of a boy. He was visiting his brother-in-law, Dr Aitken, retired, and I always took off my cap to him. I daresay I paid this homage fifty times, but never was there any response. Once I seized a babe, who was my niece, and ran with her in my arms to a spot which I saw he was approaching; my object that in future years she would be able to say that she had once touched the great Carlyle. I did bring them within touching distance, but there my courage failed me, and the two passed each other to meet no more.5

  Stalking came naturally to him. In London as a young journalist he stalked another hero, the poet and novelist George Meredith (who later became a friend). Indeed, his very first railway journey on arrival in the capital was to Box Hill to gaze at ‘the shrine’ – Meredith’s house: ‘There is a grassy bank... opposite the gate.’ Barrie ‘sat on the grassy bank and quivered’. Presently he saw a face at the window of a little sitting-room and knew at once whose face it was. ‘Then the figure stood in the doorway, an amazing handsome man in grey clothes and a necktie. He came slowly down the path towards the gate.’ It was too awful for Barrie. He ran away.

  Throughout his life he was driven by hero-worship, perhaps because he felt himself to be unheroic. ‘It was always terrible not to have the feelings of a hero,’ he admitted in his autobiographical novel, Sentimental Tommy; but he seemed unable to emulate the qualities he so admired. Carlyle’s ‘savage sincerity – not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things’, was hardly Jamie, any more than was the ‘most gentle heart withal, full of pity and love’, which Carlyle also held was part of the basic heroic material.

  Later in life Barrie befriended Captain Robert Falcon Scott of Antarctic fame, and after Scott’s death in 1912, his widow introduced him to his last and perhaps greatest hero: Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO, a warrior of true courage, who adjusted well to sudden immersion in the gushing waters of Barrie’s esteem. During an unusually public, oratorical phase of his life in the 1920s, he included a portrait of Freyberg in a speech he gave to the students of St Andrews University: ‘There is an officer,’ he said, ‘who was the first of our army to land at Gallipoli. He was dropped overboard to light decoys on the shore, so as to deceive the Turks as to where the landing was to be. He pushed a craft containing these in front of him. It was a frosty night, and he was naked and painted black. Firing from the ships was going on all around. It was a two-hours’ swim in pitch darkness. He did it, crawled through the scrub to listen to the talk of the enemy, who were so near that he could have shaken hands with them, lit his decoys and swam back. He seems to look on this as a gay affair. He is a V.C. now, and you would not think to look at him that he could ever have presented such a disreputable appearance. Would you?’ he concluded, pointing to Freyberg sitting in the stalls.6

  But when Scott invited Barrie along on an expedition to the South Pole, he wriggled out of it, and when yet another of his heroes Robert Louis Stevenson invited him to Vailima, the South Sea island where he lived, he exuded enthusiasm, but prevaricated and never went. He said he couldn’t leave his mother. The truth was that there was a yawning gap between the heroic fantasy world in which Jamie lived with his mother and comrades-in-arms, and the real world.

  Excluded, as he saw it, from the social mainstream of life at the Academy by his lack of success with girls, he adopted a new, rather bookish persona and made a friend of a frail scholarly boy called James McMillan. They went on long walks together and, while Barrie shared with him his infatuation with Carlyle, McMillan, who loved poetry and would die young, encouraged Barrie’s desire to write, the inevitable consequence of the happiness he felt in ‘playing so real-like in the Den’, and in creative session with his mother. After McMillan, Barrie always carried a notebook in which to jot observations and thoughts to be drawn on later.

  At 18, he went up to Edinburgh University to read English Literature. In the company of young adults his shyness with women conspired with a hopeless lack of a student community at the university to make him very lonely – ‘The absence of facilities maimed some of us for life,’ he said later, and wrote of himself in the third person as ‘a man of secret sorrows, [who] found it useless to love, because, after one look at the length and breadth of him, none would listen’.7

  Fellow undergraduate Robert Galloway recalled that he was ‘exceedingly shy and diffident, and I do not remember ever to have seen him enter or leave a classroom with any companion’.8

  Grimly, Barrie attempted to neutralise his sense of inferiority by hanging on to the heroic fantasy images of the Riverside den. In his notebook he wrote, there are ‘far finer things in the world than loving a girl & getting her... Greatest horror – dream I am married – wake up shrieking... Want to stop everybody in street & ask if they’ve read “The Coral Island”. Feel sorry for if not.’9

  What had Margaret done to her third son? Had she made him into someone who lived exclusively in a fantasy of his own making? Where was the real Jamie? He was nowhere to be found. Jamie was an island unto himself, rejected by his mother, alienated from the world. ‘To be born is to be wrecked on an island,’ he once wrote.10

  Robinson Crusoe had been his first book. He had read The Swiss Family Robinson too, but ‘one remembers [it] as almost too satisfactory’, for intuitively he knew that his island challenges would not be so easily solved as theirs. Only The Coral Island would do. Ballantyne’s spell never left him, but as in his stalking of Carlyle and Meredith, there was a repressive streak in his adulation, later to be transformed with impish humour in the Garrick, a London gentleman’s club:

  It is a few years ago and I am in a solemn London Club, which I do not much frequent because I have never been able to get the hang of clubs. I know you select a chair and cross your legs, but what do you do next? I was there to meet a learned American who had vowed that he would show me how to make a fire as Jack made it in The Coral Island. We adjourned to the library (where we knew we were not likely to be disturbed) and there from concealed places about his person, he produced Jack’s implements, a rough bow and a rougher arrow, pointed at both ends. Then he ordered a pat of butter (the waiter must be wondering still), and, like Jack, he twisted the arrow around the string of the bow and began to saw, ‘placing the end of the arrow against his chest, which was protected from its point by a chip of wood; the other point he placed against a bit of tinder. Jack had no butter, but we had no bit of tinder.’ The result, however, was the same. In half a minute, my friend had made a fire, at which we lit our cigars and smoked to the memory of Ballantyne and The Coral Island.11

  There was a text-book inevitability about what would become of him. Dr Eugene Bliss, an American psychiatrist who has made a study of obsessive fantasists, found that they ‘all created their first “personality” early in childhood, to combat loneliness or insecurity’.12

  Maternal rejection is a terrible thing. It can destroy a child’s self-esteem. Jung wrote that a deep sense of inferiority is always balanced by unconscious compensating megalomania, the drive for power over another (and vice versa). This was the great attraction of the fantasy heroics: they always put him in charge. As Captain Stroke, Dare Devil Dick, or any of his mother’s explorers – William Edward Parry, James Clark, John Ross, or the ill-fated Sir John Franklin – Jamie learned that he could be a controlling force, at least in his own world of illusion.

  But it was an illusion, and the fantasy life proclaimed his emotional impotence. Denis Mackail tells us that once when Barrie was a boy he swapped jackets with a friend who was in mourning
for his father, just so that he could sit down and weep, and feel what it would be like to be that sad for anyone. ‘That, I tell you, is the nature of the sacket; he has a devouring desire to try on other folk’s feelings,’ Barrie wrote about this episode, again (as so often) in the third person.

  The fact was that Jamie had lost the will to feel. This is not my analysis, it is Barrie’s own admission. Maimed by his mother, he was incapable of ‘even a genuine deep feeling that wasn’t merely sentiment’, he confided to his notebook, and as a writer he went on to question whether anybody’s feelings per se were ever true, in the sense of altruistic, whatever they believed to the contrary.13

  The fantasy life led to the sobriquet ‘Sentimental Tommy’, because sentimentality, which to true feeling is like a paper flower to a rose, is what generally passed for feeling in Barrie’s fantasy world – the hollow bravado of his heroic roles and the sentiment that he liked to hang on his protagonists. To him, love was an illusion; and his fantasy relationship with Margaret was real. In the stories inspired by his sentimental relationship with his mother he could invest her with qualities he wanted her to have, avoiding the question of whether she did actually possess them. When invariably she would then adopt them, he came to believe that there is no true self, only what we or others want our selves to be – which finally led him to treat his whole life as if it were a fantasy he could write and rewrite, as required. This was the legacy of his loveless relationship with his mother. Barrie took his degree at Edinburgh on 21 April 1882. A year later, his sister Jane Ann spotted an advertisement for a leader writer on the Nottingham Journal at £3 a week. Barrie applied, sending a university essay on King Lear as a sample of his work.