However disturbing, this boy is no less an archetype than du Maurier’s ‘boy’. Tommy is a psychic structure of extreme antiquity, the trickster who has haunted picaresque tales, carnivals, revels and magic rites since time immemorial, an inauspicious puer aeternus, the very principle of discord, mischief and dissolution, who holds the fate of everyone in his hands.
In 1892, Sylvia du Maurier had married Arthur Llewelyn Davies. They moved into 18 Craven Terrace on the opposite side of Kensington Gardens to Barrie. Theirs was ‘a dear little house (or Sylvia made it so), a sort of maisonette’, as Dolly Parry described it. Visitors questioned how the young couple had found the money to pay for it. Arthur, besides what he could expect to earn from the law, which was little at this stage, had brought a legacy of £3,000 from his maternal Uncle Charles, but his annual budget was a mere £400, the same amount that Kicky had earned when he married Emma, nearly thirty years earlier.
Four hundred pounds, while a huge sum to the poor of Whitechapel in 1894, was not regarded as much of an income in the circles in which the du Mauriers moved, so Sylvia worked for a dressmaking business set up by her father with a theatrical costumier, Mrs Nettleship, who made clothes for Ellen Terry. Sylvia discovered a flair for design, and with her skill and taste created lovely clothes for herself and her sons, and soft furnishings for their home, often from whatever lay to hand.
From ‘the hand-sewn bell-rope which pulled no bell to the hand-painted cigar-box that contained no cigars’, her house was a triumph of dissemblance and inspiration –
The floor was of a delicious green with exquisite oriental rugs; green and white, I think, was the lady’s scheme of colour, something cool, you observe, to keep the sun under. The window-curtains were of some rare material and the colour of the purple clematis; they swept the floor grandly... The piano... many dainty pieces, mostly in green wood, a sofa, a corner cupboard, and a most captivating desk, which was so like its owner that it could have sat down at her and dashed off a note.1
It seemed that Sylvia and Arthur were blessed. They had beauty, love, promise, and an astonishingly attractive baby (for George, named after Sylvia’s father, had been born in 1893).
Kicky had been pleased that Arthur was a ‘joli garcon’, very handsome, as handsome ‘comme l’autre’,2 referring to Sylvia’s sister Trixy’s equally good-looking husband, Charles Hoyer Millar. ‘We used to think he was a young warrior in an Italian picture,’ Sir Hubert Parry once said of Arthur. Sylvia shared her artist father’s obsession with physical beauty. She would never have married an ugly man. But, as the daughter of George du Maurier, she brought an extra dimension to that beauty.
People remembered the du Maurier family’s appearances in Punch; but now, following Peter Ibbetson and Trilby, the du Mauriers were enjoying the spotlight once more, and there was a different aura about them, Sylvia in particular. People had wondered about the first novel, how true a picture it had given of Kicky. Interest was enhanced by the veil of secrecy he threw over his involvement with the psychic arts. He denied it in letters to fans, but in private he had a cultist mentality, for example writing to his close friend Tom Armstrong in French and in minuscule print (which he always used when mentioning anything sensitive) about a particular sympathiser as ‘one of us’,* as if there were two camps: those who believed, and those who did not.
We know that Sylvia shared her father’s special interest. Dolly had known for years that Sylvia had a secret preoccupation. In the 1940s, when Dolly was helping Peter compile The Morgue, she tried to guide him to it without compromising her friend’s confidence. She wrote:
Always [Sylvia’s] reserve about what she cared about was very strong. She had an inner life of her own, which is what gave her her great interest.
And again:
Sylvia couldn’t talk about things she really felt to those who were not very close to her. She had an inner life of her own, & was to me always interesting.
Sylvia’s inner life showed in the dreamy photographs of her, and in the undemonstrative silent moments of her courting of Arthur, as if she was away in another world. It was this that Peter was on to when he called on Daphne’s help in 1949, writing that he suspected that Sylvia inherited ‘a good deal’ from her father that made her anything but ordinary – unlike Grannie (Emma).
Dolly’s diary entry for ‘Sunday, October 15th, 1892’ reads:†
Talked a good deal with sweet Sylvia, who told me a good deal about her family etc.
There then followed instructions about how to hypnotise someone:
Place yourself before the subject with your thoughts concentrated on the effect you wish to produce, you tell him to look at you steadily and think only of sleep. Raise your hands with the palms towards him, over the crown of head and before the forehead where you keep them for one or 2 minutes, & move them slowly down to the pit of stomach, without touching subject, at a distance of one or 2 inches from body, as soon as hands reach lowest part of the stroke you carry them again in a wide sweep with outspread arms over subject’s head. Repeat same movements for 10 minutes.
It is possible that Kicky and Sylvia dabbled in hypnotism together; perhaps their relationship had inspired Henry James to write about the relationship between father and daughter in his 1886 novel The Bostonians; perhaps Kicky even hypnotised Sylvia, as in Henry James’s fiction the father hypnotises the daughter.
As Kicky’s life drew to a close, it became important for him to pass on his secret talent. His third novel The Martian was published posthumously in 1896. It took up a theme mentioned but not developed in Peter Ibbetson, that a ‘little live spark of your own individual consciousness’ can be handed down ‘mildly incandescent to your remotest posterity’, as he put it. It is in The Martian that he declared that a girl in the family would share his consciousness and would carry him into the future after his death. He appeared to be nominating Sylvia by naming his hero (as usual, a very lightly disguised version of himself) Barty Jocelyn. His successor would therefore be named Jocelyn; and Jocelyn was Sylvia’s second name.
Daphne wrote about the family secret being passed down the line in her short story ‘The Archduchess’. After her debriefing sessions with Peter in the 1950s, she saw, with disturbing clarity, that it was this secret that attracted Barrie as predator and marked Sylvia out as his victim. His motivation?
He had a grudge against his parents. They had brought into the world a maimed being, and he could not forgive them for not having made him beautiful. The child who cannot forgive his parents cannot forgive the country that cradled him, and [he] grew up with the desire to lame others, even as he himself was lame.*
In the story, Daphne code-named him ‘Markoi’, the first syllable meaning ‘spoil’ or ‘cause harm to’, the second, ‘love’ (a homophone of the Japanese word koi means ‘love’, which is why koi carp are symbols of love and friendship in Japan). Barrie’s own youth had been bereft of wonder, and he had grown up full of resentment. The du Maurier secret promised the eternal youth that Barrie had been denied. The secret marked out Sylvia’s sons as Barrie’s victims too, for ‘all princes who believe in eternal youth,’ she wrote in the same story, ‘offer themselves as victims.’
Barrie’s invasion of the family may also have been driven by resentment of the figure he displaced. For I cannot believe that he didn’t meet Kicky in the 1890s – he was too taken up with Kicky’s ideas, and they had too many friends in common, for them not to have met – and, given the absence of a record of their meeting, I feel one is bound to consider the possibility that if they did meet, they did not get on.
On the surface they had much in common: both Kicky and Barrie were diminutive and boyish, and had the same dry sense of humour and lugubrious way of expressing it; both were satirical in their work, yet sentimental and whimsical. But beneath the surface no two men could have been more dissimilar. While Kicky’s satire was upbeat and palpably sincere, a cynical drop of acid was the very essence of Barrie’s genius. Kicky was a Roma
ntic, he worshipped beauty. Feeling was what he was all about. But Barrie confessed he was incapable of ‘a genuine feeling that wasn’t merely sentiment’, hated music, had no interest in art.
According to Barrie’s biographer Denis Mackail, his insensitivity to art was the reason he ‘could never, even spiritually, be one of the real or esoteric Broadway gang’ – a reference to the cricket-playing artistic community in Worcestershire, where many of Kicky’s friends, including Henry James, used to gather. This surely was also what estranged him from Kicky, who would have recoiled from this travesty of himself and all that he held sacred. And if that is so, what, I wondered, might Barrie have done then? Rejection was not something he found easy to take.
Henry James, with the unconscious foresight of a true artist, made the link.
Svengali capers like a goat of poetry, and makes music like the great god Pan.
* Letter to Tom Armstrong about Leslie Stephen, the academic and writer, who was a friend of Arthur’s father, John Llewelyn Davies.
† In fact, there wasn’t a ‘Sunday, October 15th’ in 1892, it would have had to be either Saturday the 15th or Sunday the 16th.
* Markoi, the fictional villain of the story, was physically lame, with a twisted foot, like Mephistopheles. Lameness is the sign of the Devil in Faust, and is a feature of the Barrie figure in ‘The Little Photographer’, a story in Daphne du Maurier’s The Apple Tree collection (1952).
CHAPTER THREE
Philanderings in the park
Barrie began his ‘sentimental philanderings’ in Kensington Gardens from the time of Kicky’s death, and in 1897 first engaged 4-year-old George Llewelyn Davies and his 3-year-old brother Jack, conspicuous in bright red tam-o’-shanters and rather feminine blue blouses, both hand-made by Sylvia. The Kensington Gardens nannies commandeered the Broad Walk and were happy for their charges to talk with Barrie, a famous author, sometimes accompanied by his pretty wife. The children looked forward to his every appearance.
In time, he would make the Gardens so famous in his book, The Little White Bird, that mothers came to expect him to captivate their children with his stories and were put out when he did not. It must have become quite difficult for him, and was perhaps partly the reason why the authorities eventually presented him with his own key, so that he could go there after lock-up time with whomever he liked. The idea came from Lord Esher, Secretary to His Majesty’s Office of Works, who for some reason unrecorded took to calling Barrie ‘the furry beast’.
On New Year’s Eve, 1897, Barrie met the parents of the Davies’ boys at a party thrown by society solicitor Sir George Lewis and his wife:
P(eggy) Ll.D [Peter’s wife] remembers J.M.B. telling her that he found himself sitting next to the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, and was overwhelmed and also intrigued by the way she put aside some of the various sweets that were handed round, and secreted them. When he asked her why, she answered that she was keeping them for Peter.1
Peter’s own verdict on this was ‘a suspect story on the face of it’, and new evidence indicates that Barrie’s first meeting with Sylvia was anything but chance.
Handwritten invitation lists to Lady Lewis’s dinner parties and balls have recently come to light. They show that the du Mauriers had been frequent guests at her palatial home at 88 Portland Place, WI, since at least the 1870s.
Sir George and Lady Lewis had initially welcomed Kicky’s fine singing voice as entertainment at their soirees. So central a part did the Lewis parties then become in the lives of Kicky and Emma that the invitation lists contain clues to the whole du Maurier story, as well as touching on many other fascinating tangential stories.
Here are actor managers J. L. Toole and Beerbohm Tree sitting next to Ellen Terry, Henry James and Oscar Wilde. Tree’s wife, the distinguished actress Helen Maud Holt, was often also present. She would later work with Gerald du Maurier on Barrie’s plays, and her daughter Viola, also often present, would become a close friend of Barrie as well as of Gerald and his family, especially Daphne. Among other characters who claimed my attention were Sydney Buxton, an uncle of Rupert Buxton, the boy who drowned in the arms of Michael Llewelyn Davies in 1921, and the millionaire Otto Kahn, who impinged on Daphne’s life during a particularly rebellious phase – names gathering dust on paper, but triggers still to history.
The Lewis parties could be grand affairs. In June 1877, 278 invitations were sent out – there were 218 acceptances and 60 regrets. Occasionally there would be a select, high-profile evening, as in March 1885, when the Prince of Wales was principal guest, and Kicky and Emma attended with a dozen or so others. From the 1870s, Felix Moscheles is invited, no doubt initially on du Maurier’s recommendation. Felix was bent on recruiting members of high society to his portraiture enterprise. Other artist friends of Kicky – James Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones and Lawrence Alma-Tadema – were also frequent guests. Guy du Maurier was entertained here with his parents in March 1890. Sylvia first appears in May 1891 with ‘Llewelyn Davies’, after which she is a regular guest.
As a young barrister, Arthur Llewelyn Davies received briefs from Sir George Lewis, following his marriage to Sylvia, doubtless as a result of the connection between the du Maurier family and the Lewises. It was at the Lewises’, too, that Sylvia took 16-year-old Dolly Parry under her wing and made her look beautiful for her first society ball, a kindness Dolly never forgot.
The invitation lists show that the du Mauriers inhabited a completely different world from Barrie, and it is interesting that Barrie was conspicuous by his absence at other places where Kicky held sway, such as the Rabelais.
What is certain is that if you wanted to meet Sylvia Llewelyn Davies ‘by chance’, the best way to do it would be to find your way on to one of the Lewis party lists, which is exactly what Barrie did on 21 December 1896, just two months after Kicky’s death.
He achieved this by giving the two young Lewis daughters parts in the copyright performance of his play, based on his novel, The Little Minister. A copyright performance was a pre-production performance of a new play, usually acted before an invited audience. In this instance a number of friends, and friends of friends, were in the cast. It would not have been difficult for Barrie to have arranged the Lewis children to be part of it.
Once Barrie had his foot in the door he took hold of the Lewises’s entertainments as Kicky had done all those years before, substituting – for Kicky’s vocal entertainments – revues featuring satirical skits on the guests. In the newly opened Lewis archive are programmes for events written by Barrie including Child’s Play and The Old Bore’s Almanack, and The Foolies, ‘a programme of songs, recitations, imitation and dance’. It is all fairly cringe-making. For example, the author, editor and art critic Comyns Carr is one of many listed in a revue by Barrie called Who’s Here – ‘This Carr runs Peter Panhard, can travel faust or an-Dante; never tyres; one can rely on its comyns and goings.’*
Barrie became a hit. Lady Lewis would be firm in her support of him, finding him a flat during his divorce from Mary in 1909, and offering to help him with the boys after Sylvia’s death. Sir George’s firm of solicitors came to represent him, and a future head of it, Sir Reginald Poole, acted, according to Peter Davies, with ‘extreme and coldly hostile virulence’ against himself, Jack, and Nico in the matter of the boys’ claims on the Barrie estate in 1937.
There is no doubt that from December 1896, the Lewises were on Jim Barrie’s side, and they were powerful allies. Looking back, one might say that his friendship with the Lewises was his first and most significant step to donning Kicky’s trilby and taking over his family.
Whatever the nature of the conversation between Jim and Mary Barrie and Sir George and Lady Lewis on the first occasion they met, and the truth about how Barrie came to recognise and meet Sylvia’s boys in Kensington Gardens soon afterwards, it is likely that, two months after Kicky’s death, the du Mauriers had featured in the conversation, and the groundwork was laid there.
T
he part that the Lewises played in Jim meeting Sylvia is certain. For when, a year later, Lady Lewis drew up a guest list for her New Year’s Eve party, 1897, there was no question how one corner of it would read:
Mr. & Mrs. J.M. Barrie
Mr. & Mrs. Llewelyn Davies
The names appear in that order, next to each other in the notebook.
* The reference to Faust concerns an adaptation co-written by Carr for Beerbohm Tree.
CHAPTER FOUR
The boy in the box
J. M. Barrie was a famous playwright and novelist. The attention he paid Sylvia on the night they met at the Lewises’ will have flattered her. The story goes that he began with an allusion to Peter Ibbetson. He told her he had a St Bernard named Porthos after Peter’s St Bernard. Sylvia responded by telling him that she had a child named after the hero of the same novel. Jim alluded to a young Peter he knew who was regularly pushed in his pram in Kensington Gardens by his nanny. Sylvia recognised Jim as the man whom her sons had told her about. Jim then spoke to Sylvia about Peterkin, testing whether she knew of his favourite character from The Coral Island. She didn’t.
From 1898 Jim and Mary Barrie and Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies saw a great deal of one another. There scarcely was a day when Jim did not meet the boys in the park and return home with them. They would beg him to come in and he would remain with them until they went to bed.
Initially, Mary Ansell eased his acceptance by hitting it off with Sylvia. ‘Mrs Barrie knew all about Jim’s enthusiasms,’ Mackail writes darkly. She certainly seems to have fallen in line with her husband’s purpose to begin with, the two women finding common ground in an interest in interior design.
Nanny Hodgson resented Barrie’s intrusion on her life with the boys. In particular, she disliked his subversive way of drawing out any waywardness in them and playing them at their own game, as no other adult would. Secretly, perhaps, she was jealous, feeling that even when they were away from him, he seemed to be more present than she. Barrie later lampooned her as the nurse, Irene, in The Little White Bird:
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