Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  There is deep cynicism at bottom. Bit by bit Jim broke down Sylvia’s social and emotional conditioning, offering her a new kind of freedom – a freedom that set her apart from the pitiful world, not as a dreamer, but in a commanding position, gazing down from her carriage on the romantic boys and girls, whose lives were the real illusion. This was the fruit of Jim’s ‘tree of knowledge’, at the heart of his ‘wood of make-believe’.

  He found resonances in Sylvia’s soul. When he crossed the threshold he found her cynical about the social world in which she had been brought up. She recognised his masterfulness, the self-serving, alienating, but powerful product of the exceptional childhood that had maimed him.

  How fascinated Sylvia must have been by this mocking, dangerous game, the new reductionist science of psychoanalysis; it was knowledge that raised her above the masses. Here was the New Woman that Arthur would never understand.

  She was too captivated to see that Jim’s philosophy was the death-knell of her father’s philosophy in Trilby, that it was a cruel game which, from his position outside the matrix of human emotion, he could not fail to win, that it was only about him finding a way. She did not see that he cared nothing for the Sylvia whom Arthur loved, that for Jim that Sylvia never existed. Or, maybe she saw it all; really did see that Jim was right.

  In November 1902, in a letter to his father at Kirkby Lonsdale, Arthur wrote: ‘Sylvia is at present on a trip to Paris with her friends the Barries... The party is completed by another novelist, Mason,* and they seem to be living in great splendour and enjoying themselves very much.’ The letter makes pathetic reading. He went on: ‘I don’t know what your arrangements are for Christmas, nor if you are likely to have the vicarage very full. I should like to come, if possible, bringing one boy or perhaps two. It is just possible that Sylvia may be induced to come too, but that is not likely . . .’

  When Jim had the Sylvia he wanted, where he wanted her, the world was all that his fancy painted it and he moved seamlessly into the second stage of his strategy – ‘ever since relentlessly pursued’ – which, he revealed, is ‘to burrow under her influence with the boy [George], expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him utterly from her and make him mine’.8

  To effect this he moved from Tommy and Grizel to his next alchemic text, The Little White Bird, in which, as Jacqueline Rose observed:

  The narrator is trying to steal the child, to get at the mother and replace the father. His involvement with the child is, therefore, anything but innocent. In fact it can be traced back to an unconsummated sexual desire for which [George] is the substitute and replacement. This is not an analysis of the book, the motives and the past history are all given by the narrator himself... [which is what has made] this book such a biographical landmine in relation to Barrie himself.9

  Rose might have added that the mother (Sylvia, known in the book as ‘Mary’) is far from blameless; as the Captain (Jim himself) says, she was ‘culpably obtuse to my sinister design’.

  One would have thought that Arthur, upon reading Barrie’s book, would have thrown him out of the house. But he did not. Instead, he wrote to his father: ‘Barrie’s new book, The Little White Bird, is largely taken up with Kensington Gardens and our and similar children. There is a whole chapter devoted to Peter.’

  This is so unexpected and inexplicable that one wonders whether Arthur was given the same text to read. The oddest thing is that there is no mention of Arthur’s son Peter in the book. The only Peter who has ‘a whole chapter devoted’ to him is Peter Pan. Peter Davies comments on this in The Morgue, ‘I have always regarded [the book] as being much more about George than me. I can’t say I like it . . .’

  How Sylvia and Jim must have laughed at their own bare-faced cheek. Tommy’s triumph over Grizel so intoxicated him that, in the novel, he has to scream at intervals: ‘We’re here, I tell you, we’re here!’ And she gasped with realisation at what had been going on:

  ‘I believe – I think – you are masterful... I was afraid you were masterful!... Now I know why I would not kiss your hand, now I know why I would not say I liked you. I was afraid of you, I – ’

  ‘Were you?’ His eyes began to sparkle, and something very like rapture was pushing the indignation from his face. ‘Oh, Grizel, have I a power over you?’

  ‘No, you have not,’ she cried passionately. ‘I was just frightened that you might have. Oh, oh, I know you now!’

  ‘To think o’t, to think o’t!’ he crowed.

  To crow is a favourite expression of Jim’s, first when writing of himself as Tommy, then as Peter Pan, who ‘crows like a rooster when he sees how clever he has been’. Said Mary Ansell, who had witnessed her husband make Sylvia and the boys his own:

  One could almost hear him, like Peter Pan, crowing triumphantly, but his heart was sick all the time.

  * D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love. For the connection between Barrie’s seduction of Sylvia and Loerke’s of Gudrun in Lawrence’s novel, see Part VI: Chapter One, and Appendix.

  * A. E. W. Mason, remembered best for his ‘heroic’ novel The Four Feathers, published that year, 1902. For a single term from 1906 Mason was also a Liberal Member of Parliament and he had been an intimate of Barrie since 1898. The letter is available in full on Andrew Birkin’s website jmbarrie.co.uk.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Flying Uncle Jim to Neverland

  What did the boys think about Uncle Jim coming between their parents? Daphne suggests1 that there was an awareness that something was not quite right, that deep down they were disturbed to see their mother acknowledge Jim as the family’s new leader, but that as time wore on they settled into the new arrangement. ‘He was, after all, a relation, an uncle’, an accustomed figure, and by then they, too, were on a fantasy trip of their own with Jim, who was leading them to the tree of knowledge.

  In 1902 Barrie moved with his wife to a house at the corner of Leinster Terrace, close to where Kicky had lived and facing the Bayswater Road. Porthos had died at the end of 1901 – he barely survived the first Black Lake holiday as the pirate Swarthy’s dog or tiger in a papier-mâché mask. To Mary Ansell his death spelled the beginning of the end of her marriage. He was replaced in 1903 by a black and white Newfoundland, Luath, who would be ‘pegged’ as Nana in Peter Pan (no living thing in the inner circle escaped pegging).

  It was unthinkable that Mary should live without a dog, in Jim’s company. A dog, she wrote politely, was ‘a most admirable accompaniment to a husband. He supplies those darling little ways, so dear to a woman’s heart, and so necessary to her well-being, that come tripping along so gracefully before marriage, but by the end of the first year have tripped away – less gracefully – into oblivion . . .’

  As Jim’s life revolved more and more around Sylvia and the boys, he froze Mary with his silences, which did not ‘speak loudly’ to her, as they had done to Pamela Maude. Then Porthos and later Luath were her salvation. ‘To quote an instance,’ she wrote. ‘Those silent meals. Haven’t most of us experienced them? When the mind of your man is elsewhere, lord knows where, but nowhere in your direction. Just when the silence is becoming unbearable, your dog steps in and attracts your attention. He lays his head on your knee, or he presses your hand, as it is in the act of conveying a succulent morsel to your mouth. “Merely asking for food,” you interrupt. Quite true. But to be asked for anything is a relief.’2

  Leinster Corner, as Mary named the house, was close to the Lancaster Gate entrance to Kensington Gardens, a mile or so from where the Davieses now lived in Kensington Park Gardens, and just yards from young George’s school in Orme Square.

  In 1902 George turned nine. George was ‘the One’ and the proximity of the school and Sylvia’s hard-earned trust in him gave Jim unprecedented access, and he entered into exclusive sessions with George, dedicated to the production of Peter Pan (1904).

  [Peter] escaped from being a human when he was seven days old; he escaped by the window... standing on the ledge he could see tree
s far away, which were doubtless the Kensington Gardens, and the moment he saw them he entirely forgot that he was now a little boy in a nightgown, and away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens.3

  George, it appears, had a moment or two’s doubt that such a thing could have happened, or at least that it was a common occurrence for babies to fly away to the park. He told Uncle Jim he was certain that he had never tried to escape. So, Jim told him to concentrate hard:

  I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way up the chimney. All children could have such recollections if they would press their hands hard to their temples, for, having been birds before they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be . . .

  I ought to mention that the following is our way with a story. First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the interesting bits about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences of [his], recalled by pressing his hands to his temples and thinking hard.

  Jim’s relationship with George was clearly creative, but was it ever really about writing a play? In his Dedication to the first published text of Peter Pan, in 1928, Jim discusses the Castaway games at Black Lake Cottage as the play’s inspiration. He writes:

  They do seem to be emerging out of our island, don’t they, the little people of the play . . .

  This immediately struck me as odd, as there was no island in the Black Lake. What can Jim have meant? To what island was he referring?

  The image of an island was of course pervasive in Jim’s life. You could say he had an island fixation. The first book he read was Robinson Crusoe. The Coral Island became a symbol of his alienation from the rest of the world in his youth. All the fantasies he indulged in with his mother initially concerned ‘desert islands and enchanted gardens’, and Tommy’s reading matter ‘is about desert islands; he calls them wrecked islands... and sees that unless his greed for islands is quenched he is forever lost’.

  Then there is Birds’ Island in The Little White Bird, and, after Peter Pan, islands are significant in Jim’s plays The Admirable Crichton and Mary Rose. He also made sure that islands figured prominently in the boys’ lives, by taking them on holiday to Eilean Shona on the west coast of Scotland, to the Outer Hebrides, and Amhuinnsuidh on the Isle of Harris. But this mention of the little people emerging from ‘our island’ did not refer specifically to any of these. So, what did Jim mean?

  The Dedication to Peter Pan is addressed personally to the Llewelyn Davies boys. He jogs their memories of adventures on Black Lake, in the pine-tree forest, etc. It is all very entre nous, with phrases such as, ‘We are not going to give away all our secrets’ and ‘None may see this save ourselves’. Uncle Jim was writing to George, Jack, Peter and Michael on a personal level. The boys knew what ‘our island’ meant, and it was so significant that it had to remain their secret.

  Then I recalled something about Barrie and islands in Margaret Forster’s biography of Daphne. In a (1940) letter to a friend, Garth Lean, Daphne let slip that Uncle Jim had shown her how to release herself from the material world with its illusory claims, how to lapse out and live in another world, from another centre by concentrating on the image of an island just surfacing from the sea . . .

  Ever since J. M. Barrie had inspired her with the notion, her mind centred on an island, the island of her dreams . . .

  She drew a picture of it for Garth, with the sun behind the island and a boat sailing towards it . . .

  Immediately I connected this with the island often employed by actors in theatre workshops to encourage improvisation. I have played the island game myself. You lie on the ground, relax deeply and concentrate your mind on an island while a narrator in a gentle voice paints a picture of it in increasing detail in your mind. The notion of the island resurfacing from the sea is a good approach, because its gradual appearance aids concentration. Bit by bit you get a closer view of the island, of its landscape, its natural vegetation. And eventually of course ‘the little people’ of the island emerge, and soon you might have the rudiments of a play. But you also have a perfect light, hypnotic environment. Brain activity passes effortlessly into that band of consciousness known as hypnotic trance.

  Uncle Jim asked George to concentrate hard and at the same time to relax, because that is how you enter a state of hypnotic trance.

  Hypnosis is a process involving a hypnotist and a subject who agrees to be hypnotised. Being hypnotised is usually characterised by (a) intense concentration, (b) extreme relaxation, and (c) high suggestibility.4

  Psychologists accept ‘that there is a significant correlation between being imaginative and being responsive to hypnosis... that those who are fantasy-prone are also likely to make excellent hypnotic subjects’. Also, ‘vivid imagery enhances suggestibility’, and ‘the greatest predictor of hypnotic responsiveness is what a person believes about hypnosis’.

  Freud observed that children, unconscious of a hypnotist or controller’s ‘motivation, anxieties, wishes and possible conflict, are particularly susceptible and vulnerable’. It is difficult to imagine a more susceptible set of subjects than the children of the imaginative du Maurier family.

  What Sylvia believed about hypnosis was what had been passed down to her by her father, and the island game would surely have been acceptable to her, for an island lay at the centre of the du Maurier myth. In Peter Ibbetson the steel engraving that triggers the flights of unbridled ecstasy of Peter and Mary is an image of an island where, as Byron describes, the Songstress teaches the stranger boy ‘Passion’s desolating joy’, where ‘all our dreams of better life above close in one eternal gush of Love’, where the object of love is ‘in years a child... the infant of an infant world, as pure as Nature – lovely, warm and premature’... whose ‘heart was tamed to that voluptuous state at once Elysian and effeminate’.

  Jim was concocting a hypnotic environment of sensuousness within which to woo his young collaborators, who, like Peter Ibbetson and Mary in the novel, progressed to it after leaving their fairy games behind. The island was the entry point to their ‘never never dreamland’ – the world of hypnotic trance – an environment given up to rapturous sensuality, the ‘other world’ that comes into existence only when we are made conscious of it under hypnosis.

  Just as Mary drew a picture of the island for Peter Ibbetson, so Peter Pan would lift ‘the film that obscures’ it for Wendy, and Daphne would draw it for Garth, flirtatiously, with the sun behind it and a boat sailing towards it. As Barrie explained in Peter and Wendy –

  The Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose . . .5

  The environment Uncle Jim created for the boys was custom-made to initiate a hypnotic procedure which, in psychologist Nicholas Spanos’s words, is designed to ‘influence behaviour indirectly by altering subjects’ motivations, expectations and interpretations’.6

  Dr Spanos dislikes talk of hypnosis as a state of trance, accepts the idea that it is a function of concentration and relaxation, but prefers to see it as arising out of a cognitive-social context in which the roles of hypnotist and
subject are constantly reinforced. This describes perfectly what was going on between Uncle Jim and the boys.

  There is a control figure (Jim) and a subject (George). Each is aware of his role and prepared to reinforce the other by his performance. Suggestions are made to the subject by the control figure – ‘First I tell it to him . . .’ The subject then responds to the suggestions – ‘then he tells it to me . . .’ This is exactly the context Spanos has in mind. Indeed, George’s fantasy that in the pre-natal stage children are birds is just the kind of symbolic material to stream from the first stage in a Jungian analysis, where a subject is encouraged to identify with his personal infantilism.

  The question is in what ways the boys’ minds were affected by these sessions, and you only have to look at the nihilistic and morbid ideas in Jim’s novels and plays for the answer. But in none of the works is there quite the morbidity that is present in the character of Peter Pan.

  The reason for Peter’s mother’s rejection of him – the ‘great thing she cried for’ – was ‘the great mistake’ which Peter had made and we are never told about, but is so big a mistake that a hug is not going to be enough to put it right. I have suggested that Peter’s mistake is associated with death.

  Death had been ‘a thing’ for Jim ever since the death of his brother, David. He hid with his sister Maggie under the table on which David’s coffin had been set, and thereafter was aware that there was something unusual about his relationship with Maggie. She never believed ill of Jim. When they were together, he became the man she wanted him to be.