Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  In Tommy and Grizel it is suggested that he mesmerised Maggie (she is Elspeth in the novel) and thereby ‘maimed her... There’s no life for her now except what you mak’; she canna see beyond you.’ Denis Mackail indicated that this was a fair picture of their relationship.

  In May 1892, Maggie became engaged to the Reverend James Winter. Shortly before the wedding he was flung from a horse and killed. Maggie responded to this death as Margaret had done to David’s. She took to her bed and stayed there. The guests she had invited to her wedding attended her fiancé’s funeral instead.

  Jim had given Winter the horse.

  Death stalks Tommy in the fiction as it did Jim in his life. At one stage he dreams of ‘a very noble young man, and his white dead face stared at the sky from the bottom of a deep pool’. In the dream the young man’s lover came to the edge of the pool ‘and peered down at his staring eyes and laughed’. In the story, the dream breaks through into reality. Tommy finds a boy in precisely this condition. The scene is darkly suggestive of what would befall Michael twenty years later.

  Death continued to be a theme in the build-up to Peter Pan, and Jim went further to invest his character with an association with death. While walking with Jim one day in Kensington Gardens, George pointed to two stones with ‘W St M’ and ‘13a PP 1841’ inscribed on them. They indicated the boundary line for the parish of Westminster St Mary’s and the parish of Paddington, but Jim told him they were gravestones for two children (Walter Stephen Matthews and Phoebe Phelps) who had fallen out of their prams and died. Peter Pan had his work cut out burying dead children after lock-out in the Gardens and would dance on their graves, playing on his pipes, to make them laugh as they began their journey in the afterlife.

  Then, shortly after the first run of Peter Pan in 1904 came the clearest expression of Jim’s obsession with death. A new Act III was written in which Peter is brought to the brink of death, marooned on a rock in a lagoon.

  The stage directions, always an integral part of the significance of a Barrie play, suggest a new hypnotic island focus for George, but this time the island does not rise out of the sea, it disappears beneath the waters, which rise up until they are ‘lapping over the rock... and Peter knows that it will soon be submerged’.

  Pale rays of light mingle with the moving clouds, and from the coral grottoes is to he heard a sound, at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the Neverland, the mermaids calling to the moon to rise. Peter is afraid at last, and a tremor runs through him, like a shudder passing over the lagoon; but on the lagoon one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and he feels just the one. Next moment he is standing erect on the rock again... PETER (with the smile on his face and a drum beating in his breast as if he were a real boy at last).

  ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

  George was accredited with the famous line. It came out of one of his sessions with Jim in which death was the focus.

  From 1905, ‘to be a real boy’ was to pass over to the other side – destiny, of course, of Michael, who was four in the year the play opened and fast becoming of interest to Jim.

  The first outsider to notice how morbid shadows of the dream had begun to cleave to Sylvia and the boys was Dolly Parry, who had by this time herself married an Arthur, a diplomat and later a Liberal and then Labour Member of Parliament, eventually to become a Labour Lord – 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede, a beautiful twelfth-century Augustine priory.

  It was to this thoroughly English home-county jewel that Sylvia brought Jim, Peter and Michael one afternoon in the summer of 1903. Dolly, now mother of two-year-old Elizabeth, known as ‘Girly’, was expecting them for tea. The party arrived in Jim’s motor car (they had come from Black Lake Cottage, which lies a few miles to the north). It was a sunny afternoon at the end of a week of incessant rain. The idyllic picture was captured in Dolly’s diary –

  Jim Barry [sic] with a child clinging to each hand at once went & sat in the dining room chimney corner & looked so characteristic & like one of his own books. Elizabeth petrified at all the company sat refusing to eat her tea. Sylvia beautiful & satisfying – loving the house & appealing to ‘Jimmy’ [Barrie] about it... It was very charming to see Girly give her hand to Jimmy & with Michael on one side & her on the other they walked down the garden path into the field – his devotion & genius-like understanding of children is beautiful & touching beyond words – as he has none himself.

  This is the Barrie legend. The children, captivated, absent from the adult world, holding hands with the quiet and gentle Uncle Jim. One can imagine nothing but beauty and goodness coming of it.

  But a dark side was immediately apparent. For Dolly also reported that Sylvia had ‘a sort of morbidness about her’. Later she interpreted this as ‘a sort of premonition’.

  She also recalled that when she began to say something critical about Jim in the presence of 3-year-old Michael, ‘I remember [Sylvia] saying “Ssh” when I burst out with [it]... looking at Michael [in case he heard], and I felt quite ashamed’. Dolly referred to this as Sylvia’s ‘apprehensive imagination’.

  Intensity, apprehension, morbidity attended Sylvia’s attachment to Jim even in 1903. Michael’s attachment to Jim a decade hence was haunted by similar doubts, and – given the dark, cynical view of life he was feeding them – I am not surprised. Yet, as Grizel follows Tommy in the novel, so they still would follow him, because somehow they knew they must.

  Jacqueline Rose concluded, without any reference to the hypnotic environment in which Barrie went to work on the boys, that his guilt lay in ‘a form of investment in the child... not so much something which could be enacted [i.e. sex] as something which cannot be spoken. The sexual act which underpins Peter Pan . . . is an act in which the child is used (and abused) . . .’7

  The ‘investment’ of hypnotist and subject in the process of hypnosis is indeed enormous: ‘the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play... It often happens,’ wrote Jung, ‘that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the doctor’s sore spot.’8 That George was the right plaster for Jim’s sore spot there is no doubt.

  But George was a child in the subject seat, and the enduring tragedy is that it is in the very nature of hypnosis that from within a controller can make deep and lasting changes to his subject. Professor Marcuse warned: ‘The inexperienced hypnotist... may forget to take out suggestions which he has given... It is wise and a standard procedure among experienced hypnotists to remove whatever suggestions have been given.’9 On one occasion a student of his was hypnotised by a friend who suggested that he was drowning. Scared at what he had done, he awakened the subject without removing the suggestion. The subject continued to experience the breathing difficulties of a drowning man until Marcuse was called in, re-hypnotised the subject, removed the suggestion, and brought him out of it.

  It is readily seen that when the suggestion implanted is a nihilistic or morbid philosophy, not immediately visible in behavioural change – no obvious suffocating, no symptoms of drowning – there is no urgency to return the subject to his status quo.

  Uncle Jim did not ‘release’ the boys, or Daphne. A piece of him – a ‘little live spark of individual consciousness’ – lodged in a corner of their minds until the end.

  Can we now begin to understand why Peter said that ‘Jack and I while not very closely resembling each other in general, are both “clouded over a good deal and among those whom melancholy has marked their own.”’?

  For George, who had been in thrall to Jim since he was a child of 8 or 9, the effect was devastating. At 20, the once bright, imaginative, cocky little boy had, according to a friend of his, Norma Douglas Henry, ‘almost what the Germans called Weltschmerz – a sadness of the world... but never said anything unkind about Barrie’.10

  He could not. So mesmerised was he, he would not have been able to see through the cloud. This terrible image of George resonates with Dolly’s description of the ‘morb
idness’ of Sylvia while under Jim’s influence. It was how Daphne showed that her fictional Archduchess, with whom she identified, ‘had been hypnotised... Because her eyes had all the grief in the world.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Peter Pan, a demon boy

  Peter Pan opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 27 December 1904, the day after Boxing Day, having been postponed due to difficulties with the flying equipment. Three days later Sir William Nicholson, who designed the costumes, reported: ‘It is a huge success – biggest bookings they’ve ever known.’

  Judging by early fan letters, there was more of an interest in Wendy than Peter, with a number of 6- to 9-year-olds wanting to marry her. The part of Wendy was taken by Mary Ansell’s friend Hilda Trevelyan and the consensus was that she ‘acted the best’. Kenneth Morrisson pleaded: ‘Please write and tell me whether your love for Peter Pan (Miss Paulene Chase) is real, I should so love to know.’

  Mark Twain described the play as ‘a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age’. To the Daily Telegraph the play was ‘so pure, so natural, so touching that it brought the audience to the writer’s feet and held it captive there’. Bernard Shaw’s judgement, however, was that it was an ‘artificial freak... foisted on the children by the grown-ups’, and Anthony Hope* was reduced, by its sentimental treatment of children, to pleading, ‘Oh, for an hour of Herod.’†

  The American impresario, Charles Frohman, who was Jim’s partner in most of his successful work, was happy about the sentimentality, and no doubt euphoric about what almost certainly stuck in Anthony Hope’s craw: a scene at the end called ‘The Beautiful Mothers’, in which Wendy auditions applicants for the position of ‘mother’ for each of the lost boys, submitting them to a series of mawkish and very silly tests to decide their suitability.*

  The fact that here was a demon boy who not only has no love in him, but steals children from their beds in the night, changes sides in a fight, and kills without conscience, was ignored. It was not in the nature of the production that anyone should notice.

  The play underwent constant revision from the moment of its first rehearsal. Captain Hook was almost nowhere to be seen initially. It was only after Gerald du Maurier, who played both Mr Darling and Hook, made such a good job of the pirate that Hook assumed a large presence on stage, eventually to command a whole Act of his own. But that of course meant that when Peter defeated him, the demon boy was taken to be a terrific goody.

  The original audience, which was almost entirely adult, saw what they wanted, perhaps needed, to see. Then the children took over, and its pantomimic quality shone through.

  Lost was any interest in why the author should have chosen the name Pan, after the goat-foot god of Greek myth, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and appeared to Faust with his pipes and Dionysian maenads – ‘the Wild-folk’, who ‘know what no man else doth guess’. Pan is also of course the origin of the European Pied Piper myth, in which all the children of Hamelin are stolen from their homes and led into the mountain. It would be some time before biographers dug out of Jim’s original notes for the play that Peter was marked out as ‘a demon boy, villain of the story’.

  After the first production, Jim set about restoring the balance to his original vision. The Mothers scene disappeared. Neverland, which had only been mentioned twice in the first performance, was made ever more a supernatural environment, with magical islands, mermaid lagoons and heavenly moments.

  And by 1911, in the novel Peter and Wendy, Peter’s true character was revealed in his conceit and cockiness, characteristics that shock Wendy, and in his ‘greed’ and ‘cunning’ and ‘slyness’ – all words used to describe the manner of his persuading the children to fly away with him. Peter’s anarchic character is much clearer in the novel than on stage. This played havoc with audience perceptions, as W. A. Darlington, who witnessed this personally, observed: ‘The differences between book and play disconcerted the many sentimentalists who had by this time lost all sense of proportion, regarded the play as a kind of holy writ, and visited it in much the same frame of mind as if its performance were a religious ritual.’

  The image of Peter in people’s minds was not Barrie’s at all, which was probably just as well. Audiences were happy. Aiding this process of appropriation was the fact that no script was published until 1928. In January 1907, the Bookman observed: ‘Mr Barrie has often been asked to write a short narrative or libretto of his immortal child’s play and has as often refused. This encouraged others to perpetuate a myth that was never Barrie’s in the first place.’ As Jacqueline Rose wrote: ‘While Barrie hesitated, others moved in, with pictures and images from the play, or mementoes or biographies of Peter Pan.’

  Still trying to redress the balance, Jim criticised a statue of Peter, which he had commissioned from Sir George Frampton for Kensington Gardens and which was erected overnight to appear on May Day 1912, by saying: ‘It doesn’t show the Devil in Peter.’

  Nobody associated Peter with the Devil. Nor is it clear how Frampton was supposed to capture this demon boy, since Uncle Jim gave him photographs of the beautiful, angelic, naked Michael to go on. He wrote to Sylvia: ‘Frampton was very taken with Mick’s pictures & I had to leave them with him,’ but, no doubt to Michael’s relief, ‘he prefers the Peter clothes to a nude child . . .’

  Everyone took Peter out of Barrie’s hands, even the sculptor.

  Meanwhile, within the Llewelyn Davies household, Arthur had a plan to take his boys out of Jim’s hands. He moved his family to a large suburban house, Egerton House, in Berkhamsted, preferring to commute to London each day if it meant that he could be rid of Jim.

  Dolly described her first visit to the house in her diary:

  Took E. [Elizabeth, her daughter] to Berkhamsted with me to stop with Sylvia & Arthur. They have a beautiful large Elizabethan house in a street – the outlook is dreary, but nothing could be more perfect than the inside especially for so large a family. Huge nurseries & schoolroom with mullioned windows that occupy whole sides of the room – then odd long shaped bedrooms with beams & slanting floors – & all so charmingly done as Sylvia only can do things with harmonious chintzes & linens & lovely bits of Chippendale furniture – the whole thing is very ideal – a perfect & very cheap school next door where the 3 elder boys go, returning to meals – a kindergarten for Michael. Arthur D. came down in the evening looking handsome & severe. Poor little Girly very much distressed at my leaving her for a minute & is very quiet & subdued... I like to see [Sylvia] at luncheon seated at the head of her long table in the beautiful Hall with its huge windows & immense sixteen century chimneypiece & serving food to the 4 beautiful boys who all have perfect manners & are most agreeable companions – especially George.

  But there was to be no escaping Jim. He went down to Berkhamsted ‘quite a hundred times over the next three years’.1

  In 1905, Jim brought the entire production of Peter Pan to Berkhamsted just so that Michael could see it, a clear sign that Michael was fast becoming ‘The One’.

  ‘We took the play to his nursery,’ Jim wrote, ‘far away in the country, an array of vehicles almost as glorious as a travelling circus; the leading parts were played by the youngest children in the London company, and No. 4, aged five, looked on solemnly at the performance from his bed and never smiled once.’

  The following spring Jim invited Sylvia to Dives in Normandy. She travelled with Michael. That summer the family split again, Sylvia and Michael going to Black Lake Cottage alone.

  With the boys outside London, Jim had time on his hands, and now, just as he was enjoying unprecedented public adulation, there began another extraordinary episode.

  In 1905 A. E. W. Mason, a dedicated bachelor and firm friend of Jim’s, introduced him to Captain Robert Falcon Scott. They took to one another ‘instantaneously’, according to Mackail – ‘something more than a response on both sides. Here, for Jim, was the bravest and manliest sailor in the world. There, from
Scott, was such instant admiration – spurred on by all the tricks and all the spells – that he was captured and appropriated at once.’

  Jim describes their first meeting in an Introduction to The Personal Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, RN, CVO, on his Journey to the South Pole, which he edited after the explorer’s death in 1912.

  On the night when my friendship with Scott began he was but lately home from his first adventure into the Antarctic, and I well remember how, having found the entrancing man, I was unable to leave him. In vain he escorted me through the streets of London to my home, for when he had said good-night I then escorted him to his, and so it went on I know not for how long through the small hours. Our talk was largely a comparison of the life of action (which he pooh-poohed) with the loathly life of those who sit at home (which I scorned); but I also remember that he assured me he was of Scots extraction... According to [family traditions] his great-great-grandfather was the Scott of Brownhead whose estates were sequestered after the ’45 . . .

  Scott’s widely publicised first expedition to the Antarctic had coincided with the three Black Lake holidays. Reports of his heroic exploits had added spice to the games of Jim and the boys, and now Jim began to court him (there is no better word).

  That Scott’s family might have links with the Jacobite Rebellion excited him tremendously – the ’45 characterised the boys’ games in Sentimental Tommy and this connection made Scott ‘one of the gang’. Jim accorded Scott a Tommy-style fantasy childhood, as befits a member of the Thrums elite:

  He enters history aged six, blue-eyed, long-haired, inexpressibly slight and in velveteen, being held out at arm’s length by a servant and dripping horribly, like a half-drowned kitten . . .