Neverland

by Piers Dudgeon

  Jim’s cameo continues in a cringingly embarrassing vein of hero worship; Scott seems to have met this adulation a little uncertainly, with shyness and reticence, though it was not the first occasion he had excited such interest in another man.

  Clements Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society, had selected Scott to captain an expedition to the South Pole in 1901. Scott was then an undistinguished officer of average ability, and this would be his first command. David Crane2 argues that what appealed to Markham, who was a homosexual, were Scott’s arctic good looks and charm. The explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard told him that there was not a crevasse that he would not happily fall through with Scott: ‘I know Scott intimately... I am sure that you will come to know him and believe in him as I do, and none the less because he is sometimes difficult.’ Cherry-Garrard added that he never knew a man who cried so easily as Scott.

  Barrie wanted immediately to show him to his friends:

  I remember the first time [Scott] dined with me, when a number of men had come to meet him, he arrived some two hours late. He had dressed to come out, then fallen into one of his reveries, forgotten all about the engagement, dined by himself and gone early to bed. Just as he was falling asleep he remembered where he should be, arose hastily and joined us as speedily as possible . . .3

  Already Jim had his hero down as a dreamer. He confessed himself ‘intoxicated’ by Scott’s two-volume record of his first Antarctic expedition, Voyage of the Discovery, which he ‘fell on [and] raced through’ before flying with his new friend to a rehearsal of Peter Pan, which left Scott ‘exhilarated and impressed’. He next took him to Black Lake Cottage, and mounted an accelerated re-run of the Castaway games, which, he told him, had been designed to teach ‘by example lessons in fortitude and manly endurance’. From this time his letters to Scott were signed, ‘Your loving... J. M. Barrie’. Soon he would invite Scott into the inner sanctum, his ‘family’ – Sylvia and the boys.

  In September 1906, Scott mentioned a vacant place for a boy at Osborne Naval College. Jim pursued the project with gusto, recommending Jack Llewelyn Davies for his heroic qualities, as ‘a fine, intelligent, quick boy with the open fearless face that attracts at first sight’.

  In London the unheroic writer and the handsome explorer were inseparable, as this undated letter from Jim to Scott suggests –

  Sunday. Welcome home. Want to see you much. This chill will probably keep me in the house [Leinster Corner] some days. The maid has instructions to admit you at any hour, day or night, and the sooner the better. So do come.

  Buoyed up by Jim’s interest in him and by the image of intrepid Polar explorer, which at every opportunity Jim projected back on to him, Scott decided to mount another expedition to the South Pole. Jim was quick to reply – ‘I chuckle with joy to hear all the hankerings are coming back to you. I feel you have got to go back again . . .’

  In the six years between their first meeting and the second expedition, there was a marked change in Scott’s personality. In 1905 he had been ‘a man of ambition without direction, of aspirations without vision, of will without conscience, of charm without kindness, of character without centre’,4 but by 1911 he had become completely steeped in the heroic myth, with a clear view of himself as hero. He changed into a man who was self-confident, self-important, petulant, and possessed of a sense of the significance of ‘the explorer’ as the custodian of the British heroic vision, one who needed to suffer and show courage and discipline and duty and endurance, and who would therefore eschew the ‘modern’ technology of exploration* because it was, in effect, ‘cheating’. Scott had become a fantasist, and his expedition was a tragic disaster.†

  Where can this dangerous fantasy persona have come from, if not from Jim, the hero-manque, the greatest fantasy streamer of them all, whose reverence for the heroic ideal was driven by a psychosis, and who, from the moment he met the explorer, melted before Scott’s charm and good looks?

  In Scott, Uncle Jim found the very flesh and blood model of his fantasy hero, and Scott played Jim’s game, even to the point of joining him with Michael and Nico after lock-out in Kensington Gardens for what Jim referred to as ‘our Antarctic exploits’. These involved a race with Jim’s team to reach the Pole ‘in advance of our friend Captain Scott and cut our initials on it’. Wrote Jim years afterwards: ‘[It was] a strange foreshadowing of what was really to happen.’

  So lost a fantasist was Scott after six years in Barrie’s company that he insisted on man-haulage in place of dogs, because, he wrote, ‘In my mind no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realised when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts... Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.’

  Scott translated Jim’s fantasy into reality. When Scott invited Jim to join his expedition, Jim wrote: ‘Your invitation is really the only one I have had for years that I should much like to accept. I can’t. I mustn’t, I have been doing practically nothing for so long, [etc . . .] I know it means missing the thing I need most – to get into a new life for a bit... Altho’, mind you, I would still rather let everything else go hang and enrol for the Antarctic... I want to know what it is really like to be alive. I should probably double up the first day. So they say, but in my heart I beg to inform you I am not so sure . . .’

  In the spring of 1906 the sarcoma presented for the first time in Arthur Llewelyn Davies’s mouth. He had an exploratory operation at a London nursing home, writing to his sister Margaret on 26 May that ‘there are no grounds for anxiety’.

  Subsequently, when the cancer was diagnosed, he underwent a second operation to remove half his upper jaw and the roof of his mouth. Afterwards, outside his room, Sylvia fell on her brother Gerald’s shoulder and wept: ‘They’ve spoiled my darling’s face.’

  Thereafter, Barrie stood sentinel over Arthur in his decline, playing, as Peter Llewelyn Davies put it, ‘the leading part in the grand manner’. While Arthur scribbled notes of what he was thinking about – his sons, ‘S’s blue dress’, Porthgwarra,* etc. – Jim made notes for a prospective work – ‘The 1,000 Nightingales: A hero who is dying. “Poor devil, he’ll be dead in six months.”’

  And Sylvia? Dolly wrote to Peter that during Arthur’s illness Sylvia ‘developed the most courageous and remarkable character; she suffered intensely, because her power of feeling and her love was so strong, and in connection with your dear splendid Father’s illness I had some agonizing, unforgettable moments with her. But she was very controlled and reticent – and minded so much [her sister-in-law] poor Margaret’s outpourings and desire to help her. She felt much too much to talk about it in that way.’

  How could Sylvia discuss her deepest feelings with anyone? How could she still the tensions and recriminations inside? This was assuredly Arthur’s most difficult and courageous time, when, for the sake of his family, he had to bury his feelings too. He, Sylvia and ‘Jimmy’, as Arthur began to refer to him, made ‘as odd a variation of the menage a trois as ever there was’, as Peter had to admit. Before the end, Arthur ‘surrendered utterly’.

  ‘Arthur’s surrender’ is Peter’s phrase, but ‘Barrie’s triumph’ would seem more appropriate, when Arthur asked Margaret to bring him the one surviving copy of The Boy Castaways.

  On top of that, they gave him the just published Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, the Peter Pan material from The Little White Bird. One can only guess what Arthur made of Barrie’s Dedication:

  To Arthur & Sylvia Llewellyn Davies and their boys – My Boys

  Dolly visited Arthur in the nursing home and wrote with perfect balance in her diary for 14 June:

  It was very sad but they are both so remarkable. He looked very altered but with his usual determination insists upon speaking in spite of having no roof or teeth, both of which he will have later* – in spite of this I understood nearly everything he said. He tried to smile & made a remark as I l
eft about my being beautiful in his old dry chaffy way... But to see Sylvia tending this poor maimed creature was something I shall never forget. She seemed a living emblem of love, tenderness & sorrow – stroking his hair & his hand & looking unutterable love at him & so beautiful – it seems to have completed her. She broke down a little outside & we talked about it, but she is brave – it was wonderful to see her . . .

  Two weeks later, Dolly returned.

  Wed. 27th Up to London. Went to see Arthur Davies. It seems sadder than ever & I hate his not being able to use one eye. Sylvia looks better & is more cheerful... Little Barrie was of course there, lurking in the background!

  It is possible that Dolly voiced her concerns, for Barrie’s follow-up letter to her visit reads as if she had expressed disquiet to Sylvia, or asked for some sort of explanation:

  Oct 10, 1906

  Dear Mrs Ponsonby,

  Dr Rendel and the local doctor are attending Arthur mainly to do certain necessary things that any medical man can do. They have not and never have had in any way this case in their charge, that is [surgeon] Mr Roughton’s, from whom they have their instructions. He is in touch with Sir Frederick Treves [also a surgeon... who said] that everything that could be done for a human being was being done.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. M. Barrie

  As Treves was the surgeon who treated and supported the Elephant Man, Dolly might have been reassured. Meanwhile, Sylvia wrote to Michael (now 6), ‘Mr Barrie is our fairy prince, much the best fairy prince that was ever born because he is real.’

  Arthur was worried about paying for the education of his eldest two boys, who were 13 and 12 in 1906. George sat the Eton scholarship while Arthur lay ill, and failed it, whereupon a friend of Arthur’s from Cambridge, Hugh Macnaghten, a housemaster at Eton, offered financial assistance to get him a place as an Oppidan. Sylvia wrote to Dolly in May 1907, ‘I am so grateful to Hugh for his love and generosity.’

  At this stage there were no references to financial support from Jim. He was not mentioned in Sylvia’s letter, though that may have been because she sensed Dolly’s antipathy towards him. Sylvia had learned to handle people’s inability to understand Jim’s influence over her. Jim certainly steered matters regarding Jack’s future. He recommended him to Scott for Osborne Naval College, and by 11 April 1907 Jack had passed his second exam for the College and was lined up to leave home.

  According to both Peter and Nico,5 Jack, alone of the brothers, represented a threat to Uncle Jim. Sylvia was especially close to Jack, and Jack resented Jim’s assumption of the role of father after Arthur’s death. Entering him for the Navy effectively removed him from the family for months at a time, often when his brothers were home from school. Jack was the only one of the boys who did not go to Eton, and he hated the Navy.

  * Author of The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).

  † The reference is to a famously heavy play about the Massacre of the Innocents by Stephen Philips, performed four years earlier at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

  * It is possible that Jim meant this to allude to ‘the Mothers’ in Faust, of whom Mephistopheles speaks in awe. For Goethe, mothers are the creative force that weaves the Ideas, Forms and Archetypes into the human mind. But, as in Jane Annie, when Barrie attends to serious ideas he generally prescribes a high dose of saccharine to sweeten the pill.

  * Pioneered by Peary and Nansen.

  † Scott left in 1911 and was beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, the following year. Scott and his colleagues, Wilson and Burrows, died a terrible death just eleven miles from safety, and famously Captain Oates trudged to his frozen grave with the immortal words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’

  * The place in Cornwall where Arthur and Sylvia spent their honeymoon.

  * He was to have an artificial jaw fitted, which was not a success.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sylvia’s Will

  Arthur died on 18 April 1907.

  Years later, Daphne recalled with discomfort, ‘I am rather shaken that the du Ms kept themselves out of the picture when Arthur was ill and dying.’ To quote Edmund Burke, ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’

  Jim immediately contacted Dr Rendel and asked him to prepare ‘a sleeping draft’ for Sylvia. Two weeks later she wrote to Dolly:

  Dear darling Dolly,

  I think of you so often & I know how you love Arthur and me & that helps me in my sorrow – you will love me always won’t you – and help me to live through these long years. How shall I do it I wonder – it seems to me impossible. We were so utterly and altogether happy & that happiness is the most precious thing on earth. We were not going to part. I must be terribly brave now & I know our boys will help me. They only keep me alive & I shall live for them and as always what Arthur wd most like in them. How he loved us all & he has been taken from us... just now I am full of deadly pain & sorrow & I often wonder I am alive... I think of him almost always now as he was before the tragic illness & God gave him the finest face in the world.

  It is a touching letter, which surely confirms the depth of Sylvia’s love for Arthur. Perhaps it marked a turning-point.

  She also wrote:

  The five boys are loving & thoughtful & I always sleep with my George now – & it comforts me more than I can say to touch him & I feel Arthur must know. He will live again in them I feel & that must be my dear comfort until I go to him at last. We longed to grow old together – oh my dear friend it is all so utterly impossible to understand.

  Shortly after Arthur’s death Sylvia made notes for a will. She named Florence Gay, a family friend, to look after her children, along with Nanny Hodgson (‘I hope she will stay with them always’), and she called upon Arthur’s sister Margaret, upon Barrie, and upon her own sisters and brothers (in that order) to give advice. But she ended the document, ‘Of one thing I am certain – that J. M. Barrie (the best friend in the whole world) will always be ready to advise out of his love for . . .’

  She never finished the sentence. Was it ‘me’? Was it ‘George’? Or ‘the boys’? Maybe she desisted because ‘love’ was not something Jim did, and in the wake of Arthur’s death she realised that, after all, she rather needed love. Jim’s influence was not so readily disposed of, however.

  From June to September 1907, after which George was due to go to Eton, Jim took the family on holiday to Dhivach Lodge on the banks of Loch Ness. Various of his friends – including Captain Scott – were invited. This was followed by a trip to Ramsgate, where Sylvia’s mother, Emma, lived. Then came the move back to London from Berkhamsted, to a three-storey townhouse at 23 Campden Hill Square. ‘No doubt the cash was partly put up or guaranteed by JMB,’ wrote Peter.

  Late in 1907, word reached Jim that Scott was seeing a woman, a young sculptor called Kathleen Bruce. He heard it first from Mason. Not only was Scott seeing a woman, he had married her. That Jim was furious is understatement. Scott had been so worried about his reaction that he had not dared approach him.

  Kathleen advised Scott by letter, ‘Please write quite by return of post... As nice a letter as ever you can think of.’ Eventually Scott invited Jim to be godfather to their son, whom they planned to name Peter, after Peter Pan. But Scott knew that this would not be enough. He had rejected Jim. Wounds like that did not heal. Four years later, even as he lay in Antarctica – ‘in a desperate state, feet frozen etc, no fuel, a long way from food’ – knowing he was about to die, Scott wrote to Jim, ‘It hurt me grievously when you partially withdrew your friendship or seemed so to do – I want to tell you I never gave you cause,’ and ended his note by pleading: ‘Give my memory back the friendship which you suspended – I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, as you had much to give and I nothing.’

  Dolly noted a stiffening of Barrie’s attitude during this period, an ever keener focus on the boys,
and a hardening of resolve. On 12 August 1908, she wrote in her diary:

  Mr Barrie arrived in the evening... We talked a great deal of Sylvia’s boys & it is extraordinary to see how they fill his life & supply all his human interest.

  Dolly remarked on his talkativeness and on his trenchant opinions. But something about him also triggered a wariness in her.

  JMB does alarm me. I feel he absolutely sees right through one & just how stupid I am – but I hope also he sees my good intentions.

  Jim was reasserting his control. At Christmas 1908 he organised an extravagant holiday for Sylvia and the boys at the Grand Hotel in the fashionable Alpine resort of Caux. Mary Ansell was to come too, and Gilbert Cannan, a recent graduate of Cambridge and would-be author and actor, who was at that time reading for the Bar and had been pulled in to be secretary to a campaign Jim had agreed to undertake to abolish the Censor.

  Cannan had been Kathleen Bruce’s boyfriend before she took up with Scott. Now he was working with Mary Ansell on the Censor business out of Black Lake Cottage, and discovering consolation in her arms.

  Jim did not know about Cannan’s affair with his wife. Sylvia did know, and wanted to promote it. Diana Farr wrote in her biography of Cannan1 that ‘Sylvia encouraged and abetted Cannan’s affair with Mary Barrie, making it easy for them to see each other unknown to Barrie.’ Denis Mackail suggested that Sylvia saw how the situation could play into her hands. With Mary out of the way, Barrie could make her financially secure in the wake of Arthur’s death. Mackail wrote: ‘Temptation here, as well as elsewhere. The money again.’ All of which suggests a Sylvia rather different from the one who had written to Dolly a year earlier.

  Even the boys were aware that something was not quite right. ‘Why is Mr Cannan always with Mrs Barrie?’ Jack asked. Why, he might as well have been asking, was Mummy always with Uncle Jim? As Mackail put it: ‘One sees who Sylvia’s chief companion would be.’