J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  None, that is, except children. His brother Alexander had married in 1877, and Barrie now had two young nieces, whom he visited whenever he could. They were not puzzled by him, as many of his contemporaries were puzzled, and while he was in their company, he ceased to be a puzzle to himself. He felt safe with them, alive with them, at one with them.

  In 1882, Barrie was able to return home to Kirriemuir with the letters M.A. after his name. But if the intervening years at University had brought about an increasing shyness, they had not dimmed his determination to become a writer:

  ‘It was not highly thought of by those who wished me well. I remember being asked by two maiden ladies, about the time I left the university, what I was to be, and when I replied brazenly, “An author”, they flung up their hands, and one exclaimed reproachfully, “And you an M.A.!” My mother's views at first were not dissimilar; for long she took mine jestingly as something I would grow out of, and afterwards they hurt her so that I tried to give them up. To be a Minister—that she thought was among the fairest prospects.’

  Barrie as an M.A.

  It was Barrie's sister, Jane Ann, who was instrumental in securing him his first literary opportunity. She saw an advertisement in The Scotsman for a leader-writer on an English provincial newspaper, the Nottingham Journal, and showed it to him. He duly applied, and was offered the post at the seemingly enormous salary of three pounds a week.

  One of Barrie's tasks in preparing for his M.A. at Edinburgh had been to write essays on topics of surpassing boredom and make them both convincing and readable. His duties on the Nottingham Journal required him to perform a similar feat with the humdrum subjects handed him by his Editor. Whether it was ‘English Blank Verse’, ‘Roses’, ‘The Leafy Month’ or ‘My Umbrella’, Barrie's approach was invariably the same: enter the mind of another for the space of a column, adopt the standpoint least expected by the reader, then proceed to inject into the affair as much cynicism and laconic humour as his spirits could muster. These techniques were soon to become his literary hallmarks, though presently they would be tempered, and in the opinions of some marred, by two other idiosyncratic characteristics: sentiment and ‘whimsy’. Their absence from his writing at this stage was no accident: Barrie himself was only too well aware of the sentimental streak in him, and his intellect fought against it.

  Not all of his articles were on topics beyond his sphere of interest. Cricket was already making an appearance; so too were the theatre and amateur theatricals. A third subject had also found its way into the anonymous columns of the Nottingham Journal: boys. His first article on the breed was a typical piece of cynicism, entitled ‘Pretty Boys’:

  ‘Pretty boys are pretty in all circumstances, and this one would look as exquisitely delightful on the floor as when genteelly standing, in his nice little velvet suit with his sweet back to the fireplace, but think of the horror and indignation of his proud and loving mother. … When you leave the house, the pretty boy glides like a ray of black sunshine to the door and … holds up his pretty mouth for a pretty kiss. If you wish to continue on visiting terms with his mother you do everything he wishes; if you are determined to remain a man whatever be the consequences, you slap his pretty cheeks very hard while the mother gazes aghast and the father looks another way, admiring your pluck and wishing he had the courage to go and do likewise. It would, on the whole, be a mistake to kill the child outright, because, for one thing, he may grow out of his velvet suit in time and insist on having his hair cut, and, again, the blame does not attach to him nearly so much as to his mother.’17

  Strath View, the Barries' home in Kirriemuir from 1872

  It would appear that Barrie's provincial readers were not altogether amused by his sense of humour: at any rate his employment on the newspaper was short-lived, and by the end of October 1884 he was back in Kirriemuir—without a job. He had never regarded Nottingham as anything more than a stepping-stone towards Fleet Street journalism, and he now bombarded various London publications with unsolicited articles. One of these, entitled ‘An Auld Licht Community’, was based on some of Margaret Ogilvy's anecdotes about the Kirriemuir of her childhood. The St James's Gazette published it on November 17th, 1884, and Barrie quickly followed it with another article on a different theme, having assumed he had exhausted the subject of the Auld Lichts. It came back by return of post with a reject slip attached; the Gazette's editor, Frederick Greenwood, softened the blow by adding a note of his own: ‘I liked that Scotch thing—any more of those?’18 Barrie consulted his mother, and soon ‘An Auld Licht Funeral’ was on its way to Greenwood, followed in rapid succession by ‘An Auld Licht Courtship’, ‘An Auld Licht Scandal’ and ‘An Auld Licht Wedding’. Spurred on by Greenwood's enthusiasm, Barrie decided it was time to make his assault on London:

  Auld Licht gossips

  ‘I wrote and asked the editor [Greenwood] if I should come to London, and he said No, so I went, laden with charges from my mother to walk in the middle of the street, … never to venture forth after sunset, and always to lock up everything (I who could never lock up anything, except my heart in company). … London, which she never saw, was to her a monster that licked up country youths as they stepped from the train; there were the garrets in which they sat abject, and the park seats where they passed the night. … I daresay that when night comes, this Hyde Park which is so gay by day, is haunted by the ghosts of many mothers, who run, wild-eyed, from seat to seat, looking for their sons.’

  ‘Let us survey our hero’: Barrie in 1886, aged 26

  Before leaving Kirriemuir, Barrie took the precaution of sending Greenwood another offering, though it was a somewhat risky venture, since the article, ‘The Rooks Begin to Build’, had nothing to do with his mother's Auld Licht stories. Without waiting for a response, he packed his all-purpose university box and caught the night train to London. In The Greenwood Hat, Barrie described himself in hindsight:

  ‘Let us survey our hero as he sits awake in a corner of his railway compartment. … He is gauche and inarticulate, and as thin as a pencil but not so long (and is going to be thinner). Expression, an uncomfortable blank. … Manners, full of nails like his boots. Ladies have decided that he is of no account, and he already knows this and has private anguish thereanent. Hates sentiment as a slave may hate his master. Only asset, except a pecuniary one, is a certain grimness about not being beaten. … The baggage of our hero … consisted of a powerful square wooden box. … Having reached London for the great adventure, he was hauling this box to the left-luggage shed at St. Pancras when his eyes fell upon what was to him the most warming sight in literature. It was the placard of the “St. James's Gazette” of the previous evening with printed on it in noble letters “The Rooks begin to Build”. In other dazzling words, having been a minute or so in London, he had made two guineas. Forty-five years having elapsed since this event, the romance of my life, I myself can now regard it with comparative calm, but I still hold that it was almost as if Greenwood had met me at the station.’

  2

  1885–1894

  ‘The most precious possession I ever had [was] my joy in hard work. I do not know when it came to me—not very early, because I was an idler at school, and read all the wrong books at college. But I fell in love with hard work one fine May morning. … I found her waiting for me at a London station [and] she marched with me all the way to Bloomsbury. … Hard work, more than any woman in the world, is the one who stands up best for her man.’1

  Barrie's first novel. When asked his opinion of it in later years, Barrie's reply was the title

  For once, this was no exaggeration. Hard work took Barrie's mind off his increasing bouts of depression, when he would ‘lie awake busy with the problems of my personality’.2 Moreover it was sheer hard work that took him, within the space of three years, to the top of his profession. By 1887 he was contributing articles to virtually every prestigious publication in the country, including W. E. Henley's influential National Observer in the select c
ompany of Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats.

  A ‘Souvenir of Thrums’: picture postcards such as this were commonplace in Kirriemuir during the 1890s, marketed for literary tourists hunting out the scenes of the Thrums novels

  Barrie writing The Little Minister at Strath View in 1890. The little minister of the title is Gavin Ogilvy: ‘“It's a pity I'm so little, mother,” he said with a sigh. “You're no' what I would call a particularly long man,” Margaret said, “but you're just the height I like.” … Though even Margaret was not aware of it, Gavin's shortness had grieved him all his life.’

  But journalism was only a stepping-stone; literature was still his game, and in 1888 he tried his hand at his first novel, Better Dead. The title was somewhat apt, and Barrie, who had it published at his own expense, lost £25 to experience. The book was cool, witty and satirical, but, like his articles for the Nottingham Journal, it was too sophisticated for the general reader. He had written it from his head, not from his heart—indeed one reviewer went so far as to suggest that the novel was a collaboration between Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Undaunted, Barrie collected together his old articles from the St James's Gazette on the Auld Lichts, and offered them in book form to Hodder and Stoughton, who cautiously agreed to publish it. When Auld Licht Idylls appeared on the bookstalls in April 1888, it was greeted with a chorus of praise from reviewers and public alike, while its sequel, A Window in Thrums, put Barrie among the authors and Thrums among the places which the reading public knew better than their own homes. Thrums was, of course, the Kirriemuir of Margaret Ogilvy's childhood, as were many of the stories and characters. But the style in which they were told was unique to Barrie. After years of repressing his sentimental streak, he had at last allowed it to blend with his intellect and humour. This sentiment had a reverse side, a form of genial sadism. As The Times later observed, Barrie could be ‘as hard as nails, as cruel as the grave, as cynical as the Fiend. … The cruelty in him came of his intellectual vision; the tenderness came of his warm, trusting, but painfully sensitive heart.’ The results repelled a number of readers, while others, particularly in Scotland, were indignant at the way in which Barrie chose to portray his fellow countrymen in the Thrums novels. The critic George Blake wrote: ‘It is perhaps the most puzzling thing about Barrie from first to last that the expert toucher of emotions, the weaver of charmingly whimsical webs, the delight of the nurseries, had in all his dealings as a writer with such topics as death and sepulture and grief and suffering the way of a sadist.’3

  Barrie's third Thrums novel, The Little Minister, appeared in 1891 and was hailed as ‘A Book of Genius’ in a front-page review by the National Observer. The book's success was not limited to Great Britain: in New York alone, five publishers brought out their own pirated editions, and sales throughout the British Empire turned it into an international best-seller. If Barrie had lost a few of his more intellectual admirers, he had gained a world-wide readership that would remain solidly behind him for over half a century. Nor was his following restricted to the common man; Barrie's boyhood hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote to Henry James from his island retreat in the South Pacific:

  ‘Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie—O, and Kipling—you and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. … But Barrie is a beauty, the Little Minister and The Window in Thrums, eh? Stuff in that young man; but he must see and not be too funny. Genius in him, but there's a journalist at his elbow—there's the risk.’4

  Stevenson later wrote to Barrie in person:

  ‘I am proud to think you are a Scotchman … and please do not think when I thus seem to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. … I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you are a man of genius.’5

  Barrie's friendship with Stevenson was restricted to a lengthy correspondence, but his increasing fame brought him into close contact and friendship with a number of other writers, despite his somewhat cultivated reputation for shyness and inaccessibility. Closest of all were George Meredith and Thomas Hardy:

  Barrie and George Meredith

  ‘The most satisfactory thing in my little literary history is that the two whom as writers I have most admired became the two whom as men I have most loved. Hardy I first met at a club in Piccadilly, where he had asked me to lunch. It is a club where they afterwards adjourn to the smoking-room and talk for a breathless hour or two about style. Hardy's small contribution made no mark, but I thought how interesting that the only man among you who doesn't know all about style and a good deal more is the only man among you who has got a style.’6

  In 1890, Barrie recruited some of his friends into his own cricket club, the Allahakbars (Arabic for ‘Heaven help us!’), afterwards changed with complimentary intentions to the Allahakbarries. He soon found, however, that the more distinguished as authors his men were, the worse they played. Over the years, the Allahakbarries increased their reputation, if not their skill, and sometime members included Conan Doyle, Will Meredith, Charles Turley Smith, A. E. W. Mason and P. G. Wodehouse.

  Two Allahakbarries: Barrie (in straw hat) and Bernard Partridge

  Barrie's circle of friends had also expanded to include the children of many of his associates: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's son Bevil, W. Robertson Nicoll's two children, and W. E. Henley's daughter Margaret, who christened Barrie ‘my Friendy’, but because she couldn't pronounce her r's, it came out as ‘my Wendy’—a non-existent name at that time. Meanwhile his young nieces in Scotland now had two brothers, Charlie and Willie. Charlie was exceptionally good-looking and intelligent, which appealed to Barrie; he was also extremely destructive and anarchistic, which appealed to him even more. His younger brother Willie was well-mannered, obedient and polite—a very conventional affair compared to Charlie, and consequently a rather dull companion. Unlike Kingsley, Carroll and Wordsworth, Barrie rarely perceived children as trailing clouds of glory; he saw them as ‘gay and innocent and heartless’7 creatures, inspired as much by the devil as by God. He exulted in their contradictions: their wayward appetites, their lack of morals, their conceit, their ingratitude, their cruelty, juxtaposed with gaiety, warmth, tenderness, and the sudden floods of emotion that come without warning and are as soon forgotten. Their unpredictable nature was a source of constant fascination and delight to him. Barrie knew exactly how to win a boy's affection: flatter his insatiable ego, treat him as an equal, and play him at his own game. When Charlie teased and flirted, his uncle would respond with the same tactics; when he hurt his feelings, Barrie would hurt back with equal relish.

  Margaret Henley, who died at the age of 6. Her cloak was later copied for Wendy, the name she invented

  Never one to waste good copy, Barrie turned his young nephews into bread and butter on several occasions. In My Lady Nicotine, a novel extolling the joys of smoking, Charlie appears thinly disguised as Primus, a wily nephew who steals his uncle's cigarettes and smokes them with a friend in Kensington Gardens. On another occasion, a visit from his nephew became the basis of an article in the distinguished Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, entitled ‘Peterkin: A Marvel of Nature’:

  ‘Peterkin will be six years old by and by. … Circumstances have allowed me, his uncle, to see a good deal of Peterkin lately, and though we are now far parted, he has left an impression behind. …

  ‘Peterkin and I first realised that we were no common persons three weeks ago. His hammer, which has a habit of flying from his hand and making straight for any brittle article in its neighbourhood (when Peterkin immediately disappears), alighted on my head one evening. Then I arose in my wrath and addressed Peterkin in these words:–

  Charlie Barrie, the original of Peterkin

  ‘“You thundering curmudgeon, get out of this, or I'll kick you round the room.”

  ‘Peterkin bolted, and I heard him clattering up the stairs. …

&nb
sp; ‘I returned to my work, and by and by Peterkin walked in with a look of importance on his face such as I had not seen since he first got hold of the hammer. I left him severely alone, but every time I looked up his eye was on me. He came and stood by my side, offering himself mutely for slaughter. Then he sat down on a chair by the fire, and presently I discovered that he was crying.

  ‘“What is the matter now?” I demanded fiercely.

  ‘“You said you would kick me round the room,” he moaned.

  ‘“Well, I won't do it,” I said, “if you are a good boy.”

  ‘“But you said you would do it.”

  ‘“You don't mean that you want it?”

  ‘“Ay, I want it. You said you would do't.”

  ‘Wondering, I arose and kicked him.

  ‘“Is that the way?” he cried in rapture.

  ‘“That's the way,” I said, returning to my chair.

  ‘“But,” he complained, “you said you would kick me right round the room.”

  ‘I got up again, and made a point of kicking him round the room.

  ‘“Kick harder!” he shouted, and so I kicked him into the lobby.

  ‘However desirous of gratifying Peterkin, I could not be always kicking him … and for the sake of peace I bribed quietness from him with the promise that I would kick him hard at eight o'clock. He now spent much of his valuable time gazing at the lobby clock, and counting the ticks—each of which he fondly believed meant a minute. …