J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  The young couple returned to Craven Terrace, where their second son was born on September 11th. He was christened John, after Arthur's father, but was almost immediately nicknamed Jack. Mary Llewelyn Davies wrote to Sylvia from Kirkby Lonsdale:

  K.L. Friday.

  My Sylvia,

  No Mil [mother-in-law] ever got a dearer or sweeter letter than I did the other day! … You tell me all so nicely, and I can so well fancy you lying in yr. blue bed, looking so delicious, and yr. two sons with you. Jack seems to make good progress—and never mind if you can't be all in all to him. It is better it should be so for your picking up your strength. …

  Goodbye. I must not tire you, darling. I hope A's cold is better? I shall love to hug you and the 2 sons.

  Bless you all!

  M.

  Sylvia (JMB)

  In February of the following year, Mary Llewelyn Davies died of a sudden heart-attack. Both Arthur and Sylvia were heartbroken by this first sorrow to cloud their blissfully happy lives. Dolly Parry wrote: ‘When she died, I realised the depth of Sylvia's feeling for her—in fact, I don't think I ever came across a mother and a daughter-in-law so deeply attached. Sylvia could not talk about it.’ A second bereavement followed swiftly upon the first: on October 8th, 1896, George du Maurier died at the early age of sixty. Sylvia's brother Gerald, who was playing a small part in the stage production of Trilby, had visited him a few days before his death. As he left the room, his father held out his hand and murmured, ‘Si c'est la mort, ce n'est pas gai.’6

  George du Maurier's ashes were interred in Hampstead Churchyard, the first in a long line of du Mauriers and Llewelyn Davieses who would eventually lie beside him. On his tombstone were written the last lines of Trilby:

  A little trust that when we die

  We reap our sowing! and so—good-bye!

  * * *

  Mary Hodgson

  By the beginning of 1897 it had become clear that the house in Craven Terrace was too small for a family that already consisted of two young boys—with another child on the way. The death of Sylvia's father had provided her with a very reasonable legacy, largely as a result of Trilby, and the recent death of one of Arthur's elderly aunts left him with the tail-end of a lease on a larger house in Notting Hill: 31 Kensington Park Gardens. The prospect of a third child also required the services of an under-nurse to supplement the efforts of the resident Nurse Woodward. Arthur's brother Maurice had recently dispensed with the services of a young under-nursemaid, Mary Hodgson. Mary's brother was a sidesman at the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies's church, and her family had long Kirkby Lonsdale connections. Arthur therefore wrote to her, offering her the post of under-nursemaid, and a few days later the twenty-two-year-old Mary Hodgson travelled south to London to take up her duties. Within a short space of time she had become exclusive nurse to the family, and proved to be worthy of the absolute trust Sylvia placed in her. From the outset she insisted that George and Jack addressed her as ‘Mary’; to call her ‘Nurse’ was to incur her instant wrath. She brought to her role a measure of the traditional nanny, and walks in Kensington Gardens soon became a daily routine.

  George, Sylvia and Jack in 1895

  On February 25th, 1897, a third son was born to Sylvia and Arthur. He was named Peter, after Peter Ibbetson, but unlike George and Jack he was never christened. His parents decided that this was a choice he should be allowed to make for himself later on. Peter proved to be somewhat frailer than either of his two brothers. Dolly Parry wrote to him in later life, ‘You were not nearly so strong as George or Jack. … You were pale and different, and the fact that you were not hearty for some years appealed to me.’7

  Sylvia and Peter (JMB)

  Sylvia continued her dressmaking with Mrs Nettleship, while at home she put her talent to practical account, making clothes for herself and her boys ‘out of nothing and other people's mistakes’,8 as Barrie was to write of Mrs Darling. For Peter the scope was rather limited as he was still in his pram, but for George and Jack she created loose-fitting square-necked silk blouses, corduroy trousers and high-laced boots. One day, while clearing out an old chest of drawers, she found an ancient judicial robe of red velvet that had once belonged to Arthur's grandfather. Seeing no further use for it in its courtroom capacity, she cut it up and transformed the pieces into bright red tam-o'-shanters. Thus arrayed, George and Jack soon became a distinctive feature of Kensington Gardens, and could hardly fail to catch the attention of the little Scotsman out strolling with his dog.

  Sylvia and George

  Many of Arthur's briefs were now coming to him through the office of Sir George Lewis, and it was only natural that he and Sylvia should be invited to the Lewises' New Year's Eve dinner party on December 31st, 1897. ‘If only I hadn't accepted that invitation to dine,’ bemoans Mr Darling to his wife on returning from a dinner party to find that his children have flown away to the Neverland with Peter Pan. It was shortly to become Arthur's cry too.

  George and Jack in 1897

  5

  1898–1900

  15, Old Cavendish Street, W.

  14 Aug. 1892.

  Dear Miss du Maurier,

  And so you are to be married tomorrow! And I shall not be present. You know why.

  Please allow me to wish you great happiness in your married life. And at the same time I hope you will kindly accept the little wedding gift I am sending you … It reaches you somewhat late, but that is owing to circumstances too painful to go into.

  With warmest wishes to you and Mr Davis,

  Believe me, dear Miss du Maurier,

  Yours sincerely,

  J. M. Barrie.

  P.S. To think that you don't know about Peterkin!

  This ‘characteristic whimsicality’ (as Peter Llewelyn Davies later described it) is dated one day prior to Sylvia and Arthur's wedding date, the address being Barrie's at that time. It was, in fact, written some time in 1898, on the back of a piece of 133 Gloucester Road writing paper, and delivered to Sylvia by hand. The mis-spelling of ‘Davies’ was probably unintentional, but both the slip and the letter itself—not to mention the gift—must have proved mildly irritating to Arthur.

  Sylvia (JMB)

  George (JMB)

  Now that the ice had been broken, Barrie started seeing more of George and Jack, both at home and on their daily walks in Kensington Gardens. But it was George who won his closest affection, and their friendship soon started to blossom in the pages of Barrie's notebook:

  — George admires me as writer ∵ [= because] thinks I bind & print.

  — George burying face not to show crying.

  — Little White Bird book described to me by George.

  — L.W.B. Telling George what love is … in answer to George's inquiries abt how to write a story.

  — L.W.B. What George said while walking me round the Round Pond (abt what to have for his birthday—ship—greek armour—book &c)—I sneer.

  — The queer pleasure it gives when George tells me to lace his shoes, &c.

  — L.W.B. The boys disgrace one in shops by asking shopkeeper abt his most private affairs. Shopkeeper &c takes me for their father (I affect rage).

  This was the key to their relationship: they were like father and son, yet Barrie was spared the tiresome role of being the stern disciplinarian. He later elaborated on ‘the particular pleasure this gives me’ in The Little White Bird, disguising George as ‘David’:

  George, with Arthur and Jack in background (JMB)

  ‘“Boy, you are uncommonly like your mother.”

  ‘To which David: “Is that why you are so kind to me?”

  ‘I suppose I am kind to him, but if so it is not for love of his mother, but because he sometimes calls me father. On my honour … there is nothing more in it than that. I must not let him know this, for it would make him conscious, and so break the spell that binds him and me together. … He addresses me as father when he is in a hurry only, and never have I dared ask him to use the name. He say
s, “Come, father,” with an accursed beautiful carelessness. So let it be, David, for a little while longer.

  ‘I like to hear him say it in front of others, as in shops. When in shops he asks the salesman how much money he makes in a day, and which drawer he keeps it in, and why his hair is red, and does he like Achilles, of whom David has lately heard, and is so enamoured that he wants to die to meet him. At such times the shopkeepers accept me as his father, and I cannot explain the particular pleasure this gives me. I am always in two minds then, to linger that we may have more of it [or] to snatch him away before he volunteers the information, “He is not really my father.”

  ‘When David meets Achilles I know what will happen. The little boy will take the hero by the hand, call him father, and drag him away to some Round Pond.’

  George (JMB)

  Just as Tommy and Grizel chronicled Barrie's failing marriage and his own inability to grow up, so The Little White Bird follows his relationship with George and his own profound yearnings for fatherhood—or, perhaps, motherhood. Like Tommy, the new novel would evolve slowly over the next four years before being published in 1902.

  The book is narrated in the first person by Barrie, who thinly disguises himself as Captain W—, ‘a gentle, whimsical, lonely old bachelor’, who also happens to be a writer, given to long walks in Kensington Gardens with his St Bernard dog, Porthos. His unfulfilled ambition is to have had a son of his own, whom he would have called Timothy. He becomes involved with a needy young couple, acting as their anonymous benefactor when the opportunity arises. On the night their child is born, Captain W— meets the husband pacing the streets while his wife, Mary, is in labour. The husband assumes that the Captain is ‘an outcast for a reason similar to his own, and I let his mistake pass, it seemed to matter so little and to draw us together so naturally’. Therefore when the father tells the Captain that their baby is a son, he is obliged to pretend that he too now has a son—Timothy. Without ever revealing his true identity as their anonymous benefactor, the Captain continues to take a vicarious interest in the progress of their boy, David. One day he sees the mother about to sell her possessions to a pawnshop because she has no money with which to buy clothes for her child. The Captain contrives to meet the father, and blithely informs him that since his own son Timothy has recently died, he has no further use for Timothy's clothes. Barrie's style of narration up to this point has been one of dry, laconic humour, but in the following passage, in which he describes ‘the last of Timothy’, he quarries the depths of his own frustrated paternity to a degree that is almost embarrassing (to some even nauseating), and yet is such a cry from the heart that it all but transcends sentimentalism by its very sincerity:

  George ‘waiting for the dawn’ (JMB)

  ‘Timothy's hold on life, as you may have apprehended, was ever of the slightest, and I suppose I always knew that he must soon revert to the obscure. He could never have penetrated into the open. It was no life for a boy.

  ‘Yet now that his time had come, I was loth to see him go. I seem to remember carrying him that evening to the window with uncommon tenderness (following the setting sun that was to take him away), and telling him with not unnatural bitterness that he had got to leave me because another child was in need of all his pretty things; and as the sun, his true father, lapt him in his dancing arms, he sent his love to a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never have a mother. I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me to look; that he could have sailed one paper galleon on the Round Pond; fain would I have had him chase one hoop a little way down the laughing avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once, on a long summer day, emerging at the other end as men and women with all the fun to pay for; and I think (thus fancy wantons with me in these desolate chambers) he knew my longings, and said with a boy-like flush that the reason he never did these things was not that he was afraid, for he would have loved to do them all, but because he was not quite like other boys; and, so saying, he let go my finger and faded from before my eyes into another and golden ether; but I shall ever hold that had he been quite like other boys there would have been none braver than my Timothy.’

  George (JMB)

  David's mother, Mary, is closely modelled on Sylvia. She guesses that Timothy was merely a figment of the Captain's imagination, and that it is he who has been their mysterious benefactor. She sends him invitations, but he refuses to visit her unless David is first allowed to visit him alone in his chambers—without the disapproving presence of David's nurse, Irene (a somewhat caustic portrayal of Mary Hodgson). Mary agrees, and the Captain sets about winning the boy to himself: ‘It was a scheme conceived in a flash, and ever since relentlessly pursued—to burrow under Mary's influence with the boy, expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him utterly from her and make him mine.’ As David grows older, the Captain comes to look upon him as his own son. ‘It would ill become me to attempt to describe this dear boy to you, for of course I know really nothing about children, so I shall say only this, that I thought him very like what Timothy would have been had he ever had a chance.’ But despite his growing affection for David, the Captain feigns indifference towards the boy's mother. ‘When Mary does anything that specially annoys me I send her an insulting letter. I once had a photograph taken of David being hanged on a tree. I sent her that. You can't think of all the subtle ways of grieving her I have.’

  George (JMB). In The Little White Bird, Barrie wrote? ‘I work very hard to retain that little boy's love; but I shall lose him soon; even now I am not what I was to him; in a year or two at longest, … [he] will grow out of me’.

  Unfortunately for Arthur, the real-life J. M. Barrie took precisely the opposite attitude towards George's mother. Far from declining invitations to visit her and the boys at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, he availed himself of every opportunity—regardless of whether an invitation had been extended or not. In the Davies family he had found what he had been searching for all his adult life—a beautiful woman who embodied motherhood, a brood of boys who epitomized boyhood—and he did not mean to let them go. What objection could Arthur offer to the intrusive little Scotsman? He knew well enough that he presented no threat to their marriage, that he was ‘quite harmless’. Sylvia was devoted to Arthur, and in a curious way Barrie also found himself devoted to their mutual devotion. He could flatter Sylvia, even flirt with her, yet feel secure in the knowledge that she would never put him to the test.

  While making notes for The Little White Bird, Barrie continued to toil away on Tommy and Grizel. He wrote to Quiller-Couch: ‘Oh, that final “canter up the avenue”. They [the publishers] should see the author belabouring the brute. I see the finish not so far off … but it cracked somewhere about the middle and needs a deal of sticking-plaster yet.’1 Until now, Barrie had sketched the adult Grizel, Tommy's neglected wife, from his own wife. But the resulting portrait lacked charm. ‘What is charm, exactly?’ asks Alick in What Every Woman Knows. Barrie's reply was a succinct description of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. ‘Oh, it's—it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.’

  It is hard to decide which Mary Barrie found the more galling: to have Grizel based upon herself and her own private anguish, or to find her role as model usurped by Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. Whatever her feelings on the matter, she had little choice but to move aside; her husband had found his sticking-plaster:

  — T & G. Revise. G's nose tiptilted (really more as if point cut off). She is square-shouldered—woman who will always look glorious as a mother, (so I think of her now, always so). A woman to confide in (no sex in this, we feel it in man or woman). All secrets of womanhood you feel behind these calm eyes & courage to face th
em. A woman to lean on in trouble.

  — Revise. G's voice richness of contralto? like child's voice that has never known fear, boy's. Merry, infectious, cd soothe, be mothering.

  — Revise. Grizel's crooked smile.

  — Grizel. Trill in voice, gurgles like stream in gay hurry. Cooing voice.

  Sylvia, from the portrait by Charles Furse

  Having decided to incorporate Sylvia into the character of Grizel, Barrie found it necessary to rewrite whole chapters at a time. One such chapter was almost entirely devoted to her description, under the title ‘Grizel of the Crooked Smile’:

  One of Bernard Partridge's illustrations from the American edition of Tommy and Grizel. Barrie confessed to not knowing what most of the characters looked like, but said he could be of some help when Partridge came to draw Grizel: ‘Mrs Llewelyn Davies, whom she is meant to be a bit like, is willing to sit for you for this, and she has some idea of the dressing too’. The illustrations did not appear in the British edition, doubtless to spare Mary Barrie further loss of pride.

  ‘When the winds of the day flushed her cheek she was beautiful, but it was a beauty that hid the mystery of her face; the sun made her merry, but she looked more noble when it had set, then her pallor shone with a soft radiant light, as though the mystery and sadness and serenity of the moon were in it. The full beauty of Grizel came out at night only, like the stars.