J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys

by Andrew Birkin

  ‘It was a bitterly cold night, and a snow-storm was raging. Frohman's secretary in the office in New York had arranged to telephone the news of the play's reception which Lestocq [Frohman's London manager] was expected to cable from London. On account of the storm the message was delayed.

  ‘Frohman was nervous. He kept on saying, “Will it never come?” His heart was bound up in the fortunes of this beloved fairy play. While he waited with Potter, Frohman acted out the whole play, getting down on all fours to illustrate the dog and crocodile. He told it as Wendy would have told it, for Wendy was one of his favorites. Finally at midnight the telephone-bell rang. Potter took down the receiver. Frohman jumped up from his chair, saying, eagerly, “What's the verdict?” Potter listened a moment, then turned, and with beaming face repeated Lestocq's cablegram:

  PETER PAN ALL RIGHT. LOOKS LIKE A BIG SUCCESS.

  ‘This was one of the happiest nights in Frohman's life.’

  ‘Peter Pan all right’ was an understatement characteristic of Lestocq, who, as Frohman's business manager, was primarily concerned with box-office takings. The cable intimated little of the thunderbolt that had struck the Duke of York's Theatre that night. For the past number of years, audiences had been subjected to a bombardment of ‘problem plays’, concerned with social criticism and steeped in gloom. Barrie himself had attempted such a play with The Wedding Guest, and since Peter Pan had been wrapped in secrecy from the outset, few had any idea of what the author had in store for them. When the curtain rose to reveal a dog preparing a small boy for his bath, it was greeted in stunned silence – followed by a gasp of astonished delight. For the rest of the evening the audience succumbed as one to Barrie's spell: the élite of London's society, with few children among them, emulated Sentimental Tommy by ‘flinging off the years and whistling childhood back’. The audience were not the only ones to be taken unawares: the entire company, bleary-eyed and exhausted, were as astonished as anyone else by the reception they received. When Nina Boucicault turned to the distinguished gathering and begged their belief in fairies, the response was so overwhelming that she burst into tears.

  Programme for the first production of Peter Pan. In the programme notes for the 1908 Paris production, Barrie came very close to giving himself away: ‘Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up is a play for children and for those who once were children by an author writing as a child. … Of Peter himself you must make what you will. Perhaps he was a little boy who died young, and this is how the author conceived his subsequent adventures. Perhaps he was a boy who was never born at all—a boy whom some people longed for, but who never came. It may be that those people hear him at the window more clearly than children do.’

  Peter's character is a delicate balance between the mortal and the immortal in his being – ‘Poor little half-and-half’, Old Solomon Caw calls him in The Little White Bird. He is not a fairy, like Puck or Ariel, but ‘a tragic boy’, who seems to be perpetually engulfed by an immense sense of loneliness that stems from the mortal in him. Thousands of actresses have played Peter Pan, but, judging by contemporary evidence, few have caught his enigma with such exquisite perfection as did Nina Boucicault. Denis Mackail as a boy of twelve saw her performance:

  Nina Boucicault as Peter Pan. In her 1904 rehearsal script, Peter tells Mrs Darling ‘Don't want to be useful. But I'll be good to the dead babies. I shall come and sing gaily to them when the bell tolls; and then they won't be frightened. I shall dance by their little graves and they will clap their hands to me and cry “Do it again, Peter, do it again”, for they know I'm funny, and it's the funny things they like.’

  ‘Miss Nina Boucicault as Peter Pan … The best, as no one has ever questioned, because of this haunting, eerie quality, this magic, and this sadness which is a kind of beauty too. Others will be more boyish, or more principal-boyish, or gayer and prettier, or more sinister and inhuman, or more ingeniously and painstakingly elfin. … But Miss Boucicault was the Peter of all Peters … She was unearthly but she was real. She obtruded neither sex nor sexlessness, which has so far beaten everyone else. Above all she had the touch of heart-breaking tragedy that is there in the story or fable from beginning to end; yet she never seemed to know it. … Barrie, lucky in so many of his actresses, was never luckier than here.’

  The first night concluded with numerous curtain-calls, though inevitably there were a few dissenters to the general enthusiasm. The writer Anthony Hope found the sight of the Beautiful Mothers adopting the Lost Boys too much to stomach, and groaned aloud, ‘Oh, for an hour of Herod!’ while the musical-comedy impresario George Edwardes was heard to mutter, ‘Well, if that's the sort of thing the public wants, I suppose we'll have to give it 'em.’8 The critics, however, were more generous. The Daily Telegraph observed that the play was ‘so true, so natural, so touching that it brought the audience to the writer's feet and held them captive there’. ‘To our taste,’ wrote A. B. Walkley in The Times, ‘Peter Pan is from beginning to end a thing of pure delight.’ Beerbohm Tree's half-brother, Max Beerbohm, paid Barrie a perceptive though somewhat back-handed compliment in The Saturday Review:

  Nina Boucicault and Hilda Trevelyan in the Tree Tops in the last scene of the play. Peter's command in the printed play, ‘No one must ever touch me’, was not added until 1928, at the request of Jean Forbes-Robertson

  ‘Undoubtedly, Peter Pan is the best thing [Barrie] has done – the thing most directly from within himself. Here, at last, we see his talent in its full maturity; for here he has stripped off from himself the last flimsy remnants of a pretence to maturity. …

  ‘Mr Barrie is not that rare creature, a man of genius. He is something even more rare – a child who, by some divine grace, can express through an artistic medium the childishness that is in him. … Mr Barrie has never grown up. He is still a child, absolutely. But some fairy once waved a wand over him, and changed him from a dear little boy into a dear little girl.’

  ‘This man is mine!’ Bedford's illustration from Peter and Wendy (1911)

  Bernard Shaw went so far as to proclaim that Peter Pan was an artificial freak which missed its mark completely, and was ‘foisted on children by the grown-ups’.9 The play may have missed its mark on Shaw, but for the vast majority of children who trooped to see it, Barrie scored a bull's-eye on their aspirations. Peter Pan was the first of the pre-teen heroes: girls wanted to mother him, boys wanted to fight by his side, while the ambiguity of his sex stimulated a confusion of emotional responses. The play soon began to attract a hard-core following of matinée fanatics who occupied the front row of the stalls to hurl thimbles at Peter and abuse at Hook. Daphne du Maurier wrote of her father's performance:

  ‘When Hook first paced his quarter-deck in the year of 1904, children were carried screaming from the stalls. … How he was hated, with his flourish, his poses, his dreaded diabolical smile! That ashen face, those blood-red lips, the long, dank, greasy curls; the sardonic laugh, the maniacal scream, the appalling courtesy of his gestures; … There was no peace in those days until the monster was destroyed, and the fight upon the pirate ship was a fight to the death.’10

  Pre-eminent among Peter's fans were the boys who had started it all. After spending Christmas at Berkhamsted, they came up to London and went to the play with Barrie's friend, the writer E. V. Lucas, his wife Elizabeth, and their six-year-old daughter, Audrey. In 1939 Audrey recalled:

  ‘I went … to the first matineé … with George, Jack, Peter, and Michael Llewelyn Davies (Nicholas being too young), and so imposing in size was our party that we drove to the theatre in one of those private buses which used to be hired by large families to take themselves and their luggage to railway stations. We sat in a box, in two more likely, and we loved the play … Hook had become one of us, the Jolly Roger had cast its spell, Smee was to become a household word, to fly a burning ambition. On the way home George demonstrated his excited approval by pretending to fall out of the bus.’11

  The Davieses went back to Leinster
Corner for tea, then returned home to the country, leaving the author alone with his wife. Barrie and Mary rarely communicated with each other these days, and any reflections that Barrie might have had on the triumph of Peter Pan were kept to himself. What was his mood, as he paced up and down his study, contemplating his success? Was he, like Frohman, elated? Perhaps his own description of Captain Hook best described him:

  ‘Hook trod the deck in thought. O man unfathomable. It was his hour of triumph, … and knowing as we do how vain a tabernacle is man, could we be surprised if he [was] … bellied out by the winds of his success? But there was no elation in his gait, which kept pace with the action of his sombre mind. Hook was profoundly dejected. He was often thus when communing with himself … in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone.’12

  J. M. Barrie in 1905

  When Barrie wrote his Dedication to the five Davies boys in 1928, he expressed a further reason for his dejection:

  ‘I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. I am sometimes asked who and what Peter is, but that is all he is, the spark I got from you.

  ‘What a game we had of Peter before we clipped him small to make him fit the boards. He was the longest story on earth, and some of you were not born when that story began and yet were hefty figures before we all saw that the game was up. Do you remember a walled garden at Burpham, and the initiation thereat of Michael when he was six weeks old, and three of you grudged letting him in so young? Have you, Peter, forgotten Tilford, and your cry to the Gods, “Do I just kill one pirate all the time?” Do you remember Marooners' Hut in the haunted groves of Black Lake, and the St Bernard dog in a tiger's mask who so frequently attacked you, and the literary record of that summer, The Boy Castaways, which is so much the best and the rarest of this author's works? What was it that eventually made us give to the public in the thin form of a play that which had been woven for ourselves alone? Alas, I know what it was, I was losing my grip. One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge. Sometimes you swung back into the wood, as the unthinking may take a familiar road that no longer leads to home; or you perched ostentatiously on its boughs to please me, pretending that you still belonged; soon you knew it only as the vanished wood, for it vanishes if one needs to look for it. A time came when I saw that George, the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe that he was ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic eye for me derided the lingering faith of Jack; when even Peter questioned gloomily whether he did not really spend his nights in bed. There were still two who knew no better, but their day was dawning. In these circumstances, I suppose, was begun the writing of the play of Peter, so much the most insignificant part of him. That was a quarter of a century ago, and I clutch my brows in vain to remember whether it was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a little longer, or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and butter. … You had played it until you tired of it and tossed it in the air and gored it and left it derelict in the mud and went on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib. … I talk of dedicating the play to you, but how can I prove it is mine? How ought I to act if some other hand thinks it worth while to contest the cold rights? Cold indeed they are to me now, and Peter is as far away in the woods as that laughter of yours in which he came into being long before he was caught and written down. … There is Peter still, but to me he lies sunk in that gay Black Lake.’13

  * Barrie was never formally godfather to any of the Davies boys, except Nico, who himself chose Barrie when he was christened at the age of fourteen. Peter and Michael remained unchristened.

  9

  1905–1906

  By the spring of 1905, the Davies family had settled into a comfortable, almost idyllic existence at their new home in the country, Egerton House. Dolly Ponsonby went to visit them in February, writing in her diary:

  ‘Feb 13. [1905] To Berkhampstead to stay with Sylvia & Arthur. They have a beautiful Elizabethan house in a street: the outlook is dreary, but nothing could be more perfect than the inside, especially for so large a family. There are huge nurseries & a schoolroom with mullioned windows which occupy the whole length of the rooms – odd-shaped bedrooms with beams & sloping floors – & all so charmingly done as only Sylvia can do things, with harmonious chintzes & lovely bits of Chippendale furniture. It seems very ideal – a cheap school where the elder boys go & a kindergarten for Michael. … Spent a happy day with Sylvia, who is as dear as ever she was. I like to see her at luncheon at the head of her long table in the beautiful Hall with its huge windows & great 16th century chimney piece – serving food to 4 beautiful boys who all have perfect manners & are most agreeable companions, especially George. Arthur came down in the evening, looking handsome and severe.’

  Arthur and his five sons in 1905. l to r: Jack (aged 10), Michael (5), Peter (8), George (12); Nico (1) is in his father's arms. In Peter and Wendy, Barrie described Peter Pan's anguish as he gazed at the Darling family reunited after the children's adventures in the Never Land: ‘There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. [Peter Pan] had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.’

  Arthur was in no sense the typical Edwardian father of the Mr Darling variety. Dolly Ponsonby wrote of him, ‘He was so tender and gentle with children that I never met one who feared him, in spite of his rather severe though wonderful looks.’1 He never inflicted corporal punishment on his sons, and on the sole occasion when he was moved to curtail an excess of Jack's obstreperousness with a swift kick up his backside, he totally unmanned the boy by coming to him later in the day and apologizing for what he had done. In many ways, Arthur had a more parental instinct than Sylvia. Jack later gave his own wife the impression that ‘Sylvia wore her children as other women wore pearls or fox-furs. They were beautiful children, but beautiful as a background to her beauty. If one of the boys was ill, it was never Sylvia who held their heads or took their temperatures – it was always Arthur who did that kind of thing.’2 Dolly Ponsonby recalled a passing fragment of conversation indicative of their priorities. ‘I remember a funny sort of conservatory through which you passed to go into the little garden – it was filled with plants and flowers by Sylvia. Mary [Hodgson] would put the prams there – and Sylvia said, “I do wish they wouldn't leave the prams here.” And Arthur said, “I think the prams are more beautiful than the flowers.”’3

  Egerton House

  Michael playing Romeo to Sylvia's Juliet at Dives (JMB)

  Simplicity was one of Arthur's great virtues; considerable patience was another, for although he had put twenty-five miles between his family and Leinster Corner, Barrie had begun to make frequent visits to Egerton House. Nor was there any respite in his invitations to Sylvia and her boys. He had already taken Sylvia to Paris on several occasions, and at Easter 1905 he invited her to Dives, a fashionable resort on the Normandy coast. Arthur knew that Sylvia's character was more complex than his own. She had, in Peter's words, an ‘innate and underlying tendency towards melancholy, a constant awareness of the lacrimae rerum’,4 counterbalanced by an appetite for luxury that Arthur neither shared nor could hope to satisfy. She once teased his sister Margaret's socialist principles by exclaiming, ‘I should love to have money. I should like to have gold stays and a scented bed and real lace pillows!’ Barrie was in a position to gratify those whims. Denis Mackail wrote, ‘He was rich; in a way he was extraordinarily innocent; and if Sylvia Davies used him – which she was undoubtedly doing by this time – as a kind of extra nurse, extremely useful fairy-godmother, or sometimes even errand boy, it wasn't in her character to resist that amount of temptation. More, for her, never existed.’ M
ary Hodgson later told Peter, ‘Your mother consented to go to France on condition that one or more of her boys should go with her. Your father was more than willing, where your mother's happiness was concerned.’ Jack and Michael therefore accompanied Sylvia to Dives, where Barrie entertained them in his own inimitable style. He bought Michael a costume so that he could photograph him playing Romeo to Sylvia's Juliet on the balcony of their hotel, then in the evenings took Sylvia to the Casino at Trouville, observing in his notebook: ‘Sylvia gambling – loses – gambles children.’

  Jack, Michael, Barrie and Sylvia at L'Hostellerie de Guillaume Le Conquérant, Dives, in April 1905

  While Barrie was away in France, Peter Pan ended its first run at the Duke of York's to make way for Alice Sit-by-the-Fire and a one-act curtain-raiser, Pantaloon. Alice had been the play offered to Frohman as collateral against any losses incurred in staging Peter Pan. The outcome was the exact reverse. Despite Ellen Terry's fine performance, Alice barely survived its run, whereas the demand for Peter Pan was such that Frohman confidently announced that it would re-open the following December, with advance bookings commencing in May.

  The prospect of a Peter Pan revival, in addition to the forthcoming American production, afforded Barrie the opportunity of revising the play, and he went down to Black Lake in early June to work on it. Mary Barrie had gone to France on a motoring trip with her friend Molly Muir, and although E. V. Lucas and his family were staying at the cottage, Barrie felt in need of a boy's company to spur his creativity. He therefore invited Sylvia and Michael to stay for a fortnight.