by J. M. Barrie
The telegram was prophetic, and with Peter Pan’s success came theatrical acclaim in the most robust possible terms for J. M. Barrie. He had already established himself in professional terms, both as novelist and dramatist. Awards were now bestowed on him with astonishing frequency. And there was more money available than he could ever imagine spending, given his modest tastes and needs. (In its seven-month run in New York, Peter Pan made the then extraordinary sum of over half a million dollars for Barrie and Frohman.)
Program for the first performance of Peter Pan. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
While Peter Pan was in rehearsal, Arthur and Sylvia had moved to quarters in the town of Berkhamsted to accommodate their growing family—they now had five sons in all. Barrie missed his daily encounters with the boys in Kensington Gardens. As he wrote to Peter, “Sometimes when I am walking in the Gardens with Luath [the successor to Porthos] I see a vision and cry Hurray, there’s Peter, and then Luath barks joyously and we run to the vision and then it turns out to be not Peter but just another boy, and then I cry like a water cart and Luath hangs his sorrowful tail.”37 Distance did nothing to diminish Barrie’s feelings for the boys and for “Jocelyn” (the pet name he used in letters to Sylvia), and early in 1906, he urged Sylvia to join him and Mary in Paris, an invitation she declined on the grounds that Michael and Nico were ill. It was in the spring of that year that Barrie brought Peter Pan to Berkhamsted to entertain Michael, who was still too ill to come to London for the show.
Nico Davies provides fascinating insight into how Barrie’s feelings were divided up in those days. Writing in 1975, he recalls that “George and Michael were The Ones—George because he had started it all, and Michael . . . because he was the cleverest of us, the most original, the potential genius. . . . I haven’t the skill to answer about J. M. B. being ‘in love’ with George & Michael. Roughly, yes—I would agree: he was in love with each of them: as he was in love with my mother: when you come to Mary Ansell it’s a different ‘feeling’: . . . for myself, Peter & Jack at our different times different again—nearer to normal deep affection.”38
In the years that followed the theatrical triumph of Peter Pan, Barrie was tested in ways he could never have imagined. He had always been on intimate terms with personal tragedy: the accidental death of his brother, the loss of his sister to cancer, the passing of his mother—each had required another trip up Cemetery Hill in Kirriemuir, and each had proven, in different ways, traumatic. But Barrie’s professional ambition always remained strong, fortified by a deep love of hard work and by pride in literary accomplishment. Possessed of staunch Scottish determination, he was able to manage periodic bouts of depression that mystified friends when the ordinarily affable playwright wrapped himself in dour silence.
No one could have imagined on that day when Peter Pan was performed for Michael in Berkhamsted that Arthur and Sylvia would be gone in a matter of years, long before their boys had grown up. In 1906 they were both still healthy. Barrie himself was mourning the death of his agent, Arthur Addison Bright, a man who had been for many years his “most loved friend.” Bright committed suicide after it was revealed that he had embezzled thousands of pounds from his clients. Barrie never paid much attention to his earnings—he would stuff checks into drawers and leave them there for months on end—and might never have noticed the missing sums had others not uncovered the fraudulent transactions. With characteristic generosity, he worried more about the corrupting influence of his high earnings than about the actual embezzlement of funds.
Letter of October 22, 1905, to Michael Davies from J. M. Barrie with letters reversed. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
In early June of 1906, within days of Bright’s suicide, doctors discovered that Arthur Davies had cancer. What had appeared to be nothing more than an abscess turned out to be a life-threatening tumor. Surgeons removed half of Arthur’s upper jaw and palate. Even under the best of circumstances, Arthur’s speech would be permanently impaired, his face disfigured, and his career as barrister at an end. Barrie put his financial resources at the disposal of Arthur and Sylvia. If Arthur had once found Barrie’s courtship of his wife and children mildly irritating, he was now deeply grateful to Uncle Jimmy: “Barrie has been wonderful to us—we look on him as a brother.”39
Arthur responded to the challenges of his disfiguring illness with courage, enduring agonizing pain, periodic heavy bleeding, attempts to fit him with a prosthetic device, and, finally, the news that the cancer had spread and could not be cured. Buoyed by the affectionate care of his wife and by Barrie’s “unfailing kindness and tact,” he lived on for several months after the operation.40 Barrie kept vigil at Arthur’s bedside on many occasions, and, shortly before his death, on April 19, 1907, Arthur wrote a touching note about how much he liked to “just see” Barrie.
J. M. Barrie with the Llewelyn Davies boys at Scourie Lodge, 1911. George and Peter stand in the back row, with Nico and Michael in the front. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
The Davies home in Berkhamsted was sold, and Sylvia returned to London with her boys. The family’s new house, in Campden Hill Square, was not far from the Barrie residence at Leinster Corner. A second unsavory drama unfolded, far more momentous for Barrie than the embezzling episode, this time involving Barrie’s own domestic circumstances. The gardener at Black Lake Cottage, filled with resentment over Mrs. Barrie’s constant complaints about his work, revealed that an affair was being carried on behind Barrie’s back. Confronted by her husband, Mary owned up to the affair with Gilbert Cannan, a charismatic young writer several years her junior, and she asked Barrie for a divorce. Given Barrie’s cult of beautiful women and their children, who could blame Mary for moving ahead with divorce proceedings? With a husband more devoted to other women’s children than to her, it must have been something of a challenge for her to remain married to a man described by H. G. Wells as a “genius” with “little virility.”41 In the Barries’ social circle, there was gossip not just about Mary’s infidelity but also of an unconsummated marriage.
Barrie himself apparently never had the desire to stray with adults. His adoration of the Llewelyn Davies boys and his devotion to Sylvia had always been enough to sustain him. But he was deeply hurt by Mary’s infidelity and tried in vain to talk her into leaving Cannan even if she went ahead with a legal separation. He loathed the idea of seeing his name in the newspapers in connection with divorce. Henry James, H. G. Wells, and other writers appealed to the press to limit their coverage of the marital turmoil in Barrie’s life: “He is a man for whom the inevitable pain of these proceedings would be greatly increased by publicity.” And they hoped that the press, “as a mark of respect and gratitude to a writer of genius, will unite in abstaining from any mention of the case.”42
Mary Ansell, 1893. (Courtesy of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
The Barrie divorce was finalized in 1909, and just two days later Sylvia Davies collapsed at home. The diagnosis was cancer, and the tumor was so close to her heart and lungs that an operation was out of the question. When Sylvia died a year later, on August 27, 1910, Barrie was at her side. She was only forty-four and left behind five orphaned boys. Peter Davies described the desolate atmosphere on the day of his mother’s death, when the boys were returning from a day of fishing: “It was a grey, glowering, drizzly sort of day. . . . Somehow or other the dreadful significance of [the drawn blinds] conveyed itself to my shocked understanding, and with heart in boots and unsteady knees I covered the remaining thirty or forty yards to the front door. There J.M.B. awaited me: a distraught figure, arms hanging limp, hair disheveled, wild-eyed.”43
George, Peter, and Jack Llewelyn Davies, 1899. (Courtesy of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
Sylvia had left a will, written at the farmhouse and, according to Barrie, not found until a few months after her death. Barrie wrote out the entire last testamen
t in his own hand and described it as an “exact copy of Sylvia’s will.” A key sentence concerned how the five boys would be raised, and Barrie reproduced it as follows: “What I would like would be if Jimmy would come to Mary [Hodgson, the devoted nanny], and that the two together would be looking after the boys and the house and helping each other. And it would be so nice for Mary.” In fact, Sylvia had written “Jenny” (Mary Hodgson’s sister), and not Jimmy. “Jimmy” had managed, with just a few strokes of the pen, to become linked with their nanny, the closest he would get to de facto fatherhood. Campden Hill Square remained the boys’ home, and Mary Hodgson was also still in charge of the household. Barrie himself divided his time between his own flat and their living quarters, but he called the latter home.
What was in the children’s “best interests”? It is not entirely clear how the boys would have received the financial support they needed from the blood relatives on each side of the family. Many of the uncles and aunts had their own children, and none had the resources to support all five boys, whom Sylvia had wished to keep, at all costs, together. All of the boys went to Eton, save Jack. Certainly they would never have made it there without Barrie’s support, although it bears noting that all but George were desperately unhappy for stretches of time there.
As for the possibility that there was something more than paternal in Barrie’s interest in the boys, statements by Peter and Nico make it clear that what appears at times to be an unhealthy obsession never went beyond the bounds of appropriate affection. “I’m 200% certain there was never a desire to kiss (except upon the cheek!) though things obviously went through his mind—often producing magic—which never go through the more ordinary minds of such as myself,” Nico later wrote. “All I can say for certain is that I . . . never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophilia: had he either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware. He was an innocent—which is why he could write Peter Pan.”44 Whatever desires he had were sublimated and found their expression either in his writing or through his avuncular relationship with the children.
Typescript of Henry James’s letter to Daphne du Maurier about the death of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
Still, who can fail to be disturbed by Barrie’s flagrant misrepresentation of Sylvia’s last wishes and by what later appeared to some to be deliberate efforts to cut the boys off from family friendships that had flourished while Arthur and Sylvia were still alive? The boys became Barrie’s chief preoccupation, and it is hard to imagine how anyone could have been more dedicated than Barrie to their welfare and well-being. In the years following Sylvia’s death, he was far less prolific an author than in the previous decade. Barrie became increasingly absorbed in the boys’ lives, and, although he did “a little writing,” there was a dramatic change in productivity, especially considering that literature was his game. “I have not much concern now with literature and drama, which both have flowed me by,” he confessed to his old friend Arthur Quiller-Couch. “I have in a sense a larger family than you now. Five boys whose father died four years ago and now their mother last summer, and I look after them, and it is my main reason for going on. The Llewelyn Davies boys.”45
J. M. Barrie’s transcription of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’s will. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
The Llewelyn Davies brothers had, now, truly become “my boys.” Barrie was a bachelor of fifty when he adopted them. Only two of the five, Nico and Michael, were still at home. George was at Eton, with plans to attend Cambridge—“the most gallant of you all,” as Barrie wrote in the dedicatory preface to Peter Pan, and the boys themselves would not have disagreed. Peter was also at Eton, with Jack forging plans to enter the navy. Barrie prided himself on giving his boys the best possible education, and he revered British public schools, even if he did not feel entirely comfortable with their elitism. “All I am arguing,” he once said in a speech to a school run by his niece, “is this, that if [the public schools] are so splendid, a way in should be found for the boys outside.”46 The boys were given the best of everything—summer holidays, clothing, theater, and the finest restaurants. It is especially moving to learn, from Barrie’s letters, about the exact contents of the many packages containing food and clothing he sent to George when the young man was facing the sanguinary horrors of combat at the western front during World War I.
J. M. Barrie at the door to his study in Adelphi Terrace, 1933. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
Summers were spent fishing in areas so remote that, when World War I finally broke out, it took more than a day for the news to reach Argyllshire and the lodge where Barrie and the boys were staying. By early September, George and Peter had become junior officers in the army, and Jack a sublieutenant in the British navy. Although Barrie felt confident that the young men who had enlisted would be “right as rain,” hopes of a quick victory were dashed as the body count mounted. “I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious,” Barrie wrote to George, “it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.”47 Guy du Maurier, the boys’ uncle, was serving in the Royal Fusiliers, and his letters back home included frighteningly graphic reports about rotting corpses, decomposing body parts, and the mud, blood, and stench of the trenches. “The war has done at least one big thing,” Barrie wrote, in a speech entitled “Courage,” delivered at St. Andrews. “It has taken Spring out of the year. And, this accomplished, our leading people are amazed to find that the other seasons are not conducting themselves as usual. The spring of the year lies buried in the fields of France.”48
Peter Llewelyn Davies, 1916. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
Stationed on the front in Belgium, George had entered the military with no illusions about what he would be facing. He realized that he would most likely “stop a bullet,” and he went into battle in the early hours of March 15 with premonitions of death. Still, he had tried to maintain a light-hearted tone in letters to his Uncle Jim. On the day before he was killed, he urged Barrie to “keep your heart up” and to remember “how good an experience like this is for a chap who’s been very idle before.”49 Promising to write frequently, he begged Barrie to keep up his “courage.” Tragically, George was shot in the head while sitting with other officers taking instruction from a colonel, and he died instantly. He had “won the love of everyone,” according to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s son, who wrote Peter Davies that he and his comrades all believed they had lost “one of their best friends.”50
The terrible knock at the front door of Campden Hill Square came on March 15, 1915, the very day of George’s death. Mary Hodgson and Nico were asleep in the night nursery. “I heard Uncle Jim’s voice,” Mary later reported, “an eerie Banshee wail—‘Ah-h-h! They’ll all go, Mary—Jack, Peter, Michael—even little Nico—This dreadful war will get them all in the end. . . . I knew that George was dead.”51 The loss of George had a devastating effect on the family, loosening bonds that had been forged over the years. “As it was circumstances were too much for J.M.B. left solitary, as well as for us,” Peter wrote, “and we became gradually . . . individuals with little of the invaluable, cohesive strength of the united family.”52
The War Office informs Sir James Barrie of the burial site for George Llewelyn Davies. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
Just a few weeks later, Charles Frohman boarded a ship in New York bound for Britain. Barrie had asked him to help out with the staging of his play Rosy Rapture, and Frohman moved his trip up to oblige Barrie. On May 7, 1915, the elegant ocean liner Lusitania, with Frohman aboard, sank to the bottom of the sea in perhaps the most dramatic and horrific civilian attack of World War I. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 perished, among them Frohman, who had refused a place on one of the few lifeboats.
The war years inevitably witnessed dramatic changes in the household, first with t
he departure of Mary Hodgson, then with the hiring of Cynthia Asquith as Barrie’s personal secretary. Asquith had plenty to do, for Barrie had continued with many of his old habits, including the practice of stuffing checks into a desk drawer and promptly forgetting about them. In the next two decades, Barrie finally plunged back into the game of literature, writing plays and screenplays as well as supervising productions. There were nearly fourteen screen adaptations of his work, including Sentimental Tommy, which was filmed by Paramount. Cynthia did more than arrange Barrie’s business affairs. Married, with a family of her own, she nonetheless developed deep connections to the “impenetrable shell of sadness and preoccupation” that Barrie had become and provided personal, moral support for his remaining years.
Even Cynthia was helpless in the face of the news that came to Barrie in 1920. In the middle of the night, Barrie called her to report: “I have had the most terrible news. Michael has been drowned at Oxford.” The month was May, and Barrie had left his flat in the late evening to post a letter to Michael. A reporter from a London newspaper stopped him to ask for details about “the drowning.” Barrie had no idea that he was referring to the death in Sandford pool of two undergraduates, Rupert Buxton and Michael Llewelyn Davies. “All is different to me now,” Barrie wrote to an old friend. “Michael was pretty much my world.” Nothing seemed to matter, and, with the one “great thing” gone, other things could feel only empty and trivial.
Barrie was never quite himself after Michael’s death—he was nearly as deeply affected as his mother had been by the death of David. He continued writing in his notebooks, and small pieces of work were produced, but nothing major came from his pen again. Emotionally exhausted and with nerves strained, he nonetheless remained a public figure, accepting awards and becoming rector of the University of St. Andrews, where he gave an impressive address at the end of his term in 1922. He recalled his early days in London and the “glory” of being swallowed up in the city, “not knowing a soul, with no means of subsistence, and the fun of working till the stars went out.”53 “Courage” was the title of Barrie’s ninety-minute speech, and courage, for Barrie, was “proof of our immortality.” Thunderous applause greeted the speech, and Barrie was carried triumphantly on the shoulders of the undergraduates as they poured out of the hall to greet the crowds waiting outside.