The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  ‘No,’ she answered.

  Barrie made no comment. He went on with his dinner. At the end of the chicken en casserole, curiosity overcoming her awe, she turned to him again.

  ‘Have you?’ she asked.

  A far-away expression came into Barrie’s great deep eyes.

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  After that they both lapsed into silence.

  On an earlier occasion, before he was married, a great lady had invited him to her castle in the country. ‘The house party was a large one,’ recalled Jerome. ‘There were peers and potentates, millionaires and magnates … Barrie did not say anything, but in the morning he was gone. No one had seen him leave, and the doors were still bolted. He had packed his bag and climbed out of the window.’

  Increasingly, Mary Ansell found the situation difficult to bear, for he was as silent with her as in company. At first she assumed that all husbands were the same. ‘Those silent meals. Haven’t most of us experienced them? When the mind of your man is elsewhere, lord knows where, but nowhere in your direction.’

  At such times she thanked God for Porthos.

  Just when the silence is becoming unbearable, your dog steps in and attracts your attention. He lays his head on your knee, or he presses your hand, as it is in the act of conveying a succulent morsel to your mouth. ‘Merely asking for food,’ you interrupt. Quite true. But to be asked for anything is a relief.

  Barrie’s male friends saw his silences as ‘full of unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force’11 – a quirky aspect of a uniquely fascinating individual, whose equally sudden, radiant, garrulous form was worth waiting for.

  Of people meeting him for the first time, some took his silences as shyness or uneasiness on his part. Others interpreted them as a sneering aloofness or presumptuous superiority. Yet others were not a little intimidated, as if he was someone who set out to conquer by silence.

  Barrie would have said that all were to some degree justified in holding these views and was the first to admit that ‘my moods are as changeable as a hoary ocean. There are times I am the best of company, when my wit sparkles and cuts. At other times I walk in the shadows. Then let no one speak to me … for I am in a world of my own. Suppose I am ruminating with the mighty dead.’

  It took a child to understand what that meant. ‘He was made of silences,’ Pamela Maude wrote in her autobiography Worlds Away. ‘We did not find these strange, they were so much part of him … his silences spoke loudly. Mr Barrie did not talk and Mrs Barrie did not smile, and yet he was our companion.’

  Children read his silences as detachment from the world of adults, a part of the magic aura he created around himself; as if he was off in another world, as Pamela recorded of a holiday she and her parents spent with Barrie in Scotland:

  In the evening, when the strange morning light had begun to change, Mr Barrie held out a hand to each of us in silence, and we slipped our own into his and walked still silently, into the beech-wood. We shuffled our feet through the leaves and listened, with Mr Barrie, for sudden sound made by birds and rabbits. One evening we saw a pea-pod lying in the hollow of a great tree-trunk, and we brought it to Mr Barrie.

  There, inside, was a tiny letter, folded inside the pod, that a fairy had written. Mr Barrie said he could read fairy writing and read it to us. We received several more, in pea-pods, before the end of our visit…

  At the Lewises on New Year’s Eve 1897, there were no children present, but Barrie’s increasing fascination with Sylvia’s boys may be seen to have played a part in his decision to accept their invitation, even possibly to have moved it in the first place.

  For if you wanted to meet du Maurier’s daughter ‘by chance’, the best way to do so was to get yourself onto one of the Lewis party lists. The Lewises had not sent an invitation to Barrie cold. He had met one of their two young daughters at the house of a mutual friend and suggested she and her sister might like parts to play in the copyright performance of The Little Minister.12 The casting led to his inclusion on a party list in February 1897.

  In time, the Lewises would be among Barrie’s greatest allies. Lady Lewis would be strong in her support of him. Barrie found special favour by contributing, even managing, the Lewises’ entertainments, producing revues featuring satirical skits on some of their famous guests. Sir George’s firm of solicitors, which gave Arthur his first briefs as a barrister, came to represent him. And a future head of the firm, Sir Reginald Poole, acted for his estate in a threatened conflict with Sylvia’s boys, when three of them considered making a claim on it in 1937. But chiefly the Lewises earn their place in our story by playing matchmaker between Barrie and Sylvia in December 1897. Their names were next to one another on the seating plan.

  That night, so he told the wife of Sylvia’s son Peter years later, Barrie found himself sitting next to the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and was overwhelmed, but for once he did not remain silent.

  Intrigued by the way Sylvia put aside some of the various sweets that were handed around, secreting them in her purse, he enquired of her why. She explained that she was keeping them for Peter.

  ‘Peter?’

  Sylvia told Barrie that Peter was her third son, born the previous February, who had been named after Peter Ibbetson, the hero and title of her father’s first novel.

  Barrie then revealed that he had named his St Bernard dog, Porthos, after Peter Ibbetson’s St Bernard.

  For Barrie this was unusually candid. He had not even told his wife that Porthos was named after Peter Ibbetson’s dog. Mary imagined that he had been named after one of the three musketeers in Alexandre Dumas’s famous novel. The nearest Barrie ever came to admitting publicly that the choice of name had anything to do with the dog in Peter Ibbetson was in a book he published in 1902,13 where he admits, ‘I think I cut him out of an old number of Punch.’

  Porthos in Peter Ibbetson had itself been based on du Maurier’s own St Bernard, named Chang after an eight-foot Chinese giant exhibited in the British Museum in the 1860s. Like other members of the du Maurier family, the St Bernard Chang appeared frequently in his master’s illustrations in Punch, so that when the dog died in 1883, his fans were stricken.

  The four-legged Chang had sat at du Maurier’s feet as he worked. The four-legged Porthos now sat at the feet of Barrie as he worked in the room above the front door at 133 Gloucester Road.

  It is fair to say that George du Maurier had held a fascination for J. M. Barrie long before he met his grandchildren in Kensington Gardens. But for reasons that will fall clear he never liked to associate himself openly with the man.

  Barrie had been electrified by Peter Ibbetson. In this he was far from alone. John Masefield, Poet Laureate in Britain from 1930, and sixteen years of age when the book was published, recalled the excitement of growing up at this time and how du Maurier delivered the era’s most acute desire:

  Men were seeking to discover what limitations there were to the personal intellect; how far it could travel from its home, the personal brain; how deeply it could influence other minds at a distance from it, or near it; what limit, if any, there might be to an intense mental sympathy. This enquiry occupied many doctors and scientists in various ways. It interested many millions of men and women. It stirred George du Maurier … to speculations which deeply delighted his generation.14

  During his apprenticeship as a young artist in Paris, and later in Belgium, du Maurier had become adept at hypnotism, a practice widespread in the 1850s, particularly among artists whose life-models were required to hold their position in situ for hours at a time. His friend Felix Mocheles wrote about their hypnotic exploits together, which even extended to hypnotising at least one child that they had met in the street.15

  In the course of his experiments, du Maurier developed a method of light trance or self-hypnotism, which he like to call ‘dreaming-true’, and it was his skill in this area that he wrote about in Peter Ibbetson.

  Another friend, the artist Whistler, conf
irmed that

  [du Maurier] often used to talk about his dreams to me before Peter Ibbetson appeared … He used to say that when lying down he crossed his legs, put his hands behind his head, and then had all sorts of dreams at will. In fact, Peter Ibbetson who ‘dreamt true’ was partly taken from his own experience.

  In the novel, Peter, a young architect, receives instruction from Mary Duchess of Towers – ‘the duchess of dreams’ – a woman who had learned the art of ‘dreaming true’ from her father. In the first instance, Peter focuses his mind on a memorable moment in his childhood:

  I lay straight on my back, with my feet crossed, and my hands clasped above my head in a symmetrical position; I would fix my will intently and persistently on a certain point in space and time that was within my memory – for instance, the avenue gate on a certain Christmas afternoon, when I remembered waiting for Le Major Duquesnois to go for a walk – at the same time never losing touch of my own present identity as Peter Ibbetson, architect, Wharton Street, Pentonville; all of which is not so easy to manage as one might think, although the dream duchess had said, ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte;’ and finally one night, instead of dreaming the ordinary dreams I had dreamed all my life, I had the rapture of waking up, the minute I was fairly asleep, by the avenue gate, and of seeing myself as a child sitting on one of the stone posts and looking up the snowy street for the major. Presently he jumped up to meet his old friend…’

  In the course of his dream Peter becomes the boy he once was. With ‘newly aroused self-consciousness at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my bliss’, he spends ‘hours, enchanted hours’ reliving his idyllic childhood in Passy, which was then ‘a quiet village on the outskirts of Paris, facing the Bois de Boulogne’.

  He rediscovers a long-forgotten friendship with a little girl called Mary Seraskier, known as Mimsey, a ‘sick, ungainly child’, full of gratitude and love that Peter should play with her. Peter is touchingly unaware that her little heart is so full of him that she would like to be his slave – she would, literally, die for Peter.

  We also see him playing with two boys, pretending to be Athos, Porthos and Aramis in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, and Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s famous frontiersman novels, rousing tales of adventure about American Indians and early pioneers of the American West. While alone he would engage in island fantasies, his favourite book being Robinson Crusoe and next favourite The Swiss Family Robinson.

  But the real fun comes in the nearby Bois de Boulogne, not at all the pristine park it is now, and in particular beside a lake called the Mare d’Auteil, surrounded on three sides by ‘a dense, wild wood … The very name has a magic from all the associations that gathered round it at that time.’

  How interesting, therefore, that Peter Ibbetson enjoyed boyish adventures in the park and the Mare d’Auteil just like du Maurier’s grandchildren, Sylvia’s boys, did with Barrie, in Kensington Gardens and by the Black Lake in Surrey. And islands are his delight.

  More uncanny still, Peter Ibbetson even had an Uncle Jim figure in his life in the Bois de Boulogne, who captivated him with fairy tales.

  Le Major Duquesnois lives on the edge of the park and befriends Peter: ‘He took to me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me … and told me a new fairy tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years. Scheherazade could do no more for a Sultan, and to save her own neck from a bowstring!’

  Again like Barrie, when he is tired of fairyland Duquesnois would tell Peter and his young French friends tales of adventure and high heroism (some of which he had, unlike Barrie, actually lived), ‘of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days – never of St Helena; he would not trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how, virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore.’ On the little party of Duquesnois’s followers, as on Barrie’s young followers in Kensington Gardens, a solemn, awestruck stillness would then fall.

  At some point Sylvia will surely have recognised Barrie as the man in the park that George and Jack had told her about, the little man who would hypnotise with his eyebrows, enchant them with his fairy stories and amuse them boxing with his St Bernard dog. And because she knew the story of Peter Ibbetson well, she may even have addressed Barrie as Le Major Duquesnois that very night.

  But she wouldn’t have exposed him. It was in Sylvia’s nature only to have mocked him gently. She would have loved that he was so ardent a fan of her father’s dreamland. That Peter Ibbetson was Barrie’s source remained their little secret.

  11 D. H. Lawrence, who corresponded with Barrie, knew Mary Ansell, and met him at least once in London.

  12 A copyright performance was a pre-production performance of a new play, usually acted before an invited audience, and in this instance a number of friends, and friends of friends.

  13 The Little White Bird (1902).

  14 Introduction to Peter Ibbetson and Trilby (1947 edition).

  15 In Bohemia with George du Maurier (1896).

  Chapter Six

  1897–99: Lost Boy

  AFTER THEIR FIRST meeting the two families began to see a great deal of one another, though mainly when Arthur was out at work. Everyone knew of the association and began to speak of the Barries and the Davieses in the same breath. Barrie and his wife would walk the boys home from the park almost every day, Mary Ansell befriending Sylvia while her husband continued his fun and games with the boys upstairs in the nursery.

  At the start Sylvia seems to have treated him a bit like a useful second nanny, who would keep her children amused for hours on end. As for Mary, Sylvia enjoyed her company at first. There was a shared interest in interior design, and there is no doubt that the friendship helped pave the way for what happened next. But it is clear that Mary knew nothing about Peter Ibbetson, and it is likely that Barrie didn’t at first appreciate just how deeply Sylvia herself was caught up in Peter Ibbetson. This came out between them over the ensuing months and strengthened their bond considerably.

  Sylvia had been her father’s model for the Duchess of Towers. Indeed, she had a spiritual life that owed everything to her father’s psychic ability and to the close relationship they had enjoyed with one another.

  When Sylvia’s third son, Peter, was researching a history of the family he caught wind of this and wrote to Sylvia’s close friend, Dolly, about it.

  Dolly tried to guide Peter to it without betraying Sylvia’s confidence: ‘Always [Sylvia’s] reserve about what she cared about was very strong. She had an inner life of her own, which is what gave her her great interest.’

  This was typical of the du Mauriers. There was an unspoken rule in the family, where fun and laughter were paramount, never to tax people with anything too deep. ‘One must never be au serieux about anything,’ observed Sylvia’s sister Trixy’s husband, Charles Hoyer Millar. ‘The family in general had a rooted dislike to serious topics of any kind, at all events in the presence of each other.’ Deep thoughts were not avoided, however. On the contrary, there were special words for them in their vocabulary, like ‘main talks’ or ‘psychological politics’. Deep thoughts were in fact at the heart of what the du Mauriers were about.

  Chief among these were psychological and supernatural matters. Daphne couldn’t keep quiet about them in her fiction, and once spelled them out in her non-fiction, writing in The Rebecca Notebook:

  There is a faculty among the myriad threads of our inheritance that, unlike the chemicals in our bodies and in our brains, has not yet been pinpointed by science, or even fully examined. I like to call this faculty ‘the sixth sense’. It is a sort of seeing, a sort of hearing, something between perception and intuition, an indefinable grasp of things unknown … The phenomena of precognition, of telepathy, of dreaming true, all depend upon this sixth sense, and the therapeutic value of hypnosis, still in its infancy, depends up
on it too.

  It was almost all too much for Dolly not to mention in her diary something about her paranormal beliefs and skills, though characteristically they had been told to her in absolute confidence: ‘Sylvia couldn’t talk about things she really felt to those who were not very close to her. She had an inner life of her own, & was to me always interesting.’ The entry for Sunday 15 October 1892 reads: ‘Talked a good deal with sweet Sylvia, who told me a good deal about her family etc.’ There then follows instructions about how to hypnotise someone, clearly copied down after Sylvia had described the process to her:

  Place yourself before the subject with your thoughts concentrated on the effect you wish to produce, you tell him to look at you steadily and think only of sleep. Raise your hands with the palms towards him, over the crown of head and before the forehead where you keep them for one or 2 minutes, & move them slowly down to the pit of stomach, without touching subject, at a distance of one or 2 inches from body, as soon as hands reach lowest part of the stroke you carry them again in a wide sweep with outspread arms over subject’s head. Repeat same movements for 10 minutes.

  The truth was that Sylvia’s secret inner life made her who she was, the Sylvia she shows us in the dreamy photographs that Barrie took, her undemonstrative moments, as if she was away in another world, which she was when the mood took her.

  Wrote her son, Peter, ‘People of both sexes told of the indelible impression she left with them of something rarer than mere charm, and deeper than mere beauty.’ Arthur’s brother, Crompton, ‘as a rule pretty reticent, once, shortly before his death, tried to talk about her to [Peter’s wife] and me; and it was as if he spoke of a being of more than earthly loveliness’.

  It was this ‘more than earthly’ aura that Peter was referring to when he wrote that he suspected Sylvia inherited ‘a good deal’ from her father, which made her anything but ordinary like her mother (du Maurier’s wife, Emma, had done everything in her power to dissuade her husband from meddling in the paranormal).