This, Sylvia’s most beguiling feature, brought her ever closer to Barrie as bit by bit it emerged how bound up she and her father were together, both in life and in the writing of du Maurier’s books.
The physical similarity between Sylvia and the dream duchess in Peter Ibbetson is striking, and although the hypnotic heroine of du Maurier’s second novel, Trilby, had been loosely based on a seventeen-year-old girl named ‘Carry’ who had been hypnotised on many an occasion by du Maurier as a young man, Sylvia had modelled for the illustrations of Trilby in the book.
Barrie became fascinated by the way du Maurier had captured Sylvia in book form as an artist might capture his subject on canvas. And, in his desire to win her over, he now captured Sylvia in an autobiographical novel he was writing.
Before they met, the two main characters in his novel Tommy and Grizel had been based on himself and his wife, Mary Ansell. After meeting Sylvia he had been so affected that he’d floundered with the writing of it and made the decision to follow du Maurier and model Grizel on Sylvia instead.
When Bernard Partridge came to illustrate the characters in Tommy and Grizel for publication in Scribner’s Magazine, Barrie told him he could give him a real-life model for one of them. ‘Mrs Llewelyn Davies, whom she is meant to be a bit like is willing to sit to you for this and she has some idea of the dressing too. If you like this idea would you communicate with her about it?’
The physical similarity of Sylvia and Grizel is clear in the text. Just as du Maurier gave Sylvia’s nose to Mimsey in Peter Ibbetson and described it as ‘rather tilted at the tip’, so now Grizel has Sylvia’s ‘tilted nose’. Grizel’s gray eyes are also Sylvia’s – ‘unusually far apart, [which] let you look straight into them and never quivered, they were such clear, gray, searching eyes, they seemed always to be asking for the truth’. Diana Farr observed that ‘perhaps Sylvia’s most remarkable feature’ was her ‘eyes, set wide apart’. Meanwhile, Dolly wrote at this moment in her diary, ‘Sylvia has got one of the most delightful, brilliantly sparkling faces I have ever seen. Her nose turns round the corner – also turns right up. Her mouth is quite crooked.’ In Tommy and Grizel Barrie gives Sylvia’s characteristic mouth to Grizel too:
She had an adorable mouth. In repose it was perhaps hard because it shut so decisively, but often it screwed up provokingly at one side, as when she smiled or was sorry or for no particular reason, for she seemed unable to control this vagary, which was perhaps a little bit of babyhood that had forgotten to grow up with the rest of her.
Not to have grown up completely was the greatest thing – for the time of childhood is the unforgettable emblem of the bliss to which Peter Ibbetson aspired when dreaming true. Childhood is a time when what is dammed up later flows off without restraint, when things ‘go of themselves’, when there is no need to do this thing or that thing or find a way, or achieve a result.
And it was the little bit of the child left in Sylvia which soon crystallised in Barrie’s mind his most famous idea. ‘Genius is the power to be a boy again,’ Tommy announces in the novel. Tommy had made up his mind. He was going to write a book of his own about a boy –
a reverie about a little boy who was lost. His parents find him in a wood singing joyfully to himself because he thinks he can now be a boy for ever; and he fears that if they catch him they will compel him to grow into a man, so he runs farther from them into the wood and is running still, singing to himself because he is always to be a boy…
The moment he conceived the idea he knew that it was the idea for him.
So much a feature of the lives of Sylvia and her boys was Mr Barrie now that in the summer of 1899 he thought nothing of showing up uninvited at Rustington-on-Sea on the Sussex coast where Sylvia, Arthur and the boys were holidaying. Dolly Parry’s family owned the Mill House there, which was really no more than a cottage, but right on the shore, ‘an enchanted place,’ Peter Davies recalled, ‘with the windmill in working order and lofts and sacks of flour to play about among.’ For the past eight years, this had been a more or less regular occurrence.
Barrie took his camera with him and turned out to be quite the little photographer, taking pictures on the beach of the boys as they changed from their bathing costumes, with Sylvia – towels swirling around her in the wind – drying and dressing them.
Chapter Seven
1900: Peter and Michael Break Through
OCCASIONALLY IN HER travels through her children’s minds Sylvia would find things she could not understand, and of these quite the most perplexing, so Barrie tells us, was the word ‘Peter’.
It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning. When you wake in the morning, the naughtinesses and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.
I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose … On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
On the night we speak of the children were in bed. All were looking so safe and cosy that Sylvia sat down tranquilly by the fire to sew.
The fire was warm, however, and the nursery dimly lit by three nightlights, and presently the sewing lay on her lap. Then her head nodded, oh, so gracefully. She was asleep.
While she slept she had a dream. She dreamt that the Neverland had come too near and that a strange boy had broken through from it. He did not alarm her. But in her dream he had rent the film that obscures the Neverland, and she saw … Michael … peeping through the gap.
The dream by itself would have been a trifle, but while she was dreaming the window of the nursery blew open, and a boy did drop on the floor. He was accompanied by a strange light, no bigger than your fist, which darted about the room like a living thing; and I think it must have been this light that wakened her. She started up with a cry, and saw the boy, and somehow she knew at once that he was Peter Pan.
He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.16
Peter Pan had first entered her children’s minds one sunny, autumnal day in the gardens, around the same time as Michael was conceived. The boys were standing on the banks of the Serpentine when Barrie pointed to a drowned forest at the bottom of it. Peering over the edge, they could see trees growing upside down. At night, so Barrie told them, there were also drowned stars in it. And beyond the bridge nearby, which crosses the Serpentine into Hyde Park, there is the island on which all the birds are born that become baby boys and girls, the island where lives wise old Solomon Caw.
‘No one,’ Barrie said, ‘no one who is human can land on that island, except of course Peter Pan (and he is only half human).’
‘Of course you may write to him on a piece of paper,’ Barrie told them, ‘and then twist it into the shape of a boat and slip it into the water, and it will reach Peter’s island after dark.’
By the time they were home and the paper boats were well on their way to the island, George, Jack and Peter were rapt with wonder at Barrie’s tale of how Peter Pan had got there.
For all of one week of his life, he had been a boy just like them. But then one night, looking out of the open bedroom window he had s
een trees far away, which were doubtless the Kensington Gardens, and the moment he saw them he entirely forgot that he was now a little boy in a nightgown, and away he flew, right over the houses to the Gardens, eventually to find his way onto the island. It is wonderful that he could fly without wings, but the place itched tremendously, and perhaps we could all fly if we were as dead-confident-sure of our capacity to do it, as was bold Peter Pan that evening.
At first, George had not been so sure about this and was unable to remember ever wanting to escape the nursery and return to the Gardens. But Barrie told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples as usual, and when he had done this hard, and even harder, George did distinctly remember a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way up the chimney. It was quite natural that Peter had been a little wild yet, having been a bird before he was human, and, as George added, being still very itchy at the shoulders, where his wings used to be.
Over the ensuing days, weeks, months and years, the story of Peter grew and grew between them. To play as other children play he would have to leave the island, but Solomon warned him there is no second chance for a boy who flies away to the island of dreams. And now that he had lost faith, he found he could fly no longer. That was when the poet Shelley came to the rescue.
Most of the time Peter’s heart was so glad that he felt he must sing all day, just as the birds sing for joy, but, being partly human, he needed an instrument, so he made a pipe of reeds, and he used to sit by the shore of the island of an evening, practising the sough of the wind and the ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon, and he put them all in his pipe and played them so beautifully that even the birds were deceived, and they would say to each other, ‘Was that a fish leaping in the water or was it Peter playing leaping fish on his pipe?’
Now he knew he could never be a real human again, and scarcely wanted to be one, but oh! how he longed to play as other children play! Wistful tears would start in Peter’s eyes when he began to think like this…
All true poets are half-and-halfs like Peter Pan – ‘They are never exactly grown up,’ Barrie wrote. ‘They are people who despise money except what you need for today, and Shelley had all that and five pounds over. So, when he was walking in Kensington Gardens he made a paper boat of his banknote, and sent it sailing on the Serpentine. It reached the island at night: and the lookout brought it to Solomon Caw.’17
Shelley’s five-pound note persuaded the thrushes to build Peter a boat in which he contrived to leave the island. It took many months during which Peter paid all the thrushes sixpence a day, but eventually he launched the boat and sailed to the Gardens, and with the help of the fairies there, flew home. This was not in the end a wise thing to have done, but at least it confirmed his destiny.
As for Michael, on the day he finally did break through the film that obscures the Neverland, Barrie was with George on the coast of Patagonia, whither they had gone to shoot the Great Sloth, known to be the largest of animals, though they found his size to have been underestimated.
Besides George (seven), Barrie and the sloths, there were George’s father (Arthur) and mother (Sylvia) and nanny (Mary Hodgson). It made for quite a party, as Barrie recalled:
George, his father and I had flung our limbs upon the beach and were having a last pipe before turning in, while Sylvia, attired in barbaric splendour, danced before us. It was a lovely evening, and we lolled man-like, gazing, well content, at the pretty creature.
The night was absolutely still, save for the roaring of the Sloths in the distance.
By and by Mary came to the entrance of our cave, where by the light of her torch we could see her exploring a shark that had been harpooned by George earlier in the day.
Everything conduced to repose, and a feeling of gentle peace crept over us, from which we were roused by a shrill cry. It was uttered by Mary, who came speeding to us, bearing certain articles, a watch, a pair of boots, a newspaper, which she had discovered in the interior of the shark. What was our surprise to find in the newspaper intelligence of the utmost importance to all of us! It was nothing less than this, the birth of a new baby in London to Sylvia.
How strange a method had Solomon chosen of sending us the news!
Mary’s bald announcement plunged us into a fever of excitement, and next morning we set sail from Patagonia for England. Soon we came within sight of the white cliffs of Albion. Sylvia could not sit down for a moment, so hot was she to see her child. She paced the deck in uncontrollable agitation.
‘So did I!’ cried George, when I had reached this point in the story.
On arriving at the docks we immediately hailed a cab.
‘Never, George,’ I said, ‘shall I forget your mother’s excitement. She kept putting her head out of the window and calling to the cabby to go quicker, quicker. How he lashed his horse! At last he drew up at your house, and then your mother, springing out, flew up the steps and beat with her hands upon the door.’
George was quite carried away by the reality of it. ‘Father has the key!’ he screamed.
‘He opened the door,’ I said grandly, ‘and your mother rushed in, and next moment her Michael was in her arms.’
There was a pause.
‘Margaret,’ corrected George.
‘Michael,’ said I doggedly.
‘Is that a girl’s name?’
‘No, it’s a boy’s name.’
‘But mother wants a girl,’ he said, very much shaken.
‘Just like her presumption,’ I replied testily. ‘It is to be a boy, George, and you can tell her I said so.’
George, Jack and Peter had known for some time that a baby was expected and Sylvia had prepared them by telling them they must be good or the baby wouldn’t be. Agitated about what they should give him, they settled on their Methuen button, memento of Field Marshal Paul Methuen’s exploits in the Boer War. Sylvia was pleased, though she didn’t appreciate the sacrifice they were making. Otherwise, all the talk had been whether it would be a boy or a girl.
In his notebook18 Barrie suggests that George, Jack and Peter, now going on seven, six and three, wanted a boy and he sent them a jeering message – ‘One girl is more use than twenty boys!’ – which is what Peter Pan says to Wendy in the Peter Pan play. Sylvia admitted, ‘I’m wanting a girl.’ But she was so good at boys, so a boy it was.
Michael turned out to be the most beautiful and happiest baby of all, so beautiful he could have been a girl. Sylvia fell in love with him at first sight, as did everyone, and he kept his baby curls until he was at least seven.
A few days later Sylvia let Barrie know that Solomon had selected well and Uncle Jim responded with a present of a rocking horse and a letter.
My dear Jocelyn,
It is very sweet and kind of you to write me from the throne, which is what I take your residence to be. He is a gorgeous boy, is Delight, which was your own original name for him in the far back days of last week or thereabouts when you used to hug Peter with such sudden vehemence that I am sure he wondered whether you were up to anything.
I don’t see how we could have expected him to be a girl; you are so good at boys, and this you know is the age of specialists. And you were very very nearly being a boy yourself.
May he always be a dear delight to you and may all your dreams about all of them come true.
Ever yours,
J. M. B.
‘Jocelyn’ was now Barrie’s pet name for Sylvia. It had a special significance. Before du Maurier died he speculated that his extrasensory receptivity would be inherited by someone in the family, conjuring the idea that ‘a little live spark’ of his own ‘individual consciousness’ might be handed down as it were genetically. This posthumous inheritance became the subject of his third and final novel, The Martian, published in 1896, the year of his death. In it, he appeared
to be suggesting that Sylvia was to be a mediator. Her father called the hero of the novel (who is a lightly disguised version of himself) Barty Jocelyn. Jocelyn was Sylvia’s second name. His legacy would thus be inherited by someone in the Jocelyn line. In June 1900 it was one reason to look with singular optimism upon Michael’s birth.
If Sylvia felt that it was down to her now to take her father’s legacy into the next generation, in Barrie she found an ally to help her, and so he had taken to addressing her in letters ‘Dear Jocelyn’. Soon she was signing her letters to him, ‘Your Jocelyn’.
From Barrie it was praise indeed that Sylvia had been ‘very very nearly a boy’ herself. To be a boy was the highest compliment he could have paid her. Not only was genius ‘the power to be a boy again’, as he’d said, but also the line was straight out of her father’s novel, Trilby, which because it was applied to the artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall herself, was a reference whimsical enough to amuse Sylvia that she was falling under his spell, as Trilby did under Svengali’s.19
16 J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy (1911).
17 Barrie in The Little White Bird (1902).
18 Barrie’s notebook was his constant companion – in successive editions he scribbled anything that caught his interest and might be used in a story.
19 Artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall, who falls under the spell of the hypnotist Svengali, ‘would have made a singularly handsome boy’, and ‘it was a real pity she wasn’t a boy, she would have made a jolly nice one’.
Chapter Eight
The Real Peter Pan Page 5