The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Loving,

  JMB

  By Easter 1918, Michael and Nico were installed at Adelphi Terrace, and Barrie was hard at work on Mary Rose.

  Barrie’s oddly unsettling corruption of Hogg’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Kilmeny’ poem, began during the 1912 holiday at Amhuinnsuidhe and was now to be filtered into Mary Rose by means of Barrie’s archaic idea of the ‘little gods … tricky spirits’ that looked after him.

  They first appear in the play as ‘seekers’ responsible for making ‘the call’ to Mary on the island at Voshimid – ‘soft whisperings from holes in the ground – “Mary Rose, Mary Rose”.’ Then ‘in a fury as of storm and whistling winds that might be an unholy organ [which] rushes upon the island, raking every bush for her. These sounds increase rapidly in volume till the mere loudness of them is horrible,’ writes Barrie in the stage directions to the play.

  They have a counterpart – ‘You have forgotten the call,’ says Harry to his mother in the end. ‘It was as if, in a way, there were two kinds of dogs out hunting you – the good and the bad.’

  ‘Unseen devils’ appear and disappear time and again in the play, and they are not confined to Barrie’s script. A seeker is ‘one that keeps step, as soft as snow’ with each of us, and if, like Michael, your ‘childhood may have been overfull of gladness; they [the seekers] don’t like that’, wrote Barrie in 1922.

  Before long Michael was himself writing a poem from a Scottish island in which ‘the white mists eddied, trailed and spun like seekers’, and Daphne, who came under Barrie’s influence strongly after Michael’s death, would, far in the future, write a poem called ‘Another World’ in which they are ‘the loathly keepers of the netherland’ and she hears ‘their voices whisper me from sleep’.

  Daphne leaves us in no doubt that this is a different Neverland to the one Hogg ascribes to Kilmeny, rather the nightmare one of Barrie’s own gloomy imagination, but it is impossible to be sure to what degree he deliberately darkened Michael’s mind or believed what he impressed upon him. He was, as Peter wrote, such ‘a fantasy-weaver that anyone he made much of ended up by either playing up to him or clearing out’.

  The author Jon Savage53 concluded that the Barrie boys, whose lives had been ‘filleted’ for Barrie’s plays, had been the subject of an ‘act of transference, if not possession’ by Barrie. If you can make people believe something of your dream, it will cleave to their perception of reality. Every magician, every religious leader, every politician knows this to be the case. But Michael had the literary image to hand that explained his situation best. As ‘the foster-child of Silence and slow Time’ held on the sculpted surface of Keats’s beautiful Grecian urn, Michael was trapped within Barrie’s morbid works.

  In the opening stage direction to Mary Rose, Barrie explains that what the resurrected Mary Rose cannot tell us of ‘what only the dead should know’ is available for us all to see in the ‘disturbing smile’ of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’. Two years later he pointed to Michael as the one who ‘half knows’ this secret – ‘something of which [his fellows] know nothing – the secret that is hidden in the face of the Mona Lisa’.54

  Once, lingering long in the lonesome hills of Amhuinnsuidhe, Michael’s smile had been closer to the beauteous visage of the mythical maiden caught by Hogg in ‘Kilmeny’ than to the Mona Lisa’s ironic, or as Barrie would have it ‘cynical’ smirk, almost a sneer. But because of the gloom inherent in having as one’s keeper a man who wandered over his world ‘lone as incarnate death’, the boy was rapidly fulfilling Barrie’s projection of him as ‘the dark and dour and impenetrable’.

  The nature of the gloom under which he lived is nowhere more obviously found than in the story of Mary Rose, whose ghost prowls about the cold house looking for her son, ‘searching, searching, searching’, just as Michael once prowled around the house searching in his nightmares for ‘the old enemy. It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking,’ Barrie wrote. ‘I stood or sat by him, like a man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me…’

  Not only had Barrie elected to write a play about summoning up a dead mother to visit her son, a woman whose role he had usurped, but he had co-opted the son in the venture and connected his mother’s state of mind to his experience of nightmare. There was a storm cloud gathering. Even while he was moving into Adelphi Terrace, life was becoming increasingly dark for Michael.

  Meanwhile, the War Office was still asking for more men.

  Michael’s housemaster Macnagthen recorded that his star pupil was not faring well under the pressure, though Macnaghten didn’t know the half of it: ‘It was a time of great strain: the war was still raging; his friend Roger Senhouse, who was half a year older, had left, and Michael was uncertain whether to stay on another Half. He was obviously unwell.’

  In the middle of May, Macnaghten called Barrie down to talk things over. Michael told them he wanted to leave at the end of the summer term. He was going to enlist in the Scots Guards and at the end of the war, he was going to study art in Paris, as his grandfather du Maurier had done before him.

  Barrie had wanted him to try for the Cambridge scholarship, but taken by surprise by his frank and forthright message it was arranged that Michael would leave Eton at the end of the Half.

  The regiment was Peter’s idea. He had written on more than one occasion that Michael shouldn’t underestimate what it was like for an Etonian in the ranks: ‘Without accusing myself of snobbishness, I feel in this battalion like a survivor of a dead race, and sometimes wonder if I’m being pedantic when I speak the dialect which is my native tongue.’

  Peter’s concern reminds us of a significant aspect of life in 1918, the class war. Michael was an ingenu when it came to the big wide world. Also, he was increasingly forthright in his approach to people. It was Peter’s view that his life would have been made miserable by the more streetwise squaddies.

  So, he would join the Scots Guards. But not before one last summer holiday with rod and gun this time (good practice at the expense of the grouse): Edgerston and Tomdoun again: ‘Leading a bucolic life up here,’ reads a letter from Barrie to Gilmour.

  The great event is going out in a dog-cart to bring home the lamb. We won the lamb in a raffle, but always when we go for it, it is ‘up in the hills’, so we keep going. Fine hay crop, but no fishing owing to the want of rain. Michael shoots grouse. He will be going to Bushey for Scots Guards in November … The war news heartens one up a bit.

  Meanwhile, Michael was persuaded to think again about leaving Eton. ‘Subsequently,’ wrote Macnaghten,

  he wrote in the quiet of the holidays asking if he might return. He was welcomed back, and the record of his last Half is, ‘A wonderful Captain [he was made Head of House]: he worries, but his judgment is unerring, and his actions swift as lightning: the most admirable boy who has ever been in the house.’

  And then in October the war was obviously ending – Bulgaria, Turkey, then Austria bailed out, and on 9 November the Kaiser abdicated. It was over.

  Michael had been spared.

  53 Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945 (2007).

  54 Barrie’s rectorial address at St Andrews University, 23 May 1922.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  1919: Oxford

  ON 22 NOVEMBER, Barrie wrote to Eveline at Glan Hafren:

  So it actually is ended! It was dear of Peter [Lewis] to say that about Michael. You can guess how thankful I am. I don’t think he will be wanted for the army now, and I’m going to Eton on Sunday to go into his future. They marched at Eton with their bath-tubs as drums [on Armistice night] and the night ended with Michael getting 500 lines! (For standing on his head on a roof when he should have been in bed, or something of the kind.)

  At the Sunday meeting at Eton, Michael, who was so thrilled to be speaking about any kind of future, was persuaded to go to university.

  Eiluned saw the folly of his bending to Barrie’s will, believing that Barrie should have
allowed him to go to Paris. She could see that Michael’s artistic talent was something of his own, un-seeded and un-moulded by Barrie, who had no appreciation of art.

  Had Michael been firm, a bohemian existence in Paris might have been the making of him, as it had been in the case of his grandfather. But Michael conceded his life to Barrie, in return for which Barrie would buy him a car and, indeed, a cottage, which he would never take up. His adopted father’s largesse knew no bounds. Michael would have £5,000 in his bank account in 1921, the equivalent of £170,000 today, and he hadn’t worked one day in his life.

  However, Michael did not get a scholarship or an exhibition to Cambridge. On 20 December 1918, Barrie wrote to the Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford: ‘[Michael] went in for the Cambridge Trinity Scholarships this year [and] just failed to get an Exhibitionship. But in any case his wish was to go to Oxford…’

  Michael matriculated from Christ Church, as the expression goes, on 23 January 1919. From Hilary term (January–March) 1919 through Trinity term (April–June) 1920 he resided in college at what is known as Peck 1:5, short for Peckwater Quad, Staircase 1, Room 5; a second floor apartment, quiet, wood-panelled, fairly dark. The living room overlooks the quad – the college library to the south.

  On 17 January, Barrie wrote to Elizabeth Lucas:

  Michael went off today to Oxford and Christchurch [sic] full of suppressed excitement. He has a very nice panelled sitting room, with furniture that would make you shiver. He hopes to be able to put in pieces from Campden Hill in place of it. Freyberg [Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO, a warrior, a hero, and a close friend who adjusted well to sudden immersion in the gushing waters of Barrie’s esteem] has been staying here for the last fortnight also and got on very well with the boys. Nicholas just come in and calling for billiards…

  The following month Barrie sent Michael some small dining room chairs and a sideboard and sofa from No. 23, the rest of the furniture being put into storage and the house let to an artist called Speed.

  Michael took Mods – the first public examinations in Latin and Greek, in Hilary term 1920. Mods, or Moderations, are the first part of the Classics degree course known as Literae Humaniores or, colloquially, Greats. Honours Mods for Classics students have been called the hardest examinations in the world. They lead to Second Public Examinations – Finals.

  Macnaghten, who saw Michael occasionally when he visited Eton, noted in his book that for a year and a half he was still very restless: more than once he made up his mind to leave.

  That may have been the case, but he also had some fine times too. Among his friends were a number of Old Etonians, among them Roger Senhouse and Bob Boothby, who was interviewed at length in the 1970s by Andrew Birkin.

  Boothby, a Magdalen College man, was the only son of Sir Robert Tuite Boothby, a banker from Edinburgh. The aristocratic, moneyed, Scottish and Etonian background would have pleased Barrie, who did appear initially to have been happy that Michael was invited by Boothby’s parents to stay at the family home in Scotland.

  Boothby, who was bisexual, described Michael as ‘a very desirable undergraduate’ and classed him as a brilliant scholar who read widely – ‘he’d have got a First in anything’.

  Boothby did not have an affair with him. He described Michael as ‘introverted and moody’, ‘very emotional’, a young man who concealed his emotions, but if there was one word that described him best, it was ‘Romantic’. Sebastian Earl, another contemporary Etonian, who rowed for Oxford in the 1920 Boat Race, agreed: ‘He was someone who cared for poetry and I would have thought music, though music didn’t mean much to my generation. Nothing like it does today.’55

  Michael did have an interest in music. Nico told a defining story about Michael’s taste when a large wind-up gramophone appeared at the flat in Adelphi Terrace at some point after he and Michael began living there. Barrie gave them each a ten-shilling note to buy some records. Nico’s choice was Japanese Sandman and Whispering by Paul Whiting, which became a number one hit in 1920, while Michael chose Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade. He said to Nico, ‘You bloody fool. You’ll want to throw yours away in half a minute.’ (Nico told Andrew Birkin this in January 1976 – and he still had his copy of Whispering.)

  But Michael came out of his shell with Boothby and there was laughter. There developed a little group of them: four young men – Boothby, Michael, Senhouse and Clive Burt – ‘all tremendous friends, and frightfully gay’.

  Of course, Boothby knew about Michael’s affair with Senhouse, but said that Michael wasn’t physically homosexual. ‘He had emotional relationships with a great many people.’

  There was nothing unusual or particularly homosexual in this. It was quite normal for two men at Oxford at this time to enjoy a casual, free-and-easy friendship that was intimate intellectually, spiritually and emotionally, yet singularly pure by nature.

  Nico said of his brother that he had ‘a number of friends who were girls, rather than that he had a number of girlfriends’. He wondered whether Michael’s inability to get a girl, ‘as a presumed more normal friend would have been doing in Oxford days’, was the reason for his restlessness.

  Boothby thought not. He himself made love to a woman for the first time at twenty-five. In those days at Oxford, it wasn’t natural to have a girlfriend. ‘Occasionally undergraduates would go up to London, have a woman and come back in “the fornicator”, but the idea of having anything to do with any woman in Oxford – it wasn’t on.’ No change from Eton, then.

  In July of 1919, the four young men went to France for a holiday together. They went to Tour Solidor, near St Malo in Brittany, and stayed at a pension. It was then that Boothby realised Michael was afraid of water.

  In fact, that summer Michael went home and announced that he was going to learn to swim properly, because they had a punt the following term.

  In Brittany Boothby watched Michael gamble for the first time. They played boule, a game similar to roulette. Michael won and ‘was terribly excited. We had a marvellous month in France, drinking green chartreuse.’

  From there they travelled to Paris for a peace procession, where Michael tried to trade on his relationship with Barrie for a suite for all of them at the Meurice. It didn’t work out. Instead, they trawled the bistros, climbed into a tree in the Champs-Elysées and sat in it until the peace procession came by.

  After it all broke up Boothby took Michael and Senhouse to stay with him in Scotland, where they drove all over the place in a Ford car.

  Boothby had no idea that Michael was dissatisfied with Oxford, only that he felt pressured about what he should do with his life. He described Michael as ‘brilliant with his pen – painting people. What he would have done, God alone knows.’

  Barrie was on his case, as usual. When Michael heard that Violet Bonham Carter had heard what a brilliant mind he had and that she wanted him to join the Liberal Party and go into politics at Oxford, he was furious – ‘Who is this bloody Mrs Carter who thinks I’m clever and wants me to go into politics?’ he bawled. The answer was that she was the daughter of Herbert Henry Asquith, Liberal Prime Minister up until 1916, and Barrie’s secretary Lady Cynthia Asquith’s sister-in-law.

  Politics would never have been for Michael, for whom opposition of any kind was anathema. He also understood that the moment he defined a goal or ambition, he would be trapped in it. He wanted his freedom, not only from Barrie, but partly as a result of the pressure he was under, from the whole world of time and space – freedom simply to be.

  When Boothby met Barrie, he saw at once, without Michael saying anything, precisely where his problems lay. ‘It was an unhealthy relationship. He was an unhealthy little man, Barrie, you know? I mean in a mental sense.’

  As Boothby saw it, Barrie pulled Michael down into his own black moods; also that he was the only one who could get Barrie out of them. ‘It was morbid,’ he said.

  Boothby spoke of going to the apartment in Adelphi Terrace one day and being overwhelmed by the a
tmosphere. When they left, intending to drive to Oxford, Michael had been furious and slammed the door of the car as they got in. Boothby said what a relief it was to get away, and Michael agreed with him. But he never spoke to Boothby about getting away from Barrie. It was a complex relationship indeed: ‘Sir Jazz-Band Barrie, he used to call him. He loved him. It was a great love. He was very grateful to Barrie. Barrie did do a tremendous amount for them all.’

  55 Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979).

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  1919: Garsington

  LESS SUCCESSFUL THAN his friendships with Boothby and the others was Michael’s foray into the so-called Bloomsbury Group, members of which Michael had links with on both sides of his family, one might even say on all three sides.

  The group formed around 1905 in conscious revolt against the repressively male ethos of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. It was time now for courage to live one’s life in broad daylight with integrity and truth, a time to champion the freedom of the individual and denounce the unquestioned authority of institutions, particularly that of the Church. It was a time for free love, too, which the group exercised with particular commitment and imagination.

  Although Barrie was to fall to the new post-war writers, led by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, most of whom were part of the Bloomsbury Group, he might claim to have been in some ways quite modern. The war had diluted his child-like adoration of the heroic and shaken his views about pacifism, for example, and he had never been religious in the conventional sense.