Pipe of Pan
PATRICK ANDERSON
J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image Janet Dunbar (Collins 45s) He was a tiny man with a trick of raising one eyebrow and lowering the other which proved irresistible to the children he met in Kensington Gardens. He had a pipe or a Cigar constantly in his mouth and gave him- self regular attacks of bronchitis for fifty years. Although often scintillating he suffered moods of depression when he-would remain speechless for the length of a luncheon-party or a long- tramp across the moors. Worship- Ping pretty women, he married a young actress but never went to bed with her, pre- ferring to move in on families where an ador- ing mother was surrounded by even more adoring male children who were only very occasionally heard to cry 'I wish it was Father and not that little man . . .' (Father was likely to be more emphatic.) As a men- tor of youth he was good on pirates, cricket, fishing, visits to musical comedy and hampers from Fortnum's but surprisingly reticent about art and literature: as one of his boys was to put it later, The fact is that music and painting and poetry, and the part they may be supposed to play in making a civil- ised being, had a curiously small part in [his] vision of things'. Writing made this weaver's son successful and rich, although his 'Kali- yard' novels and sketches of Scottish life were much resented by his own people for their odd combination of sugar, satire and sadism, while his once famous plays have now almost completely faded from the stage. Loving a lord, he ended up with an earl's daughter as secretary (she had sons in the offing) whose own strong personality he mollified with cheques for £500. He was charming, fey, difficult, generous and men- dacious. He wrote the unconsciously Freud- ian masterpiece, Peter Pan. When this play first opened on 27 December 1904 I think it was wise of Gerald du Maurier to play both Mr Darling and Captain Hook, thus bringing into focus two preoccupations of any self-respecting young Oedipus: Dad in the doghouse together with the castrating Father.
-Now Mrs Dunbar has written a new bio- graphy of Sir James Barrie with the sub- title 'The Man Behind the Image'. One gathers that this was a labour of research rather than of love; Mrs Dunbar shows at times a proper scorn for a mother-obsessed impotent—Margaret Ogilvy had declared that sexual relations were 'necessary but regrettable'—who didn't reveal his possible predicament to his fiancee or bother to dis- cuss it with a wife he preferred to ignore. As early as her preface she speaks of Barrie as 'a man of mystery', a 'debating point', add- ing 'Where, in all Barrie's writings about himself, does fact end and fantasy begin?' and expressing some vague hope for 'the light of further psychological knowledge.' She goes on to say that her study will be largely concerned with Barrie's relations with four women, his mother, his wife, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (mother of the five Peter Pan boys who were more or less adopted after the early death of their parents) and Lady Cynthia Asquith, thus avoiding any critical discussion of the plays and novels. (The Admirable Crichton is potted in five lines.) She has had access to the working notebooks, although she doesn't make much use of these, and to an interesting commen- tary on certain family letters written by the late Peter Davies. In describing Barrie's rela- tions with his brothers George and Michael, Mr Davies felt that they comprised 'a dash of the paternal, a lot of the maternal, and much, too. of the lover', a remark borne out by a letter sent to George when a young soldier on the Western Front in 1915: 'I do seem to be sadder today than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of twenty-one instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart ...'
Mrs Dunbar sketches the career with skill, although she does not deal very fully with -the all-important early years; she quotes many boy-obsessed letters whose burden is affectionate, anxious, concerned with prac- tical matters from bows and arrows to bowl- ing averages; but when she comes to remark that Barrie corresponded with Stevenson, met Hardy, helped Galsworthy, was friendly with H. G. Wells, one is brought up with a start because the 'man behind the image' has established so little of himself beyond a gift for commercial success and a capacity tb invade other people's marriages. What was his point of view, his imaginative vision of life? Where did he stand with regard to religion, politics, social problems, new move- ments in the arts? She seems sometimes to forget that, quite apart from the evident elusiveness of the man, we are completely unaware of the potency of the image.
Personally I find sad treacle dispiriting, and sad old treacle depressing beyond words. Although Mr J. B. Priestley is on record as saying that Barrie was a 'superb theatrical technician' and I can myself admit that The Twelve Pound Look is an exceedingly skil- ful one-acter, I have recently skipped through several of his other plays without illumina- tion. I recall only the hideous little-girlishness of Mary Rose, Lob's colloquy with his flowers, 'Pretty, pretty, let me see where you have a pain', the mawkish treatment of the charladies in The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, and Peter's remark to Wendy, 'when the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.' Barrie knew little about other human beings. He was a con-man par excellence; his whimsical charm is perhaps at its worst when it seeps into the stage directions and becomes stickier than ever. But I suppose we all owe some sympathy to what Mrs Dunbar calls a 'flawed genius' and I would term a monster,
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