It was more than the forthcoming publication of his book that prompted Barrie’s early return to London that summer. Instinct told him that following the success of Ibsen’s Ghost, it would be unwise to remain for too long out of London. The revisions to the new play, The Houseboat, were now completed and Barrie anticipated that Toole’s success with the Ibsen parody would encourage him to cast a more sympathetic eye over anything else he might be offered. His intuition was correct, and by the middle of October, with Irving’s encouragement, Toole had purchased all the rights to Barrie’s new play. Having effectively bought a permanent option he wasn’t, however, under any obligation actually to stage it, but with Toole’s Ibsen’s Ghost coup in mind its fledgling playwright hoped that sooner or later Toole would consider it. Despite the failure of Richard Savage, in a year of serial successes for Barrie, with the purchase of his first real play by Toole and the launch of The Little Minister, he could reflect on October 1891 as a particularly satisfying month.
In January of the new year Toole did indeed announce that he would be staging The Houseboat. At the last minute it was discovered the title had previously been used and so it became Walker London; walker then being a vogue word for a trickster. Toole reassembled the actors from Ibsen’s Ghost and rehearsals began almost at once. While Barrie was gratified at Toole’s confidence in his play, and exhilarated at the prospect of its staging, characteristically this had little effect on his behaviour. The patterns were already too well established. He worked immensely hard, believed that he would succeed, and without cynicism happily paid court to those whom he admired. At thirty-one he could already claim as his friends two of the most distinguished living English writers. Yet, while always treating anyone he admired with grave respect, he did not ingratiate himself. Whatever private fears he might have been subject to, Barrie wasn’t really capable of behaving with subservience.
In addition, his force of personality was such that to change his mind once it was made up, to curb or coerce him, was a truly formidable task. Thus, unperturbed by either Toole’s standing in the theatre or his furious protestations, Barrie insisted that he wasn’t satisfied with the choice of second-lead actress. With just one dramatic success behind him the young playwright refused to budge. He was after all famous for his journalism and novels, and he now quietly reiterated that without his choice of actress there would be no play. The actress he had in mind was quite unknown, and pretty. Her name was Mary Ansell.
Jerome K. Jerome’s reputation had been assured in 1889 with publication of Three Men in a Boat. He was touring one of his plays in the provinces with a travelling company, for which Mary Ansell was playing the ingénue. In his autobiography, My Life and Times, Jerome tells how Barrie asked him if he could recommend an actress for the new play. ‘He didn’t want much,’ recalled Jerome.
She was to be beautiful, quite charming, a genius for preference, and able to flirt. The combination was not so common in those days. I could think of no one except Miss Ansell. It seemed unkind not to give her the chance. I cancelled the contract and sent for her . . .1
Mary Ansell was neither a genius nor especially sophisticated, but she was intelligent, quick-witted, pretty and tantalisingly flirtatious. She was also ambitious. Although her father, a publican, was dead, and her mother was not left well off, Mary Ansell wasn’t going to allow modest circumstances to limit her prospects. Mrs Ansell and her daughter were not close, and so there was no objection to her leaving home. The stage – as yet one of the few options for a girl who wanted a career and some independence – was Mary Ansell’s goal. In order to further this ambition she took a gamble; a bold move reflecting her determination and resolve. Rather than wait, perhaps for ever, until a manager noticed her in a production and sought her out, Mary saved, or borrowed, enough money to put into a touring company of her own. In this way she had been playing, albeit mostly in the provinces, for some time. Her looks were of course an asset, but they didn’t make an actress of her, and she wasn’t yet in great demand. When the call came to meet Barrie any young actress thirsting for parts on the London stage would have congratulated herself on her good fortune.
Toole himself may have been angry and frustrated at the young Barrie’s challenge to his authority, but Irene Vanburgh, to whom Toole had given the lead, was privately outraged. Not only was Barrie insisting on putting forward an actress in place of someone already chosen, but the new second lead, Miss Ansell, was to have a higher fee than Miss Vanburgh. In addition, Irene Vanburgh had now realised that although her part as the bluestocking Bell Golightly was the lead, it was much less characterful than the exuberant Irish girl, Nanny O’Brien, played by Mary Ansell. Vanburgh later recorded how she
approached the shy little author, confident at seventeen that my position as Toole’s leading lady would intimidate him into giving me a choice of either part. How young but how foolish I was and how quiet but firm he was.2
The actress also wrote candidly about her feelings. ‘Mary Ansell . . . was delightful and extremely pretty. I acknowledge this now more freely than I did at the time because I was jealous of her success; especially as the author was in love with her.’ And it certainly did appear that Barrie had been swept off his feet. By the time Walker London was staged, at the end of February, the playwright and Mary Ansell were regularly seen together in public. Barrie’s notebooks for this spring and on into the summer of 1892 are filled with ideas for a new play, clearly reflecting his preoccupation with the young actress. Beginning as The Bookworm, this play would slowly develop until it eventually became The Professor’s Love Story.
This tells the absurd story of Professor Goodwillie, so absent-minded and emotionally undeveloped that he fails to recognise first that he has fallen in love and second with whom, believing instead that he is ill. His doctor diagnoses the ‘malady’. The professor is horrified and flees to Scotland in an attempt to escape, taking with him his secretary, Lucy White, the very source of his unease. Lucy White is already quite aware not only that the professor loves her, but that she is in love with him.
Meanwhile Walker London had its premiere on 25th February 1892, and what would become the typical response to Barrie’s writing was here prefigured. Most critics came to regard him as a dramatist of great technical skill, who turned out conservative plays with just enough edge to give them popular appeal. His drama would quickly be categorised by these critics as a drama of the surface. Consequently, a more reflective reviewer would later write that Barrie’s masterly skill in dramatic construction and his famous whimsicality had obscured his other virtues, which included ‘his deep psychological meaning’.
This came about in part because his family background and his training as a journalist gave Barrie the understanding that without some kind of private funding a working writer cannot be aggressively unpopular and survive. Over and again he makes this point, with regard to both his drama and his humour; while his prose heroes are made to reinforce the point: ‘When I say a humorous thing myself I’m dependent on other fowk to tak note o’ the humour o’t, bein myself tae’n up with the makkin o’t.’3
Underneath the apparent conventionality there was already a high degree of the unorthodox in Barrie’s early works, whether journalism, novels or plays. Resisting classification, he was enigmatic and difficult to pin down, and with time less and less likely to follow any artistic mainstream. He was also aware that in order to say some of the uncomfortable things he wanted to communicate, they had to be presented with an appealing surface. With these thoughts in mind his work would become increasingly layered. As he enticed his audience by the brilliance of the surface – famously referred to as his ‘lightness of touch’ – below there were further, more challenging meanings for those who were prepared to look. That many critics, and no doubt many in his audience, failed to do so was in part because his work was so disarmingly approachable. This quality would eventually lead one critic to write, ‘No dramatist has ever been more perilous to criticism than Barrie within a week of his death.’4
Walker London was a success. It ran right through the rest of 1892 and on into the middle of the following year, before going on tour for several more months. It played in New Zealand, South Africa, India, the US and several British provinces. Meanwhile, five days before the launch of Barrie’s play, Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan had also received its London premiere. Wilde had irritated critics and actors alike when, at the curtain call,
a fat man in evening dress, wearing a fur-lined overcoat, had strolled into view smoking a cigarette and, the applause subsiding, had continued to smoke while he assured the audience that he was so glad the acting had not quite spoilt his little play.5
This studied condescension was repeatedly criticised in the play’s reviews, which complained that it was nothing more than a series of dialogues, and a vehicle for Wilde’s own epigrammatic wit. This was something out of which J. L. Toole cleverly made currency when taking his own curtain call on Walker London’s first night. By implied contrast with Wilde, he recounted how Barrie’s nerves had been so extreme he had left the theatre, and neither did he smoke. That Barrie didn’t smoke was of course arrant nonsense, but in contrasting him with Wilde, Toole’s comments enhanced the popularity of Barrie and his creation by adding to the already complex myth of his modesty.
In Walker London Barrie had disclosed an experimental mind with an instinctive feeling for the theatre. Here, both actors and designers were in agreement that he had created a play of extraordinary visual inventiveness. As well as this, while Barrie revelled in his play’s light-heartedness, he had also given Walker London real themes. Themes which anticipated what were to remain some of his chief concerns: the self-delusion of lovers; the mistaken belief that life must be judged on rational grounds alone; and the impossibility of different social classes really communicating with one another until certain prejudices had been dislodged.
Old Toole made a hefty profit with his young protégé’s farce, while the young protégé himself, having sold it outright to the savvy Toole, made nothing further than the initial sum of three hundred pounds. What he did make was something much more valuable to him than money at this point in his career; a leap forward in his understanding, and his apprenticeship as a writer for the stage.
Despite a few subsequent flops, such as the one-act satire, based on Thackeray’s great heroine Becky Sharp, performed in 1893, Barrie learnt quickly from his early efforts for the stage. The critics noticed how his plays became less laboured, and saw that what was to become his legendary understanding of dramatic structure and stagecraft was developing fast. In Walker London, for example, he confined the entire three-act play to one strikingly creative set. The designer, Joseph Harker, would later say that this set was the most rewarding he had made in the whole of his career. The dramatist and critic Harley Granville Barker – to become an outstanding figure in progressive theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in turn a campaigner on Barrie’s behalf – would later write that Walker London was ‘evidence enough of the extraordinary scenic inventiveness to be cultivated later’.
Barrie was not only achieving more dramatic lightness of touch. His concentrated personal involvement in the making of Walker London was also to set a precedent for the rest of his working life. ‘When he was rehearsing Ibsen’s Ghost, he had no idea what he wanted; dress and business he left despairingly to the company. But when he rehearsed Walker London he had precise views about everything.’6
He was capable of an exhausting intensity, and would usually dictate the course of any communication. At the same time he was renowned for his reticence. Inadequate though it is, the justification he himself gave for it was his Scottishness.
You only know the shell of a Scot until you have entered his home circle at social gatherings where you and he seem to be getting on so well, he is really a house with all the shutters closed and the door locked. He is not opaque of set purpose, often it is against his will – it is certainly against mine, I try to keep my shutters open and my foot in the door but they will bang to . . . Now, it seems to be a law of nature that we must show our true selves at some time, and as the Scot must do it at home, and squeeze a day into an hour, what follows is that there he is self-revealing in the superlative degree, the feelings so long dammed up overflow, and thus a Scotch family are probably better acquainted with each other, and more ignorant of life outside their circle than any other family in the world. And as knowledge is sympathy, the affection existing between them is almost painful in its intensity . . .7
Barrie’s force of personality, at times overpowering, was juxtaposed with an endearing willingness to put his own needs to one side if he perceived that someone else’s were greater. Often a surprise to those who were irritated by his urge to control, once his sympathy was stirred Barrie’s readiness to listen patiently, to console and sustain were qualities cherished by his friends. He possessed, too, that rare and welcome quality: he found no difficulty in giving praise. In old age he complimented a close friend on that very quality which he himself possessed in abundance: ‘Your first instinct is always to telegraph Jones the nice thing Brown said about him to Robinson; you have sown a lot of happiness that way.’
These sensibilities often meant that, although he had good men friends, as time passed Barrie was often easier in the company of women. His empathy with them didn’t, however, arise from the wisdom of experience. In many ways he didn’t understand women. And, yet, another intuitive female part of him responded to some of their deepest feelings and concerns. In this respect Barrie was quite different from his contemporary Bernard Shaw, who sometimes appears to have had difficulty in understanding that there might be others, besides the activist New Woman, who possessed any sensitivity or strength of character at all.
Meanwhile, Barrie’s courtship of Mary Ansell continued. The actress must have been flattered by the attentions of someone so clearly a man of the moment, but her liking for him didn’t spring from his growing reputation alone. Her lively intelligence was combined with an astuteness which enabled her to appreciate that his Scottish humour was an essential part of Barrie’s character. When the spirit moved him that remote sadness in his beautiful blue eyes would temporarily ease, and the diffidence was replaced by a jubilant gaiety. Counter to this, his by now notorious unpredictability was something Mary Ansell appeared capable of handling. Revealing little of his moods Barrie rarely smiled, and with a perverseness that never ceased to unsettle all but his closest associates, he often sent up those very things dearest to him with a completely impassive countenance. Where even his good friends sometimes found him impossible to gauge and grew impatient, many acquaintances refused to persevere.
Barrie’s notebooks for this period are full of references to a novel with the working title The Sentimentalist. Much of it is straightforwardly autobiographical, revealing equivocal feelings. So, while the gossip columns were reporting a blossoming romance between Mr J. M. Barrie and Miss Mary Ansell, Barrie was writing:
This sentimentalist wants to make girl love him, bullies and orders her . . . yet doesn’t want to marry.
– Such a man if an author, wd be studying his love affair for book. Even while proposing, the thought of how it wd read wd go thro’ him . . .
– She pretends she doesn’t want to marry him – really this cause of her doubts – she can’t be sure he loves her.
Her way of peering over her fur collar.
– Her ordering clothes for him, &c. – Motherly feelings. If she an actress, shd he not be a dramatist? Tho he and she had married wd she have been happy not acting? Probably not.8
Driven to hold centre stage, Barrie would also write of a deep sense of isolation, exemplified by the comment, ‘He is really a house with all the shutters closed and the door locked.’ With time, refining his wit and refusing to contain his quirkiness, he would become a public figure of depth and pathos. And yet he always remained at his most relaxed when smoking and talking with no more than one or two. Writing to a friend after a hectically social time away he said, ‘I wish I could drop in on you about nine p.m., put another log on the study fire and tell you all about it.’9 Barrie’s inclusion in an ever-expanding social scene, spilling over into the intense bustle and energy of literary London, meant that his new life in England was utterly different from the quiet solitude also necessary to him and learnt during his boyhood in Scotland.
For the ambitious young journalist, however, finding a larger place than Kirriemuir in which to hammer his career into shape had been imperative. At another level the artist in him had felt compelled to leave behind the arid constraint of his parents’ vision, his birthplace, even his country, in order to expand and find his own. Fortunate in being equipped with that immense self-belief, Barrie rarely experienced the provincial’s customary sense of vulnerability when faced with the rigours of city life:
Big as the place is, I don’t think it has the effect of making you feel your own littleness, else could you not slave so hard in it. For they do slave in London, do they not? The gospel of work, work till you drop often means that you are to live a life bounded on north-south-east-and-west by the mighty trifles of your own pen.10
Despite this disclaimer, for a long time yet it was to be the ‘mighty trifles’ of his own pen that more than anything else were to fire Barrie’s spirit. In the process he became an honorary Londoner. He might refer to a temporary absence, saying, ‘I was not sorry to leave London’, but he had also quickly grown to love this great city. Indeed, by the time he died, London was the place in which Barrie had spent by far the major part of his life, and he would write, ‘It eternally thrills me and has been to me all the bright hopes of my youth conceived.’
Even so, in those first London years the distance from his origins never entailed Barrie’s rejection of them, and his frequent journeys home to Scotland were as much as anything essential psychic refuelling. He was also making the best of necessity. With the decline in Margaret Barrie’s health throughout the 1890s, again and again, at a moment’s notice, her son would leap on to the northbound train. With each emergency, as his journey brought him closer to home, he dreaded that this time it would be the end. During repeated episodes awaiting his mother’s recovery, he discovered that Kirriemuir had become for him a good place in which to work. He also described ‘those many night alarms, when lights flickered in the house and white faces were round my mother’s bedside’. And in Margaret Ogilvy he relived
The long vigils, when night about we sat watching . . . the awful nights when we stood together teeth clenched – waiting – it must be now. And it was not then; her hand became cooler, her breathing more easy; she smiled to us. Once again I could work by snatches, and was glad . . .
Barrie’s mother persistently searched for herself in his female characters. As a result, in her single-minded and self-absorbed fashion she would regularly interrupt to comment on the authenticity, or not, of her son’s fiction. For the rest, what he had so far printed was pored over by Margaret and Jenann, provoking Margaret’s observation, ‘It is a queer thing that near everything you write is about this bit place. You little expected that when you began.’