Author Topic: James and Mary  (Read 10941 times)

Hannah High

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James and Mary
« on: April 25, 2005, 01:46:41 AM »
After their divorce did they ever see each other again?

Robert Greenham

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James and Mary
« Reply #1 on: April 25, 2005, 11:06:51 PM »
I don't really know but, perhaps these notes may be a little help to you:

1.  When Mary was considering divorcing Gilbert Cannan in 1917, JMB wrote to her (on March 5th). The letter is on page 259 of Andrew Birkin's book, and there is a bit of information over the page. Clearly, JMB was wanting to meet with her at that time. He offered to pay Mary an annual allowance and see her just once a year. I don't know what happened though, but I don't think they did see each other between 1909 and a few days before JMB died in 1937. I read somewhere that it was well-known that JMB still possessed a great love for Mary for the rest of his life. Among other reasons, he seemed oblivious to her lies about her age, etc, details of which are in my new book. (I had to put in a little plug for it!).

2.  Quite some time before JMB died, aged 77, Mary emigrated to France and lived in Biarritz. After her divorce from Cannan she had joined a new circle of friends which included D H Lawrence, although he himself didn't move to France (see next point). When Mary heard JMB was dying, she returned to the London and visited him daily at a nursing home. She stayed at a nearby hotel and kept in touch with him until the end.

3.  I think Mary moved to France not before 1924, for in that year she attended a dinner party given by D H Lawrence at the Cafe Royal in London. This was just before Lawrence emigrated to, I think, New Mexico.

4.  Mary died in Biarritz in July 1950. Some of the information I have set out here came from the report of her death in the Daily Telegraph here in the UK.

ecb

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James and Mary
« Reply #2 on: April 26, 2005, 12:28:29 AM »
However be sure to go to the Audio portion of this website and go under Nico - do a find on "ex-wife"  (use the ctrl F to find a word) and find the story of Barrie seeing Mary in 1922 - and making sure he avoided her!

stourhead

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #3 on: October 30, 2009, 06:42:22 PM »
In Cynthia Asquith's 'memoir' about Barrie - which made me dislike her intensely, - she has a very 'catty' section about Barrie staying at Stanway, her parents' home in the Cotswolds, and being terrified of seeing Mary Ansell who was staying in Broadway.  She makes it sound as if Mary was stalking him.  (She's also quite rude about Florence Hardy.)  Susan Biven Aller in her 1994 book on Barrie says that he paid Ansell an allowance for the rest of his life after she'd left Canaan and was destitute.

tcarroll

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #4 on: October 30, 2009, 06:58:39 PM »
Whether Mr. Barrie paid Mary a salary or not I do not know, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. He seemed generous to a fault at times, and that is one of the things I admire most about him. I sometimes wonder if he didn't feel a little responsible for the way Mary's life turned out, though he was in no way to blame.  I find this subject quite interesting.

andrew

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #5 on: October 31, 2009, 04:13:10 PM »
I may well have posted this elsewhere on the website, but I can't find it!
It's a letter from Mary Cannan (Barrie/Ansell) to Peter Llewelyn Davies (at Peter Davies Ltd) in response to Denis Mackail’s 1941 biography, The Story of JMB:  


24 Sandlands Road,
Walton-on-Hill,
Surrey.

April 14th, 1941.

My dear Peter,

My attention has been drawn to a statement by Mr Mackail in his book "The Story of J.M.B." It will be found at the top of p. 186. The whole of this statement is a gross fabrication.
My mother never kept seaside lodgings. So Barrie never stayed there, or was ill there, and the "pretty daughter" could never have helped to look after him.
Moreover I never met J.M.B. until "Walker, London" was being cast. Mr Addison Bright, a mutual friend, was the means of bringing us together. After seeing me play in "Brighton" at the Criterion Theatre, J.M.B. arranged a meeting to ask me whether I would accept the part of Nanny. This was the beginning of our friendship, and entirely rules out Mr Mackail's sordid Hollywood romance, which is an absolute lie from beginning to end.
My mother was always in a position to have a house of her own, and to give her children a good education, two of her sons being put into professions, and she always allowed me a small income until well after my marriage; also she was very much against my taking up a career, especially the stage.
From my grandfather I inherited £1,000, which enabled me to gain experience on the stage by taking my own Company on tour. When I married J.M., I gave up a profession very dear to me, and in which I was making great headway.
There is another statement entirely incorrect. The first time I went to Kirriemuir was when J.M. was dangerously ill. His sister Maggie, whom I had previously met, sent me an urgent telegram to come, and I started for Scotland the same night. I arrived at the house the next morning and was taken at once to his room where I found two trained nurses in attendance. He was only half conscious, but managed to smile feebly as he said, "So you've got to Thrums."
When he was well enough, we were married by his uncle, Dr Ogilvy, and left for a London hotel at once. Again he was taken ill, and it was Lady Jeune, afterwards Lady St. Helier, in the great tenderness of her heart, for which we could never be sufficiently grateful, who carried us to her home in Harley Street, where we stayed for a week before going to Switzerland.

These are the true facts of the case. I want now to know what you and Mr Mackail propose to do to put the matter right. I ask that a correction be put into the four leading London daily papers and that the offending text be deleted from the book.

It is not for me to criticize this work. It is certainly not the J.M. that I knew for sixteen years. Mr Mackail has cloaked him so heavily with petty meannesses and snobbery that very little of the real man is seen. But he had a fine spirit and great dignity. His tragedy was that he knew that as a man he was a failure and that love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced, and it was this knowledge that led to his sentimental philanderings. One could almost hear him, like Peter Pan, crowing triumphantly, but his heart was sick all the time. There was so much tragedy in his life that Mr Mackail has ignored - tragedy not to be treated humourously or lightly.

Mr Mackail has a passion for the word "little", and after a time it becomes boring.
I would suggest that it should be placed on the title page and left there.

I am,

Yours Sincerely,

Mary Cannan.



In responding to this letter (to F. G. Howe, Peter’s legal man at Peter Davies Ltd), Denis Mackail pointed out that Mary Cannan had refused to cooperate with the writing of the biography in any way, on the grounds that "Barrie would not have wished any biography to be written at all." In the absence of Mary's first-hand information, he had been obliged to gather details of her background from other contemporaries, namely Irene Vanburgh, C. M. Lowne, Sir Seymour Hicks, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. "I might add," wrote Mackail, "that all these witnesses disliked Mrs Cannan very much indeed." He concluded, "She isn't nearly as loyal to J.M.B. as she now pretends. She was bitter and appallingly outspoken at one time. And a number of people who knew her have told me that I have treated her, in the book, with great mercy and kindness. ... I should have thought that Mrs Cannan would have preferred me not to dwell on the physical side of Barrie's marriage, and anyhow, Lady Cynthia wouldn't let me mention it. ... As for my treatment of J.M.B., I just don't agree with her."
Mr Howe visited Mary Cannan on several occasions, and, in the end, she withdrew her demands for an apology. No correction was made to the biography in either British or American edition.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2009, 04:17:51 PM by Andrew »

Robert Greenham

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #6 on: November 01, 2009, 01:08:53 PM »
Thanks for your last post on this, Andrew.  Mary's letter to Peter Davies, and Denis Mackail's subsequent comments, are most interesting.

I think Mary may have been increasingly bitter and resentful during and after her marriage to Barrie, and that this may have been due to a number of reasons.

One reason may have been his undeniable generosity, in terms of both his time and his money, towards so many people.  Mary's mention of his 'sentimental philanderings' would seem to indicate that during the marriage she had felt that she never had enough of him to herself.

Another, that she seemingly had an unfulfilled sex life, and certainly no children, with him.

Also, and this could have been terribly hurtful, that she may have endured for some years what we might now view, however reluctantly, as veiled taunts from Barrie. Taunts such as:

(i) For a very few eyes only: His protracted entry in the Andersons' guest book at Waverley Abbey House in September 1901, in which he made fun of Mary's persistence at increasing her family of substitute children - ie her delphiniums at Black Lake Cottage, for which she had obtained permission to extend her garden - and of Mary's ultimate wish to adopt the Anderson's son: "Dear Mr Anderson, What a handsome little boy you have got. May I put my fence round him? M.B."  This entry can be found within Andrew's database.

(ii) For public consumption: His possible revelation to the world that he had discovered that Mary had deceived him about her age, and that she was a gambler.  This was in the character of Mrs Page, and in the dialogue, in his post-divorce play, Rosalind, which he wrote in 1912.

If such bitterness and resentment did exist, and grow with the passing years, one might begin to understand why Mary did not feel like co-operating with Mackail for his biography. And, of course, she may have been correct in saying that "Barrie would not have wished any biography to be written at all".  Mackail did make some mistakes, but, in correcting him, Mary may have bent the truth somewhat, and we now know this would not have been out of character, and so it might be wise to take some of her assertions with a pinch of salt.

Her first two paragraphs: Mackail's page 186 relates to the year 1891, although he does say, "At one time or another...", and, while suitably vague, he is at this point providing background information on Mary; background in which, just a few sentences beforehand, on the previous page, he had stated perfectly correctly that she was just "a year or so younger than Barrie".  I don't doubt that she would have been highly irritated about that revelation, and that from that point in the book she may have started looking for excuses to have a go at the author.

In my own researches I have shown, here and there, that Mackail was in error with some of his 'facts'.  I have never found any indication that, after she was widowed, Mary's mother kept lodgings anywhere.  In 1881, according to the Census, Mary and her mother lived in Hastings, it is true, but both ladies' occupations were recorded as "Income derived from houses", and there were no other persons living or staying at their address on Census night. In 1891 Mary's mother lived in lodgings in Hove, and in 1901 she was in lodgings in Brighton, living on her own means. In January 1905, when she died just a few days after the opening of Peter Pan in London, she had been living seriously ill in lodgings in Hastings, and Mary (who was present at her mother's death) and James Barrie stayed (somewhere) in Hastings for a few days. That Barrie stayed in Hastings is confirmed in a report in the local newspaper dated 19 January 1905.  Mackail, unfortunately, stated that Mary's mother died in Hastings over a year later, in the spring of 1906, and that Mary had had to be summoned from Paris to be with her. 




andrew

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #7 on: November 06, 2009, 12:16:20 PM »
I quite agree with your conjectures, Robert. Mackail is not infallible, but he knew Barrie (and the Davies boys) since childhood, and is the best authority we have. Incidentally, I have the whole of Mackail's original handwritten MS - around 750 pages. If anyone has the time/inclination to scan and upload them into the database, please let me know!
« Last Edit: November 06, 2009, 11:06:14 PM by Andrew »

stourhead

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #8 on: November 06, 2009, 07:59:49 PM »
I would willingly do the work, but I'm in Canada.  I don't imagine you want the manuscript leaving the country.

andrew

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #9 on: November 08, 2009, 09:08:40 AM »
That's a very kind offer, and one that I ought to check with Mackail's family. But I have much other material that awaits scanning - several hundred letters from JMB to Cynthia Asquith, ditto to Nico, ditto to Jack and Gerrie...  None too sure where the originals wound up - probably Beinecke - but as these are all xeroxes it would be a disaster if some got lost. Feel free to email me at laurenticwave@btinternet.com for a further discussion, and many thanks for the generous offer!

stourhead

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #10 on: December 23, 2009, 10:55:31 PM »
Reading Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey and on page 88-89 Holroyd writes: 'Mary Cannan has formerly been married to J.M. Barrie, who still gave her an annual allowance of money on which the couple largely subsisted and which was handed over each year at a tete-a-tete dinner held, at Barrie's whimsical suggestion, on the divorced pair's wedding anniversary.'  Andrew - have you ever heard this before? (And Merry Christmas!)

Holly G.

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #11 on: January 13, 2010, 11:27:59 AM »
I would be delighted to take time to scan documents for your database.

andrew

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Re: James and Mary
« Reply #12 on: January 15, 2010, 03:06:12 PM »
Reading Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey and on page 88-89 Holroyd writes: 'Mary Cannan has formerly been married to J.M. Barrie, who still gave her an annual allowance of money on which the couple largely subsisted and which was handed over each year at a tete-a-tete dinner held, at Barrie's whimsical suggestion, on the divorced pair's wedding anniversary.'  Andrew - have you ever heard this before? (And Merry Christmas!)
I remembeer reading this in Holroyd's biography - Nico knew nothing about it but said (with a chuckle!) it wouldn't surprise him!