Almost a hundred years ago, at half past eight
on the evening of December 27, 1904, the curtain went up at the Duke of York’s
Theatre, in London, to reveal, among other things, a man dressed as a dog. The
man was an actor named Arthur Lupino, suffering for his art in a shaggy
costume, and the dog was called Nana. Most plays enjoy a fitful life, at best,
but we can be fairly sure that this winter grown men will once again drop on
all fours and work up a canine sweat, while grown women will crop their hair,
pull on green tights, and turn into temporary boys. The play is “Peter Pan,”
and, like its eponymous hero, it gives freakishly little sign of growing old.
The author was J. M. Barrie: Jimmy to some of his friends, and, in his
later pomp, Sir James. He was short and slight, with bags under his eyes and a
pale, protuberant brow, like a clever schoolboy who has stayed up late reading
books under the bedclothes. He had a heavy mustache and a pipe smoker’s
percussive cough. Of humble origins, he grew rich, yet his choice of overcoat
remained several sizes too large, as if he were wearing a father’s
hand-me-down. Both in face and in body—and, it became apparent, in the
lineaments of his soul—Barrie seemed ill-suited to adult life, and those neat,
child-friendly features sank all too readily into the caved-in sadness of old
age.
Up to his death, in 1937, Barrie, as a result of his novels and plays,
was one of the most famous men of his day; when Chaplin, on a trip to London in
1921, was asked whom he most wanted to meet, the answer was J. M. Barrie. Not
even Barrie’s ardent admirers, however, would have described him as a matinée
idol, and he would have been wryly flattered to find himself reincarnated, for
the centenary of “Peter Pan,” in the beauteous person of Johnny Depp. A new
film, entitled “Finding Neverland,” tells the story—or a decorated version of
the story—of J. M. Barrie and the circumstances under which Peter Pan leaped
into existence. Depp resembles Barrie in no way, except in his slenderness of
form. We get a passable, soft stab at a Scottish burr but no mustache; we see
more of the sweet side of Barrie than the insidious flip side; and the harshest
coughing in the film comes not from Depp but from Kate Winslet, who plays
Barrie’s friend Sylvia Llewellyn Davies.
Sylvia was one of a number of strong, rather Shakespearean female
figures who ringed the life of Barrie—a dominance that began, unsurprisingly,
with his mother. She was Margaret Ogilvy, a stonemason’s daughter who hailed
from a particularly hard outcrop of the Presbyterian Church. James was born in
1860, the son of Margaret and a weaver named Alexander Barrie, in the Scottish
town of Kirriemuir, and, until the age of six, he played in the shadow of his
gifted and handsome older brother, David. Then, in the winter of 1867, David
was killed; he was hit by a fellow ice-skater, fell, and cracked his skull.
Margaret took to her bed under the onslaught of grief, and young James was
dispatched to offer comfort:
The room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from
the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or
perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never
been listless before say, “Is that you?” I think the tone hurt me, for I made
no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously “Is that you?” again. I
thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely
voice, “No, it’s no’ him, it’s just me.” Then I heard a cry, and my mother
turned in bed, and though it was dark I knew that she was holding out her arms.
From here on, James worshipped his dead brother with a devotion that
carried the taint of jealousy. Once, he even entered his mother’s presence
wearing a suit of David’s clothes. The residue of the calamity, as it
eventually seeped into Barrie’s art, was the conviction that a perfect child
who dies on the eve of his fourteenth birthday will be spared the degradation
of growing up, and that the death will be outshone by the thought of the
perfection—so blindingly, perhaps, that the boy will seem scarcely to have
passed away at all.
We think of Barrie as one of the chief explorers—or, in a gloomier
light, invaders—of childhood. Yet the childhood that gripped him most tightly
was not his own but that of other people; it is almost as if his own did not exist.
The souls around him were like books, ripe for perusal, and he preferred their
opening chapters. Hence “Margaret Ogilvy” (1896), which in part is a memoir of
his mother’s youth. One of Barrie’s biographers, Denis Mackail, calls it “that
distressingly human and inhuman book,” presumably because it demonstrates, even
more than “Peter Pan,” the weird twinning of Barrie’s gifts—an almost
telepathic self-spiriting into the emotions of others, and a professional
shamelessness about baring them in public. Listen to his proud recital of
Margaret Ogilvy’s deprivations: “She was eight when her mother’s death made her
mistress of the house and mother to her little brother, and from that time she
scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed.” At once we see that image skipping
the generations, from mother to son, and from the son to the Wendy of “Peter
Pan,” who was obliged, when she flew to Neverland and found a host of unclaimed
children, to become a mother before her time.
The Barrie family—James was one of
ten children, two of whom died in infancy—was ardently ambitious for its sons,
the tool of that ambition was education, and Barrie duly studied at Dumfries
Academy and at Edinburgh University. He emerged timid but industrious, and
plowed a path into local and then national journalism. He moved to London, and,
in 1887, produced his first novel, which bore the title “Better Dead.” Within a
few years, thanks largely to some sharp, rosy fictions set in Scotland and to
“The Little Minister,” a quaint tale of a minister who falls in love with a
Gypsy, he had acquired not just a solid readership but a serious reputation;
all of a sudden, we find him in correspondence with Thomas Hardy and Robert
Louis Stevenson. He started writing for the theatre, kicking off with a parody of
Ibsen, and indulging in the traditional sport of losing his heart to the
leading ladies. His most acute biographer, Andrew Birkin—whose “J. M. Barrie
and the Lost Boys” has been granted a timely reissue (Yale; $18.95)—digs up
some astounding entries from Barrie’s private notebooks. Some are composed in
the third person, as jottings toward a possible novel:
—Greatest horror—dream I am married—wake up shrieking.
—Even while proposing, the thought of how it wd read go
thro’ him.
—He never has contact with a woman—If he had this might have
made him exult less in making women love him.
In 1894, ignoring these self-cautions, Barrie married an actress named
Mary Ansell, bestowing upon her, by way of a wedding present, a St. Bernard
dog. The saga of Barrie is full of long-sufferers, the longest being Barrie
himself, but nobody could follow its course and not spare a wealth of pity for
Mary. Her husband loved many women, but the evidence suggests that the actual
making of love lay outside his interests, or beyond his grasp. The creator of
“Peter Pan” never had a child of his own. To us, the bewildering thing (and to
Mary, surely the roughest insult) was that Barrie, far from burying his secret
incapacities, dug them up like a pirate uncovering a treasure chest: “Grizel, I
seem to be different from all other men; there seems to be some curse upon me…
. You are the only woman I ever wanted to love, but apparently I can’t.” That
comes from “Tommy and Grizel,” the tale of a devastated marriage which was
published six years into Barrie’s own. At one point, the narrator says of
Tommy, the fruitless husband, “He was a boy who could not grow up,” adding, of
Grizel, “He gave her all his affection, but his passion, like an outlaw, had
ever to hunt alone.” So where did the distinguished author like to hunt?
The answer is specific: Kensington Gardens, the
broad, half-empty stretch of greenery next to Hyde Park. Here, in 1898, Barrie
met a pair of boys, George and Jack Llewellyn Davies, aged five and four, who
walked there with their nurse. They were amused by the small Scotsman with the
enormous dog. Barrie talked with children, rather than at or down to them, and
the meetings with George and Jack became drawn into the rhythm of their days.
To our panicked eyes, such a relationship would be unthinkable—or, if thought
about, nipped in the bud. We assume that a strange man, nearing forty, in a
public place can offer only one thing to children still in knickerbockers, and
that is harm. We would call the police, or, at least, call our children away.
If we discovered the man to be a celebrity, we might call our lawyers, or, if
we were feeling spiteful, the newspapers. And, if we were later to read what he
wrote about our children, in an account so lightly ornamented as hardly to count
as fiction, we might not be responsible for our actions:
I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he
would give me a kiss. He shook his head about six times, and I was in despair.
Then the smile came, and I knew that he was teasing me only. He now nodded his
head about six times.
That was the prettiest of all his exploits.
The tone of this, written in 1902, grates nastily on modern ears. Ever
since “Lolita,” we have realized that one of the pleasures of the child-seeker
is not merely to play games with the victim but to pretend that the victim is
complicit in that game, or even pulling the strings; thus is the burden of
guilt shifted smoothly away from the raptor. Did readers of 1902 feel nothing
of the sort, or are we the guilty party, unable to conjure a time when
playfulness was its own reward, rather than an alibi or a ruse? The passage
comes from “The Little White Bird,” Barrie’s half-disguised novel about George
Llewellyn Davies. In the book, George becomes David—note the name of Barrie’s
dead brother—and is befriended by the bachelor narrator, who pretends to have a
son of his own. This son, he then declares, has died (somewhere around here,
the sheer weirdness of Barrie starts to multiply out of control), and he uses
the nonexistent death to ingratiate himself further with David’s parents. He is
especially pleased that David’s mother, Mary—note the name of Barrie’s wife—is
“culpably obtuse to my sinister design,” the design being “to burrow under
Mary’s influence with the boy, expose her to him in all his vagaries, take him
utterly from her and make him mine.” Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may
retire to consider your verdict.
Yet the stubborn fact remains: J. M. Barrie was innocent. He no more
sought sex from children than he did from women. Andrew Birkin, who knows more
about Barrie than anybody else (the last Llewellyn Davies boy, Nico, having
died in 1980), has arrived at the balanced conclusion that the author of “Peter
Pan” was “a lover of childhood, but was not in any sexual sense the paedophile
that some claim him to have been.” His sinister design, it turns out, was not
to corrupt boys with the murk of adult desire but to slough off any corruptions
of his own, rejoin the unadulterated—the very word shows up the impurities in
grownup life—and shrink once more, as best he could, into boyhood. This plan of
Barrie’s may have been creepy and pathetic, but it was not a crime, and, as
weaknesses go, it may be the most widespread in the world, haunting every
harassed male who lies awake and tells himself how much simpler everything was
as a kid.
At the heart of “The Little White Bird” is a story that the narrator
slowly invents not only for David’s entertainment but with David’s help. It is
about a boy named Peter Pan, who lives in Kensington Gardens. The first name is
a direct allusion to the fact that George Llewellyn Davies now had another
brother, Peter, born in 1897. There would be two more: Michael, born in 1900,
and Nicholas (or Nico), born in 1903; a sisterless five in all, rather than the
four of “Finding Neverland.” The film also opts for Peter Llewellyn Davies as
the focus of Barrie’s attention—a not unnatural choice, given his name, but the
wrong one, for it was really the whole gang of them whom Barrie loved. If he had
a favorite, it was Michael, but, as the notorious preface to “Peter
Pan”—dedicated “To the Five”—explains, “I always knew that I made Peter by
rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce
a flame… . That is all he is, the spark I got from you.”
The course of the flame is a tricky one to trace, and what matters is
that in Peter Pan Barrie achieved the rarest alchemy of all, the one that no
writer can plan or predict: he invented a myth. The idea of Peter seems to have
been flying around forever, a constant of humanity, and all that Barrie had to
do was reach up and pluck the boy out of the air. After his first appearance,
in “The Little White Bird,” Peter outgrew the nest; the passages about him were
revised and republished, with illustrations of delicate grotesquerie by Arthur
Rackham, under the title “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,” in 1906. In the
meantime, the play, after its London début, was triumphantly staged in New York
in the winter of 1905. The novel we now think of as “Peter Pan” is actually
called “Peter and Wendy,” and it first saw the light in 1911. It is worth
emphasizing that much of this material is close to unreadable—sometimes because
it is sappy with sentiment but mostly because it is just too gnarled and
knotted for current taste (increasing one’s reverence for Rackham, who saw its
warpings at once), let alone for that of our children. What on earth will they
make, for instance, of the opening pages of the novel, in which Mr. and Mrs.
Darling, Wendy’s parents, are seen deciding whether they can afford to have
more babies—literally adding up the doctors’ fees for the infant diseases
(“measles one five, German measles half a guinea”) that they will be called
upon to nurse?
Barrie would remonstrate severely on this point. He would claim that
children cleave naturally to the misshapen and the morbid; like Roald Dahl, he
admired the heartlessness and cunning of the young far more than he did their
good behavior, and, for every mention of skipping fairies in “Peter Pan,” there
will be some dashed-off sketch of alarming and sanguinary malice. Look between
the cracks of the play, in the stage directions, and you will find his prose
hardening and cooling into casual sadism, as in this line about Tootles, one of
the pirate boys in Neverland:
He has been in fewer adventures than any of them because the
big things constantly happen while he has stepped round the corner; he will go
off, for instance, in some quiet hour to gather firewood, and then when he
returns the others will be sweeping up the blood.
The most unfeeling child of all, needless to say, is Peter Pan himself.
He flits through the play and the novels, and he has flitted through a century
of stage productions and movies, and one result of those flittings is that we
regard him as airy and innocuous. In truth, he is mean and green, a
mini-monster of capering egotism; could there be any more dazzling proof of
self-regard than a boy who first shows up in pursuit of his own shadow? In the
early versions of the play, there is no Captain Hook, because there is no need
for him; Peter supplies all the cruelty that is required. As “Peter Pan in
Kensington Gardens” makes clear, our hero escaped from his parents as a baby
and, after much prevarication, decided to forsake them for the unwithering
plea-sure gardens of Kensington. He would fly back like a bird to watch his
sleeping mother, but, once the decision was made, his way was barred—“When we
reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.” Such is
Peter’s tragedy, but only because it was also his choice, and we should recall
the terrifying title that Barrie appended to an early draft of the story: “The
Boy Who Hated Mothers.”
And what of the real mother? Sylvia Llewellyn
Davies first met Barrie at a dinner party in 1897; as the evening progressed,
she realized that he was the man who wiggled his eyebrows at her children in
the park. This revelation seems to have charmed rather than offended her;
Barrie and she would be intimate friends for the rest of her life. Kate
Winslet, who plays Sylvia in “Finding Neverland,” is ideal for the role,
because she radiates that peculiar ease which starts to appear in photographs
toward the end of the nineteenth century—no longer prim and straitened but
open-faced, trusting, educated, and not without flickers of fire. In short,
Sylvia (the daughter of a fast-witted literary clan, the du Mauriers) was
altogether more modern than her husband, Arthur—scholar, lawyer, and stiff. Yet
he, too, adored his boys, and it may be unfair of “Finding Neverland” to elide
him, for streamlining purposes, from the scene; by the time that Johnny Depp
meets Kate Winslet, she is already a widow, whereas Arthur was very much alive
when Barrie first entered the consciousness—and, little by little, the home—of
the Llewellyn Davies family. Soon, he was staying for tea, and then to wish the
boys good night, and before long the Llewellyn Davieses were invited down to
the Barries’ house in the country for idyllic vacations. He began as Mr. Barrie
the author, and grew into Uncle Jim. It was all too much for Barrie’s wife,
who, in the end, sought understandable consolation in the arms of another man;
Barrie, in turn, sought a divorce, which was granted in 1909.
“Finding Neverland” is a weepie, and some viewers will mock it on that
score, but it needs to be defended. First, because these days a good weepie is
hard to find. And, second, because there is so much to weep about—far more, in
fact, than you would gather from the film, which closes decorously after the
death of Sylvia. (If you want a more accurate and leisurely testament, you
could go online and order the DVD of “J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys”—a
wonderful TV drama, written by Andrew Birkin and running to four and a half
hours, that the BBC produced in 1978, with Ian Holm providing the definitive
Barrie.) From the moment that Barrie met George and Jack, and started to ponder
the means by which they might be rendered immortal, the story becomes a dismal
catalogue of mortality:
1907—Arthur Llewellyn Davies dies from cancer of the jaw.
1910—Sylvia dies of lung cancer. The five boys are orphaned; Barrie is
made their guardian.
1915—George is killed in the First World War, fighting with his regiment
in Flanders.
1921—Michael, an undergraduate at Oxford, is drowned while swimming with
a friend. The two bodies, when recovered, are found clinging together.
All of this was enough to wreck Barrie, or, at least, to throw
intolerable shadows over the remainder of his life. Few of his works, aside
from “Peter Pan” and his desert-island comedy of class conflict, “The Admirable
Crichton,” are remembered now, yet in 1922 he was invested with the Order of
Merit, the grandest of British honors. He died in 1937, and we should be
thankful that he didn’t live to be a hundred, and so to witness the terrible
final act. On April 5, 1960, Peter Llewellyn Davies, by then an esteemed
publisher, threw himself under a subway train in London. We should not presume
to read a mind in torment, but we may note in passing that, if he had lived
another month, he would have reached the centenary of Barrie’s birth and thus,
one imagines, a fresh flurry of interest in “Peter Pan”—“that terrible
masterpiece,” in the words of Peter Llewellyn Davies. His numerous comments on
the genesis of the work, as quoted in Janet Dunbar’s 1970 biography of Barrie,
are judicious, amused, and apparently unperturbed. But the effect of “Peter
Pan” was like that of those iron bars on the hero’s family home; it is a kind of
prison drama played onstage as a slice of festive cheer, and it locked the
Llewellyn Davies boys into the garden of pre-puberty as surely as Pan himself
is locked out from his mother’s embrace.
Does that make Barrie the bringer of mischance, after all? Peter “is
never touched by any one in the play,” a stage direction in “Peter Pan” reads,
and Barrie never touched his young charges—as Peter Llewellyn Davies
confirmed—with anything more than affection. Once Arthur and Sylvia had died,
Barrie, in loco parentis, fulfilled his duties with diligence and pride. But
the damage, unwitting as it was, had been done long before, not by Barrie the
middle-aged man but by Barrie the successful author; in making the Five the
tinder for Peter Pan, he treated them as ideal spirits made flesh, and no child
should be freighted with such an embarrassing burden. Their innocence was
imperilled from the moment that it became prime-quality material for his
elaborate public fantasies, and there may never have been a more desperate or
acquisitive dedication than the one at the start of “Peter Pan in Kensington
Gardens”: “To Sylvia and Arthur Llewellyn Davies and their boys (my boys).”
Barrie was a wounded creature, from his earliest youth, and his probing
of that wound is what makes “Peter Pan” so enduringly painful to read. Toward
the end of the novel, an immutable Peter drops in to find the adult Wendy, now
a mother herself, as if he were the ghost of David Barrie, still cold from that
skating accident, alighting beside Margaret Ogilvy. The tensions are bald and
excruciating:
He was a little boy, and she was grown up. She huddled by the
fire not daring to move, helpless and guilty, a big woman.
“Hullo, Wendy,” he said, not noticing any difference, for he
was thinking chiefly of himself; and in the dim light her white dress might
have been the nightgown in which he had seen her first.
“Hullo, Peter,” she replied faintly, squeezing herself as
small as possible. Something inside of her was crying, “Woman, woman, let go of
me.”
Is this really the stuff of classic children’s fiction? Do people still
read “Peter Pan,” or has Peter shrunk to a brand by now, a chirping Disney
figure wrenched from the unsettling landscapes where he originally appeared? If
so, he demands restitution, for he sprang from the mind of an oddball, and he
is not alone. Consider Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and J. M. Barrie: the
stammerer with the camera, the wandering epileptic, and the coughing frequenter
of playgrounds. The great dreamers of English children’s literature were not,
as it happens, dreamy types at all but exacting, even pedantic, in the
dramatizing of their fathomless unhappiness. If their characters are pricked by
a helpless urge to travel—down a rabbit hole, to sea in a sieve, second star to
the right and straight on till morning—it is because there is always something,
a drab existence or a dreadful past, that begs to be fled. Open a page of
“Harry Potter,” by contrast, and you know that it was written by a clever,
funny woman of sound mind, with a keen commercial eye and a Barrie-like love of
the fizzing narratives for which children naturally thirst; but there is
nothing smarting beneath, no ominous beat of the heartsick. Harry will grow up,
and we think it only proper that he should; but will he continue to taunt and
haunt us, a hundred years from now, like the boy who never did?
© http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/22/041122crat_atlarge
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