BIO-ARTICLE ABOUT J.M. BARRIE
On the morning of
April 6,
1960, the New York Times announced: "BARRIE'S PETER PAN KILLED
BY A
LONDON SUBWAY TRAIN." Newspapers around the English-speaking world
played
with the idea that an "immortal" -- a publishing executive by the
name of Peter Davies -- had ended his life. Shocking notices
like, "PETER
PAN STOOD ALONE TO DIE" and "PETER PAN'S DEATH LEAP" silenced
other important news of the day. An article in the Daily Express
of
London read:
"Until he died at 68
[he was actually 63] Peter Davies was Peter Pan. He was the Little Boy
Who
Never Grew Up; the boy who believed in fairies. The name was a gift to
him from
playwright Sir James Barrie, and Peter Davies hated it all his life.
But he was
never allowed to forget it until, as a shy, retiring publisher, he fell
to his
death on Tuesday night."
The Daily
Express informed its readers not of
Mr.
Davies' publishing accomplishments but of the loathing he felt about
being
associated with Peter Pan. Davies' life was an unhappy one; despite many
attempts to distance himself, he felt the Never Never Land pirate-killer
overshadowed him. The coroner pronounced Davies' death a suicide,
remarking
that "the balance of [his] mind was disturbed." We will never understand
why Davies detested his connection to the character that thrills so
many.
But despite the
public's
beliefs, Peter Davies was not the only model for Peter Pan. J.M.
Barrie's
character is an artful gathering of Sir James's own childhood
experiences in Scotland
and the precious time he shared with the Davies family of London. Barrie
masterfully sculpted his Peter Pan play and novel from a mass of facts
and
fantasy that is difficult to untangle. Nevertheless, Barrie's adventure
story
was the consequence of his untold search for love; Peter Pan
served as a
consolation for the lack of affection he received from the two most
important
women in his life -- his mother Margaret Ogilvy and his actress-wife,
Mary
Ansell.
James Matthew Barrie, born in the small
Scottish
town of Kirriemuir on May 9, 1860, inherited his mother's passion for
storytelling. From the time James was three, his mother charmed him with
fantastic tales of her childhood spent in Kirriemuir -- a weaving
community
that represented a quaint Scotland long vanished. Many of Margaret's
stories
came from the Auld Licht [Old Lights], a religious sect to which
Margaret had belonged before her marriage. These tales, or
Idylls, fired
young Barrie's imagination, and later provided him with ample source
material
for his articles and novels. In his mother's biography, Margaret
Ogilvy,
Barrie tells how much the stories about his mother -- the little girl
who sold
water-cress -- occupied his thoughts.
"This romantic
little
creature took such hold of my imagination that I cannot eat water-cress
even
now without emotion. I lay in bed wondering what she would be up to in
the next
number; I have lost trout because when they nibbled my mind was
wandering with
her; my early life was embittered by her not arriving regularly."
In awe of his
mother, and
perhaps jealous that his own experiences paled in comparison, James
decided at
a young age that he, too, would have stories to
tell.
Barrie braved a
trying
childhood. When he was only six, tragedy befell the family. While away
at
school, James's thirteen-year- old brother David, a talented boy and
Margaret's
favorite child, died in a skating accident. James would always struggle
for his
mother's love and respect; he felt he had to fill the shoes of his late
brother. Perhaps by becoming a successful writer he could finally win
his
mother's affection. Despite his efforts, Margaret's grief over David
death
intensified as the years passed. Unwittingly, she alienated her other
children.
James, an impressionable boy, yearned for his mother's love and
suffered in her
absence. In Margaret Ogilvy Barrie writes, "She [Margaret] lived
twenty-nine years after his [David] death. . . But I had not made her
forget
the bit of her that was dead; in those nine-and-twenty years [David]
was not
removed one day farther from her." Even on her death-bed, Margaret
struggled with the pain of losing her pride and joy -- a struggle that
unintentionally shut James from her heart.
As a result of his
mother's
neglect, Barrie grew emotionally distant. At Dumfries Academy, he
quickly
immersed himself in school life, playing football, taking part in the
debating
society, and frequently visiting the local theater. "The theatre in
Dumfries [was] the first I ever entered" Barrie writes in a journal,
"so it is the one I like best. I entered many times in my school days,
and
always tried to get the end seat in the front row of the pit. . . . I
sat there
to get rid of stage illusion and watch what the performers were doing
in the
wings. Such doings led inevitably to the forming of a dramatic club at
school
for which I wrote my first play, Bandelero the Bandit. . . .
[Bandelero]
had one character who was a combination of [my] favorite characters in
fiction."
Barrie and his
friend
Wellwood Anderson wrote to Sir Henry Irving, the celebrated actor, to
enlist
his support of the Dumfries Dramatic Club. Despite his passion for
theater,
Barrie's shyness worsened, due in part to his small, frail stature. As
he
neared his fifteenth birthday, Barrie jotted down his sense of
insecurity in
one of his school notebooks. "The boys write on walls, [a] name of boy
and
girl, coupling them together. As they never did it to me, I wrote my
own with
girl's name. . . . [I] am ashamed at being small enough to travel half
ticket
by rail." At seventeen Barrie barely reached five feet and began to
avoid
social gatherings.
J.M. Barrie's first
writing
success came in 1882 as a journalist for the Nottingham Journal
with a
series called Auld Licht Idylls. These articles, inspired by his
mother's anecdotes, featured the colorful, gossipy characters of
Kurriemuir.
The articles touched numerous readers. The Auld Licht tales
charmed
people with their witty yet cynical depiction of different types of
Scots. In
Andrew Birkin's biography of Barrie, he describes the appeal of the
Auld
Licht series. "Barrie's approach was to enter the mind of another
for
the space of a column, adopt the standpoint least expected by the
reader, then
proceed to inject into the affair as much cynicism and laconic humor as
his
spirits could muster." Barrie injected sentiment into his more acerbic
caricatures to make his characters lively and entertaining. He had
found his
niche in the literary world. His articles quickly drew large audiences,
and
with this encouragement he turned his attention to his first love --
playwriting.
The years following
the Auld
Licht articles brought Barrie enormous success in both prose and
playwriting. Long before the creation of Peter Pan, he enjoyed
fame with
Better Dead (his first novel), The Admirable Crichton,
A
Window in Thrums, What Every Woman Knows, My Lady
Nicotine
(extolling the joys of smoking), and Ibsen's Ghost. Ibsen's
Ghost,
a parody on Hedda Gabler, provided him with his first stage hit;
one
reviewer noted that "Barrie is the most kindly and pungent satirist."
Although The Times observed that Barrie could be "as hard as
nails,
as cruel as the grave [and] as cynical as the Fiend," he balanced his
hard
edge with raillery -- and this, along with kind reviews by authors
Henry James
and Robert Louis Stevenson -- gained him a worldwide readership. As a
result of
Barrie's popularity, famous actors and actresses -- Minnie Palmer, Irene
Vanburgh, Maude Adams -- welcomed the chance to act in his
productions.
In July 1894, Barrie
married Mary Ansell, a stunning actress who played opposite Irene
Vanburgh in
Barrie's second play, Walker, London. He fell in love with the
young
starlet who had run her own touring company. Despite their mutual
attraction,
the marriage floundered. Barrie the writer expressed some of the most
delicate
emotions one person could have for another, but Barrie the husband was
rigid
and unemotional. This malaise, together with the couple's inability to
have
children -- both Mary and James desperately longed for a family and
lavished
love on Porthos, their dog -- ultimately led Barrie to seek affection
from
other people's children and created an unbreachable chasm between him
and his
wife.
Barrie's personal
failures
did not affect his triumph in the literary world. By the end of 1897,
Barrie's
name as a playwright was established on both sides of the Atlantic, due
mostly
to the success of his play The Little Minister, which premiered
in New
York at Frohman's Empire Theater on September 27, 1897. The play,
starring
Maude Adams, went on to give over three hundred performances, breaking
all
Broadway records. To celebrate New Year's Eve, Barrie accepted an
invitation to
Sir George and Lady Lewis's dinner party -- an event that would change
the
course of his life and ultimately give birth to Peter
Pan.
The dinner party
consisted
mainly of prestigious lawyers -- Sir George's clientele included such
notables
as the Prince of Wales -- fashionable actors, artists, politicians,
musicians,
and writers. Barrie was seated next to "the most beautiful creature he
had
ever seen," a lady named Mrs. Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the wife of a
young
barrister. Intrigued by this beauty with "a tip-tilted nose, wide, grey
eyes. . . . and a crooked smile," Barrie watched as Sylvia concealed a
few
small desserts under her coat. When she noticed his stare, she said
calmly,
"It's for Peter [my] youngest." Struck by her honesty, the two
engaged in a lively conversation. She was the former Miss Sylvia
Jocelyn du
Maurier, the daughter of George du Maurier, author of Peter
Ibbetson and
someone with whom Barrie was well acquainted. As the discussion ensued,
a
strange parallelism in their lives became clear; Barrie had met her
eldest son
George several times during his walks in Kensington Gardens, his
favorite park.
Sylvia told Barrie that her son would come home with their nurse, Mary,
who
told her about a man who entertained the Davies boy by "wiggling his
ears
and perform[ing] magic tricks with his eyebrows" and telling him stories
about fairies, murders, pirates, and treasure. Barrie confirmed that he
was the
mysterious earwiggler and that her son George, known fondly to Barrie
only as
"the boy in the bright red tam-o'-shanter," had influenced the
development of a character in his new play The Little Minister.
Thrilled, Sylvia invited Barrie to the Davies' London home -- a meeting
that
sparked the genesis of Peter Pan.
In an early draft
of Peter
Pan, Barrie writes, "There never was a simpler, happier family until the
coming of Peter Pan." Indeed, he refers to his own intrusion into the
Davies' lives. For Barrie, the blithe, close-knit family represented
the life
that he could never experience with his wife -- Barrie's relationship
with Mary
grew steadily worse as every year failed to produce children. To
compensate for
his feeling of sterility, Barrie took to walking with the Davies'
children
every afternoon in the park, entertaining them with comic bits he was
developing for his next drama. The bold cockiness of the Davies'
children,
George in particular, reminded Barrie of his own childhood when he,
too, looked
at the world in a carefree way. The antics of the Davies' boys
transported
Barrie backwards to the age of six. In a letter to his sister, he
remembers how
the theme of "a lost childhood" first occurred to him while he observed
his mother console herself with the notion that David -- who died as a
boy --
would remain a child forever. In Margaret Ogilvy, he sadly notes
the
ending of his childhood:
"The horror of my
boyhood was that I knew a time would come when I must give up the games
[cricket and football] and how it was to be done I saw not. This agony
still
returns to me in dreams, when I catch myself playing marbles, and look
on with
cold displeasure; I felt that I must continue playing in
secret."
Barrie combined his
recollections
of the past with his daily adventures with the Davies' kids, and
eventually the
theme of "eternal childhood" became his main focus. Rediscovering
these memories not only brought Barrie great joy but also rekindled
feelings of
tremendous loss.
From January until
July
1900, Barrie explored the theme of a "lost childhood" in stories he
traded back and forth with young George. In the fall of 1900, he
formulated a
complete anecdote that two years later gave birth to Peter Pan.
The
highlight of Barrie's after-school walks with George in Kensington Park
were,
in their early stage, stories of an infant, George's baby brother
Peter, who
could fly. In the beginning, this tale was meant to answer George's
question
regarding babies and perambulators. Barrie spun the tale to entertain
George
with the notion that before baby buggies, infants could fly. The story
reasons
that "all children were once birds" and could lift off whenever they
pleased. He used this idea to explain certain mundane phenomena: "[T]he
reason
there are bars on the windows and a tall fender by the fire is because
[children] sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to
fly
through the window or up the chimney. Peter, however, was still able to
fly
[because] his mother had forgotten to weigh him at birth. He therefore
escaped
through the unbarred window and flew back to Kensington
Gardens."
Then, Barrie
created a
twist in the story and presented the young listener with a challenge of
truth.
"If you think he was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows
how
completely you have forgotten your own young days." He instructed
George,
"think back hard, and pressing [your] hands to temples, think even
harder." Once this was done, Barrie suggested to the lad that now he
could
recollect a youthful desire to the tree-tops, a yearning when he lay in
bed to
flee as soon as his mother was asleep.
As time passed, the
story
developed, yet an inherent inconsistency in the narrative became clear.
If
Peter could fly, why would he be content to stay in his perambulator?
Ultimately, this is the query that gave birth to the second Peter; this
second
Peter was Peter Pan, a boy half-bird, half-earthbound, named for the
Greek god
that symbolized natural forces. Pan was the ancient god of forests,
flocks, and
shepherds, represented with the head, chest, and arms of a man and the
legs,
horns, and ears of a goat. Pan belongs to the pastoral world and evokes
unbridled sexuality. Barrie's inclusion of Pan -- influenced by Maurice
Hewlett's newly published play, Pan and the Young Shepherd,
which opened
with the line, "Boy, boy wilt thou be a boy forever?" -- enabled
Barrie's mind to explode with possibilities. By fusing Peter with Pan
the
supernatural dryad, Peter could embody both innocent and magical
qualities:
Peter could simultaneously yearn for his mother's love and be capable of
conquering a murderous villain. Peter's enchanted Pan-side granted him
the
power to remain a child forever.
From this point
onwards,
Peter Pan became the major topic of discussion between Barrie and young
George,
as Barrie remarks in The Little White Bird:
"The following is
the
way with [our] story. First I tell [George] and then he tells it to me,
the
understanding being that it is quite a different story; then I retell
it with
additions. . . . the bald narrative and most of the moral reflections
are mine,
though not all, for this boy can be a stern moralist; but the
interesting bits
about the ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly
reminiscences
of [his], recalled by pressing his hands to his temples and thinking
hard."
With the theme and
the main
character further established, the story went through two major
developments
before becoming the play with which so many are familiar
today.
The first expansion occurred in the summer of 1901, when Barrie
accompanied the Davies' family on their vacation to a retreat on Black
Lake
Island. He spent all of his time with the boys, taking their pictures
and
recording the various skits and games they played -- mostly pirates
versus
island Indians. When the vacation ended, Barrie published a book The
Boy
Castaways of Black Lake Island, which told its story through a
series of
photos and captions, for example, "George and Jack outside their
marooner's hut," and "George, Jack and Peter at Black Lake, a coral
island glistening in the sun." The exquisite location of Barrie's
vacation
with the Davies ultimately inspired the creation of Peter Pan's home,
Never
Never Land.
Barrie drew enormous
inspiration for the tailoring of the Peter Pan characters from
each
member of the Davies family. There are unmistakable similarities
between Mr.
Darling and Mr. Davies, the young lawyer; Mrs. Darling and the refined,
nurturing mother Sylvia; the Davies boys and the pirate gang; the
Indians and
The Lost Boys; and the Davies' doting nurse Mary Hodgson and Nana the
dog
(Barrie combined the idea of his dog Porthos with the Davies' nurse
Mary to
insult the "priggish" woman who disliked Barrie's
"meddling" in the Davies' affairs).
The second and final
development of the tale took the form of a one-hundred-page chapter of
Barrie's
novel The Little White Bird, which bears obvious relation to the
early
narratives told to George in Kensington Park. In this version, Peter is
a baby
who flies out the nursery window every day. One time, he is absent too
long and
his mother has forgotten him -- Peter returns after one year and sees
his
mother quietly rocking a new infant son in the nursery. This chapter in
White
Bird brings to light Peter's longing for his mother. Unable to let
Pan
rest, Barrie began working on a play version of the fable in 1903,
completing
the first draft on March 1, 1904. The curtain finally rose on his dream-
play, Peter
Pan, on Tuesday, December 27, at 8:30 p.m. in London under the
direction of
Dion Boucicault, the famous Irish director and playwright. The play met
with
immediate success. Barrie was elated when he read that audiences had
remarked
that he had created a "spell" that had the power to "fling off
the years and whistle childhood back." The endearing subject of Peter
Pan had a similar effect to that of the Auld Licht articles
in the
past. Yet, unlike the Auld Licht tales, the magic of Peter Pan
lies in
Barrie's artful combination of the real world of the Darling nursery
with the
surreal world of Never Never Land.
The special appeal
of Peter
Pan is best expressed by Barrie in a letter he wrote to the Davies
children
in 1905. He writes: "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." Peter is a special character, not only because he
is an amalgam of the mischievous antics of all five of the Davies
children, but
because Peter represents the little part of each of us -- Barrie
included --
that escaped our grasp.
Despite the fact that the final creation of Peter Pan was
served
by Barrie's observation of the Davies family, it is profoundly his own
story.
Barrie remarks in his notes that he --not Peter Davies -- is "the boy
who
wouldn't grow up," giving Peter Pan a more tragic yet everlasting
quality. Barrie wrote the play in an attempt to define his regret of
losing his
childhood and never having a son or daughter like the make-believe
Peter and
Wendy. In a letter to Peter Davies in 1904 after the play's debut,
Barrie
writes, "Sometimes when I am walking in the Gardens, I see a vision and
I
cry, Hurray, there's Peter, and then Luath [his dog] barks joyously,
and we run
to the vision, and then, it turns out to be not Peter but just another
boy. . .
." This statement reveals the sensitivity of the author who received the
distinction "Sir" for his contributions to English
literature.
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