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? ♦
