J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan
by Andrew Birkin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andrew BirkinEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-07-11
ISBN: 0300098227
Number of pages: 344
Publisher: Yale University Press
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Book Reviews of J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan
Book Review: "Don't Turn Up The Light!"
Summary: 5 Stars
Finally back in print after a quarter of a century, Andrew Birkin's J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys: The Love Story That Gave Birth To Peter Pan (1979) is a fully realized, mesmerizing, and genuinely tragic book that succeeds on every level. As the title suggests, the book is not only a biography of Scottish playwright and novelist J. M. Barrie, but of the Llewelyn Davies family, whose five sons, with Barrie's dead brother, David, inspired the creation Peter Pan, one of Western literature's most enduring and suitably timeless figures. By drawing heavily on Barrie's notebooks as well as his and the Llewelyn Davies family's letters and other correspondence, the text allows the large cast of participants to tell their story in piecemeal fashion. The result, which resembles an elaborate mosaic, is a poignant reflection on tragic events, both those which might have been averted and those, like disease and the Great War, which could not have been.
J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys is also an excellent illustration of Freud's theory of Family Romance in both its constructive and destructive aspects. The sentimental Barrie was deeply tied to and haunted by his own familial relationships, a psychology he brought to and projected upon the Llewelyn Davies family after becoming enchanted by two of their young boys in Kensington Gardens. Barrie was a middle aged and childless man, if a very successful one, at that time in his life, and his manipulative and interloping intrusion into the family has been a subject of speculation by historians and literary scholars ever since.
Though ostensibly nothing less than financially generous and well-intentioned, as Humphrey Carpenter illustrated in Secret Gardens (1985), even Barrie's earliest work inspired by the Llewelyn Davies boys, The Little White Bird (1902, later reissued as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), contained material which suggested that Barrie's fascination with the boys was potentially inappropriate. In one passage, a very young boy, modeled on George Llewelyn Davies, invites himself into a grown man's bed with language that is simultaneously seductive, hesitant, and tender. The narrator, who stands in for Barrie, accepts the boy's invitation, stating, "It is what I have been wanting all the time," like a breathless, succumbing lover. Climbing into bed, the young boy then sleeps "on and across" the narrator, "retains possession" of the man's "finger," and "occasionally" awakens him to assert that "he was sleeping with me."
So obsessively tied to the Llewelyn Davies boys was Barrie that when his favorite, the sensitive, brilliant, and troubled Michael, drowned under unusual circumstances at 17, Birkin is accurately able to state that Barrie's life was now rendered "utterly pointless" without him; Barrie's comment was "for ever and ever I am thinking of him." Though Michael undoubtedly loved Barrie, he was plagued by night terrors throughout his boyhood, which may have possibly arisen not only from Barrie's passive-aggressive takeover of the boy's family, but from Barrie's own narrowly fixated and smothering love. After mother Sylvia Llewelyn Davies' early death, Barrie went so far as to misrepresent her will in such a manner as to give himself duo guardianship over the children. Not surprisingly, two of the boys, Jack and Peter, neither of whom were Barrie favorites, eyed him with increasing suspicion and thinly-veiled hostility as they grew into adolescence and beyond.
Barrie, however, was not the only presence in the boys' lives guided by inappropriately managed emotion: in later years, their beloved nanny, Mary Hodgson, who detested Barrie and fought a protracted cold war with him over the boys' affections for years, eventually refused to acknowledge their young wives with such vehemence that she induced a miscarriage in one, before finally acknowledging her jealousy and surrendering her position.
Part of the sadness inherent in J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys is the genuine tragedy that arises, against the backdrops of Kensington Gardens, Eton, and the London theater, from the unrelenting destruction of the high Edwardian ideals and truly noble characters that most of those involved embodied. As the numerous photographs attest, the early life of the handsome Llewelyn Davies family was loving, hopeful, relatively prosperous, and enchanted, but the coming years brought disfigurement from facial tumors, cancer, the boys orphaned at early ages, the deaths of vital family members in War World I, and at least one verifiable suicide among them. Barrie's apparently celibate marriage collapsed, and a key figure in his personal and professional life died during the sinking of the Lusitania.
Amidst these tragedies and those of Barrie's youth arose the transcendent figure of Peter Pan, the apparently indestructible boy who, by willfully failing to mature, believes he has discovered a means of permanently avoiding the tragedies inherent in the normal cycle of life. But wayward, thoughtless, selfish, and repeatedly manifesting other unmistakable signs of sociopathology, deluded Peter in fact only condemns himself to an existence of eternal isolation and the repetitious loss of those he chooses as companions, as Peter And Wendy (1911, reissued as Peter Pen and Wendy in 1921 and eventually as Peter Pan) makes evident in the passage in which the Darling children finally return to their parents from the Neverland: "There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."
An even more grueling scene follows in the final chapter, in which, years later, the unreflective Peter visits Wendy, expecting to find a young girl, only to be confronted by a mature women, with children of her own, standing in a dimly-lit room. Vaguely sensing the truth, "at last a fear assailed him," leading Peter to cry out, in a telling phrase that applies to J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys as a whole, "Don't turn up the light!"
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