J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan by Andrew Birkin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan
Book Review: Sheds a new light on Peter Pan
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book to be a well-researched and moving account of not only Barrie's life but also the lives and deaths of the original "Lost Boys". After reading this book, I read Peter Pan again in a whole new light and enjoyed it even more. I think reading this book is essential in order to fully appreciate the entire Peter Pan experience as it truly helps to bring the characters alive.Book Review: The Many Origins of Peter Pan
Summary: 5 Stars
With the release of the film _Neverland_ to critical and popular acclaim, most people got their first introduction to the life of the creator of Peter Pan, James Matthew Barrie. Film biographies are notorious for their additions and deletions for dramatic or commercial purposes, and while _Neverland_ did fairly well in its telling of a limited part of the story, those who are interested in a larger and fuller picture will love reading _J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story behind Peter Pan_ (Yale University Press) by Andrew Birkin, in a recent new edition. Birkin's work first came out in 1979, after his trilogy of television plays on the theme. He says he is interested in filming an authentic Peter Pan, and he could be trusted to do so, when the original has already been turned into pantomime, cartoon, and the update by Robin Williams and Stephen Spielberg. His loving, sad, and wonderfully illustrated biography shows him to be our leading authority on the story of Peter Pan and how it came to be told.
Barrie was born in 1861 in the weaving village of Kirriemuir in Scotland. When he was six, his older brother died, and Barrie realized that for their mother, the idealized elder brother would always be a boy of thirteen. The theme of the boy who never grew up was to be a constant in Barrie's novels and plays. He was notoriously quiet and shy, as he would be all his life, attracting little observation by others, but observing others constantly. He became a journalist and then a tremendously successful novelist and playwright. He married, but his real love was for children, and he and his wife (who left him for a lover fifteen years later) never had any. The "lost boys" of the title, and the originals of those in Peter Pan, were the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, whom he befriended within nearby Kensington Gardens. The senior Davies were a model couple devoted to each other, but Barrie insinuated himself into the family by his overpowering sense of juvenile fun and by fostering the imaginations of the sons. He became a staple of the family, discomforting the boys' father and causing lifelong resentment in their nursemaid. The fantasy life he led with the boys in Kensington Gardens included dressing up in costume, and the many photographs reproduced here (frequently by Barrie himself) show the boys happily engaged in outdoor amateur theatricals. They sharpened his memory and preoccupation for childhood and were the inspiration for his literary output.
Boys do grow up, of course; George was killed in World War I, and the twenty-year-old Michael drowned with a fellow Oxford undergraduate in an accident or suicide pact. Barrie was devastated; Peter observed that the Davies family had in the end brought him "so much more sorrow than happiness." Birkin's work is not a full biography, but an examination of his relationship with his five boys, and ends quickly after Michael's death. Jack and Nico had prosperous lives, but Peter was troubled by his association with Barrie's masterpiece. He was ragged at Eton for being "the real Peter Pan," and that turned out to be his one link to fame. He became a well known publisher, but when he threw himself under a train at the age of 63, the press noted the death of Peter Pan; he had called _Peter Pan_ "that terrible masterpiece." Peter did amass a six-volume family history, upon which Birkin draws. Birkin's other great sources are Barrie's published works, and his notebooks, which are available on Birkin's fine website, and the wonderful, touching pictures of some very photogenic boys often in costume. Birkin is obviously devoted to his subject, and anyone interested in Peter Pan and Barrie's other writings, will love them more deeply after reading this penetrating portrait.
Book Review: Tragic loss of dear illusions . . .
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book over 15 years ago in an attempt to find out who the author of Peter Pan really was, and what his life was like. It was not a pleasant or easy read. I wanted to forget all about it and just have the enchantment of "Peter Pan," but as with the real life of the author and photographer of "Alice in Wonderland," the truth can wound deeply. But lies and half-truths can never reveal the relationship between biography and art, so one must often face much disturbing information in order to understand the art itself. This is not to say that art is reducible to biography; it is not. There is, nevertheless, a kind of dialectic (God, I do hate to sound so gawdawful jargony, but when it so plain, other words just do not work) between the life of a genius and the art of the same individual. The truth of art can only come from the struggle between an artist's vision and the life that made such a vision a necessity. Yes, a necessity: there are those artists whose lives were so fraught with sheer catastrophe that revelation through a skewed fantasy can be so powerful as to take on a "life" of its own. And this is why it is so grievous to "paint-over" the unpleasant details of such a life. There was a recent film with an appropriately disturbing title: in the attempt to not really "find" Neverland in Barrie's life, the art itself is drained of its truly tragic roots. At the time such "nice" little fantasies are presented, they seem so harmless, but they are not. Successful attempts to eradicate truth can also eradicate the depth of the art itself. "Neverland" is a word that begs a little attention: a land where children "never grow up." This is not to say that they physically die - no - instead they live their lives, as did Barrie, in a desolate, lifeless, and desperately lonely "land" and try, from within their internal isolation, to bring others along for the rides to nowhere and "never." Where else could such a person bring another? If one lives in "Neverland" of the mind, there is nowhere else to lead another - nowhere else to go. And if we do not face unpleasant truths as they are revealed in the crucible where life and art meet, we learn nothing further from the art. It is better, actually, to know nothing of an artist's life than to be fed untruths. I would suggest the readers either read this book and/or see Peter Pan, but would urge them *not* to see Peter Pan after experiencing a false represenation - no matter how "well-performed" the falsehood is presented. The play or story would be meaningless. The truths, whatever you choose to make of them are here in this book, like it or not. And once the genie is out of the bottle (such as when you have been fed a disingenuous Hollywood film or other disingenuous account), to refrain from the truths of an artist's life is a violation of the art. No one can any longer understand or be truly moved by Peter Pan, much less try to interpret it based upon a sugar-coated Hollywood paint-job. And the effect goes on: if other artists were inspired by Barrie's work (perhaps because it touched the nerves of their own catastrophic lives), and all we have is a candy-coated film, their art and whatever in their lives might have inpired their interest in Barrie's work is also distorted. I do not know if truth sets anyone "free," but I do know that untruths distort and harm. And then the distortion goes on . . . This book cuts deep, but struggles for truths, which is what a biography of an artistic genius should try very hard to do.