by J. M. Barrie
Unlike characters in most other children’s literature, Peter Pan has achieved mythological status. Even though many people have not read Barrie’s novel or play, Peter Pan is now as well known as Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty. Why is Peter Pan such a memorable drama? The story may be so compelling partly because of its attentiveness to reversibility. Childhood and adulthood, birth and death, boys and girls, dreams and waking life all persistently change places in the story. But they change places in such a way that they reinforce rather than dismantle the oppositions that confuse and distress us. Children do become adults; birth leads to death; boys and girls cannot effortlessly change roles; dreams remain distinct from waking life. Time moves ferociously forward. Even though Peter Pan is the story of a boy who never grows older, the narrative proves that everyone else must age. The first sentence of the novel tells us so: “All children, except one, grow up” (p. 7). While the legend tempts us with achingly desirable unions, it is about the difficulty (if not the impossibility) of fusing disparate worlds: life and death, dreams and reality, masculinity and femininity, childhood and adulthood. Through lively comedy, Peter Pan brilliantly masks the underlying sadness that threatens to pull the story apart.
The heartbreaking undercurrents in Peter Pan become evident when we consider the mirroring between fantasy and reality that took place in J. M. Barrie’s life. Like Peter Pan, Barrie remained a ghostly outsider. He wanted children of his own but instead found himself staring in at the Llewelyn Davies family, with whom he shared no blood relationship. Peter Pan convinces the Darling children to fly away with him in an attempt to take them from their parents and make them his; Barrie inadvertently achieved the same result with the Davies boys. In 1907 Arthur Llewelyn Davies, their father, died of cancer of the jaw. In 1909 James and Mary Barrie were divorced because of her affair with Gilbert Cannan. And in 1910 Sylvia Llewelyn Davies died of cancer. Barrie was left with five boys—age seven to seventeen—all of whom were now orphans left to his care.
What was J. M. Barrie’s relationship with the Davies brothers? There are certainly passages in some of Barrie’s novels that read, a century after their publication, as suspiciously attentive to the attractiveness of little boys. Barrie’s involvement with the Davies boys was unusually close—more intense, perhaps, than typical relationships between parents and their natural offspring. However, Nicholas Llewelyn Davies swore to Barrie’s biographer Andrew Birkin that Barrie never showed one hint of homosexuality or pedophilia toward him or his brothers. Critics have for the most part concluded that Barrie was entirely sexless. Nevertheless, he loved the Davies brothers obsessively. We might even go so far as to say that he was in love with at least two of them, George and Michael. As Barrie himself wrote in Margaret Ogilvy, “The fierce joy of loving too much, it is a terrible thing” (p. 206). Years later, Barrie wrote to George Llewelyn Davies, then twenty-one years old and fighting in World War I:
I do seem to be sadder today than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart. For four years I have been waiting for you to become 21 & a little more, so that we could get closer & closer to each other, without any words needed (quoted in Birkin, p. 228).
Shortly after receiving Barrie’s letter, George was killed in Flanders. This event was probably the most traumatic experience Barrie had endured since his brother’s death. But the worst was still to come. On May 19, 1921, Michael Llewelyn Davies, the fourth of the boys, was drowned while swimming in Oxford with his best friend, Rupert Buxton, who also drowned. Like George, Michael died when he was twenty-one. Rumors circulated that the deaths of Michael and his friend Rupert were intentional, the result of a mutual suicide pact.
Barrie never recovered from Michael’s death. His secretary, Lady Cynthia Asquith, wrote that he looked like a man in a nightmare. He became suicidal and grew quite ill with grief. “All the world is different to me now. Michael was pretty much my world” (letter to Elizabeth Lucas, December 1921; quoted in Birkin, p. 295). He explained in his notebook that he dreamed Michael came back to him, not knowing he had drowned, and that Barrie kept this knowledge from him. The two lived together for another year quite ordinarily though strangely close to each other. Little by little Michael realized what was going to happen to him. Even though Barrie tried to prevent him from swimming, both knew what was sure to happen. Barrie accompanied Michael to the dangerous pool, holding his hand, and when they reached the deadly place, Michael said “good-bye” to Barrie and went into the water and sank. Barrie interrupts his account of the dream with new insight into the import of Peter Pan: “It is as if, long after writing P Pan, its true meaning came back to me, desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.” Although Barrie lived for another sixteen years, he was never able to write successfully after Michael died. The author passed away before the final scene of this tragedy, for Peter Llewelyn Davies, too, eventually took his own life; in 1960 he jumped beneath an underground train in London.
As much as Barrie associated Peter Pan with doomed children who die before they fully mature (such as his brother David, George, and Michael), he also identified with all that made Peter Pan a tragic boy. Barrie wanted to develop into a man—to have a reciprocal relationship with a woman and have children of his own. But as a boy in a man’s body, he was possibly unable to consummate his marriage and would never experience these joys. Instead, he was driven to turn to a family of strangers and to adopt five boys who were not his own. Barrie’s closeness with the Davies children was all-consuming and heartrending. Likewise, Peter Pan’s happiness cloaks a fundamental sorrow. His rebellion against time might be seen as a form of make-believe ; if he could, he would gladly grow up. In the play Peter Pan, Mrs. Darling tries to convince Peter to let her adopt him, and he asks if this means he will have to grow up. When she responds in the affirmative, he says passionately, “I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” But Barrie wisely adds this parenthetical remark: (“So perhaps he thinks, but it is only his greatest pretend”). With this aside, Barrie gives us an important clue as to what makes Peter Pan a tragic boy.
People who read the novel version of Peter Pan for the first time may be surprised by Peter’s fits of sadness, considering that by nature he seems to be such a happy boy. In the chapter “Do You Believe in Fairies?” Barrie explains Peter’s trouble with dreams: “Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence” (p. 115). Even on the night when Peter kills Captain Hook he has “one of his dreams” and he cries in his sleep “for a long time,” while Wendy holds him tight (p. 138). Barrie drew these details about Peter Pan’s dreams from notes he made about Michael Llewelyn Davies. As a child Michael had horrible nightmares or waking dreams, and he used to like for Barrie to sit by his bed at night doing something ordinary, like reading the newspaper. Some of Barrie’s notes about Michael may have been for a sequel to Peter Pan about Peter’s brother, “Michael Pan.” However, this piece never got much further than the title, perhaps because Barrie interwove his notes about Michael into descriptions of Peter in the novel Peter and Wendy. Michael and Peter Pan merged in other ways as well. When Peter and Wendy was first published in 1911, ten years before Michael’s death, Barrie gave the sculptor Sir George Frampton a picture of Michael to use as a model for a statue of Peter Pan. Barrie then had the statue placed in Kensington Gardens one night after Lock-out Time so it would seem the next day to have been put there by magic. The statue still stands in London’s Kensington Gardens.
Although Barrie wrote some fine plays after he lost George, such as Dear Brutus in 1917 and Mary Rose in 1920, he was so wounded by Michael’s death that he could not repeat his past glories. However, he did cont
inue to be recognized in other capacities. In 1922 he received the Order of Merit; in 1929 he gave all rights and royalties from Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children; in 1930 he received an honorary degree from Cambridge, and he was installed as chancellor of Edinburgh University During his later years, Barrie developed a reputation as a public speaker. Nevertheless, his brightest days as a writer were over. He had been writing the play Shall We Join the Ladies?, which appeared in 1921, for Michael and with Michael’s guidance. Barrie did not complete the play after Michael’s death but let it stand as it was. In 1936 his last play, The Boy David, was performed. Based on the Bible, it is about the relationship that develops between Saul and David (who is still a child). Although Saul grows to love David, he feels he must murder him when he realizes that David will replace him as king. Like Peter Pan, The Boy David deals with attraction, terror, and obsession. Barrie had high hopes for the play but was disappointed by its lack of success. The production came to an end after only fifty-five performances, to Barrie’s acute distress. He died shortly afterward, on June 19, 1937, at the age of seventy-seven and, at his request, was buried beside his family in the cemetery at Kirriemuir, his childhood home.
The best piece of Barrie’s writing composed after his series of losses may be his 1928 dedication to the play Peter Pan. The same themes that run through all of Barrie’s important work—the tension between childhood and adulthood, ferocious love and loss, memory and forgetfulness, realism and fantasy—take center stage in Barrie’s dedication. He addresses all five Llewelyn Davies boys as if they are still alive, even though two of them were most likely already dead when he wrote it (George died in 1915 and Michael in 1921). Barrie begins the dedication by confessing that he has no recollection of ever having written Peter Pan. Speculating that he may have written the story, he still gives the boys all the credit: “As for myself, I suppose 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” (Peter Pan and Other Plays, p. 75). Barrie devotes much of the dedication to an exploration of the unsettling passage of time. He maintains that while some say that we are different people at different periods of our lives, he does not believe this. Rather, he supposes we remain the same from start to finish of our lives, “merely passing, as it were, in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house” (p. 78). Reminiscing about his own childhood, he remembers how he read feverishly about desert islands, which he called “wrecked islands.” He pursues himself like a shadow, watching as he becomes an undergraduate who craves to be a real explorer. Still, he goes “from room to room,” until he is a man, real exploration abandoned, though only because no one would have him. Soon he begins to write plays, many of which contain the wrecked islands that fascinated him so much in his youth. And he notes, “with the years the islands grow more sinister.”
Barrie struggles to sustain the belief that we do not change as we grow older, but at last he concedes he may be wrong: “Of course this is over-charged. Perhaps we do change; except a little something in us which is no larger than a mote in the eye, and that, like it, dances in front of us beguiling us all our days. I cannot cut the hair by which it hangs” (p. 79). He concludes with what he considers to be his “grandest triumph,” the best scene by far in Peter Pan, though the scene is not in Peter Pan at all (p. 85). This was the time long after Michael had ceased to believe in magic, the time when Barrie brought him back to the faith, even if only for a few minutes. Michael, Nico and Barrie were on their way in a boat to fish the Outer Hebrides. Even though Michael was excited to begin, he suffered from one pain: the absence of Johnny Mackay—a friend he had made the summer before who could not be with them, as he was in a distant country. As their boat drew nearer to the Kyle of Localsh pier, Barrie told Michael and Nico how this was such a famous wishing pier that all they had to do was to ask for something for their wish to be granted. Nico believed at once, but Michael refused to participate in the game. Barrie asked Michael whom he most wanted to see. When Michael answered “Johnny Mackay,” Barrie told him that it couldn’t do any harm to wish. At last Michael wished (quite contemptuously), and suddenly as the ropes were thrown on the pier, he saw Johnny waiting for him. Thus Barrie ends the dedication:
I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes No. 4 [Michael] was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to he gave me a smile which meant that we understood each other, and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny. As I have said, this episode is not in the play; so though I dedicate Peter Pan to you I keep the smile, with the few other broken fragments of immortality that have come my way (p. 86).
The broken fragments of immortality come our way, too. Of children’s adventures with Peter Pan, Barrie says in the last sentence of his novel, “and so it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless” (p. 159). Miraculously, so it does—for all of us. We follow Barrie from room to room. The window is open. Expectantly, the stars wink and shout. A boy floats, beckoning us from the dream-like night sky. Laughing, but with tears in our eyes, we fly out.
Amy Billone teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She has published articles on both children’s literature and poetry in numerous places, including: Children’s Literature, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Browning Society Notes, Silence, Sublimity and Suppression in the Romantic Period, Victorian Poetry, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies. In 2003 she was awarded the Sidonie Clauss Memorial Prize from Princeton University.
CHAPTER I
Peter Breaks Through
ALL CHILDREN, EXCEPT ONE, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.
Of course they lived at 14, and until Wendy came her mother was the chief one. She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.
The way Mr. Darling won her was this: the many gentlemen who had been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her, and they all ran to her house to propose to her except Mr. Darling, who took a cab and nipped in first, and so he got her. He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon1 could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door.
Mr. Darling used to boast to Wendy that her mother not only loved him but respected him. He was one of those deep ones who know about stocks and shares. Of course no one really knows, but he quite seemed to know, and he often said stocks were up and shares were down in a way that would have made any woman respect him.
Mrs. Darling was married in white, and at first she kept the books perfectly, almost gleefully, as if it were a game, not so much as a Brussels sprout was missing; but by and by whole cauliflowers dropped out, and instead of them there were pictures of babies without faces. She drew them when she should have been totting up.a They were Mrs. Darling’s guesses.
Wendy came first, then John, then Michael.
For a week or two after Wendy came it was doubtful whether they would be able to keep her, as she was another mouth to
feed. Mr. Darling was frightfully proud of her, but he was very honourable, and he sat on the edge of Mrs. Darling’s bed, holding her hand and calculating expenses, while she looked at him imploringly. She wanted to risk it, come what might, but that was not his way; his way was with a pencil and a piece of paper, and if she confused him with suggestions he had to begin at the beginning again.
“Now don’t interrupt,” he would beg of her.
“I have one pound seventeen here,2 and two and six at the office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings, making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven,—who is that moving?—eight nine seven, dot and carry seven—don’t speak, my own—and the pound you lent to that man who came to the door—quiet, child—dot and carry child—there, you’ve done it!—did I say nine nine seven? yes, I said nine nine seven; the question is, can we try it for a year on nine nine seven?”
