by J. M. Barrie
Yet he also risks, through a process of cultural entropy, becoming a cartoon version of himself as his story is adapted, appropriated, and recycled. Each new version of Peter Pan seems to lose some of the luster of the original, especially when it migrates into commercial advertisements, comic books, and Disney sequels. Fortunately, we can still go back, and this book offers an opportunity to return to the original Neverland—the first one invented—the one that appears in J. M. Barrie’s stories about Peter Pan. This is not to say that we should not keep reinventing Peter Pan—a figure who has gathered the storybook power of a Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, or Winnie-the-Pooh. But copies are rarely as sharp, clear, and captivating as the original, and Barrie’s Peter Pan gives us something that no one after him managed to capture fully.
At the end of his autobiographical poem The Prelude, William Wordsworth wrote: “What we have loved, / others will love, and we will teach them how.” This volume is dedicated to that proposition, to the belief that stories like Barrie’s can continue to work their magic and that we do not break the spell by knowing more about Peter Pan and his creator. Peter and Wendy serves as the perfect springboard for looking at the many different versions of Peter Pan’s story that came to be written down in the course of Barrie’s lifetime—from the Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island to the first filmscript for Peter Pan. Its presentation here serves also as an opportunity for meditations on many other matters: J. M. Barrie’s own life story, the fortunes of the play Peter Pan, the illustrations created for stories about Peter Pan, and the impact of the boy who would not grow up on the lives not just of luminaries and literati but also of ordinary people. In Peter and Wendy, full chords are sounded on every page, and they resonate powerfully with Barrie’s life, art, and cultural legacy.
Hayley Mills plays Peter Pan on the London stage in 1969. (By permission of Photofest)
At the London Palladium in 1936, Elsa Lanchester played Peter Pan, and her husband, Charles Laughton, took the role of Hook. (By permission of Photofest)
ENTERING PARADISE THROUGH THE BACK DOOR
In a moving memoir about her encounters with C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the cultural critic Laura Miller tells us about her passionate devotion to reading as a child. As an adult, she found herself disappointed in some respects when she tried to go back, disillusioned by the many ideological wrong turns in books she had loved as a child. Yet she did not simply dismiss those stories and condemn them as outdated and obsolete. Instead she found a way to renew her love and appreciation of her childhood reading. “What if I decided to know even more, to learn more, about how the Chronicles came to be written and all the various ways they have been and can be read? Then I might arrive ‘somewhere at the back’ and find a door open. Not the original one, not the wardrobe itself, but another kind of door, perhaps, with a different version of paradise on the other side.”22 We would do well to approach Peter Pan with the same irreverent devotion, digging further in and deeper down to get at the true spirit of J. M. Barrie’s book through an understanding of its genesis, cultural context, and effects.
Like C. S. Lewis, J. M. Barrie was a child of the British Empire, though Lewis’s real allegiances were to his Irish ancestry, while Barrie’s were to his native Scotland. Neither was ever able to cut loose from the ideologies and biases of his day. Much as some critics have sought to prove that Barrie undoes racial stereotyping by overdoing his depiction of redskins and Piccaninnies, many adults will find themselves resorting to editing when reading the story to children. As adults, we may be clever enough to recognize that some of the excesses are part of a broader satirical strategy, but we will surely find ourselves wondering what children will make of the “wiliness” of the “redskin race” or the strange language of the Piccaninnies.
Toni Morrison has suggested that what we perceive as racial stereotyping may be nothing of the kind to a child’s eyes. She tells us that Helen Bannerman’s Story of Little Black Sambo was her favorite book as a child: “Little Black Sambo was a child as deeply loved and pampered by his parents as ever lived. Mumbo. Jumbo. Sambo. They were beautiful names—the kind you could whisper to a leaf or shout in the cellar and feel as though you had let something important fly from your mouth.”23 Nonetheless, once you read, say, Jean de Brunhoff’s The Story of Babar with postcolonial eyes and observe how the Old Lady embarks on a European civilizing mission when it comes to African elephants (turning Babar into an educated elephant who introduces Western civilization to the natives he left behind), it can become challenging to claim that children’s stories are all culturally innocent. It is precisely for that reason that we need the stories behind the story.
Do we want to lose Peter Pan? Should he fly off into oblivion? Should we invent a new character and story that conform more closely to the cultural values we embrace? Peter Pan’s call to “Come away! Come away!” remains powerful and is unlikely to be silenced soon. His story remains a source of beauty and enchantment as well as terror and fright, taking hold in ways that are beyond our control. And so we continue to read it and to pass it on to the next generation, often without coming to terms with its content. Yet we also no longer read Peter Pan with innocent eyes, and part of growing up, for us as for our children, means historicizing and coming to terms with aspects of the text that grate on our own sensibilities. We owe it to our children to give them books that do not put a politically correct dot on every “i” and that offer challenges, provocations, and an occasional sting that keeps us alive and thinking about those who lived before us. And they too will learn to search and explore, as did Laura Miller when she grew up.
As part of a precious cultural heritage, Peter Pan belongs to a special class of books designated as the canon of bedtime reading. Plunging us into the nighttime rituals of the Darling nursery, it takes the children to a land whose inhabitants—everyone from the lost boys to the pirates—crave stories. It is itself the consummate bedtime story, a tale that emerged at a time when parents in England needed potent substitutes for the soothing syrups (often containing narcotics) that they had used for some time to quiet children down at nighttime. Peter Pan may not have put children to sleep, but it did wake parents up to the idea of reading with their children, providing entertainment and comfort at a time when everything becomes “deathly still” and when children’s thoughts can take an anxious turn. It has retained its bonding power even a century after its publication.
The Annotated Peter Pan is, as Barrie would have meant it to be, for both adults and children. It offers an opportunity to create a place where the child can be swept away by the story and where the adult can meditate on it, getting lost in a “good read” yet also pondering the genesis of J. M. Barrie’s story, its architecture, its cultural codes and meaning, and its fortunes over time. Read it without the annotations, if you prefer, and savor the text and the illustrations. The commentary is there for those driven by the same addictive curiosity about pirates and lagoons, plays and parties of cricket, or Porthos and the Llewelyn Davies boys that led me to spend several years of my life with J. M. Barrie and his literary creation.
Barrie was not a philosopher, but he seems to have understood better than any writer the wisdom of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on childhood and its games. Like the philosopher, Barrie endorsed play and freedom from constraint. More important, both the French philosopher and the Scottish playwright understood the role of attentive affection in interactions with children. Rousseau, over two centuries ago, dispensed advice that may seem obvious to us but that rankled his contemporaries. “How people will cry out against me!” he grumbled. What he proposed will not sound revolutionary to our ears: “Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts.”24 Barrie became the champion of Rousseau’s philosophy, and he created, miraculously, a story that indulged the child’s love of play yet also captured our adult tragic awareness of mortality and the fleeting nature of childhood pleasures.
Mia Farrow points the way to Neverland as sh
e flies past Big Ben in a 1976 television production of Peter Pan. (By permission of NBC, Photofest)
1. J. M. Barrie, in Mark Twain, Who Was Sarah Findlay, with a Suggested Solution of the Mystery by J. M. Barrie (London: Clement Shorter, 1917), 10.
2. E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 60.
3. New York Herald, February 10, 1906.
4. Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 64.
5. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 14.
6. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 1–2.
7. Ibid., 73.
8. Ibid., 2.
9. J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird, or Adventures in Kensington Gardens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 159.
10. Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, 225.
11. Donald Crafton, “The Last Night in the Nursery: Walt Disney’s Peter Pan,” The Velvet Light Trap 24 (1989): 33–52.
12. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott, eds., His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 71.
13. Beinecke Library, MS Vault BARRIE, A3.
14. Jean Perrot, “Pan and Puer Aeternus: Aestheticism and the Spirit of the Age,” Poetics Today 13 (1992): 35.
15. Ann Yeoman, Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth. A Psychological Perspective on a Cultural Icon (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1999), 15.
16. Timothy Morris, You’re Only Young Twice: Children’s Literature and Film (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 114.
17. Mark Twain, Boston Globe, October 9, 1906. Twain met Barrie on several occasions and was frustrated by the fact that their conversations were always interrupted: “I have never had five minutes’ talk with him that wasn’t broken up by an interruption,” he complained.
18. Roger Lancelyn Green, Fifty Years of Peter Pan (London: Peter Davies, 1954), 70.
19. Janet Dunbar, J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image (Newton Abbot, Devon: Readers Union, 1971), 142.
20. Ibid., 88.
21. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters, 1898–1910, edited by Dan H. Laurence (London: M. Reinhardt, 1965), II, 907.
22. Laura Miller, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008), 175.
23. Jim Haskins, Toni Morrison (Springfield, MO: 21st Century, 2002), 24.
24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or, On Education (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 51.
J. M. Barrie in Neverland:A Biographical Essay
Through Peter Pan, James Matthew Barrie will forever be linked with youth, joy, and the pleasures of childhood. The Scottish writer, born on May 9, 1860, in the village of Kirriemuir, had a boyish quality to him even in middle age. His delicate features, short stature, and lifelong habit of wearing an overcoat several sizes too large made him appear even younger than he was. On walks with his St. Bernard, Porthos, in Kensington Gardens, Barrie socialized with children more than with adults, stopping to perform tricks and tell stories, all the while endearing himself to everyone by wiggling his ears and raising one eyebrow while lowering the other. It was through Porthos that he met the boys who stood model for Peter Pan.
A man in a bulky overcoat, a large dog, small children, a public park—that combination is fraught with dark overtones, and our cultural associations with J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan are not, by any means, all positive. We do not have to look long and hard to come up with disturbances in the frequencies of the Peter Pan airwaves. There is Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch, pop psychologist Dan Kiley’s Peter Pan Syndrome, and Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, each in its own way pointing to trouble in Neverland. All the more reason to look closely at the man who created the character of Peter Pan in an effort to understand the cultural stakes in his work and to identify the extent to which his own fears and desires permeate a story about childhood innocence and adventure.1
J. M. Barrie and Luath, 1904. William Nicholson took this photograph of Barrie with Luath in the garden of the Leinster Corner residence. Nana’s costume for the first production of Peter Pan was modeled on Luath’s coat. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
Barrie’s many acts of kindness and generosity—he often used the great wealth acquired from his success as a novelist and playwright to benefit those around him—suggest a man deeply committed to family, friendship, and community. Yet time and again his intimates describe him as “morose,” “reticent,” “withdrawn,” and “gloomy.” He would, from time to time, simply shut down, and a note to A. E. Housman, after an awkward encounter, speaks volumes: “I am sorry about last night when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man.”2 (Housman wrote back the exact same words with a curt postscript stating that Barrie had only made things worse by misspelling his last name.) Barrie himself acknowledged a dark, depressive side and worried that the “reserve” he had inherited from his mother closed him off from the world. Blaming his national heritage, he declared that, like the Scots in general, he was “a house with all the shutters closed and the doors locked.”3 And much as he tried to open those shutters from time to time and prop the door open, “they will bang to,” he worried. By turns confessional and effusive (as in Margaret Ogilvy, by Her Son, J. M. Barrie, the biography he wrote of his mother), and both dour and withdrawn (as in his marriage), he remains an enigma even with the wealth of information we have about his family, his literary life, and his social activities.
The Allahakbarries cricket team in 1905 at Black Lake Island. Members included (back row) Maurice Hewlett, J. M. Barrie, Henry Graham, E. V. Lucas; (front row) H. J. Ford, A. E. W. Mason, Charles Tennyson, and Charles Turley Smith. (Courtesy of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity)
James Barrie’s childhood was haunted by the knowledge that, like every child, he would one day grow up. “The horror of my boyhood,” he wrote, “was that I knew a time would come when I also must give up the games, and how it was to be done I saw not . . . I felt that I must continue playing in secret.”4 Barrie’s descriptions of childhood games—playing cricket, staging shipwrecks, building fortresses—are full of light and joy, suggesting an intensity of sensation absent from most childhood recollections. All his life he characterized himself as a “man’s man.” With Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne, and other writers, he found one way to resurrect the intoxicating energy of childhood sports. Barrie organized a team that came to be known as the Allahakbarries (a friend returning from travels in Morocco told the team that “Allah Akbar” was the Arabic term for “God help us,” and the suffix gave the term a relevant twist). But it was through the Llewelyn Davies boys, whom he first met in Kensington Gardens in 1897, that Barrie achieved what he was really after: summers filled with the seemingly endless daredevil thrills of pirate games and other escapades. “Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much,” he wrote wistfully, even after success had come to him as playwright and author.5
In one of his earliest fictional works, Tommy and Grizel, Barrie reminds us that anxieties about growing up can be both alarmingly real and deeply felt. Tommy Sandys—unlike Peter Pan—has matured physically, but “he was so fond of being a boy” that he finds himself unable to attain emotional maturity and eventually, in a sequel, comes to a wretched end. In one charged episode, Tommy tries desperately to return to his childhood haunts: “He came night after night trying different ways, but he could not find the golden ladder, though all the time he knew that the lair lay somewhere over there.”6 As an adult, Barrie worried constantly that he might be caught by other adults while enjoying the pastimes of youth, his therapeutic alternative for dreary grown-up obligations.
Barrie was perpetually in search of golden ladders that could take him back to his childhood. There was much in
that childhood that could be described as idyllic and euphoric, and yet quicksand also opens up when we take a closer look. Tragedy visited the Kirriemuir household on more than one occasion, and it is not hard to imagine why Barrie’s boyish features later sank all too readily into what one critic describes as “the caved-in sadness of old age.”7 Tortured by nightmares (“in my early boyhood it was a sheet that tried to choke me in the night”) and tormented by feelings of inadequacy (“the things I could have said to them if my legs had been longer”), he struggled all his life with the pall cast over his childhood self by trauma and loss. Later in life, death continued to stalk his closest friends as well as members of his family, well before they reached their time. “[Barrie] has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die,” D. H. Lawrence wrote, without any real malice, to Barrie’s ex-wife, Mary Cannan.8
J. M. Barrie with his mother, Margaret Ogilvy, 1892. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)
The youngest of three sons born to the handloom weaver David Barrie and his wife, Margaret Ogilvy (who kept her maiden name according to an old Scots custom), Jamie, as the young Barrie was called, lived to some extent in the shadow of his two older brothers, Alexander and David. Kirriemuir had evolved, by midcentury, into a textile center with 1,500 weavers. It had an astonishingly high literacy rate and a culture that valued education. David Barrie worked long hours and practiced thrift in ways that enabled him to support his large family and to educate them for a higher station in life than his own. Oddly, Barrie hardly ever wrote a word about his father except to extol him as a steadying force, even as he wrote a full appreciation of his mother.
