The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  THE REAL PETER PAN

  THE TRAGIC LIFE OF

  MICHAEL LLEWELYN DAVIES

  PIERS DUDGEON

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Chapter One 1905: An Awfully Big Adventure

  Chapter Two 1860–1900: A Rich Harvest of Possibility

  Chapter Three 1895: A Key to Kensington Gardens

  Chapter Four 1897: Spellbound

  Chapter Five 1897: Barrie Comes Out

  Chapter Six 1897–99: Lost Boy

  Chapter Seven 1900: Peter and Michael Break Through

  Chapter Eight 1901–03: Island Games

  Chapter Nine 1901–03: Unrest Within the Family

  Chapter Ten 1903–04: The Real Play

  Chapter Eleven 1904–05: Arthur’s Retreat

  Chapter Twelve 1905–07: Death Takes a Hand

  Chapter Thirteen 1906: Barrie’s Scotland

  Chapter Fourteen 1907: The Widow Sylvia

  Chapter Fifteen 1908: Dependence and Uncertainty

  Chapter Sixteen 1909: Mind Games and Manoeuvres

  Chapter Seventeen 1910: No Idle Steer

  Chapter Eighteen 1910–11: Scourie: Learning to Fly

  Chapter Nineteen 1912: The Outer Hebrides: Catching Mary Rose

  Chapter Twenty 1913–14: Broken to Eton

  Chapter Twenty-One 1914–15: Loving, J. M. B.

  Chapter Twenty-Two 1915: The Blue Bird of Happiness

  Chapter Twenty-Three 1916–17: Home Fires Burning

  Chapter Twenty-Four 1917–18: Michael Turns Away

  Chapter Twenty-Five 1918: The Real Peter Pan

  Chapter Twenty-Six 1918: Within the Gothic Chamber

  Chapter Twenty-Seven 1919: Oxford

  Chapter Twenty-Eight 1919: Garsington

  Chapter Twenty-Nine 1920: Romance

  Chapter Thirty 1920: Michael Breaks Out

  Chapter Thirty-One 1920: Between Earth and Paradise

  Chapter Thirty-Two 1920–21: Barrie Gets His Way

  Chapter Thirty-Three 1921: Disposal

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  A lovely youth, – no mourning maiden decked,

  With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,

  The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:

  Gentle, and brave, and generous, – no lorn bard

  Breathed o’er his dark fate one melodious sigh:

  He lived, he died, he sung in solitude.

  ‘Alastor’ by P. B. Shelley (1816)

  Foreword

  OF THE LLEWELYN Davies boys who were the inspiration for Peter Pan, Michael was J. M. Barrie’s favourite. ‘We all knew Michael was The One,’ wrote his younger brother Nico. Barrie loved him with ‘a great love’, as Michael’s friend at Eton and Oxford, Robert Boothby, recalled.1

  The Real Peter Pan is the story, both joyous and tragic, of a beautiful boy who was chosen by Barrie to be his gateway to the magical world of childhood, which he longed to recapture, and to the strange spiritual world of his later work.

  Unlike Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll (in the context of Alice in Wonderland), and Alastair Grahame and Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), Michael was not simply the audience of stories related by Barrie. He was a participant in a creative improvisation that produced Peter Pan, a collaboration that continued into Michael’s teenage years and the writing of the later plays.

  There have been films, novels, biographies and plays aplenty since Peter first made an appearance in Barrie’s 1902 novel, The Little White Bird, but no perfect accord as to what ‘the poor little half-and-half’ – this half human, half supernatural boy – means.

  Barrie’s play opened in London in 1904, and played annually to huge audiences for many decades into the future. In America it opened the following year and was just as popular nationwide. In 1911 came Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, the equally famous novel, and in 1924 the first film, a silent movie faithful to the original.

  Barrie was surprised by what audiences and critics in America read into the play, particularly about their own history and culture, in which of course Tiger Lily and the American Indians feature more meaningfully than elsewhere. But he could not have wished for more gravitas than he got from Mark Twain’s note to Peter Pan’s American star, Maude Adams, that the play was ‘a great and refining and uplifting benefaction to this sordid and money-mad age’.

  The feeling in America in 1905 was that Peter Pan was a significant symbol of something that society was in danger of losing, even that already we in the West had lost.

  But then Walt Disney seized upon the more saccharine elements of the story and produced an animated film which far from censuring our money-mad age turned them to huge commercial advantage.

  So pervasive did the Disney interpretation of Peter Pan become in the national consciousness that even today there is for many no incongruity in the eternal boy, the child in all of us, being associated with a pleasure park designed by the singer Michael Jackson, a bus company in Springfield, Massachusetts, a make of peanut butter, and Hummingbird egg candy.

  Other animated films followed – one from Australia in 1988, and Disney’s sequel Return to Neverland in 2002.

  There was however also a different movement, an increasing interest in the life of Peter’s creator, J. M. Barrie, and of the Llewelyn Davies boys with whose lives Barrie made the play ‘streaky’, as he put it.

  Andrew Birkin’s brilliant docudrama mini-series, starring Ian Holm as Barrie, led the way in 1978. And Marc Foster’s fictional Finding Neverland again featured Barrie in 2004, this time played by Johnny Depp.

  But Finding Neverland was not as true to life as it made out. The biographical aspect had been sanitised so that Barrie came upon the Llewelyn Davies family after the boys’ father had died; thereby removing any possible suggestion that he might have come between Sylvia and her husband.

  This phenomenon of writers and makers deftly dampening down or altering facts to idealise Barrie is another pervasive element. Possibly lurking behind it is the fear of the curse levelled at all who would write about him. Even Andrew Birkin admitted to this: ‘I feel somewhat felled by Barrie’s curse – “May God blast any one who writes a biography of me.”’

  But the curse was not going to stop it happening because there were now two theatres of interest – the fantasy story of Peter and the reality of the Davies boys’ lives. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed that the creative improvisation that led to Peter Pan had not only effected the fiction it had affected the boys who were part of it, deeply.

  The first germ of the idea of Peter, long before the original play was written, was a vision of a boy lost in a wood, singing for joy because he knew now that he could be a boy forever and not be compelled to grow into a man.

  In the world of film this seemed like the perfect theme for a musical. Dwight Hemion’s 1976 adaptation of Peter Pan starred Mia Farrow and Danny Kaye. Joseph Weinberger’s version appeared in 2001, and in 2014 Phil Willmott’s Lost Boy.

  Willmott’s Lost Boy was interesting not only because it was a musical, but because it reunited some of the characters of the original play as young adults on the eve of the First World War, that great watershed which separated the old world from the new. There is something about Peter Pan that makes him eternally part of the new, with potential for growth and hope for the future.

  Meanwhile, the analytical psychology movement had got hold of him and declared Peter a puer aeternus, one of the archetypal ideas that define the ‘primordial, structural elements of the human psyche’.

  Inevitably there follo
wed attempts to show him at work in the modern world. Damion Dietz’s 2003, award-winning Neverland: Never Grow Up, Never Grow Old, was set in an amusement park, with Peter an older, androgynous teenager, and Steven Spielberg’s Hook, 1991, presented Robin Williams as a corporate lawyer who discovered the Peter Pan in himself.

  Many a production started out with high hopes and ground to a halt before being revived with heavily revised scripts, as if there remained in the minds of their ageing creators an uncertainty of who or what Peter Pan is.

  Barrie knew this would be a problem. When it was all over with the boys, he wrote that the ‘tree of knowledge in the wood of make-believe vanishes if you need to look for it’. This, of course, is why he had needed Michael.

  In search of an anchor in authenticity, every so often a production returns to the Barrie prototype. P. J. Hogan’s 2003 Peter Pan was faithful to it, but the audience had been led astray so often now that it failed to break even at the box office.

  Ten years later Ella Hickson for the Royal Shakespeare Company produced Wendy and Peter Pan. Hickson admitted how difficult it was to convince people that the sentimental, heroic, Disney adventure was not the whole story. She looked hard at the scripts and the book of Peter Pan and noticed how much the theme of death features. With Peter it began with his speculation at the mermaid’s lagoon, faced with the possibility of drowning, that death would be ‘an awfully big adventure’.

  In his life with Michael and in two of his later plays – A Well-Remembered Voice and the ghostly Mary Rose – Barrie became ever more concerned with the question, and the feeling we get is that childhood and death, like two ends of a circle, meet somewhere, and that it is here in this misty arena that the deeply meaningful half of Peter – the supernatural half – really lies.

  It was in this arena that with joy in his heart Michael alone was able to explore the real Peter Pan, and it was here that he met his destiny.

  Meanwhile, in 2015, well over 100 years after Peter first appeared, the cinematic and theatrical bandwagon rolls on. Ella Hickson’s Wendy and Peter Pan returns as this book is published. Piers Chater Robinson’s musical Peter Pan has a USA Arena Tour. Harvey Weinstein’s theatrical musical production of the Johnny Depp film Finding Neverland has its premiere in America. And Joe Wright’s Pan, a film starring Hugh Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, Rooney Mara, Garrett Hedlund and Levi Miller, is scheduled to open across the world.

  Piers Dudgeon, February 2015

  1 Interviews with the film-maker Andrew Birkin in the 1970s.

  Chapter One

  1905: An Awfully Big Adventure

  LOOKING AT THE photographs taken in the summer of 1905 of James M. Barrie and Michael Llewelyn Davies in the garden of his country retreat, Black Lake Cottage in Surrey, one cannot help but be reminded that Edwardian England (1901–10) was an era distinct in time for reasons other than that it spanned the reign of Edward VII.

  It isn’t only the straw hats of the men and the long, waisted skirts and floppy hats of the women that speak so eloquently of our graceful, peaceful past, nor the boyish, snake-linked belt holding up Barrie’s cricketing whites. It is something to do with the laziness of the scene, which echoes in our minds with the sound of leather against willow and the hum of bees, that tells us that this was an age unperturbed by time – held in stasis like the clock that stands at ten to three in Rupert Brooke’s nostalgic evocation of it in ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’.

  The era portrayed itself as one of innocence, in contrast to the worldliness of the Victorians and before the carnage of the First World War. The Edwardian age was the last gasp of old rural England. After 1918, nothing here would be quite the same again. Small wonder, then, that it took the eternal image of Peter Pan, the archetypal innocent who would never grow up, to its heart.

  The play, written on the back of Barrie’s games with four of the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, met in London’s Kensington Gardens, was always a work of improvisation and underwent constant revision from the moment of its first rehearsal, so that it was not published between book covers for twenty-four years.

  In the summer of 1905 Barrie was still reeling from the success of its first London showing. It had premiered at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 27 December 1904, run for 145 performances, and would return annually to similar success for decades afterwards.

  But already he had it in mind to write a whole new act, making more of ‘the Neverland’. It was with this in mind that, in July 1905, he sent for Michael Llewelyn Davies.

  He wanted the boy to revisit the scenes in Black Lake forest from which ‘the chief forces’ of the play – the lost boys, Captain Hook, the crocodile and so on – had emerged. He wanted to remind Michael of the real haunts that inspired the play, to return him to the roots of the Neverland, and use him once more as the creative catalyst for a new Act III.

  Michael had taken to Barrie’s world of make-believe and imagination into which he, alone of his brothers, was actually born, as if it were second nature. It was no coincidence that Michael is the first to ‘let go’ in the play, when Peter Pan teaches the children to fly.

  And now that his elder brother George, at age twelve, no longer believed in fairies, Michael, at five, was coming into his own. Of course, Michael knew the play intimately. It had been re-enacted time and again in the boys’ nursery at home. He had visited the theatre back-stage, been introduced to the cast as one of the creators of it. He had even flown in the harnesses that transported Peter, Wendy, John and Michael to the Neverland and, like the other Llewelyn Davies boys, he knew the difference between Tinkerbell, the fairy, and Tinkerbell the light that danced on stage, which was really shone by one of the stage staff. But he didn’t yet consciously question the difference, and that was why Uncle Jim, as Barrie was known within the family, needed him.

  Barrie needed to become a boy again, to re-enter that unconscious, unreflective, mysteriously self-contained mind-set of boyhood, insulated against the real world and so soon mislaid, but from which the naturally curious, inquisitive, imaginative and in every sense beautiful Michael never strayed.

  The playwright had decided that the Neverland, which had only twice been mentioned in the original script, was to be made more the focus of the play as a magical environment of heavenly moments and with a very special element of danger.

  Michael was to be ‘the golden ladder into the dream’, as Barrie had long ago imagined introducing his own son to ‘the old lair’ of his boyhood exploits. In Michael’s company, the Black Lake would be more than ‘this tiny hollow where muddy water gathered’. The pine forest environs of Barrie’s cottage would become once again ‘an impregnable fortress full of pirates and redskins, their war-like voices breaking the air as they came and went’.

  Many a time in the two years that had passed since the last Black Lake holiday, Barrie himself had lost his way to the golden ladder, ‘though all the time he knew that the spot lay somewhere over there. When he stood still and listened he could hear the boys at play, and they seemed to be calling: “Are you coming, Captain?” … but he never could see them, and when he pressed forward their voices died away.’

  When Michael arrived, Barrie wanted him to say: ‘Take my hand, father, and I will lead you there; I found the way long ago for myself.’2

  Even at five years of age, Michael had something unique. His older brother Peter, who became a fine scholar and publisher, remembered his having ‘the true stuff of the poet in him from birth’.3 Michael’s famous cousin, Daphne du Maurier, at fourteen wrote of him in her first story as ‘a boy who is searching for happiness, at least not exactly happiness, but that something that is somewhere, you know. You feel it and you miss it and it beckons and you can’t reach it … I don’t think anyone can find it on this earth.’4

  In a few years, people would be talking of Michael as gifted, sensitive, charming, impressionable and with an aura around him not of this world. Barrie realised that he was a chip off the du Maurier block more th
an any of the other boys. It was this ‘something’ in Michael that he was after, whether less for his own salvation than for his work we will never know.

  But there was a price to pay. While a new Act III of Peter Pan did come out of their liaison at Black Lake Cottage in July 1905, embedded in it was something disastrously formative for Michael personally. It was, as we shall see, from this time that the boy’s nightmares began.

  Flying was of course a metaphor for finding your way into the Neverland. In a letter to a friend, Michael’s cousin Daphne described how, when she was brought low during the Second War, she lay in bed, ‘looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope, the world itself and the people on it being very small and ant-like, and all their activities a little futile’ and then ‘centred her mind on an island, the island of her dreams … an island just surfacing from the sea’.5 And it was this same technique that Barrie played with the Davies boys, whom he dubbed ‘the boy castaways of Black Lake Island’. Never mind that there was no island in the Black Lake in fact: there was in their mind’s eye. Bit by bit, as the island emerged from the water, their focus on it increased, and eventually ‘the little people’ of the island also emerged and soon you had the rudiments of a story.

  ‘They do seem to be emerging out of our island, don’t they, the little people of the play,’ wrote Barrie, ‘all except that sly one [referring to himself, the model for the pirate captain, Hook], the chief figure, who draws farther and farther into the wood as we advance upon him? He so dislikes being tracked, as if there were something odd about him, that when he dies he means to get up and blow away the particle that will be his ashes.’

  The island game was the perfect, light-hypnotic environment for the creative process. But this time, after Michael and Barrie were left to themselves, the focus was switched from islands to the Black Lake itself:

  If you shut your eyes and are a lucky one, you may see at times a shapeless pool of lovely pale colours suspended in the darkness; then if you squeeze your eyes tighter, the pool begins to take shape, and the colours become so vivid that with another squeeze they must go on fire. But just before they go on fire you see the lagoon. This is the nearest you ever get to it on the mainland, just one heavenly moment; if there could be two moments you might see the surf and hear the mermaids singing.