Peter Pan
by J.M. Barrie
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Sometimes for stories as for sausages, it’s best to follow the adage--if you want to enjoy them, don’t ask how they’re made. I seldom follow my own advice.
Suggestions that Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie had a more than professional interest in the children he wrote about had abounded even before the play about the boy who never grew up took theaters by storm in 1904. But when I researched the beloved story, I found things even worse than I feared. Whether Barrie had sexual relations with the five young beautiful sons of Arthur Llewelyn Davies and his wife Sylvia, daughter of artist and novelist George Du Maurier, his destruction of the Llewelyn Davies marriage and usurpation of the role of guardian for their orphaned children was startling.
Then I read Peter Pan, which I admit to having previously encountered only second hand through Disney’s and other revisionist versions, and wasn’t surprised by the statement that Barrie’s original notes for the play made child-stealing Peter Pan “a demon boy--the villain”). Or that after the deaths of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and the suicide of their middle son Michael, D.H. Lawrence could write to Barrie’s divorced wife of his “fatal touch for those he loves. They die.”
Fortunately for the rest of the world’s children, time burned away the dross of Barrie’s Peter Pan and left only the gold. This alchemy was aided by Barrie’s refusal to publish a script of the play until 1928, leaving audiences to craft their own versions of the story into myth. The first publication of the story in novel form, Peter and Wendy, dates from 1911, a year after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’ death.
Fortunately for the rest of the world’s children, time burned away the dross of Barrie’s Peter Pan and left only the gold. This alchemy was aided by Barrie’s refusal to publish a script of the play until 1928, leaving audiences to craft their own versions of the story into myth. The first publication of the story in novel form, Peter and Wendy, dates from 1911, a year after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’ death.
“All children, except one, grow up,” the story begins, relating the visits of Peter Pan, that boy who never grew up, to the children of the Darling family, Wendy, Michael and John. At last, sprinkled with fairy dust, the Darlings fly away, following the second star to the right from their nursery window to the Neverland.
There they will have adventures with pirates (including the one-handed Captain Hook who the uncle of the Llewelyn Davies boys, actor Gerald Du Maurier, transformed into a formidable character on stage). And with an equally improbable tribe of American Indians, the vengeful fairy Tinkerbell, and a lagoon full of snobbish mermaids, until they finally set sail for home
“There could not have been a lovelier sight,” than the reunion between Mr. and Mrs. Darling and their long-lost children, the book relates, “but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. (Peter) had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know; but he was looking the the window at the one joy from which he must be for ever barred.”
Barrie added an epilogue entitled “When Wendy Grew Up” to his story. In it, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the original of Mrs. Darling, was dismissed in the epilogue as “now dead and forgotten”. And Wendy has forgotten how to fly also, when Peter Pan returns, now to purloin her own daughter.
“Why can’t you fly now, mother?” her daughter asks. To which Wendy answers, too wisely, “It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly.”
Of the five beautiful Llewelyn Davies boys--George, Jack, Michael, Peter, and Nico-George died in World War I and Michael and Peter committed suicide. Following Michael’s death in 1921, Barrie gave the rights to the Peter Pan play to a children’s hospital, probably to help assuage his guilt over his ward’s suicide, speculates Piers Dudgeon in Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan.
Numerous versions of Peter Pan are widely available, as is Dudgeon’s book. For more about Barrie, his writings and photographs, including the illustration for this post, see
www.jmbarrie.co.uk/.
(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a November of fantasy with Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.)
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