Almost a hundred years ago, at half past eight on the evening of December 27, 1904, the curtain went up at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in London, to reveal, among other things, a man dressed as a dog. The man was an actor named Arthur Lupino, suffering for his art in a shaggy costume, and the dog was called Nana. Most plays enjoy a fitful life, at best, but we can be fairly sure that this winter grown men will once again drop on all fours and work up a canine sweat, while grown women will crop their hair, pull on green tights, and turn into temporary boys. The play is “Peter Pan,” and, like its eponymous hero, it gives freakishly little sign of growing old.

The author was J. M. Barrie: Jimmy to some of his friends, and, in his later pomp, Sir James. He was short and slight, with bags under his eyes and a pale, protuberant brow, like a clever schoolboy who has stayed up late reading books under the bedclothes. He had a heavy mustache and a pipe smoker’s percussive cough. Of humble origins, he grew rich, yet his choice of overcoat remained several sizes too large, as if he were wearing a father’s hand-me-down. Both in face and in body—and, it became apparent, in the lineaments of his soul—Barrie seemed ill-suited to adult life, and those neat, child-friendly features sank all too readily into the caved-in sadness of old age.

Up to his death, in 1937, Barrie, as a result of his novels and plays, was one of the most famous men of his day; when Chaplin, on a trip to London in 1921, was asked whom he most wanted to meet, the answer was J. M. Barrie. Not even Barrie’s ardent admirers, however, would have described him as a matinée idol, and he would have been wryly flattered to find himself reincarnated, for the centenary of “Peter Pan,” in the beauteous person of Johnny Depp. A new film, entitled “Finding Neverland,” tells the story—or a decorated version of the story—of J. M. Barrie and the circumstances under which Peter Pan leaped into existence. Depp resembles Barrie in no way, except in his slenderness of form. We get a passable, soft stab at a Scottish burr but no mustache; we see more of the sweet side of Barrie than the insidious flip side; and the harshest coughing in the film comes not from Depp but from Kate Winslet, who plays Barrie’s friend Sylvia Llewellyn Davies.

Sylvia was one of a number of strong, rather Shakespearean female figures who ringed the life of Barrie—a dominance that began, unsurprisingly, with his mother. She was Margaret Ogilvy, a stonemason’s daughter who hailed from a particularly hard outcrop of the Presbyterian Church. James was born in 1860, the son of Margaret and a weaver named Alexander Barrie, in the Scottish town of Kirriemuir, and, until the age of six, he played in the shadow of his gifted and handsome older brother, David. Then, in the winter of 1867, David was killed; he was hit by a fellow ice-skater, fell, and cracked his skull. Margaret took to her bed under the onslaught of grief, and young James was dispatched to offer comfort:

The room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless before say, “Is that you?” I think the tone hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously “Is that you?” again. I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, “No, it’s no’ him, it’s just me.” Then I heard a cry, and my mother turned in bed, and though it was dark I knew that she was holding out her arms.

From here on, James worshipped his dead brother with a devotion that carried the taint of jealousy. Once, he even entered his mother’s presence wearing a suit of David’s clothes. The residue of the calamity, as it eventually seeped into Barrie’s art, was the conviction that a perfect child who dies on the eve of his fourteenth birthday will be spared the degradation of growing up, and that the death will be outshone by the thought of the perfection—so blindingly, perhaps, that the boy will seem scarcely to have passed away at all.

We think of Barrie as one of the chief explorers—or, in a gloomier light, invaders—of childhood. Yet the childhood that gripped him most tightly was not his own but that of other people; it is almost as if his own did not exist. The souls around him were like books, ripe for perusal, and he preferred their opening chapters. Hence “Margaret Ogilvy” (1896), which in part is a memoir of his mother’s youth. One of Barrie’s biographers, Denis Mackail, calls it “that distressingly human and inhuman book,” presumably because it demonstrates, even more than “Peter Pan,” the weird twinning of Barrie’s gifts—an almost telepathic self-spiriting into the emotions of others, and a professional shamelessness about baring them in public. Listen to his proud recital of Margaret Ogilvy’s deprivations: “She was eight when her mother’s death made her mistress of the house and mother to her little brother, and from that time she scrubbed and mended and baked and sewed.” At once we see that image skipping the generations, from mother to son, and from the son to the Wendy of “Peter Pan,” who was obliged, when she flew to Neverland and found a host of unclaimed children, to become a mother before her time.

The Barrie family—James was one of ten children, two of whom died in infancy—was ardently ambitious for its sons, the tool of that ambition was education, and Barrie duly studied at Dumfries Academy and at Edinburgh University. He emerged timid but industrious, and plowed a path into local and then national journalism. He moved to London, and, in 1887, produced his first novel, which bore the title “Better Dead.” Within a few years, thanks largely to some sharp, rosy fictions set in Scotland and to “The Little Minister,” a quaint tale of a minister who falls in love with a Gypsy, he had acquired not just a solid readership but a serious reputation; all of a sudden, we find him in correspondence with Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson. He started writing for the theatre, kicking off with a parody of Ibsen, and indulging in the traditional sport of losing his heart to the leading ladies. His most acute biographer, Andrew Birkin—whose “J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys” has been granted a timely reissue (Yale; $18.95)—digs up some astounding entries from Barrie’s private notebooks. Some are composed in the third person, as jottings toward a possible novel:

—Greatest horror—dream I am married—wake up shrieking.

—Even while proposing, the thought of how it wd read go thro’ him.

—He never has contact with a woman—If he had this might have made him exult less in making women love him.

In 1894, ignoring these self-cautions, Barrie married an actress named Mary Ansell, bestowing upon her, by way of a wedding present, a St. Bernard dog. The saga of Barrie is full of long-sufferers, the longest being Barrie himself, but nobody could follow its course and not spare a wealth of pity for Mary. Her husband loved many women, but the evidence suggests that the actual making of love lay outside his interests, or beyond his grasp. The creator of “Peter Pan” never had a child of his own. To us, the bewildering thing (and to Mary, surely the roughest insult) was that Barrie, far from burying his secret incapacities, dug them up like a pirate uncovering a treasure chest: “Grizel, I seem to be different from all other men; there seems to be some curse upon me… . You are the only woman I ever wanted to love, but apparently I can’t.” That comes from “Tommy and Grizel,” the tale of a devastated marriage which was published six years into Barrie’s own. At one point, the narrator says of Tommy, the fruitless husband, “He was a boy who could not grow up,” adding, of Grizel, “He gave her all his affection, but his passion, like an outlaw, had ever to hunt alone.” So where did the distinguished author like to hunt?

The answer is specific: Kensington Gardens, the broad, half-empty stretch of greenery next to Hyde Park. Here, in 1898, Barrie met a pair of boys, George and Jack Llewellyn Davies, aged five and four, who walked there with their nurse. They were amused by the small Scotsman with the enormous dog. Barrie talked with children, rather than at or down to them, and the meetings with George and Jack became drawn into the rhythm of their days. To our panicked eyes, such a relationship would be unthinkable—or, if thought about, nipped in the bud. We assume that a strange man, nearing forty, in a public place can offer only one thing to children still in knickerbockers, and that is harm. We would call the police, or, at least, call our children away. If we discovered the man to be a celebrity, we might call our lawyers, or, if we were feeling spiteful, the newspapers. And, if we were later to read what he wrote about our children, in an account so lightly ornamented as hardly to count as fiction, we might not be responsible for our actions:

I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he would give me a kiss. He shook his head about six times, and I was in despair. Then the smile came, and I knew that he was teasing me only. He now nodded his head about six times.

That was the prettiest of all his exploits.

The tone of this, written in 1902, grates nastily on modern ears. Ever since “Lolita,” we have realized that one of the pleasures of the child-seeker is not merely to play games with the victim but to pretend that the victim is complicit in that game, or even pulling the strings; thus is the burden of guilt shifted smoothly away from the raptor. Did readers of 1902 feel nothing of the sort, or are we the guilty party, unable to conjure a time when playfulness was its own reward, rather than an alibi or a ruse? The passage comes from “The Little White Bird,” Barrie’s half-disguised novel about George Llewellyn Davies. In the book, George becomes David—note the name of Barrie’s dead brother—and is befriended by the bachelor narrator, who pretends to have a son of his own. This son, he then declares, has died (somewhere around here, the sheer weirdness of Barrie starts to multiply out of control), and he uses the nonexistent death to ingratiate himself further with David’s parents. He is especially pleased that David’s mother, Mary—note the name of Barrie’s wife—is “culpably obtuse to my sinister design,” the design being “to burrow under Mary’s influence with the boy, expose her to him in all his vagaries, take him utterly from her and make him mine.” Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may retire to consider your verdict.

Yet the stubborn fact remains: J. M. Barrie was innocent. He no more sought sex from children than he did from women. Andrew Birkin, who knows more about Barrie than anybody else (the last Llewellyn Davies boy, Nico, having died in 1980), has arrived at the balanced conclusion that the author of “Peter Pan” was “a lover of childhood, but was not in any sexual sense the paedophile that some claim him to have been.” His sinister design, it turns out, was not to corrupt boys with the murk of adult desire but to slough off any corruptions of his own, rejoin the unadulterated—the very word shows up the impurities in grownup life—and shrink once more, as best he could, into boyhood. This plan of Barrie’s may have been creepy and pathetic, but it was not a crime, and, as weaknesses go, it may be the most widespread in the world, haunting every harassed male who lies awake and tells himself how much simpler everything was as a kid.

At the heart of “The Little White Bird” is a story that the narrator slowly invents not only for David’s entertainment but with David’s help. It is about a boy named Peter Pan, who lives in Kensington Gardens. The first name is a direct allusion to the fact that George Llewellyn Davies now had another brother, Peter, born in 1897. There would be two more: Michael, born in 1900, and Nicholas (or Nico), born in 1903; a sisterless five in all, rather than the four of “Finding Neverland.” The film also opts for Peter Llewellyn Davies as the focus of Barrie’s attention—a not unnatural choice, given his name, but the wrong one, for it was really the whole gang of them whom Barrie loved. If he had a favorite, it was Michael, but, as the notorious preface to “Peter Pan”—dedicated “To the Five”—explains, “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.”

The course of the flame is a tricky one to trace, and what matters is that in Peter Pan Barrie achieved the rarest alchemy of all, the one that no writer can plan or predict: he invented a myth. The idea of Peter seems to have been flying around forever, a constant of humanity, and all that Barrie had to do was reach up and pluck the boy out of the air. After his first appearance, in “The Little White Bird,” Peter outgrew the nest; the passages about him were revised and republished, with illustrations of delicate grotesquerie by Arthur Rackham, under the title “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens,” in 1906. In the meantime, the play, after its London début, was triumphantly staged in New York in the winter of 1905. The novel we now think of as “Peter Pan” is actually called “Peter and Wendy,” and it first saw the light in 1911. It is worth emphasizing that much of this material is close to unreadable—sometimes because it is sappy with sentiment but mostly because it is just too gnarled and knotted for current taste (increasing one’s reverence for Rackham, who saw its warpings at once), let alone for that of our children. What on earth will they make, for instance, of the opening pages of the novel, in which Mr. and Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s parents, are seen deciding whether they can afford to have more babies—literally adding up the doctors’ fees for the infant diseases (“measles one five, German measles half a guinea”) that they will be called upon to nurse?

Barrie would remonstrate severely on this point. He would claim that children cleave naturally to the misshapen and the morbid; like Roald Dahl, he admired the heartlessness and cunning of the young far more than he did their good behavior, and, for every mention of skipping fairies in “Peter Pan,” there will be some dashed-off sketch of alarming and sanguinary malice. Look between the cracks of the play, in the stage directions, and you will find his prose hardening and cooling into casual sadism, as in this line about Tootles, one of the pirate boys in Neverland:

He has been in fewer adventures than any of them because the big things constantly happen while he has stepped round the corner; he will go off, for instance, in some quiet hour to gather firewood, and then when he returns the others will be sweeping up the blood.

The most unfeeling child of all, needless to say, is Peter Pan himself. He flits through the play and the novels, and he has flitted through a century of stage productions and movies, and one result of those flittings is that we regard him as airy and innocuous. In truth, he is mean and green, a mini-monster of capering egotism; could there be any more dazzling proof of self-regard than a boy who first shows up in pursuit of his own shadow? In the early versions of the play, there is no Captain Hook, because there is no need for him; Peter supplies all the cruelty that is required. As “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” makes clear, our hero escaped from his parents as a baby and, after much prevarication, decided to forsake them for the unwithering plea-sure gardens of Kensington. He would fly back like a bird to watch his sleeping mother, but, once the decision was made, his way was barred—“When we reach the window it is Lock-out Time. The iron bars are up for life.” Such is Peter’s tragedy, but only because it was also his choice, and we should recall the terrifying title that Barrie appended to an early draft of the story: “The Boy Who Hated Mothers.”

And what of the real mother? Sylvia Llewellyn Davies first met Barrie at a dinner party in 1897; as the evening progressed, she realized that he was the man who wiggled his eyebrows at her children in the park. This revelation seems to have charmed rather than offended her; Barrie and she would be intimate friends for the rest of her life. Kate Winslet, who plays Sylvia in “Finding Neverland,” is ideal for the role, because she radiates that peculiar ease which starts to appear in photographs toward the end of the nineteenth century—no longer prim and straitened but open-faced, trusting, educated, and not without flickers of fire. In short, Sylvia (the daughter of a fast-witted literary clan, the du Mauriers) was altogether more modern than her husband, Arthur—scholar, lawyer, and stiff. Yet he, too, adored his boys, and it may be unfair of “Finding Neverland” to elide him, for streamlining purposes, from the scene; by the time that Johnny Depp meets Kate Winslet, she is already a widow, whereas Arthur was very much alive when Barrie first entered the consciousness—and, little by little, the home—of the Llewellyn Davies family. Soon, he was staying for tea, and then to wish the boys good night, and before long the Llewellyn Davieses were invited down to the Barries’ house in the country for idyllic vacations. He began as Mr. Barrie the author, and grew into Uncle Jim. It was all too much for Barrie’s wife, who, in the end, sought understandable consolation in the arms of another man; Barrie, in turn, sought a divorce, which was granted in 1909.

“Finding Neverland” is a weepie, and some viewers will mock it on that score, but it needs to be defended. First, because these days a good weepie is hard to find. And, second, because there is so much to weep about—far more, in fact, than you would gather from the film, which closes decorously after the death of Sylvia. (If you want a more accurate and leisurely testament, you could go online and order the DVD of “J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys”—a wonderful TV drama, written by Andrew Birkin and running to four and a half hours, that the BBC produced in 1978, with Ian Holm providing the definitive Barrie.) From the moment that Barrie met George and Jack, and started to ponder the means by which they might be rendered immortal, the story becomes a dismal catalogue of mortality:

1907—Arthur Llewellyn Davies dies from cancer of the jaw.

1910—Sylvia dies of lung cancer. The five boys are orphaned; Barrie is made their guardian.

1915—George is killed in the First World War, fighting with his regiment in Flanders.

1921—Michael, an undergraduate at Oxford, is drowned while swimming with a friend. The two bodies, when recovered, are found clinging together.

All of this was enough to wreck Barrie, or, at least, to throw intolerable shadows over the remainder of his life. Few of his works, aside from “Peter Pan” and his desert-island comedy of class conflict, “The Admirable Crichton,” are remembered now, yet in 1922 he was invested with the Order of Merit, the grandest of British honors. He died in 1937, and we should be thankful that he didn’t live to be a hundred, and so to witness the terrible final act. On April 5, 1960, Peter Llewellyn Davies, by then an esteemed publisher, threw himself under a subway train in London. We should not presume to read a mind in torment, but we may note in passing that, if he had lived another month, he would have reached the centenary of Barrie’s birth and thus, one imagines, a fresh flurry of interest in “Peter Pan”—“that terrible masterpiece,” in the words of Peter Llewellyn Davies. His numerous comments on the genesis of the work, as quoted in Janet Dunbar’s 1970 biography of Barrie, are judicious, amused, and apparently unperturbed. But the effect of “Peter Pan” was like that of those iron bars on the hero’s family home; it is a kind of prison drama played onstage as a slice of festive cheer, and it locked the Llewellyn Davies boys into the garden of pre-puberty as surely as Pan himself is locked out from his mother’s embrace.

Does that make Barrie the bringer of mischance, after all? Peter “is never touched by any one in the play,” a stage direction in “Peter Pan” reads, and Barrie never touched his young charges—as Peter Llewellyn Davies confirmed—with anything more than affection. Once Arthur and Sylvia had died, Barrie, in loco parentis, fulfilled his duties with diligence and pride. But the damage, unwitting as it was, had been done long before, not by Barrie the middle-aged man but by Barrie the successful author; in making the Five the tinder for Peter Pan, he treated them as ideal spirits made flesh, and no child should be freighted with such an embarrassing burden. Their innocence was imperilled from the moment that it became prime-quality material for his elaborate public fantasies, and there may never have been a more desperate or acquisitive dedication than the one at the start of “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”: “To Sylvia and Arthur Llewellyn Davies and their boys (my boys).”

Barrie was a wounded creature, from his earliest youth, and his probing of that wound is what makes “Peter Pan” so enduringly painful to read. Toward the end of the novel, an immutable Peter drops in to find the adult Wendy, now a mother herself, as if he were the ghost of David Barrie, still cold from that skating accident, alighting beside Margaret Ogilvy. The tensions are bald and excruciating:



“Hullo, Peter,” she replied faintly, squeezing herself as small as possible. Something inside of her was crying, “Woman, woman, let go of me.”

Is this really the stuff of classic children’s fiction? Do people still read “Peter Pan,” or has Peter shrunk to a brand by now, a chirping Disney figure wrenched from the unsettling landscapes where he originally appeared? If so, he demands restitution, for he sprang from the mind of an oddball, and he is not alone. Consider Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and J. M. Barrie: the stammerer with the camera, the wandering epileptic, and the coughing frequenter of playgrounds. The great dreamers of English children’s literature were not, as it happens, dreamy types at all but exacting, even pedantic, in the dramatizing of their fathomless unhappiness. If their characters are pricked by a helpless urge to travel—down a rabbit hole, to sea in a sieve, second star to the right and straight on till morning—it is because there is always something, a drab existence or a dreadful past, that begs to be fled. Open a page of “Harry Potter,” by contrast, and you know that it was written by a clever, funny woman of sound mind, with a keen commercial eye and a Barrie-like love of the fizzing narratives for which children naturally thirst; but there is nothing smarting beneath, no ominous beat of the heartsick. Harry will grow up, and we think it only proper that he should; but will he continue to taunt and haunt us, a hundred years from now, like the boy who never did?

anthony lane


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