J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys Read online

  ‘A fascinating story, beautifully constructed and told with grace, great sympathy and skill. By a rare dramatic gift, Mr Birkin makes the past live around the characters. The numerous illustrations appear next to the text which refers to them, a text which uses their haunting qualities to extraordinary effect.’ – Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

  ‘One of the most deeply moving stories I have ever read.’

  – Fern Long, San Francisco Examiner

  ‘The book that Mr Birkin has written is as lucid and gripping as his award-winning television trilogy, The Lost Boys.’ – John Leonard, New York Times

  ‘Having created one of television's masterpieces, The Lost Boys, Andrew Birkin follows it up, not with the now customary book of the programme, but with its documentation set out in another form but with an equally compelling artistry … It is indicative of the author's creative use of restraint that this astonishing history justifies his claim of ‘love story’ from beginning to end. It is a lesson in revelations.’ – Ronald Blythe, The Listener

  ‘A work so rich in incident and character, and ultimately almost unbearably poignant.’

  – Richard Dyer, Boston Globe

  ‘Birkin's brilliant and shattering biography … one of the year's most engrossing biographies.’ – Joseph Kestner, Tulsa World

  ‘Immensely gripping and satisfying … one of the most poignant stories I have read for a long time.’ Nicholas Tucker, – BBC Kaleidoscope

  ‘This book is not to be dismissed as a spin-off from the television. Birkin has drawn in his portrait of Barrie surely one of the most extraordinary human beings that ever walked the earth …’ – Haro Hobson, Daily Mail

  ‘This tender yet tragic story … has never been so fully or compellingly presented as in this handsomely produced, engrossing study.’ – Edward Griffin, Choice Magazine

  ‘Absolutely delightful … the rich yet restrained narrative coupled with the entrancing photographs make this book a wholly memorable experience.’

  – Millicent Braverman, KFAC Radio

  ‘Birkin, a superb writer, has made a fascinating book – tender, compulsive, passionate … an astonishing and poignantly disturbing biography.’

  – Eugenia Thornton, Cleveland Plain Dealer

  ‘The most candid and perceptive biography to have been written on Barrie.’

  – The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature

  ‘This startling biography … daring and entertaining … so overwhelming that it forces us to view Peter Pan in an altogether new light.’

  – Andrea Darvi, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  The Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity warmly acknowledge the generous donation from Andrew Birkin of the copyright in this book, a gift to the patients and staff in the true spirit of J.M. Barrie himself.

  First published in Great Britain in 1979 by Constable and Company

  First published in paperback in 1986

  This edition first published in paperback in 2003 by Yale University Press

  Copyright © 2003 The Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity

  Second printing 2005

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

  U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com

  Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk

  More background information on this book at www.jmbarrie.co.uk

  Set in Monophoto Ehrhardt 11pt

  Printed in China through Worldprint

  ISBN 978-0-300-09822-8 (pbk.)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  To my Mother

  Into my heart an air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

  The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

  A. E. Housman

  Contents

  Introduction to the Yale Edition

  Introduction

  Geneaology

  Prologue

  1 1860–1885

  2 1885–1894

  3 1894–1897

  4 The Davies Family

  5 1898–1900

  6 1900–1901

  7 1901–1904

  8 1904–1905

  9 1905–1906

  10 1906–1907

  11 1907–1908

  12 1908–1910

  13 1910–1914

  14 1914–1915

  15 1915–1917

  16 1917–1921

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Source notes

  Illustration sources and acknowledgements

  Index

  ‘You're old, but you're not grown up.

  You're one of us.’

  Alexander Puttnam, aged 11

  Introduction to the Yale Edition

  ‘I do loathe explanations’ is the Barrie maxim that should caution me in writing this new introduction to a book I thought I'd disposed of a quarter of a century ago. Another is ‘Beware, or you may get what you want’ – a warning I found in one of Barrie's notebooks but always forgot to include in subsequent editions.

  I didn't catch up with Peter Pan till my late twenties. As a struggling hack, I'd accepted the job of co-adapting the story for an American musical starring Mia Farrow as Peter and Danny Kaye as Hook. I knew nothing of Peter – I'd never even seen the Disney cartoon – but my mother knew a thing or two about him, having sung the somewhat sugary ‘Peter Pan Song’ at the beginning of every performance of the silent movie in her father's cinema back in 1924. She lent me her copy of the play, urging me also to read the lengthy ‘Dedication to the Five’, in which Barrie breaks his own maxim by partially explaining how Peter came into being, referring to the Llewelyn Davies boys with enigmatic numbers:

  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 Peter is – the spark I got from you. What a game we had of Peter before we clipped him small to make him fit the boards. He was the longest story on earth. Some of you were not born when that story began and yet were hefty figures before we saw that the game was up. … What was it that eventually made us give to the public in the thin form of a play that which had been woven for ourselves alone? Alas, I know what it was. I was losing my grip. One by one as you swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe you reached the tree of knowledge. … A time came when I saw that No 1, the most gallant of you all, ceased to believe that he was ploughing woods incarnadine, and with an apologetic eye for me derided the lingering faith of No 2; when even No 3 questioned gloomily whether he did not really spend his nights in bed. There were still two who knew no better, but their day was dawning. In these circumstances, I suppose, was begun the writing of the play of Peter, so much the most insignificant part of him. That was a quarter of a century ago, and I clutch my brows in vain to remember whether it was a last desperate attempt to retain the five of you for a little longer, or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and butter. You had played it until you tired of him, and tossed him in the air, and gored him, and left him derelict in the mud, and went
on your way singing other songs; and then I stole back and sewed some of the gory fragments together with a pen-nib…

  Although this cry from the heart touched deep chords, had I not fallen in love with Mia Farrow things might have ended there. But I was keen to remain in her orbit, and justified my presence on the set by becoming the resident Barrie expert. My inherent inertia was further provoked by my friend Richard Loncraine, a film director who at once saw the dramatic possibilities and urged me to write it down. By the end of shooting I'd skimmed a couple of biographies (notably Janet Dunbar's excellent J M Barrie: The Man Behind the Image) and set about cobbling together an outline that took a good deal of dramatic licence, but was nevertheless a framework on which to hang the story as a film for television. I sent it to the BBC, where a new producer, Louis Marks, commissioned me to write it as his first production.

  It was at this point that Sharon Goode, my amazing researcher, tracked down Nico Llewelyn Davies (No 5), then living in happy retirement in the countryside. This precipitated a spate of letter-writing – over 600 between the three of us – as well as frequent Sunday visits to his home in Kent. Nico was a treasure-trove of stories and anecdotes, moreover his cellar contained not only fine whiskey but a trunk stuffed with old family letters, photograph albums, and the unpublished typescript of his brother Peter's ‘Family Morgue’ (as Peter wryly referred to it). Starting in the 1840s, the Morgue chronicles the Llewelyn Davies family's history via hundreds of letters and documents, interpolated with Peter's comments. But by the time he reached his brother George's death in 1915, Peter had become so depressed that he abandoned the project, burnt most of the original letters, and later threw himself under a train.

  It took a good fortnight to digest this huge compilation, along with the many other letters and papers that had neither found their way into Peter's Morgue, nor the flames. And, as always, the more one read, the more complex the story became. I went to see Louis Marks, explained my dilemma and begged for more time – not just time in which to write the script, but actual screen time. Instead of ninety minutes, I felt we needed four or five hours if we were to tell the story without resorting to the simplified characters and dramatic licence of Hollywood biopics. Louis listened patiently. It would mean losing our green-lighted production dates, with no guarantee that in a year's time the whole BBC regime might not have changed for the worse. To my eternal gratitude, Louis agreed to a trilogy totalling four-and-a-half hours.

  This book was something of an afterthought, written two years later in the far-too-brief span of the six months between completion and transmission. My initial idea had been to edit Peter Davies' Morgue, but Nico felt that it would require far too many footnotes. Despite Peter's wonderful comments, much of it is off the point insofar as any book about Barrie is concerned, and the overall work incomplete since it ends at George's death. Sharon was either too modest or too wise to write a biography herself, so I took the plunge. The publishers Constable agreed to take it, believing it to be some sort of TV tie-in of so-many-thousand words. The finished typescript ended up over twice the contractual length. After a good deal of haggling, a 300-page limit was agreed upon, and a hundred pages chopped, which meant I had to end the saga somewhat abruptly at Michael's death in 1921. A second edition in 1986 allowed me to add new material in the margins without disturbing the original pagination, and this third edition permits the same. But it still leaves a wealth of material unpublished, not to mention the many new things that have turned up in the intervening years. These include all Barrie's original notes for Peter Pan – over 700, long believed lost – which I discovered in the Beinecke Library at Yale in the 1980s, and spent many weeks transcribing from Barrie's microscopic scrawl. What makes these notes so remarkable is the realisation that Barrie wrote his first draft of the play without any mention of Captain Hook at all. He didn't need a villain because he already had one: ‘P[eter] a demon boy (villain of story).’ It was only due to the prosaic necessity of a ‘front-cloth scene’ to give the stagehands time to change the scenery from the Never Never Land back to the Darling Nursery that Hook was conceived at all:

  The Homeward Journey. The Flight by flying, the Homeward Journey by water (P[eter] with oar defending W[endy] from great birds—also attack by pirates?) P takes command of Pirate Ship.

  The front-cloth soon became a new act – The Pirate Ship – and the stagehands found their work had increased exponentially. Even with Hook firmly entrenched, Barrie's first instinct was to have him played by a woman: ‘Pirate Captain—Miss Dorothea Baird’. Dorothea Baird had been cast to play Mrs Darling, and the idea of the mother-figure doubling as the ostensible villain would have been a gratifying touch, echoing one of Barrie's original titles: ‘The Boy Who Hated Mothers’. In the event, Gerald du Maurier – already cast as Mr Darling – persuaded Barrie to let him play Hook as well, thus initiating a tradition that has no real thematic justification. Had Barrie conceived the play with Hook as the villain all along, I doubt that Peter Pan would have become the ‘terrible masterpiece’ that so haunted his namesake, Peter Davies. To anyone studying Pan's evolution, these notes are essential reading, and I shall gradually post them on the internet – at www.jmbarrie.co.uk – along with the best of the rest, including Barrie's other notebooks, Peter's Morgue, his letters to Barrie from the Western Front (discovered at the back of a drawer in 1990), his (and Nico's) letters to Mary Hodgson (1916–1960), Nico's research letters to Sharon and me (1975–1980), and the hundreds of photographs, letters and documents bought by me from Nico before he died in 1980. This will hopefully allow some future writer to plough the same field and come up with a different perspective than mine. I also hope that this additional material will add weight to my belief that yes, of course Barrie was a lover of childhood, but was not in any sexual sense the paedophile that some claim him to have been. As Nico so delightfully remarked, ‘I don't believe that Uncle Jim ever experienced what one might call a stirring in the undergrowth for anyone – man, woman, adult or child. He was an innocent…’

  When Barrie finally let go of his dream child, by donating all his rights in Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in 1929, he did so ‘for the very best of reasons’ according to Nico, ‘but also for the not-quite-so-good reason that he hoped everyone would say what a splendid thing to have done. In fact nobody said any such thing, and all that happened was that the following year the hospital wrote to Uncle Jim saying, “Thanks so much for Peter Pan last year. What are you going to give us this year?”’ Nico loved telling this story, true or not, and I mention it here only to guard against a similar accusation levelled at me. When I carted away all those things from Nico's house for the princely sum of a few cases of malt whiskey, I knew they were not really mine – that I was at best a guardian, and that one day they would wind up with the hospital, along with the rights to this book.

  The not-so-good reason for handing everything over is that I feel somewhat felled by Barrie's curse, quoted in my original introduction: ‘May God blast anyone who writes a biography about me’. My son Anno was born on my birthday in 1980, seven weeks after Nico died. As he and his brothers David and Ned grew up, I came to experience first hand the joy that Barrie had so longed for – children of one's own. I secretly hoped that one of them would be a Michael – the poet among the five Davies brothers – but as a boy, Anno seemed much more like George, with lashings of Nico's humour. Then around his fifteenth birthday, Anno suddenly blossomed into a poet and musician of great originality. About this time I was asked to make a film based on this book. To condense the original Lost Boys seemed both pointless and impossible, but I was drawn to the idea of filming Barrie's relationship with the adolescent Michael, who drowned in 1921, one month short of his 21st birthday. I spoke with Anno about doing such a film, and he rightly felt that I should only do it if I had something new to say. But what?

  In September 2001, Anno headed for Italy with his band to record their first album. On the day we said goodbye,
I'd been to Hampstead to visit Yale University Press, the publishers of this latest edition. I had always meant to look for Michael's gravestone, which I knew lay somewhere in Hampstead Cemetery, and later that day I found it, photographing it for this edition. When I saw Anno that night for the last time, I mentioned finding the grave. ‘Ah, but have you found something new to say?’

  Visiting George's grave with Anno in 1983

  A month later I paid a visit to Eilean Shona, where Barrie and Michael had spent their last summer together in 1920. Five glorious days were spent roaming the island, finally climbing the sole mountain to the spot where Michael had written his last (surviving) poem, which ends: ‘Man arose to his master-height, shivered and turned away; but the mists were round him’. I'd visited most of the Barrie locations many years before, but had never made it to Dumfries, where he claimed he spent the happiest days of his life. I wanted to find the ruined keep he used to visit with his boyhood friend James McMillan (see page 10) – and found it on my way back south- as I did that ‘certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land to me’ – now abandoned and overgrown. I drove on, spending the night in the Lake District, miles from anywhere at the head of a vast black lake, where I pitched camp and started writing about fantasy and reality, the twin sides to the coin of Barrie's Pan. When I finally reached home, the phone was ringing. It was Anno in Italy. They'd just finished recording a rehearsal of their album, and he sounded as happy as I'd ever heard him. We talked and talked, and then he had to go. The next morning came the phone call. Anno had been killed in a car smash in thick mist with three of his friends. Like Michael, he was one month short of 21.