MAN WHO COULDN’T GROW UP… OR FORGET
Peter Pan, running at The Gate until January 14, is not just the story of a boy who wouldn’t grow up: it’s also the story of a man who couldn’t forget. The play, a mixture of pantomime, villainy and conflicted emotions, is practically the story of the writer James Matthew (JM) Barrie’s emotional and mental life.
In one of his notebooks, Barrie wrote, ‘It’s as if, very long after writing Peter Pan, its true meaning came to me – a desperate attempt to grow up, but can’t’.
It’s not just that he didn’t grow up emotionally; he was physically just over five foot tall. It has been suggested that the trauma of his childhood led to a condition that restricted his growth.
Born in Kirriemuir, Scotland, in 1860, Barrie was one of the most successful writers of novels and plays of his era. He was made a baronet, became chancellor of Edinburgh University, and was awarded the Order of Merit, the highest British honour available to people distinguished by their services to the arts, science, culture or the armed services: there are only ever 24 living people holding the honour.
Yet, today JM Barrie is remembered almost exclusively as the author of Peter Pan. There are rare revivals of his plays The Honourable Crichton and Quality Street, (probably best known for having chocolates named after it).
The death of his 14-year-old brother David affected him so much that it directed the rest of his life.
David, tall and intelligent, was killed in a skating accident. His mother never got over his death. The six-year-old James tried to become a replacement for David but couldn’t succeed.
And in his mind there grew the idea that growing up is dangerous: childhood became a state of freedom from rules and change. But it’s also a Neverland that can only survive in the imagination.
David never left Barrie’s mind. In his book A Window In Thrums, the story Dead These Twenty Years, is about a precious young son who runs down the road to play. A cart comes along and kills him instantly. His brother is still grieving at the end of the book.
When he later went to Dumfries Academy, where his brother and sister were teachers, the area became his enchanted land. Barrie made friends and developed the adventure stories that later grew into books and plays about Peter Pan.
The modern Peter Pan is often a likeable, impish character, not the self-obsessed, selfish Peter of Barrie’s play and books.
When the statue of Peter Pan was unveiled in London’s Kensington Gardens in 1912, Barrie was disappointed. ‘It doesn’t show the devil in Peter,’ he said.
In 1894, he married the actress Mary Ansell who was appearing
His brother, David, tall and intelligent, died in a skating accident
Before the boys’ father died he wrote of Barrie’s unfailing kindness and tact
in one of his plays. They had no children and were divorced in 1909. Her second marriage was also a failure. But
Barrie kept supporting her financially and left her an annuity in his will.
A major change in his life was his meeting with Sylvia Llewellyn Davies in Kensington Garden, with her sons. He became a close friend of the family, especially of the five sons, even going on holidays with them. He regularly played games with the boys, inventing stories, adventures and plays that would later surface in the Peter Pan books.
There was occasional uneasy talk of the close relationship between Barrie and the boys, but to them he was just Uncle Jim. They never spoke of anything improper about Barrie’s behaviour. Like his former wife, they considered him a benign, asexual man who constantly entertained them.
His book Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens is dedicated almost naively to ‘Sylvia and Arthur Llewellyn Davies and their boys (my boys)’. He had made them live permanently as part of his whole Peter Pan creation. ‘I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together like sticks to produce a flame. Peter is the spark I got from you,’ he told them.
But tragedy had a habit of following Barrie. In 1894, the five-year-old Margaret Henley daughter of a writer friend, died of meningitis. In her childish speech she called Barrie her friendy-wendie. It gave him the name Wendy that became famous through Peter Pan.
In 1907 Arthur Llewellyn Davies, died of cancer. Sylvia died in 1910. Barrie became the boys’ legal guardian and practically took over the running of their lives.
Arthur had often been irritated by Barrie’s personality but when he became seriously ill with the cancer that destroyed his face, Barrie met all the expenses. And before Arthur died he wrote of Barrie’s unfailing kindness and tact.
In 1915 George, eldest of the five brothers, was killed during World War I; in 1921 the second youngest, Michael, studying at Oxford, drowned with a friend, apparently by suicide. He had been the Llewellyn Davies boy closest to Barrie.
In 1960, Peter, mentally disturbed, threw himself under a Tube train in London. He had called Peter Pan ‘that terrible masterpiece’, perhaps a reference to the brothers becoming known as the Lost Boys of Peter Pan.
In 1929 James Barrie bequeathed the royalties from all his Peter Pan works to London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.
Roddy Doyle’s version of Peter Pan runs at The Gate Theatre in Dublin until January 14.