J. M. Barrie was inspired by a family of boys to write 'Peter Pan' - but he never left this fantasy world, writes A. S. Byatt
The summers of late-Victorian and Edwardian England were unusually long and hot. Families were large, and children were no longer required to be seen and not heard. They talked and were talked to; they ran wild in woods and fields; they had an autonomous, carefree existence of which their staid parents were somewhat envious. Or so it seems, reading the fantasised adventures of the powerful children's literature of the time.
Jackie Wullschlager has observed in Inventing Wonderland that the threatened and resourceful girl heroines of the Victorian period (in Alice's Adventures Underground, for example) were replaced by the adventurous boys created by male writers who wanted in some sense to remain boys - Kenneth Grahame, Sir James Barrie, A. A. Milne. R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1860) gave three shipwrecked boys a chance to conduct their own adventures, and influenced many other writers, including Barrie.
Beyond adventure, there was a fashion for what was called the "pagan", which included a kind of earth-mysticism about the great god Pan. Grahame published Pagan Papers in 1893, The Golden Age in 1895 and The Wind in the Willows (in which Pan makes a mysterious appearance) in 1908. Related to this Pan is Kipling's earth-spirit in Puck of Pook's Hill, who takes Dan and Una on various adventures. Virginia Woolf named the group surrounding Rupert Brooke the "neo-pagans". Brooke and the tomboy, tree-climbing Olivier girls went camping in woods, swam naked, and agreed that to become middle-aged was an appalling tragedy. "Is there a greater tragedy than for a boy to die, except for him to grow old, to live!" Brooke wrote to a friend.
Brooke was addicted to the play, Peter Pan (which opened in 1904). He saw it at least 10 times, and fantasised about it when he was a Cambridge undergraduate: "As I stroll through Cambridge, Trinity Street fades and I find myself walking by the shore of the Mermaid's Lagoon, King's Chapel often shrinks before my eyes, and rises, and is suddenly the House in the Tree-tops." He was also, it is fair to add, addicted to Wagner's Ring, and to Wedekind's Spring Awakening - a play, not at all innocent, about the dangers of prolonged childish ignorance.
Peter Pan was written out of the imaginative games Barrie played with the Llewellyn-Davies boys, whom he met in Kensington Gardens. There were five boys, and their parents - Arthur and Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies - both alive when Peter Pan appeared, both soon to die, leaving the boys to Barrie's care.
"There never was a simpler and happier family until the coming of Peter Pan," Barrie wrote in Peter and Wendy, and Andrew Birkin in his splendid book, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, says he believes that Barrie had his own intrusion into the Llewellyn-Davies family in mind. Barrie - small, ugly, wildly energetic, rich, kind and tactless - took over the family despite the anxiety and irritation of their father, giving them presents, holidays, a fantasy world to play in.
Barrie's Dedication to the Five tells the story of how the play came to be: "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 . . . 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." He goes on to claim that as the boys "swung monkey-wise from branch to branch in the wood of make-believe" they "reached the tree of knowledge" - and, he implies, left their companion behind in Neverland.
Marc Forster's new film, Finding Neverland, is a version of the tale of Barrie, the boys and Peter Pan, which imposes (perhaps inevitably) a kind of Hollywood sweetness on the tangled story. It reduces the five boys to four, which doesn't matter much. More seriously, it kills off Arthur Llewellyn-Davies before Barrie (Johnny Depp) meets Sylvia (Kate Winslet) and her sons, thus making Barrie and Sylvia into an innocent romantic couple, until Sylvia's own tragic early death.
Depp, whose charm is very different from that of the Greedy Dwarf (another Barrie game-hero), makes the playwright into a handsome, boyish dreamer. But he does suggest a certain incomprehension of adult emotions, a certain incompleteness. The failure of Barrie's marriage, to the actress Mary Ansell, is not explained - it was widely believed that the marriage, like Ruskin's, was never consummated. The real Barrie fell romantically in love with actresses - the stage being an archetype of Neverland, as Hollywood is, in which people are surreal, not real.
The most exciting parts of the film are the stagey bits - a sequence where Depp dances with a bear among terrible clowns, the flying machinery, the final sequence where Neverland is privately re-created for the mortally sick Sylvia in her own back garden.
The atmosphere of that Neverland is a dense and sickly green - with a crocodile and a cannon lurking in the depths into which Sylvia wanders. And the relationship between eternal boy and growing boys has its good spiky moments. Peter Llewellyn-Davies tells Barrie: "You're not my father," and at the first night of Peter Pan, when identified as Pan he says fiercely: "I'm not Peter Pan. He is."
NEVERLAND IS ONE of the great "secondary worlds", as Auden called them, writing about Tolkien's myth-creation. It is a world with its own laws - its own kinds of fairies, mermaids and pirates, as well as flying children responsible for their own fates - which is not only sentimental. There are secondary worlds, like Tolkien's and Pratchett's, into which no children have wandered from a primary world in pyjamas or shorts and gym-shoes, and I find these easier to inhabit imaginatively than those in which "real" children are there to experience them.
I find C.S. Lewis's children nuisancey and repugnant. I mildly enjoy E. Nesbit's family who make disastrous wishes in Five Children and It. Kipling got it right, imaginatively, in the Puck books, because his Dan and Una meet imaginable historical adults as a young reader meets characters in a grown-up book. Puck is giving them what books and tales do give children, only in their own lives. I can still read The Railway Children, which has no magic, and The Secret Garden, which has Dickon (a "real" Pan figure), and find a lump in my throat.
As a little girl in the second World War, and now as a woman, I found and find tears in my eyes at the end of Peter Pan, as I do when Bobbie recovers her father at the end of The Railway Children, or Arthur Ransome's family survives a storm in the North Sea, to find their father on a boat in a Dutch port.
But Peter Pan, like a lot of dangerous Victorian fantasy, conflates fairyland with death. The Lost Boys are those who vanished from their prams. Pan is Barrie, whose formative experience was the death of his brother (aged 15) when he was little, and who felt compelled to try to replace him for his mother, even wearing his clothes and whistling his whistle. Peter Pan is the ghost of a dead child, flying in the dark. Even as a five-year-old, I was crying for Mrs Darling because I knew the vanished children wouldn't really come back, as I was crying for my father, who was lost in the air force, and might not return. In the film, Barrie tries to persuade Peter that his mother will always be there in Neverland. I think Peter, and we, know better.
IT IS BRAVE to make a film on this subject in a time obsessed with paedophilia. Parents have been prosecuted for naked photographs of their children, which are as innocent as those of the five boys that illustrate Andrew Birkin's book. In Barrie's tale, The Little White Bird, about a man who invents an imaginary son in order to be able to play with a real boy called David, the scene in which David is allowed to sleep the night with the narrator would be unpublishable now.
"'Why, David,' said I, sitting up, 'do you want to come into my bed?' 'Mother said I wasn't to want it unless you wanted it first,' he squeaked."
In this tale, too, the boys and their adult friend invent Peter Pan, the boy who could fly because babies are birds before they are born, and Peter's mother had forgotten to weigh him at birth, which would have held him down. The narrator's imagined son, Timothy, resembles the daughter in Dear Brutus, a stage-play in which a man meets the daughter he never had, who didn't "want to be a might-have-been".
Barrie's fantasies and needs were close to the surface, and freely expressed. The Llewellyn-Davies boys are on record as saying he was simply an innocent. The youngest, Nico, said: "Of all the men I have ever known, Barrie was the wittiest and the best company. He was also the least interested in sex. He was a darling man. He was innocent; which is why he could write Peter Pan."
He is said to have bought an engagement ring to give Sylvia before her death, and his love for her, as well as for her boys, bears little resemblance to the behaviour of Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, where he married the mother to ensure access to the child. Nor does his Neverland bear much resemblance to Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch, though Jackson is certainly a weird, panicky version of both Barrie and his hero.
What happens to those who have inhabited Neverlands? One thing is that they get called "the boy who was Peter Pan", or the "boy who was Little Lord Fauntleroy" or "the boy who was Christopher Robin" all their adult lives, and the haunting is not pleasant. What happened to the golden boys of the Edwardian Age was, of course, the first World War. "To die will be an awfully big adventure," Peter Pan said blithely on his rock - a line that was cut in performance as the war wore on. Rupert Brooke died of an infection in the army in 1916. Kipling's only son, on whom Dan was based, was killed in his first battle. George, the eldest Llewellyn-Davies boy, was killed in 1915, in Flanders. The toy cannon in the film, Finding Neverland, and the ticking crocodile prefigure this.
More darkly, Michael, the boy Barrie most loved, drowned in 1921, with a friend, at Oxford - he couldn't swim, and the deaths were felt to be a possible suicide pact. Barrie was heartbroken. Kenneth Grahame's son, Alastair, went to Oxford after the war and went out one evening and lay down on a railway line in front of a train.
Saddest, and in a way final, was the fate of Peter Llewellyn-Davies. He became a successful publisher. He began to construct a family history out of the documents he called "the Morgue". In 1952, he burned more than 2,000 letters between Barrie and Michael. He loathed the association with "that terrible masterpiece". In 1960, at the age of 63, he committed suicide by throwing himself under a train at Sloane Square station. Fleet Street reported his death with headlines such as "The Boy Who Never Grew Up Is Dead" and "Peter Pan's Death Leap". And the innocence of the boys' stories died too. The Coral Island inspired not only Peter Pan, but also that great myth of the Fall, Lord of the Flies. - (Guardian Service)
Finding Neverland is on general release. A.S. Byatt's most recent book, A Whistling Woman, is published by Vintage