Peter Pan (3 page)

Yet he overcame his shyness and doubts and married Mary Ansell on July 4, 1894. They took their honeymoon in Switzerland, where, according to his wife, their marriage was never sexually consummated. Ironically, the unproductive years of their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1909, coincided with one of Barrie’s most productive periods. Not only did he write the novel
The Little White Bird
(1902), with key chapters introducing Peter Pan to the world (published separately in 1906 in
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
), he also produced some of his great plays, such as
The Little Minister
(1897),
Quality Street
(1902),
The Admirable Crichton
(1902),
Little Mary
(1903),
Peter Pan
(1904),
What Every Woman Knows
(1908), and
A Slice of Life
(1910). Moreover, he corresponded with most of the great writers of his time, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, and others, and he was personally acquainted with many other leading figures in theatrical and literary circles. Thanks in large part to the gracious help of Mary Ansell, and despite major difficulties within their marriage, he held parties in his home and attended dinners at the homes of the social elite in London.

Barrie’s most memorable and notable social event of this period, however, took place not with adults, but with three small boys in Kensington Gardens. Barrie and his wife had moved to a spacious dwelling at Leinster Corner, very near Kensington Gardens, and Barrie customarily took walks there with his large St. Bernard dog, Porthos. In the summer of 1897, he happened to encounter Mary Hodgson, a nurse, who was taking a stroll
with the Llewelyn Davies boys: four-year-old George, and his younger brothers Jack and Peter, ages three and one, respectively. Attracted by the boys, Barrie began performing magic feats and playing with them. He continued doing this throughout the summer and into the fall, often inventing stories about fairies, pirates, magical islands, and strange characters. It was not until a dinner party later in the year that Barrie met their mother, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, daughter of the novelist George du Maurier and sister of the actor Gerald du Maurier, who was later to make the role of Captain Hook famous. Sylvia Davies, a beautiful and gracious young woman, thirty-one at the time, was married to a struggling young lawyer named Arthur, who was thirty-four. Once Barrie realized that Sylvia was the mother of the Davies boys he had met in Kensington Gardens, he felt a strong rapport with her. Whether he fell in love with Sylvia as an ideal woman and mother is insignificant. What is significant is that Barrie embraced and consumed her and her family for the rest of their lives.

Whether one calls Barrie’s relations with Sylvia and Arthur and their five sons—they later added two more, Michael (born in 1900) and Nicholas (Nico, born in 1903)—invasive, infiltrating, manipulative, and obsessive, the fact is that he took over and “doctored” their lives the way he doctored his fictional works, endeavoring to alter and change the narratives of their lives according to his imagination and whimsy. This is not to say that Barrie was a monster or a dictator, or that he was even fully conscious of how intrusive he could be. Barrie was very loyal, generous, and kind. But he was also a driven man who apparently did not reflect much upon the drives that possessed him in his relations with close friends, and especially women. Thus there was always a price to be paid for the interest he took in people, and for his generosity. In fact, Arthur Davies, and later one of his sons, Peter, did not appreciate Barrie’s involvement in the family.

Yet, once attached, Barrie would not be shaken off. By 1898, after he had met Sylvia, he was no longer satisfied to meet the boys in Kensington Gardens; he now followed them home and often invited himself for tea or dinner. His stories about fairies
expanded, and he named Peter Pan after both the third Davies son and Pan, the mythic god of herds, known for his riotous behavior and revelry. Of course, Barrie’s Pan was not as virile and licentious as the Arcadian god. Rather, he was a little boy locked out of his mother’s home, a boy who could fly and had learned to fend for himself in the fairy realm of Kensington Gardens—but outside this realm, he was powerless.

In the meantime, Mary (Ansell) Barrie, who had realized very early that she was in a dilemma of a marriage, had bought a cottage in Surrey, outside London, which she redecorated and made into a country home to which friends and relatives were invited. The Davieses were among the guests, and it was there that Barrie took photographs of the boys and Porthos that he made into a book titled
The Boy Castaways of Blacklake Island Being a Record of the Terrible Adventures of the Brothers Davies in the Summer of 1901.
One copy he kept for himself, and the other he gave to the boys’ father, Arthur, who pointedly left the book in a train. However, despite this “literary” loss, Barrie was not yet done with the Davies boys and Peter Pan.

Their next appearance would occur in several chapters that he had already begun writing for
The Little White Bird
(1902), a novel published for adults, in which the narrator muses about his encounters in Kensington Gardens with a little boy named David. It was also during this time, at Christmas to be exact, that Barrie took Jack, George, and Peter Davies to see a musical play for children in London—
Bluebell in Fairyland.
One of the first commercial plays performed explicitly for children, it concerned a little flower girl who wanders off to fairyland, where she has exciting adventures, only to learn at the end of the play that she has been dreaming. The charming plot influenced Barrie’s own imagination. More important, it prompted him to consider writing a fairy-tale play for children and adults in which he could incorporate the many notes that he had been writing about Peter Pan.

Due to his involvement in other projects, Barrie could not fully turn his attention to the figure of Peter Pan, who haunted his imagination, until October of 1903. Then, as his private notebooks reveal, he worked feverishly on the play and completed
a first draft on March 1, 1904. He intended to offer the play to his American friend and producer, Charles Frohman, who was due to arrive in London at Easter. In the meantime, he tried to interest the great English actor Beerbohm Tree in the role of Mr. Darling, and gave him a private reading. Tree was disappointed—perhaps shocked—by this spectacular fairy-tale play, a genre in which Barrie had not written prior to that time. Tree wrote to Frohman to alert him that “Barrie has gone out of his mind…. I’m sorry to say it, but you ought to know it. He’s just read me his new play. He is going to read it to you. I know I have not gone woozy in my mind, because I have tested myself since hearing the play; but Barrie must be mad.”

However, the play had just the opposite effect on Frohman, who became so enthusiastic about it that he scheduled it for production at the Duke of York’s Theatre in time for the Christmas season on December 27, 1904. With such encouragement, Barrie began an intense period of preparing Peter Pan for performance, rewriting the script six times. Afraid that the audience—largely adults—would not respond as he wished to the fantastic story, he instructed the members of the orchestra to put down their instruments and clap when Peter appealed for help to save Tinker Bell’s life and cried out, “If you believe in fairies, clap your hands.” However, there had been no need for these instructions, for the audience clapped thunderously, causing Nina Boucicault, the actress playing Peter, to burst into tears. The play was such a success that the first run lasted until April of 1905, went on tour, and was successfully produced in New York. Indeed,
Peter Pan
continued to be performed in London every Christmas during Barrie’s lifetime and beyond. However, he did not publish the final revised script until 1928, the same year in which he bequeathed all royalties from the play to the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street.

Even if
Peter Pan
had not been such a success, Barrie had achieved fame as a dramatist. The play served only to make him extraordinarily famous and wealthy. Yet fame and money never went to his head; he lived for his projects. Barrie carried a notebook with him at all times and was constantly jotting down ideas for stories or plays. He was the consummate workaholic,
who neglected his wife and felt more at home in his study than anywhere else. Perhaps, one could argue, he felt more at home in another realm—his imagination. If Barrie had spare time, it was spent mainly with the Llewelyn Davies family, but a series of tragedies was soon to disrupt the idyllic relations he thought he had formed.

In 1906 Barrie, who had already lost his mother and father and other members of his family, was saddened to learn that Arthur Davies had cancer. Although Barrie had always been distrusted and disliked by Davies, he became even more devoted to him and his family during Davies’s illness, often providing financial assistance. After a courageous struggle, Davies died on April 19, 1907. Meanwhile, unknown to Barrie, who had now assumed the role of surrogate father and husband in the Davies household, his own wife was having an affair. Though he had just written one of his best social satires about human relations,
What Every Woman Knows
(1908), he was not very perceptive regarding his most intimate relationship, and his own marriage ended in a divorce in 1909, when he finally learned about Mary’s affair. Shaken by this break, he could barely write plays after this, for not only had Mary left him, but Sylvia Davies had also become seriously ill in the summer of 1909. She died the following year, on August 27, 1910.

Distraught and depressed, Barrie took solace in the thought that Sylvia had supposedly promised to marry him. What probably sustained him more, though, was his new role as surrogate father to the five Davies boys. Later in his life Peter Davies commented on some of Barrie’s letters:

Actually, it did not matter what the will stated; Barrie took charge of the boys. Significantly, it was at exactly this time that Barrie adapted the play
Peter Pan
and wrote the novel
Peter and Wendy
, which was published in 1911.

Even as he sought to take control of “my boys,” as he called them, and even though he was anointed a baron and became Sir James Barrie in 1913, he could not determine the destinies of those closest to him. The tragedies continued. Barrie’s brother Alec, who had played such a great role in his youth, died in 1913. George, the eldest Davies son, was killed in 1915 while fighting in World War I. That same year, his close friend Charles Frohman, who had produced
Peter Pan
, lost his life while traveling to London to see Barrie and to take care of business affairs, when the luxury liner
Lusitania
was torpedoed and sunk on May 7. Peter, the third eldest Davies son, went to France in 1917 only to return from the war shattered. Even after the war ended in 1918 there was more tragedy in store for Barrie when his favorite Davies son, Michael, died in a swimming accident on May 27, 1921.

This last death was particularly devastating for Barrie because he had been very close to Michael and had great expectations for him. Fortunately for Barrie, in 1917 he had met Lady Cynthia Asquith, who became his private secretary and emotional support in his later years. When they met, Lady Cynthia was thirty years old and the mother of two sons. A beautiful and gifted woman who eventually published some books for children and her memoirs, Lady Cynthia was also a replacement for Sylvia Davies. Yet she played a different role than Sylvia Davies had. As much as Barrie proceeded to invade and take over her life and family, she took over his and became responsible for the organization of his life, especially during the 1930s.

Although Barrie had one last successful play,
Mary Rose
, produced in 1920, he had lost his joy in writing for the stage, having never reconciled himself to Michael’s death. On the other hand, with the help of Lady Asquith, he began writing and giving speeches and publishing short stories, attending social gatherings, and monitoring the activities of the three surviving
Davies sons: Peter, Jack, and Nico. He did make one final, surprising effort to write a play with
The Boy David
(1936), a philosophical drama based on David’s days before he became King of Israel. But the play was produced in Edinburgh and London to little success. Barrie’s creative powers had by then reached an end. During the last few years of his life his health deteriorated, and he suffered from bouts of depression. Lady Asquith was called upon to nurse him, even though she herself was ill at the time. Barrie wavered in and out of depression and, at times, appeared morose and crazed. By June of 1937 he rarely left his apartment in London, even though he might enjoy an evening out. On June 13, he became seriously ill, and the Asquiths and Peter and Nicholas Davies took turns attending him until he died on June 19. He was buried in his hometown of Kirriemuir next to his mother, father, and siblings.

Very few critics have taken note of the fact that the novel
Peter and Wendy
was published in 1911, one year after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies’s death, and before Barrie had published a final version of the play. It was as though Barrie was prompted by Sylvia’s death to fix the script of all the Peter Pan writings in order to memorialize her and his encounters with her children. Up to that point he had produced numerous works that directly involved Peter Pan and his friends:
The Boy Castaways of Blacklake Island
(privately printed, 1901),
The Little White Bird
(1902), scripts for the production of
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up
(1904), and
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
(1906). There were also other Peter Pan publications not authored by him—Daniel S. O’Connor’s
Peter Pan Keepsake
(1907); Daniel S. O’Connor and Alice Woodward’s
The Peter Pan Picture Book
(1907); O. Herford’s
The Peter Pan Alphabet Book
(1909); and G. D. Drennan’s
Peter Pan, His Book, His Pictures, His Career, His Friends
(1909). Interestingly, Barrie’s novel is the only Peter Pan writing that mentions a character other than Peter in its title; significantly, it is Wendy, that is, the mother/wife figure related to Sylvia, the love of Barrie’s life, the dead woman who supposedly wanted to marry him.