Peter Pan’s Dark Side.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 18, 2008 |

The headline, “How bad was J.M. Barrie?” screams sensationalism, and, although she does try to be balanced, Justine Picardie doesn’t seem too comfortable with Barrie the person. She opens with a “curse” Barrie “scrawled across the pages of one of his last notebooks”, “May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me”, and she mentions that Barrie biographer Andrew Birkin has suggested he may have been a victim of this curse: his son was killed in a car crash just a month before his twenty-first birthday, the same age Barrie’s adopted son Michael was when he drowned. Although this seems like a tragic coincidence, she adds that she avoided Barrie in writing her novel Daphne, about the author Daphne du Maurier, at least partly because “as the mother of two teenage sons, I didn’t want to incur the posthumous wrath of Barrie.”

To be fair it may be hard for her to avoid sensationalism because the article is a review of Captivated: J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers and the Dark Side of Neverland by Piers Dudgeon. She sums up Dudgeon’s view that Barrie “filled the vacuum of his own sexual impotence by a compulsive desire to possess the family who inspired his most famous creation, Peter Pan.” This goes against the Hollywood version, Finding Neverland, in which Barrie, played by Johnny Depp, is a friendly but mature man, a kind of eccentric uncle who has a strained relationship with his wife but has a fulfilling, although strictly platonic, relationship with Sylvia Davies. It seems like too much of a cliché to say the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. Nico Davies, quoted by his daughter (who was one of Barrie’s godchildren), said, “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…” Picardie adds that this view is shared by Birkin, who had more extensive access to Barrie’s archives than any other biographer. I also can’t help wondering why there’s a need for some to ponder the sexuality of some children’s authors. Dodgson is also mentioned, and while it’s true that Dodgson made some creepy photographs of little girls and Barrie wrote some unnerving things in his novel The Little White Bird, isn’t it possible that they had an interest in children and an understanding of children that was rooted in their own childhood and not in some sexual deviance?

While it’s tempting to say that Dudgeon is simply wrong because Barrie never had a “vacuum” caused by “sexual impotence”–that he couldn’t miss what he never had, I think there’s also a risk in leaning too far the other way as Alison Lurie did when she called him “the boy who couldn’t grow up”. Barrie was, like anyone else, the sum of his life experiences, from the death of his brother (who was their mother’s clear favorite) to what may have been a glandular problem that prevented him from developing into adulthood (although he could grow a pretty impressive moustache). I think the reason why J.M. Barrie still fascinates us is because none of us really want to grow up, but he inspires sensationalism because we have a conflicting desire to grow up.