Introduction
to the Yale Edition (2003)
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The new introduction to the Yale edition of
J M Barrie & the Lost Boys attempts to put the website
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the Website Introduction.
"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 20s. 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 the
1924. She lent me her copy of the play, urging me to
also 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:
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Cover of the new Yale Edition
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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 ...

Mia as Peter, captured with my
Pentax.
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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 precipi-tated a spate of letter-writing
over 600 between the three of us as well as frequent
Sunday visits to his home in Kent.
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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 not
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.
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JMB in 1912
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Ian Holm as JMB in The Lost
Boys (1978)
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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.
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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.
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Nina Boucicault as Peter Pan impersonating
Napoleon in the 1904 production.
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The front-cloth soon became a new Act
V 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 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-
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Mr. Darling (Gerald du Maurier)
and Mrs. Darling (Dorothea Baird) examining Peter's
shadow in the 1904 production.
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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.
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 grew up,
I came to experience first hand the joys that Barrie had so
longed for "my boys". I secretly wished 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, a sort of miracle occurred, and 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 had 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?"
Michael's poem, returned to the
heights of Eilean Shona
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A month later I decided to
pay 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 wrote 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 Barrie 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 as I did
that "certain Dumfries garden, which is enchanted land
to me" now abandoned and overgrown. I drove on,
and decided to spend the night in the Lake District, winding
up 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.
Anno, Kumbakonam, 2001
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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 outside Milan
with three of his friends. Like Michael, he was one
month short of 21.
I don't remember ever having read
Peter Pan to Anno or his brothers. I don't think
he ever saw The Lost Boys, or read this book.
He didn't have to. Whether I make my Barrie film remains
to be seen, but yes, Anno I do have something
new to say.
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Andrew Birkin
Wales, March 2003
[]
Introduction to JM Barrie & The
Lost Boys, published by Yale University Press and quoted
with their permission.
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