Andrew Birkin - J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan

A fascinating story, beautifully constructed and told with grace, great sympathy and skill. By a rare dramatic gift, Mr Birkin makes the past live around the characters. The numerous illustrations appear next to the text which refers to them, a text which uses their haunting qualities to extraordinary effect. Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph

One of the most deeply moving stories I have ever read.

Fern Long, San Francisco Examiner

The book that Mr Birkin has written is as lucid and gripping as his award-winning television trilogy, The Lost Boys. John Leonard, New York Times

Having created one of television's masterpieces, The Lost Boys, Andrew Birkin follows it up, not with the now customary book of the programme, but with its documentation set out in another form but with an equally compelling artistry It is indicative of the author's creative use of restraint that this astonishing history justifies his claim of love story from beginning to end. It is a lesson in revelations. Ronald Blythe, The Listener

A work so rich in incident and character, and ultimately almost unbearably poignant.

Richard Dyer, Boston Globe

Birkin's brilliant and shattering biography one of the year's most engrossing biographies. Joseph Kestner, Tulsa World

Immensely gripping and satisfying one of the most poignant stories I have read for a long time. Nicholas Tucker, BBC Kaleidoscope

This book is not to be dismissed as a spin-off from the television. Birkin has drawn in his portrait of Barrie surely one of the most extraordinary human beings that ever walked the earth Haro Hobson, Daily Mail

This tender yet tragic story has never been so fully or compellingly presented as in this handsomely produced, engrossing study. Edward Griffin, Choice Magazine

Absolutely delightful the rich yet restrained narrative coupled with the entrancing photographs make this book a wholly memorable experience.

Millicent Braverman, KFAC Radio

Birkin, a superb writer, has made a fascinating book tender, compulsive, passionate an astonishing and poignantly disturbing biography.

Eugenia Thornton, Cleveland Plain Dealer

The most candid and perceptive biography to have been written on Barrie.

The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature

This startling biography daring and entertaining so overwhelming that it forces us to view Peter Pan in an altogether new light.

Andrea Darvi, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

The Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity warmly acknowledge the generous donation from Andrew Birkin of the copyright in this book, a gift to the patients and staff in the true spirit of J.M. Barrie himself.

First published in Great Britain in 1979 by Constable and Company

First published in paperback in 1986

This edition first published in paperback in 2003 by Yale University Press

Copyright 2003 The Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity

Second printing 2005

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:

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More background information on this book at www.jmbarrie.co.uk

Set in Monophoto Ehrhardt 11pt

Printed in China through Worldprint

ISBN 978-0-300-09822-8 (pbk.)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

To my Mother

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

A. E. Housman

Contents

You're old, but you're not grown up.

You're one of us.

Alexander Puttnam, aged 11

Introduction to the Yale Edition

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 twenties. 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 1924. She lent me her copy of the play, urging me also to 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:

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

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