“May God blast anyone who writes a biography of me.”
– J. M. Barrie
Those complexities are compellingly and more accurately explored in the leisurely-paced BBC award-winning The Lost Boys (1978). Ian Holm, looking and sounding like the Scottish author, gives a powerful and moving performance that earned the highest accolades from the youngest and only surviving Llewelyn Davies son, Nicholas (Nico), as Holm became the real “Uncle Jim.” The miniseries was written by Andrew Birkin who followed up the television script with his excellent biography J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979, reissued by the Yale University Press in 2003).
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Marc Forster's Finding Neverland |
With Arthur airbrushed from Finding Neverland, audiences did not have to witness his slow, agonizing death from cancer of the jaw that disfigured his face. Instead, we are left with Barrie and Sylvia as an innocent romantic couple and with Sylvia’s grim-faced mother the only member of the family to register disapproval at the new family arrangement. When Sylvia, whose only symptom is a discrete cough, dies a tragic death, Forster cranks up the sentimentality. The boys’ devastation at losing both parents to cancer within a four-year period is barely touched upon and limited to Peter, the only brother who is given an individualized identity in the film. Freddie Highmore plays the wary, troubled Peter, who in reality, along with Jack, was ambivalent about Barrie, and he is outstanding the scenes in which he tells the eternal boy, “You’re not my father,” and says pointedly when referred to as Pan at the opening night of the play: “I’m not Peter Pan. He [Barrie] is.”
Neither would any casual observer know from Finding Neverland that Mary Ansell, Barrie’s wife, was a distinguished actress, and that the time Barrie was spending all his time at rehearsals and with the Davies family was not the only reason their relationship foundered. He neglected her even when he was home; she wanted a sexual relationship he denied her. Eventually, while Peter Pan was in production, she pursued another man and Barrie reluctantly granted her a divorce. It was widely believed that Barrie was impotent and did not consummate his marriage. In the first edition of J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, Birkin wrote that talk of Barrie of being impotent is speculative. But by the 2003 edition, he had uncovered a letter Ansell wrote to Peter Llewelyn Davies in which she wrote of her husband, “he knew that as a man he was a failure and that love in its fullest sense could not be experienced by him." Apart from the subtle hint that Barrie is cool to her sexual advances, none of this is explored in the film.
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Ian Holm and his son Barnaby Holm in The Lost Boys (1978) |
The most important decision that the dramatist and director made was to end the film with Sylvia’s death before Barrie became the indulgent surrogate father of their children. His possessive instincts, however, did create tensions as the boys grew into young adults desiring to live their own lives, a conflict that The Lost Boys and Birkin’s biography chronicles with insight and sensitivity. George, with whom Barrie was close, enlisted four days after the declaration of war and was killed in March 1915. The mounting casualties disabused Barrie of any illusions he had harbored about the glory of war. In his last letter to George before his death, he movingly conveyed to him that he could not care an “iota of desire for you to get military glory.” His “one passionate desire [was] that we may all be together again.” Peter likewise volunteered and was invalidated home with shell shock and eczema. When he was demobilized in 1919, he was little more than a ghost. With his parents and his brother George dead, and with no real communication with Barrie – he loathed “that terrible masterpiece” and hated the moniker Peter Pan by which he was called at school – the psychological effects of the war remained with him for life. In 1960 he committed suicide. Three years after the armistice, the death by drowning of his beloved Michael, the most gifted of the family, shattered Barrie, who looked “like a man in a nightmare.” Although it has never been proven, family members did suspect that he and a companion may have entered into a suicide pact. Perhaps he was as much a victim of the cult of the glorious youth as George had been a casualty of the war. Birkin wisely allows the evidence to speak for itself. He was fortunate to be the beneficiary of a huge trove of letters from Nico Llewelyn Davies, who worked closely with the author until his death in 1980. The letters are liberally incorporated into his biography. But in an eerie coincidence, Birkin reveals in his updated preface to the most recent edition of J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, that his son had been killed in a car crash, one month before his twenty-first birthday, the same age that Barrie's adopted son, Michael, had drowned. Birkin wrote, “I feel somewhat felled by Barrie's curse.”

There is no letup in Dudgeon’s highly prejudicial account. Even when he quotes passages that other biographers have cited, he puts a perverse interpretation on them. Consider the last letter that Barrie wrote to George before he was killed. He can only deride Barrie’s letter: “It could have been written by George’s mother – or by his lover.” And he offers a pompous pronouncement about Michael’s tragic end: “There is a programmed inevitability about Michael’s death, and the programmer is Uncle Jim.” Barrie was totally responsible for what happened to Michael. (By contrast, Birkin focuses on how Barrie was affected and quotes Nico’s sensitive assessment: “When Michael died the light of his [Barrie’s] life went out.”) To bolster his overheated argument that Barrie was a satanic figure, Dudgeon relies on the author’s stories and those of Daphne du Maurier, indirect evidence, which at best is dubious. Given this relentless denigration of Barrie, it is worth quoting Andrew Birkin: “Piers Dudgeon is of course entitled to his own opinion, but his book is so full of errors, distortions, half-truths, and his own opinion passed off as fact, that I personally regard it as worthless.” It is a harsh but not unfounded judgment. Is Dudgeon worried about Barrie’s curse?
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(photo by Keith Penner) |
I appreciate your take on all this. Just having read an article in the Mail I can see how it's author was influenced by Dudgeons book. There is usually two sides to every human, but I doubt Barrie was that dark.
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