J. M. Barrie, who was born on this day in 1860, invented Peter Pan as a way of dramatizing his own fathomless unhappiness and his desire to shrink once more into boyhood.
Barrie’s play, like its eponymous hero, gives freakishly little signs of growing old.Almost a hundred years ago, at half past eight on the evening of December 27, 1904, the curtain went up at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in London, to reveal, among other things, a man dressed as a dog. The man was an actor named Arthur Lupino, suffering for his art in a shaggy costume, and the dog was called Nana.
The room was dark, and when I heard the door shut and no sound come from the bed I was afraid, and I stood still. I suppose I was breathing hard, or perhaps I was crying, for after a time I heard a listless voice that had never been listless before say, “Is that you?” I think the tone hurt me, for I made no answer, and then the voice said more anxiously “Is that you?” again. I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, “No, it’s no’ him, it’s just me.
In 1894, ignoring these self-cautions, Barrie married an actress named Mary Ansell, bestowing upon her, by way of a wedding present, a St. Bernard dog. The saga of Barrie is full of long-sufferers, the longest being Barrie himself, but nobody could follow its course and not spare a wealth of pity for Mary. Her husband loved many women, but the evidence suggests that the actual making of love lay outside his interests, or beyond his grasp. The creator of “Peter Pan” never had a child of his own.
At the heart of “The Little White Bird” is a story that the narrator slowly invents not only for David’s entertainment but with David’s help. It is about a boy named Peter Pan, who lives in Kensington Gardens. The first name is a direct allusion to the fact that George Llewellyn Davies now had another brother, Peter, born in 1897. There would be two more: Michael, born in 1900, and Nicholas , born in 1903; a sisterless five in all, rather than the four of “Finding Neverland.
The most unfeeling child of all, needless to say, is Peter Pan himself. He flits through the play and the novels, and he has flitted through a century of stage productions and movies, and one result of those flittings is that we regard him as airy and innocuous.
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