The Lost Man

By Gerald Clarke

J.M. BARRIE & THE LOST BOYS

by Andrew Birkin

Potter; 323 pages; 14.95

For 75 years audiences have regarded Peter Pan as child's play. In fact, the work now enchanting a new generation on Broadway is not fantasy but tragedy. Nor is it, as the subtitle declares, about a "boy who wouldn't grow up." It is about a man who couldn't.

The stunted adult was Playwright James M. Barrie; the event that maimed him, the death in a skating accident of an older brother. Jamie, who was six when the accident occurred, imitated David, and even put on his clothes. But none of it did any good: Jamie remained the runt of the family, whereas the lost David, in his mother's eyes, would always be tall, handsome, ripe with promise. "When I became a man," Barrie noted sadly, "[Da-vid] was still a boy of 13."

That was as old as anyone should be, concluded Barrie. "Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much," added the little Scot, whose body cooperated by arresting its growth at 5 ft. But the adult world mattered when, after graduation from Edinburgh University, he was expected to prepare for a solid job and search for a mate. The first prospect filled him with gloom, the latter with dread. He wrote in his notebook: "Great-est horror--dream I am married--wake up shrieking."

The problem of a career was solved when Barrie discovered a talent for the sentimental stories favored by Victorians. He wrote about his mother, his childhood and, most particularly, about boys. The other problem--women--was more difficult. Sketching out a character, he noted: "Perhaps the curse of his life that he never 'had a woman.' " Whether that curse was autobiographical is moot, but In 1894, when he was 34, James did marry Actress Mary Ansell, the lead of his second play, Walker, London.

Whatever happened or did not happen in the bedroom, Mary was not a large part of Barrie's life. His chief attachments were reserved for male youths. Finally, in the late '90s, he met and, in effect, married his true love: the Davies family. Arthur Davies was a successful barrister, his wife Sylvia a woman of memorable vivacity. They had five sons, each as perfect in his way as David had been so long ago. Slowly, almost insidiously, the playwright enveloped them with his charm and money. All but one of the boys adored Barrie and his tales. He, in turn, created for them the character of Peter Pan. "I suppose," he said, "I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame."

Barrie was now half a father, and fate soon gave him full title. Arthur died of cancer in 1907 and Sylvia followed him three years later, leaving the play wright as her boys' principal guardian. His care and kindness could not be faulted, but no indulgence could save the doomed family. George, the eldest, was killed in the trenches of World War I; Michael, the most brilliant, drowned at Oxford, possibly as the result of a suicide pact with another student; Peter jumped in front of a London subway train in 1960. As Birkin unfolds the darkening drama, his book becomes a psychological thriller. The biographer's own style is self-effacing, and he is content to let the characters tell much of their history in let ters. But such reticence does not obscure the fact that J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys is one of the year's most complex and absorbing biographies.

As Birkin observes, when Barrie died in 1937 he was revered and renowned as a novelist and playwright. Yet it is doubt ful that he felt himself anything but a failure, still longing for that country of lost content, a landscape that existed only in his mother's mind when she dreamed of her dead David. What Barrie discovered in his single masterpiece is that almost everyone secretly yearns for vanished innocence. Most people put the search aside to answer the demands of here and now. Barrie's tragedy was that he was condemned to look for it every day of his life.

-Gerald Clarke

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