Hide-And-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie

Hide-and-Seek With Angels: A life of J.M. Barrie By Lisa Chaney J.M. Barrie was an extraordinary man who lived in extraordinary times. Although he is remembered largely for his classic story of childhood and belief, Peter Pan,¨ he was one of the leading literary lights at a time when giants like Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells dominated British literature. Stevenson wrote from Samoa that Henry James, Kipling and Barrie were his "muses." Barrie was enormously successful as a playwright, amassing a fortune which he bequeathed, characteristically, to a children's hospital. But his life was marked by tragedy: the premature death of his sister, his friend George Meredith, and a failed and likely unconsummated marriage. In her excellent biography, "Hide and Seek with Angels," Lisa Chaney examines Barrie's childhood with a domineering mother and a wimpy father (and we all know what that leads to); his education; first attempts at literature, and strange affection for children. Barrie was complex: sometimes charming, sometimes aloof and threatening; confusing and perplexing. Not having read Andrew Birkin's "JM Barrie and The Lost Boys" (it's not in our library system), I can't compare the two books. But Barrie's obsessive relationship with the orphaned boys...which continued through their adolence... is touched on although not excessively. "Herein lies the profound difference between Barrie and the other great writers for children. All of them --Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl--no matter how subversive or anarchic their worlds, wrote stories that include the idea of negotiating with and becoming adult. No matter how impious or irreverent, they all acknowledge time. But in Peter Pan it is unavoidably clear that at the deepest level Barrie¡¦s little hero refuses to grow up. He fears the very qualities of adulthood, and this is Barrie¡¦s dilemma.¡¨ (Hide and Seek with Angels,P. 237) Hide and Seek With Angels¡ is a remarkably complete, well-researched, and well- presented biography of a difficult subject. *****

After I've gotten to know an author, I generally get the urge to find out whether his life matches up with my notions. Thus, the publication of Lisa Chaney's "A Life of James Barrie" was especially timely for me, since I've been systematically working through Barrie's novels and plays over the last couple of years. I wish it hadn't taken me so long to become aware of his body of work. Barrie's importance stretches far beyond "Peter Pan," and Chaney gives due attention to other stages of his life and to his many other literary and dramatic successes. She falls occasionally into amateur psychoanalysis, but Barrie was so eccentric that I can hardly blame her. Her prose is straightforward and does not distract (although her book contains a surprising number of spelling errors, mostly the sort of thing that spellcheck programs don't pick up, like "it's" versus "its"). Her biography of this literary craftsman is more than satisfying. I was pleased to learn from Chaney about Barrie's friendships with Thomas Hardy and other luminaries like Arthur Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and George Meredith. However, Chaney makes little effort to relate Barrie's work to that of his contemporaries, other than to contrast "Peter Pan" with other prominent works of children's literature. There was surely more to be said; personally, I could not help linking Barrie's early "A Window in Thrums," a book of tender episodes in the lives of rustic Scots, to Hardy's "Under the Greenwood Tree," an episodic early novel containing affectionate portrayals of English rustics. And given their friendship, was it coincidence that Hardy abandoned novel-writing for poetry about the same time that Barrie abandoned novel-writing for drama? By the time of his last novel, "The Little White Bird," Barrie had achieved a degree of control over language and tone that, in my view, would be surpassed only by E. M. Forster and P. G. Wodehouse. He had an ear for dialect to rival Hardy's. The half-dozen best of his ingenious and felicitous plays, gems like "The Admirable Crichton" and "What Every Woman Knows," not to mention "Peter Pan," will last as long as Shaw's. J. M. Barrie is an underrated writer, and this biography was well merited.

Lisa Chaney's excellent, insightful Hide-And-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie (2005) offers readers a broader view of the Scottish writer's life than can be found in Andrew Birkin's classic J. M. Barrie & the Lost Boys: The Love Story That Gave Birth To Peter Pan (1979). Though Barrie's obsessive relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys is not the primary focus of Chaney's biography, the physically unassuming Barrie is, over the course of the biography, nonetheless exposed as having been a domineering, shrewd, and deceitful arch-manipulator who cloaked his motives and emotional neediness in financial generosity and elaborate, ostensibly good manners. Despite Barrie's many novelistic and theatrical achievements, and the fact that he was a self-made man of modest origin, the question of Barrie's divided, willful, and often poisonous character dominates his life story; though in time Barrie came to be seen as a noble being in the eyes of the masses ("the British public had long since taken him to their heart...he could meet anyone he choose, anything he did was news, and the honors continued to be awarded"), much of his personal behavior reflects differently on this estimation. Though Chaney astutely examines the social and sexual mores of Victorian and Edwardian England, which she contrasts with those of the present day, and doesn't find Barrie's behavior towards the Llewelyn Davies boys intrinsically suspicious, Chaney's emphasis on overt sexual desire and genital contact perhaps misses the point. Though no hard evidence that Barrie was actively pedophiliac exists, it is possible that Barrie was pedophiliac by nature, even if he never acted upon his desires with the Llewelyn Davies boys or any others. Some unusual, perhaps abnormal, psychic factor certainly fueled his ambitions where the family was concerned. Thought simply asexual by many--and with good reason, since his marriage to actress Mary Ansell was never consummated--Barrie smoothly insinuated himself into the daily lives of the Llewelyn Davies family, even though he knew his smothering presence was resented, to varying degrees and at different periods, by husband and father Arthur, and sons Jack and Peter. The truth is that Barrie didn't care whether or not he was unwanted, initially or thereafter. Year after year, he slowly took control of the family wherever and whenever he saw an opportunity, until the boy's lives were almost completely under his management. Revealing the same kind of telling disrespect to mother Sylvia after her death that he showed to father Arthur in life, Barrie even went to far as to deceitfully alter a copy of Sylvia's will to give extended family members the impression that he was the party Sylvia had selected to become the children's guardian after her passing. Though Barrie obviously bore no responsibility for the cancer that killed both Arthur and Sylvia early in their lives, nor for son George's death in World War One, Barrie may have

By providing a deep look at J. M. Barrie, Lisa Chaney also presents a keen glimpse into the creating of Peter Pan in this fine insightful biography. Ms. Chaney provides the childhood background of the renowned author who was the ninth child of Scottish parents during the industrial revolution. He left for London to become a journalist and soon became friends with writers George Meredith and Thomas Hardy even as he began his career (yes he wrote other works besides Pan). In his late thirties Barrie befriends Arthur and Sylvia Davies; he especially enjoyed the times with their offspring as his only marriage ended in divorce and no children. That time spent with the Davies family led to his play Peter Pan in 1904 as he saw his friends as the loving Darlings. When they died he felt alone though his play made him rich and famous yet perhaps as Peter Barrie he never wanted to grow up. Well written and entreating this is a solid bio but feels lacking as a historiographic perspective of critics analyzing the author and his works hinted at with references would have rounded out the insight. Still this is a fascinating look at one of the leaders of the golden age of English writers of children tales; in this case a man who seemingly preferred fantasy so as to never grow up. Harriet Klausner