Tragedy of the little Darlings
EX LIBRIS
J.M. BARRIE AND THE LOST BOYS
A“CATCHING OF HAPPINESS” is how Philip Larkin, in a tender moment, referred to one of his godchildren. The phrase might also describe the relationship between another literary darkling, J.M. Barrie and a whole family of children: the Llewelyn Davieses. Their relationship is captured not just in Peter Pan and other works Barrie wrote around them, but in a haunting book by Andrew Birkin first published in 1979, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys.
Birkin had spent years researching the real-life inspirations for Peter Pan while preparing a landmark television series on Barrie. But the book that followed a year later is an unsurpassable account of this disturbing corner of popular literature.
The youngest of the boys, Nico, was still alive when Birkin was writing and helped him unknot the family relations Barrie immortalised in Peter Pan. The resulting, beautifully-produced book is like a family album, full of generous quotations from Barrie’s work, private letters, accounts from the family as well as photographs and other memorabilia.
Birkin relates Barrie’s own Scots Calvinist upbringing,
