Trapped in a Neverland not of their own choosing

Among the splendid moments in “Finding Neverland,” the new film about the family that inspired James M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan,” is Barrie’s epiphany as he watches the boys impishly jumping on their beds.

Movie magic enables us to follow the progress of the writer’s imagination: In Barrie’s vision, the boys leap from the bedroom window, one by one, and instead of falling to a ghastly death on the cobblestones below, glide effortlessly through the night sky. Next stop: Neverland.

As the film recounts, Barrie (Johnny Depp) made the brothers famous in his tale of lost boys, lilting fairies, diabolical pirates and an irresponsible charmer named Peter Pan.

What the film doesn’t do, however, is let the story run past the moment of Barrie’s triumph at the 1904 opening night of “Peter Pan” -- to do for that moment, in effect, what Barrie’s musings did for the boys and their bedroom high jinks.

What happened next to the children immortalized in his wonderful yarn?

It’s not the film’s fault, of course, that the question goes unanswered. That wasn’t the story the filmmakers wanted to tell. But it’s worth wondering about, especially because a major subplot in another new work, Cynthia Ozick’s superb novel “Heir to the Glimmering World,” essentially picks up where “Finding Neverland” leaves off.

She deals with a different children’s classic, but the theme is the same: Growing up is always difficult, and it’s made all the harder when the childhood has been frozen in print and shared with the world.

In an intriguing creative coincidence, an otherwise unrelated film and novel both deal with the commercial uses to which adults put childhood. “Finding Neverland” is a benign look at this practice -- Barrie, by all accounts, cherished the boys he transformed into Peter Pan and his retinue -- and “Heir to the Glimmering World” a sinister one, as the writer who exploits his son’s adventures is chilly and distant. But both movie and book force us to explore the relationship between real-life kids and the adults who use them to fashion an idealized portrait of childhood. Even if the portrait is intended as a tribute, it always ends up trapping the child in an artificial landscape of manufactured whimsy.

Thus, “Finding Neverland” and “Heir to the Glimmering World” are more sophisticated versions of the all-too-familiar chronicle of the famous child, a Macaulay Culkin or a Tatum O’Neal or a Drew Barrymore or, from an earlier era, a Judy Garland, someone whose own emotional needs are secondary to the audience’s desire to keep the kid cute and uncomplicated.

As O’Neal chronicled in her recent book, “A Paper Life,” and as Barrymore, whose father died recently, has pointed out many times, it’s tough to grow up in a world that would rather see you forever young, forever blissful and carefree. Both women have struggled with various addictions, fighting their way out of the box of a very public, very prolonged childhood.

The adult view of youth -- tinged with nostalgic longing for a vanished era of casual magic and innocent fun -- can push away the realities of actual childhood, which is, like all of life’s many stages, a combination of light and dark, of joy and sadness, of promise and pain.

Children whose lives are represented to the world by adult sensibilities -- be the interpreter Barrie or A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh books who used real-life son Christopher Robin Milne as the model for Pooh’s pal, or Lewis Carroll, who based “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” on a little girl he knew -- are, like an insect wing in a fossil, poised forever in the public imagination as what they were at 6 or 7 or 8. They can’t grow up because readers (or viewers) don’t want them to.

Imagine the peculiar sort of hell that would go along with being an adult Peter Llewellyn Davies. The initial thrill of notoriety -- “Why, yes, I am one of the chaps upon whom ‘Peter Pan’ was based, now that you mention it” -- eventually would sour, become tiresome and finally unbearable. In 1960, Davies, by then a successful businessman, committed suicide. Another brother died in college in a swimming accident that may have been suicide.

“Heir to the Glimmering World” includes an account of the adult wanderings of a fictional character based on Christopher Robin Milne -- known in the novel as “the Bear Boy” to fans of his father’s books -- and how the recognition grates: “He understood that there would be no escape, he would always carry the mark of the Bear Boy, he would have to carry it into old age; when he was forty they would say of him, ‘Look at that fellow, he’s the Bear Boy, all grown up,’ and when he was seventy they would say, ‘That was the Bear Boy, can you imagine?’ ”

Ozick’s novel is primarily about the emotional growth of the book’s narrator, Rose, who works in a chaotic household headed by itinerant scholar Rudolph Mittwisser in the late 1930s. The dissolute James -- the once and future Bear Boy -- gets mixed up with the family. Despite a number of subplots, the passages involving James’ tormented interior are the book’s most memorable; they are rich with confusion and despair, and they eerily seem to channel the souls of the Llewellyn Davies boys, whose innocent games became public spectacles.

“He was not a normal boy, he was his father’s drawing, his father’s discourse, his father’s exegesis of a boy,” Ozick writes of the embittered James. “His father had created a parallel boy; his father had interpreted him for the world. The Bear Boy was never himself.”

Being observed -- and knowing one is being observed -- can poison any enterprise, including the easy, natural games of children. Poet Anthony Hecht, who died earlier this year, wrote these insightful lines in his poem “Terms”: “The young are full of an astonishing grace, / Soft-eyed, trustful, and lithe till they have grown / Aware of being admired for their grace, / Whereupon they go through some fall from grace, / An aging that reminds us of our close.”

Selfishness, then, may lie at the bottom of our refusal to let go of those golden literary images of childhood thronged by ghosts of real-life people, a Peter Llewellyn Davies and a Christopher Robin Milne and a Drew Barrymore. We don’t want them to grow up because when they do, we are reminded of the inevitable ends of all things, including our own lives. Better to keep famous children perpetually young, we secretly say, better to keep them just the way they are. Better to make them human bonsai: tied off to preserve them as charming miniatures -- and never mind the cost to the psyches of maturing bodies.

According to his autobiography, the real-life Christopher Robin, who died in 1996 at age 76, did finally come to terms with his father’s internationally beloved Winnie-the-Pooh books, the ones that “filched from me my good name and ... left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son,” as the younger Milne once snarled.

Adults won’t stop making fictions out of childhood’s enchanted realms -- and who would want them to? -- but perhaps we can loosen our grip on the actual children who serve as models for the works we love so much, from plays to books to movies. Grant them privacy as they age, give them the space to grow gawky and make mistakes.

And so off they fly, Barrie’s lost boys, out into the night of dreams, and if we cannot be them -- we’re too big and clumsy and burdened with mortgages and obligations, we silly grown-ups -- we can read about them, and sigh our little what-if sighs, and wish them well, and let them go.

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Julia Keller is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.