A little bird broken out of the egg

Somewhere between the boy hero of Disney studios and the dangerous, complicated lead of Brom's The Child Thief lies the real Peter Pan.

J. M. Barrie's original Peter is neither the spirit of sweetness nor the incarnation of malice. This Peter is nothing more or less than a small boy who is static, unchanging, embodying both the innocence and heartlessness of a child who doesn't grow up and therefore never learns to be kind.

Peter himself says, "I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg." To an extent, that's true, and it's long been a popular way of considering him. Unfortunately, this charm is tempered with a lack of practicality and ability to exasperate, as the Darling children see over and over on their flight to Neverland.

Barrie tells us how Peter acquires food for himself and the others by stealing it from the beaks of passing birds, which John and Michael find delightful.

But Wendy noticed with gentle concern that Peter did not seem to know that this was rather an odd way of getting your bread and butter, nor even that there are other ways.

One of Peter's more alarming traits manifests when the children fall asleep from exhaustion and tumble through the sky.

Eventually Peter would dive through the air, and catch Michael just before he could strike the sea,and it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life.

And he's never completely trustworthy.

Indeed, sometimes when he returned he did not remember them, at least not well. Wendy was sure of it. She saw recognition come into his eyes as he was about to pass them the time of day and go on; once even she had to tell him her name.

He was very sorry. "I say, Wendy," he whispered to her, "always if you see me forgetting you, just keep on saying 'I'm Wendy,' and then I'll remember."

Carelessness is integral to Peter's character, as is the way he tries on identities. On one level, Peter wants to be a captain, wishes to play at being a father. But he wants these roles never to be truly real.

I was just thinking," he said, a little scared. "It is only  make-believe, isn't it, that I am their father?"

"Oh yes," Wendy said primly.

"You see," he continued apologetically, "it would make me seem so old to be their real father."

"But they are ours, Peter, yours and mine,"

"But not really, Wendy?" he asked anxiously.

"Not if you don't wish it," she replied; and she distinctly heard his sigh of relief.

He inhabits his roles briefly, and they leave no real impression upon him. It's as if everything is make-believe, including the consequences of his actions.

He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it; and then when you went out you found the body; and on the other hand, he might say a great deal about it, and yet you could not find the body.

Peter has the callousness of the child who doesn't understand death, or the fact that people have lives and concerns of their own that have nothing to do with him."I forget them after I kill them," he says of the pirates in Neverland. Because Peter Pan can be heartless--with his indifference towards those he kills, and the way he "thins out" the population of lost boys as they become older--it's easy to see where the dark interpretations come from. But this is a simple interpretation of a much more complex character.

Peter even forgets Tinker Bell after the Darling children leave Neverland and the fairy dies of old age. Most people aren't real to him once they pass off the screen of his immediate life, Wendy being the exception, and that not complete. "Being present" is held up as a high ideal in our culture, but Peter warns of the risks that come if one disregards the richness and depth that present and past bring to existence. His is the peril of the child who refuses to learn and mature.

John and Michael forget about their parents during their time in Neverland, much to Wendy's distress. She is the only one mature enough to realize what is happening, and her attempts to keep those memories alive make up a significant part of Barrie's book. In contrast, the lost boys, who have no such memories to draw upon, do their best to construct pasts for themselves.

Peter's world is one of adventure and novelty and joy. And yet, he cries sometimes in the night, and is at least as unsettled than triumphant when he takes over the captainship of the Jolly Roger. On some level, he knows all is not right with the way he has chosen to live. The scene where the Darling children return home brings into relief what Peter has lost in his refusal to grow up.

There could not have been a lovelier sight; but there was none to see it except a strange boy who was staring in at the window. He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred.

And herein lies the essential sadness of Peter Pan. Courageous in facing the dangers he sets up for himself to defeat, and yet so fearful of the prosaic unknown he does everything he can to avoid it. In the end, he is more lost than the boys who follow him.

Defending Mr. Smee

I didn't realize when I began writing The Stowaway that I would become protective of characters I had formerly not been overly concerned about. Such as poor Mr. Smee, being seen by the world today as an ineffective bumbler when he was originally nothing of the sort.

The first Smee, as acted by
George Shelton in the 1904 theater
production of Peter Pan.

J.M. Barrie describes Smee as Irish and a Nonconformist--e.g., not a member of a state religion like the Church of England. He does not mention his first name, allowing that detail to be guessed at by numerous tellers of the Peter Pan story, not always in ways of which I approve. For example, "He was called Smee because he looked like a Smee."--Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry. Really? Must we be that disrespectful to the original? (I confess to having a little fun with Mr. Smee's first name in The Stowaway, but I do my best to be respectful otherwise. In fact, it's hard for me to refer to him without the honorific of "Mr." after so long writing about the crew with the formality with which their captain addresses him.) 

In Barrie's Peter Pan, we first see Mr. Smee as "an oddly genial man who stabbed, so to speak, without offence." Make no mistake, he has no compunctions about killing, taking lost boys hostage, and other acts of piracy.

Smee had pleasant names for everything, and his cutlass was Johnny Corkscrew, because he wriggled it in the wound. One could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing, it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.

Bob Hoskins, who plays Mr. Smee in the movie Hook in 1991 and reprises the role in Syfy's 2011 Neverland, touches upon the quality the original Mr. Smee possesses of being a genial sociopath, in that the women of Neverland fear him. But even Hoskins does not portray him with characteristics that he would be required to have in his role of bo'sun of the Jolly Roger (not first mate, another common mistake).

Barrie does describe Smee as "rather stupid," and indeed he is less educated than the erudite Jas. Hook, with little understanding of his captain. But as bo'sun, Mr. Smee must have some degree of intelligence and a great deal of common sense. The bo'sun (or boatswain) is responsible for the maintenance of all the equipment on a ship, from rigging to anchors, and supervises the crew who work on the deck. Mr. Smee has a working knowledge of every aspect of sailing the Jolly Roger. And while it is popular to depict the crew of the Roger as a pack of dunderheads, if that were so, there wouldn't have been a ship around long enough to present worthy foes to Peter Pan.

No. 

 

Also, a bo'sun's whistle looks like this.

ABC's Once Upon a Time takes regular liberties with its characters, and amusingly has created a William Smee closer to Barrie's character than Disney's, a competent and decent man--perhaps more decent than Mr. Barrie would have liked. Christopher Gauthier's interpretation could expand to include a trait which Barrie does describe as native to Mr. Smee--a curious quality of unknowingly inciting pity from others. Perhaps other portrayals confuse this quality with idiocy?

Christopher Gauthier in Once Upon a Time

There was little sound, and none agreeable save the whir of the ship's sewing machine at which Smee sat, ever industrious and obliging, the essence of the commonplace, pathetic Smee. I know not why he was so infinitely pathetic, unless it were because he was so pathetically unaware of it; but even strong men had to turn hastily from looking at him, and more than once on summer evenings he had touched the fount of Hook's tears and made it flow. Of this, as of almost everything else, Smee was quite unconscious.

[Pg 202] 

Most striking of all, Mr. Smee possesses traits which Hook himself hopes to embody:

For long he muttered to himself, staring at Smee, who was hemming placidly, under the conviction that all children feared him...Feared him! Feared Smee! There was not a child on board the brig that night who did not already love him. He had said horrid things to them and hit them with the palm of his hand, because he could not hit with his fist; but they had only clung to him the more. Michael had tried on his spectacles.

To tell poor Smee that they thought him lovable! Hook itched to do it, but it seemed too brutal. Instead, he revolved this mystery in his mind: why do they find Smee lovable?

Richard Briers--also known for playing Tom Good
 in  BBC's"Good Neighbors"--as Mr. Smee
in the 2003 Peter Pan film.

[Pg 206]

He pursued the problem like the sleuth-hound that he was. If Smee was lovable, what was it that made him so? A terrible answer suddenly presented itself: 'Good form?'

Had the bo'sun good form without knowing it, which is the best form of all?

This Mr. Smee is far from the man seen in so many books and films who regularly trips over his own feet, who doesn't seem like anyone a ship captain would rely on for anything. Yes, the common depiction of Mr. Smee provides ample comic relief, but at the expense of a character who originally possessed depth and even a bit of mystery.