This topic was inspired by Terry Pratchett’s amusing
fantasy novel The Wee Free Men. The chapter in which the young witch Tiffany
Aching meets two boys who are trapped in Fairyland is called Lost Boys.
This reminds me of J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
and the Llewelyn Davies boys. J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story
Behind Peter Pan is the title of a book by Andrew Birkin.
Kenneth Grahame is the second specific
example of an eternal boy that comes immediately to mind.
Barrie and Grahame immortalised their names, created
magical worlds and enhanced the lives of millions with their works, but all was
not well behind the scenes and below the surface.
It is bad enough that the marriages of both men were doomed to fail, but worse things happened to people close to them.
A deadly effect of not growing up
One of the features of eternal boys who never
leave Fairyland is that they often have a bad effect on those around them,
young, dependent people in particular. They get their hooks into and exert a
psychic stranglehold and backwards pull on their victims so that they too have
trouble growing up and moving on.
J. M. Barrie, who has previously been
mentioned in several articles and had a devastating effect on the entire
Llewelyn Davies family, is said to have also had a bad effect on the novelist
Daphne du Maurier. He met her when she was a child; her aunt was the mother of
the Llewelyn Davies boys and he used this connection to get into the du Maurier
family.
Sometimes their touch can be fatal.
J. M. Barrie’s ward Michael Llewelyn Davies
killed himself just before his 21st birthday. He was an undergraduate at Oxford
at the time.
Kenneth Grahame’s son Alastair killed himself
just before his 20th birthday. He was an undergraduate at Oxford at the time.
There are more details of the bad effects and
there is more material of interest in the lives of these two men, but this is
not the place for any of that.
There are several biographies available,
these for example:
