Biography: The title of this biography is a quotation from Barrie himself, who used the objectionable phrase to describe the writing process, but it is out of sympathy with Lisa Chaney's book, which makes an excellent case for Barrie as a writer of serious, even profound intent.
Barrie was aware of the threat to his reputation posed by the critical perception of him as a lightweight writer, as this excerpt from a speech to the Critics' Circle indicates: "Your word for me would probably be fantastic . . . I felt [ your chairman] could not be so shabby as to say whimsical, and that he might forget to say elusive. If you knew how dejected these terms have often made me".
But if he was viewed sceptically by some contemporary critics (and his literary reputation has certainly not improved with time), he was astonishingly successful as a writer in every other way: he was extremely prolific and wrote dozens of plays, many of them wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as novels and other pieces; he made more money from his work - most of which, by the way, was not for children - than he knew how to spend; he moved in the most illustrious circles and counted men like Thomas Hardy and Captain Scott among his intimates; and honours of all sorts, including a baronetcy, were heaped upon him.
His personal life, however, was a succession of tragedies. Over his lifetime, he buried sibling after sibling, many of them prematurely. When he was only five, his mother's favourite son died at the age of 14, and young Jamie tried desperately but (naturally) unsuccessfully to make good this terrible loss. His relationship with his mother remained intense, and in some ways quite difficult, until her death long after Jamie had left his modest Scottish hometown and was established as a writer in London.
Unfortunately for his wife, an actress he met through his involvement with the theatre, Barrie appears to have been impotent; unfortunately for him, this intimately private information came out in court when they were divorced after 15 years of marriage. Obviously, this impediment meant that Barrie, who loved children with a consuming intensity, was himself childless.
It is tempting to see this inadequacy as part of a reluctance to grow up, a reluctance famously celebrated (if that is the appropriate word) in Peter Pan, and it is widely held that Barrie had paedophiliac tendencies.
Chaney concludes her central chapter on Barrie's close relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, whose children were the inspiration for Peter Pan, with the sentence, "He was undoubtedly in love with the Davies boys".
Chaney is clearly of the opinion, however, that his being "in love with" these boys, although it included taking a delight in their physical beings, did not involve sexual contact, even if some of the behaviour that it did involve would be considered distinctly dubious in today's climate of suspicion about relations between men and children.
In any case, Barrie was usually in love with someone, and had two prolonged and intense relationships with women (apart from that with his wife) as well as innumerable passions and flirtations. He survived the great if platonic love of his life, Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, mother of "the Davies boys", and also the two of her sons to whom he was most deeply attached - one was killed in the first World War, and the other apparently committed suicide by drowning, at a young age.
Whatever about Chaney's contention that Barrie was a literary genius (and he was certainly in a creative fever for much of his life), there is no doubt that as the creator of Peter Pan he is a centrally important figure in Edwardian children's literature, and for that reason alone this book is worth reading for anyone with an interest in the history of children's literature.
It's worth reading anyway for the fascinating life it reveals, but it is not without its flaws, chief of which is a clumsy style. Chaney is not well served by her editor, and her prose (ultimately an author's own responsibility) falls far short even of workmanlike.
In particular, she uses link words like "although", "thus", "despite" as if they have syntactical function but no meaning. The result is sentences that set out promising to go in one direction but end up in a totally unexpected place, with a confused and mentally exhausted reader trotting after the troublesome constructions. On top of this come innumerable dangling modifiers, occasional "sentences" that are really only subordinate clauses with notions of grandeur, and punctuation that is eccentric in its absence and more eccentric in its occasional flurry of presence.
This is a shame, because the language problems interfere greatly with the reader's pleasure in and ability to follow with ease this otherwise coherently told and absorbing story of an extraordinary literary life.
Siobhán Parkinson's new book for older children, Second Fiddle, has just been published by Puffin
Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of JM BarrieBy Lisa Chaney Hutchinson, 402pp. £20