Read if you can. Listen if you can’t.

Okay, put down that copy of Reader’s Digest with its endless tales of how to live a happy life. Here’s my advice: don’t screw around with fairy tales or you’ll hate yourself in the morning.

Earlier, if you see a matinee performance of the musical Finding Neverland.

That’s where I learned that James M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, got his inspiration for the character, and its adventures, by telling stories to John, George, Peter, Michael, and Nico Llewelyn Davies. They were the five sons of Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, his neighbors in Kensington Gardens, London.

The play implies that Peter Davies inspired Peter Pan. But I’ve never considered the entertainment industry a reliable arbiter of history. I’d long harbored suspicions that Peter Pan wasn’t the secret identity of Mary Martin.

The Los Angeles Public Library had several books about the history of Peter Pan. I took them home. I was flying high.

Until I crashed.

Even though Peter was kidded in school, and hounded by the media, about being the real Peter Pan, and even though he cursed the play as “that terrible masterpiece,” chances are Barrie liked the name Peter Pan more than George or Michael Pan. Peter Davies seemed the least Pan-ish of the bunch.

Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie’s work as a character in a book called The Little White Bird, which Barrie published when Peter was about five years old. The stories Barrie spun for the brothers were most likely the result of interactions with John and George. Peter’s sensibilities, as well of those of his younger brother, Michael (who was two at the time), would more likely have influenced Barrie’s play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), and its subsequent revisions.

Peter Davies’ most important role in the history of Peter Pan was as curator of his siblings’ relationships with James Barrie. He created the Morgue, his name for a collection of family letters. Although he deftly left out much of his own correspondence, what he did include reveals a darker soul than those of his brothers.

James Birkin, author of J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan, pointed out that Nico (Nicholas), the youngest of the five, always felt that Peter Pan was the product of George and Michael.

Especially Michael.

Michael and Barrie exchanged over 2,000 letters. And a chapter in The Little White Bird, in which an older man spends an evening with a young boy of Michael’s age has long been thought to be about Barrie and Michael.

Despite Peter Davies’ long and successful career as a London publisher, he was not a happy man. He, as did all his brothers except Nico, suffered from his association with Barrie. Birkin speculated that Barrie, perhaps eager to stay a child himself, retarded the Davies’ boys transition from child to adulthood. As adults, they were somewhat ill-equipped to face the world, although Peter, George and John served with distinction during World War I.

Like Peter Pan, George and Michael never grew up. George died in World War I.

Michael, the boy most likely to be Peter Pan, drowned while bathing in the River Thames at Sandford Pool in the company of his closest friend, Rupert Buxton. There were reports of a homosexual relationship between the two, driving suspicions that their deaths were a double suicide, especially since Michael couldn’t swim.

He was 20 years old.

Peter Davies gave up curating the Morgue in 1952 and simply destroyed the remaining letters in his possession. He found reliving his life too disturbing. In 1960, at the age of 63, Peter bought a ticket for the London subway. He spent several hours pacing along the station before he stepped in front of an oncoming train.

One theme that runs through the Morgue is a love-hate relationship with Barrie, who insinuated himself into their lives, quite uninvited, and later adopted them when their parents died of cancer. The boys called him Uncle Jim, but their correspondence is laced with a resentment of sorts over the way he controlled their lives.

Barrie never singled out one boy over the others when it came to Peter Pan. In the dedication of the play, published in 1928, he wrote, “I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.”

It was more than I wanted to know. Three of the four possible models for Peter Pan never grew up.

But not in the way I expected.