Barrie Never Stopped Pretending

J.M. Barrie's works are full of contradictions. 

They are burdened with the dilemma between remembering and forgetting, the discrepancies of childhood and adulthood, the disparity between the change and the changelessness, the distinction between love and indifference. 

Still, within the plays of Barrie these distinctions meet one another; they meet perfectly and simply. They get to know one another in which time they connect in a wondrous kinship. Then when the adventure is over and the story thru, they show just how far one lies from the other and how impossible it is for them to be the same. 

In many ways, his plays mimic the man, for Barrie himself was a great contradiction, both a man and a husband, but also a child manifested perfectly in his role as a great pretender. Barrie loved to play pretend, hence the long hours spent playing at piracy with the Davies boys and the many days on which they set out to be "wrecked" on an island. The Davies boys out grew pretending before Barrie did. One by one they all fell away. But even then Barrie did not stop pretending.

 

Barrie's pretending says more about him than anything real or realistic he ever did, such as his insistence that he had no memory of writing the play Peter Pan. Barrie did not wish to own Peter. He did not wish to be Peter Pan's creator, and so he pretended that he wasn't. He would rather have stuck to the story of how he and Davies caught Peter in Kensington Gardens, something at which they had played at in the early days when the Davies still had a mother. According to Barrie, Peter was "caught and written down" rather than created. Catching Peter at the park was an adventure. But putting him into being by writing a play about him was too grown-up, both for Barrie and for Peter Pan.

Still, it would be easy to assume that Barrie's insistence that he did not remember writing Peter Pan was also part of his pretend, some part of a game he played with himself and no one else. For some reason, Barrie did not wish to remember the writing of Peter.

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie himself struggled to differentiate between the child in him and the adult playwright that gained fame through Peter. When Barrie dedicated the published edition of Peter Pan to the Davies he wrote to his boys that he struggled "in vain to remember whether (writing Peter Pan) was a last desperate throw to retain the five of you for a little longer or merely a cold decision to turn you into bread and butter". Barrie did not know whether the writing of Peter was an attempt to preserve their childishness and retain the pretend they had lost or an adult choice to make money from their imaginative games. Perhaps this is in part the reason Barrie gave the rights to the theatrical production of Peter to a children's hospital, so that he did not have to think about it. He did not want to be burdened by the money Peter was making and thus question his motives for the writing of it. 

Barrie did remember acting out the origins of what would later become parts of the play, such as the creation of Nana and early shadows of Jay Hook before he lost his hand. He remembers the pretending of it all, and in his dedication to the Davies he writes at the length about their games. 

He says little about the times when the boys stopped playing them, thereby leaving Barrie an older and possibly lonelier man with nothing to do but to write their games down, stringing a childhood spent together into a story of pretend remembrances. 

Barrie's desire for pretend is clued at by his insistence to constantly keep editing his plays. His works were never completed for him. Many an audience would come to his plays only to discover that a scene had been added which no audience would ever see again. When Wendy Grew Up was one of these scenes once, and so its subtitle calling it an afterthought sits right on its opening page. 

Pretending never ends for Barrie, for his plays are simply manifestations of his pretending, unleashing his games into play so that he and others could watch them come about.

 

And yet, I do not think that Barrie's preference of pretend over the real and the adult is in any way a weakness. Although perhaps it might be Barrie's tragedy. Barrie, like Peter, like Crichton, like Maggie and Mary Rose, changed little throughout the course of his being. He was one of those rare creatures of consistency, like Peter Pan himself. 

Yet it is human nature to change, and thus Barrie's own consistency, while preserving his ability to pretend, also isolates him. Those rare characters who do not change, who somehow refuse to let their soul get older, are slowly left behind by those around them. Thus, Barrie's Crichton can only be loved by Lady Mary while they get to play on their island; Peter Pan is only the source of adventure till his companions feel the need for change calling and abandon Neverland; Mary Rose spends her days searching for the child that grew up without her, a child that reached old age before she herself had touched it; and, finally, J.M. Barrie loses his play mates one by one. 

For J.M. Barrie our best selves lie in our pretending. The heroes we played at as children, the kind princess, the run away child, the companion of fairies, they are our wondrous selves, the selves we thought we could be for real someday when we were no longer burdened by a mothers worry or the trivialities of naps and bedtimes. These are the selves we held on to while the pretending still sufficed. 

But by the time we get to An After Thought in Barrie's book of plays Wendy has lived a whole life, become a wife, and a mother, and woman. Yet none of that life is ever written about; it is only there to give Wendy's daughter something to slip away from so she can take her place in the little house in Neverland. The other, real life lies in wait unmentioned, only there so that she has something to return to. Returning comes almost like an afterthought, for it must be remembered that the Darling children almost forgot to return to her mother, just as Mary Rose nearly did not return to her child.

Still, in a way Wendy was already the things her adult life makes her while in Peter Pan, only there it was part of their pretending. Wendy played mother to her brothers and the lost boys, and even to Peter. She played wife when she loved Peter with a secret love too adult for Peter to understand, and she played wife when she took care of Peter as he confusedly took up the role of pretend father. Wendy becomes a woman when she makes the adult choice of choosing to grow up and stop pretending. Yet the form of these plays suggests that Wendy in her pretending and forgetting, in the play in which she participated in Neverland, is, if not more real than the Wendy we meet in An Afterthought, more pure and more true, and thus, she is worth holding on to, if only with an afterthought, or, perhaps, with a play written by someone who forgets writing it. 

 

"In those days when one by one you came out of your belief in fairies... my grandest triumph, the best thing in the play of Peter Pan... is that long after No. 4 (Michael) had ceased to believe, I brought him back to the faith for at least two minutes" 

~To the Five, Barrie

The View from the Window

Virginia Woolf's To the Light House

 

Anyone reading Virginia Woolf for a story will find themselves sorely confused. Virginia Woolf does not write stories. She writes about people. She spills life in lines, spurring characters into action and musings, supplementing them with acute details, letting them exist with a stubbornness that only real things possess. While her character's outer shapes are cast like silhouettes into memory, their thoughts and musings flow from the page into one's mind so smoothly and so easily, it is as if they were one's own.

No one fits life, with all its richness and wondrous ordinariness, into books like Virginia Woolf.

In To the Lighthouse, Woolf fits a handful of lives, not just into a book, but into a day. We meet the cast of the novel on a summer's day on the Isle of Skye where we spend half the novel with them, observing their thoughts, watching the children play, listening in at dinner. We get to know them only to have them disappear. 

 

 

 

The books first section, titled "The Window" provides a window-view, allowing us a glimpse into the character's lives. Woolf knew how to write thoughts, but she also knew how to write time, and here she draws it out like a beam, gloriously, wondrously. That single day feels like the type of day one longs for as soon as it is over. It is full of good company, walks along the beach and other simple time-passes, and, importantly, revelations realized from the wondrously ordinary. It is indeed not a story, for there is little permanence in it and little happens that we have not experienced ourselves, in one way or another. 

From the beginning, one quickly loses the illusion that this is a story, in which one event follows another. Rather, the book feels from the outset like a memory, and if it is a memory, it is a fond one. 

 

Like most fond memories, this one takes place away from home and the everyday-ness of life, during the summer, surrounded by good company.

 

Throughout, it is as if the people inside the story know they are characters inside a book, for every moment of their literary lives is heightened, full of deep discovery. Through the text-lined window from which we see them, the characters exist at the pinnacle of their being, and every moment, once ended, is immediately stowed into the space in which one keeps their fondest memories. Every moment within the first half of To the Lighthouse reminds one of the good old days, which ever those may be; and though they are not ours, we remember our own golden days; days in which, looking back, we feel we were our best selves, were with our favorite people; the days in which we so gloriously happy that we realize too late that we forgot to revel in it. 

 

 

 

  

Throughout the book, it feels as if the characters are aware that they will never exist outside the limit of these 200 pages. Thus, the moments they do have contain all the life inside of them, reminding one of the days in which they felt most alive. Every thought within reads like a sigh, as if the characters whose minds we momentarily share are taking pleasure in this simple instance of their existence. 

This gives them both a permanence and a vulnerability because I, the reader, know that they will be here again. In their time-span this will be the last trip to the Isle of Skye as a completed family. In my life though, I know they will be here again, for if in a few years I reread Woolf's To the Light House I will find them there still, feeling a bit like a memory or a dream. I will find them going for walks, painting on the shore, reading to their children, alive and returned to those sweet days which they long for in the latter half of the book. 

While at times that single day seems to last forever, one still gets a sense that it is slipping through one's fingers. Moments heightened by thought last a while only to drift away in an instant. So, dinner ends and Mrs. Ramsay knows that it is already a memory. Sometimes it is not clear whether something has already happened. Is Mrs. Ramsay thinking about something that happened this morning? Or is it something that has been done so many times that it is a part of the very fabric of her life? Still, this single day wanders back and forth like the tide, and mundane tasks are thought about as if they are already memories.

Indeed, I had not yet ended that near perfect day for the first time when I wrote in the margins of the book that the characters only existed here, in this stretch of a day across half a novel. There is no day that comes after this one, for when it is over ten years pass in an instant, as with a breath extinguishing a candle. I knew before I'd even watched time unleash itself in the "Time Passes" section that if the family did not decide today to go to the lighthouse tomorrow, they would not go at all. If the missing brooch was not found on the beach that evening, it probably never would be. If Mrs. Ramsay did not finishing knitting her son's stocking by the time the day was through, she never would. 

All one ever has is a day before time unfolds like pages full of unwritten story, and a perfect summers day becomes the good old days of a lost past.

 

To the Light House is itself a window, like a house one often passes late in the evening, the people inside are always there, in the soft light behind the glass, inviting the illusion that they never change. I know I will pass this house with its glowing window again, and I know that even as I circle the garden, time will pass above me like a lapse replayed. 

Still, when the longing for the good days nestles inside me like an ache, I will read about the Isle of Skye and the family that used to come there every summer, knowing full well that even books are limited in their capacity to hold things, and so, I will not get to go to the lighthouse, no matter how many times I try. I only get to look upon Mr. Ramsay and his children come upon it from a distance.