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

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.

    

The Tragedy of Peter Pan

The Star-Crossed Story of How Peter Lost Wendy

I recently wrote about the puzzling feeling of panic my first encounter with Fantastic Mr. Fox left me with. Yet recently I have been thinking about another beloved story from my childhood that leaves me with a far deeper and more personal sort of pain.

The people who are closest to me know that I only watch the film adaptation of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (2003) when I'm incredibly sad. This is because as far back as I can remember, watching the film has left me with a deep feeling of heartache that I could never quite explain.

While the book is in some ways lighter and more whimsical than the film I am referring to, it has a similar sense of sorrow beneath its childish fancy that no child will ever fully pick up on. For one, the fairies and pirates are too distracting, but for another, these gentle sorrows are whispered in a voice only an adult will hear. Children need not trouble themselves with them. Peter Pan has other secrets for them. 

Peter Pan is, after all, a tale that is greatly concerned with children and the act of growing up, and naturally, it contains secrets for both adults and children alike.

Like many books, it begins by stating a universal fact (which it will inevitably try to slip away from).

"All children grow up," the book claims.

Yet contained in this very same line the story simultaneously creates an exception.

"Except one," it whispers. And with that Peter Pan slips away across the page, like across the night sky, revealing himself to be the extraordinary exception to the first universal rule every child eventually comes to know.

Childhood feels like it's forever, while it lasts that is. And at the beginning of Barrie's pondering over this simple idea, he informs us that Wendy was aware of the inevitable-ness of her having to age out of childhood ever since she was two years old. It happened when her mother cried out, quite innocently, "oh, why can't you remain like this forever". And there is that word: forever.

"Two is the beginning of the end," Barrie writes. Another fact.

So, Wendy became aware that forever was only a dream; that forever was available to no one, and nothing.

Not even Peter Pan.

 

Growing up is gradual, and you won't know exactly when you've done it, nor will you know how; much less why. I surely can't tell you how it happens, only that it starts happening when a child first begins to mourn that they will not stay this way forever. (I remember crying over this myself when I was young and wanted everything to be permanent.)

Yet Peter Pan remains the grand exception. For Peter, everything is permanent. And so, from the moment she first meets him in her wakefulness, Wendy, who is by now a great deal more grown up than Peter is, knows that she is "in the presence of a tragedy".

Why? Why this painful word at the beginning of a tale about wonder and childishness?

For Peter Pan, there is another word, equally painful; a word out of which all the great tragedies are made. Love.

The first time the tale mentions it we pay it little heed, for it is a grown up word, unfamiliar to the cares of children.

 

The tale tells the account of how Mr. Darling won their mother's heart by stating a very remarkable and seemingly impossible fact: that once upon a time, when her parents were younger, a great "many gentlemen who had (once) been boys when she was a girl discovered simultaneously that they loved her".

Strange, and though perhaps slightly exaggerated, not that strange, after all. For that is how it works. Is it not? One moment you are two and just beginning to wonder if things will ever change, and the next, there is first love; a love that by its first-ness is so unlike the simple love you once knew for your parents. It is not even like the love you have seen your parents display for one another, for there is nothing practical nor sensible about it. This love is a truly unique sort of love, totally untarnished by adulthood. And it is likely that you will never feel anything like it again.

That is part of the enchantment: that you can only love in this way while you are a child, and no child can ever love this way more than once.

It is exactly this type of love that, I believe, Peter Pan feels for Wendy, and she in turn feels for him. It is a love rich in childishness.

We do not know when Peter first sees her. But we do know that she is the first girl he ever brings to Neverland, and I believe that speaks for itself.

As Wendy and her brothers fly away, the narrator asks us if the parents will reach the nursery in time. But time is of little relevance in this story– at least, for now, and if time had played its course then and worked its right, then we would have no story at all.

Yet, when the narrator solemnly promises us that "it will come right in the end" one could also suppose that he not talking about the parent's distress at finding the nursery empty. What he might just as well be saying is that the children will not slip out of time forever. Either way, the answer is the same: the children will return, and time will go right before the story ends.

 

After this, great adventures are had in Neverland, and though it would bring me great thrill to recount them, I think that would be missing the point. I am no longer a child, after all; and adventure, though wonderful, does not apply nor speak to me as it once did. I think of the coming chapters fondly. But nonetheless, they always end so quickly. I cannot hold onto them no matter what I do. The pages pass too quickly. 

But glimpsed between these lines, we see the tragic nature of Peter, and this has never left me.  Wendy knew from the beginning that she was in the presence of a tragedy, and she sees it also there, in the wondrous Neverland. She sees it late at night, when Peter Pan is sleeping and unaware of her.

The narrator tells us that sometimes Peter had dreams that are fully unlike the dreams of other boys, for they were more painful and far more troubling.

"For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them... At such times it has been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she has subjected him."

The narrator never tells us what Peter Pan was dreaming about, only that these dreams had to do with the riddle of Peter's existence. Yet their very painfulness reveals to me now a piece of the tragedy. No feeling, no matter how unchildlike, can alter Peter's nature, can push him into adulthood. Children grow up gradually; they grow up every time they feel something that their childish hearts cannot bare, beginning with the very feeling of the impermanence of the things around them, or of themselves. It lies in the painful contradiction of Peter's nature that a boy who dreams of such un-boyish and troublesome things cannot grow up, can neither out grow them or grow up to understand them better.

Peter Pan has another dream the night they fly back to London to bring Wendy and her brothers home. The story tells us that Wendy held him tight that night, while he was sleeping. But the chapter ends there, and in the one that follows, Wendy Darling returns home. And so, Peter Pan is confronted with the first thing since his whimsical life on Neverland began that has not been permanent.

Peter Pan never admits to loving Wendy, as boys that age never do, expect maybe to their mothers. Peter Pan does. And, because everyone knows that Peter Pan does not have a mother, he tells her's (though she's asleep, and so, she does not hear him.) "I'm fond of her too," he whispers.

 

As the children reunite with their parents, the narrator takes us back outside the window to glance at the sight of the "strange boy", a boy who he tells us as "ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know". And yet, here he was "looking at the one joy from which he must be forever barred."

For Peter Pan, the space between growing up is as narrow and thin as the sheet of glass from Wendy Darling's nursery window.

So why all this? Well, it dawned on me when I listened to Taylor Swifts new song "Cardigan", of all places. Therein lies a line that brought be back to this familiar heart ache story, a line about how Peter loses Wendy.

Strange, that Taylor Swift should sing about Peter Pan in a break up song; and yet, not so strange at all. Because Peter Pan does lose Wendy, in the end. But that is not what makes it all so terrible. What really hurts deep within myself, is the part of me that knows that it takes growing up to get over such a heart break.

The story of Peter Pan, with all its marvelousness and magic, still makes me ache. It made me ache as a child, but only because I could sense, even then, how terribly lonely Peter Pan was there at the end of the film when he looks at Wendy through the window.

As I grew, it reminded me of a different kind of heart ache, the kind that breaks your heart when a childish love doesn't end well and it feels like all the world will never be the same.

I cannot even listen to the musical piece from the film entitled "Fairy Dance" without feeling a twinge of loss deep inside myself, in a box that no one else will ever open. Over time though, I have learned that it is a beautiful kind of heart ache. The kind of hurt your heart feels when you love someone so much that it aches inside, like a tight hug in reverse.

At last, a few weeks ago, I walked down the aisle to this song, so forever reversing what was once a tragedy into the fairy tale definition of a happy ending.

The only feeling of sadness I feel now is that I might never need to watch Peter Pan again; that there will never be a night in which my heart hurts so much that it feels like the world is ending. I have grown out of it, I suppose.

Now, when I hurt, I get to hug my husband. And, what's more, I know from experience that time will pass, and I will grow in wisdom, and I one day I will get over it, no matter how deep the hurt. 

 

Book-Worm; Childhood Favorites

My love for literature began before I even learned how to read. 
My passion started with my Dad. 
My Dad's bed time stories were the first stories I remember falling in love with. Whether it be a story he invented, or a re-tell of one of his favorite books, I loved it when my Dad told me stories. I often wonder what I might have become if my Dad hadn't read to me a as child. He introduced me to books like The Chronicles of Narnia, and, the book that would forever change my life, The Hobbit.
Growing up, I had more books than I had friends. 
People often thought I was shy, in some cases, they even thought I was lonely, but I rarely felt alone.
I found greater friends with-in the pages of my favorite books than I did in other kids my age. 
I never felt uncomfortable with being excluded. I never felt like I was a loner or a loser, and somehow, I never even realized I was different. Maybe it's because I spent so much time with my nose in a book, or maybe I just didn't care. 
All I know is, although I did make friends eventually, I believe growing up as a book worm shaped who I am today. The more books I fell in love with the greater became my passion for fiction. 

  
Some of my childhood favorites include Narnia, The Hobbit, The Sisters Grimm, Peter Pan, Pippi Longstocking, The Tale of Despereaux, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Matt Cruse, East, Coraline, and Stardust.

The Photo-credit goes to my Dad. 
You can see more of his pictures at 
www.heinrichnikel.com

Thanks for reading to me Dad.