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

Keats' Buried Letters

John Keats always knew he would die young. I don't know how he knew, but his poems are overshadowed by that knowledge, haunted by his tragic end. Famously, Keats lies buried in a grave that doesn't even bare his name. He himself desired the words "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" to be engraved into his tombstone. He died at the age of 25 with the belief that he would be forgotten, tormented by the knowledge that the only legacy he left was the anguish he would bring to the lover to whom he never returned.

 

 

Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne were full of musings concerning his own death, as were his poems. The fear of an early death sits ripe in them, rich as flesh is with blood. In one of the most haunting personifications of death I have ever read, Keats wrote "I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath". The theme of oblivion ripples deep only to be swallowed like an echo that hangs hollow in the air. Reading his works, one constantly feels like the shadow of a spectator watching as Keats stands alone, contemplating "on the shore of the wide world...till love and fame to nothingness do sink".

Keats knew he did not have long, and so, love for him was painful, impatient, and urgent. He was so haunted by the fact that he would have to leave her that at times he fled from her even when he did not have to. It was like he did not want to allow himself to live, to relish in things that belong to a full-lived life, with its experience, and its aging, its soft winding down. But death showed itself with that first drop of blood on his own pillow. Death fueled his exigency every night when he wrote to her desperately only to tame himself by morning. Thus, when his poor health drove him to the warmer climates of Italy, he knew already that he would not return. 

 

 

I recently read the letters that he wrote to her before his flight, when life still held some taste for Keats. 

He did not write to her after he fled to Italy. 

I read in the book's introduction that the letters she sent to him throughout those weeks were buried with him unopened. I also read that based on his friend's accounts Keats was tormented by visions of her on his death bed, visions fueled by the fear of what his death would do to her. She was so young, so new, and he had died a thousand times. 

 

Strangely, these horrid deathbed visions also seem prophesied in Keats' own writing. He wrote to her once that she should "suppose (him) in Rome", saying that he would see her there. "I should there see you as in a magic glass going to and from town at all the hours". Yet Keats never saw Fanny again. The Fanny he described in this early letter sounds like a ghost. Even the magic glass, at first described so lovely and innocently, turns out to be something ghastly and agonizing. 

Towards the end, Keats was haunted by her. 

As I read the works he wrote for her I tracked the lines with etchings, skimming his love letters as they slowly unraveled into tragedy. I could see my own lines even as I turned the pages, like half-healed scars shown through skin-thin paper. 

I did not think there was any particular purpose to the order in which the poems appear, until I read the final one. Not until, at the end, Keats wrote about drawing out her blood with his once live inky grasp into his now cold dead fingers. Like an image wrought straight from Shelley's Frankenstein, love and loss becomes a monstrous thing, vampiric in its ability to draw the heart out of you. 

It was there that Keats reached out to me completely, desperately, from death itself. "See" he says, reaching out his pale dead hand. "Here it is – I hold it towards you."

 

 

At the start of the book, an illustration of Keats slept in shadows, nestled between the pages, a silhouette of man of whom no photographs exist. By the end, the only thing the book leaves you with is the imaginary image of his cold corpse, sweat still drying, blood spots on his sheets from his coughing, fingers unmoving, laying where he last reached out. 

As I contemplated the collection I was left with an image of Keats on his death bed, surrounded by haunted mirrors reflecting the image of the woman he loved but could never marry. 

 

But the is truth, this is not how the story of Keats and his love ends. 

 

It ends with a twenty year old girl cutting off her own hair and spending three years dressed in black, dwelling in the Heath where she had once walked with him. It ends with Fanny's unnamed husband who came thirteen years later and a life lived into old age with no account of the passion with which it began. Finally, it ends with a woman remembered by time only for the greatness of her grief and the love she never got to hold. 

 

After all, it is Keats' anguish that we read about. We never get to hear about her suffering from her own mouth. Her own letters were never read, not by Keats, not by anyone. 

Instead, they lie unread and entombed, withered with her first loves corpse before the woman herself even breathed her last. 

Still, she must have had the gift of a poet within, for one can feel her agony when she asks by Keats' account: "Is there another life?... There must be, we cannot be created for this kind of suffering".

Some Oddities of Time

At the end of the day, the one thing we all need is more time. 

 

The café in which I work is open around the clock. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. We’ve got nothing but time. Which is why it’s kind of ironic that the clock on the wall doesn’t work. The levers frozen at 3:42. It’s been that way for almost as long as I’ve worked here, yet no one’s bothered to fix it. Not that it matters, we’re always open anyway. So, if you’ve got time to spare, so do we. 

Most people don’t stick around for long though. Actually, you’d be surprised how many people pass through in a day. They come, and they go, busy and bustling, hustling by, passing between errands and places unknown. Time keeps us all on our toes. We all have appointments to keep, people to meet and places to go; things to do and not enough time to do it in.

It seems we are always pressed for time in one way or another, which is why it does not surprise me how quickly time escapes us. It occurred to me once that perhaps if clocks counted backwards we’d realize how the hours count down throughout the day. Time is of the essence, as they say, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day, after all. 

Sometimes I wonder how a force so strong can be so invisible. How can people be so unaware of something so imminent? Perhaps if we had less to do, or if people took more time to take joy in simply doing nothing, we would notice how the days go by. Time is the great hassler, turning our lives into time lapses of responsibilities and deadlines to meet. Hours that turn into days and days that turn into weeks, and so, all too soon, life passes us by. 

But there are a few times a year when people become painfully aware of the passing of time. During the holidays for example; or when the first leaves begin to fall; when you wake up in the morning and the world is white; or when blowing out birthday candles that grow from a flicker to a burning flame too fierce to blow out in one breath. 

Other than holidays, birthdays, and the change of the seasons, the rest of the year we tend to believe that time never counts beyond its twenty-four-hour mark, always counting up to something that never seems to occur. But then we stand next to grown-up children, or catch glimpses of old photographs, and we are no longer fooled.  

You see, most people think time is constant; dependable; predictable; always the same. But those of us who really pay attention know that time is as varying as we are. Time is fickle and unreliable. And, just like us, time has its quirks and oddities. Even time can be dreary and lazy, at times. It can be eager and eccentric. Time can be exhilarating, and time can be aggravating, as oppressing as it is ambitious. Even time has its peculiarities. And, just like time becomes more palpable in moments when its fleeting, such as when you’re saying goodbye to someone you love, time changes its pace in some places. 

 

 

Take airports for example. Nowhere does the tempo of time march faster or with such impending velocity. Or consider how time works in classrooms, so tedious and lackluster. And then there are cafes, like the one in which I work, in which time stands still.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it’s always 3:42, and that’s not just because the clock doesn’t work. Cafes are timeless places. I would know. I work in one. 

And I think I’m not the only one whose noticed this peculiarity.   

There is an odd young man who used to come here for lunch. He always tucked his pants into his socks and wore the same brown bowler hat. I heard he was a business student, and so I’m sure he knew the pressure of deadlines better than most. He always sat in the same booth, in the corner by the window. And with feet outstretched, a unique pair of socks each day, he sat and mulled over his laptop, just passing the time, or rather, trying to escape it, almost as if he knew that his responsibilities would not find him here in one of time’s rare loopholes.

I used to not believe in destiny, but I also used to believe in the reliability of time. But a young man, as odd as time itself, proved that sometimes there is such a thing as being in the right place at the right time. 

Destiny walked in one rainy Thursday carrying a polka-dotted umbrella, her strawberry blonde hair dripping from the rain. There was nowhere else sit. All the seats were taken. 

The young man rarely sat alone after that. They sat together in his sunlit booth by the window all throughout the golden summer. He wrote on his laptop, and she brought stacks of books to read from a never-ending to-read list. They sat for hours sometimes, just savouring each other’s company, unaware of the frantic and frenzied people around them who, unlike them, were always pressed for time; or perhaps, simply less aware of its peculiarities.

 
There will always be those who come in here to “kill some time” before an appointment or when waiting for a bus; those who order a drink and maybe a dessert and glance impatiently at the clock that doesn’t work, slaughtering time instead of savouring it. 

 

Then, of course, there are those who are always running late, like the composed looking gentleman who is always flustered by the lateness of the hour. Perhaps he just hasn’t realized that the clock on the wall doesn’t work, or maybe he just has a bad sense of time in general, but he can never seem to catch up with it. He comes in once or twice a week to have lunch with a colleague and they chat till eventually he rushes off to some appointment or other. Maybe time just goes by faster for some people.

But just because cafes are timeless does not mean that time does not work its tolls here. Sooner or later, something always changes. Outside the café window rainy spring days become sunny summer days, and soon the first leaves of autumn begin to fall in one of time's most prominent moments. The girl with the strawberry blonde hair doesn’t come here anymore and the young business student sits alone, though he too doesn’t come nearly as often as he used to. 

Time is relentless, and, sooner or later, it catches up to all of us. But at least we have cafes, so remarkably ordinary in their timelessness. Every once in a while, when I see old friends reunite over coffee, catching up and reminiscing about the past when life was young and time abundant, I cannot help but think that perhaps they should have spent more time in cafes, savouring time and drinking coffee. 

Of course, there are also those who have more experience with times ability to fly by. Many of the retired folk come here to idle away their afternoons. People think they come for the free refills, but I know better. They come because they know that here time will not escape them. 

I told you that a man in funky socks taught me about destiny. Well, an old woman in chunky jewellery taught me how to savour time. 

It was the winter in which I first started working here, in this timeless café before I discovered its timelessness. It was December 24th, one of the rare nights of the year in which we close. The clock read 3:25, and I was just mopping up to close at four. The café was empty, except for a tiny old woman in a vibrant green and purple dress sitting at a table alone. 

I had never seen her before, but I have seen her many times since. She comes in most nights, wearing every piece of jewellery she owns, from pearly necklaces to emerald earrings. But on her left ring finger she wears only a simple golden ring, as if to heighten its importance. She never orders anything but coffee, decaf, which she sips quietly as she stares pondering out the window, dwelling on the past as she fiddles with her golden ring. 

I did not have the heart to ask her to leave, so I asked her if she was waiting for someone. “No,” she said, smiling up at me with kind old eyes and blush coloured cheeks. “I’m just making up for lost time.”  

 

 
I sat with her that Christmas eve. I was new in town. I didn’t have anything better to do. I would not have admitted it then, but I was pretty lonely, not just because I felt alone but because I felt abandoned; left behind by time, regretful of the years I had lost and the time I had wasted.

We laughed that night, me and the old lady dressed in emeralds and purple flowers. We drank coffee, decaf, and we talked about our pasts, starring out the window at the snow which drifted slowly down into the silent night. 

I didn’t notice it then, but the clock stopped ticking that night. Maybe it was the time we savoured, or maybe it just ran out of battery. Though, looking back now, something tells me that clock isn’t broken at all. Maybe it’s just enchanted.

Because at the end of the day, we all need more time: time to savour, to read a book, or catch up with a friend; time to ponder; to relish in the moments; and, maybe, to enjoy a cup of coffee.