Barrie in Love XI
Miss Barrie sat at her desk, contemplating the world. Surely
the destiny of life seemed more fierce and compulsive to him now, ever since
his rendezvous with death.
The man who has died asks himself this final question: From what, and to
what, could this infinite whirl be saved? Is it worth writing about like I did
with Peter Pan?
The mystic pagan certitude of Peter Pan surely belongs to a
consciousness that has transcended the dualisms of tragedy. The split has not
been healed, it has simply been transcended.
After losing the Davies boys, Barrie turns instinctively to
the allegorical mode, the most primitive and the most sophisticated of all
visionary expressions.
Peter Pan, by contrast, irresolute and contradictory—it
offered only the finite, tentative "resurrection" of marriage between
two very incomplete beings. Man and boy—manhood and boyhood.
But now Miss Barrie must fashion her life in
a distinctly unmythic, unidyllic landscape. His fate no longer centers on the
statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Park. Or the play or the book.
How was Barrie to escape history?—defy the death-process of
our culture? With difficulty. In sorrow. So long as we live, even strengthened
as we are by the "mystic conjunction," the "ultimate
unison" between boy and man.
Barrie’s life tempered by the ungovernable contingencies of
the world that is no metaphor—but our
only home.
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