The bird returns and sits on the hat - imaginative Peter Pan

Another bad assumption: that the hodgepodge of elements in Peter Pan – fairies and mermaids, Caribbean Pirates and vaguely Iroquois Indians, all on a South Seas island – were just kitsch, more larkiness.  Now, I see that Barrie is parodying boy’s adventure books.  Treasure Island, by the time of the first performance a twenty year old classic, is referenced a couple of times, and I have no doubt that there are many other nods to books and plays unknown to me.

The key is, the hodgepodge is Peter’s, his private amusement park.  If he had preferred The Arabian Nights to James Fennimore Cooper, the island would contain genies and flying carpets rather than Indians.  Perhaps it once did, or someday will.  Wendy first comes to Peter’s attention as a source of the one thing he can’t seem to create himself – stories.  Peter’s imagination is somehow ideally suited for creating scenes within stories, but he needs help with the frame and the plot.  Thus, like most boys his age, he borrows.

The imagination is borrowed, too, of course, borrowed from J. M. Barrie.  I’ll say farewell to Peter Pan with an example of Barrie’s proto-Surrealism, a bit I had to read twice just to make sure it was really on the page.  The scene (end of Act 3):  Peter has been battling the pirates in a lagoon.  He is stranded on a rock.  The tide is rising.  Peter can fly, yes?  No, because he is pretending to be wounded.  A bit earlier, the Never Bird has drifted by on its floating nest (?).

(Peter is afraid at last, and a tremor runs through him, like a shudder passing over the lagoon; but on the lagoon one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and he feels just the one)

PETER  (with a drum beating in his breast as if he were a real boy at last)  To die will be an awfully big adventure.

( [time passes] The nest is borne nearer, and the bird, after cooing a message to him, leaves it and wings her way upwards.  Peter, who knows the bird language, slips into the nest, first removing the two eggs and placing them in [a pirate’s] hat, which has been left on the stave.  The hat drifts away from the rock, but he uses the stave as a mast.  The wind is driving him toward the open sea.  He takes off his shirt, which he had forgotten to remove while bathing, and unfurls it as a sail.  His vessel tacks, and he passes from sight, naked and victorious.  The bird returns and sits on the hat)

And curtain.  That one line of dialogue supplies the title of the 1989 Beryl Bainbridge novel which is partly about a performance of the play.  A footnote in the Oxford edition informs me that Peter originally had to fight the bird for the nest, but “[t]his upset the reviewers” (318).  Theater reviewers are so delicate and sensitive, poor little orchids.

Anyone who has acted in the play, or seen it performed – did the bird return and sit on the hat?  I’d love to see it myself.

No children love me - frightening Peter Pan, pathetic Captain Hook

I’ve never seen Peter Pan on stage.  Not sure if I’ve ever seen the Disney movie, either.  I’ve picked up bits and pieces – Peter and Wendy fly around on wires, and I knew that the audience had to clap its hands to save the poisoned Tinker Bell.  I guess I had assumed that the scene was cutesy, or insipid.  Maybe most of the time it is.  Not in the play I read, though.  Not so much.  Nana, by the way, is the Darling children’s nanny, and also, in a bit of Surrealism, a dog:

PETER  She says – she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies!  (He rises and throws out his arms he knows not to whom, perhaps to the boys and girls of whom he is not one)  Do you believe in fairies?  Say quick that you believe!  If you believe, clap your hands! (4.275-81)

So far, so insipid, although, as usual, there is something odd in that stage direction.  What happens?

(Many clap, some don’t, a few hiss.  Then perhaps there is a rush of Nanas to the nurseries to see what on earth is happening.  But Tink is saved)  Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!  And now to rescue Wendy!

(Tink is already as merry and impudent as a grig [grasshopper], with not a thought for those who have saved her.  Peter ascends his tree as if he were shot up it.  What he is feeling is ‘Hook or me this time!’  He is frightfully happy) (4.281-7)

A few hiss!  Tinker Bell is heartless, but is a fairy, so perhaps we excuse her.  What Barrie deftly avoids saying here, is that it is not just the inhuman fairy who has not a thought for her saviors, but Peter Pan, too.  He is not one of the boys and girls.  He’s not human, either.

The Peter Pan of the play is cruel – a bully, frankly.  His interest in other people can be intense but is fleeting.  He plays a game until he tires of it, and then drops it for the next one.  You still wanted to play the other one?  Too bad.  And for Peter Pan, everything is a game.  The story of the play, taken this way, is actually the chronicle of the specific moment when Peter tires of the game of “Pirates.”  “Hook or me this time!”  The next visitors will get to see Peter fight Fu Manchu or Darth Vader or whatever has taken his fancy.  He’s tired of pirates.

Poor Captain Hook.  Hook is an amusing blend of boy’s book cliché and anxious Everyman, “[a] man of indomitable courage, the only thing at which he flinches is the sight of his own blood, which is thick and of unusual color.”  If Wendy reminds us of one side of growing up, sex and motherhood, Hook is the walking memento mori.  To grow up is to die.  Is Hook a tragic figure, or a heroic one?  Well, mock-tragic, mock-heroic, just as he begins Act 5 with a mock-Shakespearean soliloquy (“No little children love me” and so on).  His end, mock-sublime:

Lifting a blunderbuss he strikes forlornly not at the boy but at the barrel, which is hurled across the deck.  Peter remains sitting in the air still playing upon his pipes.  At this sight the great heart of Hook breaks.  That not wholly unheroic figure climbs the bulwarks murmuring ‘Floreat Etona,’ and prostrates himself into the water, where the crocodile is waiting for him open-mouthed.  Hook knows the purpose of this yawning cavity, but after what he has gone through he enters it like one greeting a friend. (end of 5.1)

Oh, yes, Hook was an Eton lad.  And Peter, larky Peter?

The curtain rises to show Peter a very Napoleon on his ship.  It must not rise again lest we see him on the poop in Hook’s hat and cigars, and with a small iron claw.

She is probably wasting valuable time - surprised by Peter Pan

Launching the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge, I predicted that I would be sick of the whole thing in August, which was pretty much spot on.  I’ve kept on, though, with Margaret Oliphant and Thomas Carlyle and, now, J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.  Please don’t let my waning enthusiasm stop anyone – my commitment to read along is good until the end of the year, three and a half month from now.  Three and a half long, long months.

I’m a little surprised no one has jumped on Peter Pan yet.  It’s popular, isn’t it?  Maybe everyone thought they basically knew what was in it, so why bother.  I’ll admit I read it partly out of a sense of – not duty, exactly – but completeness.  Well, I was wrong.  I mean, I knew a lot of what was in the play.  But I've never seen a play like this:

WENDY  He is chaining Nana up.

    (This unfortunately is what he is doing, though we cannot see him.  Let us hope that he then retires to his study, looks up the word ‘temper’ in his Thesaurus, and under the influence of those benign pages becomes a better man.  In the meantime the children have been put to bed in unwonted silence, and Mrs Darling lights the night-lights over the beds) (I.300)

Now, I see how some of that can be made visible on the stage, but I have doubts about other parts.

Here, Peter Pan and Wendy are trying to catch a mermaid:

WENDY  (preserving her scales as carefully as if they were rare postage stamps)  I did so want to catch a mermaid.

PETER  (getting rid of his)  It is awfully difficult to catch a mermaid.

    (The mermaids at times find it just as difficult to catch him, though he sometimes joins them in their one game, which consists in lazily blowing bubbles into the air and seeing who can catch them.  The number of bubbles Peter has flown away with!  When the weather grows cold mermaids migrate to the other side of the world, and he once went with a great shoal of them half the way)

They are such cruel creatures, Wendy, that they try to pull boys and girls like you into the water and drown them.

WENDY  (too guarded by this time to ask what he means precisely by ‘like you,’ though she is very desirous of knowing)  How hateful! (III.20-5)

Barrie certainly packs a lot of whatever he is doing into those stage notes.  Whatever influence that last one has on the actor playing Wendy, it must be pretty subtle.

One more, just because they’re so much fun.  Tinker Bell, who is just a light, is in her little home, where:

She is probably wasting valuable time just now wondering whether to put on the smoky blue or the apple-blossom. (IV.30-2)

“Probably” is one of Barrie’s favorite words in Peter Pan, despite, or because of, the utter improbability of the whole thing.

Peter Pan has a baffling textual history.  The first performance was in 1904, but Barrie was a tinkerer, so the versions proliferated.  I’m using the 1928 edition, as published in Peter Pan and Other Plays, Oxford World’s Classics, 1995.  The book cover is from Barrie's novelization of his own play.