Farewell Miss Julie Logan

Times Literary Supplement
Barrie's emotional make-up was singular. If the tender, terrified letters he wrote to George [Llewelyn Davies] at the Front seem strangely unselfconscious in their scrambling of gender and relationship -

". . . I do seem to be sadder to-day than ever, and more and more wishing you were a girl of 21 instead of a boy, so that I could say the things to you that are now always in my heart" - it is because Barrie was not shy of such things. He was just another Great War mother: "I shall have many anxious days and nights too, but I only fall into line with so many mothers." The letters to Michael are apparently stronger still; a surviving brother destroyed them in the 1950s on the grounds that they were "too much". And yet they may not have seemed quite that at the time. Barrie was an exceptionally affectable man writing in an affectable age.

The two great authors for children of their time, both Kipling (his junior by four years) and Barrie were short ("The things I could have said to them (ladies) if my legs had been longer . . ."), smokers, energetic, melancholy and ill (Barrie had a permanent cough from an early bout of pleurisy and pneumonia); and they enjoyed a similar fertility of narrative invention.Both of them "lost boys" in the Great War. But if it doesn't seem fanciful to say so (since the Anglo-Indian Kipling was temperamentally more like a Scottish than an English writer), they represent the separate tendencies of the Scottish mind, the practical and the sentimental. Kipling was devoted to the real, to the workings of man and other machines, to the spoken voice in all its accents, and the boy he lost was his son. Literature, to Barrie, was play, as in the opposite of earnest, and it happened in Never Land, or Never-Never Land (a more winkingly ambiguous formula), in the Might-Have-Been, in the world as it isn't. And the boys he lost were someone else's.

Genre: Literary Fiction