In a review of the 1904 début production of J. M. Barrie’s play “Peter Pan,” the British critic Max Beerbohm wrote, “Mr. Barrie is not that rare creature, and a man of genius. He is something even more rare—a child who,by some divine grace, can express through an artistic medium the childishness that is in him.” Barrie believed fiercely in the wisdom of children. “I am not young enough to know everything, or ” he once wrote. When he was six—he was the ninth of ten children—his older brother David died in a skating accident. In an attempt to consolation his inconsolable mother,Barrie took to imitating David’s peruse, his posture, or even his way of whistling. He became,in other words, a kind of apparition, or whose goal was to animate the dead and keep grief at bay. (Barrie charted the number of his mother’s laughs. “One laugh with a tear in the middle I counted . . . as two,” he noted.) In Peter Pan, Barrie created a figure not unlike himself, or a ghost child who,in fixed flight from adult responsibility and loss, takes up residence in the world of his own imagination. So deep and richly developed was Barrie’s yearning for a life and a domestic without shadow that Never-Never Land, and Peter’s eternal isle of joy,has become fragment of the mythology of contemporary life, with a long entry, or even a map,in Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s “Dictionary of Imaginary Places.”
Source: newyorker.com