J. M. Barrie retrospective: 1. Who Wrote “Peter Pan”? M’Connachie? 2. J. M. Barrie’s “The House of Fear” 3.“Peter Pan,” a multiple personality story.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Who Wrote Peter Pan? J. M. Barrie? Or M’Connachie? His “Writing Half”

James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) gave the Rectorial Address at St. Andrew’s University on May 3, 1922. His title and theme was Courage (1). However, the speech is most remembered for Barrie’s mention of “M’Connachie,” whom he called his “writing half.”

According to “Barrie’s Other Self,” an article in the New York Times of May 21, 1922, Barrie “revealed that McConnachie, whom he called his other self, really wrote the plays and not the Sir James Barrie known to all.”

Let me help you decide whether to take Barrie seriously or to dismiss M’Connachie as a joke (the latter being conventional wisdom).

Someone who knew him said, “Barrie, as I read him, is part mother, part hero-worshipping maiden, part grandfather, and part pixie with no man in him at all” (2, p. 301).

His secretary described him as “an extraordinary plural personality” (2, p. 307).

The biographer comments that “He was as unpredictable to himself as he was to others; he allowed moods to overwhelm and encase him until the strange M’Connachie who had him temporarily in thrall suffered James Barrie to be released again” (2, p. 368).

A story Barrie wrote called The Body in the Black Box had “the still fashionable Gothic theme of the doppelgänger. Here, Barrie is speaking about himself, about his own shadowy identity” (3, p. 60).

“Divided soul that he was…” (3, p. 114).

“The many selves that constituted J. M. Barrie…” (3, p. 195).

“…his complex personality—his many personalities…his warring selves…” (3, p. 247).

In the above context, I quote from Barrie’s speech, Courage (1):

He said that his work as a writer “may be described as playing hide and seek with angels. My puppets seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much more swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address. It is M’Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M’Connachie, I should explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half. We are complement and supplement. I am the half that is dour and practical and canny, he is the fanciful half…

“…I sometimes talk this over with M’Connachie, with whom, as you may guess, circumstances compel me to pass a good deal of my time…

“…M’Connachie is the one who writes the plays…

“…My so-called labors were just M’Connachie running away with me again…

“…Another piece of advice; almost my last. For reasons you may guess I must give this in a low voice. Beware of M’Connachie. When I look in a mirror now it is his face I see. I speak with his voice…He has clung to me, less from mischief than for companionship; I half like him and his penny whistle…he whispered to me just now that you elected him, not me, as your Rector…” (1).

It took courage for Barrie to talk about this publicly. I don’t think it should be dismissed as a joke.

1. J. M. Barrie. Courage: The Rectorial Address Delivered at St. Andrews University May 3, 1922. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930, 49 pages.

2. Janet Dunbar. J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.

3. Lisa Chaney. Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005.

Friday, June 6, 2014

J. M. Barrie’s The House of Fear Hints How To Unmask His Incognito Alternate Personalities

Lady Cynthia Asquith (1887-1960), an English writer, was the personal secretary and close friend of Sir James Barrie (1860-1937) for his last twenty years. His will gave her the copyright to all his works except Peter Pan, whose copyright he had given to support a hospital. Asquith described Barrie’s personality as follows:

“…an extraordinarily plural personality” (1, p. 18).

“No pen could convey how widely Barrie varies” (1, p. 22).

“As always, he was fluctuating, unpredictable” (1, p. 141).

“At…times…apparently neither consciously depressed nor annoyed, he would just fade out—perhaps tell one funny, very funny, story, and then subside into silence—Trappist silence—for the rest of the dinner” (1, p. 150).

“Barrie is unpredictable” (1, p. 163).

Of course, readers of this blog know that a person’s puzzling inconsistence may be a clue to the presence of multiple personality.

Barrie’s hint about his multiple personality, and the way Asquith could unmask it, were in one of his plays that he read to her:

“Another evening, I remember Barrie reading to me one of the very few recently ‘slung-off’ one-act plays he thought worth keeping. This was The Fight for Mr Lapraik [renamed The House of Fear], a terrifying drama about the struggle between the forces of Good and Evil for the possession of one more or less average man. At first, Barrie read dispassionately; then, suddenly kindling, dramatically, and in an utterly different voice for each character. The effect was unforgettably eerie…I can’t describe the disquieting tricks he played with face and voice, nor how both visibly and audibly he split himself into the two Mr Lapraiks…this singularly uncomfortable play had been suggested to him by a dream of his own…This nightmare sense of some sinister, furtive being lurking about his flat, determined to oust and supplant him, remained with him after he awoke…” (1, p. 26-27).

Barrie’s play, plus an article about it, are available online:

The House of Fear by J. M. Barrie

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol27/iss1/3

"J. M. Barrie’s Jekyll and Hyde Drama: Lifting the Curtain on The House of Fear" by R.D.S. Jack

http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol27/iss1/4

In the play, Mrs. Lapraik has to distinguish between her real husband and his look-alike double. She succeeds in doing so by asking the man about things that her real husband would know, but that an impostor would not.

Therefore, when Cynthia Asquith would observe puzzling, unpredictable, distinct changes in Barrie’s behavior, she could have done something similar to what Mrs. Lapraik did. That is, when Barrie was behaving one way, she could have asked him about something that had been said or done while he had been behaving another way. If these different behaviors indicated different personalities, then he might have amnesia for what she asked him about. [But she evidently missed the hint and never questioned him in this way.]

One other episode Asquith mentions that is suggestive of multiple personality was when Barrie had “writer’s cramp,” and he had to change writing from right hand to left. Barrie told her:

“I’m going to take to writing with my left hand. It shouldn’t be as difficult for me as for others for I have really been ambidextrous all my life. In fact, I was naturally left-handed, but was compelled to use my right hand at school…It isn’t so difficult as you might fancy to write with the left hand, but it’s the dickens to think down the left side. It doesn’t even know the names of my works…” (1, p. 45).

In multiple personality, one personality may be right-handed and another personality may be left-handed.

1. Cynthia Asquith. Portrait of Barrie. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1955.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up: a Multiple Personality Story

Peter Pan is not an immature man or a man who wishes for eternal youth. He is a prepubescent boy who never ages. He has hardly any memory of the past and hardly any sense of the future. No such boy has ever existed. And most men would not want to be one.

Such boys are found only in multiple personality. Indeed, as noted in yesterday’s post, they are one of the most common types of alternate personality.

“Child and infant personalities are found in virtually every MPD [multiple personality disorder] patient’s system of alter[nate] personalities. Usually there will be a number of child personalities, and they often exceed the number of adult personalities. The child and infant personalities are usually frozen in time; they are locked into a given age…” (1).

The other thing that I wish to highlight is found in “J. M. Barrie’s Introduction to the Play Peter Pan,” which begins:

“Some disquieting confessions must be made in printing at last the play of Peter Pan; among them is this, that I have no recollection of having written it…I remember writing the story of Peter and Wendy many years after the production of the play, but I might have cribbed that from some typed copy. I can haul back to mind the writing of almost every other assay of mine, however forgotten by the pretty public; but this play of Peter, no…How odd, too, that these trifles should adhere to the mind that cannot remember the long job of writing Peter” (2).

J. M. Barrie’s amnesia for writing Peter Pan reminds me of Sir Walter Scott’s amnesia for writing one of his novels, which I discussed at the end of my Dickens essay (June 2013 post).

The point is this, that if a writer had multiple personality, it would have been possible for one personality to have written something and have remembered doing so, but for another personality to have no memory of it.

It may be that the one who remembered writing Peter Pan was M’Connachie (see May 14th post).

1. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.
2. J. M. Barrie. The Annotated Peter Pan: The Centennial Edition, Edited by Maria Tatar. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.