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MeI loved children for years before I realized they were reality. I can summon the magic I felt when I saw the pictures that confirmed this: a little boy dressed almost in hunters’ skins, he seems to have won. A girl with dark hair and bright eyes, her inner expression like that of someone who has just grown up used to being seen.
And – here’s the one that really gets me – a big-eyed, seven-year-old in a soft sweater and a loving haircut, holding a teddy bear that might be more popular than it actually is.
First: Michael Llewelyn Davies, who, along with brothers Peter, John and George, gave their names to three children (and one father) in JM Barrie’s Peter Pan. The second, Alice Liddell, whose difficult journey up the Thames is with the mathematician Charles Dodgson – later and better known as Lewis Carroll – became the flower of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and who served as the model for Carroll’s painting. The last, Christopher Robin Milne, son of AA Milne, whose early years with nursery toys (Winnie-the-Pooh chief among them) will be recorded in the most beautiful paradise in children’s books, the Hundred Acre Wood.
I was very jealous of these children. Like many children, I longed to be seen, promoted, anointed as a winner for doing nothing. If I couldn’t go to Neverland, I wanted to be enrolled. I think it seemed pretty cool to me at the time (I had never heard of riot grrrls) to promote art over production.
My attitude changed as I grew up. Images of Alice – alone, wearing shoulder rags like little Carmen, or in the milking queue with her sisters – began to haunt me. I could no longer push away the reality of the man in the room, looking at the child with the eye of his camera. I learned JM Barrie he was a stranger to the boys of Llewelyn Davies whom he met in the park, whose interest in them made them very close to their family. He helps them financially after their father’s death, and becomes their foster parent after their mother’s death – and, apparently, the business is his will. Whether he was a benevolent person in their lives or not, there is something disturbing about the idea of this change: from a visitor who admires the children in the park, to the guardian of the children’s law.
And think of Christopher Robin Milne. He was raised by a nanny and then sent to boarding school at the age of nine, only to come of age in a ruthless group of friends that he first met as a sweet five-year-old in prim shorts and bobby socks, walking through the friendly tree with his stuffed animals. Milne later described the bullying and humiliation of those years, and his opinion that his father’s fame was undermined by “riding on my infant shoulders, that he stripped me of my good name and left me with the worthless reputation of being his son”.
More and more of these writers I love, whose work I still love, began to look like vampires, or dark dolls, their old, invisible bodies lurking outside the golden borders of the world – childhood – they can write but never return. Adding to the confusion of this feeling is that, among other things, a lot of desire, the mysterious story of the shadow that never ends under the brightest circumstances, which has made them endure.
Children it grew out of this evolving interest in both classic fiction and the relationship between the author and the old orphanages. It is the story of Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe, brother and sister written on the pages of their estranged mother’s biography. The childhood he writes for them is like the opposite of what he gives them, a self-made magic and a lot of neglect in the Kingdom of Northeast Vermont. The story is divided between the true story of their childhood and the lives of their older siblings – now separated – 20 years after their parents died when they were young, leaving only witnesses of their youth and its many secrets.
The brothers have acted in ways that go against the fame that their mother forced upon them, and the hungry insistence of the world to know and love them. But everyone has turned something old into art. Guinevere has just written her name on a refined, soulful account of her childhood life as she dreams of what her mother’s readers have always imagined. Ennis takes the most painful route: gaining fame through large-scale installations that highlight the subjects that her mother admires, and others will not follow: doors and doors, limited spaces, the concentration of all the stories in order.
He then announces that, after twenty years of silence on the matter, he will open a new program called “Mother”. Afraid of what, exactly, he plans to reveal what sends Guinevere reeling from her childhood, revisiting her beautiful eyes and hidden tragedies – and reexamining the reality of her terrifying magic.
In creating these older children and the series of books that haunt their lives, I first drew on my early, simple love of books like Peter Pan and The Chronicles of Narnia (the legend of which flew over my head). But I also wrote from my experiences by re-reading them as an adult, a writer, a mother, when my interest in the children behind them increased to the point of being alert, even sad. When I began to question older writers who used their names, their reality, the reality of their existence as the exciting anchor of their fiction, allowing the boundaries of life and story to blur in a strange way.
It is not a straight line, the popularity of children’s literature determines the results of adults. Alice Liddell grew up and apparently did well, marrying a wealthy and handsome (if not very handsome) cricketer, receiving an honorary degree from Columbia, and posing as Lady Hargreaves, though she didn’t have her own name. Christopher Robin found his place in literature, as a memoirist and book owner; until he reached the most acceptable place in the matter of his name.
The story of the Llewelyn Davies boys had a sad ending. George was killed at the age of 21, Michael drowned with his friend at the age of 20. Cruelly, ironically, a London newspaper saw fit to include Pan’s famous line in their accounts of the tragedy: “To die will be a great journey.” Peter Llewelyn Davies, who insisted that “pain” came upon him because Barrie had given his name to the Boy Who Didn’t Grow Up, died by suicide at the age of 63. No clean story can be told about it; it’s a sad coda to a much-loved story.
In the last pages of Peter Pan, she meets face-to-face with Peter, Wendy who is now grown up, pleads to be young again: “Something inside her was crying, ‘Woman, woman, let me go.'” The real people who are among the characters make us think about a terrible confusion, which only a few can understand: the desire to escape from your mind and be captured by the loving words of your child, and torment the mind of your child. a nation that is long gone, that they cannot leave you.
