Sentimental Tommy: J.M. Barrie

[poliphilo]

Tommy Sandys has no character of his own, so he becomes other people. Sometimes for fun and sometimes for advantage. He is very good at it. He can put himself in another person's shoes and articulate their feelings better than they can themselves.  It is a heartless exercise- an exercise of empathy without love.  He is a trickster, a fantasist, an egoist and- like his no-good, dead father- a "masterful man". He is qualified to become one of two things, some sort of criminal or some sort of artist.

Grizel loves him. Grizel is as tough as he is (with as horrid a back story)- but earth and water to his air and fire. She has protections up against his magic. Then there's Elspeth (Tommy's younger sister). She loves him too- worships him, rather- and Tommy values and protects her as the guardian of his ego. Grizel and Elspeth are mortally jealous of one another. At the climax of the novel Tommy is placed in the position of choosing between them. He can't do it. And a deus ex machina rescues him in the nick of time. This story is to be continued...

Sentimental Tommy is Barrie's David Copperfield. But where Dickens dodged self-examination and let his avatar drift into his profession without explanation, Barrie is unsparing in his picking over of the qualities (verging on psychopathology) that go to the making of a writer. 

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Is there a psychopathology to writing, do you think?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I'm not a writer- at least not in the sense that Barrie was.

I think novelists are often ruthless. Barrie certainly was. He would sit by the deathbeds of those he loved, writing notes.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that's why I've seldom entertained the idea of writing fiction. A touch of sociopathy and I might have been famous.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The only fiction I've written has been escapist, fantasy stuff. I think you have to be a lot more hard-bitten than I am to do realism.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I sometimes fear that I'm too much of a literalist to write fiction, maybe buttoned down a bit too tightly.

Come to that, I haven't attempted fiction since high school. A friend of mine needs only a character and an idea and off he goes. His difficulty is discipline, seems like, having trouble setting limits to his flights of fantasy.