Good news for collectors (sometimes)

Something I've found while researching The Stowaway is a vast and (to me, at least) surprising discrepancy in the prices of out-of-print books. Some academic volumes from the ancient days of the 1980s are so expensive I can't justify buying one for a single essay on Peter Pan. But in a much happier turn of events, books from the turn of the 19th century are often ridiculously affordable. They're sold as "used," not quite antiques, not quite archivable. And while they're not as cheap as a used Grisham novel, they're also not the price you might expect for tangible bits of history.

I continue to take advantage of the situation.

The most expensive of the books above, Volume I of The Novels, Tales and Sketches of J. M. Barrie, was $10. The others were half that or less. (Ironically, I can't read them now because I have begun channel Barrie's writing style with almost no provocation, and it begins to seep into The Stowaway, where it doesn't belong.)

 I can only conclude these books have fallen into "the Trough of No Value." Mike Johnston of The Online Photographerr has this graph in his essay on the subject:

Johnston's examples include photographic negatives, computers, and lunchboxes from the 1950s and 1960s. "One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable," he writes. "And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time." This, of course, is difficult to predict.

He also mentions that the craftsmanship of an item can determine its fall into the Trough. And this applies to books as well, of course. A perfectly-preserved first edition of a still-popular book may cost hundreds or thousands of dollars--why I don't yet have my own first edition of Peter and Wendy. But if someone like me wants a book mainly for its contents, it's worth keeping track of the Trough.

Luckily for my own collecting, I often appreciate a book all the more if it shows signs of its lifespan and evidence that it was loved. A "Merry Christmas" message from Aunt Lizzie, 1909, has value to me which it might not to a regular book collector. (This is the same impulse that has prevented me from refinishing the table I used as the background for these book photographs. A practical nostalgia?)

If you're willing to overlook some damage and signs of age, you can find a treasure trove of books from the Edwardian era. They may be offered by some unexpected sources, and that's part of the fun. I paid under $20.00 for most of these, some of which I discovered in used or antique book stores, others which I found on eBay or from ABE Books.  If they were first editions, or in better condition, they would of course be priced higher, although I think most of them would still qualify as "affordable." But I find value in their shabbiness, in evidence they were read and maybe even loved.

My copy of the 1907 The Girl's Own Annual 

So if you're interested in books of a hundred years ago, this is a good time to buy them. There's no guarantee they'll go up in price, of course, and we can't predict the desires and contexts of future societies. But from what I've observed, and from what the Trough of No Value tells us, these affordable books aren't likely to stay that way forever.

"I must go down to the sea again"

Not  Peter Pan, but relevant to The Stowaway

These books come to us without commentary, giving us a direct look into history without the overlay of our present priorities. And of course reading books from another era is one of the best ways to learn the diction and styles of writing from the past--very useful when writing about those times. But that's a subject for another day.

The haunting of Kensington Gardens

There are places in this world that seem to exist as much in fiction as they do in reality: Times Square, Hawaii, Paris. Kensington Gardens in London is another such place, providing inspiration for J. M. Barrie and other writers, and sparking a world entire for Argentinian author Rodrigo Fresán.

I circled Kensington Gardens for a while before I dared open it. Given that it's about a children's book author who kidnaps the young actor who has been hired to play his character Jim Yang, I feared it might not be friendly to my own possibly-romanticized views of Barrie and my Beatles-obsessed early adolescence. The chance of horrific violence tainting either or both also felt like a real possibility. Happily, what I found between its covers was completely different--and far stranger.

Map by Arthur Rackham for the 1906 first edition
of Barrie's The Little White Bird

Kensington Gardens, translated beautifully by Natasha Wimmer, has been described by more than one reviewer as surreal. The narrative wanders through time, a dizzying weaving of facts and images, filled with musings on creativity, death, childhood, and cultural change. The son of a socialite and a rock musician, brother of a boy who died in childhood, Peter Hook (no relation to the Joy Division/New Order bassist) sees ghosts everywhere--whether literary or actual--in his own life, in Barrie's, in the lives of the Llewellyn-Davis boys who inspired the stories of Peter Pan.

Hook is obsessed with Peter Pan and even more so with his author. "Barrie, who suffered so much for us, who died for our sins, and whose only and unpardonable crime was having written an infectious creature carrying an incurable disease," he says. He is determined to find parallels between Barrie's and his own, even when this means ascribing motivations and feelings to Barrie that may have no basis in reality. Given that the even the narrator admits he is unhinged and self-destructive, perhaps we shouldn't take his musings too seriously. Fresán suggests as much in his afterword. But Barrie and Hook are both indelibly marked by the deaths of their brothers when they are children, and perhaps the same ghosts do haunt them both.

Kensington Gardens is thoroughly researched, and I learned a few new facts about Barrie. He was ambidextrous, for one. And as I suspected, like many writers, he was changed forever by World War I and the loved ones he lost to the conflict.

From Fresán's book, I also learned about poet Humbert Wolfe. A popular British writer of the 1920s, he's not well-known now, but I've seen his poem "Autumn (Resignation") on more than one Tumblr post. A version of Kensington Gardens also existed vividly in Wolfe's imagination, and he wrote an entire book on the park in a style not unlike that of e. e. cummings, including--of course--a piece on its famous statue of Peter Pan.

Humbert Wolfe, as drawn by his friend
William Rothenstein in 1931

PETER PAN

Peter Pan
leave your dead
tunes, you faun
of gingerbread !

Over hills
you never guessed
,lonelier
than Everest,

blows an older
colder reed
the belovèd
children heed,

following
(O icy-thin !)
Pan, who was Piper
at Hamelin.

From my own visit, October 2014

Peter Pan as the Pied  Piper is not the most unreasonable comparison. More likely, perhaps, than the duality between Jim Yang and Peter Pan, despite what Peter Hook may believe.

Peter goes to France

Occasionally I search eBay for unfamiliar versions of Peter Pan books and art. I love finding international children's versions of the story--it's always interesting to see the variations in both text and visuals--and this French version did not disappoint.

The illustrations led me to think this translation must be very different from Barrie's story. Note that Tinker Bell is hardly the size of a hand, unless that hand belongs to a giant.

I don't speak French (and if someone who does wants to take a look at the book for me, I'd welcome the input), but some time with Google Translate showed me that the story wasn't changed significantly more than other versions simplified for young children. What differs is the inclusion of The Little White Bird in the narrative, including how Peter Pan came to run away from home and how he met a little girl named Mamie. Allusions to those events at the end of the picture book draw the two stories together in a way I haven't seen before: Peter speaks of his mother, who may well be dead since he hasn't seen in her in so long, and returns to Kensington Gardens to play his music for Queen Mab and her fairy subjects.

Some fun bits of the translation include Tinker Bell being renamed Campanelle (after all, a bell tower, or campanile, is a rather more flattering comparison than a bell on a tinker's cart), and the names of the lost boys. Google Translate and some other internet research tells us we have Pipeau (Pipe), Panache (Plume), Plume-au-Vent (Feather on the Wind), Frisottin (Frizzy), Casse-Cou (Daredevil), and Pavre-Fueille (Poor Leaf). Compare these with Tootles, Nibs, Slightly, Curly, and the unnamed twins of the original. Most of the pirates are not named (hmph), but Captain Hook becomes the Pirate Harpon--a title I think the Captain would appreciate. Wendy's brothers are now Mike and Johnny.

There are no pictures of the mermaids, which makes me sad, but this is a rather nice Hook, er,Harpon. The book appears to an international endeavor from Editions Mondiales, Duca del Paris, Paris/Impremerie Steb, Bologne (Italie), with "editorial realization" by Roberto Borghi, adapted by Saulla Dello Strologo, and illustrations by Giu-Pin.

Peter Pan editions published after the 1957 Disney animated film usually show its influence, and Peter's depiction here seems to follow that pattern. I'm a bit concerned about a boy this age and size staying afloat for long in the nest of a bird small enough to make its home in England's Kensington Gardens. Tiger Lily seems to come straight from the cartoon as well, but Wendy in red is an original.

Why Peter Pan still matters

It may seem ridiculous to wonder if the story of Peter Pan is still relevant, given how thoroughly it's woven into pop culture. References to its characters are dropped into TV conversations and movie scenes and newspaper articles, used to describe personalities and psychological tendencies. Over and over, retellings of the story appear, often updated and/or "dark." Tinker Bell is the Walt Disney Studios mascot (though I'm sure she'd prefer the term "spokesfairy").

But the original story is frequently lost in the cultural shorthand. Far more people know it through the 1953 Walt Disney animated film than from the original book or even the original play. And Disney, along with the 1954 Broadway musical, took liberties with the story that did it no favors--note the songs about the Indians which are so blatantly cringe-worthy today. The retellings often take the story so far from its roots than only its outlines are left.

So why is James Matthew Barrie's original Peter Pan still important today?

Gwynedd M. Hudson, 1931

❧ Because Peter Pan has value as a work of literature, as well as a source of enduring fantasy images. It's written with style and whimsy and wit, with characters who contain both good and bad qualities. It doesn't talk down to children, but instead presents them with challenging ideas and an ending that is not altogether happy. And thus it's a book that unfolds with further meaning when read by adults, one which takes us back to a time when the possible was not so circumscribed by experience and failure, yet which doesn't altogether dismiss the realities of the world.

❧ Because we all need to grow up. This idea is watered down--if not absent altogether--in many versions of Peter Pan (Disney being perhaps the worst offender here).  But the 1911 book is rife with examples of how Peter's youth makes him heartless and negligent. And children who refuse to grow up have given us climate change and the garbage gyre and poisoned water supplies. They leave the wreckage of their relationships behind them and have no idea how to look to the future. Even Peter Pan himself has some inkling of the truth of this, when nightmares bring him to tears in his sleep.

Flora White, 1913

❧ Because other eras have something to teach us, in both positive and negative aspects. It's important to understand how people lived and thought in the not-actually-so-distant past, in order to understand what we're doing here and now.

Any work of art from the past will contain ideas and attitudes we find jarring now. I've been catching up on books written ten years ago and I'm surprised how much what is acceptable to say has changed in just that short period of time. Edwardian Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie had little reason to study the history of the American Indian when he wrote a fantasy play for children. We in the modern world have no excuse not to examine these attitudes and realize what is accurate and fair. And perhaps seeing that other eras were not all as consumer-focused and cynical as ours can show us an alternative, or at least be a comfort.

❧ Because there are women--and men--who treasure the idea of being parents, though it may not be fashionable to say so. Wendy does not have to be seen as an anti-feminist icon.

Scott Gustafson, 1991

❧ Because families still lose children, to illness or tragedy. It's not as common as it was in the past and it's rarely talked about outside of support groups and immediate families. But there are parents who ache as much for their lost ones as Mrs. Darling does. Perhaps there is some solace for them in literature like Peter Pan, especially if one knows that Barrie's own childhood was marked by the death of his older brother, and that this loss resonates throughout the book.

The enduring power of an image

❧ Because dismissing literature from the past is like refusing to listen to our grandparents. Our elders have something to teach us. Yes, some of their attitudes may seem unforgivable. But they have knowledge and experience and wisdom we should consider as well.

Tales of innocence and experience

How a Peter Pan-related film starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant escaped my attention when it was released, I don't know. It was only when my research for The Stowaway led me to the original version of the story--Beryl Bainbridge's 1989 novel An Awfully Big Adventure--that I found there was a 1995 movie version as well.

Directed by Mike Newell in a sharp turn away from the levity of his 1994 Four Weddings and a Funeral, it's the story of 16-year-old Stella Bradshaw, who, having no other career interests or aptitude, goes to work for a struggling Liverpool theater company. Stella is romantically inclined toward Meredith Potter, the theater's director (Hugh Grant), never seeing that his interests are otherwise inclined. It's the attention of another actor altogether that she attracts, and reciprocates to some extent. Stella is obtuse, self-interested, stubborn, and often hilarious. She's also confident and calculating in a way that ensures her survival in this group of other self-interested and highly dramatic people.

"The best Captain Hook there has ever been," one of the troupe says of P.L. O'Hara (Alan Rickman), the famous actor who returns to Liverpool to take the place of an injured troupe member--and also for reasons of his own. While I'm personally partial to Jason Isaacs' 2003 movie Hook, and would never be able to forget I was watching Rickman, I can't deny his Shakespearian appropriate for the character in J.M. Barrie's play. And I can certainly see O'Hara's appeal to various members of the theater company. As well, there's a gravitas to Rickman's O'Hara that brings across the bittersweet nature of the text.

The movie makes reference to O'Hara playing Richard II on stage, which dovetails with Rickman's character Alexander Dane in 1999's Galaxy Quest, an actor bitter that his success comes from his time on a TV space adventure rather than because of his stage portrayals of Richard III. Rickman himself studied Shakespeare with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And it was with the Royal Shakespeare Company that he played the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaison Dangereuses in 1985, which led to a Broadway run and a Tony Award nomination.  While Rickman may be best known as a film actor, he also enjoyed great success on the theatrical stage--not unlike P.L. O'Hara.

In some ways this story is better suited for the book, which received a Man Booker Prize nomination. Some of the important plot developments become Hollywood-ized in the movie in a way that robs them of their full impact and emotion, and Bainbridge's black humor is sometimes lost to sentimentality. It's one of the few short novels that I don't think skimps on character development--in fact, I think Bainbridge's sometimes acid approach works to flesh them out in a way the film does not. Stella, in particular, is calculating in a way I don't think comes across fully. But the cinematic version has the performances, and they're worth seeing. Hugh Grant plays against his loveable romantic lead persona, and I took notice of Prunella Scales, otherwise  known as Basil Fawlty's wife Sybil in Fawlty Towers, as actress Rose.

Clare Woodgate is a lovely Stella with an interesting story of her own: After being turned down for the role after her first audition, the 20-year-old, middle-class, Essex actress returned in the persona of a 17-year-old redhead from working-class Liverpool named Georgina Cates and read for the part again. Not only did she get the part, she received an Actress of the Year nomination for her performance from the London Critics Circle Film Awards in 1996.

Rickman, director Newell said, wasn't pleased with Cates's dissembling. "He treated Georgina very tactfully, presuming that she was sexually inexperienced and could get upset by the scene. Well, who knows, maybe she was."

I was surprised to realize I'd seen Cates before, in the 1998 movie Clay Pigeons, which I've always thought is underrated and which features a couple of my favorite songs from the band Old 97s. Proving once again that everything in my life seems to circle back around to Peter Pan and Captain Hook and The Stowaway.

An Awfully Big Adventure is also available as an audiobook read by Paul McGann, whom I think would be an excellent Hook actor in his own right, if only he were as tall as the character as described by J.M. Barrie.

A blog's 2015 in review

It's rather gratifying to see which five Hook's Waltz posts of 2015 were the most-read.

By Trina Schart Hyman, 1980

Searching for the lost boys
I didn't realize the lost boys were so popular. It was fun investigating various visualizations of them throughout the years. Some of their portrayals--particularly current ones--are very far from J. M. Barrie's understanding indeed.

A Partnership
I'm pleased this was popular, both because it's an example of my fiction writing and because I got to explore the character of  'Becca Bloom in more detail than The Stowaway allows.

Berliner Ensemble/Cocorosie interpretation of Peter Pan

New Directions for Peter Pan
For all the versions I find problematic, there are other interpretations that I find intriguing and worthwhile.

Mural at Grand Ormond Street Hospital

Peter at the hospital
Also gratifying, because the staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital are lovely and do good things. I'm pleased that I got to visit them and that I can tell people about them and J. M. Barrie's financial gift.

"The Libertine's Death," from Rose Mortimer,
or, The Ballet Girl's Revenge, 1865

Defending the Victorians
Written because I had reached the end of my tolerance of people speaking of Victorian England as if it marked some low in human civilization, when in fact it was the era that birthed attitudes and reforms we are still working to perfect today. A huge amount of research went into this, so I'm glad to know others find the topic interesting.

Tall ships and historical inaccuracies

I welcomed a movie about life aboard a ship, dramatizing incidents I've been reading about this year, as an entertaning addition to my research. I thoroughly enjoyed the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick, and looked forward to the dramatization. But I did have some reservations, and unfortunately, those reservations turned out to be on the nose.

I suppose anyone who studies history is frequently disappointed in historical films, but there's a fundamental mismatch between this particular story and the approach taken by the filmmakers. Maybe this is a story that can't be filmed, or shouldn't be. Maybe the themes alone are too big to fit into a two-hour movie. But I've seen action and philosophy coexist in a film, if not often, and I wish that had been accomplished here. A feature about whaling was going to have difficulty finding an audience, Chris Hemsworth notwithstanding. But if it had delved into some of the themes in the book, perhaps it could have achieved comparable relevance.

I'm not certain anyone connected with the movie gave the book more than the most cursory of readings. I suspect most of the reviewers haven't either, or I would have seen more criticism of the aspects I find most irksome.

Warning: SPOILERS ABOUND.

Philbrick's 2001 book describes the 1819 voyage of a whaling ship that was destroyed by a sperm whale--an incident which provided Herman Melville with the basis for his Moby-Dick. (Smithsonianmag.com has a good synopsis.) A book that rates five out of five stars for me is one that I can't stop talking about, whether or not anyone around me wants to hear more about it, and this is one of my five-star books. It's not only a straight-forward yet graceful account of some horrifying incidents, it gives the story historical and philosophical grounding that show how the sinking of the Essex remains relevant to the current era. It's also readable and quick-moving, not glossing over the unpleasantness of the story but also not dwelling overly on the more sensational aspects.

In particular, the book's descriptions of the Nantucket whaling trade demonstrate a small-scale culture of greed and ignorance that is endemic today. And Philbrick also shows a sensitivity to the complexity of human relationships and motivations that make survival less straightforward a task than one might expect.

After doing the amount of research I have for The Stowaway, I accept that I have an esoteric knowledge base about careers at sea. I've read Moby-Dick, Ahab's Wife, Master and Commander, and In the Heart of the Sea in the past year and taken scads of notes on all four. I wondered how the filmmakers would approach the grisly job of rendering a whale, and this is shown, if briefly, including in one scene that reminded me of a scene in Moby-Dick that is one of the most hilariously gruesome things I've ever read.

But the most controversial and horrific aspects of the story, if addressed at all, have little of the context and impact of their counterparts in the book. The cannibalism among the survivors aboard the whaleboats is touched on only lightly. And the ending of the book, which is chillingly effective, was evidently decreed too intense to be included in the film.

It's hard to be my book.

More disturbingly, the movie disregards the fact that in reality none of the ship's black crewmen made it home from the wreck of the Essex (and for that matter, no non-Nantucketers, a fact mentioned in passing but in such as way as to cast the cliquishness of those particular men as a purely admirable trait.)

And some of the historical blunders are significant enough to ruin entire crucial scenes for me and even make me laugh out loud. For instance, in real life, whalers advanced upon a whale in a small boat and lanced it with a harpoon attached to a rope. The crew held fast to this line as best they could, towed by their prey until it became exhausted and it was safe for them to stab the whale repeatedly until it bled to death. If anyone ever killed a whale simply by lancing the animal with a harpoon attached to nothing, it was a fluke. (Pun acknowledged but not withdrawn.)

On top of that scene's inaccuracies, it's a glowing example of a cinematic sentimentality throughout the film which does not engage actual emotions. Chase's teary-eyed wife is more of a trope than a character, and pensive stares into space by the actors do little to convey the horror and trauma of the experience of the Essex survivors.

And there are more bothersome inaccuracies as well. Some of the historical representations strike me as unfair, especially that of Captain George Pollard, who was assigned every bad decision made by the officers of the Essex. But other characters fare almost as badly. Even first mate Owen Chase's own account of the voyage, while glossing over his mistakes, did not portray Chase as heroically as does this film. Pollard's nephew manages to be both more and less noble than in real life. In actuality, the officers were both more selfish and hubristic, and more stubbornly determined to survive, than the movie conveys.

The movie does contain some beautiful cinematography (although it falls so squarely into the blue and orange category that it became distracting). The difference in lighting between scenes on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is glorious. But a technique almost unavoidable in blockbusters--quick cutaway shots--both misrepresents the often tedious reality of life on a ship and made it hard to follow the action. If I hadn't read the book, I wouldn't have been completely sure what had happened to the Essex in the Gulf Stream or when the whale rammed it. The bracketing scenes with Herman Melville interviewing former cabin boy Thomas Nickerson disrupt the action and dilute the tension of the film, though Ben Wishaw and Brendan Gleeson deserve credit for their portrayals.

I was unsure from the outset if Richie Cunningham was the right director for In the Heart of the Sea, and my misgivings were confirmed from the first scenes. I've been considering which other living director(s) might have been able to do this book justice--someone with less of a commercial instinct and a greater willingness to explore the themes with honesty. Someone who doesn't flinch at the rougher aspects of the story but still has an eye for the drama inherent in it. Perhaps Alejandro González Iñárritu or Martin Scorcese or John Sayles (director of both The Secret of Roan Inish and Lone Star), or maybe Werner Herzog for a documentary retelling. I welcome further suggestions in the comments.

Grey whale skeleton at Pacific Science Center

For more discussion of the actual nature of whales, see How realistic are the vengeful whales of "Moby-Dick" and "In the Heart of the Sea," really? at qz.com.