Temple of Low Men (Part One)
“Every time you say you don’t believe in fairies, a fairy dies.” — J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1911).
J.M. Barrie’s older brother David died in an ice skating accident when Barrie was 6 years old. According to Barrie, his mother was permanently inconsolable, and regularly catatonic, since David was her favourite child. For several years after David’s death, the young Barrie dressed in David’s clothes and imitated David’s trademark whistle as he crept around the family home, following his mother as she attended to housework. The impersonation was so effective that his mother would often ask, spooked, “is that you David?” before turning, crestfallen, to see it was her less-favourite son. In his biography of his mother, which was titled Margaret Ogilvy, Barrie wrote “I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to, and I said in a little lonely voice, ‘No, it’s not him, it’s just me.’”
Neuroendocrinologists have cited Barrie as a probable example of psychogenic dwarfism, a physical and psychological growth disorder triggered by emotional stress and alienation from the parent during the ages five to twelve. Barrie never grew taller than just over five feet and had an allegedly asexual adulthood. His social circle was heavily populated with school age children. Perhaps hence Peter Pan’s population of lost boys, celestial mother figures, and the boy who never grows up and…
