BARRIE IS GROWING UP

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 11, 12 July 1930, Page 29

BARRIE IS GROWING UP

Sir James Barrie, the creator of "Peter Pan," confessed on his 70th birthday that he was "growing up." He spent the day quietly at home in his top floor flat terrace, sitting in his favourite black armchair reading letters and telegrams from friends throughout the world, and refusing to be iuterviewed by any of the stream of reporters who came to his door, says the special correspondent of the "New Yorjs Times." Many callers took the elevator to the oak doors of his homo, but got no further. To one who saw him, however, Sir James remarked: "ITcs, I am certainly getting on." Ho went out that evening, however, t attend the anniversary dinner of the Literary Fund, at which he was the guest of honour. Sir James was in a reminiscent mood at the dinner, but, far from admitting his age, he complained that all the guests around him looked so old. Even the design on the menu-card showed Father Time, with an hour-glass and a scythe, offering him a birthday card, but the author was shown standing on a pedestal of Ms own books, holding a pipe in one hand and waving Fathef Time away with the other.

"Not for years and years have I written anything," Sir James told the diners, "and it is rather sad to know that nobody seems to have noticed it but myself. Of course, I don't notice things much nowadays. I can't find my way even among my own characters." Ho complained of 70 women, children, and fairies, "who, between them, have done for me by coming into my works absolutely, uninvited, and giving themselves qualities the very opposito of those with which T had labelled them."

"Let us treat children and fairies in a more summary manner," ho said. "I never could abide them. Nowadays if in reading a book I come across a word beginning, with C or F I toss_ it aside. Have you ever seen the lion at tho Zoo unable to chase from his cage a mob of sparrows? I have sometimes thought that children and fairies aro my sparrows, and that I am that badgered lion, I came to the decision that no author should ever write anything. I disappeared from literature, and for a. pocketful of years I have lived serenely in my new delightful calling."