An international conference and exhibition Co-convened by Donatella Barbieri, Jessica Bugg, Nadia Malik London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London 9 – 11 September 2026
The World Turned Upside Down The World Turned Upside DownThe world Turned Upside Down
With wonderful talks by other speakers including Maelisa Singer and Phoenix Ariel Thomas.
The poet of simply describing it as it is. One of my favourite writers.
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WORLD WAR 11
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It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane
just as we were dumping bombs on the already smoking city
on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron.
The plane jumped again and again as the shells burst under us,
sending jagged pieces of steel rattling through our fuselage.
It was pure chance
that none of us got ripped by those fragments.
x
Then, being hit, we had to drop out of formation right away,
losing speed and altitude,
and when I figured out our course with trembling hands on the instruments
(I was navigator)
we set out on the long trip home to England
alone, with two of our four engines gone
and gas streaming out of holes in the wing tanks.
That morning at briefing
we had been warned not to go to nearby Poland,
partly liberated then by the Russians,
although later we learned that another crew in trouble
had landed there anyway,
and patching up their plane somehow,
returned gradually to England
roundabout by way of Turkey and North Africa.
But we chose England, and luckily
the Germans had no fighters to send up after us then,
for this was just before they developed their jet.
To lighten our load we threw out
guns and ammunition, my navigation books, all the junk,
and made it over Holland with a few good-bye fireworks from the shore guns.
x
Over the North Sea the third engine gave out
And we dropped low over the water.
The gas gauge read empty, but by keeping the nose down
a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward
and kept our single engine going.
High overhead, the squadrons were flying home in formation
– the raids had gone on for hours after us.
Did they see us down there in our trouble?
We radioed our final position for help to come
but had no idea if anyone
happened to be tuned in and heard us,
and we crouched together on the floor,
knees drawn up and head down
in regulation position for ditching,
listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,
and we went down into the sea with a crash,
just like hitting a brick wall,
jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.
Who would ever think water could be so hard?
You black out, and then come to
with water rushing in like a sinking-ship movie.
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All ten of us started getting out of there fast:
there was a convenient door in the roof to climb out by,
one at a time. We stood in line,
water up to our thighs and rising.
The plane was supposed to float for twenty minutes,
but with all those flak holes
who could say how long it really would?
The two life rafts popped out of the sides into the water,
but one of them only half inflated,
and the other couldn’t hold everyone,
although they all piled into it, except the pilot,
who got into the limp raft that just floated.
The radio operator and I, out last,
(Did that mean we were least aggressive, least likely to survive?)
we stood on the wing watching the two rafts
being swept off by waves in different directions.
We had to swim for it.
x
Later they said the cords holding rafts to plane
broke by themselves, but I wouldn’t have blamed them
for cutting them loose, for fear
that by waiting the plane would go down
and drag them with it.
x
I headed for the overcrowded good raft
and after a clumsy swim in soaked heavy flying clothes
got there and hung onto the side.
The radio operator went for the half-inflated raft
where the pilot lay with water sloshing over him,
but he couldn’t swim, even with his life vest on.
Being from the Great Plains,
his strong farmer’s body didn’t know
how to wallow through the water properly,
and a wild current seemed to sweep him farther off.
One minute we saw him on top of a swell
and perhaps we glanced away for a minute
but when we looked again he was gone
just as the plane went down sometime around then
when nobody was looking.
x
It was midwinter and the waves were mountains
and the water ice water.
You could live in it twenty-five minutes,
the Ditching Survival Manual said.
Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft
I had to stay in the water hanging on.
My raft? It was their raft—they got there first so they would live.
Twenty-five minutes I had.
Live, live, I said to myself.
You’ve got to live.
There looked like plenty of room on the raft
from where I was and I said so, but they said no.
x
When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up
and I was getting numb,
I said I couldn’t hold on anymore,
and a little rat-faced boy from Alabama, one of the gunners,
got into the icy water in my place,
and I got on the raft in his.
He insisted on taking off his flying clothes,
which was a fatal mistake because even wet clothes are protection,
and then worked hard, kicking with his legs, and we all paddled,
to get to the other raft,
and we tied them together.
The gunner got in the raft with the pilot
and lay in the wet.
Shortly after, the pilot started gurgling green foam from his mouth-
maybe he was injured in the crash against the instruments—
and by the time we were rescued, he and the little gunner were both dead.
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That boy who took my place in the water,
who died instead of me,
I don’t remember his name even.
It was like those who survived the death camps
by letting others go into the ovens in their place.
It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live.
I’m a good swimmer,
but I didn’t swim off in that scary sea
looking for the radio operator when he was washed away.
I suppose, then, once and for all,
I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,
although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world,
even if, when opportunity knocked,
I instinctively chose survival.
x
As evening fell the waves calmed down
and we spotted a boat, far off, and signaled with a flare gun,
hoping it was English not German.
The only two who cried on being found
were me and a gunner, the other gay member of the crew.
The rest kept straight faces.
x
It was a British air-sea rescue boat:
they hoisted us up on deck,
dried off the living and gave us whiskey and put us to bed,
and rolled the dead up in blankets,
arid delivered us all to a hospital on shore
for treatment or disposal.
x
This was a minor accident of war:
two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea
and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base,
ready for combat again,
the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,
and went on hauling bombs over the continent of Europe,
destroying the Germans and their cities.
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Edward Field, from AFTER THE FALL, poems old and new, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
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CELEBRATING HIS ASS
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they try to block your dick
with their little pills
for blood pressure, prostate, heart
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they figure you’re an old guy
so what’s the difference
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and just to stay alive
you go along with it, take the goddam pills
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but how lucky I am
to live with an antidote to their poison
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whatever the depredations of age
he still has one goddam beautiful ass
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and just looking at it
I can’t stop pulling on my dick
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I follow him around like a dog
drooling over the ballet of his movements
and can’t stop pulling on my dick
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actually, anything he does
goes to my dick
and he’s walking around naked all the time
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I get to watch him putting on his clothes
watch the way he fills his underwear
and even better when he takes it off
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and when he does the dishes naked
each cheek as he moves
here and there at the sink
altering its shape, its roundness
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and I can’t stop pulling on my dick
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and when he bends over
I ‘m riveted by the beautiful
crack of his ass, and can’t stop
pulling on my dick
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and when he does his daily exercises
I’m breathless, I’m breathing hard
I’m sipping the nectar of the gods
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oh lord, let me die looking at that ass
with my hand still pulling on my dick
x
****
Field was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, to a family of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. He grew up in Lynbrook, New York, and, being Jewish,he and his family faced antisemitism and discrimination. He played cello in the “Field Family Trio”, which had a weekly radio program on WGBB in Freeport.
Field served in World War II with the Eighth Air Force in England and France as a navigator in heavy bombers, flying 25 missions over Germany. In February 1945, he took part in a raid on Berlin. His B-17 was crippled by flak and crash-landed in the North Sea. All ten crew members reached the life rafts, but only seven survived until rescued by a British air-sea vessel hours later.
In 1959, Field met Neil Derrick. As Field later recalled: “I was working in the typing pool of an advertising agency, and the supervisor assigned the typewriter next to me to a new temp, a terrific-looking young man from California named Neil Derrick. It was a case of immediate attraction between WASP and Jew.” In 1972, the couple moved to the nonprofit artists’ housing Westbeth Artists Community in New York City’s West Village. Derrick died on January 5, 2018. Field continued to reside at Westbeth and was regarded as one of the complex’s notable residents. Field died on September 6, 2026, at the age of 102.
The poet Edward Field in 2014. William Carlos Williams said of him: “I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”Credit…Roger Netzer
NEW YORK TIMES had this to say in an obituary by Rebecca Chace:
“William Carlos Williams said of him: “I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”
Edward Field, one of the most accomplished American poets of the postwar era, whose award-winning work — characterized by everyday language and an openly gay landscape — was forged by nearly a century of living in bohemian New York, died on Sunday at his home in the West Village section of Manhattan. He was 102.
The death was confirmed by Roger Netzer, his close friend for several decades.
Mr. Field found his calling by happenstance. As a newly enlisted soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, he was handed a bag by a Red Cross worker. It contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar and an anthology of poetry.
“I was on that train for three days,” he said in a 2022 interview for this obituary. “I read it over and over. I knew immediately that I was going to be a poet.”
He was just 18 and had never read a book of poetry or written a line. But he would go on to write 12 books of poetry and edit two anthologies, “A Geography of Poets” (1979) and “A New Geography of Poets” (1992), and receive, among other honors, the Prix de Rome, the Lambda Literary Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and the W.H. Auden Prize.
Diana Athill, the renowned British editor and writer, published “Letters to a Friend,” an epistolary chronicle of her 30-year friendship with Mr. Field, in 2011.
“The whole point of poetry for me is subject matter,” he told Ms. Athill. “Saying what I have to say, saying what has never been said before, what’s not polite to say.”
During the war, as an Army Air Corps navigator at the Grafton Underwood base in the English Midlands, Mr. Field met Coman Leavenworth, the first published poet he had encountered. Mr. Leavenworth introduced him to the work of contemporary poets who were writing about same-sex desire at a time when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the Atlantic and most gay writing was coded or underground. Mr. Field, who had concealed his own homosexuality from his family and in his own writing, was shocked and thrilled.
By the time he published his debut collection, “Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963), he was a writer openly embracing his own sexuality.
In the poem Unwanted, he wrote:
It is perfectly obvious that he was not popular at school
No good at baseball, and wet his bed.
His aliases tell his history: Dumbbell, Good-for-nothing,
Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name,
Responds to love, don’t call him or he will come.
Edward Field was born in Brooklyn on June 7, 1924, one of six children of Eastern European Jewish parents who were among a wave of immigrants in the early 20th century. After five years in the Bensonhurst neighborhood, Edward moved with his family to the Long Island town of Lynbrook in Nassau County, then a center for the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, a political organization for Americans of German descent that supported the rise of Hitler in the mid-1930s.
“I was beaten up every day after school,” Mr. Field said in 2022. His father, Louis Felscher, changed the family name to Field in an attempt to avoid antisemitism.
Home life was not easy either. Mr. Field described Louis, a commercial artist who designed movie posters for MGM, as tyrannical. But Mr. Field’s mother, Hilda (Taubman) Field, was musical with a streak of nonconformism, believing in the health benefits of nudism and eurhythmic dancing exercise.
All the children took music lessons. Edward, who played the cello, performed regularly with two of his siblings on a local radio show called “The Field Family Trio and Their Romantic Melodies.” The first in his family to go to college, Edward studied marketing at New York University at his father’s insistence but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army.
He was a decorated first lieutenant who navigated B-17 bombers, the aircraft known as the Flying Fortress, in 27 raids over Germany. He nearly died in February 1945, when his plane was hit by enemy fire and crash landed into the North Sea.
His poem about his survival, “World War II,” was made into an award-winning short animated film, “Minor Accident of War,” in 2019, by Mr. Field’s niece, Diane Weis, and Piotr Kabat, with Mr. Field narrating the text.
After the war, he returned to New York University on the G.I. Bill and met other ambitious young writers including Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, and Alfred Chester, a literary critic and novelist whose meteoric rise and tragic end had a profound effect on Mr. Field’s own life and work. Mr. Chester had struggled with depression, leading to drug-fueled psychotic breaks after he moved to Morocco to join the writer and composer Paul Bowles. After Mr. Chester died under mysterious circumstances in 1971, Mr. Field became the keeper of his legacy.
Mr. Field successfully lobbied publishers to reprint Mr. Chester’s work. He edited a collection of his short fiction called “Head of a Sad Angel: Stories 1953-1966” (1990) as well as a collection of his Moroccan letters, “Voyage to Destruction” (2021). He also paid homage to Mr. Chester in his own memoir of life in literary Greenwich Village, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and Other Intimate Portraits of the Bohemian Era” (2005); the title story about a would-be Sontag spouse referred to Mr. Chester.
Mr. Field left N.Y.U. before graduating, and headed for Paris in 1948. There, he met other expatriate American writers, including James Baldwin and Robert Friend, and published work regularly in literary magazines. He eventually worked his way back to New York in 1950 as a deckhand on a freighter.
But America then was a chilly place for a young gay poet. The House Un-American Activities Committee swept up a broad swath of artists, many of them Jews and gay people.
Then, in the mid-1950s, Mr. Field met the poet Frank O’Hara. Their brief love affair altered the course of Mr. Field’s life and work. “Frank O’Hara showed me the way,” Mr. Field wrote for outhistory.org. Mr. O’Hara’s ability to write easily and unselfconsciously as a gay man gave Mr. Field the courage to follow his instincts and loosen up with his own writing. The result was a breakthrough in his poetry.
“Stand Up, Friend, With Me” (1963) received the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, though the book had been turned down by 24 publishers. Mr. Field’s colloquial language, emotionality and openly gay topics brought him widespread praise and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
As Mr. Field burst on the scene, the poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “I don’t know how the hell old you are or anything about you but I’m certain you’ve got the stuff: clean, straight writing that knows (or you know) what a poem could be made of. I am impressed.”
Mr. Field was hired by Johnson and Johnson, the pharmaceutical giant, to write the narration for a film at the company’s pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. The film won an Academy Award for best documentary short in 1966.
By the early 1970s, Mr. Field became that rare creature: a successful poet, able to support himself through public readings and freelance writing.
The love of his life was Neil Derrick, a novelist who published bodice-rippers such as “Sticky Fingers” (1970) under the pseudonyms Eleanor Bartlett and Bruce Elliot. They met in 1959, while they were both working in a typing pool at an advertising agency. “We started a nonstop conversation that led the supervisor to switch him to another typewriter, rows away from me,” Mr. Field recalled.
But in 1971, Mr. Derrick was diagnosed with a brain tumor, which left him blind. Mr. Field became his caregiver.
They continued to travel to Europe and collaborated on several Bruce Elliot novels, including “The Potency Clinic” (1978) and “Village” (published in 1982 and republished as “The Villagers” in 1999), which became an unexpected best seller.
The two were married in 2017. Mr. Derrick died the following year. Mr. Field leaves no immediate survivors. A longtime resident of Westbeth Artists Housing, a community for artists and arts organizations in Greenwich Village, Mr. Field continued to write and publish throughout his ninth decade. An anachronistic bohemian to the end, he shared an excerpt from one of his poems on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” in 2006:
Hugely pleased that these six metaphysical sonnets by Arturo Nathan have appeared in The Fortnightly Review
Intrigued to discover a metaphysical painter I had not heard about, I bought several catalogues of Arturo Nathan’s work. In one I found these “Six Metaphysical Sonnets”. I was excited to find examples of metaphysical writing – since I already knew the paintings of De Chirico, Carra, Morandi, Paul Nash, but I had not found much metaphysical writing.
I’m not referring to the metaphysical poets of 17th century Britain, but to the modernist metaphysical movement in painting. Of course I knew “Hebdomeros” – the novel by De Chirico – but I didn’t know of any poetry, apart from that of Quasimodo, whose earlier work may be considered metaphysical. So I was all the more intrigued to find a metaphysical painter who wrote what he considered to be a poetic equivalent to his visual preoccupation.
I was richly rewarded. Take this example – Sonnet 3 – it has an eerie sense about it of immutability. That, and a powerful “clunkiness”. It reminds me of the later paintings of Philip Guston:
This is a question asked, but never answered, by Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), the extraordinary Russian writer who is the master of the inconsequential. I don’t want to label him “absurd” as that would suggest that he was part of a school that would include Eugène Ionescu and his “Theatre of the Absurd” – whereas Kharms is an eccentric, an outlier; often writing simply for the drawer, as they say in Russia when they talk of someone who was deemed increasingly unpublishable – although, earlier, his children’s books were popular, and I believe they still are.
Kharms believed that a poem should be so made that if flung against a window-pane that pane would be shattered. For this to be the case, the poem had to become an object created so thoroughly out of words that all significance, all reference to the normal meaning of those words, had to be removed. Here is ‘An Evil Gathering of Infidels’ (1930):
Not I, Lord, is it? – thought the apostles.
Here are the signs:
a face like a mouse,
a wing like a knife,
a little steamship foot,
a house like a family,
a rope-ladder bridge,
a robe like atlas’ brow.
And only one’s a genius. Yes, but which?
One’s smart, another is a dullard, the third is a dolt.
But who’s the genius? Oh Lordy, Lordy!
All people are poor. I am a sheepskin coat.
This defies any attempt to discover what it signifies. It exists solely as an object made out of words. That is why it can shatter the window-pane. Read a conversation from “Party Going” by Henry Green. Consider the “plot” of “Two Serious Ladies” by Jane Bowles. One realises that an absence of significance is as crucial to the advanced art of the twentieth century as abstraction: it allowed for a modernism that could even be achieved in a perfectly narrative or figurative way. Italo Svevo’s writing is another example. These days, artist Michael Crowther makes objects out of paint, and I am going to let his images accompany this text:
Silly Quid, Nov ‘24, Michael Crowther
But I’ve turned my back on modernism, or so I say to myself. The idea of Mondrian beginning with an apple tree and gradually abstracting from it in order to derive a set of lines and coloured blocks; that no longer has any appeal. Art is not necessarily concerned with truth, so however true this felt for Mondrian, for me, today, it has become a cliché – and the cliché is anathema in both art and literature.
Instead, I am investing in Deep Art. What is Deep Art? Look at the visual work of Victor Hugo or Alexander Cozens. I call what they do, and what I attempt to do, Deep Art. To some extent Deep Art has been anticipated by the surrealists, though it is actually earlier than surrealism. Basically it is going in the opposite direction to modernism – begins with some involuntary chaotic action, splotches, blots, found chaos, even a confused photograph, then works into that chaos to attempt to get somewhere – to create a work that has presence. Not necessarily to achieve a figurative result (Cozens goes too far in this regard) but to a feeling of resolution in the artist’s mind.
Off, July ‘23
Deep Art is a departure. It is alchemy. Its primary aim is for the artist to lose consciousness of the self in the engrossment of making art. This also reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s advice: to look at a wall – at its blotches and imperfections, and see what image you might discover there. Deep Art is done as a form of personal meditation. This is the only response to an “artworld” flooded by ambitious practitioners.
So Deep Art emerges from chaos. Happy with this mantra, I set out. But as is often the case when intuition wears off, doubt sullenly emerges. I cannot help but ask, are there a variety of forms of chaos? “Forms of Chaos” – there’s an irony. No chaos should be the same as another. If two sorts of chaos were the same, they would be considered a pair, and not chaos therefore. Repetition is order. It turns out that chaos is not that easy to generate.
Harthope, May ‘26
I would like to start in chaos and arrive somewhere. Achieve a goal, when, at the start, I had no goal. Actually, I do not need to arrive anywhere. I don’t have to have a goal. I would like to start in chaos and achieve presence.
Presence is what I find in the paintings of Michael Crowther. They are done on wood. They make a nice clunk when set onto the pins which place them on the wall. If you threw one at a window, it would definitely shatter the pane.
Bollihope May’25
Throughout history, each independent mind struggles to emancipate itself from the fixed ideas it has inherited. For artists of Crowther’s generation and my own, abstraction was very much the order of the day. For a host of non-practioners, modern art looked abstract or surreal. Even more naively (and this is particularly true of British pundits) art had to be significant, resolved: it had to accomplish its meaning. Take Peter Fuller in art, and F.R. Leavis in literature. The one expressed admiration for the aesthetic principles of John Ruskin, the other championed seriousness and moral depth in literature. Their naivety would have appalled Schopenhauer. But for pundits such as this unremarkable twain, only through significance could art achieve its true equilibrium – which brings us, at last, back to Kharms.
Bollihope,’24
Yes, it is necessary to get out of equilibrium. Because there is so much art that is resolved, very much so, but in ways which are trite: it’s art that’s too easily read, whereas I struggle with the paintings of Michael Crowther. I am told that they are figurative. But they are not like anything I’ve seen. At the same time, abstraction isn’t a term that I would apply to them. These paintings are elsewhere. An object is suggested, in the foreground. This is the case because there is clearly a background. But as to what that object is, or what is in the background… There I have to use guesswork, and this only helps a little bit. If these works are figurative, what they figure ought to be my prerogative. Thus I am led into each one by hint and by intuition. That could be a distant clump of trees, that could be one of those barns you see on farms with open sides, that could be a barbecue set up on spindly legs, but it might not be, it might be a creature with spindly legs.
Farmer’s Boy 2024
Getting out of equilibrium, getting out of a comfily resolved idea of what art might be. Going off at a tangent, as in this essay. Getting away from some received idea about what art is supposed to be. Somehow Philip Guston achieved this, when he broke with abstraction. Michael Crowther achieves it in these small intense paintings shown by Benjamin Rhodes at his gallery in Old Nichol street. They provoke uncertainty and achieve presence. And what do I mean by presence? That is for you to decide.
Anthony Howell, 28/08/2026
***
“Crowther’s book-sized panels are imbued with thinking about painting, writing, history and landscape, each its own work of visual poetry – we continue from his brilliant solo-installation of last year: Bollihope and Others which loudly declared an integrated vision at home in an enigmatic and painterly strangeness.”
It takes you to several performance art videos and videos of the slideshows I made a few years ago – many drawn with the eyes closed. There are also slideshows which accompany readings and videos of my poems.
The French invented impressionism and modernism: the British invented children’s literature and nonsense poetry. Zola’s Nana can say, Fuck me! to a young man paying her a surprise visit. For a British writer of the same period, that is quite impossible to say. In Britain, women do not have bottoms, they have bustles. They do not give birth, according to J.M. Barrie: babies are birds. Other birds hatch them, and they fly off to mothers and become children. France and Britain have a relationship which is similar to a difficult marriage. The two countries are very close, and many British people aspire to speak French, far more than aspire to speak Spanish and more also than aspire to speak German, though German is also fairly popular. However, in my own schools, only Latin and French were taught. Like husband and wife, we are familiar with each other’s ways, but the husband’s way is not the wife’s and vice versa.
The French woman is the comrade of the French man, thanks to their revolutions, though the man can be a brute and beat the woman savagely, and the wife can be a whore or a courtesan. I am speaking in the language of generalisations here, because in what we call “The Victorian Age” such generalisations seem to have affected the production of literature, though George Meredith can be pretty direct, as in his novel The Difficult Marriage. The British paid little heed to the realism promoted by French writers. More often, appalled by the promiscuity of the Georgians who dressed in full fig and fucked everything above and below stairs, the staid, mercantile Victorians reinvented womanhood as a sexless willow, wearily drooping, or faintly floating away like Ophelia on some water-lily stream. Famously, it was Ruskin who was appalled to discover that his wife had pubic hair. The Edwardian reaction was savage. People have been justifying our new terrorist laws designed to suppress protests against weapons factories by citing the demonstrations of the suffragettes as if these were genteel. This is false history. The suffragettes were genuine revolutionaries. They had to be. In Great Britain and Ireland, between the years 1912 and 1914, the suffragettes orchestrated a violent bombing, assassination and arson campaign.
Now John Ashbery always said that he preferred the byways of literature to its highways, and I have tended to agree with him. Indeed, I enjoy the ultra-esoteric. You could say I like to follow some goat track of literature. It’s fun to explore wherever such a track may lead. Being the only person on the planet to be reading a particular book is to me a greater pleasure than that of reading a best seller. It makes me feel unique. Recently I began painting water-colours of London’s statues, and visited Kensington Gardens, where Peter Pan stands on top of a magical tree-stump piping to the fairies who clamber up to listen to his piping (and to peep under his smock). The statue is placed on the very spot where Peter landed in his mud-lined thrushes nest on his first excursion from Bird Island. In the way of quantum connections, this led me to recall a book I had seen in my childhood but never read. I managed to find a copy, and found myself alone on a goat-track.
J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is to my mind an eccentric masterpiece. The writing is just different to anything I have ever read – it’s a grown up book for a child or vice versa. There is great sadness too, although it can be very funny. But in those days, children often died, and parents and siblings were often traumatised. Barrie is no exception. His mother was clearly traumatised.
Illustration for the First edition of Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens, 1906.
The question is, Who is a children’s book written for? It is easy to respond, For the child. But if the book is being read to the child by the parent, or the uncle or the nurse, especially in those Victorian times, such a response is suspect. Books for children which are expected to be read by children are one thing – Treasure Island and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were written to be read by children. I grew up reading Puffin Books, some of which were quite haunting and politically questionable – A Moor of Spain; the Story of a Rogue being one (written by Richard Parker in 1953 – who seems to have written no other book).
So there is already a split between books written for children who cannot yet read and books written for children who can. The books written for children who cannot yet read are actually being written for the reader who is a grown-up, and this is the case, I believe with Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
Peter is of course the archetype of the lost child, and that child is epitomised in the book with this title, which, though published later, must have preceded Barrie’s popular West End play featuring Wendy, Captain Hook and Neverland. This earlier version is a far more surreal story, tragic, and hauntingly written, and with the strangest of all Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to accompany the writing. The tale is a creation engendered by the Victorian unsayable, as is the case with Charles Kingsley’s TheWater Babies.,
If I shut my eyes, you’re not there. While the Victorians could deny the existence of sex (which never stopped boys getting erections or girls going about their explorations), what they could not do was to deny the existence of death, and we remember death. When I was seven I recall that our school library had a bookshelf dedicated to a boy called Peter, who had died. A few years later, a boy I knew died of leukaemia. Deaths in childhood were far more common in the nineteenth century than in my own time or now.
According to Andrew Birkin’s J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan published in 2003:
‘When James Barrie was six years old, his elder brother David (their mother’s favourite) died in an ice-skating accident on the day before his 14th birthday. This left his mother devastated, and Barrie tried to fill David’s place in his mother’s attentions, even wearing David’s clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time, Barrie entered her room and heard her say, “Is that you?” “I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to”, wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother Margaret Ogilvy (1896) “and I said in a little lonely voice, ‘’No, it’s not him, it’s just me.’” Barrie’s mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.’
At the beginning of the book under discussion, the original story of Peter Pan, we are given a tour of Kensington Gardens as the author, who is the narrator, takes David, a toddler, and one of the sons of Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies, for a stroll around them:
We are now in the Broad Walk, and it is as much bigger than the other walks as your father is bigger than you. David wondered if it began little, and grew and grew, until it was quite grown up, and whether the other walks are its babies, and he drew a picture, which diverted him very much, of the Broad Walk giving a tiny walk an airing in a perambulator. In the Broad Walk you meet all the people who are worth knowing, and there is usually a grown-up with them to prevent them going on the damp grass, and to make them stand disgraced at the corner of a seat if they have been mad-dog or Mary-Annish. To be Mary-Annish is to behave like a girl, whimpering because nurse won’t carry you, or simpering with your thumb in your mouth, and it is a hateful quality; but to be mad-dog is to kick out at everything, and there is some satisfaction in that.
The tone may appear somewhat arch to us now, but the matter of the book is very particular: there is use of the sort of private language that families use among themselves, particularly with children. I am reminded of the “personism” manifesto put forward by Frank O’Hara – which stated that one should write a poem as if writing a letter to an intimate friend, where references that may not be available to the reader are simply communicated because the person to whom you are writing understands. The text is also, like Alice in Wonderland, a fusion of nonsense and children’s book – which is as near as the Victorians ever got to the surreal.
Moreover, the book is not as misogynist as this passage above suggests. One girl defeats an entire cricket team of boys with her unassailable Yorkers. However, the personism is so intense that I get the feeling that I am reading a work of outsider literature (“outsider art” being a term for art made by clinically obsessed or unhinged types). Such art is often naïve, but not always. Richard Dadd, the artist who murdered his father, was technically accomplished as a painter (and as obsessed by fairies as Barrie and his illustrator Arthur Rackham). Obsessive writing can be powerful and frightening and is often recognised as being great literature. Kafka comes to mind as an example. In Kafka, very often, a paragraph will begin with optimism, only to conclude in disappointment. A piece of obsessive “outsider” writing which has had a strong influence on my own work is Nijinsky’s diary – written as he descended into catatonic silence. When speaking of his feelings, Nijinsky can contradict himself in the same paragraph. This has always impressed me. I guess my feelings are often like that.
Peter lives on Bird Island at the far end of the Serpentine. He flew there when he was a week old, and could still remember how to fly. When he gets there, the birds point out that he wearing a nightgown and has therefore become a boy. This awareness destroys Peter’s ability to fly. And so he is stuck among the birds on the island. The story of how he manages to visit the distant shore of the Serpentine beyond the bridge, and therefore continue to play in Kensington Gardens, and the poignant story of the two times when he manages to visit his mother make up a large part of the matter of the book.
Kensington Gardens is portrayed as a place of delight during the day. At night, after the gates are closed, it becomes a dark and deadly location infested by fairies. Traditionally, from Elizabethan times, fairies have been small; usually no larger than one’s thumb. Shakespeare lied about them, when he made Titania large enough to embrace Bottom with his ass’s head – but this was dramatic licence. Michael Drayton’s wonderful poem Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy is a far more accurate account of their nature. For instance, the chariot of the Queen of the fairies is a “snail’s fine shell”, the seat “the soft wool of the bee”, the wheels “composed of crickets’ bones.” Drayton also points out that fairies tend to be malicious:
These, when a child haps to be got,
Which after proves an idiot,
When folks perceive it thriveth not,
The fault therein to smother:
Some silly doating brainless calf,
That understands things by the half,
Say that the fairy left this aulf,
And took away the other.
Barrie’s fairies in Kensington Gardens are no less dangerous, and no child should venture into the gardens, or stay in them after dark, when the gates are shut. So now it should be clear that the delightful Tinkerbell is simply a light cast around the stage and no real fairy, and that Neverland never existed. Kensington Gardens is the true repository of ominous secrets and these gardens can tell us all there is to know about the dangers surrounding childhood.
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