Early Days
And rapid dawns
Better Dead and Shall We Join the Ladies? by J. M. Barrie
Look at late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction, as written for children or enjoyed by children, or written by those who at other times also wrote for children, and you will find not far buried a deep undercurrent of menace. After all, the world is a scary place. You don’t make all of that go away by forgetting about it for a while. And for writers as well as readers, there’s catharsis in thinking about, in elaborately dramatising, the very worst. For J. M. Barrie, too, there was the humour of the thing. One cannot forget that.
Barrie wrote parodies which were elaborate and occasionally funny. He had a sense of humour. One must not omit it. And in Better Dead, a truly macabre story about a young man, Andrew Riach, without a future, there is some of the grimoire, but also some humour.
When the protagonist ‘went to London,’ Barrie notes, his breezy ‘intention was to become private secretary to a member of the Cabinet. If time permitted, he proposed writing for the Press.’ As it turned out, that plan was not to be. Instead, after a series of petty humiliations and about turns, he finds himself without work, at the end of his rope, so to speak. He wanders the streets, he thinks about ending it all; he considers the anguished notes he will have to leave, the people to whom he has been a grave disappointment. And then, suddenly, something happens. He is approached by members of a society.
This society is his salvation; it is a warm and embracing club. They want new members, have scouted him out, and they have a philosophy, a philosophy of doing good in the world. And we all want to do good in our time, don’t we, folks? And the price charged by this club, a small and trivial price in their own minds, is that each member will have, on occasion, as part of their dues, to kill someone – someone who is not up to it, who is taking up space and air, a windbag and a waste, a ‘useless eater’ to use the phrase of quite another society, at work in another country somewhat later in our history.
Riach is not happy when he hears about this. It’s murder, he stammers. It’s murder. But the members of this society, with their kind faces and their knowledgeable eyebrows, they sit him down and tell him the truth. Is it not necessary that society advance? they say. Yes, the young man replies. And is it not also necessary that on occasion, bad avenues are closed off, bad decisions are ended and made final, and sometimes people who are not helpful are let go? Yes indeed, he answers. And after all, is it not a kindness to liberate people from their sad and wasted lives? Is it not decent to free up space and resource for contributors, not takers, people who are energetic, not people who dawdle, people who matter and are valuable, and not people who are leeches and drags, people who add nothing, effectively amoebas, mere yeast in human form?
Why, yes, Mr Riach tells them. And then he must demonstrate his faith. He must do as this group asks. And the rest I will leave to you in your own time. Shall We Join the Ladies? is something else: a kind of procedural social play, one in which a dinner party of some importance, filled with people of some significance, diverges from what is expected. I will not say more.
People wonder who Barrie was, this eager reader of the more sensational side of literature when he was a boy, someone whose very early efforts – while still a very young man – were denounced by stiff-collared clergymen for reasons which are now obscure. Was he as barbarous as they say? I think not. Better Dead is, for all its morbid content, quite obviously a comedy, one dripping in irony.
And one only need read another piece of Barrie’s, one in which he describes his early days as an author – seeing a well-dressed young woman appear at a book table with his own work on it, seeing her pick a copy up, flick through it; seeing it apparently hold her attention; and all the while willing her on to like it, to buy it, to take it over with some money in hand to the shopkeeper; and congratulating himself on his genius, his marketability, and seeing in advance the money that would at some point work itself down to him, only to see her put it down and walk away. To see that is to known he well mingles humour with the mundane tragedies of life. Well enough, anyway: Better Dead’s better read than put back down.