Books: Barrie Back

FAREWELL Miss JULIE LOGAN—J. M. Barrie—Scribner ($1). Not many authors and fewer poets know when to retire. Notable exception is Alfred Edward Housman who, at the age of 63, published his Last Poems and has stuck by his announcement. Sir James Matthew Barrie has certainly done his bit for the world of letters; readers, without actually thinking him dead, may well have thought him finished. But now, after nearly 30 years (in which he has written 14 plays but no stories) comes a little Scottish fairy tale as neat as a pin, bright as a button, sentimental as Tommy. Barrie lovers will hail it; it should send readers who do not know him scuttling back to his early works. Adam Yestreen, who tells the tale, is pastor of a little hamlet among the hills, still visited (say some) by ghosts of Prince Charlie’s men—aye, and women too. Pastor Yestreen, though a simple soul, takes no stock in such things. His parishioners are a shrewd and cautious lot. ”They make a complete sentence by saying of a friend, ‘He is one who on a market day,’ and leaving the rest to the listener’s common sense.” When winter sets in in earnest, the manse is isolated from the rest of the village: sometimes the pastor has to preach at his flock from across the brook. He is lonely, but his one neighbor, old Mrs. Lindinnock, always waves goodnight to him by pulling her windowshade up & down. When one fine night a young and beautiful stranger appears with old Mrs. Lindinnock at a sociable, and even calls on him at the manse, Pastor Yestreen’s simple soul is nearly swept from its moorings. Miss Julie Logan is a flirtatious chit, but her heart is kind. Parson Yestreen comes as near as nothing to marrying her outright. The fairy story has a sighing end, as a proper Barrie fairy story should.

The Author. Very much of a bygone generation, 72-year-old Sir James Matthew Barrie sets such modern teeth as Aldous Huxley’s excruciatingly on edge. If sentimentality be a sin, Author Barrie should fry eternally in hell. But sentimentality has paid him well: with Arnold Bennett, Hall Caine and Edgar Wallace dead, he is considered far & away Britain’s richest writer. From such perennial goldmines as Peter Pan and The Little Minister (one New York run of which brought in $375,000), royalties have rolled him into affluence. Bachelor by divorce (from Actress Mary Ansell, in 1909), Sir James lives like a grandlfatherly pixy in comfortable solitude on London’s Adelphi Terrace catty-corner from George Bernard Shaw’s former home. He frequently emerges to go to his club (The Athenaeum), to garden parties at Buckingham Palace, to make such resounding speeches as his famed “Courage” (on his installation as Lord Rector of St. Andrews in 1922). With money to burn, he has been generous to other people’s fires. He gave some $25,000 to the tragic Scott Antarctic Expedition, some $50,000 more to Scott’s widow. He made over the royalty rights of Peter Pan (estimated as at least $10,000 a year) to London’s Hospital for Sick Children. During one theatrical season he paid all expenses for meritorious but unsuccessful plays by rival playwrights. After 1902 he turned to play writing almost exclusively; since 1922 he has written nothing (except a mysterious autobiography whose 20 copies were intimately distributed last year), was apparently content to spend the rest of his life cushioned on bays that are still green, among people who are not above sentiment.