It's right in front of you.

John Singer Sargent.  Leon Delafosse, ca 1893.  Seattle Art Museum.  J.M. Barrie, The Little White Bird, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1902.  ABBA Gold - Greatest Hits, 1992.

One of the first posts here was devoted to J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan which premiered in 1904.

M.W. sent me this Telegraph article on J.M. Barrie which asks the question, how bad was he?  If you're familiar with the real story of the Llewelyn-Davies boys who ended up in his care, then you may at least have wondered.  The Little White Bird, which is narrated by a bachelor gentleman who takes a very active interest in a little boy, is a challenging and even fairly unsavory read today.  You tell yourself the author didn't understand the psychological implications of his tale, that he was writing without the benefit of Freud, that he surely didn't realize the unhealthy dimension of the relationship he was describing, but you have a hard time convincing yourself.  Plus, knowing that the lives of the real Lost Boys ended in drowning, death in battle and suicide doesn't help any.  

Once a thing is known, it cannot be un-known.   I'm reading The Word of God (2008) by Thomas Disch.  Like Peter Pan, Disch's novel On Wings of Song (1978) is the story of a boy who learns to fly.  In a whole different way.  It's one of my favorite books.  Disch committed suicide earlier this month, on the 4th.   Consequently, you read his work differently now. 

Disch kept an online journal, and it isn't hard to figure out from his postings that he was frustrated with the way his career had turned out, that he was devastated by the loss of his longtime lover/companion Charles Naylor, his financial situation was bleak, his New York landlord wanted him out of the rent-controlled apartment he'd shared with Charles, and meanwhile friends, agents, colleagues and publishers had betrayed and abandoned him.  There was a terrible bitterness and sarcastic self-pity in his writing, and he knew it.  He admitted in one of our e-mail exchanges (I had written him a fan letter a couple years ago) that he thought he'd scared me off, and he wasn't wrong.  I had sought him out because he was a writer I'd long admired, and it was a shock to find him so miserable.  At the time I didn't get it.  He was a published author with a lot of books to his name. 

That's the problem with writing, you know.  A reader can never know, except perhaps in retrospect, just what sort of desire or ache or longing or hope or searching a writer is going through or trying to express.  A reader can probably never know how much it mattered to the writer that anyone read and understood him.  Or the writer may, like Barrie, not even fully understand himself what he was saying, or trying to put into words. 

I was at a party this weekend and everyone was talking about Mamma Mia! -- the ABBA musical.  "I blogged about it," I heard myself say, and I had to wince inwardly at this lame self-promotion.  It's just the sort of geeky thing a geeky character says, followed by reaction shots of people rolling their eyes.  No one present, of course, had read my "review."  But that's the point.  Just wanting any reader at all is only the beginning.  Then you want them to appreciate what you've written and why it matters so much to you, when you may barely know why it matters yourself, and then maybe only later will anyone, maybe, begin to understand what you were actually trying to say, or what you meant.