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Childhood’s end
J.M. Barrie, asked once how his plays since Peter Pan had done, replied, “Well, some peter out, others pan out.” Few plays on the world’s stage have petered out as unhappily as Michael Jackson’s. The last twenty years seem to have been for him a succession of precipices which he always succeeded in falling off. He will be remembered a generation hence, perhaps (as Elvis is now) for his performing brilliance. Now all that comes to mind is an unhappy little boy trapped in an adult body. Peter Pan was the boy who refused to grow up. “‘I don’t want ever to be a man,’ he said with passion. ‘I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.’” Jackson had his first triumphs before he was six, performing with his big brothers and sisters as the Jackson Five. It may be that he stuck, emotionally, at that age. He himself said that he was compensating for the childhood he’d been deprived of by an ambitious and abusive father.
You can get by with acting the child – even if you are rich and famous – only until you are twenty-five or thirty, perhaps. After that the most devoted fanatics expect some maturity. Those who have contributed most to Western popular music are they who outgrew their reckless youth and became solid and dependable, realising the art is bigger than the artist. With Jackson, instead, we had a pathetic rejection of maturity in any form. The story spread, and was probably true, that he slept in an oxygen tent to rejuvenate his tissues. While other black musicians became esteemed spokesmen for the African-American community, we beheld the absurd spectacle of Jackson bleaching his skin and sharpening his nose. But what did he know about anything? He must have gone to school; it is the law. What did he know about managing his life? Most black musicians then struggled just to get before a microphone. Poverty does not seem to have been one of the Jacksons’ problems when Michael was a boy. It’s no wonder he said much later that he felt most comfortable on stage, he’d even sleep there if he could; that he couldn’t handle meeting people. He had not been trained to face life. He needed that balloon, that oxygen tent. Genius rarely comes without strings attached, and the ends of those strings are in the hands of the gods. To be a “pop icon” revered by millions is nice, but it does not necessarily mean you sleep well at nights. Jackson fell into the clutches of some of those pimps who are doctors to celebrities in Los Angeles, and apparently lived by prescription drugs, including narcotics. He may have died by them. Why do some people want to remain children? Usually, it is because of a luminous childhood, I think. Often it is the opposite. However, many excellent writers for children succeed in sublimating either experience. Many who feel this way, like Jackson, try and find someone to handle their adulthood for them – a spouse, or a sibling, or a manager. It works for the lucky few. “Having fun” is not a concomitant of childhood. You can grow up and have fun in different ways. Just being grown-up is fun in its own way, though we all weep for our lost youths as a matter of course. The yearning for childishness is all about not having any cares. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, or in the Neverland, did not have to worry about food and shelter. Best of all, he had no parents or teachers to tell him what to do. This is the dream we all dream in deepest sleep without knowing it, the return to the womb. An oxygen tent is a poor substitute. I am not belittling his talents. His song was simple and plaintive, from the heart. His dance was, if you break it up frame by frame, simple too. He only put the movements all together as no one had before. When he danced you saw the true individual, the soul freed of the prison of body. Thriller was an incredibly virtuoso performance: How different the driven young man of “Beat It!” is from the introspective lover of “Billie Jean”. Though I watched it last in 1984, I’ll never forget how the flagstones lit up, square after square, beneath his feet, and died into darkness behind. I was just young enough a lover then to know how it felt.
To a posterity whose entire entertainment experience will be electronic, that may be Jackson’s greatest achievement. He took the music video as far beyond the second-generation The Wall as Pink Floyd had taken it beyond the first-generation Queen. And there it has stayed. Twenty-five years later, we’re still waiting for somebody to go beyond Jackson. It’s strange that I’ve had in less than a month to write of two wonderful artists who lived as children, and died – only they know how. Kamala Das always had someone to look after her. Jackson had, it seems, no one. And fifty years old! Michael Jackson! Outrageous. He had a new series of concerts to look forward to, but after the failure of his last tour, fear must have haunted him. It was as well to go, gently or raging, into the night. There was another and a greater Pan before Peter. Plutarch writes, in Isis and Osiris, of a loud voice heard calling across the Ionian sea to a passenger on a tide-tossed ship: “The great god Pan is dead.” The news spread, and gloom consumed all the European classical world. Now at the death of young Peter not only gloom but idiocy seems to have seized the world. Some of the tributes have been egregious. No sane person can think Jackson the greatest singer or dancer to have trod the boards, or compare him to Mozart or Barack Obama except to take up newspaper space. But let it be. How long did the original Peter, created immortal, survive Barrie’s death in 1937? He lives yet and is yet a child, for his story is still read and acted. Michael Jackson will dance and sing as long as he keeps the hearts of his admirers young. May that be many many years.
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Unhappy child, unhappy man, Michael Jackson was only really at home on the stage. He grew up without wanting to, and his years since stardom were almost wholly an attempt to recapture youth. Musings on a fractured life.
Reliving a lost childhood: Michael Jackson.