by Laura Smith
Reviewers and readers loved Barbara precisely because she was young. She was a pure conduit to childhood, unfettered by adult thinking. Her verbal precocity enabled her to speak the language of adults, but from another, long-forgotten world. A reviewer in the New York Times wrote, “There can be few who have not at one time or another coveted the secret, innocent and wild at the same time, of a child’s heart. And here is little Miss Barbara Follett, holding the long-defended gate wide open and letting us enter and roam at our will over enchanted ground.” A reviewer at the Saturday Review of Literature suggested something similar: “This book grows almost unbearably beautiful. It becomes an ache in [one’s] throat.” Barbara’s book was a reminder of all that was beautiful about childhood—and all that adults had lost.
With all of the positive reviews came one note of warning: “I can conceive of no greater handicap for the writer between the ages of nineteen and thirty-nine than to have published a successful book between the ages of nine and twelve.” The reviewer, Anne Carroll Moore, argued in the New York Herald Tribune that the publishing world was too corrupt for the innocence of children, whose sensibilities are “unduly excited or prematurely deadened by such experience.” Children had a right just to be children, unencumbered by questions of money and critical success. She had harsh words for the Follett parents about their methods of education: they had isolated her, robbed her of “variety of social relationships.” Barbara needed “the companionship of other children.” To Wilson, she wrote that rather than allowing Barbara to flourish free of the “Tyranny of Things,” as he claimed he was doing in his conclusion to her book, he had opened its door and shoved her through. He had commoditized her. Moore warned, “What price will Barbara Follett have to pay for her ‘big days’ at the typewriter?”
Barbara fired back an angry two-page response: “I am very much amused at the favorable reviews which are being written—I do not take them at all seriously—but I do take seriously an article which distorts into a miserable caricature my living, my education, my whole personality.” The message is clear: this was her story. She was the one making predictions.
—
Novels are one of the few places where authors can control the narrative entirely. Yet it’s not clear that Barbara controlled even that. In 1925, she wrote to Mr. Oberg, “Daddy and I have been correcting it, to make it as perfect as we can.” Wilson described his editorial process this way: “Barbara has been given by her parents, in the final preparation of this manuscript, exactly what help she has asked for. That is not nearly so much help as many an adult author often has from us, for there is not one idea or structural change of ours in the entire story. But I see no value in withholding solicited advice in order to make a Roman holiday for those who like to chuckle or guffaw over infantile slips in spelling and grammar. . . . When she wants to know: ‘Have I made it clear what this means?’ or ‘Have I used this word twice too near together?’ of course we say how it strikes us.”
Barbara’s drafts were covered in neat black script—handwriting that was not Barbara’s, but Wilson’s. Those edits go beyond correcting “infantile slips in spelling and grammar,” though most are not major changes. Sentences are trimmed and reordered, repetitions removed. Occasionally parts of sentences are entirely scratched out and rewritten.
Barbara’s “But when she got to the bottom she had seen houses; and so walking back or rather running as fast as she could, she decided that that wasn’t the side for her,” became, with Wilson’s edits, “But when she got part way to the bottom she began to see houses; and so, deciding that that wasn’t the side for her, she ran back.”
He was smoothing the text, making it more fluid. Of course he’s correct to point out that many adults’ writing gets the same treatment by an editor. Barbara’s letters are fluent and precocious. Her vocabulary rivals that of many adults. But writing a novel requires balancing specific details and ideas with a larger, sustained narrative arc. As anyone who is experienced with children knows, they think less linearly than novel writing typically requires. They are prone to spastic fits of inspiration and sometimes entirely nonsensical narrative turns. The uninhibited stream of consciousness of their storytelling is what is so charming about it. Some of this jubilance can be found in The House Without Windows. But it is tidy enough to make a reasonable reader wonder: Was this really just her work?
In Barbara’s first draft, the book ends differently. Eepersip is reunited with two sisters (the second sister would later be edited out). Butterflies land on their foreheads and they are transformed into fairies, who stay in the woods forever. Barbara ends the book, “And please learn to love and respect NATURE. For if you do, she will love you, and you will be much happier. If you ever do hurt NATURE just remember that she will not do you any good turns. If you don’t hurt NATURE, remember that she will do you a good turn. Remember how NATURE reunited the three loving sisters as a reward for their kindness to HER.”
These lines are scratched out in wavering pencil lines (probably Barbara’s), leaving the presumed last line of the book, “And when you catch a butterfly in your hat, be sure not to hurt it. . . . Remember, too, that that butterfly might be a fairy changing itself into a butterfly so you can see it.”
That sounds like a child’s writing. A second look at the published version reveals the intellectual and stylistic disparity between the two versions:
She was a fairy—a wood-nymph. She would be invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature—a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.
The syntax is much more complex—perhaps too complex for a child to have written. It’s also a much more compelling ending. The reader does not get the satisfaction of seeing where Eepersip goes, the place where she finds lasting fulfillment. Barbara had been obsessed with pinning down exactly what the world looks like, what berries, what foliage, what birds and animals live there, but to spell out exactly how Eepersip had found satisfaction would have disappointed: nothing specific could be as tantalizing as the idea of satisfaction. The writer of those words knew that.
So who wrote them?
The ending recalls the entry Wilson had made in his diary when Barbara was a baby: “You are an ageless incarnation of spirit, the rarefied essence of Baby, a creature of dream and desire and we know that you could dissolve into a wish and become only a dream-that-was-too-beautiful.” Wilson had been dreaming up a vanishing story ever since Barbara was born.
There is another possibility for how this ending came to be. It is possible that as Wilson sat at his desk, surrounded by his daughter’s drafts, he was suddenly struck by an idea. What if Eepersip didn’t just go off and live in the woods—what if she vanished off the face of the earth entirely? He wouldn’t have to write the words himself exactly, just plant the idea, and then edit the language for fluidity.
There was much at stake. Not just Wilson’s own vanity—to be the parent of a remarkable child is to be remarkable yourself—but also Barbara’s dreams. She was young, her ego just forming, and failure at that age is devastating. There are ways you can nudge your child without realizing you’re doing so, to protect without fully meaning to. Who wrote the end of The House Without Windows is not just a literary curiosity. It matters because that scene so closely mirrors what would happen to Barbara just over a decade later.
THREE
Around the time I started looking for Barbara, I decided to get married. I was ambivalent about marriage, but not about P.J. We’d been friends for three years in college before we started to date. My roommates had told me that he was interested in more than friendship, but I’d ignored them because I was dating someone else. On weekends he would pick me up in his Mercury Cougar to go grocery shopping, catch a movie, or eat sushi at the university cafeteria. During my senior year, I broke up with the boyfriend. When I told P.J. about the breakup at a crow
ded bar one night, I remember being struck by his reaction. He told me that it was my ex’s loss. But there was something about his expression, and the tone of voice. He had just started dating someone else, and he sounded regretful. I considered him differently for a moment. What would it be like to date him? But our timing was off and I dismissed the idea.
P.J. broke up with his new girlfriend not long after. Then one night in my apartment, as we were watching a movie for film class, he leaned across the couch and kissed me. Why not? I thought. I hadn’t been single in years and had missed out on the “hook-up culture” of college entirely. What my friends described was mostly unappealing—their experiences seemed to vacillate between slapstick comedy and disappointment, but I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
One afternoon, a couple of weeks after the movie night, I was in a strip mall parking lot headed off to lunch with a friend when, as I slammed the car door, I was struck by a desperate desire to see P.J. as soon as possible. What was he doing at that exact moment and how quickly could I get this lunch over with?
Suddenly, he was transformed. He became strikingly handsome, with his elegant dark eyelashes and angular features. He had gripped me entirely, lodging an enormous steel fishing hook in my center. My long-held ideas about how to live suddenly mattered very little. Oh, I thought. This is why people do what they do. This is why people buy houses together and have children. This is why they garden on the weekends. Suddenly I saw all those things not as tedious burdens, but as monuments to love.
He had invited me to join him at a party that night. I called him on his cell phone when I arrived so that he would come outside. I wanted to see him for a moment alone. He had sensed my hesitance about the relationship and I wanted to reassure him. When he came out, his face was ashen. I realized he thought I had called him down to break up with him. “I’m into this,” I said, and he looked thrilled.
“Want to sleep in the same place tonight?” he asked with a little too much excitement.
“Yes,” I said.
We hadn’t told our friends we were dating, partially because we didn’t feel like having them make a fuss. That night, as we stood around talking, he secretly gripped my hand for a moment and I felt a rush.
On Valentine’s Day, when we hadn’t made clear plans (we’d been dating for only a few weeks at this point), I moped melodramatically through the day. I tried to go for a run but couldn’t, and I got back into bed on the verge of tears at three in the afternoon. What had I become? How had the power shifted so suddenly? My phone rang and it was P.J. He asked me if I wanted to go get a beer. I decided I would break up with him because I couldn’t stand the emotional turbulence of feeling this powerless anymore. I got into his car and told him I wanted to end it. He looked crestfallen and told me he felt the opposite, that he wanted us to date each other exclusively. He was so upset that he pulled over into a bank parking lot. The sun was setting and the colors were so dramatic that it nearly hurt to look at it. I said fine, knowing full well that this was what I had hoped he would say.
—
Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.
Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.
It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.
I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.
In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness there is a section on “bad faith”—behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly . . . he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.
In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.
I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things—the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony—turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.
The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.
One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.
A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tr
ied on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”
“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering fifteen seconds.
“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.
“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.
My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.
“Why must everyone match?” I asked.
“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?
But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.