Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  In the darkness who would answer, in the darkness who would care,

  If the odor of the roses and the winged things were there.

  After Lava Lane, it was the quantity more than the quality of Nathalia’s work that now seemed prodigious, as reviewers pointed out. If she noticed the critics, though, she wasn’t intimidated. Nathalia seemed unstoppable, rather like her father. Still evidently quite a homebody, she wasn’t letting the public fuss deter her from pursuing her interests. In 1926 Nathalia produced another book of poems, The Singing Crow, and also published a first novel. The Sunken Garden, she confessed, didn’t “just come” to her. She struggled to yoke her fondness for historical exotica to a conventional theme. Her protagonist, a young British duchess who is shipwrecked, falls in love with a gorgeous boy on the island, once home to castaways during the Children’s Crusade. Already in her prologue, it was obvious that her love of words wasn’t going to rescue her plot:

  Through the wizardry of a storm a yacht with a girl near the wheel is wrecked upon a barbarous strand, and a sun-gilded wilding, a forest youth, is torn from a shore covert and driven, amid weltering forest debris, into the frenzied breakers.

  A year later, at fourteen, Nathalia won first prize—and $500—for a Kiplingesque poem commemorating Lindbergh’s flight, beating established poets like Babette Deutsch. By 1930, the year she turned seventeen, she had written six books (including a second novel, about a child with wings), and was ready to ask forty-five-year-old Untermeyer a favor. She had just written an epic called Pocahontas. Would he blurb it, and write something about her, at the behest of her publisher—and do it quickly? Though nonplussed by her “phantasmagoria,” he did her bidding, briefly reviving the authorship storm. In Nathalia’s strange poem, he figured as Clovis Vanderspire, leader of a band of eight other faintly disguised poets who join the reincarnated Indian princess to beat back a Communist invasion. Another wave of reviewers smelled a hoax—not because of the work’s maturity.

  Nathalia lucked into a new benefactor, this time anonymous, who wisely decided to encourage a lower profile. Another scholarship, to attend Barnard College as a general studies student, came Nathalia’s way—under one condition: that she publish no further work until she graduated. She eagerly accepted, later emphasizing her lucky trajectory. After a prolific adolescence, in which she had avoided directing undue “attention…toward the college entrance exam” (and, she primly added, “commercial amusements”), Nathalia welcomed college—and time abroad in Spain—as good for her writing. She quietly kept up her creative work, pleased to be more self-critical.

  Nathalia retained her ageless aura in the press accounts that greeted her return to print in 1936 with a collection called Swear by the Night. She was still living in her parents’ apartment, where her ailing father was more eccentric than ever. “Nathalia at 22 is grown up, wears long skirts and thinks about a wave in her hair,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “but the same mystic quality that made folks wonder when she was 10, has not changed much….The child has matured but there was something mature about her as a child.” Nathalia’s poetry, too, had a curiously static and anachronistic quality, the critics agreed, even Untermeyer, whom she enlisted to write an introduction, after being out of touch.

  It was a peculiar transaction on both of their parts. Was Nathalia expressing her dependence, or semiexploiting a former mentor? If she had hoped for a fond foreword, she got a bluntly mixed tribute that must have startled her but probably stirred interest in her book. Untermeyer staked out a new distance, while retaining his status as adjudicator of youthful genius. Nathalia, once the center of a critical storm, continued to be creatively buffeted, “by turns unusually graceful and surprisingly awkward,” in his view. Her language veered between the instinctively musical and the overliterary, her insights between “clairvoyant illumination” and naïve pedantry. The subtext—that the best in Nathalia’s curiously unblended work came unbidden—emerged in the most quotable line of all: “It may be an erratic genius that dictates this poetry, perhaps an only half-conscious genius, but genius in any case it is.” Nathalia had puzzled Untermeyer from the start, he wrote, and she still did.

  His praise was double-edged, yet he acknowledged Nathalia’s quirky consistency, and he didn’t presume to predict where her avid writing might take her—or perhaps more to the point, where she might take it. (Juvenilia, Lewis Terman’s associate agreed, wasn’t much of a guide to literary futures.) In any case, Nathalia’s father seems to have bequeathed an imperviousness to conventional creative expectations early on. Steeped in his battle lore, she had set off on word-strewn, rhythmic journeys, often to uncanny places far from typical girlish haunts. Meanwhile, her educational patron, as discreet as Clarence was verbose, had been the ideal enabler. She (or was the benefactor a he?) helped secure Nathalia some adolescent privacy and gave her the chance to broaden her horizons. As varieties of noninvasive support go, a former prodigy could hardly ask for better.

  Yet finding a mature poetic path is not easy, and Nathalia never did. Culture, perhaps even more than nature and nurture, can be fickle. The same literary ferment that helped create an audience for an offbeat girl poet may well have been just what a loyal, rhyme-entranced daughter of a literary throwback couldn’t thrive on. Nathalia published two more books before she was thirty. The reviews of one, a coauthored collection of humorous alphabet verses, were not kind. It’s possible that the other—a long poem, set partly in hell, about the death of poetry—reflected some bitterness. And yet Nathalia was as undaunted as her father. To keep poetry alive, she continued to write commemorative poems and publicly read them, with “The Janitor’s Boy” an often requested encore. Her first husband, with whom she had no children, died in 1968. Four years later she married a philosophy professor at San Diego State, where she taught in the English department for many years. After Nathalia Crane’s death at eighty-five, a former student recalled her “frequently and rapturously” invoking the phrase “reverence for life.”

  · 3 ·

  Barbara Newhall Follett, born half a year after Nathalia, in March 1914, inspired a double dose of word-besotted parenting from the very start. Shortly after her birth, her mother, Helen, began making entries in a baby diary, addressing Babbie directly as she noted down observations and conveyed endearments. “Remember you’re mine all through the day-times; remember your little mother when you are being fondled by your dream-mother-bird,” she wrote one summer evening after putting Barbara down. A maternal acolyte of J. M. Barrie, Helen was channeling his myth of the original bird-stage of child life. She had the Darling children’s escape to Neverland in mind, too. “Come back to me in the morning my Precious!” she urged. Helen promised she would make it worth Barbara’s while. “Just sunshine, joy, laughter, the brown-bird twittering, and love, much love—these things are yours. And they shall be yours, my Precious, just so long as we can help to keep them yours.” They would read together, she rhapsodized several months later when a friend sent Barbara a storybook about birds.

  Barbara’s father, Wilson, didn’t hang back. When he took a turn in the diary that first summer, he added his share of enchanted, anxiously possessive mulling. Even as Barbara’s gurgling filled him with wonder, he worried about all that was eluding him. “Only—one does not know the language! One cannot know it; one can find no key to the obscure code of your choosing,” he wrote. “And so this whole period of your unfolding (a period that you yourself are going to forget while you are still only on the verge of understanding it in our crass and arbitrary terms) baffles and must baffle us….O! how we want to understand!” Like Helen, he looked at a sleeping baby girl lost in her “own drunken-world of fairies and moonshine” and hoped that with parents so eager to commune, she would stay to keep them company in a drabber world.

  The entries tapered off as Barbara grew into voluble toddlerhood in Providence, Rhode Island, where the family settled in the fall of 1914, when Wilson left Dartmouth for a new teaching job at Brow
n. Their modest house was as tweedily cultured and child-centered as the Cranes’ apartment was chaotic and Clarence-centered. After a hiatus—“war, I suppose, has made us all restless,” Helen reflected—she noted that Barbara, at three and a half, was “now using the Corona typewriter intelligently,” typing various words over and over, including “bluebird.” Two months later Barbara had “caught on to the reading game with (to us) astounding rapidity and never ceasing eagerness.” Their romantic idyll of childhood worship had very quickly turned writerly.

  As both Folletts told the story, Barbara had taken the initiative. Shortly before she turned three, she stood mesmerized beside one and then the other of them as they typed, which they were often doing. Each claimed credit for seizing the teachable moment and putting aside work to introduce her to the typewriter’s marvelous powers. Barbara cranked the platen, pressed the keys, zipped the carriage, was entranced by the bell. Progress was swift because she kept coming back for more, eager to produce her own marked-up paper. Helen started with dictation, first letter by letter and soon word by word as Barbara slowly typed. She especially loved punctuation marks.

  Her parents grew enthralled, too, as it occurred to them that this “piece of machinery—the indispensable tool of business and commerce,” as Helen later wrote, could also serve a very different purpose: as a child’s early means of expression, liberating her from handwriting, unwieldy work when fine motor skills are still immature. By four, Barbara was spelling and typing out her own thank-you notes—Helen’s suggestion—as well as reading. She was so pleased with her first typewritten letter that she slept with it for several days before letting it be mailed.

  Barbara’s parents were so pleased that Helen felt inspired to pursue homeschooling, having stumbled on an “educational scheme…as practically sound as it was romantically adventurous.” A constantly typing Barbara would hone her expressive skills, at the same time revealing the unknown resources in the child soul that adults yearned to discover. Wilson, in an article in Harper’s in 1919, felt emboldened to share their ideas about “Schooling Without the School” with other disenchanted postwar parents eager to rescue the creative powers of childhood from the standardizing pressures of school and modern civilization in general. Wilson made very clear theirs was not a call “to let your son or daughter run wild, form associations by accident, and be taught mainly by experience and necessity.” It was a summons “to pour yourself into your child” and develop a child’s urge to pour herself into words as part of both work and play. That such an enlightened course might prove a mistake was, he granted in a rhetorical gesture, a possibility:

  Fostering a child’s natural sense of order and beauty may be, for all we can say, a sorry preparation for life in a world of prevalent dullness and ugliness; giving such guidance as we have given may lead only to a more painful disillusionment in a scheme of things in which every one is ultimately left to flounder undirected.

  But he and Helen, who served as the hands-on project manager (he assumed the hero-in-the-wings role), didn’t really doubt their careful choreography.

  A childish urge for disorderly camaraderie had no place on their agenda. What kept their kindergartner from wanting to run off to school upon hearing the morning bell ring in Cheshire, the town outside New Haven where they now lived, Helen wrote, was the proud pleasure of sitting down promptly at her beloved typewriter. The home lessons that ensued were “no shilly-shally affair, subject to unwarranted moods and interruptions.” Helen made out a schedule for every morning, and Barbara followed it. Meanwhile, her mother tended to her own affairs and housework, on call but not constantly at hand. The Folletts officially disapproved of undue intrusion, though a subtle invasiveness lay at the heart of their endeavor. As Helen described it, the typewriter was the adult’s accomplice and a peer substitute rolled into one. It constantly nudged Barbara to copious description and self-revelation, not just at her lessons. The machine also wanted news of her solo wanderings, a homeschooled child’s luxury:

  All the doors and windows of this five-year-old’s world were wide open. The typewriter had helped to open them, and it would now help to keep them open. As soon as it imprisoned in words one fact from her world, one scrap of imaginative beauty, one echo of laughter or of a dream, it asked for more and still more. Where she went, what she did, what she saw—the typewriter enticed her, by urging its own simple magic upon her, to tell in her own words.

  The imagery—every fleeting, private experience “imprisoned in words” for a parent’s perusal—was curiously oppressive, especially given that Barbara’s creative liberation was the goal. Helen, an educated woman who had been her husband’s collaborator, didn’t hesitate to emphasize that the process was also designed not “to be a bore to me; I was quite as much concerned over that as I was over what might or might not happen to her.” She was a cutting-edge mother, as attuned to her own fulfillment as to her daughter’s and confident in complete synchrony between the two. Compared to Clarence Crane, happy to natter on and be adored, Helen had very particular ideas. She was not about to “limit my relationship with the child to that of nurse, social secretary, cook, or general adviser. I wanted something more permanent and lasting than any of these things; I wanted a friend and intellectual companion.”

  Barbara wrote constantly. She responded daily to her mother’s prompt: “Let’s say something in words about…” That was how Helen posed the expressive challenges, which elicited work that was perhaps not always quite as fresh as she claimed when she touted her methods. On one occasion, Helen proposed clocks as the topic, picking up on “the consuming passion of Barbara’s existence” at the time. They got down to work, side by side that day. Helen wrote about numbers and clock mechanisms while Barbara typed out lively tales about Mrs. Clock. Helen was quite thrilled to have her own prosaic adult style upstaged: “As for me, wasn’t she showing me how much writing could be enriched through the injection of personality?”

  Yet as Helen noted in passing, Barbara wasn’t drawing directly on her own imagination. She was recycling clock stories told to her by one of her special friends, Holdo Teodor Oberg, an elderly Swedish antique restorer whom the Folletts had met while Wilson was teaching at Brown. He was the most fondly attentive of a whole coterie of grown-up correspondents who had become central to Barbara’s curriculum. She kept up with them by mail, her letters a way to work on expressive and literary, not just typing, skills. She wrote more than thank-you notes. She evoked her days and relayed her thoughts—“her world,” in a way, except that Barbara’s peer-pressure-free life was not exactly an idyll of pure childish independence. Barbara was well aware that a maternal eye would look over what she produced, which often got retyped several times until it was right. “Mention the exquisiteness of the bundle” was Helen’s directive on one bread-and-butter effort.

  But Barbara was also just writing. She produced “masses of stuff, about everything under the sun, just for the pleasure and relief it gave me,” she later remembered, describing her “hours of good practice in descriptive writing,” though she wasn’t mostly thinking of her pastime that way then. What emerged from those hours was not glimpses into alien child-soul terrain, but evidence of ample reading in the best of children’s literature: Walter de la Mare, W. H. Hudson, Kipling’s Just So Stories, fairy tales. At six, Barbara wrote a magical fantasy about Mrs. Spinning-Wheel (a present from Mr. Oberg) and Mr. Horse (a rocking horse given by her parents). It was remarkable more for its ambition and execution—four chapters, over four thousand words, brisk pacing, lots of dialogue, great sentence structure, all carefully typed—than for its conception, which involved a quest for a fairy’s magic wand to work various transformations.

  Barbara later described her “little battered typewriter” as “a constant companion, and the most important thing in my life. When I was happy or sad, ecstatic or anxious, I…poured out my heart to it.” She was also excited to begin violin lessons, but it was writing that gave her a proud sense of connection
to her father, the man she adored, who was always toiling on manuscripts himself. He worked on revisions with her, teaching her proper copyediting and proofreading style. Her delight in the lessons confirmed his sense that children shouldn’t be treated like broad-brush primitives; they love the fine points of writing. When his students were reading Dickens with him, so did Barbara. The two of them sang together.

  But their outdoor life together—in “my native element,” she called it, echoing her parents’ view of childhood—formed their deepest bond. She was Wilson’s “comrade of trail and river,” as he was hers. He was the presiding spirit of Lake Sunapee summers in New Hampshire that she began looking forward to as early as February. At eight, Barbara made her breathless anticipation a theme of her letters to the dean of the Auburn Theological Seminary, another of her adult correspondents, and one who joined her in worship of “Nature’s wonders”:

  I want as long as possible in that green, fairylike, woodsy, animal-filled, watery, luxuriant, butterfly-painted, moth-dotted, dragonfly-blotched, bird-filled, salamandrous, mossy, ferny, sunshiny, moonshiny, long-dayful, short-nightful land, oh that fishy, froggy, tadpoly, shelly, lizard-filled lake—oh, no end of lovely things to say about that place, and I am mad to get there.

  In New Hampshire she got lost in pretend fairy games with several children: summer’s bounty included human company. She loved “dressing up in a green dress which I took the sleeves off of, putting berries or sprigs of pine in my hair, and dancing in the beautiful pine grove.” But hikes into the mountains with her father were the highlight. Barbara began to devote herself to nature writing, which she did in lovingly exhaustive detail—in keeping with Wilson’s approach. She worked hard on close-grained description of sunsets, lizards, aquatic plants, a red squirrel whose “pink tongue lapped the water much the way a cat’s tongue does.” She was obsessed with butterflies. Inspired by her summer world, Barbara also invented an imaginary world, Farksolia, and its language, Farksoo, poring over its grammar. Her father, whose lifelong project was a book on American usage (Modern American Usage: A Guide), was very attentive. Wilson even tracked down real card-catalog files to hold her growing store of Farksoo words.