Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  BARBARA FOLLETT Credit 5

  Barbara didn’t yet say it in her letters, but, nearing nine, she was obviously lonely. To be sure, she threw herself into the intensive projects she dreamed up—an advertisement for her parents’ belief in sparing a child the curiosity-dampening distractions of ordinary school. Barbara wrote a long story about a cat mother’s ingenious way of teaching her kittens to be self-reliant. She inventoried butterflies (no pinning, only temporary capture), first describing real ones, then inventing her own. Mr. Oberg later joined in, sending on elaborate paintings of imaginary butterflies she had described. Still, Barbara was restless, especially in “this vile apartment house,” she wrote when the family moved from the outskirts into New Haven temporarily. Her father had taken a job at Yale University Press, but she wanted to be “oh, anywhere, everywhere except here!”

  It was then, as 1923 began, that she posted the keep-out message on her bedroom door. Around the same time, she also wrote a blunter letter to her mother, relaying fierce annoyance on paper rather than in person:

  Talk about something! Get rid of your female friends who talk about nothing but their children, and your gentlemen friends who talk about nothing but books and colleges and automobiles. Or if you can’t get rid of them talk about something really worth while. The worst part of this dull talk is that the listeners are interested!

  She went on, lecturing her parents about the phoniness of their circle and the more serious topics they should take up. She would discuss Farksolia, the slaughter of trees, the beauties of nature, “and I would say a little about books and poetry. Not that I am putting an abuse on the books. I love books, but this everlasting talk about them all the time (and mostly not interesting ones at that) drives a sensible fellow mad.”

  Barbara didn’t mind conveying that she felt like a butterfly caught in a net herself. She was plainly irritated with all the adults yet envious of her parents’ friendships, suffocated by the self-conscious literary atmosphere yet unable to breathe without it, eager to be a rebel yet lacking a model for how to be other than—as she was in her note—a parent-like scold, urging more attuned awareness, more authenticity, more spontaneity. But Barbara knew where else to turn for venting; her rearing-by-writing truly had taken hold. She began a longer story than she had ever attempted. It was very much her own project, about a girl “so lonely that she went away to live wild,” she wrote another adult friend. At the same time, it was also a quest to fulfill her parents’ dreams of understanding the child soul. Here was yet another double bind, or a sense of redoubled purpose, or both: behind her closed door, Barbara was in fact on a family mission. She wasn’t just aiming to meet a ninth-birthday deadline to present her work to her mother. She also put up the barricade so that she and her father would have privacy in which to peruse and perfect it together, part of the deep pleasure for her.

  Wilson was impressed as his daughter read him installments of her forty-thousand-word creation—on which she tapped away for weeks, sometimes producing as many as four thousand words a day. He was also relieved to discover that “tawdry” urban apartment living hadn’t squelched her nature-loving spirit. He surely recognized the classic theme, the childhood fantasy of escape. Barbara, with her nymph and fairy games, had been circling it for years in her writing, and her reading had featured it, too. But an adult friend’s gift was especially well timed: Barbara received a copy of Barrie’s Peter and Wendy that February, “one of the loveliest books that I have ever read,” she wrote in thanks. “I don’t see how you knew just exactly what I liked—I have always wanted to fly, myself.”

  She took wing with Eepersip Eigleen, whose flight from her parents takes her first to live amid the meadows, then by the sea, and finally in the mountains. Eepersip isn’t an anarchic rebel. She works hard at her romantic outsider status: “For hours every day she practised running, leaping, dancing, and prowling, until she was as fleet as a deer and as soft on her feet as a lynx.” Her parents aren’t ogres, as Eepersip appreciates. Though they pursue her, they’re also awed by her proficient wildness—“amazed at the way in which her dancing and leaping had improved.” They yearn to have her back, but also can’t help worrying that the price of capture may be too high. Eepersip discovers that the price of freedom is high, too, but she is willing to pay it.

  Barbara ventured onto unsettling terrain in pushing Eepersip beyond heartwarming communion with nature. After her own escape, Eepersip returns to lure her little sister away from home to keep her company, but Fleuriss is scared of this leaping creature. Eepersip is too ethereal and unreliable for a smaller girl who needs the comfort of her mother. (Peter Pan is irresponsibly elusive, too, but he’s also a rascal who captivates other children, and he calls forth Wendy’s urge to nurture.) Eepersip grows more and more aloof. Lovely though the butterflies that encircle her are, she is slipping beyond the reach of human connection, into very cold regions. She ends up high in the mountains. A leaf-clad sprite now, Eepersip is stunned by a sunset as she stands on a snowy peak, before falling asleep in the frozen realm:

  In the sky Nature still flung about her colours wildly—fire was in the zenith, the long bank of clouds was vividly fringed with red-gold, and there to the south it changed to caverns of shadowed pink and strange violet….Then one thrill and flame of gold spread about the whole earth; the snow at her feet was shadowy gold, and a pathway of it danced upon the air ’way to the horizon. It played upon each frost-feather; the eastern mountains were flushed with this soft gold.

  Soon after, Eepersip turns into a fairy wood nymph invisible to all, “save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see.”

  Actually, Fleuriss and that scene of mountain sublimity weren’t in the pages that Barbara read to her father in early 1923, just before she turned nine. They appeared in the version Knopf published as The House Without Windows and Eepersip’s Life There four years later, in February 1927, just before Barbara’s thirteenth birthday. In a “historical note” about the book’s provenance (which Wilson stressed was Barbara’s idea rather than his), he emphasized preservation rather than evolution. Time had intervened but hadn’t spoiled what he felt was a uniquely full, firsthand expression

  of what is in a normal, healthy child’s mind and heart during that mysterious phase when butterflies, flowers, winging swallows, and white-capped waves are twice as real as even a quite bearable parent, and incomparably more important—the phase before there is any unshakable Tyranny of Things.

  Here was a child’s preadolescent vision rescued from “standardized” influences and revealed in its spontaneous, nature-loving essence. Readers of all ages, he felt, might learn from Eepersip.

  The truth was more complicated, though a fervent child-ally like Wilson probably couldn’t see it. Barbara’s novella was a very mediated creation, which didn’t make the product less interesting or the process less rewarding for her. After Barbara presented the original story to her mother, who was pregnant that spring, she got the plaudit that really counted—a chance to work it over with her father. He even proposed a private printing after careful revising. But a fire in their apartment building in the fall of 1923 destroyed the manuscript. After struggling to reconstruct her exact sentences, Barbara eased up and was pleased by how much better the new version was, especially since her new baby sister, Sabra, gave her a plot twist the heavily descriptive tale needed. And one of the best hikes Barbara had ever taken with her father—up Mount Moosilauke in 1925—gave her the vivid acme it needed, too.

  By now the aim was no longer a private printing. Wilson had left Yale University Press to join Knopf, where his purview was a bigger public. Barbara wanted his attention. “Nothing ever happens unless you’re here,” she wrote her father, who was commuting and away more often. As the girl renaissance unfolded, Wilson’s sights rose, and so did Barbara’s. In early 1925, her story still in revision, she wrote Mr. Oberg that “Daddy and I have been correcting it, to make it as perfect as we can—and, when it is all corrected and copi
ed on nice clean paper—it may be published.” As she and her father focused on a final bout of editing in 1926, Nathalia’s novel The Sunken Garden didn’t escape the Follett family’s notice. Knopf was surely watching the Daisy Ashford–inspired field, too. When Wilson submitted the manuscript to his bosses, the anticipation was intense. Barbara fell on the floor screaming with relief when, opening the gray Borzoi stationery, she read that Blanche Knopf liked her manuscript “enormously.”

  So did the critics. No unsettling maturity was going to stir up controversy this time (though in fact Barbara’s parents supplied more bookish and fine-tuned collaboration than Clarence Crane could begin to manage). “We cackled over ‘The Young Visiters’ and whooped over Nathalia Crane,” the critic and professor Howard Mumford Jones wrote in his review of The House Without Windows, under the headline “New Child Genius.” He went on, “Fortunately there is no likelihood that Barbara Newhall Follett is going to suffer this indignity. She is too serenely a lyric artist. She has the Mozartian calm. She writes as though she were living in that serene abode where the eternal are. It is as it should be. That is where she lives and where she takes us.”

  The influential children’s book reviewer Anne Carroll Moore disapproved of the homeschooled isolation and worried over the perils of premature publication and precocious professionalism, but Moore was the exception. A piece about the novel for young readers in The American Girl magazine advised that Barbara’s vocabulary should be a model. Barbara’s book was just what nostalgic adults needed, too. “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,” wrote the New York Times reviewer. “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.”

  Jones was wrong, though, about the serenity. As Margery Williams Bianco, the author of The Velveteen Rabbit, pointed out, Barbara’s fantasy of escape was bound up with “extraordinary single-mindedness and almost ruthless determination.” Eepersip acted on both. Barbara clearly felt that her turn had come. Heralded as a voice of childhood freedom, she was now a teenager who wanted to actually exercise some clout—to push back against the adults on all sides. She wrote Moore, the reviewer, a testy letter: “It surely is very rash to slam down into the mud a childhood and a system of living that you know nothing about.” Her focused hours at her desk gave her days outdoors, long summers, time for her violin as well as piano, and suited her perfectly, she informed Moore. She wrote what she pleased. At the same time, Barbara the writer whirled on her parents. She had a new passion—a less bucolic one—and dared them to thwart her pursuit of it.

  “I am wild over PIRATES,” Barbara wrote one of her correspondents, and she harangued her parents about acting on her enthusiasm, not just writing about it—though she did that, composing a forty-two-stanza ballad on the topic. She threatened to run away unless she was allowed to sail as a cabin boy on a schooner bound for Nova Scotia in the summer of 1927. Barbara took the planning in hand herself, consulting a nautical neighbor and scouting the New Haven wharf. Treasure Island, which she had first read at ten, remained a favorite. She may also have noticed a boys’ spin-off of the girl-writer vogue, popularized by the son of the wealthy publisher George Putnam. In 1925 David Binney Putnam, twelve, wrote the first of a succession of books, in a direct boyish style for other boys, about glamorously adventurous trips arranged by his father—to the Sargasso Sea, Greenland, the Arctic, Africa, and more.

  Barbara was impatient with the fairy-filled fantasy of escape and with her tame family, and eager for a very different follow-up to her first novel. She wrote letters to a friend while on the ten-day trip. Knopf quickly turned them into another book, The Voyage of the Norman D., as Told by the Cabin-boy, published not long after she turned fourteen in 1928. The memoiristic account got no lengthy working over with her father. This was her book, and it tacked this way and that, without Mozartian calm. In it, Barbara wrote as a self-conscious and confident teenager, half-mocking her “gay, piratical” romanticism but also proudly plunging into a real world that was utterly foreign. She mingled with shipmates, making a particular friend in barely literate Bill. Still the naturalist, she brought a newly human, often comic, perspective to her descriptions. “Some looked as though they were in a great hurry,” Barbara wrote about a stream of jellyfish

  —as though they were gathering up their robes of state around them and hastening on; others were small, dainty, modest, and very scornful of the more splendid ones; some went sailing by, looking, for all the world, as though they were lost in a remote dream.

  And then suddenly Barbara was upended. Shortly before the book’s appearance, a letter arrived from her father, two days after her fourteenth birthday, telling her that he was leaving her mother. Wilson had fallen in love with a twenty-year-old secretary at Knopf and now portrayed his marriage to Helen as misery from the start. The child who had spun imaginative visions of fleeing abruptly became an abandoned adolescent. And as her devastated mother wrote a friend shortly after the news broke, Barbara had “worshipped her father in a terrifying way.”

  It’s tempting to say, as Barbara soon did, that her father had worshipped her in a trifling way—indulged in child-focused fantasies of freedom, only to take flight himself, in search of new rejuvenation, when his lyrical girl and family idyll turned moody, unwieldy. At first Barbara appealed to him in the spirit of collaborative adventure he had reared her on. “This is the time of year when you are wont to have feverish spells of mountain-lure—why aren’t you having them?” she wrote him. “I depend very much on you,” she emphasized, using all of her metaphorical skills. “I trust you to give another heave at the capstan bars, to get the family anchor started toward the surface again. After all, you have the strongest shoulders for heaving of us all!” Barbara spoke for her sister, who “is not possibly able to grow up decently in the midst of this whirlpool.” She confronted Wilson’s girlfriend, who proceeded to tell Barbara that surely she wanted her daddy happy. Barbara lashed out at her: “I wouldn’t stand up there, so extremely unashamed of myself.”

  And then, by the late spring, she gave up. Barbara “has changed terribly,” a worried friend observed. But there was no mention of her turmoil in the version of subsequent events that Helen later recounted in a memoir called Magic Portholes, which Barbara worked on with her, this time editing her parent, not the other way around. It was an account of a literally outlandish plan to run away to sea, instigated by Barbara and signed on to by a mother distraught over her daughter’s “bad condition spiritually.” If Wilson could assert his freedom, so could they—and no scolding from him was going to stop Helen. “I believe there’ll have to be a lot more iron in your control of her in the next two or three years,” he had the audacity to write her in the summer, “or else she’ll go completely to pot.”

  In the fall of 1928, mother and daughter set sail with their typewriters as part of their minimal luggage and with only a tenuous sense of how they would manage. They had Barbara’s royalties and an advance for another book in hand. They also hoped Wilson would wire money along the way, though they weren’t counting on it. They would sell journalistic dispatches as they went. Leaving Barbara’s not-yet-five-year-old sister behind in the care of a friend, they were gone for almost two years. They made their way to the West Indies and then Tahiti and Samoa. They went on to Honolulu and the West Coast, earning some money by writing about their adventures. “To the world it is an extremely interesting educational procedure, and will be watched as such,” Helen wrote a close friend. In truth, she confided, it was hell with, and often for, Barbara.

  “A happy trip, a trip of gaiety and laughter and romance, all of these, but it was something more,” Helen claimed as she promoted Magic Portholes four years later, celebrating her “playmate idea” of parent-child relations. “It was a piece of real continuity of those ten years which we had had before.” Youth, she went on, wa
s now sharing not just its imagination but “its unquestioning confidence in itself and its ability to accomplish anything in life.” In fact, Barbara was unproductive and defiant, and Helen—with Wilson’s call for “more iron in your control of her” now echoing in her head—felt scorned and powerless. Barbara did whatever she wanted. “I allow her to do so for any peace whatever,” Helen confessed.

  In this Neverland, nobody was a grown-up, but nobody was a carefree child either. The playtime the Folletts had so prided themselves on protecting and prolonging for Barbara was over—but where did that leave her at fourteen? “If you knew how extraordinarily wild I was,” Barbara wrote from Tahiti to a friend, “you would get a good laugh out of it. Why, I make friends with the devil all the time.” She even seems to have found herself being romantically pursued by an islander. Helen was panicked. Her daughter, whom she counted on as her coauthor, was supposed to be the gifted observer of exotic nature and island customs, not a rebellious participant. Barbara was disoriented, too. When Helen wrote to friends a couple of months later from American Samoa with news that “Barbara has gone to pieces,” she was alarmed. “Her writing is not anywhere finished. She has lost interest in things, in living, in writing. She says, herself, she is ‘homesick.’ ” Then Helen vented some pique, sounding like the put-upon teenager: “And it still seems incredible to me that it is Barbara who is dragging me back, and who is such a drag here.”