Part 9

It was the youthful author's idea, not mine, that her story should be accompanied by a word of explanation from her father. I do not know how, when, or exactly why she formulated such a requirement, any more than I can explain where she got many another of the ideas with which she has been known to startle or confound me. Long after the story had been completed and while it was undergoing revision, there arrived a day on which I was told that the requirement existed: that Barbara had secretly been counting on me, and with pleasure in the thought. Pleasure! If I could give that and so easily, and to her, it not mine to make a gesture of resistance. I insist only that what I have to say shall be placed where it can stand between no reader and the story.

It would be neither good manners nor good sense for me to attempt any sort of appraisal of this chronicle of Eepersip's adventures in the spacious rooms of her House without Windows. I have been too near to the whole thing, and am too near the chronicler. The most that I can now add without impropriety is a statement of why the first thought, a book to be manufactured but by no means published, gave way after all to a different idea.

It began to strike me that here was something representatively valuable--valuable, I mean, as a representation of something lovely in generalized childhood itself--and yet not so very likely to achieve frequent expression. The fact is that the impulses crystallized in this story mostly fade into the light of common day a year or two before the dawn of that amount of mechanical articulacy which is necessary for a tangible expression of them; and they are therefore almost never expressed. Actually, I do not happen to be acquainted with a single prose document of much scope which achieves the full expression, or any first-hand expression, of what in a normal, healthy child's mind and heart during that mysterious phase when butterflies, flowers, winging swallow, and white-tapped 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.

What is probably unusual about Barbara is the conspiracy of the circumstances which have made these two things, the phase and the necessary articulacy, overlap. She is precocious, and the phase may have lasted a year or two longer than it does in many. She is not excessively gregarious and has not been regimented in schools and groups; therefore nothing has as yet standardized her, or ironed out her spontaneity, or made her particularly ashamed of it. She has been given plenty of time to know herself. And, almost above all, having used a typewriter as a plaything from a time that she can't remember, she was able to rattle off an easy 1200 words an hour, with any awareness of the physical process, years before penmanship could have developed half the proficiency, even with intense concentration on the physical process alone.

I formed, then, the opinion that her Eepersip, who lives an ardent life of three or four years in nearly every child's consciousness, lives not at all anywhere no the world's multitude of books. And it came to seem to me that this Eepersip very possibly has something to say to you about your children, and about yourself of a time that you may easily have forgotten, as well as, perhaps, to your children directly.

A last point: 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. Barbara, whose spelling and grammarhappen to be very reliable, would want us to straighten them out for her if they weren't; and we should do it. When she asks whether a comma will do or ought it to be a semi-colon? we answer as well as we can. 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. Annoyingly from my Yankee point of view, she insists on a preference for Oxford spelling, undoubtedly met in three out of four of the contemporary books which she reads. Well, then, I point out to her that if going to spell "colour" she, must also spell "favourite" and "storey" and "veranda." But the words themselves, the sentences, are hers, just as truly as is the pattern of the whole; and hers is a really workmanlike care for weeding out gawky constructions and repetitions of the words of which she ins been successively over-fond.

One of the great objects of imaginative writing, I take it, is to have joy. Another, not wholly separable from the first, is to learn as you go. I like to suppose that Barbara, just turned twelve, is having her just share of both.

Wilson Follett

March, 1926