Cooke Stefan - Barbara Newhall Follett: a life in letters

Barbara Newhall Follett

A Life in Letters

edited by Stefan Cooke

Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life inLetters

By Stefan Cooke

Smashwords edition

2015 Stefan William Follett Cooke

All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe used or reproduced without written permission except in the caseof brief quotations for articles or reviews.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personalenjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to otherpeople. If you would like to share this book with another person,please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If yourereading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchasedfor your use only, then please return to your favorite ebookretailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting thehard work of the editor.

Cover design by Resa Blatman www.blatmandesign.com

For more Barbara, please visit farksolia.org

ISBN: 978-0-9962431-1-7 (softcover)

ISBN: 978-0-9962431-2-4 (epub)

First edition August 2015

Table of Contents

for Barbara and her sisters

My heartfelt thanks to my wife, Resa Blatman, for herlove and support;
to Grizzly, Minx & Little Mouse for furry distraction;
to Columbia Universitys Rare Book & Manuscript Library;
to the Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and
The Society of Authors as their representative;
and to all who keep Barbaras flame flickering.

Introduction

Three years ago I visited the archive ofBarbara Newhall Follett, my mothers half-sister, at ColumbiaUniversity in New York. I had little idea of what I would find, andthe amount of material left me very happy indeed. Hundreds ofletters, stories and essays long and short, poems, photographs,watercolors, press clippings, galley proofs, an account ofFarksolia (Barbaras imaginary world) and a lexicon of Farksoo (itslanguage), Lost Island (a lost novel). I had only a fewhours with this treasure and speed-read as much as I could,photographing the pages I wanted more time with. I returned acouple of months later and spent several leisurely days withBarbara and her mother, Helen, whose archive is also atColumbia.

The papers in Barbaras and Helens fourteenboxes are organized by broad category and much of the material isundated and/or unidentified. Many pages are brittle andcrumblingsome repaired with Scotch tape brown with age. No matterhow careful I was, my table in Butler Library was covered withconfetti. I couldnt let Barbara disintegrate like this: Iphotographed almost everything. When the library closed I wanderedthe streets of the neighborhood nearby where Helen, Barbara, andher sister, Sabra, had lived eighty years earlier. I sat in thelittle park near Grants Tomb that two of their apartments hadoverlooked, trying to imagine what things were like back then.

Back at home I sorted through my thousandsof digital photographs. The more I read, the more I fell in lovewith Barbara and the more I wanted to share her remarkable writingand life. I wrote a short biography and transcribed some of herstories and Lost Island for a website I had made, Farksolia. Iposted a few letters and photos and some other bits and pieces, butsoon realized that what I really wanted was a big book of Barbaraon my shelf next to The House Without Windows, The Voyage of theNorman D., Magic Portholes, Stars to Steer By, and Barbara: TheUnconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius. Her letters are sovibrant and generousand her philosophy and yearning and lust forlife so timelessthat I knew the best way to tell her story wasthrough her own words. So I transcribed all of her letters and manyof those of her correspondents, and did more research. And here101years after Barbara was bornis her big book.

A note about the editing. To borrow from mygrandfathers Historical Note in The House Without Windows,Barbara, whose spelling and grammar happen to be very reliable,would want us to straighten them out for her if they werent.Likewise Ive fixed a few of Barbaras very rare mistakes forreadabilitys sake, as I think she would have liked. Ive retainedher preference for British over American spelling, although youllfind that that preference tended to waver. Ive also given herunderlined words italics, and changed her double-hyphens to emdashes.

Youll notice that several of Barbarasearlier letters are unsigned. She often typed a draft, edited it byhand, then typed a clean copy for her correspondent. These draftsmade their way into the Columbia archive many years later, whilemany of the signed letters were forwarded to Helen in the 1940s and50s, their recipients rightly thinking them worth keeping.

1
Here (1914-1922)

BarbaraNewhall Follett was born on March 4, 1914, in Hanover, NewHampshire. Her father (my grandfather), Roy Wilson Follett(1887-1963), was teaching English at Dartmouth College while hermother, Helen Thomas Follett (1883-1970), a former school teacher,stayed at home with Barbara and Helens motherLizzie HumphreyNewhall Thomas (1850-1934)or Ding for short.

Barbaras parents kept a diary for her early years.Several of the entries followalmost all of them by her mother, butthe first is Wilsons.

11 August 1914

Blessed Barbaretta:

Do you mind if your daddyan insufficientsubstitute in any casescribbles you off a wee bit of a letterin propria persona, in lieu of diary? The fact, thepersistent and inescapable fact, is that youre a mystery to me. Iwatch you lovingly and lingeringly, by hours and multiples ofhours; I hang on the queer motions of your hands; my spiritdissolves in ecstasies over the inscrutable things you do with yourdimpled feet; I marvel over your limpid baby-eyes that grow brownerand browner; and everlastingly I speculate about what you mean byall these things. But I do not understand. I can do everythingexcept that. You are not a reticent nature; I do not think yourmost unsparing critic could accuse you of being uncommunicative.And beyond doubt your naive and charming disclosures have a sweetclarity of their ownare, in fine, models of expositoryself-revelation. Onlyone does not know the language! One cannotknow it; one can find no way to the obscure code of your choosing.And so this whole period of your unfolding (a period that youyourself are going to forget while you are still only on the vergeof understanding it in our crass and arbitrary terms) baffles andmust baffle us. We admire, we gloat, we adore, we worshipbut O!how we want to understand! Perhaps you are the sole being in ourcosmos whom to understand perfectly would be not to love less.

Well, we watch you. Our eyes widen in wonderas we watch; all the unassuming and spontaneous tricks of yourdevelopment (and there is a new trick every day) are the historic,breath-bereaving events of our state. Today, it seemed a memorablething that you should have come, at some appalling hour hard aftermidnight, out of angelic sleep into a stratum of rubbing your eyesopen and murmuring silken murmurs. Later on, you paid by sleepinguntil half-past six, instead of waking on the hour and clucking tothe mother whose eyes are so quick to open at your calland thattoo seemed momentous. Those, perhaps, are things you have donebefore; things not unprecedented, but only faint departures fromyour charming amenable personality. Yet they stirred usmomentarily. Judge, then, how weyour mother Helen, your ecstaticgrandmother, your acquired Aunt Belle, and your daddy who managesthe type-machine better than the penpassed into a delirium of joywhen, kicking solemnly in your bath, you twisted with one alarminglurch out of your mothers arms and turned clean over on yourcherubic belly, there to seize the rim of your insufficient tub intwo dimpled fists (four dimples each!) and hold fast, smiling atEurope! That was a great moment in your lifein this first of yourlives, this serene and limpid shadow-existence across animpenetrable barrier from us who love and watch andwait... Thisafternoon, as you lay supine on the many-times-folded comforter,and wrestled to turn over, were you re-living that triumph of themorning, touching again in some dim reflex way the attitude of thatfirst thrilling experience? I suspect you were; I suspect you were,in your own devious and inexplicable way, remembering. Certainly,when I gave you a finger to clutch in the baby-fist of unbelievablesoftness and so supported just the needed half-ounce of propulsion,you gave me the same smile. Doubtless you thought you had done itall yourselfand spiritually you had! Spiritually, you were anexplorer in unknown lands, a voyager in uncharted seas. You weregreat; you were coping with the world, unafraid and radiant withhope. And I think you were remembering. But that is another of thethings we cant know. All we can know is, that I gave you a fingerthat knew its strength and your weakness, and so turned youover.