History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 36
CHAPTER 36
Opal Whiteley
By Elbert Bede
Elbert Bede, editor of the Cottage Grove Sentinel and one of the columnists previously considered, has been the Boswell of the amazing Opal ever since she came out of a Lane County logging camp to receive at his hands her first delicious taste of public notice. He first wrote about her as a religious leader of young people, then as a nature student, and when she leaped into sudden and international fame with her diary his brilliant articles were widely published and republished to satisfy the general curiosity about her. She has been the greatest mystery and the greatest sensation of Oregon literature. In this essay, especially written for this book, he has summarized her remarkable and enigmatic career.
About 20 years ago I was reporting a Junior Christian Endeavor convention in Cottage Grove and was astounded when informed that a 17-year-old girl from a nearby logging camp had been elected president. My newspaper instinct told me that here was to be found an unusual human interest story. I sought the girl. Her name was Opal Whiteley.
This was the olive-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed maid who, a few years later, as the author of The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart, published under the auspices of the Atlantic Monthly, staid beacon light of literature, was to precipitate the literary controversy of the century; was to present in that story a foster-parentage fantasy that drew into the controversy psychologists, scientists, astrologers, psychists, editors, ministers of the gopel, literary critics, and every person who had at any time known Opal; and that brought sorrow and embarrassment to many who believed themselves relatives of this fanciful and imaginative young woman. No other book, with an Oregon locale, no other Oregon author, has claimed so many hundreds of columns of gratuitous publicity.
The Atlantic Monthly had discovered something different, even though that magazine may have afterards wished the job had been left to others.
A volume would hardly suffice to summarize the personality of the nature-tutored child who at the age of six, so the diary would have us believe, confided her most intimate heart secrets to Michael Angelo Sanzio Raphael (a fir tree), and whose associates, instead of people, were Lars Porsena of Clusium (a crow), Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus (a most dear wood rat), Brave Horatius (a Shepherd dog), Peter Paul Rubens (a pet pig) and other characters with equally classical appellations. My first impression of Opal was that of a vibrant, fluttery, exotic, whimsical person, informed strangely beyond her years, eager, deeply earnest and seriously religious. She later became to mean inexplicable enigma.
Opal told me her plans for the Junior Endeavor for the coming year, already well advanced while the convention was yet in session. She was going out among the children of the state to tell them of God. She was going to interest them in Endeavor work through stories of His fairy creatures that roam the fields and flutter in the air. She was going to give them messages whispered by the flowers and trees, the flowing streams, the rocks of the mountains, the fairies of the air, the shells of the seas.
"How did you get your plans laid so quickly?" I wanted to know.
"I've been preparing for this for years," she explained innocently, frankly.
In various of Opal's excursions into fame circumstances seem to have been made to order for her, but she was no mean performer in laying backgrounds for her fantasies. Sometimes it has seemed uncanny, supernatural almost, the way circumstances have suited themselves to her plans.
Other characteristics should be known for their bearing upon the literary efforts of this waif of the mountains and logging camps. Although usually she fluttered from one unfinished thing to something else, she was capable, under stress, of a prodigious amount of work. She could apply herself at nerve-racking effort 12 to 16 hours a day over a considerable period.
This little maid, though having a huge fund of information upon many subjects, seemed totally unfamiliar with the ways of the world, so that many things which would have seemed utterly impossible to others did not in the least daunt her.
Opal could walk as an unknown person into a gathering of notables and with a childish, naive charm interrupt whatever was going on to introduce herself to each of those present. This was not discourtesy nor lack of breeding—it was Opal.
These several traits had considerable bearing upon the preparation of the tattered and torn diary in the manner in which I believe it was prepared, upon the accidental request for it from the Atlantic Monthly editor, and upon various things that happened during its publication.
Even Opal's name is peculiarly fitted to her character and personality. The stone is both transparent and opaque, and nothing better describes our Opal. The last definitely heard of her she had been accepted as a princess of India, through an alleged marriage of Henri d'Orleans, the angel father of the diary. The opal is believed by many to have magical qualities. How appropriate if Opal came out of India, land of magic and mystery, of glitter and glamor, a perfect setting for the fairy world in which this master of make-believe always lived.
Opal wrote The Journal of An Understanding Heart, but she never had an affair of the heart, probably because hers was an understanding one.
In her adolescent years Opal gathered geological specimens, and bugs and worms by the thousands, by the barrel. She garnered chrysalises by the bucketful and watched how God brought life to his fairies of the great outdoors. Somewhere, somehow, she gained a prodigious amount of knowledge about these things. Without having completed a high school course, this little maid of mystery presented herself at the University of Oregon, where entrance requirements were waived because of her knowledge of geology, astronomy and biology. She became an indifferent student.
Opal made friends quickly, but intimate association usually was short lived. However, she had an uncanny way of getting acquaintances to assist her financially.
After a year or two at college, during which she was the subject of many news stories, Opal decided to give her life to conducting nature classes for children and went to Los Angeles for that purpose. A woman she had met but once furnished the money for the trip.
The nature classes did not do so well. Opal therefore decided to become an author in a big way. Just as a starter, she decided upon a comprehensive volume, The Fairyland Around Us. It was to be profusely illustrated, to be bound in genuine leather and to sell for $10. She listed a number of volumes to follow.
Opal, though ill from an accident, undertook to finance the publication. All funds from her nature study classes, all that could be secured from admiring friends, went into the production of the book, but were not sufficient. Opal, so lacking in worldly wisdom, then solicited contributions from such persons as An drew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and actually got money from some of them. Still funds were not sufficient for the purchase of color plates. Somewhere, however, Opal secured picture cards of the desired subjects and laboriously pasted these into her books, copies of which are in a number of Oregon libraries. A leaflet advertising the book carried expressions of wondering admiration from such persons as Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, Theodore Roosevelt, Nicholas Murray Butler, Gene Stratton Porter and others of equal prominence. No worldly wise author ever dreamed of launching a first book under such auspices.
Sales were not sufficient to satisfy the ambitions of Opal, so she decided to offer the Atlantic Monthly the privilege of completing publication. A kind woman provided funds for the trip to Boston.
So far as I know no money borrowed has ever been returned.
Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was not interested in The Fairyland Around Us, but—here again the unusual circumstances that fitted into Opal's plans—he was struck by the personality of the girl from the Oregon wildwood. Such a girl must have kept a diary that might make interesting reading. Certainly there was a diary, and it was all that Sedgwick had expected and more, much more. Opal, with no thought of selling it to the Atlantic, had a background all prepared and plans all laid to make the impossible seem probable.
With the publication of the diary came the first intimation to relatives and friends that Opal claimed foster parentage.
Opal was born, according to the Whiteleys, at Colton, Washington, 22 years before the publication of the diary. Opal herself said, at the time of its publication, that she was born in a far land where she had roamed the fields with an angel mother and an angel father, that while the child of the Whiteleys was being taken to Wendling, Lane County, Oregon, the Opal we know was put in place of the Opal born to the Whiteleys. The Whiteley Opal, it was claimed, fell into water while the exchange was being made and the mother left with the foster child without knowing that her own had been saved. During the publication of the diary Opal wrote that the first Opal had been saved from the water and that trace had been secured of her, but nothing developed.
If the Opal we know is not a daughter of the Whiteleys, it was by a most remarkable combination of circumstances that the foster child, substituted without advance arrangements, bore such a strong resemblance to members of the Whiteley family that even the father, who had come on ahead, did not suspect the substitution. It is even more remarkable that the substituted Opal asked for a dog Ginger (not the Brave Horatius of the diary), a little red chair and other things that the original Opal had left at Colton.
Opal has often been spoken of as of lowly origin, but there was nothing about the Whiteley parentage to be renounced. They cared well for their children, and the mother, saved by death from the embarrassment of the diary, is spoken of by those who knew her as having been a woman of education and refinement.
Family pictures prove beyond reasonable doubt that Opal is a Whiteley, but in mental characteristics she fits more the place her supposed child fantasy gives her. However, at least one member of the Whiteley family has an imagination as lively as Opal's and once explained away the foster parentage claim with a story as fanciful as any of Opal's.
The diary which Sedgwick wanted, sent post haste from Los Angeles to Boston, was in 50 or 60 cardboard boxes, all of it supposed to have been written in Opal's younger years, and supposed to have been torn into shreds by a younger sister who didn't approve of Opal's love for nature and her conversations with trees, bees, pigs, bugs and other things.
Opal's family moved many times and Opal lived in various places besides home. According to Opal's own story, she guarded the diary carefully, but I have in years of effort found but three persons who ever saw any of it and they only saw one box. Surely a girl guarding 50 or 60 cardboard boxes would have attracted some attention. At the home where she was received in Los Angeles no such collection of boxes arrived, but after she had been in Los Angeles two years there was such a collection. At this home, where Opal lived six months, she spent long nights printing on paper. Reference books in that home and in the Los Angeles library—by another chain of circumstances probably—were well thumbed where appeared things that were also word for word in the diary. Possibly Opal was merely comparing her childish work with these books which, incidentally, contained much about Henri d’Orleans, adopted by Opal for parentage.
After Opal had been with the Atlantic Monthly for some time, various relatives in Oregon received mysterious letters and valuable presents from Boston, purportedly from persons in the employ of Opal's real relatives. A long story could be written about these, but briefly the letters stated that the persons writing them had always been near Opal since the time of her substitution, to watch her and keep from her her parentage. The presents were rewards from Opal's estate to the Whiteleys for the care they had given her. The letters were written by someone intimately acquainted with persons and events in Cottage Grove. They told an involved story of Opal's parentage that gave a perfect background for the diary running in the Atlantic and for the cleverly concealed acrostics in French adroitly brought into the diary and discovered by accident after the diary had gone into book form. These acrostics pointed directly to Henri d’Orleans as the father of Opal. One of them is as follows:
I did sing it le chant de fleurs that Angel Father did teach me to sing of Hiacinthe, Eclaire, Nenufar, Rose, Iris, et Dauphinelle et Oleandre, et Romarin, Lis, Eglantier, Anemone, Narcisse et Souci.
The first letters of the names of the flowers spell Henri d'Orleans. Wasn't that something for a seven-year-old? I am firmly convinced that Opal had aid in Los Angeles in preparing these acrostics.
It is significant that the angel mother, so tenderly referred to by Opal, is not pointed out in the acrostics, most likely because no biography shows that d'Orleans ever married. The acrostics also give much intimate information found in the will of d'Orleans, a copy of which—here is that odd chain of circumstances again—was in the Boston library. Also in this library were books by d'Orleans, whole sections of which must have been taught Opal by her father, for they appeared in what Opal claimed was written by her at the age of six or seven.
Information in my voluminous files show that Opal was not only piecing together and transcribing the tattered and torn heart throbs of childhood—in itself a sufficient task; she not only was spending much time in the Boston library; but she also had a secret establishment in which were prepared the letters purport ing to come from the mysterious persons who were guarding her. It was she who sent the presents. I have said that Opal was at times a prodigious worker.
During publication of the diary there came to me many strange letters—some of them weird almost—that laid a background for the foster-parentage fantasy of the diary. One of these was from Opal herself and a second letter accompanying it explained that the first letter was written soon after Opal went to Los Angeles, and had not been mailed because it had been mislaid in a box containing part of the diary. That it had been written years before was proved by the three-cent stamp it bore, that denomination having been out of use for several years. This incident proves that Opal was for some purpose poring over the diary in Los Angeles. Was she embellishing it with the foster-parent age fantasy and the acrostics?
Another mysterious letter, bearing the telltale three cent stamp, contained pictures that purported to be of Opal's real father, of her real grandfather and of her real uncle. I was unable to find pictures of the d'Orleans family with which to compare them, but an expert, not knowing the history of the pictures, said that the one of the grandfather and the one of Opal were undoubtedly of persons of the same family. I have no doubt Opal contrived the mailing of these, but if they had been what they purported to be she certainly wouldn't have parted with them to send on a strange journey to me. Anyone else, wishing to aid Opal, certainly would have sent them to her instead of to me.
With all these plans so well laid long before the jaunt of Opal to Massachusetts' center of culture, I have often wondered what plans she had made to give the diary to the public. And then how Ellery Sedgwick should accidentally ask for this diary.
Yet this diary of childish romance and of an impossible foster-parentage fantasy was not all hoax and plagiarism, for it contains intimate details of things known to have happened at the time Opal was a child—the births of children who have been identified, a girl burned to death, a suicide, visits of various persons, persons identified by the intimate descriptions of them, things that could have been remembered in de tail only by being recorded at the time they happened. Whole sections are the beautiful, innocent, sincere un veiling of the heart of a precocious tot in composition childishly expressive; fact and fancy so cleverly inter woven as to be almost inseparable; improbable and probable imagery told with the same naive charm, humor, tragedy, human interest; everything a story should contain for sustained interest. These were enough to have assured Opal a niche in the hall of fame, to have proclaimed her a literary genius, to have brought her a welcome from the literati.
It is my belief that what was presented to Ellery Sedgwick—at least what he examined before he staked his own reputation and that of his magazine upon its genuineness—appeared to be the kind described in the preceding paragraph, the kind that would have been accepted under such auspices as the Atlantic Monthly for what it pretended to be.
As it is, many want to know how a child of six could have a nimble familiarity with French yet never use a word of that language in conversation or at any other time; they want to know why The Fairyland Around Us contained many of the odd references and classical names later found in the diary when pieced together; they want to know why Opal couldn't re member at any time in her life the name of her father when at six or seven she constructed involved acrostics that named her father and all his family; they want to know how she could remember trivial things that happened when she was three years of age, yet couldn't remember her own name; they want to know why a child of five, just come from a foreign land, spoke the language of other children of five whom she found here. They refuse to believe that any mother could be so unnatural as to put her own daughter out of her life forever through a chance meeting with strangers and not stop to learn whether her own daughter was saved from water into which she had fallen. They want to know how a girl of six or seven became familiar with classical names given her pets, some of them based on the physical characteristics of the persons whose names were taken, peculiarities known to few scholars who had searched libraries of the world. For example, lambs were named for the personal characteristics of Diogenes.
I haven’t the least doubt that a large part of Opal's diary is hoax and a large part plagiarism. I have presented facts that show the foster-parentage claim impossible, but—
Those who wish to believe in Opal will point out that Opal, who has never returned to the scenes so beautifully described as those of her childhood, embarked for Europe with a confidential document signed by our secretary of state and Sir Edward Grey of England, who became acquainted with Opal in this country through Ellery Sedgwick; they will point out that someway Opal was countenanced by the mother of d’Orleans, who probably financed Opal's trip to India; they will point out that there is strong evidence that Opal was accepted for at least a time as a relative of His Royal Highness, the Maharana of Adaipur, ruling Indian prince. Opal would have been satisfied with nothing less. From an Oregon logging camp to a princess of India was the way our little home town girl made good.
They will point out that there was a chance for the alleged substitution—and combinations of circumstances always seemed to favor Opal; they will point out that d'Orleans lived and died at a time to fit Opal's story; they will point out that if d'Orleans did not marry he might have had a reason for sending a daughter to a foreign land, or heirs to an estate might have contrived something of the sort; they will point out that the odd heirlooms, given Opal by a grand mother who had never seen her, while none went to any other member of the family, have never been fully explained; they will point out that Opal was the only nature-loving member of the family, which fits the d'Orleans parentage.
Could Opal's story be true and did she cast doubt upon it by her pains to give it background —by embellishments that tested credulity?
Would Opal's story be more amazing as fact or as fiction?
If it be only romance, why has not Opal given us another Arabian Nights?