The House Without Windows/Historical Note
HISTORICAL NOTE
(By Another Hand)
IN the opening week of January, 1923, there appeared on the outside of a certain door within a dingy, sunless, and cramped apartment a slip of paper bearing the following typewritten notice:
Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. The person in the room if he agrees that one shall come in will say "come in," or something like that and if he does not agree to it he will say "Not yet, please," or something like that. The door may be shut if nobody is in the room but if a person wants to come in, knocks and hears no answer that means that there is no one in the room and he must not go in.
Reason. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone. The author of this odd manifesto (here reproduced with strict textual exactitude from the frayed original) was the author of the foregoing story, then just three months short of nine years old. The door on which it appeared was that of the room in which, on a small typewriter, she wrote down the adventures of Eepersip; and the week in which it appeared was that in which these adventures had their beginning.
She finished them, in the same room, three months later, early in the March of her ninth completed year and a few days after her birthday. One of her curious, slightly un-American inventions, I must here explain, was the concept of her own birthday as an annual occasion for handing out things to the other members of her family. She planned this story from the beginning as a gift for her mother on March 4. Would her mother "like" it, though? On that point there would have to be a disinterested opinion—as it happened, mine. With intense secrecy, behind the latched door of that room guarded by the constrained preparatory notice, she read me the instalments as they were produced.
My candid guess was that her mother would indeed "like" it. I liked it myself, if only as unconscious expression of a radiant physical vitality— so much I found in it of the mighty swimmer, the enjoyable young comrade of trail and river, always ready to swing a paddle tirelessly or carry ungrumbling a full fair share of pack. I liked it, too, as her answer to the one year which she had ever been called upon to spend in undeniably tawdry surroundings.
But, alas, there came interruptionsone ofthem in the shape of the only appreciable illness she has ever had—and these pulled down her average daily output. On her big days the small typist clicked off fresh copy to the extent of from four to five thousand words; but still the appointed morning caught her some pages short of the end. The tale came to Finis a few days later. Its length, in that first incarnation, was some 40,000 words, or not far from what it is now.
Up to that point there had been, of course, no thought of print. It was I who introduced the question of print; and it had at that time no connection whatever with publication. The author of the story never had (and never has) experienced any school system, public or private, her education having been exclusively the home-made one devised by her mother; and I was beginning to think it high time that print became a part of it. It was in fine, my idea that we ought to have a piece of her work put into type in some small shop where she could set part of it herself, pull her own proofs, learn more about proof-reading by correcting them, and see the whole thing through to the binding of a small armful of copies for her friends.
But before anything of that sort was done I wanted her to have the practice of revising her first copy as carefully as possible and putting it into strictly printable condition—as, indeed, she was eager to do. Accordingly she took it away with her in the summer, worked on it from early July through September in the intervals of swimming, canoeing, mountain-climbing, and plain day-dreaming, and brought it back, on the 5th of October, 1923, ready for print. Twenty-four hours later we left it in a burning building from which nothing got out but the lucky human occupants.
***
From the point of view of an admittedly fond parent—for I can make no slightest pretension to the ability to contemplate all this with a stranger's or a critic's detachment—it was heart-rending to watch the nine-year-old author torture her memory to the end of reconstituting the tale in its first shape. There were, during the next weeks, a good many blank hours at the typewriter, and it was slowly and painfully that page followed page. At this rate, it was going to take about three years merely to salvage what had once been manufactured out of the void in three months.
Then, one day in December, everything was suddenly different. As an experiment of despair, Barbara had stopped trying to remember the shape of sentences, the precise order and phraseology of details, and had begun to let the material come back as it listed. And to her astonishment it came in a freshet, like northern rivers when the ice goes out. When, a few days later, we put work aside to organize our makeshift Christmas, she was still in a happy glow, the first third of the fantasy existed again, and the story was running over its banks.
There followed one interruption after another, and it was not until the autumn of 1924 that the second draft was completed. In the late winter of 1924-25, Barbara worked patiently through the first third, putting it in what she hoped would be final shape. The manuscript had to be laid away in May of 1925, and was not touched again for nine months. Then, in February and March, 1926, she did her revision of the second and third parts, made a few minor improvements in Part I, and typed out a fair copy of the whole—the copy from which this little book is set.
To what extent is this twelve-year-old manuscript identical with the nine-year-old story? To a far greater extent, I am sure, than seems compatible with the huge number of hours spent on it since it was completed ; for it happens that a disproportionate number of those hours has gone into laborious, at times unconscious, recovery of the precise effects which were in the lost original. The differences are not where a stranger to the author would naturally look for them: that is, in the diction and the build of sentences. Barbara's vocabulary at nine was, of course, a stratified arrangement of deposits from Walter de la Mare[1] and George Macdonald,[1] W. H. Hudson[1] and Mark Twain, Shelley and Scott; that is to say, it was just what it is now except for the later addition of words which could not be in this story anyhow—the words of history, of science. And certainly the fundamental ideas and emotions of the story have undergone no change. The fact is, it was conceived and written at the end of a phase which could not return—that phase of normal childhood in which nature means nearly everything and civilization nearly nothing. The whole purport of Eepersip's existence is simply a healthy nine-year-old consciousness made articulate—something that an eleven-year-old could recover only by a feat of the memory, and an adult mind only by an improbable tour de force of the imagination. Barbara, in short, designed this curious narrative at the last moment when to do so would have been at all open to her. By no human possibility could it have been in her head at eleven if she had not had it down on paper at nine.
The chief differences, then, between the printed and the destroyed versions represent the inevitable development of the author's taste in minor particulars, and they are these: (1) There is appreciably less of the pursuit-and-escape device, and correspondingly more of the sheer revelling in natural beauty; (2) a great many exact measurements, in the form of dates, distances, rates, heights, and depths, have been omitted as realistic and therefore trivializing; (3) there is a somewhat maturer attempt to keep the fauna and flora consistent with latitude, altitude, and season; and (4) the lapse of time is managed rather more consciously and coherently than it was in the first place. If, in the treatment of these and other details of the story, there seems to he a progressive increase in maturity, that is a consequence and a measure of the nine months' interval between the author's revision of Part I and her revision of Parts II and III.
It will be observed that the differences involve little or no addition. The one piece of addition is in the episode of Eepersip's young sister Fleuriss, which is considerably more developed. The obvious reason for this is that the author's own young sister, at the time of the first draft, existed only as an insistent demand on Barbara's part; whereas in the period of the revision she was a dream fulfilled, subject to adoring daily observation.
As to ordinary literacy, there is no perceptible difference, and has been none since the typewritten by-products of Barbara's sixth and seventh years. In short, what the leader is here given is an articulate eight—and nine-year-old child's outpouring of her own dreams and longings in a fanciful tale, superficially revised by the hand of a twelve-year-old girl whose life on its more artificial side is made up principally of books and music.
***
It was the youthful author's idea, not mine, that her story should be accompanied by a ward 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 mother 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 yens 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; end they are therefore almost never expressed. Actually, 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 fives 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 the great objects of imaginative writing, I take it, is to have joy. Another, not wholly separable from the first, is to learn you go. I like to suppose that Barbara, turned twelve, is having her just share of both.
March, 1926