Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters

By Barbara Newhall Follett

Born in 1914 into a literary family, Barbara Newhall Follett published her first novel with Alfred A. Knopf--THE HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS--when she was twelve. It was widely praised throughout the United States and Great Britain. Eleanor Farjeon, who composed the hymn "Morning Has Broken," wrote: "These pages simply quiver with the beauty, happiness, and vigour of forests, seas, and mountains.... I can safely promise joy to any reader of it. Perfection." 

In 1927 Barbara convinced her parents to let her sail on an old trading schooner from her home in New Haven, Connecticut, to Nova Scotia; and the following year Knopf published THE VOYAGE OF THE NORMAN D.--her remarkable description of the voyage. Barbara's literary career looked bright, but shortly before publication her father deserted his family for a younger woman. Barbara was devastated, but convinced her mother that their best recourse was to go to sea with their typewriters.

After ten months at sea Barbara met and fell in love with a sailor, Edward Anderson. After moving to New York during the early months of the Great Depression, Barbara began writing her third and last book--LOST ISLAND--which mirrors her own life and that of her wandering sailor's. Soon, however, she would meet a new beau, Nickerson Rogers. Both devotees of woods and mountains, the couple spent the summer of 1932 walking the Appalachian Trail from Katahdin to the Massachusetts border. After a year exploring Europe they married in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1934. Five years later, with the marriage failing, Barbara walked out of her home and was not heard from again. She was twenty-five.

Happily, Barbara left behind dozens of her remarkable, rich letters; descriptions of wilderness adventures; short stories (the later ones autobiographical); accounts of her imaginary world, Farksolia, and her semi-autobiographical novel, Lost Island  (now available from Farksolia). This book, compiled and edited by Barbara's half-nephew, tells the story of Barbara's life through her own words as well as those of her family and correspondents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Farksolia
• Release date: Aug 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996243124

Book preview

Barbara Newhall Follett

A Life in Letters

edited by Stefan Cooke

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Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters

By Stefan Cooke

© 2015 Stefan William Follett Cooke

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

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard 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

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 — Here (1914-1922)

Chapter 2 — The Cottage in the Woods (1923-1926)

Chapter 3 — To the Sea! (1927-1929)

Chapter 4 — New York City (1930-1931)

Chapter 5 — Life with Nick (1932-1939)

Chapter 6 — Gone

Barbara Newhall Follett online

for Barbara and her sisters

My heartfelt thanks to my wife, Resa Blatman, for her love and support;

to Grizzly, Minx & Little Mouse for furry distraction;

to Columbia University’s 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 Barbara’s flame flickering.

Introduction

Three years ago I visited the archive of Barbara Newhall Follett, my mother’s half-sister, at Columbia University in New York. I had little idea of what I would find, and the amount of material left me very happy indeed. Hundreds of letters, stories and essays long and short, poems, photographs, watercolors, press clippings, galley proofs, an account of Farksolia (Barbara’s imaginary world) and a lexicon of Farksoo (its language), Lost Island (a lost novel). I had only a few hours with this treasure and speed-read as much as I could, photographing the pages I wanted more time with. I returned a couple of months later and spent several leisurely days with Barbara and her mother, Helen, whose archive is also at Columbia.

The papers in Barbara’s and Helen’s fourteen boxes are organized by broad category and much of the material is undated and/or unidentified. Many pages are brittle and crumbling—some repaired with Scotch tape brown with age. No matter how careful I was, my table in Butler Library was covered with confetti. I couldn’t let Barbara disintegrate like this: I photographed almost everything. When the library closed I wandered the streets of the neighborhood nearby where Helen, Barbara, and her sister, Sabra, had lived eighty years earlier. I sat in the little park near Grant’s Tomb that two of their apartments had overlooked, trying to imagine what things were like back then.

Back at home I sorted through my thousands of digital photographs. The more I read, the more I fell in love with Barbara and the more I wanted to share her remarkable writing and life. I wrote a short biography and transcribed some of her stories and Lost Island for a website I had made, Farksolia. I posted a few letters and photos and some other bits and pieces, but soon realized that what I really wanted was a big book of Barbara on my shelf next to The House Without Windows, The Voyage of the Norman D., Magic Portholes, Stars to Steer By, and Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius. Her letters are so vibrant and generous—and her philosophy and yearning and lust for life so timeless—that I knew the best way to tell her story was through her own words. So I transcribed all of her letters and many of those of her correspondents, and did more research. And here—101 years after Barbara was born—is her big book.

A note about the editing. To borrow from my grandfather’s 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 weren’t. Likewise I’ve fixed a few of Barbara’s very rare mistakes for readability’s sake, as I think she would have liked. I’ve retained her preference for British over American spelling, although you’ll find that that preference tended to waver. I’ve also given her underlined words italics, and changed her double-hyphens to em dashes.

You’ll notice that several of Barbara’s earlier letters are unsigned. She often typed a draft, edited it by hand, then typed a clean copy for her correspondent. These drafts made their way into the Columbia archive many years later, while many of the signed letters were forwarded to Helen in the 1940s and ’50s, their recipients rightly thinking them worth keeping.

1

Here (1914-1922)

Barbara Newhall Follett was born on March 4, 1914, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her father (my grandfather), Roy Wilson Follett (1887-1963), was teaching English at Dartmouth College while her mother, Helen Thomas Follett (1883-1970), a former school teacher, stayed at home with Barbara and Helen’s mother—Lizzie Humphrey Newhall Thomas (1850-1934)—or Ding for short.

Barbara’s parents kept a diary for her early years. Several of the entries follow—almost all of them by her mother, but the first is Wilson’s.

11 August 1914

Blessed Barbaretta:

Do you mind if your daddy—an insufficient substitute in any case—scribbles you off a wee bit of a letter in propria persona, in lieu of diary? The fact, the persistent and inescapable fact, is that you’re a mystery to me. I watch you lovingly and lingeringly, by hours and multiples of hours; I hang on the queer motions of your hands; my spirit dissolves in ecstasies over the inscrutable things you do with your dimpled feet; I marvel over your limpid baby-eyes that grow browner and browner; and everlastingly I speculate about what you mean by all these things. But I do not understand. I can do everything except that. You are not a reticent nature; I do not think your most unsparing critic could accuse you of being uncommunicative. And beyond doubt your naive and charming disclosures have a sweet clarity of their own—are, in fine, models of expository self-revelation. Only—one does not know the language! One cannot know it; one can find no way to the obscure code of your choosing. And so this whole period of your unfolding (a period that you yourself are going to forget while you are still only on the verge of understanding it in our crass and arbitrary terms) baffles and must baffle us. We admire, we gloat, we adore, we worship—but O! how we want to understand! Perhaps you are the sole being in our cosmos whom to understand perfectly would be not to love less.

Well, we watch you. Our eyes widen in wonder as we watch; all the unassuming and spontaneous tricks of your development (and there is a new trick every day) are the historic, breath-bereaving events of our state. Today, it seemed a memorable thing that you should have come, at some appalling hour hard after midnight, out of angelic sleep into a stratum of rubbing your eyes open and murmuring silken murmurs. Later on, you paid by sleeping until half-past six, instead of waking on the hour and clucking to the mother whose eyes are so quick to open at your call—and that too seemed momentous. Those, perhaps, are things you have done before; things not unprecedented, but only faint departures from your charming amenable personality. Yet they stirred us momentarily. Judge, then, how we—your mother Helen, your ecstatic grandmother, your acquired Aunt Belle, and your daddy who manages the type-machine better than the pen—passed into a delirium of joy when, kicking solemnly in your bath, you twisted with one alarming lurch out of your mother’s arms and turned clean over on your cherubic belly, there to seize the rim of your insufficient tub in two dimpled fists (four dimples each!) and hold fast, smiling at Europe! That was a great moment in your life—in this first of your lives, this serene and limpid shadow-existence across an impenetrable barrier from us who love and watch and—wait... This afternoon, as you lay supine on the many-times-folded comforter, and wrestled to turn over, were you re-living that triumph of the morning, touching again in some dim reflex way the attitude of that first 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 unbelievable softness and so supported just the needed half-ounce of propulsion, you gave me the same smile. Doubtless you thought you had done it all yourself—and spiritually you had! Spiritually, you were an explorer in unknown lands, a voyager in uncharted seas. You were great; you were coping with the world, unafraid and radiant with hope. And I think you were remembering. But that is another of the things we can’t know. All we can know is, that I gave you a finger that knew its strength and your weakness, and so turned you over.

Just now, you lie up there, a tiny in a vastness of crib and coverlet, three hours deep in your own slumber-world of fairies and moonshine—looking so rare and radiant and beyond everything so beautiful that it’s only a wild surmise your being there at all a few minutes hence, when arms go out to you for the last meal and the goodnight. For you’re so precious a thing one doesn’t see how this world can hold you. Never, surely, did any being stay in it with so sweet a condescension, so absolute a sense of probation, so clear a conviction of being able to leave it at will. It isn’t really so: you can’t go if you will. You tried this afternoon, when it was hot and sticky, and you didn’t approve of things; you protested with wails, and tried your hardest to leave us. You were a material baby then, aetas five months, weight fourteen eleven. But now you are an age-long, ageless incarnation of the spirit, the rarefied essence, of Baby, a creature of dream and desire, and we know you could dissolve into a wish, and become only a dream-that-was-too-beautiful. And we don’t want you to go; we want, O how we want! you to stay. . .

20 August [1914]

My Lassie:

Your Helen-Mother is alone tonight, alone she has been since the very early and very foggy hours of Tuesday last. For it was then that your Daddy with pack on his back, tremendous shoes on his feet, and joy in his heart started forth to seek the freshness of the mountain. Not alone but with a sturdy camp companion (by name, Myron Fisher). He was glad to go, happy in the quest of fresh truth, new thoughts, and he knew that the mountains would give him both. A tired Daddy. Tonight I am thinking of him so hard. You, Blessed, are asleep in your big dream bed, and not even the thunder bolts disturb you or chase away the fairy moonbeams that surround you. Yes, you are very safe; but where is your daddy? Is he rolled up in his warm blanket, dreaming of us whom he sees in the stars, or is he seeking shelter somewhere from the cold winds and rains? How can we know? But we do know that he is with us—spiritually, that whether he is by his camp fire in a wild and strange wilderness, or whether he is sleeping rolled up in blanket and rain-coverings, he is thinking of his babe and her mother. We know that, and we are happy in the knowing.

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Barbara in her carriage

Are you missing your daddy, I wonder? You have been such a sleepless, restless, high-kicking lassie all day. But a twenty minutes snooze have you taken since you first began your chuckling at six o’clock this morning. You refuse with a very strong back-bone to lie on your back as much as you ought; in your carriage yesterday, you seized the rungs on each side and mighty near pulled yourself way up straight! And a finger held out to you is all you need, and up you came, smiles all over your chubby face.

And you were as funny tonight and clever too! As you lay on the soft covering on the floor drinking, you noticed the little white tassels on your blue socks. (You were wearing them because it was so cold today) and you seized and pulled and pulled, and still pulling you brought your little feet up very near your head, and then what seemed one more tremendous pull you rolled over and up you came on your little belly, smiling, nay, grinning. And you repeated the trick. Daddy’s finger was not there, but the string was! And that was what you needed!

O blessed little heart-joy asleep in your world of Brown-birds and fairies! How my arms ache for you now, how I long for the last meal hour (at ten) to come, that I may again feel the baby body, kiss the baby head, and tuck away the lassie for the long night. Do you know the tenderness that covers you? Do you know how a mother’s hands smoothes out the cover over you, how tenderly, reverently? You will never know till some day the magic time comes for you, my Blessed, to be even as I am now, a Mother.

In September the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where Wilson had a new job teaching English at Brown University.

12 October 1914

My Lassie:

You have been our greatest joy during all the weeks when time pressed us and when courage failed us. These were days of packing in Hanover during the first week of September and there were days of waiting in good friends’ rooms while your Daddy was nest-hunting in Providence; and then there was one great day when we three (Grandmother, you and I) came south in your first train (this was September 16) (and you were a sweet babe and a happy, playful one all the way down); and there was one greatest meeting with our Daddy at Providence (about 6:30 the same 16 Sept.); then came our first cab ride (and you snuggled up close in my arms, your eyes bright, big, wonderful) and we arrived! O that arrival at the new little cottage which our Daddy had found for us! How hard he had worked for us, and how lovely it looked. You, Blessed, knew you were home again, for you slept—O how you slept!—and the next day, and each succeeding day you were feeling tip-top; no more wakeful nights—for you were home again. And every day saw you grow more beautiful, more full of delightful capers. Then of a sudden came a [?] upon us all—on the 23 day of September your only Aunty—Aunty Belle died. I can scarcely believe now what I am writing. Your dear, dear Aunty whom we all loved, who loved you above all babes. You shall hear of her some day when you are bigger; I shall tell you things about her that will make you love her. But, Little One of Ones, no sorrow has come to you yet, no sorrow, no sickness, not a day’s worth. Just sunshine, joy, laughter, the Brown-Bird twitterings, and love, much love—these things are yours. And they shall be yours, my Precious, just so long as we can help and keep them yours.

Your mischievous capers are growing in number so fast that ’tis almost impossible to keep up with them. You roll and tumble about in your pen in a wondrous fashion; quick as a flash you are over now, first on your back, then on your belly and you hitch along at a pretty brisk rate. You do creep sometimes—you lift your body entirely off the floor—and then you almost leap forward. Strings are still your most happy playthings; little celluloid balls on a ribbon, Grandmother’s watch chain, the strap of your carriage: you love these very much. It happened when you were hardly 7 months old that you made the discovery of producing a noise by hitting two things together, and you (from that time) have been delighting us all with your whackings.

And today (one week later) you whacked your daddy with a very hard darning ball, you grasping the handle in your own chubby hand. You hit him hard on his face, and it hurt! But he invited it, for he had unrolled his long self in your 4x4 pen, and immediately he had become one of your playthings to do with as you liked. O that play hour for babes and grown-ups! From 5-6 each afternoon is your daddy’s most blessed luxurious time of the whole day. That hour is yours, my Darling, and only rarely does anything keep us away from you then. We watch you, and adore you. Tonight, when your Mother was about to offer you your usual water from your spoon, your little hands came forth and took the spoon, and into your mouth it went— water and all! And each time after that, you insisted upon feeding yourself with water. We called your Grandmother to witness! And she, of course, said something very silly about you!!

4 August [1915]

And this is 4 August! Babbie is seventeen months old. Where has the time gone; and why have I not written a word about my Babs, her tricks, her games and—her curls. The months have passed too swiftly; the little cottage at 68 Hazard Avenue has been so packed with busyness. Babbie’s father has spent his days (all out of college) and far too many nights at The Desk, the only desk—and the only at all comfortable place in the over-crowded (with people and things) house. O yes! There was lots to write about—which indeed was just the trouble. Babbie’s tricks multiplied with much speed; her outrageously roguish capers changed so during the hours of the day that a line or two, a word here and there would never have answered. Never.

And here it is 4 August. On the first day we moved up to the white house at 42 Hazard Avenue, and we have all been happily rushing from cellar to bed-rooms. From carpet hunting to picture hanging. And Babs has been supremely content through all. She loved her room on first sight; and when she woke up after her first nap, she said over and over again, Fwower. And indeed the paper on the wall is blossoming with small flowers. She loved the great hall upstairs. O what a run was there! And how she did poke into closets (huge ones) and squeal. Just plain joy and fun in her discoveries.

November 19 [1915]

A terrifically rainy and windy day. Miller’s house started on its journey yesterday; today it is in the field. Babbie looks at the cellar hole and says in her most tragic manner: Hool-how (house) gone, Mil how (Miller’s house). I reckon the little lass is convinced that her own house or that of anyone else’s may walk away at any time.

Tonight she played with Mater’s waste basket a long time, hiding in closets and then hunting for it. I said, Why don’t you put it on your head, Babbie? Immediately she stuck it on. Her head was entirely out of sight; and with that thing on she paraded round, waving her arms and giggling. One of the funniest things she ever did. And she knew it was funny! She’s only 20 months old!

Two months later, 16 January, 1916

A lot of things have piled up during these last two months, months so full of baby activity, baby growth development and change.

1. Just when Babs began to insist upon knowing her letters, I can’t remember. I do remember, however, that she did insist, and that she would put her finger upon a letter and come to me. I told her, and that was the end of it for the nonce. Today she knows every letter in the alphabet. Yesterday she was confused over V calling it A. Today she knows the difference.

2. When she began to want to count, I don’t remember; some weeks ago, however, she imitated her Grandmother who said, 1, 2, 3 and at 3 dropped her little bunny into the waste paper basket. Well, today and yesterday she counted up to 10 quite correctly.

3. Her love for books began quite distinctly when she was a year old. Now books are her passion. She knows all her nursery rhymes, filling in words anywhere; she knows and adores (thus showing her good taste) The House That Jack Built, The Two Bad Mice, Curly Locks book and—two oddities in juvenile fiction at any rate she loves: one is a small paper leaflet called A Grammar for Thinkers (!) and the other a catalog of Harvard College (!). Her love for [A Grammar…] comes from her love for commas, and periods! (Ridiculous!) The Lady Babs brought the book to me, and with her tiny (not so very, though) forefinger pointing out the curious marks, asked me what they were. We made commas on paper, I guiding the pencil held in the small hand. More commas, she cried. And on we went, making commas and periods and various letters.

4 March and thereabouts [1916]

Babs now makes herself clear upon nearly all subjects relating to her desires and needs. Her expression is not clear in all cases: S is still hard; and she has a tendency of compressing all words of more than one syllable into one syllable: handkerchief is hank; Hattie is Hat; Mother is Mire; bottle is bot; potato is tate; etc. When she does use two syllables, she invariably accents the second: papū; Dedée. We noticed that nouns come first, verbs second, then adjectives and their prepositions. Now she says easily: Mère plee get book on table, and when asked: Can you see it? Babs answers: I can see it. When asked, What can you see? she begins like this: I can see table; I can see book; I can see lamp; I can see kim (chimney out the window; I can see (s)moke. Etc.

She knows all her letters (and has for some time), and is delighted to read them over sign boards, books, what-not—even sees them when they don’t exist, as for example—in certain accumulations of dust on the ceiling! She sees A’s in the angle created by a door open letting in either sunlight on the ceiling, or light from the electric lamp in the hall.

She knows The House that Jack Built, from the end to the beginning, with only a that interpolated by someone. And, of course, she has known for some time her Mother Goose rhymes. She still adores books of letters (large ones) and bristling with commas and periods and question marks.

Her associative imagination is vivid. For instance, a goose girl given to her at Christmas time (a goose girl with stick in hand, driving two geese—mechanical) has given her all sorts of ideas about wheels. She called the egg-beater, goo-girl!

August 21, 1916

Barbara playing on the piano: as she strikes some bass notes she says: Sounds like a punder tower (thunder shower) down there.

20 October 1916

Ding playing Pussy can sit by the fire with one hand, and humming the air; Bar rocking in the brown chair. When Ding gets through, Bar says: Pretty good for Granma!

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Barbara reading with her father

8 December 1916 [by Wilson]

Bar, sitting astraddle of Daddy’s knee, in Mère’s room. Two lighted candles on the bureau, throwing shadows. "Two daddies on the wall, and (laying a delicate forefinger on Daddy’s nose) one Daddy in the green chair, and that makes free of ’em.

Sunday, 25 March [1917]

Eleven or twelve people in library, drinking tea, talking war; Barbara peeking in at dining room door then running away again. Oh! I am so frightened! Barbara upstairs to Ding: Now I’m going downstairs to be frightened again!

5 April 1917

Barbara, 3 years 1 month old (Apr. 4). She recognizes instantly the following words, learned from her Primer (Aldine Method): 1. come 2. away 3. and 4. play 5. run 6. rain 7. ring 8. some

These words she knows anywhere either in caps. or small letters. We prophecy that in 3 months she will know how to read almost anything in the book.

6 April 1917

Several new words recently added to B’s vocabulary: protect disturb muddy

She learned the word protect when she was told that the jacket of her pussy willow protects it. Then she used the word in this way: "The wires protect the little trees from the dogs and horses, don’t they Mother?"

20 April 1917

Barbara on her stool being dressed in the bathroom, and playing with a tooth brush which she held up to the faucet, pressing it tightly so that the water spatters delightfully. See Mother, the water is butterflying! She calls that brush her butterfly brush, the other brush her swigging brush.

September 1917

This book is dusty. I find trouble in settling down to write anything; for some time it has been an impossible thing to finish any definite task. War, I suppose, has made us all restless, has made us more aware than ever of the littleness of each of us, of the futility of all things that are.

Barbara is 3½ years old; a splendid and beautiful creature, well, keen, acquisitive, unfathomable, and inexplicable. She is now using the Corona typewriter intelligently: she has discovered the way of rolling in the paper, of turning the roll and spacing and she knows all about the little bell and what one is supposed to do on hearing it. She writes letters over and over again, and three or four words: to, come, away, bluebird. I have an idea the typewriter will interest her more in words and spelling than anything else.

[ca. November 4, 1917]

Barbara at 3½ years and two months old.

In these past two months she has caught on to the reading game with (to us) astounding rapidity and never ceasing eagerness. She has almost finished her first Primer. I am using the Aldine Primer and like it immensely; and I can truthfully say and bring witness to court that B. can read anything in the book through the snowflake story, which is, I believe, the next to the last story in the book. And the words she has learned in this book she recognizes wherever she sees them and in any context whatever.

In counting she can easily reach 100 and has got on to the scheme of the counting business after 100. Addition and subtraction from 1-10 are perfectly easy for her.

One of her favorite games and the one we (B. and I) most frequently resort to as we loiter our way across the field is the rhyming game. What rhymes with ‘girl’? But Bar will not only say: curl, pearl, and others but will make up words which if they don’t mean anything at least show that she understands perfectly the rhyming scheme.

"Motor, motor come along

Linger, binger, dinger dong"

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As is shown by the above which we call Bar’s first poem and which filtered down to us (just as I have written it) from her crib when she composed the thing during her rest hour or two.

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According to Wilson’s essay Schooling without the School (Harper’s Monthly Magazine, October 1919), Barbara’s first typewritten letter was to Cousin Helen in June 1917. The first letter in the archive at Columbia, however, is the following from 1918. Helen’s accompanying note suggests that this was in fact her first letter on the typewriter. Wilson was almost a year off.

Helen’s note reads: This is to tell you something that may surprise you—that Barbara really wrote every word of the enclosed letter (!), and also addressed the envelope. Of course, I dictated the spelling, but the actual writing, she did, including commas and periods and capitals. No mean accomplishment for a not quite four year old typewriter-lady!

March 16, 1918

Dear Cousin Helen:

I love the birds, I love the dish, and I love the card. I pasted the little birds into the little book all alone, but ’cept the first one Mother did. The birds were broken, but Mother mended them with glue. Thank you very much.

Barbara Newhall Follett.

March 22, 1918

Yesterday was Barbara’s Daddy’s birthday—31. He is out of the draft age now, which, of course, will make no difference. He said he’d like to get into the motor-truck driving for the Red Cross—carrying supplies from the wharves to the store-house. If he desires to, he may. Provided, of course, he can get me out of this financial snarl first. Once on my feet, I shall, I think, be all right; but I don’t like the idea of carrying too much all at once.

Barbara has had her flower birthday, on the fourth. A pot of yellow daffodils tied with silver and yellow; four groups of four small candles on the four sides of the table; two larger candles on her bureau, and that is all. But it was very pretty; and the little fairy-yellow girl was the most beautiful of all.

Barbara has a little girl (her favorite, I think, of 29) named Bunny. Last night Bunny was put to bed on Ding’s couch, covered with Ding’s yellow shawl and Barbara’s own brown blanket, which she has over her every night. Now, it grew colder during the night, and I didn’t like to leave Barbara without her blanket. So before I went to bed, I took away from Bunny the brown blanket, and put it over Barbara. Was 12 midnight when a baby cry came and woke me: She’ll be cold! She’ll be cold. I had to go to Bar, and actually take off that brown blanket, carry [it] down into Ding’s room (Ding, being sound asleep) and put it back on the couch where there was literally nothing, but imaginatively, Bunny.

By a great deal of skillful planning (it was skillful, if one takes in mind that I was waked out of a sound sleep for all this) I persuaded Bar to let me put her pink puff on Bunny, and bring back the brown blanket.

Things are at this point now. Barbara is calling, she wants to get up.

In 1919 Wilson swapped teaching for editing. He got a job at Yale University Press and the family rented a house in Cheshire, a few miles north of New Haven, Connecticut.

Barbara was home-schooled with assignments provided by her mother. Writing letters was always part of the curriculum, and over the years she had several regular correspondents—the first being Holdo Teodor Oberg, who ran an antique restoration shop in the Hoppin-Homestead building at 357 Westminster Street in Providence. Mr. Oberg was born in Sweden in 1855, came to the United States when he was two, and became a citizen in 1920. Barbara loved his shop because of all his ticking clocks— at the time her favorite things.

Cheshire, Connecticut

11 March, 1919

Dear Mr. Oberg:

I love Mrs. Clock a thousand-millions. She is up on my book-case and wakes me every morning at seven o’clock. But Mr. Clock is on the dining-room shelf and I don’t like him so well as I used to because he stops very often.

I thank you very very much.

Your little friend

Barbara.

Cheshire, Connecticut

June 14, 1919

Dear Mr. Oberg:

Thank you for the little picture of the roosters and the rabbits; I love it very much. I am going to put a little hinge on it so I can see the pictures and read the letter; I am going to paste it in my scrap-book.

Your little friend,

Barbara Newhall Follett

Cheshire, Connecticut

13 July, 1919

Dear Mr. Oberg:

The goldfinches come every afternoon and eat their supper on the clump of bachelor’s-buttons right on the left-hand side of the path that leads from the back door to our road. There are ten goldfinches, five males and five females. Before they eat their suppers, they sit on the clothes-line and swing in the breeze. I wish you could be here to see them.

Day before yesterday Daddy killed a snake in the potato-patch; then he threw the snake away with a stick, and then he threw away the stick. The next day Ding and I went down Ridgeview Place, and there were the snake and the stick. The snake was about three feet long.

Grandfather Bunny has lost his right eye, and I stuck in a black and blue pin.

One day last week Ding and I went down to the orchard and sat among the brown-eyed Susans and had a picnic. I took two Bolivar cookies and some bread-and-butter sandwiches in my lunch-basket.

We have some enormous pink hollyhocks in the flower-garden, and lots of white ones. A few of the flowers have gone to seed, but new ones are coming all the time.

Barbara.

Cheshire, Connecticut

28 September, 1919

Dear Mr. Oberg:

Please come back with Mother and Daddy.

Thank you very much for Peter, the painting-book, and the little animal eyes for Grandfather Bunny and Peter.

Love from

Barbara

An excerpt from my grandfather’s Schooling without the School, mentioned above.

She will sit for a whole afternoon, if the day be warm, on the thick velvet turn of the drying lawn, her crowd of toy animals surrounding her; and when she comes in she will go in sober silence to the typewriter and set down the home-made lyric which has been evolving in her head all that time:

The animals walk in the animal-patch,

Sometimes the whole day through.

And whenever any strange thing comes along

They frighten it away.

The rabbits are the best of all.

They néver bite ánybod´y at áll.

And then she will come to me with music-paper and insist that I write down the home-made tune as she hums it; after which she will copy in the words under the proper notes and pick out the melody on the piano from the notes. Who will say that the animal-patch does not mean more to her that day because she knows she is going to signalize it, to her own liking, in song, and more the next day because she has so signalized it the day before?

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Mr. Oberg’s portrait of Barbara, 1919

Cheshire, Connecticut

February 15, 1920

My dear Mr. Oberg:

Nonillion happiness from Barbara that you’ve got an old-fashioned spinning wheel; I can hardly wait for it to come, I am so anxious to play great-great-grandmother.

And, Mr. Oberg, I have a surprise that I got for Christmas, and we’ve got to go all through this performance for you to see it—you’ll see when the time comes.

One day I tried to make a dress for Grandfather Bunny out of green cloth but I could not make it; so finally we discovered a dress of red velvet. Now he has three petticoats, one to wear in the winter and two to wear in the summer—the red velvet dress, and a white collar that he wears with it.

From your little friend

Barbara

Cheshire, Connecticut

March 5, 1920

My dear Mr. Oberg:

Nonillion thanks to you, Mr. Oberg, for the letter in poetry about the little yellow chair, the dear little pictures that go with it, and the chair itself.

I will now tell you how Daddy and I got the chair. As it happened, the box was hidden in the Post-Office; Daddy took me out on my sled, and he, himself, went on skiis. When we started home Daddy put the box on the sled and me on the box.

When we got home the box was opened in the living-room, as we call it, and we all stood around. Grandfather Bunny sat on the top of the box! Pretty soon the box was open, and there in it was the BEAUTIFULLEST yellow chair in the world!

There was one thing that was missing: it was you, YOURSELF.

Love to the little boy from

Barbara

[March 20, 1920]

My dear Mr. Oberg:

You asked me if Grandfather Bunny’s pink eyes were both there, and so I will tell you: they are.

The surprise that you wondered about is a giraffe, at least I think it is; but he is a funny giraffe, for his neck is short, and he isn’t spotted like most giraffes but is brown all over. He has short ears, and so I think he might possibly be a brown lop-eared rabbit.

Love from

Barbara

April 26, 1920

My dear Mr. Oberg:

Thank you very, very, very much for the little card with the picture of the three rabbits on it, and the little song that you made up for it.

Now that the snow has melted and the skiis and snowshoes are put away, I am climbing trees and bushes, digging holes with sticks, picking ferns and other things such as maple blossoms, and that’s about all.

Love from the little girl to the little boy.

Barbara

Cheshire, Connecticut

May 7, 1920

Dear Ding:

Thank you very much for the little May baskets; they are lovely, and I’m going to put flowers in them.

I’m now going to tell you something that will make you very happy: The bluets are in blossom, and the violets and dandylions are beginning to blossom.

The butterflies are coming fast now. Sometimes I sit down in a chair and suddenly I see a white Butterfly fly in circles about the potato patch; and I jump from my seat and run after it and see it alight and I tiptoe up to it, and I am just about to open my fingers to take it by the wing when away it would fly.

I miss you terribly. I hope you will be back before the buttercups come because I want you to see every one of them.

A week ago Daddy and I went into the woods and found some yellow Adders tongue and some anemones.

The maple blossoms have come and gone, and the trees are light green with leaves now. I think by the time you come home the trees will be dark green with leaves and that you can’t see Mrs. Woodbury’s house because the trees will be so thickly covered with leaves.

Love from

Barbara

Friday night,

14 May, 1920

Dear Barbara:

I am extremely sorry to be obliged to tell you that it is impossible to take the wheels off the bear without taking him completely apart; and if I did that, I am afraid I might spoil him so that he would never be the same bear again. Perhaps when Mr. Oberg comes to see us he can do something about it; but for my part I am afraid to try, because it would be dreadful if I should ruin the distinguished appearance of so splendid an animal. I am sure you will be patient about it, even if you are a trifle disappointed.

Your

Daddy.

Cheshire, Connecticut

June 23, 1920

Dear Fox:

Thank you very much for the little ivory elephant and for the little Japanese book. I like them both very much.

You should come and see my new animals. One of them is a little brown squirrel with a strip of white running down his front. Her head turns, her arms turn, her tail turns, and her feet turn. Her real name is Frisk Squirrel, but she is Grandfather Bunny’s little sister and so I shall call her Little Sister.

[Oct. 19, 1920]

Observatory Place,

New Haven, Connecticut.

Dear Mr. Oberg:

We are now living in the new house, and I should like ever so much to have you come to see me.

Barbara

At four chapters and thirteen pages, The Life of the Spinning-Wheel, the Rocking-Horse, and the Rabbit was Barbara’s first substantial story. She completed a sequel, the sixteen-page Mrs. Spinning-Wheel, Mr. Rocking-Horse, and Mr. Rabbit Go Traveling, on June 21, 1921.

Observatory Place

New Haven, Conn.

March 30, 1921

My dear Mr. Oberg:

As you wanted me to tell you the flowers are coming very fast, and now I suppose the wild flowers will begin to come. But I don’t think we shall find many buttercups and daisies because they like the open places, and we have the woods—but still we may find a few in the fields across the roads. I think we shall find some violets, and the wood flowers will be very thick.

The crocuses and snowdrops have even gone by. The yellow forsythia is on its way out, just as the little brook is on its way to join the big river.

You have read the Spinning Wheel, the Rocking-Horse, and the Rabbit, haven’t you? Well, I am beginning a new adventure of how they got traveling to China. If you will come to see me I will read it to you.

Many thanks for the beautiful card you sent me.

With love from Barbara to Mr. Oberg.

Margaret (Peggy) Tilson (1912-2004) was the daughter of John Q. Tilson, Connecticut representative in Congress (and future House Majority Leader), and his wife, Marguerite. The Tilsons owned property on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire—a place that will become very special to Barbara.

Observatory Place

New Haven, Connecticut

July 25, 1921

My dear Peggy:

This morning I made a house, and I think you would like to hear about it. It was a nice big house because I used all the front piazza to make it. Do you remember that the smaller of the two piazza rugs was right in front of the front door? Well, I moved that rug over to the right hand side of the piazza, and there I put the dining-room table and chairs. The table was a stool, and the chairs were just two chairs.

On the big rug I had the bedroom with two beds in it. One was intended for Ding because she said she would play, but she didn’t, and the bed is still there. The beds are made on one rocking chair for each. Each bed has two pillows, one to sit on, and the other to put your head on. One bed has three blankets and one towel for covers, and the other bed has only one rug for both a blanket and spread.

I now have the ice-chest to describe. Do you know the hole around the corner of the piazza? Well, I pretend that that is my ice-chest, and that there is a string sticking out of it. On that string there are the names of anything that anybody would keep in an ice-chest. If you want anything out of the ice-chest you pull the string until the word comes up that is the name of the thing you want; for instance, if you want the pudding you pull the string until the word ‘pudding’ comes up (of course you would keep pudding in an ice-chest); when you see the word ‘pudding’ you take hold of it with your thumb and fore-finger and pull, and if the pudding doesn’t come up first there is something wrong with the ice-chest. While you are pulling on the string, looking for the word that is the name of the thing you want, the things inside are churning round and forming a line that will let what you want come up first. Don’t you think that is a remarkable ice-chest inside of a nice house, Peggy?

I hope you will be home on the twenty-eighth as you said in your secret. Thank you for the letter you wrote me, and such a nice one, too.

Barbara Follett

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Observatory Place

New Haven, Connecticut

August 20, 1921

My dear Mr. Oberg:

The Beads you sent me are very beautiful, and I send you ever so many thanks for them. I think it was awfully nice of you to buy them and send them with Mother’s ring. I wonder if the silver-colored beads with the red tassel at the end of them are silver, or steel, or lead, or what? The three little shells are sweet, and I think they are just as beautiful as the beads. I thank you for them, also. The chain of tiny fragile beads is so beautiful that I shall probably hang them on the Christmas Tree next Christmas.

We have been going down to a certain beach called Indian Neck every Wednesday, and I have learned to swim the Dog Paddle. Once the tide was low enough for me to go out to the raft. I went out and jumped off and I bounced on the sand the way a tennis ball would bounce on the sidewalk; I wasn’t afraid to jump off because the salt water was only up to my neck.

Now, we can’t go down to the beach any more because we are going off camping either Tuesday or Wednesday. We are going to camp on the Tilson’s land in a big 12 x 14 that Daddy bought. We are going to sleep on three folding cots which are even more comfortable than Cousin Hattie’s beach beds which I slept in once on a visit.

The eagle story which you translated for me is so interesting that I am going to take it away with me to read to the children, and to myself. A million thank-yous for taking that trouble to translate it. I like especially the part where Truls rescued the princess from the giant.

Over the hills for

columbine,

The flower is red

It is yours; it is mine

The sweet

columbine.

[The letter at Columbia ends here.]

Observatory Place

New Haven, Connecticut

November 29, 1921

My dear Mr. Oberg:

This is Barbara Newhall Follett speaking through the telephone that goes from New Haven to Providence.

I want to tell you about what I did Monday. My dancing teacher gave a lecture at the Westville club-house, and she had some of the children dance for her. I danced The Seven Jumps and The Crested Hen in little Swedish costumes. First I will describe the costume I wore to the club-house: It consisted of a little red jacket embroidered with worsted work, a little red frontpiece with a strip of black velvet across the top and a patch of beads on the front, a little black skirt with three red strips of cloth on the bottom, a little red belt with beads sewed in the shape of flowers and stars on it, and a little red cap covered with beads also sewed in the shape of flowers and stars. I wore all of that in The Crested Hen except the skirt, which was too short to wear in the dance. The Seven Jumps costume consisted of a pair of black pants, a stocking cap with a tassel at the end, and a white vest with yellow and black stripes on it. It was the first time I ever danced before so big an audience.

I should love to see your new cat, but I am too far away to come today. The name of your cat is about right, but there is no q u in our cat’s name. Our cat’s name is just Booskey. I thank you very much for the postage stamps. Goodbye Mr. Oberg.

And now Barbara Newhall Follett hangs up the receiver.

With love from

Barbara Newhall Follett

to her most loving friend

Mr. Oberg

Observatory Place

New Haven, Connecticut

December 28, 1921

Dear Mrs. Day:

Thank you ever so much for the lovely orange-colored bag you sent me. It is exquisite and the nuts in it are very good. I shall keep them in it until it is empty, and then I shall go down town with a piece of sunshine in my hand. I think it is too beautiful to keep money in, so I’ll carry it only for beauty and keep money in something else. I think it would be wonderfully beautiful with my Tarantella costume, which is all lovely blue and gold. The Tarantella costume was also one of my Christmas presents. Grandmother made it out of material sent by my dancing teacher, Mrs. Wallace.

Just now I am quite interested in the orchestra. When I was dancing into the Christmas room, Christmas Morning, I heard four faint tinkles. I was very curious to know what they were, but I didn’t say anything for quite a while; in fact, I didn’t say anything about it until my dance was over. And then Mother said: Did you hear any tinkling while you were out in the hall? And I said: I did, only I didn’t know exactly what it was. Then I went round shaking everything on the tree, to see if it made a tinkle like the one I had heard. At last Mother said: What would it be in an orchestra? And I jumped up and down shouting: Triangle! Triangle! Let me see the Triangle! And that was one of my Christmas presents.

Pretty soon, when we were settling down a little, Mother said something about a Tooter; I think it was: I forgot the Tooter. Of course I was very busy playing with my triangle, and I didn’t notice what was going on. After a while I began to walk round again and saw something black, with something ivory sticking out of one end of it, and it made a musical note; and I shouted: Flute! Flute! Is it a Flute? Tell me! And Daddy said: No, it’s a Flageolet.

So we have got two instruments in the house, one of percussion and the other of wood-wind. That will make a better orchestra (if we ever do have an orchestra) than a mandolin and a piano and a very poorly behaving phonograph.

I hope you have had a Merry Christmas and will have a Happy New Year.

Love to Mrs. Day

from Barbara

Observatory Place

New Haven, Connecticut

January 12, 1922

Dear Mr. Oberg:

Saturday I had a show, and I wish you could have been here to see it. It was a dance, and I danced in tinsel costumes. I will describe the costumes to you. For one costume, I had on a white dress, a tinsel band around my forehead, a band of tinsel around the bottom of my dress, a little circle of tinsel hanging every little way from the band of tinsel around the bottom of my dress, a tinsel belt, a band of tinsel around my cuffs, and a band of tinsel sewed around the neck of my dress. That is all of that costume, and now I will describe another costume to you. For the second costume I had on another white dress. The costume was: a pink ribbon for a belt, and sewed on to the right-hand side of my belt was a pink artificial rose; around my forehead was the same band of tinsel, as in the first costume, and in my hair were some more artificial flowers. I gave six dances—two dances in each costume. The third costume was the one I described to you in the other letter. I will now describe Peggy’s dance. She gave one dance, and that one came after mine. I had on in that dance a little yellow dress made out of material that shows all your underclothes, and by mistake the flowers stayed in my hair.

I don’t think I will tell you anything more about my show, but I want to tell you about some friends of mine that I pretend. I pretend that Beethoven, the Two Strausses, Wagner, and the rest of the composers are still living, and they go skating with me, and when I invite them to dinner, a place has to be set for them; and when I have so many that the table won’t hold them all, I make my family sit on one side of their chair to make room for them. My abbreviation for the Two Strausses is the Two S’s. Beethoven, Wagner, and the Two S’s have maids; Beethoven’s maid’s name is Katherine Velvet, Wagner’s maid’s name is Katherine Loureena (she got the name Loureena when she was a little bit of a girl because she loved to skate in the Arena), and Strauss’s maid’s name is Sexo Crimanz... Now I am going to tell you about a funny accident that Wagner had. One morning when I had two chairs set out, one for Beethoven and the other for Wagner, I hadn’t pretended long enough to get my family used to them, and Daddy suddenly grabbed the chair that Wagner was sitting in, but I held on to it squealing: Hey, that’s Wagner’s chair! Then he went around to Beethoven, and I was looking suspiciously at him all the time. But he turned around again and didn’t bother Beethoven. I suppose that when he got around there, he thought that Beethoven was there.

Did I tell you in the letter about the Triangle and the Flageolet, that you can take off a piece of the Flageolet and put on something else and make a Piccolo? I don’t think I did, because I don’t seem to remember the word Piccolo. I can play it pretty well, but not so well as the Flageolet, because with the Piccolo one has to force one’s bottom lip against the bottom row of teeth, and one has to let one’s upper lip hang over the hole in the side of the Piccolo, not quite touching it. Of course the end of the Piccolo is pointed to the right-hand side, and when you play it, your lips mustn’t touch the side that is opposite to the regular position of the Piccolo.

I have told you so far, counting both letters, quite a little about the family orchestra. Well, I have got something more to tell you about it. Of course everybody had a little more fun than they used to, and a little later on I went to an orchestra rehearsal, and there was quite a lot of percussion in two of the things they played. Now, in one of these things I got very much interested in the cymbals, so at last we bought a pair of cymbals, and now we have more fun than we ever had in all our lives. I pretend that I am the percussion man in the orchestra, and I have a bag to keep all my instruments in. I strap up the bag and go to the orchestra, and when I get there I take out my percussion, and Mother plays the piano, and I have a time. Then when the rehearsal is over I strap up my bag again and go home.

I got the handle of the Bunny and Tortoise top without looking for it. Mother was just pulling out things in a box, and she pulled out that without looking for it.

The verses that I spoke about in the other letter, came from the little calendar that you sent in the big box.

Thank you very much for the chocolate and the dates and the raisins, that you sent in Ding’s bag. The Ali Baba dates interested me very much, because I had read a story of Ali Baba a few weeks ago.

February 25. You see it is a long time ago that I wrote this letter to you, or, at least started it, but all kinds of things got in my way to prevent my finishing it.

Don’t forget that my birthday is the fourth of March, and that you said that you might be able to get down to see me then. Please do if you can.

I believe Aunt Mildred Kennedy was the daughter of George Golding Kennedy, a prominent Boston physician who died in 1918.

Barbara’s violin teacher, Hildegarde Donaldson (1898-1948), was the wife of Norman Donaldson (1899-1964), an editor at Yale University Press. Norman will become Barbara’s friend and correspondent (and namesake for her second book, The Voyage of the Norman D.)

Observatory Place

New Haven, Connecticut

March 7, 1922

Dear Mr. Oberg:

Thank you ever and ever so much for the exquisite little box you sent, and also for the amber beads you sent with the box. The box is so beautiful that it seems impossible, and I don’t see how any man could take thousands and thousands of those little chips of wood and just put them in one at a time, and make it come out an exquisite box. I just don’t see how it can be done. It is all right to say it is beautiful, but I don’t see how it is done, that’s all. The beads we first thought were amber, then we decided that they weren’t, and then we knew that they were. I like them for three reasons: the first is because I love the colour, the second is because I love the little odds and ends of big beads and the tassel at the end, and the third is because they cast a wonderful piece of yellow light onto my dress right where each bead is.

You know how much I have wanted a violin, and you know that I have wanted one for a long time. Well, after dinner, we all went to search what there was to search for. Then we went into the library and saw this big bundle on the sofa. We all thought surely that was Mr. Oberg’s bundle, and then we all though it was peanuts as usual, but I didn’t think that peanuts would come in a box that looked like the shape of a violin. Well, I didn’t want to say that it was a violin because I knew that a violin was ever so much smaller than that. Daddy undid the string and I just lifted up the corner of the paper, and saw something black. I knew it was a violin case, but I didn’t want to say so. I went back in the room and let Daddy undo the paper. He undid it, and then he told me to lift the cover of the case up. I did so and saw the violin wrapped up in purple oil-silk; I said: I have done what you asked me to, I have lifted up the top of the case, now you do what ever you want to. Daddy unwrapped the violin and brought out the most beautiful one that anybody ever saw, for a small violin. There was, at the end of the case, a little box, and I lifted the cover up. Inside