From the Diary of Opal...1906..
Under the step lives a toad.
I call him Virgil.
He and I are friends.
Under the house live some mice.
They have such beautiful eyes.
I give them bread to eat.
I know what to name my favorite mouse.
He is Felix Medelssohn.
In the pigpen I hear Peter Paul Ruben squealing.
He wants to go on explores.
The man who wears grey neckties and is kind to mice gave a little bell for my lovely pig to wear to church.
Brave Horatius, my dog, came walking by.
He wagged his tail.
That meant he wanted to go on an exploration trip.
The crow, Lars Porsena,flew down from the oak tree.
He did perch on the back of brave Horatius.
He gave two caws.
that means he wanted to go on an exploration trip too.
Felix Mendelssohn crawled into my lap.
I gave him two joy pats.
He cuddled under my curls.
Brave Horatius did wait waits.
I call him Virgil.
He and I are friends.
Under the house live some mice.
They have such beautiful eyes.
I give them bread to eat.
I know what to name my favorite mouse.
He is Felix Medelssohn.
In the pigpen I hear Peter Paul Ruben squealing.
He wants to go on explores.
The man who wears grey neckties and is kind to mice gave a little bell for my lovely pig to wear to church.
Brave Horatius, my dog, came walking by.
He wagged his tail.
That meant he wanted to go on an exploration trip.
The crow, Lars Porsena,flew down from the oak tree.
He did perch on the back of brave Horatius.
He gave two caws.
that means he wanted to go on an exploration trip too.
Felix Mendelssohn crawled into my lap.
I gave him two joy pats.
He cuddled under my curls.
Brave Horatius did wait waits.
After that, we turned about to the way
that does lead to the forest
to the place where is my cathedral
where we pray prayers
and where mentholatum helps them all
to have well feels.
I pray for the goodness of all.
.
Opal Whiteley, written at age 7
that does lead to the forest
to the place where is my cathedral
where we pray prayers
and where mentholatum helps them all
to have well feels.
I pray for the goodness of all.
.
Opal Whiteley, written at age 7
Opal Whiteley’s Riddles
Opal Whiteley’s Riddles
In our age of anxiety about tiny pageant queens and helicopter parenting, we have perhaps forgotten that the archetype of the gifted child antedates reality television and kindergarten-admissions coaching. The sight of a public aflutter over the talents—and the eventual fall—of a seemingly perfect child is at least as old as the last century. Consider the story of the once celebrated, then controversial, and now forgotten Opal Whiteley, whose best-selling diary predestined her to become something of a riddle. Like most “child geniuses,” her story is strange and complicated, but follows a certain familiar pattern: that of a gift that threatens to overwhelm.
Her life had the flavor of the apocryphal from the start. From the time when Opal arrived at the University of Oregon’s campus, in Eugene, in 1916, she was often seen chasing butterflies around and perched in trees, reading. She was eighteen, but she stood under five feet, with olive skin and long, dark braids. Despite her penchant for unfashionable clothing and odd behavior, she was something of a celebrity in Oregon, where she’d grown up in a small town called Cottage Grove. From the age of twelve, she’d been travelling all over the state giving well-attended lectures about the natural world, a subject on which she was largely self-taught. The press called her a genius; she called herself the Sunshine Fairy. Her popularity stemmed from her avoidance of the dryness of science; she was more of a charismatic mystic. The wife of the president of the university told people that she had once come upon Opal crouched on the ground, singing what seemed to be hymns, to some earthworms.
By the time a twenty-two-year-old Opal made a fateful appearance at The Atlantic Monthly’s Boston offices in July, 1919, her star had dimmed. She’d dropped out of college and spent a difficult year in Los Angeles, trying to become an actress. As a kind of backup plan, she’d written “The Fairyland Around Us,” a book version of her lectures. But before she could have it printed, she was scammed out of the money that she’d raised for it. Scraping together travel costs from some benefactors, Opal came East to find a publisher. Her search led her to Ellery Sedgwick, then the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief. The way he later told the story in an autobiography, he saw immediately that he could not publish “The Fairyland Around Us.” Still, he thought this woman, who had “something very young and eager and fluttering, like a bird in a thicket,” was a charismatic figure. Did she have anything else he could publish, like a diary? She did, she said, but a sister had torn it up. She’d kept the pieces in boxes, though. They were in storage in Los Angeles. Enchanted, Sedgwick telegraphed for the boxes immediately.
There is some dispute as to whether the meeting was the kismet that Sedgwick claimed. But, in any event, Sedgwick smelled an opportunity. He was a Boston Brahmin, and a man who had risen to his position by simply buying the half-century-old magazine and appointing himself its master. He was certainly aware that the current best-seller in the country was a novel reputed to have been written by a nine-year-old English child, Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters.” When Opal’s diary arrived from Los Angeles, its contents were mostly ripped-up scraps of butcher paper and backs of envelopes, covered in a colorful childish scrawl. Opal explained that it was the only writing material that had been available to her as a child in the backwoods of Oregon. As Opal was by then out of money, Sedgwick installed her at his mother-in-law’s house to begin the long work of piecing it back together. It would take her several months to do so. There are pictures of her surrounded by fragments, tacking them up on the wall.
What emerged from the long process thrilled Sedgwick. Its diction is idiosyncratic (it begins: “Today the folks are gone away from the house we do live in”), but, even to today’s reader, the diary holds a certain charm. It is peopled not only by Opal and her family and neighbors but also by her many pets, most of whom shared their oddly appropriate names with famous artists: a mouse is called Felix Mendelssohn, a pig Peter Paul Rubens, a cow Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And the childlike wonder feels realistic. Its observations come off in the funny way that a six-year-old’s—Opal’s alleged age at the time she wrote the diary—often do: “Potatoes are very interesting folks. I think they must see a lot of what is going on in the earth; they have so many eyes.”
Opal’s reveries are occasionally cut short by “the mamma,” who appears in the narrative mostly to switch young Opal when she’s been bad. And Opal finds her impossible to please. “She says I am a new sance,” Opal writes, in a preserved misspelling that shows the limits of her childish vocabulary. Curiously, though, as Opal put the book together, Sedgwick noticed a proliferation of French words in the diary. He asked Opal if she knew French. She said she did not.
The diary reaches its fifth chapter before it mentions a person called the Angel Father. The Angel Father, and eventually an Angel Mother, too, are benevolent figures from heaven who left Opal a book full of names she needed to learn; it was from these books that the precocious names of her pets were drawn. And the Angel Father had taught her a song he said she must always remember: “Le chant de Seine, de Havre, et Essonne et Nonette et Roullon et Iton et Darnetal et Ourcq et Rille et Loing et Eure et Audelle et Nonette et Sarc.”
The diary itself does not explain exactly who the Angel Father and Angel Mother represent. When the first installment of “The Story of Opal” appeared in the Atlantic, in March of 1920, Opal wrote a short introduction. In it she said that she remembered, as a very young child, a mother and father (later the Angels) who were not the Whiteleys. She remembered going out in a boat with that mother. “Then something happened and we were all in the water.” Her mother died that day, and she was later told her father perished elsewhere. Eventually, the introduction claimed, Mrs. Whiteley obtained Opal as a replacement for the “real” Opal, who was the same age as the diarist but had died a few years before.
Fuelled by that fantastical backstory, the diary was an immediate sensation. It was published as a book in both America and England (a copy can be read at archive.org) and crept onto best-seller lists. But there were skeptics from the start. On the East Coast, the New York Tribune wrote of the doubters, “They are certain that no six-year-old could have written these chronicles, so rich in classic lore, so well sustained in narrative interest, and, above all, so extensive that the mere physical labor involved would be worthy of a highly systematized author of bestsellers.”
In our age of anxiety about tiny pageant queens and helicopter parenting, we have perhaps forgotten that the archetype of the gifted child antedates reality television and kindergarten-admissions coaching. The sight of a public aflutter over the talents—and the eventual fall—of a seemingly perfect child is at least as old as the last century. Consider the story of the once celebrated, then controversial, and now forgotten Opal Whiteley, whose best-selling diary predestined her to become something of a riddle. Like most “child geniuses,” her story is strange and complicated, but follows a certain familiar pattern: that of a gift that threatens to overwhelm.
Her life had the flavor of the apocryphal from the start. From the time when Opal arrived at the University of Oregon’s campus, in Eugene, in 1916, she was often seen chasing butterflies around and perched in trees, reading. She was eighteen, but she stood under five feet, with olive skin and long, dark braids. Despite her penchant for unfashionable clothing and odd behavior, she was something of a celebrity in Oregon, where she’d grown up in a small town called Cottage Grove. From the age of twelve, she’d been travelling all over the state giving well-attended lectures about the natural world, a subject on which she was largely self-taught. The press called her a genius; she called herself the Sunshine Fairy. Her popularity stemmed from her avoidance of the dryness of science; she was more of a charismatic mystic. The wife of the president of the university told people that she had once come upon Opal crouched on the ground, singing what seemed to be hymns, to some earthworms.
By the time a twenty-two-year-old Opal made a fateful appearance at The Atlantic Monthly’s Boston offices in July, 1919, her star had dimmed. She’d dropped out of college and spent a difficult year in Los Angeles, trying to become an actress. As a kind of backup plan, she’d written “The Fairyland Around Us,” a book version of her lectures. But before she could have it printed, she was scammed out of the money that she’d raised for it. Scraping together travel costs from some benefactors, Opal came East to find a publisher. Her search led her to Ellery Sedgwick, then the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief. The way he later told the story in an autobiography, he saw immediately that he could not publish “The Fairyland Around Us.” Still, he thought this woman, who had “something very young and eager and fluttering, like a bird in a thicket,” was a charismatic figure. Did she have anything else he could publish, like a diary? She did, she said, but a sister had torn it up. She’d kept the pieces in boxes, though. They were in storage in Los Angeles. Enchanted, Sedgwick telegraphed for the boxes immediately.
There is some dispute as to whether the meeting was the kismet that Sedgwick claimed. But, in any event, Sedgwick smelled an opportunity. He was a Boston Brahmin, and a man who had risen to his position by simply buying the half-century-old magazine and appointing himself its master. He was certainly aware that the current best-seller in the country was a novel reputed to have been written by a nine-year-old English child, Daisy Ashford’s “The Young Visiters.” When Opal’s diary arrived from Los Angeles, its contents were mostly ripped-up scraps of butcher paper and backs of envelopes, covered in a colorful childish scrawl. Opal explained that it was the only writing material that had been available to her as a child in the backwoods of Oregon. As Opal was by then out of money, Sedgwick installed her at his mother-in-law’s house to begin the long work of piecing it back together. It would take her several months to do so. There are pictures of her surrounded by fragments, tacking them up on the wall.
What emerged from the long process thrilled Sedgwick. Its diction is idiosyncratic (it begins: “Today the folks are gone away from the house we do live in”), but, even to today’s reader, the diary holds a certain charm. It is peopled not only by Opal and her family and neighbors but also by her many pets, most of whom shared their oddly appropriate names with famous artists: a mouse is called Felix Mendelssohn, a pig Peter Paul Rubens, a cow Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And the childlike wonder feels realistic. Its observations come off in the funny way that a six-year-old’s—Opal’s alleged age at the time she wrote the diary—often do: “Potatoes are very interesting folks. I think they must see a lot of what is going on in the earth; they have so many eyes.”
Opal’s reveries are occasionally cut short by “the mamma,” who appears in the narrative mostly to switch young Opal when she’s been bad. And Opal finds her impossible to please. “She says I am a new sance,” Opal writes, in a preserved misspelling that shows the limits of her childish vocabulary. Curiously, though, as Opal put the book together, Sedgwick noticed a proliferation of French words in the diary. He asked Opal if she knew French. She said she did not.
The diary reaches its fifth chapter before it mentions a person called the Angel Father. The Angel Father, and eventually an Angel Mother, too, are benevolent figures from heaven who left Opal a book full of names she needed to learn; it was from these books that the precocious names of her pets were drawn. And the Angel Father had taught her a song he said she must always remember: “Le chant de Seine, de Havre, et Essonne et Nonette et Roullon et Iton et Darnetal et Ourcq et Rille et Loing et Eure et Audelle et Nonette et Sarc.”
The diary itself does not explain exactly who the Angel Father and Angel Mother represent. When the first installment of “The Story of Opal” appeared in the Atlantic, in March of 1920, Opal wrote a short introduction. In it she said that she remembered, as a very young child, a mother and father (later the Angels) who were not the Whiteleys. She remembered going out in a boat with that mother. “Then something happened and we were all in the water.” Her mother died that day, and she was later told her father perished elsewhere. Eventually, the introduction claimed, Mrs. Whiteley obtained Opal as a replacement for the “real” Opal, who was the same age as the diarist but had died a few years before.
Fuelled by that fantastical backstory, the diary was an immediate sensation. It was published as a book in both America and England (a copy can be read at archive.org) and crept onto best-seller lists. But there were skeptics from the start. On the East Coast, the New York Tribune wrote of the doubters, “They are certain that no six-year-old could have written these chronicles, so rich in classic lore, so well sustained in narrative interest, and, above all, so extensive that the mere physical labor involved would be worthy of a highly systematized author of bestsellers.”
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