{"id":55748,"date":"2013-07-08T12:11:30","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T16:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=55748"},"modified":"2013-07-08T12:38:17","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T16:38:17","slug":"daring-daisy-ashford-the-greatest-ever-nine-year-old-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/08\/daring-daisy-ashford-the-greatest-ever-nine-year-old-novelist\/","title":{"rendered":"Daring Daisy Ashford, the Greatest Ever Nine-Year-Old Novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"largepicvisitors\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler\u2019s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere<\/i>. In the novel, Schuyler creates an absolutely odd and believable childhood world, told only through dialogue between the young brother and sister Alfred and Guinevere Gates and excerpts from Guinevere\u2019s diary. Alfred and Guinevere<\/i> is the best novel I\u2019ve ever read about childhood, because it accurately depicts the way children brilliantly and hilariously mimic adults, the way that children\u2019s conversations are imperfectly observed imitations of adult conversations. Because of this insight, it doesn\u2019t read like an adult imitating children\u2014and it is incredibly funny. I\u2019ve read it many times; I can\u2019t get enough of it.<\/p>\n

Going through it again this spring, I was caught by a review from Commonweal<\/i> quoted on the back cover. \u201cA deft and funny creation of a high quality,\u201d the critic wrote, \u201csomewhere between the terror-haunted humor of Richard Hughes\u2019 A High Wind in Jamaica<\/em> and the placid, presumably unselfconscious amusements of Daisy Ashford\u2019s The Young Visiters<\/em>.\u201d I had never heard of The Young Visiters<\/i>. Neither, as it happens, had any of the dozen people I\u2019ve mentioned it to in the months since. When I sought The Young Visiters <\/i>out at the library, I was startled by what would seem to be the most important fact about it. \u201cYou could have told me,\u201d I said silently to Commonweal<\/i>, \u201cthat this book was written by a nine-year-old.\u201d<\/p>\n

When in 1919 a grown-up Daisy Ashford rediscovered and agreed to publish The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena\u2019s Plan<\/i>, which she had written twenty-eight years earlier, it was an immediate and absolute success. It is a Victorian \u201csociety novel\u201d following \u201can elderly man of forty-two\u201d named Alfred Salteena and his friends, the young lovers Ethel Montecue and Bernard Clark, as Mr. Salteena strives to become a gentleman. With its distinctive, graceless narrative voice and original spelling errors intact, readers regarded it as a remarkable specimen of children\u2019s grand and unselfconscious ridiculousness. It was so popular in the United States and in Ashford\u2019s native United Kingdom that it went through eight printings in its first year. <\/p>\n

\"author\"<\/a>But I was only beginning to discover at the time I began The Young Visiters<\/i> that I had stumbled upon one of the most original artifacts of Victorian literature and the cause of a fascinating literary craze. The connection between Daisy Ashford\u2019s childhood creation and Alfred and Guinevere<\/i> is clear\u2014both derive their surprising, loopy humor from the idiosyncrasies of youth. Both conceal narrative art behind \u201cpresumed unselfconsciousness.\u201d And while Schuyler is striving toward the freedom and wildness and weirdness of a child\u2019s mind in his novel, in Ashford\u2019s we see no such effort: it comes straight from the source. The same thing is indicated in the comparison of Schuyler\u2019s and Ashford\u2019s books, the enthusiastic but puzzled public response to The Young Visiters<\/i>, and the delights of the novel itself: the debt adult writers owe to children.<\/p>\n

Most critics writing about The Young Visiters<\/i> in 1919 emphasized its comic value\u2014it was, as the New York Times<\/i> reported in two different articles from August 1919, \u201cone of the most humorous books in literature,\u201d or even \u201cquite the most humorous thing that ever found its way into print.\u201d These evaluations were not necessarily a credit to the savvy of the book\u2019s young author, but rather the opposite; the book\u2019s humor was a product of her guilelessness.<\/p>\n

The innocent and accidental strangeness of the story is certainly one of its pleasures. Ashford\u2019s mania for description can reach a fevered hilarity, as in this passage about the book\u2019s male ing\u00e9nue:<\/p>\n

\n

Bernard heaved a sigh and his eyes flashed as he beheld her and Ethel thorght to herself what a fine type of manhood he reprisented with his nice thin legs in pale broun trousers and well fitting spats and a red rose in his button hole and rarther a sporting cap which gave him a great air with its quaint check and little flaps to pull down if necesarry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In early coverage of the novel, critics\u2019 delight in this artlessness could veer uncomfortably toward the mean-spirited. As a reviewer for the magazine The Living Age<\/i> wrote in July 1919, \u201cTo laugh at a child\u2019s story is almost as bad as laughing at the child herself.\u201d But this was only one aspect of readers\u2019 confused reactions to The Young Visiters<\/i>. The book was published with an introduction by Peter Pan<\/i> author J.\u2009M. Barrie, provoking persistent rumors that Barrie was the book\u2019s true author. They discredited Ashford for the novel by saying that all of the book\u2019s value was achieved accidentally, in its unintended humor, while at the same time saying that the book\u2019s merits were too great to have been achieved by a child.<\/p>\n

\"mss\"<\/a>Critics were unconsciously running up against the problem with appreciating The Young Visiters<\/i> as a piece of juvenilia. Writers of the era tended to stress the innocence and purity of children\u2019s art. In an article titled \u201cOur Awakening Appreciation of Juvenile Literature and Art\u201d in the September 1919 issue of Current Opinion<\/i>, a critic is quoted as saying that in children\u2019s work \u201cthere is a nature untrammeled by the impedimenta of intellectual knowledge, uncorrupted by useless, if inevitable, association, unhampered by concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n

That the tone of The Young Visiters<\/i> does not come off as \u201cunhampered by concepts,\u201d but is in fact knowing, even ironic, does not indicate that it is then a bad example of a child\u2019s art, or that it might not have been produced by a child at all; it indicates that these writers\u2019 idea of the value of children\u2019s work was false. Attesting to the purity of The Young Visiters<\/i>, one writer claims that, \u201cthe author, we think, need not have read many novels.\u201d This is maybe the most absurd thing these misguided adults ever wrote about this novel.<\/p>\n

As Barrie writes of Ashford in his introduction, \u201cShe read everything that came her way, including, as the context amply proves, the grown-up novels of the period.\u201d What is truly remarkable about The Young Visiters<\/i> isn\u2019t its na\u00efve comedy but its subtle craft, the way it is brilliantly derivative of the \u201cgrown-up novels\u201d the author had read. Ashford develops the love triangle between Mr. Salteena, Ethel, and Bernard quietly, with only winking indications of what the parties are secretly feeling. Mr. Salteena and Ethel visit Bernard at his house, and at dinner there is this exchange:<\/p>\n

\n

Well said Mr Salteena lapping up his turtle soup you have a very sumpshous house Bernard.<\/p>\n

His friend gave a weary smile and swallowed a few drops of sherry wine. It is fairly decent he replied with a bashful glance at Ethel after our repast I will show you over the premisis.<\/p>\n

Many thanks said Mr Salteena getting rarther flustered over his forks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A character\u2019s small outer lapses pointing to emotions that exist within\u2014so that feelings are revealed to the audience sometimes before they are known to the character herself\u2014has been a hallmark of British comedies of manners from Jane Austen to E.\u2009M. Forster to Barbara Pym to Alan Hollinghurst. And The Young Visiters<\/i> centers on the greatest theme of British literature: class and the possibility (or impossibility) of social mobility. Both Mr. Salteena and Ethel are attempting to raise their status in the world. From the beginning, Ethel is painted, in soft strokes, as a bit rustic: her dress is said to have \u201cgrown rarther short in the sleeves\u201d and the author writes that she \u201cdid not really know at all how to go on at a visit.\u201d When Ethel marries Bernard we learn that<\/p>\n

\n

Ethels parents were too poor to come so far but her Mother sent her a gold watch which did not go but had been some years in the family and her father provided a cheque for \u00a32 and promised to send her a darling little baby calf when ready.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In much of the book Ethel must rely on the wisdom of the provincial Mr. Salteena, whose obsession with customs like the tipping of servants gives away his identity as, in his words, \u201cnot quite a gentleman.\u201d But while Ethel has a fairly straightforward opportunity to advance in society by marrying aristocratic Bernard, Mr. Salteena must find his way to the upper class by some other path. He enlists the help of the Earl of Clincham, who lives in the Crystal Palace, a facility for \u201cpeople who have got something funny in their family\u201d to legitimize their status and train in the ways of the aristocracy.<\/p>\n

What is maybe most remarkable about Ashford\u2019s exploration of this theme is the contrast in perspectives on the social hierarchy held by characters of different classes. Members of the nobility generally express ambivalence about social status. \u201cBeing royal has many painfull drawbacks,\u201d the Prince of Wales complains. \u201cAt the Day of Judgement what will be the odds,\u201d the Earl of Clincham says to put class differences in perspective. \u201cMr Salteena heaved a sigh,\u201d Ashford writes. \u201cI was thinking of this world he said.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"038782\"<\/a>The ironic society novel isn\u2019t the only genre Ashford is drawing from\u2014she also borrows, impressively for her tender age, on the melodrama of high romance. The scene of Bernard\u2019s proposal to Ethel was the focus of many early reviews\u2014\u201cHer love passages are extraordinary,\u201d wrote one reviewer\u2014as the level of ardor this nine-year-old describes necessarily pushes the novel over into the farcical. In the open air of the country near Windsor Castle, Bernard confesses his feelings: \u201cWords fail me ejaculated Bernard horsely my passion for you is intense he added fervently.\u201d Ethel replies, \u201cYou are to me like a Heathen god,\u201d swoons, and faints. The scene of course reads like it was written by someone whose only encounters with romantic love were in books. But it also highlights how closely, whether comprehending or not, children observe the adult world.<\/p>\n

The talent of a novelist depends on how they observe the people and patterns around them and how shrewdly they imitate the craft of earlier novelists. Ashford succeeded in both of these things not in spite of her age but because of it. In his introduction, Barrie describes how Ashford studied the adults she encountered and borrowed and modified things she heard discussed at home for use in The Young Visiters<\/i>\u2014the Crystale Palace became the Crystal Palace; the Gaiety Theatre became the Gaierty Hotel\u2014and cautions readers against spending \u201canother week-end in a house where there may be a novelist of nine years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Journalists at the time that The Young Visiters<\/i> was published took pains to make connections between Ashford the adult and Ashford the nine-year-old. They wrote of her as a young woman \u201calways at the centre of a great deal of fun\u201d at parties. They noted her \u201ceyes in which fun sparkles,\u201d where one \u201ccould still see the lurking merriment and joie de vie depicted in her childhood’s portrait, undiminished\u2014if anything, increased.\u201d They were trying awkwardly to deal with the fact that although Ashford wrote intensely all through childhood, she never had an adult literary career. In the Chicago Tribune<\/i> in July 1919, she said, \u201cI\u2019m afraid my literary genius\u2014such as it was\u2014lapsed with my schooldays.\u201d Barrie doesn\u2019t seem to find this surprising. He closely associates a talent for synthesizing reality into fiction with childhood, because once a person is initiated into the adult world, she never again pays as close attention to it. He describes how Ashford \u201cgives me a few particulars of this child she used to be, and is evidently a little scared by her.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not a sort of mystical \u201cpurity\u201d that makes children\u2019s art worth attention; it is curiosity about the adult world and the freedom with which children can try out, and then discard, adult conventions. In August 1919 a New York Times<\/i> writer asked, \u201cIs it possible that in The Young Visiters<\/i> the publishers have stumbled upon a posthumous work by Lewis Carroll?\u201d This was a popular comparison among critics of The Young Visiters<\/i>, and an inappropriate one. Ashford was imitating the serious, sophisticated worlds of William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry James. Carroll\u2014in his work\u2019s frenzied pace, his free and easy manipulation of time and location, his rejection of logic, his silliness\u2014was trying to imitate a mind like Daisy Ashford\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Alice Bolin is a writer living in California. Follow her on Twitter<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler\u2019s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere. In the novel, Schuyler creates an absolutely odd and believable childhood world, told only through dialogue between the young brother and sister Alfred and Guinevere Gates and excerpts from Guinevere\u2019s diary. Alfred and Guinevere is the best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":344,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11338,4734,11337,11339],"class_list":["post-55748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-daisy-ashford","tag-j-m-barrie","tag-james-schuyler","tag-juvenilia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDaring Daisy Ashford, the Greatest Ever Nine-Year-Old Novelist by Alice Bolin<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 8, 2013 \u2013 It all began on the back cover of the great poet James Schuyler\u2019s 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere. 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