Tampering with a Masterpiece
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
Tampering with a Masterpiece Opal By Opal Whitely Arranged and adapted by Jane Boulton Macmillan. 183 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by M. Anatole Gurewitsch Contributor, "Modern Fiction Studies,"...
...She rocks the baby, sweeps the floor, converses with her companions the trees and animals, carries wood in from the shed, listens to the gray talk of lichen on the rocks, exchanges messages with posting angels, and delivers eggs to the neighbors...
...the man who wears gray neckties and is kind to mice, and whose flowing handwriting bears a striking resemblance to that of the fairies...
...But / do try to have thinks as how I can bring happiness to folks about...
...It has taken TV spots and print ads aligning the book (most unsuitably) with the "tradition" of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Watership Down...
...Today, however, the 80-year-old Opal Whiteley resides in a mental institution outside London...
...every page bears the unique mark of her sunny and generous disposition...
...Recounting the daily life of a five- or six-year-old girl growing up in Oregon lumber camps, hardly a page lacks many references to a whole world of knowledge no daughter of the Whiteleys could ever have been acquainted with...
...she had an intimate familiarity with the rituals and services of the Church of Rome...
...It is not merely names that disappear...
...Since the 1920 text was complete to the extent the state of the manuscript allowed, at most minimal updating of orthography and punctuation were necessary in revising it...
...It must not go out.7 I so do [Boulton: do so] try to keep it there...
...The "cast of characters" numbered some 100 in 1920...
...She writes feelingly of joy, loss and longings...
...Over a period of months, Opal recovered a document of narrative skill and great lyric and spiritual beauty, its appeal further enhanced by the mysteries it raised...
...Since the lines seemed like poetry, that is the form I gave them...
...We read of the touching death of the old workhorse, William Shakespeare...
...That is such a help when lonesome feels do come...
...the visit of Jenny Strong, with her interesting hat...
...There is, too, a kind of piety in her remembrance that the short forms cannpt convey...
...If many of Opal's friends are absent, her closest ones are here to delight us: Sadie Mc-Kibben, the woman who gives her cheese for her favorite woodrat (the lovely Thomas Chatterton Zeus) and almost always remembers to kiss Opal's nose as well as her cheeks...
...Still, in 1919, barely older than the century...
...and the result is a highly corrupt text...
...But we really do not need the comfort of certainty, and the diary itself should be sufficient reward...
...Focusing on the behavior of family and friends, she finds more bafflement in the quirks of humankind than in the observable, orderly transformations of growing things...
...In some ways, in fact, Opal may even prove useful...
...her hope, she told me in an interview, was to bring the diary to the widest possible audience...
...Opal Whitely began to prepare her earliest childhood diaries for publication under the distinguished sponsorship of the Atlantic Monthly...
...Angel Mother did say, 'Make earth glad, little one—that is the way to keep the fire-tongue of the glad song ever in your heart...
...Aristotle, the bat who died of eating too many mosquitos...
...Perhaps now it will finally reach a broad public...
...They are "the mamma" and "the papa," and she uncomplainingly lives with them, even as they treat her with weary and un-tender negligence...
...She had come to Ellery Sedgwick, the editor, for financial assistance to complete a nature book: he declined, but the young woman herself captured his interest, and she embarked on the diary project at his prompting...
...Clearly Mrs...
...of these, Mrs...
...It is lonesome feels I have...
...Boulton's tampering and faulty judgment, briefly demonstrated above, let me also say that Opal is nevertheless still a quite charming volume...
...Isaiah, the plain dog...
...the notions of poetic "form" are immaterial and technically naive...
...What is gone...
...I so do try, for it is helps on cold days and old days...
...Soon after her journal was published, Opal became convinced (and convinced many) that she was Princesse Francoise de Bourbon Orleans, descended from the royal house of France...
...Yet her accounts and reflections, conversational in tone and always full of a sweet, earnest accuracy of detail, illuminate the ordinary no less than what might strike us as wondrous...
...Alas, the original diary is long out of print...
...Enriched" (like Wonderbread), as the ads put it, "by woodcuts," it does make a handsome gift and no doubt will give many readers an hour or so of warmth and happiness...
...Boulton, working solely from this definitive edition, has made substantial alterations of her own: "In this version scenes have been rearranged and characters introduced differently...
...Reviewed by M. Anatole Gurewitsch Contributor, "Modern Fiction Studies," "Harvard" magazine Twenty seems an early age to put one's juvenilia in order...
...The volume is in its way a charming one, but I can see little good reason for its existence...
...Similarly, most of the major events are retained in at least recognizable form...
...No rationale for the reshuffling is given...
...Worse yet, a rough reckoning reveals that Opal contains no more than about three quarters of the original diary...
...one can only be sure from her diary that Opal does not accept the Whiteleys as her real parents...
...A reader familiar with the 1920 text will quickly notice that most of Opal's capricious, rolling, sesquipedalian, resonant names for her pets and companions have been shorn: The toad Horace Ovid Virgil appears as "Virgil," the lamb Menander Euri-pedes, Theocritus Thucydides is now "Euripides," and a favorite fir tree, Michael Angelo Sanzio Raphael, bewilderingly and pointlessly becomes "Michael Raphael...
...her terms for the brooks and forests of the neighborhood show a startling knowledge of the geography of France...
...Where are Cassiopee, the neighbor's pig...
...Before going forward with the simple editorial work—emending the childishly innocent spelling, supplying punctuation, transcribing the text—a far more difficult task-needed to be performed...
...Opal's world seems by turns commonplace and magical...
...Whose child she was may never be known...
...The Pericles, Winter's Tale or Tempest that might chart the peregrinations of our modern Marina, Per-dita and Miranda is lost to herself, as it is to us...
...But the words are Opal's...
...and when she fancied the breezes calling to her, they addressed her as Francoise and often spoke in French, a language Opal no longer understood or even recognized at 20...
...In later years she was received into the royal house of India as a member of the family...
...Opal's style consists chiefly of rather simple declarative statements written with a halting charm one quickly ceases to experience as "foreign," shot through with an occasional strikingly folksy or florid phrase...
...Macmillan—again in well-meaning but devious fashion—is going all out to guarantee Opal a prosperous future...
...Dear Love and Elsie, whom the angels in their goodly wisdom have brought a baby that looks like them...
...The glad song in my heart sings [Boulton: is] not bright today...
...Suffice to note that I believe Opal's claims are essentially true, albeit mistaken in details, and that I believe her journal entirely genuine...
...Lars Porsena of Clusium, the crow with a fondness for shiny things...
...They have not been invited to Opal...
...And I did remembers how it was Angel Mother did say, 'When one keeps the glad song singing in one's heart then do the hearts of others sing.'" Having registered my exasperation with Mrs...
...Anastasia stuff you say, and I say enough of it?tantalizing as her story is (and it is far more eventful than what I have described...
...Opal's foster-sister Pearl had torn up the diary and the scrambled boxfuls of scraps had to be laboriously pieced back together...
...Consider, for example, this passage from the original text...
...Yet Mrs...
...What we have before us now is Jane Boulton's recension of it...
...And the thinks I did have?they were about the glad song...
...And important passages have been banished as well...
...Boulton's changes and omissions—particularly the shortest ones—betray an uneasiness with both the extravagantly metaphorical strains and the homey coziness...
...Apart from dimming a certain baroque dazzle, these abbreviations block our glimpses of how Opal's Angel Mother and Father taught her, and of the way she drew on the study books that were her only tangible souvenirs of them...
...But she knows that her true Angel Mother and Angel Father—who loved her and taught her to hear the colored songs of stars and stones and plants, to treasure her fellow creatures, to feel compassion and ease heart's sorrows—are gone and live with God...
...the courtship of "the man with the long step that whistles" and "the pensee girl with the faraway look...
...Years earlier...
...I have italicized what remains in Opal: "For a little time I did have thinks...
...But I will not consider that Opal has done its work until it creates a compelling demand for the reissue of the profound and unforgettable, un-domesticated and unreconstructed diary of Opal Whiteley...
...For although Sedgwick established the manuscript's authenticity beyond reasonable doubt, "The Journal of an Understanding Heart" —as the diary was called in the Atlantic and later in book form?sounds like a hoax...
...The names Opal gave the animals and trees she cherished drew on classical mythology, continental history, and world art, literature and music...
...Boulton has retained fewer than 40...
...Moreover, the English of the journal had a foreign and awkward grace neither her youth nor her sketchy backwoods schooling could explain...
...Boulton has prepared it in perfectly good faith...
...And while I have never thought of it as quaint or remote, it is true that the book, despite the stir it originally created and the glowing notices it received, has never been greatly in request...
...her claims to nobility remain unresolved and were diagnosed at the time of her admittance as schizophrenic delusions...
...Viewed from beyond childhood...
...But all that is as nothing compared to the creeping erosion within the fabric of the remaining narration...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 1
