Arctic Light

I was quite excited about the picture book Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, as I’ve been low-key obsessed with Opal Whiteley for years, and what could be better than a book about Opal illustrated by Barbara Cooney?

For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.

I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).

After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”

Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!

But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.