The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford
Daisy Ashford’s book was published when she was grown up. But it was written, she claims, when she was nine. I was inclined not to believe this. Not because The Young Visiters lacks the hallmarks of how nine-year-olds think and write. On the contrary. But because the book is so consciously a product of a nine-year-old girl that it seems almost manufactured, almost phoney.
J. M. Barrie, a writer whose comedy is perhaps a little less well known these days, provided quite a long preface, and the rumour was then that he had fabricated the whole thing for a laugh. The book sold and kept on selling. It made many people, starting a hundred and five years ago, chuckle.
I don’t know how, precisely, it got made and finished and published. The cutesy misspelling in the title is not, I think, original, because the title itself has nothing to do with the story — which is mostly about going into London to have a pleasant time and parties and getting married. So who knows at which other parts of the story the tinkering hand of the publisher might have applied a coat of polish?
I’m inclined to distrust marketing and to distrust publishers, and especially to distrust things which make people laugh despite claiming to be true, all true. I still have some of the reaction of the outraged patron who liked a comedian’s act so much he sat through the show after the one he attended, and came up thunderstruck to the performer to tell him that he’d said all the same things. The audience member had thought the comedian was doing what his pose had implied: talking off the top of his head, making it all up as he went. But no, the comedian had written it down and rehearsed it beforehand. Scandalous.
This book is perhaps the same. I didn’t laugh once but it sold very well, so the audiences of the last century must have found quaint misspellings like ‘ruge’ for rouge very funny. They must have found it very funny that the authoress apparently though rich and famous people lived in the Crystal Palace, which again she could not spell. That people wore knickerbockers at the Queen’s tea parties and rode as hard as they possibly could, if they were in the court, to keep up with the royal coach on those afternoons when the royals went for a drive through the park.
I don’t really find these things funny. But one thing that did amuse me a little was how many signs there were that the authoress had absorbed a lot of trash novels — had them read to her possibly, leafed through them herself more likely — and was determined to reproduce them in their essences despite not really knowing what it was she hinted at or said.
The writer knows, for instance, that there must be a romantic sub-plot and a wedding, but she is more interested in the food that will be served at the reception and the delicacies available on the eyelash-fluttering picnic enjoyed by our courting couple than she is in anything else. She makes half-hearted and laborious reference to clothes — frocks, fabrics, hats — because the trash she must have read presumably did so. But every supposedly romantic saying or utterance said by anyone is ‘gasped,’ which must be hell on the throat; and there is a lot of pettishness and fainting and histrionics, because that’s what our romantic heroines indulge in to show they’re spirited girls and that the path of true love never did go smoothly.
Where is the humour here? I increasingly think, at least in so far as it collides with my own delicate sensibilities, that it’s in the sustained embarrassment of seeing childish obsessions and observations played out at some length. Words pop up a lot of times, possibly because the writer had just noticed them for the first time and wanted to make use of them. Some ideas crop up over and over, likewise. It’s possible she had recently heard someone going on about champagne or whisky and how wonderful they are because, along with ice-cream, they’re gulped quite a lot. Or people a hundred years ago drank even more than I thought.
I like trash. I find it entertaining. I like trash in literature; I like it in music; I like it in films. But only in its place. Trash is funny in pop music because everyone knows it’s intended for idiots and that is fun. Trash in films is often funny because the people who make it don’t realise. Genre trash in novels is often very funny because you can imagine the authors furrowing their brows to think of the next word, failing to do so, and pressing head anyway to earn big money.
But this is different. Because the publishers assume we readers are in on a joke, and the joke is on a little girl, possibly even on childhood itself, I don’t quite buy it. This one didn’t do much for me. But it might be for you, if you have the same sense of humour that sold edition after edition of this book, starting in 1919.