Hervey White is not a man you’d be inclined to trust as a children’s book author. Instead, he was a true maverick, long before founding a colony that bore that name. Although White was one of the original founders of Byrdcliffe, his Maverick Colony broke free almost immediately, in 1905. The name Maverick was derived from legends of a white stallion living that White heard during his 1890 visit to his sister in Colorado, which he commemorated in a 1911 poem about the Maverick Horse. White felt the Horse was a suitable symbol for everything he cherished—freedom, spirit, and uniqueness. However, his colony rapidly burgeoned into a bohemian carnival that attracted thousands of visitors, and gained such a reputation for drunken brawls, robberies, and even rapes, that it was censured in 1930 as “sinful and immoral.”
Not exactly the kind of credentials you’d expect for a children’s writer. But while, White is best known for the autobiographical novel, Quicksand (also in the Byrdcliffe Library), described by Theodore Dreiser as one of the greatest books of the 20th century, White also wrote at least one ripping yarn for boys, Snake Gold. His 1903 fairy tale, Noll and the Fairies, is more difficult to categorize. Its cover does seem to promise a rather conventional children’s fairy story.
White’s central conceit is elegant enough to quote at length:
You see the fairies, at the birth, were quarreling over the baby, partly because fairies are always quarreling… and partly because this baby was born in the end of a rainbow… For to be born in the end of a rainbow… is to be born a true child of heaven, living for God’s truth an d His beauty, and trying to make them known here on earth. Some call these Heaven children poets, and some call them artists or singers, but I have heard of one who was a carpenter, and once, in a great crowded city, I thought I saw a vague memory of a rainbow in the faded sick eyes of a child.
Despite the elegance of this metaphor, White’s fairy-blessed infant Noll is more a rebellious poet than a visionary child of heaven. Noll’s tart observations and misunderstandings of the adult idealization of childhood are witty and funny — although many might feel they were not exactly an appropriate example to youth.
Little is known about the book’s illustrator, Elizabeth Krysher (later Peyraud), but what little one can glean from this clipping one might suggest she is anything but a Maverick. I for one long to return to a world of “social teas,” accompanied by “musical selections” from Mrs. Hendy. However, such a world is in sharp contrast to White’s idea of “musical selections,” which largely consisted of impromptu concerts on pots and pans that could be heard across all off Woodstock.
Elizabeth Krysher is usually described as an “illustrator and portrait painter,” but Noll and the Fairies is the only book that credits her as an illustrator. However she did do some periodical illustration, specifically for Clarence Darrow’s 1903 series of articles “Easy Lessons in Law,” published in the Chicago American, and for defense department posters for WWI. (Special thanks to the Illinois Historical Art Project, for this information.)
Noll and the Fairies is not a masterpiece, but it is an intriguing and mysterious book. The ending feels perfunctory — almost as if White lost interest in the book. The fairies, too, seem to have been abandoned — and the story of the feuds between them. However, taken in conjunction with the career of its illustration, the book is an invaluable snapshot of the turn of the century artistic and publishing circles in Chicago, which is where the founders of Byrdcliffe all met.
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