Edmund

In the world of child prodigies, novelists are the rarest breed. Barbara Newhall Follett, born in Hanover, N.H., in 1914, fit the bill. By the time she was 9 years-old she had completed her first novel, a subsequent draft of which was published by Knopf when she was 12. Two years after that, she released her second novel. Both were met with critical acclaim, and Newhall became a celebrity in the publishing world.

Nearly a decade later, after a fight with her adulterous husband, the 25-year-old Follett left her apartment in Brookline, Mass., with $30 in her pocket and a notebook. She was never seen or heard from again. The mystery of the vanished former child genius has pulled at the public imagination ever since, resulting in a number of books and articles about her life and disappearance, including a 2019 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books speculating that Newhall had committed suicide by ingesting barbiturates.

Barbara Follett, a child literary prodigy, is the subject of a new musical titled “Perfect World.”

(Courtesy of Stefan Cooke / Farksolia.org)

A world-premiere musical can now be added to the growing list of Newhall-themed explorations. “Perfect World,” written by Alan Edmunds and composed by Richard Winzeler, with lyrics by both men, opens Saturday at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, running through Nov. 9.

The project marks Edmunds’ debut as a librettist. The retired psychologist — who specialized in gifted children — hit upon the idea of creating a musical about Follett’s life after a deep dive into her archives at Columbia University almost 15 years ago.

“As I’m reading through this, I start to feel the tragedy of what really happened to her,” Edmunds said during an interview at the theater over the pounding of hammers and the buzzing of drills as the detailed set was put together. “I thought this is the hero’s journey. Unfortunately, it’s not a happy ending.”

Edmunds was so inspired by the 15 boxes of archival material, including hundreds of hand-typed letters that Follett wrote to dozens of relatives and acquaintances, and endless lyrical descriptions of the imaginary world of Farksolia at the heart of her debut novel, “The House Without Windows,” that he drafted his initial outline for the musical on his knee while taking the subway from Columbia to Broadway to see “La Cage aux Folles.”

The show’s team took creative license in the retelling of Follett’s story, but for the most part Edmunds adhered to the broad strokes of her short, vibrant life. The musical hops back and forth between two story lines: Follett’s experiences up until her disappearance, and the nationwide investigation that unfolded afterward, led by the dogged Capt. Stahl and forever pushed forward by her grieving mother, Helen Thomas Follett.

Follett’s childhood was marked by unhappiness, Edmunds said, noting that Helen, who wrote for a commercial shipping company, and Follett’s father, a Knopf literary editor named Wilson Follett, fought often.

“They were at each other hammer and tongs,” Edmunds said. “And even when they wrote about Barbara, subsequently, you could feel the animosity between them.”

This made sense because about a year after the publication of Barbara Follett’s first book, Wilson left Helen for a much younger woman, moving in with her in Greenwhich Village. Her father’s desertion dealt a crushing blow to Barbara, who adored him. She subsequently embarked on a sailing journey with Helen from New York to Barbados and then on through the Panama Canal. Barbara became seriously ill during the journey — the result of nerves and depression, Helen thought.

Barbara Follett, a child literary prodigy, is the subject of a new musical titled “Perfect World.”

(Courtesy of Stefan Cooke / Farksolia.org)

Around that time, Follett met and fell in love with a 25-year-old sailor named Edward Anderson. Helen did not approve, and Edmunds said she conspired to get Anderson fired from his position as second mate. The loss of Anderson was the second major blow in Follett’s life, Edmunds said, and it’s a thread that runs through the musical, leading to Follett’s meeting with a recent Dartmouth graduate named Nickerson Rogers — the man who would become her husband, and who would eventually leave her after having an affair with her best childhood friend.

The couple shared a love of nature, and before they were married, spent months hiking and camping together along the Appalachian Trail. Photos from the early 1930s show a slender, bare-legged Follett with short-cropped hair, sitting beside an open fire with a cooking pan and an old tin coffee pot.

Follett’s life was filled with crushing disappointment and near-constant stress, but nature provided a release. This is likely why she conjured up the perfect world of Farksolia at such a young age. It was an escape, and Follett packed it with as much detail as possible, including its own system of mathematics, its own language — Farksoo — and its own alphabet.

The heroine of “The House Without Windows” is a young girl named Eepersip who runs away from home to live contentedly with her animal friends in the woods. If it sounds simple, it was. But that was also its genius.

Critics loved it and it sold more than 20,000 copies upon its initial printing.

“I can safely promise joy to any reader of ‘The House Without Windows.’ Perfection,” wrote the English author of children’s books, Eleanor Farjeon, in a review.

Barbara Follett, a child literary prodigy, is the subject of a new musical titled “Perfect World.”

(Courtesy of Stefan Cooke / Farksolia.org)

There are many theories about what happened to the adventurous and headstrong young woman after she vanished, including that she was killed by her husband, who had demanded she stop writing and failed to report her missing until two weeks after she left. Others think she simply moved far away, changed her name and continued to write under a pseudonym. Then there is the recently surfaced idea that she went to a family-owned cottage in the woods and swallowed enough barbiturates to end her life. That theory holds that a body discovered in the late 1940s was misidentified as another woman, when it was actually Follett.

Edmunds has given the matter extensive thought and believes that Follett loved life too much to kill herself. The idea that appeals to him the most comes from a crumb of a clue in Follett’s archives — a letter from the sailor Anderson that Follett received a short time before her disappearance. It could be surmised from her letters that she never stopped loving Anderson. Could it be that she went to find him when her husband’s affair became known to her?

Edmunds ultimately decided not to go down the rabbit hole of speculation about Follett’s demise, opting instead to focus the musical on Follett’s life, “What she did, how she rescued herself, how she was so engaged and connected to nature, and how she wanted people to take care of each other and be good to each other,” Edmunds said. “How we could have a better world.”

Dave Edmunds suffered a “major cardiac arrest” and faces a “very long journey” to recovery, according to his wife, who detailed the Welsh musician’s health struggles in a Facebook post.

Best known perhaps for his 1970 hit “I Hear You Knocking,” Edmunds — who also formed the band Rockpile with Nick Lowe — “died in my arms while I desperately tried to keep him alive,” Cici Edmunds wrote in the July 29 post, before doctors revived him “by a miracle.” Dave Edmunds, 81, “very clearly has brain damage and severe memory loss” after the ordeal, Cici Edmunds wrote, and he faces the high risk of another cardiac arrest.

“And if that occurs there is no chance for Dave,” Cici Edmunds added.

Dave Edmunds topped the U.K. pop singles chart for six weeks in 1970 with his rendition of “I Hear You Knocking,” which the R&B singer Smiley Lewis originally popularized in the mid-1950s. Among Edmunds’ other solo hits are “Girls Talk” (written by Elvis Costello), “Born to Be with You” and a cover of the Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You.” He formed Rockpile in 1976 and later produced records by the Stray Cats and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, among other acts. He also toured as a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band.

In her Facebook post, Cici Edmunds thanked her husband’s fans “for your support and well wishes” and said they have made “this tremendously difficult journey a little easier.”

NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room Is Empty,” has died. He was 85.

White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg.

Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in New York’s Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the recent backlash.

A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet, along with books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates.

“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in the New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”

White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but at age 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer and his mother was a psychologist. Feeling trapped and at times suicidal, White sought escape through the stories of others, including Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and a biography of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the 1991 essay “Out of the Closet, on to the Bookshelf.”

As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.

“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”

Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would head out to bars. A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had a crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”

“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”

White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”

His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”

“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told the Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.