Incredible Discovery in Old Freddy Book

by Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.


Manuscripts are discovered in the strangest places--bureau drawer, commodes, dustbins. but who ever would have thought that two Walter R. Brooks manuscripts, a letter and a poem, would have turned up in an old Freddy book during the Friends of Freddy convention in Cooperstown last October? And turned up by me!

It happened in this way: Following Saturday´s auction of Freddy books, my house guest and fellow Friend of Freddy, Howard Phipps, returned with our dog-eared purchases to my farmhouse just east of Cooperstown. Howdy for many years has been head of New York City´s closest equivalent to the Bean Farm, that is, president of the New York Wildlife Society, which runs the Bronx and Central Park Zoos. I don´t know if he has any pigs, but he does have some peccaries and a boar or two.

Howdy and I have been reading Freddy books to ourselves, our children, and (in his case) to our grandchildren for 52 years, ever since we found them back in 1944 when we were at the Buckley School in New York. I in fact had been the first to hit on them: when I was in the hospital in February, 1944, a friend of my mothers had given me my first Freddy book, Freddy and the Bean Home News, which had just been published. As with many other Friends of Freddy, I think that book first headed me toward journalism.

At the auction, Howdy had concentrated on his favorite Freddy books, as gifts for his grandchildren. I concentrated on books published after 1948, when I had stopped collecting them, for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Back at our house, we piled our books on the kitchen table. His heap was higher than mine. I was jealous. I thought I would take him down a peg or two.

So I went back to my study and brought out my treasure: a first edition of Freddy Goes Camping, inscribed to me by Walter R. Brooks himself, on September 12, 1948. "Eat your heart out, Howdy," I said, and he did.

I riffled through the pages and out popped two pieces of typewriter paper, folded into a quarter of their size. I hadn´t the foggiest idea what the folded papers were. Upon opening them up and flattening them out, I saw that one--on Brooks letterhead--was addressed to my mother and that the other was a longish sonnet, also signed by Brooks. They are printed elsewhere in this issue. [Only available in the printed version of the newsletter--ed.]

Interestingly, I had asked Michael Cart at the convention the night before whether anything was known of the prototype of the Bean Farm--a question that is answered at least partially in the letter.

Not only had I forgotten that the papers were hidden there, but I had forgotten that I had them--indeed, I had forgotten everything about them, so successfully had I blotted them from my mind. They marked the spot where I had stopped reading Freddy Goes Camping, indeed where I had stopped reading Freddy books altogether at the age of 14--at least until I had children of my own.

It´s the sort of thing Freddy might have done--detecting himself.

The mists of 48 years parted before my eyes. There I was in New York, a gangly 14-year-old in the spring of 1948, about to graduate as an 8th grader from the Buckley School, where I was editor of The Record. I was headed for the big world of boarding school in September.

My mother enjoyed the Freddy books as much as I didin fact, over the years over many cups of tea she had read them all to me, many more than once. We were both curious about Brooks. She had the idea of writing him and inviting him to lunch in Cooperstown, when we would be there that summer.

I was dubious.

She said maybe she would ask him to write a poem for the Buckley Record I would like that, wouldn´t I?

I said no.

Unbeknownst to me, she wrote him anyway. I don´t have a copy of her letter, but clearly she asked him about the origins of the Bean Farm. It turned out that she also had a secret agenda of her own: she was very active in the International Girl Scouts, and she thought it would be a good idea if Brooks sprinkled a few Girl Scouts in his next Freddy book.

On April 21, Brooks wrote a very nice letter back (the one printed here) and offered to write a poem for the Buckley Record if I wrote him. This I did, under a maternal gun.

The following September, just before I took off (not very willingly) for boarding school, Brooks and his first wife showed up in Cooperstown for Sunday lunch. He looked a little like Freddy in the picture of him in Freddy and the Ignormus, where he is wearing one of Mr. Beans suits. His wife was, I think, wearing a pink dress.

Brooks took one look at me and said, "I thought you were 8."

Crestfallen, I confessed that I wasn´t.

"Oh," he said, clearly disappointed, having come (as I imagined him thinking) the 50 miles from Roxbury for nothing. "Well, you might as well have this anyway." And he handed me his latest book, Freddy Goes Camping, which he had already inscribed.

I don´t think I said more than two words all the rest of lunch. Talk about Childhoods End! I felt as if I had been thought an inappropriate tenant of the Garden of Eden--for such the Bean Farm is--by God himself. Imagine A. A. Milne telling you that he thought you were too old to enter Pooh Corner? Or Kenneth Grahame ordering you off the River? Or Lewis Carroll pointing your way out of the rabbit hole? Talk about traumatic experiences! No wonder that--in the brief few days before I went off to Andover--I had tucked those letters into my unfinished copy of Freddy Goes Camping and forgot about them for 46 years!

I am sure Brooks wasn´t being insensitive to a superannuated and possibly oversensitized adolescent--rather, he was genuinely surprised and caught short. But this does raise some interesting questions. For one, what would he have thought of you, and of the other Friends of Freddy, most of whose 400 members saw the wrong side of 14 several decades ago?

A more serious question is, is it possible that it never occurred to Brooks that his books--written clearly with 8 or 10 or 12-year-olds in mind--might be loved by 14-year-olds or 16-year-olds or even 40-year-olds and 60-year-olds?

In short, could it be that Brooks was not aware that he had written masterpieces of childrens literature that could be appreciated on many levels and by many ages? Or that he did not think of himself in any way as an American Milne or Grahame? Stranger things have happened.

I wish I knew the answer.