copies in the first batch before I
released any copies among the reviewers or sent any copies as samples to
the trade. And after that I'd keep the presses running steadily in the
hope of being able to keep up with the demand which is sure to follow on
the heels of publication. This is almost the funniest book that was ever
written and it is all the funnier because the writer was so desperately
in earnest, so tremendously serious all the while she was writing it."

"It has made a big hit in England already," he said. "But over there
some people are saying that the author must have been a grown-up
person--that no child of nine could have written such a thing. The
suggestion is even being advanced that Barrie himself wrote it. I know
better, because I have seen the original script in a child's handwriting
on old and faded paper, and I met Miss Ashford some weeks ago in London
and I have had all the proof one needs that this is the authentic
product of a nine-year-old mind."

To which I said:

"No doubt some people will be saying the same thing over here and
they'll be wrong just as these English skeptics are and if they'll only
stop to think for a moment they'll know why they're wrong. No grown
person, not even the creator of a Wendy and a Peter Pan, could have
done this thing. It exhales the perfume of an authoritative genuineness
in every line of it. It had to be a child who wrote it--a child with a
child's imagination and a child's viewpoint and a child's ignorance of
the things she wrote about. In a way of speaking it is like those
unintentionally humorous obituary poems which appear in the papers. No
professional humorist can hope to equal them because when he writes one
he does it with deliberate intent to be funny and invariably he betrays
his hand. It is when some poor mourning amateur dips a 'prentice pen in
the very blood of his or her heart and writes such a poem that it
becomes so pathetically and so tragically side-splitting."

This was what I said. Not in these words exactly, but to this effect.

Mind you, I am not proclaiming that I am the only person who has said
this. Between chuckles thousands and thousands of others since that day
have thought and have said it. What I am proud of is that I was the
first person in America to say it, and so to this extent I count myself
a discoverer and I feel a sort of proprietary sense in being permitted
here to introduce "Daisy Ashford: Her Book." I am mindful of t