{"id":42369,"date":"2021-04-12T10:00:23","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T15:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=42369"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:17:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:17:29","slug":"beverly-cleary-forever-1916-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/beverly-cleary-forever-1916-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Beverly Cleary Forever (1916\u20132021)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beverly Cleary, who died last month, would have been 105 today. If they\u2019re celebrating DEAR<\/a> (Drop Everything and Read) day at your local school, she\u2019s why. The patron saint of reading for reading\u2019s sake: What children\u2019s author wouldn\u2019t take that? I am delighted by the fuss\u2014not to mention the christening of Beverly Cleary School in her beloved Portland, Oregon, and of the Beverly Cleary residence hall at her alma mater, UC Berkeley. But even the longest and most glowing obituaries didn\u2019t dwell on what matters most: how her books work, what they make their readers feel, what possibilities they opened up for later writers.<\/p>\n

Consider a tiny moment in Beezus and Ramona<\/em> (1955), first of the deservedly famous Ramona series. Ramona upends everyone\u2019s Saturday morning by luring a passel of random kids to her house for a party. It\u2019s a nightmare for anyone who feels at all responsible (read: Ramona\u2019s big sister, Beezus). However, the last word goes to Ramona.<\/p>\n

Mother dropped wearily into a chair. \u201cRamona, if you wanted a party, why didn\u2019t you ask me to have one?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause when I ask you don\u2019t let me do things,\u201d explained Ramona, sniffing.<\/p>\n

Beezus couldn\u2019t help feeling there was some truth in Ramona\u2019s remark.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The candor of Beezus\u2019s reluctant admission helps explain why Cleary\u2019s books could cover ground considered shocking in her day for children\u2019s literature: household misery, depression, intense family quarrels, the outright misery of a laid-off dad who wants to yet cannot quite quit smoking. Shocking still, even today, is the careful attention Cleary pays to what actual humans do when exasperated.<\/p>\n

She is, in short, a writer with much more to offer than motorcycle-riding rodents (no offense, Ralph S. Mouse). She is a crucial bend in the highway of American humor that goes back to Thurber, to Twain and beyond. I cannot imagine Judy Blume, Arnold Lobel, or Mo Willems without her.<\/p>\n

Cleary was certainly fiercely funny; like Twain she had an ear for the phrase that reveals the fallacy beneath. But her true gift\u2014as the party passage above makes clear\u2014lay in noticing that children, like adults, are consistently\u2014and hilariously\u2014unalike. Those resonant and enduring differences in character, outlook, and nature are not there to be ironed out: they\u2019re the stuff and substance of human life\u2014and of Cleary\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n

In My Own Two Feet<\/em> (1995)\u2014the second of Cleary\u2019s memoirs; both are worth reading\u2014Cleary drops a revealing clue about how she envisions her own work. In one of her few college literature classes, a Professor Lehman held her attention by praising<\/p>\n

\u201cthe minutiae of life,\u201d those details that give reality to fiction. It is a long leap from Peregrine Pickle<\/em>, Tristram Shandy<\/em>, The Mysteries of Udolpho<\/em>, and all the other novels we studied that year to the books I was to write about Henry, Ramona, and Leigh Botts, but I know, if others may not, that the influence of Professor Lehman is there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I buy that. Most of what\u2019s great about Cleary arises when \u201cthe minutiae of life\u201d meets \u201cbooks about kids like us.\u201d Like Twain, Cleary makes moving comedy out of the sense that reality is a lot more messy than any rhetorical strategy can express.<\/p>\n

\n

So, where to begin? There are Henry Huggins lovers, and people who swear by Dear Mr. Henshaw<\/em>, or Ellen Tebbits<\/em>. But my Beverly Cleary starts with chimeric, exuberant Ramona and her sensible, cautious older sister, Beezus. Every child should be lucky enough to have all eight Ramona books in a messy pile somewhere, especially the surprisingly dark Ramona and Her Father <\/em>(1977) and Ramona Forever<\/em> (1984).<\/p>\n

Beezus and Ramona<\/em>\u2019s third sentence sets the tone for the whole series: \u201cBeezus felt that the biggest trouble with four-year-old Ramona was that she was just plain exasperating.\u201d The chapter-sized episodes that follow are vintage Cleary: stasis, disrupted by trouble, resolved by bedtime.
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Cleary’s true gift lay in noticing that children, like adults, are consistently\u2014and hilariously\u2014unalike.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nTake apples. In the first of her memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill<\/em> (1988), Cleary reports her own early memory of sitting \u201camong the windfalls under an apple tree that bore cream-colored apples with pink cheeks, sniffing the sun-warmed fruit, taking one bite, throwing the rest of the apple away, and biting into another.\u201d Why? Obviously, \u201cThe first bite of an apple tastes best.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Beezus and Ramona<\/em>, that real-life incident is assigned to the fictional troublemaker Ramona. And when she\u2019s caught\u2014having already devoured half the family\u2019s precious basement store of apples\u2014Ramona\u2019s response is revealing:<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to share the apples,\u201d she said sweetly.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, no, you don\u2019t,\u201d said Beezus. \u201cAnd don\u2019t try to work that sharing business on me!\u201d That was one of the difficult things about Ramona. When she had done something wrong, she often tried to get out of it by offering to share something. She heard a lot about sharing at nursery school.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As so often with Cleary, part of the wit lies in noting the way that adult words make it into the consciousness of children\u2014and out again. \u201cDon\u2019t try to work that sharing business on me\u201d is pure Ring Lardner: fourth grader as small-time thug. But there\u2019s more: \u201cShe heard a lot about sharing at nursery school\u201d tells you about Ramona, and something about how well Beezus knows Ramona. Yet it also casts a refreshingly cold eye on the rhetoric of Ramona\u2019s piously right-thinking school.<\/p>\n

Cleary has her finger on a pulse that most of us grown-ups are too thick-skinned to feel. A Girl from Yamhill<\/em> charts the misery and borderline abuse of a Depression-era childhood lived in thrall to her bigoted, hypercritical mother. My Own Two Feet <\/em>relates the bliss of escaping to a public university where she could break away from family and finally mingle with other students both like and unlike her (\u201cTall, short, shy, \u2018fast,\u2019 brilliant, struggling, colorless, beautiful, neat, sloppy, confident, brokenhearted. Most were wearing homemade clothes. One girl had tailored a coat from a blanket.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Both memoirs are at their best, though, when charting the emotional life of kids. Working as a children\u2019s librarian in a \u201cone-library town,\u201d she finds bored boys asking, \u201cWhere are the books about kids like us?\u201d Even at 23, long before she wrote her first book, Beverly Cleary knew how to answer that:<\/p>\n

There was only one book I could find about kids like them, kids who parked their earmuffs on the circulation desk in winter and their baseball mitts in summer. That book was Honk, the Moose<\/em>, by Phil Stong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who can resist a recommendation like that? I just ordered a former library copy from a used bookstore in Frederick, Maryland.<\/p>\n

Aristotle\u2019s Poetics<\/em> argues that every representation, every piece of art, can only come out of the actual world. Early on in Beezus and Ramona<\/em>, a cheerily right-thinking art teacher (who probably talks a lot about sharing too \u2026) tries to spur Beezus into drawing a made-up animal. Let your fancy run free, she tells her.<\/p>\n

[Beezus] tried to think of an imaginary animal, but all the animals she could think of\u2014cats and dogs, cows and horses, lions and giraffes\u2014were discouragingly real.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think Aristotle would have liked Beezus. And Beverly Cleary.<\/p>\n

\n

I am not saying Cleary goes where no other children\u2019s writer does. Even my beloved duo of wild-eyed Ramona and prosaic Beezus fits a common pattern in children\u2019s books. The story space is split between one saturnine realist, who is simply trying to play by life\u2019s dimly understood grown-up rules, and one \u201cexasperating\u201d free spirit, who breaks these rules with abandon and, it seems to the realist, with impunity. Think of Arnold Lobel\u2019s irrepressible Frog and curmudgeonly Toad, or Bert and Ernie, or Elephant and happy-go-lucky Piggie.<\/p>\n

Ramona and Beezus, though, make me look further back in the history of fiction, further, even, than Pamela<\/em>. It was four hundred years ago that Cervantes first dreamed up the conceit behind Beezus and Ramona: every hard-headed realist needs an absurd dreamer to put a little zip back into life. His realist was Sancho Panza, Don Quixote the accompanying dreamer. In Kafka\u2019s amazing parable, \u201cThe Truth about Sancho Panza,\u201d we learn that it was Sancho who made Don Quixote up, so he\u2019d have an excuse to go on adventures. Sancho Panzas of the world (hello, Beezus), admit that you\u2019d be bored stiff without your loopy Quixote.<\/p>\n

There is something profound about the idea that we partly face reality by dreaming up the version of ourselves who can face it exuberantly, ridiculously. Realistic as we are, we often find ourselves wishing that we too could\u2014like Ramona\u2014conjure up a party out of a set of strangers on a featureless Saturday.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Essays<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n E. B. White\u2019s \u201cPlain Style\u201d @75<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Jan Mieszkowski <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

It may sound as if I am praising Cleary for doing two different things: for unleashing the fiery inventiveness of a Ramona, on the one hand, and for celebrating the ordinariness that she found in Honk, the Moose<\/em>, on the other. Actually, they go together. Cleary\u2019s genius lies in being a realist who can\u2019t help wishing reality\u2019s rules would melt away\u2014even though she knows they won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I think that those of us who no longer have a mat to drop onto, no longer have a teacher to read to us, or DEAR time to do it in, still ought to celebrate every April 12, by seeking out the kind of book that mixes ordinary reality with absurd beauty. That mix is there in Stella Gibbons\u2019s Cold Comfort Farm <\/em>and Joseph Heller\u2019s Catch 22<\/em>, in Anna Burns\u2019s Milkman <\/em>and Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s My Year of Rest and Relaxation<\/em>. Cleary, though, she\u2019s got it in spades.<\/p>\n

This article was commissioned by Nicholas Dames<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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