It has often been said that death is the logical, unavoidable conclusion to all things. And, on a daily basis, approximately 150,000 people die around the world. Most are unknown and have left little impact on the planet, while some are famous enough to be everyday topics of conversation and will appear in historical records every year long after they are gone. People like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. left a legacy that long outlived them.
In my lifetime, some deaths have impacted me in deep ways with results and memories that still linger to this day. One more recently involved a literary icon who impacted my life as a writer and a reader. She was, in my opinion, one of the greatest living writers of the past few decades, despite the fact that she was better known as a writer of books for children: Beverly Cleary, who died recently at the age of 104.
The Bard of Klickitat Street, the creator of Beezus and Ramona, their friend Henry Huggins, the mutt Ribsy and the cat Picky-Picky. The librarian-turned-children’s book writer who's art will continue to live long on the pages of her books.
I praise her so richly because she accomplished something that few writers have even attempted. She wrote brilliantly about childhood as it really is. Most of the writers who have tried - even those, such as Judy Blume, who were inspired by her - drift toward the adjacent category of “young adult” writing, which is not the same; it broadens the canvas and enlarges the palette. To inhabit the lives of children without distorting or condescending is an imaginative feat of the highest order.
Cleary's realist novels (set aside her very good series on a motorcycle-riding mouse) are compelling, sharply observed and morally nuanced. And strictly real. Her characters do not solve crimes; they do not live in an abandoned boxcar down the road from their long-lost millionaire grandfather or in a New York City museum; they do not have a magical nanny with a chimney sweep boyfriend; the back of their closet does not lead to a land of fauns and talking badgers.
These are, of course, allusions to various classics. But, all point to the nearly universal urge of children’s writers to approach the audience through the most accessible portal: the wide-open door of imagination. Children know comparatively little of the real world, and they are made to feel that they know even less. Deep down, adults are not sure that we want them to know, for the real world is full of hard truths and easy lies. The smoothest path for the children’s writer is to join them in their imaginary play, rather than to approach through the narrow gate of their limited experience.
Admittedly, she did not capture every child’s life. The Oregon farm girl and Portland resident gave us characters who were white, suburban and middle-class, though very much on the struggling rather than the comfortable end of that spectrum. But, great writing must be specific. Characters must be individuals, not types; settings must be one place, not every place. The author trusts that if the characters are deep enough, and the settings are rich enough, something true will emerge that can speak across differences.
For her, that truth, which she captured to a remarkable degree, is the feeling of being between 5 and 10 years old. The boredom, frustration, mortification, warmth, impulsiveness, lability, silliness, bewilderment and capacity to forgive. It is not the feeling of looking at children. It is not the feeling of having once been a child. It is neither nostalgia nor “baggage.” It is childhood as it feels in real time.
Open any of the novels at random, as I recently did with her 1964 book, Ribsy, the first one I found on the bookshelf at the local library. This is typical Cleary, her basic routine work, not a cherry-picked sample. The title character of this novel is a homely and unremarkable dog. Henry promised to train him, but that did not work out so well. Henry is an ordinary boy. Naturally, he has an ordinary dog.
Readers had been introduced to them 14 years earlier, when the two met in Henry Huggins, of which a chapter devoted to getting the dog home on a city bus is the finest introduction to adult bureaucracy in all of children’s literature. Now Ribsy has disappeared; he has been lost for a month: “Henry pedaled slowly, leaning to the right and then to the left, as if pushing bicycle pedals was hard work. Ribsy was not coming back. He knew it now. He might as well stop telephoning the Humane Society and leaving food in the dish on the back porch. He might as well throw away the old tennis ball.”
This is the opposite of magical. The passage documents the partial death of Henry’s ability to think magically, and the weight of the moment is perfectly mirrored in the sudden heaviness of his bike. The fact that his sassy younger neighbor Ramona is oblivious - “busy stepping on all the cracks” of the sidewalk “just to show she wasn’t afraid of breaking her mother’s back” - adds poignancy to Henry’s burden of encroaching maturity. Cleary’s work is packed with such masterly paragraphs on nearly every page.
I suppose I relate best to Henry, of all her characters, because I was a boy. How could Cleary understand so fully the ambition to build a secret clubhouse out of scrap lumber? But, one of Cleary’s revolutions was to make real girls into main characters. Her finest and most complex creation was Ramona Quimby, the imperfect “pest” forever failing to match the superior example of her older sister, Beezus. Ramona is childhood times two, the child among children. She reminds the older children of the younger selves they are trying to leave behind. At the same time, like all children, Ramona is growing up swiftly.
She anchors Cleary’s greatest series of novels, published between 1975 and 1981: Ramona the Brave, Ramona and Her Father, Ramona and Her Mother and Ramona Quimby, Age 8. In these works, Cleary took on with great subtlety the most unsettling experience of childhood: the discovery that parents often fail and do not know what they are doing - leaving you, the child, to begin making your own way.
Ramona’s claustrophobic hours in the company of her snappish father as he tries to quit smoking are as intimate and unsettling as a John Cassavetes movie. Cleary’s sketch of a pointless but briefly fierce argument between Ramona’s parents - ostensibly over pancakes, but really over their sudden fear that their partnership might not survive their precarious finances - is as true to actual marriage as anything Anne Tyler or John Updike ever wrote. Though frightened, Ramona, like all children in such moments, can do nothing but grow a little stronger and hope the storm will pass.
Realism at this level - which is to say, at the highest level - requires profound powers of observation and sympathy. It also demands total writerly control, a prose style so transparent and well-structured that nothing comes between the reader and the material - writing of the sort George Orwell had in mind with his dictum, "good prose is like a windowpane.” Its wellspring is honesty and love. Those were Cleary’s gifts to children.
Cleary was richly honored in her long life and will continue to be on her birthday every April 12, National Drop Everything And Read Day.
But, to me, Beverly Cleary will not fully have her due as long as she is remembered as a great children’s author. She scorned unnecessary words.
“Great author” says it all.
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