The Mortifications of Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary: ‘I just wrote about childhood as I had known it’

As recounted in Cleary’s first memoir, 1988’s A Girl From Yamhill, the author’s earliest memory was defined by calamity: Cleary, 2 years old and living on her parents’ Oregon farm, is running by her mother’s side when she falls, tearing holes in her brown cotton stockings and skinning her knees. Her mother tells her never, ever to forget the day. Cleary dutifully remembers the stumble and the ruined stockings, but not the context—later, her mother explains that the day marked the end of the First World War. In an essay for The Horn Book Magazine, Cleary described her family’s move to Portland, where she found herself, at age 6, “confined to a city classroom full of strange children after a life of freedom and isolation on a farm.” Even worse was that her first-grade class had three groups for readers—Bluebirds, Redbirds, and Blackbirds—and Cleary found herself assigned to the group for children who were struggling. “To be a Blackbird was to be disgraced,” she wrote. “I wanted to read, but somehow I could not. I wept at home while my puzzled mother tried to drill me on the word charts.”

Thinking of a child’s shame as a blessing seems strange, but Cleary’s early struggles with letters left her with two powerful assets. One was a spider-sense for the fierce jolt and slow burn of childhood mortification—in addition to her own feelings of ineptitude, she remembered how, when a boy lost his place during a reading drill, he was banished to the cloakroom to stew among everyone’s bags and muddy boots. The other was a devoted belief that children would never learn to love reading if the only books they were given were boring. One rainy Sunday afternoon, having efficiently but begrudgingly mastered literacy, Cleary began to read, “out of boredom” and drawn in by its pictures, The Dutch Twins, by Lucy Fitch Perkins. In one chapter, the boy twin, Kit, falls into the Zuider Zee, which Cleary could laugh at “because I had once fallen into the Yamhill River during a church picnic.”

To find something funny is to take away its power. In the more than 40 books Cleary published, what is most striking is how she balances empathy and connection with an ability to neutralize shame with gentle humor. Her first published work, Henry Huggins, was devised while Cleary was working as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, after a boy, unimpressed by the selection of books on offer, asked her where the books about boys like him were. Her second, Ellen Tebbits, is about a third grader beset by humiliations: a boy who won’t stop teasing her, a rift with her best friend over a badly sewn dress, and the secret shame of the woolen underwear her mother makes her wear to dance class. Throughout the lesson, Ellen’s underwear slips past her waist; as she repeatedly tugs it up, her every movement is satirically imitated by Otis, the ballet teacher’s vexing son, until Ellen is almost in tears. She’s saved by Austine, a girl who eventually reveals that she’s wearing similarly awful thermals. I was 7 when I read this book, and I had no idea what woolen underwear was; it didn’t in the least matter. The depth of Ellen’s agony was enough to know how awful it must have been.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/31BM7yl