Beverly Cleary (1916–2021)

The writer Beverly Cleary has died at the age of 104. The New York Times has an ample feature on her life and work, beginning here. HarperCollins has a Cleary website.

I’m a latecomer to the Cleary world. In adulthood, I’ve read all the Ramona books, Ellen Tebbits (my daughter’s favorite), Fifteen, Jean and Johnny, The Luckiest Girl, Sister of the Bride, and Cleary’s two memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet. Her writing has lifted me to laughter and reduced me to tears.

Fellow kids-at-heart, I encourage you to read Beverly Cleary if you haven’t.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts

“We never have any sharp pencils”

Beverly and Clarence Cleary, in their newly bought house in the Berkeley Hills:

We had discovered in the linen closet a ream of typing paper left by the former owner. I remarked to Clarence, “I guess I’ll have to write a book.” My ambition, refusing to die, was beginning to bloom again.

“Why don’t you?” asked Clarence.

“We never have any sharp pencils” was my flippant answer.

The next day he brought home a pencil sharpener.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

Elaine was waiting for well over a year for me to read Beverly Cleary’s memoirs, this one and A Girl from Yamhill. She knew I would love them. She was right.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

“Etc., etc.”

Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) is now a student in the School of Librarianship, University of Washington. It’s noon:

As we ate our meager lunches and watched drama students, scripts in hand, emote over cups of coffee with soggy napkins folded in their saucers sopping up spills, we discussed the finer points of cataloging and invented an imaginary series of books for our instructor to catalog: six volumes, each with a different editor or sometimes two, one of whom wrote under a pseudonym and the other under her maiden name, some volumes translated from foreign languages and requiring translator cards, each volume with a preface by a different author, etc., etc. This sent us into gales of laughter as each of us thought of an addition to make the assignment more difficult. Such is the sense of humor of librarians. We also had earnest discussions on the finer points of grammar.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

“Plato: Teacher and Theorist”

History of Education, a prerequisite, holds few memories for Beverly Cleary:

What I do recall is the paper the entire class was required to write on one subject, “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” The paper had to be twenty-four pages long. Not twenty-three, not twenty-five. Twenty-four. Fortunately, I was fresh from Plato the previous semester, but I resented every word of that paper, every footnote, every ibid., every op cit., and longed to add one footnote, “I thought of this myself.” Footnotes in foreign languages, according to the wisdom of Stebbins, always impressed a reader, but I couldn’t work one in on Plato. Someday, someday, I vowed, I would write entire books without footnotes.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

This paper and its footnotes were to become the stuff of a scene in the 1963 Cleary novel Sister of the Bride.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Stebbins: Stebbins Hall, University of California at Berkeley.]

Broadening a point

College English with Mr. Frank Palmer, who sports a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch fob:

Mr. Palmer guided us through Beowulf and Macbeth, which I had studied in high school, The Mayor of Casterbridge, biography, essays, and modern American poetry. He required us to learn to spell Nietzsche, the name of a German philosopher I have never had occasion to use. Best of all, he assigned original compositions but instructed us never to use the expression “broaden our horizons” because, he said, “the horizon is the point at which the earth and sky meet, and it is impossible to broaden a point.” I never have, even though I am not sure I agree.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

It’s smart to avoid “broaden our horizons” as a stale, trite expression. But isn’t the horizon better conceived as a line, at least a figurative one? Merriam-Webster: “the line where the earth seems to meet the sky.” The vanishing point, well, that’s a point.

I hope that this post has broadened all your horizons.

Related reading
All OCA Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Dowdy finals

Dowdy-world final exams at the University of California at Berkeley:

In those days, before ballpoint pens, we filled our fountain pens, emptied them, and refilled them just to make sure. We self-addressed postcards to enclose in our blue books so readers could send us our grades before official grades came out. Then, as was the Cal custom the first day of finals, the Campanile tolled “An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever in the morn’.”

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

As a college student in the 1970s, I routinely turned in postcards with my finals. Students were still doing so when I started on the tenure track in 1985.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[“Readers”: graduate students.]

One more way to do well on an exam

It’s midterm time in Stebbins Hall, University of California at Berkeley. But this trick should work even better with finals, when it’s more difficult to track down exam takers:

Stebbins circulated a myth that it was possible to outwit a reader by writing “Second Blue Book” on the front and writing one brilliant last sentence inside. This was supposed to make the reader believe he had lost the first blue book, which would fill him with such guilt that, rather than admit to carelessness, he would give the student an A.

Beverly Cleary, My Own Two Feet: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[“The reader”: a graduate student.]

“I suspicioned you weren’t.”

Sophomore year:

Claudine and I studied The Century Handbook of Writing, giggling all the way. Examples seemed even funnier. When we came to Rule 68, “Avoid faulty diction,” we studied the examples: “Nowhere near. Vulgar for not nearly.” “This here. Do not use for this.” “Suspicion. A noun. Never to be used as a verb.” Our conversation became sprinkled with gleeful vulgarisms we had never used before. When I announced my presence by noisily tap-dancing on the Klums’ wooden porch and probably annoying all the neighbors on the block, Claudine said she was nowhere near ready for school.

“I suspicioned you weren’t.”

Claudine’s reply was something like, “This here shoelace broke.”

We thought our dialogue hilarious. Mrs. Klum sighed as she looked up from Science and Health and said with a smile, “Oh, you silly little girls.”

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

[From a 1922 edition of The Century Handbook of Writing, in Google Books.]

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

“Say telephone.”

High school, and Beverly Bunn and Claudine Klum are friends:

In freshman English, tiny Miss Hart led us through Treasure Island, which pleased the boys. The book bored me. This was followed by As You Like It and Silas Marner. We also waded into a compact little green book, The Century Handbook of Writing, by Garland Greever and Easley Jones, a valuable book that was to accompany us for four years. Completeness of thought, unity of thought, emphasis, grammar, diction, spelling, “manuscript, etc.,” and punctuation — we went over it all every year.

Claudine and I, who were inclined to giggle at almost anything, found The Century Handbook entertaining. We often quoted examples. If I said, “Phone me this evening,” she replied, “‘Phone. A contraction not employed in formal writing. Say telephone.’”

After a test, one of us quoted, “‘If I pass (and I may),’ said Hazel, ‘let’s celebrate.’” This, from a rule on the use of quotation marks, was worth a fit of giggles.

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

[From a 1922 edition of The Century Handbook of Writing, in Google Books. But no sign of Hazel.]

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

“What would I have done without the library?”

Sixth-grade, and Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) has moved from fairy tales to the Myths and Legends shelves of the Rose City Branch Library:

There I came upon the story of Persephone and her mother, Demeter. The flowers that enticed Persephone to stray from her companions reminded me of our pasture in Yamhill, where I had often been enticed to run on to a thicker clump of buttercups or a patch of fatter Johnny-jump-ups. In my imagination I became Persephone. Turning into the daughter of a Greek goddess was easy — I had had so much experience turning from a brown-haired girl with crooked teeth into a golden-haired or raven-haired princess in fairy tales. At home, the wet Oregon winter with its sodden leaves became the dark underworld, and somehow Mother’s telephone soliciting kept the world from blooming. Demeter’s search for Persephone comforted me. What would I have done without the library?

A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[“Telephone soliciting”: selling magazine subscriptions.]

Hot pillows

Beverly Cleary (then Bunn) continues to make her way through school:

The third-grade teacher at Gregory Heights Grammar School soon became ill and was replaced by a substitute who stayed the rest of the semester. Schoolwork was easy, but the substitute, I felt, could not be very bright. One day she asked a boy to make a sentence using the word “hot.” He answered, “My pillow is hot.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Stoves are hot. Fires are hot. Pillows can’t be hot.”

Yes they can, I thought. I felt sorry for the little boy, who looked ashamed. Pillows could be very hot. Dumb teacher.

Beverly Cleary, A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

This substitute reminds me of the student teacher who told fourth-grader Bryan Garner that shan’t isn’t a word and refused to acknowledge otherwise. Dumb teacher.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

“A right or wrong hand”

Beverly Cleary, writing about first grade:

The teacher was a tall, gray-haired woman who wore a navy blue dress and black oxfords. “Good morning, children,” she said. “My name is Miss Falb. It is spelled F-a-l-b. The l is silent. Say, ‘Good morning, Miss Falb.’”

“Good morning, Miss Fob,” we chorused.

She then wrote Miss Falb in perfect cursive writing on the blackboard and instructed us to get out our tablets and copy what she had written.

The whole thing seemed unreasonable to me. If the l was silent, why was it there? I picked up my pencil with the hand closer to the pencil. Miss Falb descended on me, removed the pencil from my left hand, and placed it in my other hand. “You must always hold your pencil in your right hand,” she informed me.

No one had ever told me I had a right or wrong hand. I had always used the hand closer to the task. With her own pencil, Miss Falb wrote Beverly Bunn on my paper in the Wesco system of handwriting with its peculiar e’s, r’s, and x’s that were to become a nuisance all my life.

A Girl from Yamhill: A Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 1988).

Cleary’s signature, stamped on the cover of this hardcover edition, shows the Wesco e and r.


[A library copy, with a ballpoint slash through the final y.]

For further reading: a biographical sketch of John Austin Wesco and a 1939 edition of Wesco System of Writing.

Related reading
Beverly Cleary on writing by hand : Ramona Quimby and cursive : All OCA Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Miss Falb turns out to be a real piece of work. I suspect that those of us who’ve had miserable teachers are never reluctant to identify them by name.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its second year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our second year we made it through thirty books. In non-chronological order:

Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, The Unknown Masterpiece

Willa Cather, My Àntonia, My Mortal Enemy, Obscure Destinies, One of Ours, O Pioneers!, The Professor’s House, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Troll Garden, Youth and the Bright Medusa

Beverly Cleary, Jean and Johnny, Ellen Tebbitts, The Luckiest Girl, Sister of the Bride

Hans Herbert Grimm, Schlump

Homer, Odyssey

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Timothy Snyder, Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

John Williams, Stoner

Stefan Zweig, Chess Story, Collected Stories, Confusion, Journey into the Past, Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink, The Post-Office Girl, The World of Yesterday

Aside from a few uncollected stories, we’ve now read all of Cather’s fiction. We have much more Zweig to go. Onward.

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: Linda Asher, Anthea Bell, Jamie Bullock, Simon Carnell, Carol Cosman, Richard Howard, John Hoare, Benjamin W. Huebsch, Helmut Ripperger, Joel Rotenberg, Joe Sachs, Damion Searls, Erica Segretrans, Will Stone, and Jordan Stump.

A related post
FSRC: first annual report

Beverly Cleary, writing by hand

Beverly Cleary, writing by hand:

To me, writing involves my imagination, a handful of 29-cent ball point pens, a stack of paper and time free from interruption. I often begin books in the middle or at the end and play about with my characters in my poor handwriting until I am satisfied with their behavior, which is often a surprise to me. That is the fun of writing. I then rewrite my books in somewhat more legible typing and take them to a typist who telephones for translation of words written between the lines but manages to return pristine manuscripts. I find typing the most difficult part of writing, and once bought and returned a German typewriter that had Achtung! printed on the front. Battling a typewriter is distracting enough without having it giving me orders like an arithmetic book. Telling stories quietly and privately with pen on paper is my joy.

This passage appeared in a 1985 essay published in The New York Times , “Why Are Children Writing to Me Instead of Reading?” A good question, one that results from the classroom study of “living authors.” Cleary quotes from a letter by E. B. White to a librarian in which he wonders about the wisdom of having classrooms’ worth of children write letters to writers. A sentence from the letter that Cleary is too kind to quote: “The author is hopelessly outnumbered.” In another letter, to a child, White explained why he hadn’t written another book for children: “I would like to write another book for children but I spend all my spare time just answering the letters I get from children about the books I have already written.”

Elaine found her way to the Times essay after reading Cleary’s two memoirs. They’re on my to-read list.

On an unrelated note: it’s really hard to type while listening to the Kinks.

Related posts
Beverly Cleary : handwriting : E. B. White (Pinboard)

[White’s letter to the unidentified librarian is dated May 7, 1961. The letter to a child-reader dates from late March 1961. From Letters of E. B. White , ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). White would go on to write one more book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).]

Twelve more movies

[Twelve movies, three sentences each, no spoilers.]

Yum, Yum, Yum! A Taste of Cajun and Creole Cooking (dir. Les Blank, 1990). More Les Blank, more Marc Savoy, more food, more music. I like the repeated scenes of people loading up their plates: a lump of rice, a hunk of something else. Supporting cast: red pepper, black pepper, salt.

*

Gap-Toothed Women (dir. Les Blank, 1987). Minding the gap, from the Wife of Bath to Lauren Hutton and Sandra Day O’Connor. Not the essay in objectification I thought it would be. But neither does it pass the Bechdel test: each gap-toothed woman speaks only to the camera.

*

The Lost Weekend (dir. Billy Wilder, 1945). Ray Milland as Don Birnam, writer and alcoholic, with Jane Wyman as his long-suffering girlfriend, and Phillip Terry as his long-suffering brother. Markedly different from the novel (Don’s sexuality, the ending) but excellent on its own terms. I recommend the novel too, which begins with a sentence from James Joyce’s story “Counterparts”: “The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.”

*

Fitzcarraldo (dir. Werner Herzog, 1982). “The act of territorial acquisition is done step by step.” Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known as Fitzcarraldo, a white-suited fanatic attempting to realize his dream of opera in the Amazon. My favorite scene: Caruso v. Jivaro drums.


[Klaus Kinski as Fitzcarraldo broadcasting Caruso. Click for a larger view.]

*

Burden of Dreams (dir. Les Blank, 1982). The making of Fitzcarraldo is a story of determination against all odds. Werner Herzog was his own Fitzcarraldo, mastering an environment, or attempting to. The heart of darkness is here the heart of art.

*

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (dir. Les Blank, 1980). The story goes that Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completed his film Gates of Heaven (1978). Morris did, and Herzog did. With help from the chef Alice Waters.

*

Ramona and Beezus (dir. Elizabeth Allen, 2010). In our household Sarah Polley is the one and only Ramona Quimby, but we’ve been reading Beverly Cleary, and when we saw a few minutes of this film by chance, we had to get it. It’s sweet, funny, and good for the whole family. A wonderful touch: not a cellphone or computer in sight.

*

The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014). Perfect for anyone who just happens to be reading Stefan Zweig. A beautiful, deliriously detailed treat, with moment after moment that calls for pausing and zooming. I would say what Umberto Eco said of Casablanca : The Grand Budapest Hotel is “the movies,” with all the delights to be found therein.


[“Who’s got the throat-slitter?” A Courtesan au chocolat from Mendl’s bakery, cut and shared with cellmates. Click for a larger view.]

*

Viridiana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1961). A novice leaves her convent to visit her uncle. She’s a live ringer for his long-dead wife. Celibacy and lust, purity and degradation, with strong overtones of Vertigo and a Brueghel-like Last Supper.


[Click for a larger view.]

*

Grand Hotel (dir. Edmond Goulding, 1932). Great Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery, all sojourning under various names or guises. This is the film in which Garbo famously said that she wanted to be alone. Is it heresy to think that Crawford steals the show?

*

Joy (dir. David O. Russell, 2015). A plucky mother of two (Jennifer Lawrence) invents a new and better kind of mop and triumphs on QVC. A thoughtful depiction of creativity against the backdrop of a complicated, imperfect, often unsupportive family. But the final thirty minutes feel like a contrived attempt to create further drama when the story has already come to an end.

*

Tickled (dir. David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, 2016). Much of what’s here has been on record for some years. No matter, though: Farrier and Reeve are figuring it out for themselves. What begins as a light look into a quirky online subculture turns into a story of immense cruelty, shame, and sorrow.

What would you recommend?

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen : Yet another dozen : Another twelve : And another twelve

Cleary and the critics

[Endpaper. Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).]

It’s pleasure to open a library copy of a children’s book and find traces of previous readers — if only underlined words (“vocabulary words”) or passages marked off, perhaps for reading aloud. This library copy of Sister of the Bride though is exceptional:

A great book
         Yah!
            Yah!

The
    Grooviest!!
Goovrest

  Very
Groovy!

  A
Fab!
Wow!
Book

I suspect a Beatle influence in the first and last comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Roguish Gramma

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

There’s an occasional kiss in the Cleary First Love series, but nothing else like Gramma’s comment. I imagine that it prompted any number of young readers to look up roguishly , make a puzzled face, and keep reading.

Like Lady Elaine Fairchild’s “Here it is, my lovely can”, Gramma’s comment is a naughty speck in a chaste fictional universe.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Footnotes

Barbara has agreed to type a few pages of Rosemary’s paper “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” There are lots of footnotes, because professors like footnotes, Rosemary explains, especially if they’re in French or German. Rosemary’s, alas, are in English.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

A show of hands: who remembers working out footnotes with a typewriter? I did it with at least one undergrad paper, after making the mistake of asking the professor whether he preferred endnotes or footnotes. The trick, as I remember it, was to count the number of characters and spaces in the text of the note, turn that number into lines, and measure up from the bottom margin. It was all very approximate. I must have ended up retyping one or more pages.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Don’t boo me: I was out in the hallway when I asked the question, not in class. There was never a directive to the class, and I never again made the mistake of asking.]

Silver and china

Greg’s mother has taken the young couple to lunch. And now Rosemary is beginning to bend.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Is this the same Rosemary MacLane who said no to silver, not very many pages before? It is. As in a Jane Austen novel, people accommodate themselves to the institution of marriage, and it accommodates itself to them. There’s still room for books and records and pottery.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Silver or stainless steel

Rosemary MacLane has just announced to her grandmother, her mother, her sister Barbara, and Aunt Josie that she will not be choosing a silver pattern. So what will she and her husband use to eat? Stainless steel.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Remember: for Rosemary and Greg, the only important possessions are books and records. Rosemary goes on to explain that Greg knows a couple with a potter’s wheel who can make dishes for the newlyweds — “in warm earth tones.” And Rosemary will be making place mats out of burlap. The kids these days!

And speaking of the young, or the younger: this passage is a good example of how sixteen-year-old Barbara has begun to see her eighteen-year-old sister’s wedding as her own event to manage. Like the protagonists of Beverly Cleary’s other First Love novels, Barbara will move toward greater self-knowledge, and she’ll come to understand that the difference between eighteen and sixteen, like the difference between silver and stainless steel, is pretty vast.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, Rosemary is eighteen, a college freshman. Greg is twenty-four, a graduate student getting a teaching credential.]

Books and records v. things

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Books and records: Rosemary and Greg are my people.

I think it’s time for a Beverly Cleary tag.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Museums, uh-oh

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Museums: always a dangerous sign.

Sister of the Bride is my favorite novel in Beverly Cleary’s “First Love” series. The Luckiest Girl is in second place, followed by Fifteen and Jean and Johnny . I find that I can best enjoy these books by not thinking at all about my experience of high school. Wait, what’s a “high school”? Did I even attend one? I make no comparisons.

Sister of the Bride has many wonderful moments of gentle social satire. It’s in many ways a mid-century Bay Area version of Jane Austen. But: Rosemary MacLane and Greg Aldredge, students at UC Berkeley, are, as the novel makes clear, at least a tad counter-cultural. One more school year and they can participate in the Free Speech Movement as a nice, young married couple.

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)

If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)

[Things missing: an alarm clock, a walk before breakfast to beat the heat, the heat, the humidity, &c. “When he could have”: I don’t think Beverly Cleary would use singular they . The novel would explain somewhere in chapter 1 that Elaine and I both kept our maiden names when we married.]

From Ellen Tebbits

Beverly Cleary, Ellen Tebbits (1951).

I like the way this paragraph sketches a season in so few words: days shorter, leaves deeper, nights chillier. I like, too, the reference to “downtown,” the semi-mysterious place where stores are, or were. And I like the way the passage presents time as both cyclical and linear, seasons coming around again, clothes outgrown.

Ellen Tebbits is our daughter Rachel’s favorite Beverly Cleary book. Having now I read it, I can understand why.

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

Domestic comedy

[The subject was one of Beverly Cleary’s characters.]

“He seems to have . . .”

[And then in unison.]

“. . . a very high opinion of himself!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Cute and the dictionary

A “boy” — the still mysterious Johnny Chessler — has called Jean Jarrett cute:


Beverly Cleary, Jean and Johnny (1959).

One could read this passage in relation to W. E. B. DuBois’s idea of double-consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Double-consciousness is unmistakably at work here: Jean sees herself as insignificant when others call her Half Pint; she begins to see herself as cute when Johnny Chessler pronounces her so. She later looks in a mirror and imagines how she might have looked to Johnny. By the end of the novel, Jean is able to look in a mirror with a stronger sense of self.

To my mind, Cleary’s wit heightens rather than diminishes the pathos in this passage.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

[Whatever dictionary Jean is using, I don’t have it.]

Jean Jarrett, letter writer

Jean Jarrett is headed over to her best friend Elaine Mundy’s house to write letters:


Beverly Cleary, Jean and Johnny (1959).

“Their correspondence was on a higher level”: I love that free indirect discourse.

Related reading
All OCA letters posts (Pinboard)
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

Cursive Quimby

In Mrs. Whaley’s third-grade classroom, the children are practicing their cursive capitals:


Beverly Cleary, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (New York: William Morrow, 1981).

Ramona must be in the clutches of the Palmer Method, whose capital Q is a piece of work. In The Palmer Method for Business Writing (1915), A. N. Palmer admits that “capital Q is simply a large figure two” — a big floppy numeral passing for a letter. Some Method!

I can’t recall a cursive Q of any sort from childhood. I do remember G and Z , which came to me in their Palmer forms, and which I could never get quite right. Especially Z .


[Capitals Q and Z from The Palmer Method for Business Writing (1915).]

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary
Quimby economics
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

*

April 2018: In the memoir A Girl from Yamhill (1988), Beverly Cleary writes about her first exposure to cursive, in the form of the the Wesco system of handwriting, which, like the Palmer Method, has a 2-shaped Q. It’s now obvious to me that Cleary is drawing on her Wesco childhood in her depiction of Ramona’s dissatisfaction with cursive writing.

Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

It’s the first day of school for Ramona and Beezus:


Beverly Cleary, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (New York: William Morrow, 1981).

This passage makes me remember the thrill of the small, the way the most modest surprise can spark delight. (Shiny quarters from grandparents.) Ramona’s eraser, “pearly pink,” is undoubtedly a Pink Pearl.

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 is part of my Sustained Silent Reading.

Related reading
All OCA eraser posts (Pinboard)
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary
Quimby economics

Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary

[Jane Purdy, Stan Crandall, and the miracle of telephony. And a delivery truck. The cover of Fifteen (1956).]

Beverly Cleary celebrates her hundredth birthday today.

Our fambly grew up with Ramona and Beezus. I read Fifteen just recently, after Elaine borrowed it from the library, and I loved it. There are more Cleary books in my future.

Related posts
Dowdy-world miracle : Quimby economics

Is a phone a “mythical device”?

In the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (dir. Alex GIbney, 2015), the New York Times writer Joe Nocera attempts to demystify Apple and its iPhone:

“The real magic of it is that these myths are surrounding a company that makes phones. A phone is not a mythical device. And it sort of makes you wonder less about Apple than about us.”

Once when we move beyond shields and swords, I’m not sure that anything can rightly be called a “mythical device.” But what about “magical”? Marcel Proust thought there was something extraordinary about the telephone (as did modernists more generally). The unnamed narrator of In Search of Lost Time calls the telephone a “miracle” and a “supernatural instrument.” Beverly Cleary’s character Jane Purdy backs him up: in Fifteen , she thinks of the telephone as “a miracle, a real miracle.” Jane, now Jane Crandall, seventy-five, does FaceTime with her grandchildren these days. And Stan Crandall, seventy-six, is finally using an iPhone. Another miracle, says Jane.

[Joe Nocera has some history with Apple and Steve Jobs. Beverly Cleary celebrates her hundredth birthday tomorrow.]

Dowdy-world miracle

Beverly Cleary, Fifteen (1956).

Elaine read and reread Fifteen when she was eleven. She says it taught her everything she knew about being a teenager. (She adds that her teenaged years were quite different from Jane Purdy’s.) Elaine borrowed the book from the library last week; I ended up reading it straight through in a day. She told me I would like it. Yes, it’s wonderful.

Unlike Walt Whitman, I’m not certain that I contain “multitudes.” But there must be a fifteen-year-old girl in there somewhere.

11:22 a.m.: In 2011, Daughter Number Three wrote about Fifteen and cultural mores.

Related posts
Alvin’s Secret Code and Deathman, Do Not Follow Me
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Quimby economics

Ramona Quimby speaks for us all:

"We are scrimping and pinching to make ends meet."

Beverly Cleary, Ramona and Her Mother (1979)