Illustration left by Louis Darling, from “Ramona The Pest” (1968); courtesy of the Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota
"Miss Binney,” Ramona asked, “I want to know — how did Mike Mulligan go to the bathroom when he was digging the basement of the town hall?”
This question, which wholly captures children’s persistent need to relate what they read to their own lives, and this moment — in all its realism, humor and respect for young children’s minds — encapsulate what makes books by Cleary, who will turn 95 on April 12, so enduringly appealing.
Speaking recently by phone from her home in Carmel, Calif., Cleary complained of a faulty memory, but nonetheless recalled the bathroom question as something one of her own children (she is the mother of twins) asked when she read “Mike Mulligan” to them. “So I gave it to Ramona,” she said.
No wonder Cleary’s books have sold more than 75 million copies worldwide. Her most celebrated series — Henry Huggins, Ralph the Mouse, Beezus and Ramona — all still in print, take children’s questions seriously even as they allow for the humor within.
“I longed for funny stories about the sort of children who lived in my neighborhood,” Cleary wrote in one of her memoirs, “My Own Two Feet,” which describes her evolution from Depression-era schoolgirl in Portland, Ore., to budding author in postwar Berkeley, Calif.
An only child, whose parents were forced to sell the family farm, Cleary was painfully shy. Troubled at school and beset by bad teachers, she didn’t learn to read until the third grade. Though, as she remarked tartly in our conversation, “My mother always read to me, so why should I learn to read?”
What ultimately drove her to write for children, she recalled, was a book she noticed when she had a job in a children’s bookstore in the 1940s. In it, a puppy said: “Bow-wow. I like the green grass.”
“No dog I had ever known could talk like that,” Cleary said. She wondered once again, as she frequently had while working as a children’s librarian, “What was the matter with authors?”
Her conclusion: “I knew I could write a better book.”
“When you’re the right age to read Cleary’s books you’re likely at your most impressionable time in life as a reader,” Leonard Marcus, a children’s book historian, said. “Cleary’s books both entertain children and give them courage and insight into what to expect from their lives.”
“I can’t keep her books on the shelf,” Elizabeth Bird, senior librarian at the New York Public Library, said. “They go out like crazy. She’s keeping up with all the new folks just fine.”
And in its hunger for dependable, family-friendly hits, Hollywood has come knocking. The Ramona series was turned into a 2010 movie, “Ramona and Beezus,” and a Hollywood incarnation of “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” is in the works.
How does Cleary explain her popularity? “I wrote books to entertain,” she told me. People often asked what she was trying to teach in her books. She would reply, “I’m not trying to teach anything!” This was the same attitude she had when she was first reading. “If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book,” she remembered.
More at the Sunday Book review, New York Times.
Beverly Cleary's website. - it is fun!
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