In 1939, when Beverly Cleary was a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, she had a tough time finding books to recommend to her young readers. They wanted to read about “normal, everyday kids” — characters they could relate to. Much to her dismay, Cleary could not find such books on the shelves — so she decided to write them.
That is how young readers got Henry Huggins, Cleary’s first book about a boy who adopts a stray dog. It was accepted and published in 1950 by Morrow, the first publisher Cleary sent it to. Henry Huggins was a resounding success; Cleary’s readers loved Henry, his friend, Beezus Quimby, and her sister, Ramona, who grew so popular that Cleary soon gave her her own books. Cleary, who had once said, “I think children like to find themselves in books,” had achieved what she had set out to do — through her characters, she reminded her readers of themselves.
Cleary’s storytelling stands out on several fronts: her remarkable memory — “I remember every blade of grass from my childhood” — her attention to detail, her sharp, exquisite, lucid turn of phrase. The most distinctive quality of her writing, however, is her determination to allow children to be exactly who they are. This is evident in the character of Ramona, whose journey from being a boisterous, meddlesome infant in Beezus and Ramona to turning into an empathetic, sensitive school-goer in Ramona’s World is a treat to follow. Ramona does everything a child her age would do; she vents her angst by squeezing out the contents of an entire tube of toothpaste into a basin; she names her favourite, worn-out, green-haired doll ‘Chevrolet’ just because she’s taken with the word; she swelters in the heat through a whole day in school because she’s wearing extra layers.
But alongside this, the complexity that Cleary injected into Ramona’s character was rarely seen in children’s literature at the time. From the point of view of any other person, Ramona could be a real pest. (In fact, there is a book in the series called Ramona the Pest.) However, when Cleary wrote from the perspective of the young girl, and depicted her life through her own eyes, everything Ramona did seemed perfectly logical. Like the homes of many, many children, Ramona’s home life, while not entirely unhappy, rests on a brittle sense of peace. Her father is often unemployed; her parents fight, and when they do, the ill-concealed and all-too-familiar resentment in the air can make one squirm. Children reading the books relate to her, because they are her.
Children’s literature has grown up since and taken on more dimensions; Cleary’s stories may no longer seem as unique as they were when she was writing them. But they retain one quality that readers would be hard-pressed to come by even today: her dogged aversion to telling children how to be ‘better’. Cleary, who would have been 105 this month, passed away in March. But her work endures, not just because of her clear memories of what it was like to be a child, but also because she continued to closely listen to children throughout her life.
