The writing roots of a Yamhill girl: Essay on Beverly Cleary

cleary.JPGView full size Author Beverly Cleary spent her early years in this Yamhill home.

In 1930, her eighth-grade year at Portland's Fernwood Junior High School, Beverly Bunn wrote a paragraph of "description" for a writing assignment. Bunn -- later to become beloved children's writer Beverly Cleary -- received her paper back "inflamed" with corrections in the inevitable midcentury red pencil. Recalling the incident much later, Cleary confessed that for years afterward she "avoided description," as if the shock had frozen this aspect of her writing mind.

Yet one suspects, in rereading Cleary's superb yet neglected memoirs, "A Girl From Yamhill" and "My Own Two Feet," that the teacher's red pencil may have merely confirmed in the young Cleary an existing tendency. While articles Cleary has written on adult subjects show she can adopt a more elaborate mode if she likes, the famous children's books -- "Henry Huggins," "Ramona the Pest," "Ellen Tebbits" -- and the memoirs themselves, are all characterized by an unusually dynamic and spare style. This crispness may owe something to excellent editing on the part of her publishers, yet it seems likely, given Cleary's specific background as an Oregonian, that the vigor and forthrightness of her language were engendered by the same familial and historical forces that shaped her personally.

"A Girl From Yamhill" covers Cleary's memories of early childhood in Yamhill, where her family had farmed for several generations; her parents' move to Portland; and Cleary's school years, which landed squarely in the Great Depression. "My Own Two Feet" chronicles Cleary's sojourns at a Southern California junior college and the University of California at Berkeley, library studies at the University of Washington, and a return to California during the war years to marry Clarence Cleary, a Catholic boy of whom her parents disapproved.

As a small child in tiny Yamhill, Beverly's life was free and vigorous, characterized by warm experiences with animals, plants, weather, family and neighbors. She was natively curious and brave (seeking at one time to circumnavigate the family home on a ledge 10 feet above the ground), hungry for stories and books, and confident that everyone in the world "loved little girls." The vigor and playfulness of Cleary's work is grounded in those early Yamhill years.

But when the family moved to Portland and the Depression struck them painfully, Beverly knew what it was to make do or do without. Her father, who'd been happy as a farmer, was out of work for some time, and then employed inside as a bank guard.

He became severely depressed. Her anxious mother sat in the kitchen for days on end, telephoning strangers to offer subscriptions to McCall's magazine, in order to earn a few pennies. Friends who wanted to visit were put off because "friends cost money" to entertain. At one time, financially strapped and unable to buy even a bottle of vanilla, the Bunns' every baking was flavored from a leftover bottle of almond extract.

These lessons in privation, in her home and all around the city, were reinforced by Cleary's mother, who repeatedly cautioned her daughter to remember her "pioneer ancestors," the Bunns and Hawns, whose names still pepper the road signs and gravestones of Yamhill County, people of legendary ingenuity and fortitude, who never borrowed, worked sunup to sundown, and "stood on their own two feet."

This background of both sunny vigor and careful "spending" of resources communicates itself in Cleary's style. This most beloved and best-selling of Oregon authors rarely indulges in adjectives, lush static descriptions or airy philosophies, even when the becharmed reader would beg her for more. She might occasionally allow that a dress is "red" or that a lunch tray is "heavy," or that the mill town where a friend lives is "lonely," or that sixth-grade boys are "awful." But by and large Cleary cleaves to reporting action -- what people did, and what they said about it. A paragraph in which Cleary describes undergoing a home permanent wave is illustrative of her predilection, using in only 10 sentences the verbs run, hide, leave, burn, earn, shampooed, bent, pulled, wound, raised, soaked, fastened, dangled, turned on, rang, fined and arrested. When the action is over, Cleary moves on; though she can and does write long paragraphs, many comprise only three or four brisk sentences.

Even her considerable humor is tart and dry. When narrating the story of a teacher who has insulted her deeply, Cleary refrains from luxuriating in verbal revenge, reporting simply that the teacher did not return to school in fall, having been reassigned "to the open-air school for tubercular children." This uninflected fact, placed just so at the end of the anecdote and at the end of a paragraph, leaves the reader gasping with laughter. Less is never more than it is in Cleary.

One particularly poignant episode in "A Girl From Yamhill" illustrates how deep this quality goes. At 11, having been stricken by repeated debilitating bouts of tonsillitis, the terrified young Beverly enters the hospital to have her tonsils removed. When she wakes and throws off her covers, her often-difficult, often-critical mother is there, calling her "sweetheart," and "honey," as she tucks the child back in. Beverly, still woozy, is astonished. She's never before heard such words from her mother, and, as she tells us, she never in her life heard them again. Cleary's only comment on her mother's refusal to use any endearment with her? "I have often asked myself why."

The hot wells of feeling that must have underlain that statement, and the great restraint with which she alludes to them, constitute both philosophy of life and of writing.

Another writer might amplify this moment, elaborate upon it, offer interpretations and comparisons, and ensure the reader has not missed the significance. But Cleary -- herself the mother of young children at the time of the account -- trusts the reader to fill in what she does not say. She loves the raw fact more than she loves language for its own sake.

But all this talk of stylistic austerity does not mean Cleary's work is thin or parsimonious. Indeed, anyone who has followed Ramona through one of her many stormy days knows that Cleary's other great gift is a startling recall of and respect for childhood (and not just childhood) states of mind such as rage, self-pity, longing and pride.

And the richness of the memoirs as documents of Oregon and California life in the 1920s, '30s and '40s can scarcely be overstated. We learn that Portlanders from the east side went "overtown" rather than "downtown," that Oregon farm wives dried their laundry on the porch because it was the only dry place to hang it, that to clerk at Meier & Frank was not considered suitable for a well-bred girl, and that a nickel held against a plate-glass window could be used to determine the thickness of the glass. Active dancing of the Charleston could apparently lead to a broken arm.

When Beverly goes to junior college, a skirt "twelve inches above the floor" is considered fashionable, but later, at Berkeley, she makes up a shortfall in her rent money by altering other girls' skirts to a new, shorter length for 50 cents apiece. It was a time when a girl could be in college before she realized she needed glasses, and in graduate school before she could afford them, a time when Beverly Bunn's engagement to the Roman Catholic Clarence Cleary could occasion rage and disownment by her nominally Presbyterian parents.

Beverly Cleary recently turned 96, and she may have taken a well-deserved step away from the writing desk. The children she has invented are permanent, indelible in the history of such writing. Yet it's important for her fans, young and, um, older, to appreciate that such work does not come from the air. A writer's style is unique, as individuals are unique. Like that of Lois Lenski, or C.S. Lewis, or J.K. Rowling, Cleary's is the product of a specific mind, of a life lived under particular pressures and energized by particular gifts. Cleary's own story is a lesson for writers and creative talents of other stripes: One need not be anointed or privileged, or part of an establishment, to make good work. What is required is authenticity of voice. To find the clay that built Ramona, one returns always to a farm in Yamhill.

Anna Keesey teaches at Linfield College. Her first novel, "Little Century," has just been published. Keesey will read from "Little Century" at 7:30 p.m. June 19 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St; and at 7:30 p.m. June 27 at Annie Bloom's Books, 7834 S.W. Capitol Highway.

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.