A Tribute to Beverly Cleary

RHYS BOWEN: 

This is my first time to host since the world was told of the death of Beverly Cleary, aged 104.

What a remarkable woman and a remarkable life she led. And yet, if you met her, she was quiet and unassuming, like anyone’s grandmother.

I was lucky enough to meet her back in the 1970s when I was living in Texas, writing children’s books, and helped to organize a literary festival. Beverly was the keynote speaker and I hosted her at our house. (In those days we had a Texas-style mansion with a Gone with the Wind staircase so a suitable place to house an icon.)

She was charming, undemanding, great sense of humor. She must have made a big impression on our children because after she had left the doorbell rang one afternoon. I opened it and there was my son, Dominic, aged three, standing outside with my purse over his arm and a serious look on his face.

“Good afternoon, I’m Beverly Cleary come to stay,” he said in a posh voice.

(He was born an actor!)

My daughter Jane went to school very excited and told her class that Beverly was staying at our house. Nobody believed her. They all laughed at her. So Beverly signed a copy of one of the Ramona books, “To Jane, at whose house I am staying.”

When I look back on her life it’s amazing the impact she made. She wrote a few small children’s books, about everyday subjects and ordinary people. No super-heroes, no Greek Gods, no explosions and car chases, and yet they have endured and will endure. Why? Because every child could identify with those characters. So could most adults. We think of the times we have done stupid or embarrassing things. I remember Ramona on her first day of school being told to ‘sit here for the present’. And she thinks it’s a test. If she sits there and doesn’t move she’ll get a present. So she won’t go out to recess. She won’t stand up.

That could easily have been me: hesitant, wanting to please and do the right thing but sometimes getting it so embarrassingly wrong.

Ramona’s family is everyman. The father loses his job. They have money troubles. Ramona’s relationship with her big sister is not always smooth.  And yet they are funny. We laugh at Ramona saying Jeesus Beezus and getting into trouble. Actually we laugh WITH Ramona, not at her.

Beverly’s magnum opus, of course, was Dear Mr. Henshaw that won the Newberry Award. If you read it as an adult you will see why—the subtle psychology behind a relationship between famous writer and unhappy boy, shown only through letters. The boys’ father has left them. He is unreliable, makes promises he never keeps. When the boy writes to Mr. Henshaw he asked what thinks he likes and doesn’t like. He says he doesn’t like little kids with runny noses.  Why is that we wonder until we realize that when he does see his father his father always ends by saying “Keep your nose clean, kid.” Brilliant.

Looking back over my own writing career I wish that I could say I had a body of work that would endure, that spoke of the human condition as palpably as Steinbeck or Dickens. But I don’t. Beverly Cleary does, I believe, because she retained the heart of a child and she

wrote from the heart.