Photographic Insert IV.
The Post Library at Camp Knight in the hectic days when I didn"t have time to get my hair done.
Colonel Harry L. Dale, a kind, just, and humorous C.O.
The Oakland Regional Hospital, where I enjoyed supplying patients with books and where, when it was Hotel Oakland, I had danced when I was in college Laughter in the Post Library of the Oakland Regional Hospital. Johnny, the British gunner, and Judy on the far left Clarence amuses Kitty in front of our first house in the Berkeley Hills. Hannah said he was "debasing the cat with cheap tricks."
I was not strangling the cat.
He always tried to avoid
cameras, and I was restraining him.
I have no idea why I looked so roguish at a neighbor"s house.
Clarence after he gained weight on my cooking and before he gave up smoking.
Hannah looks on as I sign books at the Sather Gate Book Shop.
Hannah crowned with a hat of artificial violets, my birthday gift to her.
Mother and Dad in 1949.
Taken about the time I sent off my first ma.n.u.script.
A House, a Cat, a Letter.
Life as a housewife in a three-room apartment was a letdown after the stimulating work in the hospital. War had scattered friends, most of them now married and parents of infants, with little time for writing letters. Librarians I had met as a member of the Special Libraries a.s.sociation asked if I would be interested in their libraries, but when I learned the work would consist of research handled by mail, I felt it would be too much like writing college papers. The postwar cost of construction prevented us from building a house on a lot we had bought during the war. Clarence was transferred to the university, where he was in charge of government research and development contracts. His travel time made our days longer.
For the first time since the war began, I went to Portland to see Mother and Dad and to admire Claudine"s beautiful baby boy. Dad, who had aged, said little but was obviously more than happy to see me after such a long time, and Mother enjoyed serving ice cream and cake to my friends when they came to call. Then one evening when Mother and I were doing dishes, I remarked that now that the war was over, Clarence and I were thinking of starting a family.
Mother said, "Oh, this having babies is just a fad."
I managed not to laugh but pointed out that if people didn"t have babies, the race would die out. But I wondered. Why had Mother made such a remark? Later, I asked her. Her tart answer-"Well, I said it, didn"t I?"-left me wondering if she did not want me to have children.
When I returned from Portland, I told myself that if I was ever going to write a children"s book, now was the time to do it. But when I sat down at my typewriter and stared at the paper I had rolled into it, the typewriter seemed hostile, and the paper remained blank. The longer I stared, the blanker it seemed. After years of aspiring, I found I had nothing to say. Maybe it had all been a foolish dream.
I kept busy making a braided rug to go in front of our living room couch and, inspired by work I had seen in the Red Cross craft shop at the hospital, traveled to San Francisco to study wood carving with a retired puppeteer who lived in his studio over a former Chinese laundry. "That"s nice," said one of the neighbors. "Gives you something to do." I carved trays, a sewing box, panels for a chest, and a mask intended to be a Greek G.o.d that turned out to look like Clarence with horns and a beard.
Then a brief pregnancy ended disastrously, leaving me pale, depressed, and lonely for the child we did not have. I had to pull myself together. To stop moping around feeling sorry for myself, I once more became Christmas help at the Sather Gate Book Shop. By then wholesale business had increased, and four of us, reaching over and around one another, manned the crowded department, serving customers and pulling library orders. There was no room to stand back from the punch of the cash register drawer. Credit cards were new, but machines for stamping names and addresses had not come into use.
I felt better being with people, and gregarious Quail, who collected people, invited Clarence and me to a party. I was fascinated by her rustic house furnished with antiques of no particular period. The living room windows were eighteen feet high and looked across a deck to a view of one end of the bay and to the bottom of a cliff, an abandoned quarry that Hannah, Quail"s mother, had turned into a rock garden. I was even more fascinated by the mixture of guests of all ages: architects, writers, artists, publishers" reps, and bookstore customers whom Quail found interesting. That evening revived my spirits.
When we returned to our apartment, I told Clarence I wanted to move to Berkeley. Now. He agreed. The next weekend we drove aimlessly around the Berkeley Hills on streets where we had walked when we were students. Three blocks up a steep winding road from Quail"s house, we came upon a FOR SALE sign in front of a privet hedge that hid a brown redwood house shaded by eucalyptus trees growing in vacant lots on either side.
We stopped, walked down the brick steps through a terraced garden, and knocked on the door. Within a couple of hours we had bought a five-room house clinging to the side of the hill and only ten minutes from Clarence"s work. As it turned out, we had bought a house and a cat.
The naval officer who owned the house was being transferred, and the cat, a large, sleek tabby with a white vest, was destined for the Humane Society. Didn"t we want a cat? No, we did not want a cat. Parting with their cat was so painful to its owners that we agreed to feed it for the ten days they would be staying with relatives. They agreed to let us paint the laundry while the house was in escrow, which horrified the real estate woman handling the sale.
We left a bedroom window open so the cat, who had simply been called Kitty, could go in and out. When we arrived with paint and brushes, Kitty ran to meet us with the saddest miaows I had ever heard, and when he followed us into the house, his desolate cries seemed to echo through the empty rooms.
"We"re going to keep that cat," said Clarence, beating me to it. We did our best to console Kitty, who endured a lonely escrow, felt rea.s.sured when furniture arrived, and was quite at home when we moved in. Because he felt the house was his, he ruled us with a fur-covered paw of iron and proved to be a remarkably intelligent animal with a large vocabulary of expressive miaows, demanding praise when he presented us with a gopher, coaxing a young cat who was badly treated into the house to share his food. He recognized the sound of our car when it was two blocks away, and ran to the door to meet Clarence. He did not care to sleep in the laundry on cold nights, so he figured out how to open the door so he could make himself comfortable, after a thorough bed-jiggling wash, in the middle of our bed. We loved the neighborhood, we loved the house, we loved the cat.
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.
The trouble was, I couldn"t think of anything to write about. Besides, I was busy turning our house into a home. We bought dining room furniture to go over the braided rug. I braided another for the living room from my army uniforms, Clarence"s wedding suit, and other memories. Quail, always generous with hospitality, helped us make friends with neighbors whose houses were scattered among the eucalyptus trees.
But it was Quail"s mother, Hannah, who became my special friend. She had been a newspaperwoman for the Spokesman Review in Spokane, Washington, as well as the mother of Quail and six sons. She was the first liberated woman I had ever known, although I sometimes felt her liberation had come at the expense of others. When Clarence and I walked down the hill to Quail"s house for dinner, we often heard mother-daughter shrieks floating up the canyon, but by the time we reached their doorstep, they were laughing at how ridiculous their argument had been. Their relationship, although not an easy one, seemed much healthier than my relationship with my mother.
Afternoons I often walked down the hill to see Hannah. Sometimes she invited me for lunch to eat "dead party," her term for leftovers from entertaining. Hannah loved parties and, when telling about one, often said, "Life is a soap opera." She liked young people, particularly if they were creative, and often said, "Deliver me from my contemporaries." I once found her in the garage running sheets through the mangle and singing at the top of her voice, "Seated one day at the organ, I was weary and ill at ease." Hannah insisted on gracious living, and that included ironed sheets even if she had to iron them herself. We drank instant coffee out of thin china cups that rarely matched because Hannah, who had an eye for antiques, felt that matching dishes were uninteresting and middle-cla.s.s. What mattered was the quality of the china.
As we drank the dreadful coffee out of elegant cups, we engaged in what Hannah called "airy persiflage," but sometimes we were serious. Hannah once said, "You know, Beverly, you are afraid of your mother." I was startled, but I knew she was right. I sat, silent and thoughtful, looking out at her beautiful garden spilling down the cliff, and wished Mother had such a creative interest in her life. Hannah treasured every plant and even managed to persuade lilies of the valley to bloom in California by putting ice cubes on the plants in hot weather. For work on the steep slope she wore a big hat trimmed with corsage ribbons and pumps with three-inch heels, which she speared into the ground to keep from falling. "I dread the day when someone calls me spry," she said.
Mother and Dad drove down from Oregon to see our new house. "Why, this is luxury!" cried Mother as she walked down the brick steps. "We worked all our lives for a house like this"-an exaggeration because the Portland house was larger, with an attic and bas.e.m.e.nt, was more solidly constructed than our little house, and they hadn"t worked all their lives for it. They bought it when Dad sold the farm.
Dad"s att.i.tude was different. He took an interest in cineraria and other unfamiliar plants in our garden. He laughed heartily when we told how Clarence had spent half a day digging a huge thistle away from the corner of the garage, only to have a puzzled neighbor inquire, "Don"t you like artichokes?"
I had asked my parents to bring us an old pair of andirons stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Instead Dad insisted on taking me to Breuner"s to choose andirons, fireplace tools, and a screen. "We had to work so long for ours," he said, and Mother agreed. My relationship with Mother was improving, but even so, the visit had its tense moments, and I was glad to return to furnishing the house.
To help pay for some of our new furniture I became Christmas help in the bookstore once more. One morning, during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, ""Bow-wow. I like the green gra.s.s," said the puppy." How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that. Suddenly I knew I could write a better book, and what was more, I intended to do it as soon as the Christmas rush was over.
During that Christmas season, Quail was excited because Elisabeth Hamilton, children"s editor of Morrow Junior Books and, according to Quail, the smartest editor in the business, was coming to speak at a library meeting in San Francisco. Quail, who had published a couple of easy-reading books and collaborated on two books for older readers, was eager to hear Mrs. Hamilton and asked her salespeople to go along if they were interested. Of course I went.
Elisabeth Hamilton was a tall, handsome woman who wore a white hat and told amusing anecdotes about her authors, which I found a bit disappointing when I had expected her to hand down Wisdom, but she had a presence that was impressive. After her talk, on our way out, I asked if she wrote a letter when she rejected a ma.n.u.script. She courteously replied to a question she must have heard too many times, "Only if the author shows talent but the book is a near miss."
On January 2, 1949, I gathered up my typewriter, freshly sharpened pencils, and the pile of paper and sat down at the kitchen table we had stored in the back bedroom. Write and no backing out, I told myself. In all my years of dreaming about writing, I had never thought about what it was I wanted to say. I stared out the window at the fine-leafed eucalyptus tree leaning into the canyon and filled with tiny twittering birds. I looked out the other window at a glimpse of the bay when the wind parted the trees. There must be something I could write about. The cat, always interested in what I was doing, jumped up on the table and sat on my typing paper. Could I write about Kitty? He had a charming way of walking along the top of the picket fence to sniff the Shasta daisies, but children demanded stories. A daisy-sniffing cat would not interest them. I thought about the usual first book about a maturing of a young girl. This did not inspire me. I chewed a pencil, watched the birds, thought about how stupid I had been all those years when I aspired to write without giving a thought to what I wanted to say, petted the cat, who decided he wanted to go out. I let him out and sat down at the typewriter once more. The cat wanted in. I let him in, held him on my lap, petted him, and found myself thinking of the procession of nonreading boys who had come to the library once a week when I was a children"s librarian, boys who wanted books about "kids like us."
Why not write an easy-reading book for kids like them? Good idea! All I needed was a story. How was I going to pull a story about boys from my imagination when I had spent so much of my childhood reading or embroidering? I recalled the Hanc.o.c.k Street neighborhood in Portland where I had lived when I was the age of the Yakima boys, a neighborhood where boys teased girls even though they played with them, where boys built scooters out of roller skates and apple boxes, wooden in those days, and where dogs, before the advent of leash laws, followed the children to school.
These musings were interrupted by a memory that sprang from my days at the hospital. A harried office worker whose husband was overseas asked if her two children, a well-behaved boy and girl, could come to the library after school. I agreed. Once they brought their dog with them, which pleased men who missed their own dogs. The next day their mother told me that a neighbor had driven the children and their dog to the hospital. When the family started home, they learned a dog was not allowed on a streetcar unless it was in a box. Rain was pouring down, the nearest grocery store that might have a box was several blocks away-by the time the woman finished her tale, she looked even more harried than usual.
Aha, I thought, the germ of a plot just right for little boys. The trouble was, I soon discovered, I did not know how to write a story. It had been thirteen years since I had written anything but letters, radio talks, and tiresome papers with footnotes. Although I had received excellent grades and complimentary comments on both high school and junior college writing, the only corrections were on spelling, punctuation, and syntax, the sort of thing dear to English teachers. No teacher ever told me how I could improve my stories or suggested any changes at all.
If, in the 1940s, there had been writers" groups, I probably would have joined one. Fortunately, they did not exist, or if they did, I did not know about them. I believe a writer"s work should spring from one person"s imagination, una.s.sisted by a group of friends who may be helpful but who also may be of questionable judgment.
As I sat listening to twittering in the eucalyptus tree and thinking of the boys from St. Joseph"s, my story-hour audiences, and cla.s.ses I had visited, it occurred to me that even though I was uncertain about writing, I knew how to tell a story. What was writing for children but written storytelling? So in my imagination I stood once more before Yakima"s story-hour crowd as I typed the first sentence: "Henry Huggins was in the third grade." Where Henry"s name came from I do not know. It was just there, waiting to be written, but I do know Henry was inspired by the boys on Hanc.o.c.k Street, who seemed eager to jump onto the page. Hanc.o.c.k Street became Klickitat Street because I had always liked the sound of the name when I had lived nearby. I moved Claudine"s house from Thirty-seventh Street to renamed Hanc.o.c.k Street to become Henry"s house. When I came to the skinny dog who found Henry, I needed a name. We happened to have spareribs waiting in the refrigerator, so I named the dog Spareribs and continued the story, based on the family who took their dog home on a streetcar. I changed the family to one boy, and the streetcar into a bus.
Writing without research, bibliography, or footnotes was a pleasure. So was rearranging life. If I needed a character or incident, all I had to do was pull it out of my memory or imagination without searching a card catalog or waiting in a crowd of pressured students at a circulation desk. What freedom!
When I finished the story I thought I was pleased with it, but I was not sure anyone else would be, so I invited a bookstore friend, Sara, who was both knowledgeable and sardonic about children"s books, to come to dinner and read my story. I knew she would not try to meddle with it, and she would be honest. While I tossed the salad, Sara read "Spareribs and Henry" and gave her opinion in her no-nonsense way: "They"ll be glad to get it." That was her only comment, but it gave me the a.s.surance I needed and was the last time I asked anyone other than Clarence to read a ma.n.u.script.
What to do next? I doubted that Elisabeth Hamilton would be interested in such a slight story. To inquire about publishers I wrote to Siri Andrews, who by then had left the University of Washington to become children"s editor at Holt and then librarian in Concord, New Hampshire. She suggested Abingdon-c.o.kesbury Press, and I sent my story on its way. As I walked down the steps of the post office, I found I was having more ideas about Henry.
The story quickly came back semirejected. The editor wrote saying, "I enjoyed reading this story very much-which is something I cannot say of all the ma.n.u.scripts that come in here! It has humor, action, and realism, and I think that both boys and girls, but particularly boys from eight to eleven or so, would enjoy reading it very much." She went on to point out that a short story for this age group did not work into book format easily except as one of a collection of short stories and that this age group preferred a book-length story. She was kind enough to say that perhaps I could write a number of these "short incident" stories and submit them to magazines. "Then perhaps you could weave these stories about a plot which would carry its own suspense and climax and have a book-length ma.n.u.script to offer." If this worked out, she hoped I would send the ma.n.u.script to her, for "it seems to me it might very well fit into our publishing program."
Well! I reread the letter half a dozen times, and went to work telling/writing my other stories about Henry, which had an a.s.sortment of inspirations. One story, "The Green Christmas," was a new version of a story I had written when I was a freshman in high school, a story based on a newspaper clipping about some boys who had gone swimming downriver from a dye works that had dumped dye into the river. The boys had come out dyed green. In my high school story I had the accident save a boy from playing the part of an angel in a Christmas pageant. This turned into a story about Henry trying to get out of playing the part of a little boy in a school PTA program. (I had once been a tin soldier in such a play.) He was saved when green paint was dumped on him when he helped paint scenery.
Another chapter was based on an incident that happened to the boy next door when I lived on Thirty-seventh Street. He was pa.s.sing a football to another boy across the street when a car came speeding around the corner. The football flew into the car and was never seen again-a good beginning for a story but not a satisfactory ending. Of course the boy who owned the football blamed Henry and demanded his football back. How? I recalled a summer vacation during college when some friends were talking about catching night crawlers to use for bait on a fishing trip. When I said I had never heard of night crawlers, we went on a hunting expedition. Armed with flashlights and two quart jars, we went to dimly lit Grant Park, where the lawn was damp from recent watering. In a short time we pulled from the gra.s.s two quarts of writhing worms each eight or nine inches long, a disgusting sight. Having caught them, we felt they should serve some useful purpose. What to do with two quarts of worms? "Waste not, want not," we were often reminded during the Depression.
Someone had an inspiration-we drove to a fire station that had a large fishpond. We dumped our worms into the water, which was instantly full of churning, leaping, apparently grateful fish. This incident helped me solve Henry"s problems. He caught, with the help of his parents, enough night crawlers to sell to neighborhood fishermen to pay for the football. Today, in my old neighborhood, I see childish signs that say: NIGHT CRAWLERS FOR SALE.
I continued to work, combining my writing with bird-watching, letting the cat in and out, and an added activity, bread baking. After Clarence drove down the hill to the university, I often mixed a batch of bread and set it to rise over the pilot light on the gas stove. Then I sat down at the kitchen table to battle my typewriter. About the time I was ready to stretch my legs, the bread had risen, filling the house with yeasty fragrance, ready to be punched down and divided into loaves to rise again. On my next leg stretch, I put the bread in to bake and inhaled the lovely fragrance. By the time the bread was done, the cat felt neglected and sat on my paper. I pushed him off, took the bread out of the oven, b.u.t.tered the crisp brown crust, and stopped writing for the day.
Hannah"s company and her garden made a soothing change after a morning with my enemy the typewriter, an enemy I finally abandoned for first drafts. Ideas flowed much more easily in longhand. I continued happily inventing stories about Henry from reality and imagination, and as I wrote, Mother"s words, whenever I had to write a composition in high school, came back to me: "Make it funny. People always like to read something funny," and "Keep it simple. The best writing is simple writing." Some of Professor Lehman"s words also echoed through my mind: "The minutiae of life," and "The proper subject of the novel is universal human experience." I remembered Mr. Palmer"s three-hundred-words-a-day a.s.signment and disciplined myself to write every day.
Then one morning as I wrote, it occurred to me that all the children in the stories were only children. Someone should have a sibling, so I tossed in a little sister to explain Beezus"s nickname. When it came time to name the sister, I overheard a neighbor call out to another whose name was Ramona. I wrote in "Ramona," made several references to her, gave her one brief scene, and thought that was the end of her. Little did I dream, to use a trite expression from books of my childhood, that she would take over books of her own, that she would grow and become a well-known and loved character.
The group of short stories needed one last chapter. I mulled over my childhood on Hanc.o.c.k Street, and for some reason recalled circus posters along Sandy Boulevard when the circus was coming to town. Why not have Spareribs be a lost circus dog? I did not much like the idea, but it was all I could come up with. More mulling did not help, so that was the way I ended the book. I was not really satisfied with that last chapter. Having a clown turn up on Klickitat Street could hardly be called universal human experience, at least not in Portland, but since I had never written anything longer than those twenty-four pages on "Plato: Teacher and Theorist," the seventy or eighty pages I had written about Henry seemed as long as the novels I had studied at Cal.
What was the next step? I knew from bookstore talk and conversations at Quail"s house that I was under no obligation to Abingdon-c.o.kesbury because the editor had not sent a contract. While I was grateful for her words of encouragement, I felt I should try a larger publisher. I thought of Elisabeth Hamilton in her handsome hat and liked the idea of my ma.n.u.scripts in the hands of someone I could visualize. I also recalled that she wrote a letter when she rejected a ma.n.u.script if she felt it revealed the author showed talent.
Unfortunately, I had some reservations about Morrow as a publisher because I had met the West Coast rep several times at Quail"s house and heard him express his dislike of children"s books and how unnecessary he thought they were. On the other hand, at one of Quail"s parties I had also heard two Morrow adult authors, Harvey Fergusson and Oregon author H. L. Davis, agree that Morrow was fair to authors. That is what I wanted, a publisher who was fair to authors. They also said that, although the rep had made much of being a talent scout, his strong point was getting books into bookstores. I could understand this because I had watched him selling to Quail at Sather Gate, where he was always kind, gentlemanly, and knowledgeable about the books on his list. I liked him; I just didn"t like his att.i.tude toward children"s books, which, however, I decided to overlook. After all, he had been denied the experience of working with Yakima"s nonreaders, so how could he understand?
I also heard H. L. Davis remark that when he sold his first ma.n.u.script he had walked through the middle door of the post office when he mailed it. He felt this had brought him luck, and ever afterward he had walked through the middle door of the post office whenever he mailed a ma.n.u.script. What worked for a Pulitzer Prize-winning author might work for me, even though I was uneasy about that last chapter. I sent my ma.n.u.script to Elisabeth Hamilton with my maiden name as author and my married name and address typed on the t.i.tle page but without a covering letter. What could I say except the obvious: I hope you buy my book.
I had often heard Quail tell would-be authors that if a publisher did not report on a ma.n.u.script within six weeks, sending a letter of inquiry was acceptable. Morrow, kind to authors, thoughtfully sent a postcard saying my ma.n.u.script had been received, so at least I knew it wasn"t lost in the mail. After several weeks went by, I began to watch for the mailman while clipping off dead roses to disguise my true purpose. Since he had never seen me in the garden, he became curious and wanted to know what I was waiting for. When I explained, he began to watch for my mail as eagerly as I, and at the end of six weeks, left his heavy mailbag by the hedge and came running down the steps waving an airmail letter. "It"s here!" he shouted as I ran to meet him. A letter, not a returned ma.n.u.script! I went into the house to read it.
I tore open the envelope and read the first sentence of Elisabeth Hamilton"s letter dated July 25, 1949. "Several of us have read your story, "Spareribs and Henry," and we are very much interested in it as a possibility for the Morrow list." She went on to praise the story and to say that "the last chapter, "Finders Keepers," was not up to the previous chapters." How right she was. She then asked if I would be willing to make revisions. Of course I would, in my own blood, if necessary. She closed by saying she was going on vacation until shortly after the middle of August, and if I would undertake revisions, she would send criticisms and suggestions on her return. I flopped into a chair and, smiling at the whole world, read and reread the letter. Then I telephoned Clarence to give him the news and wrote a letter saying I would be pleased to make revisions.
The middle of August, I started pulling weeds in the garden, but this time confessed to the mailman my motive, other than getting rid of weeds. "Not today," he said every day until the middle of September, when I had pulled a lot of weeds. He ran down the steps once more, this time waving a big brown envelope, as pleased as if he were giving me a personal gift. I tore it open and read Mrs. Hamilton"s first paragraph, which concluded with: "...my ideas of what I hope you will do with it are very definite indeed." That sentence had a do-it-or-else ring.
The suggestions began, "1. Is it important to you to use the pen name Beverly Bunn? We all like Beverly B. Cleary better." This gave me pause. I liked my maiden name because it was a name people remembered. I finally agreed to the change provided the middle initial was dropped, an initial that had been foisted on me by the U.S. Government even though my middle name was Atlee. When I wrote home, Mother was indignant. "Bunn is a fine old pioneer name," she wrote. A number of books later, Elisabeth, as I called Mrs. Hamilton by then, apologized for being so presumptuous.
Mrs. Hamilton also disliked the dog"s name and suggested Ribs or Ribsy as sounding more like one a boy would choose. She was right. Why couldn"t I have seen that? Then came her most valuable suggestions: "There are several highly dramatic spots in the story, which should be developed better. These incidents are now described very briefly, and the value of the story is partly thrown away." She listed five sentences, all of them easy to expand. And then there was the last chapter. Mrs. Hamilton was blunt: "We don"t like the last chapter at all." She went on to say it could be left out altogether; on the other hand, parts were too good to drop. "The circus idea is so threadbare that I would much prefer to have no reference to a circus at all in the story." She was right, and I have recalled this sentence many times over the years whenever I see another circus story or toy. Mrs. Hamilton went on to say I could make the dog"s former owner an ordinary person and develop the best parts of the chapter. She closed by saying that the book would probably be priced at $2.00 and they could offer 8 percent on the first 10,000 copies and 10 percent thereafter, with an advance against royalties of $500. If I would agree with the suggestions, she would have a contract drawn up. I was so naive I hadn"t known how many details a contract would cover.
After I had studied Mrs. Hamilton"s suggestions, I saw that they actually involved very little work. They were easily made and sent off; a contract and check arrived, as well as a letter saying, "We all think this is going to be one of the exciting publications of the fall." The book was now t.i.tled Henry Huggins. After all my years of ambition to write, of aiming both consciously and unconsciously toward writing, I had actually written. I was a real live author. I was most grateful to Elisabeth Hamilton for the first instruction in writing fiction I had ever received.
I telephoned the bookstore to tell Sara, who spread the news. Then I told other friends. Everyone was surprised and congratulated me with varying degrees of enthusiasm. One neighbor said, "I think it"s just great that you sat quietly at home and cracked that New York crowd. Now you can be eccentric." Harvey Fergusson said, "Why don"t you quit fooling around with children"s books and write for adults? I have a hunch you could write like Katherine Mansfield." Hannah was pleased for me, but she was also indignant because I had not given my ma.n.u.script to the Morrow rep to submit for me. "Don"t you want to be a feather in his cap?" she asked. No, I didn"t want to be a feather in anyone"s cap, especially the cap of a man who had so vigorously expressed a dislike for children"s books. The rep, the next time he was in Berkeley, said, "Don"t go out and buy a yacht, but this book will sell." He did very well by it, and so did Sather Gate because Quail offered it to every customer who came in. She sold five hundred copies during the Christmas rush of 1950. Mother wrote that Dad was proud of me and that she was telephoning everyone with the news. Clarence said he knew all along I could do it.
After keeping the advance royalty check for a few days to admire, I took it to the bank to deposit. As I walked down the winding road, the sky shone blue through the gray-green eucalyptus leaves, but because eucalyptus buds tend to roll underfoot, I watched my step. Half-hidden by a sickle-shaped leaf was a nickel. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and as I walked, my fingers played with that worn nickel while my mental pump, having been primed by Henry Huggins, was at work on a story about a girl named Ellen Tebbits who had trouble hiding her woolen underwear at ballet cla.s.s.
I was confident that a satisfying life of writing lay ahead, that ideas would continue to flow. As I walked, I thought about all the bits of knowledge about children, reading, and writing that had clung to me like burrs or dandelion fluff all through childhood, college, the Yakima children"s room, and the bookstore. As I mulled over my past, I made two resolutions: I would ignore all trends, and I would not let money influence any decisions I would make about my books.
I was so happy, the day was so bright and fragrant, that I did not bother to take the bus at the bottom of the hill but walked on down Euclid Avenue, across the campus, past buildings where I had attended cla.s.ses, the building that brought painful memories of the English Comprehensive, the library where I had spent so many evenings with Clarence, the Sather Gate Book Shop, to the bank next door. There I deposited the check and one worn nickel for luck.
In my years of writing I have often thought of that nickel and now see it as a talisman of all the good fortune that has come to me: friends, readers, awards, travel, children of my own, financial security that has allowed me to return the generosity extended to me when times were hard for everyone. It was indeed a lucky nickel.
About the Author.
BEVERLY CLEARY is one of America"s most popular authors. Born in McMinnville, Oregon, she lived on a farm in Yamhill until she was six and then moved to Portland. After college, as the children"s librarian in Yakima, Washington, she was challenged to find stories for non-readers. She wrote her first book, HENRY HUGGINS, in response to a boy"s question, "Where are the books about kids like us?"
If You Enjoyed My Own Two Feet, Be Sure to Read Beverly Cleary"s First Book About Her Life.
A GIRL FROM YAMHILL.
Avon Camelot Books.
BEEZUS AND RAMONA * DEAR MR. HENSHAW ELLEN TEBBITS * EMILY"S RUNAWAY IMAGINATION FIFTEEN * HENRY AND BEEZUS HENRY AND THE CLUBHOUSE * HENRY HUGGINS HENRY AND THE PAPER ROUTE * HENRY AND RIBSY JEAN AND JOHNNY * THE LUCKIEST GIRL MITCH AND AMY * THE MOUSE AND THE MOTORCYCLE MUGGIE MAGGIE * OTIS SPOFFORD RALPH S. MOUSE * RAMONA THE BRAVE RAMONA FOREVER * RAMONA AND HER FATHER RAMONA AND HER MOTHER * RAMONA THE PEST RAMONA QUIMBY, AGE 8 * RIBSY.
RUNAWAY RALPH * SISTER OF THE BRIDE.
SOCKS * STRIDER.
end.