My Own Two Feet (24 page)

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, unassisted 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 classes 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 Hancock Street, who seemed eager to jump onto the page. Hancock 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 Hancock 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 assurance I needed and was the last time I asked anyone other than Clarence to read a manuscript.

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-Cokesbury 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 manuscripts 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 manuscript to offer.” If this worked out, she hoped I would send the manuscript 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 assortment 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 passing 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 grass 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, buttered 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 assignment 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 Hancock 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-Cokesbury 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 manuscripts in the hands of someone I could visualize. I also recalled that she wrote a letter when she rejected a manuscript 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 attitude 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 manuscript 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 manuscript. What worked for a Pulitzer Prize-winning author might work for me, even though I was uneasy about that last chapter. I sent my manuscript to Elisabeth Hamilton with my maiden name as author and my married name and address typed on the title 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 manuscript within six weeks, sending a letter of inquiry was acceptable. Morrow, kind to authors, thoughtfully sent a postcard saying my manuscript 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 manuscript! 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 naïve I hadn't known how many details a contract would cover.