Eleanor Cameron

Dimensions of Amazement

Paul V. Allen

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496814494
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Biographien

Eleanor Cameron (1912-1996) was an innovative and genre-defying author of children's fiction and children's literature criticism. From her beginnings as a librarian, Cameron went on to become a prominent and respected voice in children's literature, writing one of the most beloved children's science fiction novels of all time, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and later winning the National Book Award for her time fantasy The Court of the Stone Children.In addition, Eleanor Cameron played an often vocal role in critical debates about children's literature. She was one of the first authors to take up literary criticism of children's novels and published two influential books of criticism, including The Green and Burning Tree. One of Cameron's most notable acts of criticism came in 1973, when she wrote a scathing critique of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl responded in kind, and the result was a fiery imbroglio within the pages of the Horn Book Magazine. Yet despite her many accomplishments, most of Cameron's books went out of print by the end of her life, and her star faded.This biography aims to reinsert Cameron into the conversation by taking an in-depth look at her tumultuous early life in Ohio and California, her unforgettably forceful personality and criticism, and her graceful, heartfelt novels. The biography includes detailed analysis of the creative process behind each of her published works and how Cameron's feminism, environmentalism, and strong sense of ethics are reflected in and represented by her writings. Drawn from over twenty interviews, thousands of letters, and several unpublished manuscripts in her personal papers, Eleanor Cameron is a tour of the most exciting and creative periods of American children's literature through the experience of one of its valiant purveyors and champions.

A Sense of Place (1881–1929)

Especially for those whose books come to be possessed by children, what waits back there in the beginning is place, a country to be treasured for all that it will yield him. It may be an actual place or it may be a symbolic place. But first of all it must be discovered.

—“A COUNTRY OF THE MIND,” THE GREEN AND BURNING TREE (1969)

Eleanor Cameron often spoke and wrote of the importance of place in story. She felt it was the key to authenticity in her fiction, not only in the experience of reading the resulting book but also in her own process in creating it. She felt she could not truly write well until her setting was figured out. As a result, her books feature fully realized, immaculately evoked settings. Not only that, but the characters in her books—such as Nina in The Court of the Stone Children and Cory in A Spell Is Cast—are highly sensitive to their surroundings and are often searching for that place where they feel most at home, most comfortable, most themselves. Not surprisingly, this longing for the right place was something Eleanor felt strongly herself, a desire borne out of a childhood and adolescence full of uprootings. Indeed, the searching started even before she was born, with her parents.

* * *

Eleanor’s father, Henry Butler, was born in 1881. He grew up in Bethnal Green, a district in London. Florence Lydia Vaughan, her mother, was born in 1889 in nearby Islington. Both districts had their share of the overcrowding and poverty associated with London’s East End, though Florence’s family was slightly better off than Henry’s. They were both Cockneys in a technical sense, though that was a term that Eleanor Cameron herself was strongly against because of its pejorative connotation. In 1903, Henry’s family (parents Henry and Emily, and brothers Frederick, Robert, George, and James) emigrated to Canada, perhaps as part of Canadian minister of the interior Clifford Sifton’s campaign to attract agricultural immigrants to western Canada. They settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

In 1909, Florence, at the age of twenty, left her parents (William John Thomas and Elizabeth Vaughan) and siblings behind, taking the ship Victorian from Liverpool to Quebec. She married Henry six months later, December 14, 1909, in Havana, Cuba. Many details are unfortunately lost to time and having never been recorded, but Eleanor mentioned more than once that her parents’ marriage was arranged by Elizabeth Vaughan. When she was a child Florence had broken her kneecap, but it was misdiagnosed as a bruise. This led to a series of fourteen painful operations, tuberculosis of the knee, and a recommendation of amputation by one doctor. Luckily Florence recovered enough to avoid that extreme, but her knee was never fully corrected and she spent the rest of her life with a lopsided gait. Eleanor believed that this led Florence’s mother to feel that she must be given in marriage to whomever would have her. But the rest—when and how the arrangement was made, why the couple married in Cuba—is left a mystery.

Eleanor likely never wrote in any detail about her parents’ courtship and marriage because she didn’t know much about it. When she was sixty-five years old, she discovered a document in her mother’s papers stating Eleanor’s birthplace as Winnipeg, Manitoba. Previous to that she’d believed she was born in Saskatoon. If her mother hadn’t clarified even this important bit of information for her daughter, it seems likely that many other details went unspoken as well. According to travel documents, Henry went to Winnipeg alone in January 1910, only a month after the wedding, with the intent to start farming. On his travel itinerary he stated an intention to ultimately move to Detroit, Michigan, though this never materialized.

Florence came along later. The couple’s first and only child, Eleanor Frances, was born on March 23, 1912. Eleanor’s mother reported that the temperature outside that day was 40 degrees below zero, but this was an exaggeration. According to the historical records, the lowest it got that day was about 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Florence’s exaggeration was likely to make a point; her memories of the young family’s life in Winnipeg centered on the cold: reminiscences of a drafty house with no steam heat, of breaking ice in the wash basins each morning, of taking frozen laundry off the line, of suffering chilblains. Baby Eleanor, for her part, “bounced happily” in her crib, nonplussed by the cold.

The couple lived a few blocks away from Henry’s family, who had all moved to Winnipeg as well, and the presence of so many uncles made for a boisterous, sometimes hazardous, atmosphere. Florence told tales of her husband and his brothers playing catch with baby Eleanor as the ball, not heeding her protests. Florence also never let go of the time that a manic game between the brothers necessitated her hiding in a closet, resulting in a frying pan falling on her face.

The young family wasn’t fully settled yet. They had little money, and Henry’s farming did not work out. Dreaming once again of better fortunes, Henry created a plan to go to the United States. In December 1914 Henry, Florence, and two-year-old Eleanor crossed the border into Noyes, Minnesota, and made their way to South Charleston, Ohio. One of Florence’s sisters, Rose, lived there with her husband, which may explain why the family chose that particular place. It also allowed Henry a chance to try again at farming. Lack of space on the small farm, and lack of money as well, made it so Florence was forced to get a job in town working sixteen-hour days as a housekeeping manager at the Houston Inn. She and young Eleanor shared a room in the hotel. Eleanor’s earliest memory, related in her unpublished memoir, takes place here:

I am four in this first scene and I am sitting cross-legged on the faded, hard, homely carpet in my mother’s and my hotel room, which we have because she is housekeeper. I have on brand-new white kid boots that button to just above my ankles, and each boot has a tassel at the top button. And the tassels bob back and forth when I walk (this gives me great pleasure as I look down and watch them) and violently when I run, as I mostly do. Right now, there I sit, cross-legged, white-stockinged knees sticking up on each side, and I am playing with a kitten. Not my kitten—not in a hotel. But whose, then?

However, my stern, unsmiling father, who doesn’t visit my mother and me at the hotel very often—just often enough to get a bit more money and with some hope of relieving his loneliness and typical frustrations—does not call it playing. He says, “If you don’t stop teasing that cat, I will smack your bottom”—But I do not stop playing with the little cat; and my father snatches me up and gives me a smacking.

Other early memories stuck with her, such as when she pressed her tongue to an iron railing on a below-freezing day. Grant, the head waiter at the hotel, warmed it with his breath to free her. And there was a time she came to the defense of an albino boy who had been driven into a corner by other children. Eleanor intervened, but wasn’t able to stop them. “The sense of injustice, of powerlessness against cruelty, remains indelibly,” she later wrote of the incident.

It’s no surprise that this living situation was ultimately untenable for the family. In 1918, the Butlers reunited and again moved a great distance, this time across the country to Berkeley, California. That same year, Henry’s mother, widowed since 1913, and two of his brothers—Robert and George—had moved to California, and Henry decided to follow. He got a job at the Oakland-based Marchant Calculating Machine Company, which in 1917 had expanded its factory in Emeryville, a neighboring city southwest of Berkeley.

Six-year-old Eleanor, whose nickname was “Chic” (pronounced “chick”), was enchanted with Berkeley from the start. Her first memory of her new home city was of riding what was known as the Dwight Way Dinkey, a smallish streetcar (Eleanor later compared it to the Toonerville Trolley featured in Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Folks comic strip). As they sat on the outside seats and crossed the thoroughfare Shattuck Avenue, she was awestruck. “I had never beheld such a street, such blazing array of lights! Never had I dreamed such a sight possible!”

The family settled at 2801 Ellsworth Street and Eleanor enrolled in Washington Grammar School. By this time she was already a devotee of stories. Her love of books had been instilled in her by her mother, who shared stories of her own English childhood and read her favorite fantasies and fairy tales to Eleanor. In her words, this was the groundwork for Eleanor’s “long delight” in those kinds of stories, especially Arthurian legend and the animal tales of Englishman Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book and Just So Stories). She was an avid follower of the children’s magazine St. Nicholas. The stories of Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter also became lasting favorites.

So naturally, one of her first orders of business in Berkeley was to get a library card. She dressed up in her best coat and a hat that had a curled feather in it and went with her mother to the Carnegie Public Library, located on Shattuck and Kittridge. She was crushed to find that she was too young to have her own card.

Though it sounds as if the family had finally found a comfortable situation in a city they could truly call home, all was not well. Henry Butler was embittered by his string of failures and still looking for a financial windfall. He often spoke of finding a way to put the family on “easy street,” a term which young Eleanor took literally, always wondering where exactly this street was located. If there’s any truth in her father’s portrayal in her unproduced one-act play Summer Lightning (later the basis of her 1975 novel To the Green Mountains) and the father in her unpublished novel Portrait of an Unknown Woman, Henry likely had an issue with authority and rankled at being told what to do, especically in a position he felt was beneath him.

Eleanor described her father in her essay “A Fine Old Gentleman” in The Green and Burning Tree as a “silent and introspective man, given to unpredictable moods and actions … he only wanted to be left alone and we did not often meet upon any plane that could have been called companionable.” He was unsmiling and did not show affection. On more than one occasion Eleanor expressed doubt that he loved her at all, indeed if he was even capable of loving her.

This created a dark mood in the household, preventing it from having the sense of safety that makes a place feel like home. “He was as stern with my mother as he was with me,” Eleanor later wrote. She lived in irrational fear of her mother abandoning the family, leaving Eleanor with just her father. And she dreaded his spankings and would pretend to pray when the situation arose in the hopes of evoking a sympathetic reaction. Henry was a devoted member of the Church of the Brethren, a religion based in New Testament scripture, with an emphasis on pacifism and Christlike aspirations. How spanking fit into those teachings is unknown; Henry Butler was a conflicted soul.

As to what Eleanor might have done to warrant punishment: “If you wonder whether I got into as much trouble as Julia does in those two books [Julia’s Magic and That Julia Redfern], the answer is yes!” she later revealed in a publisher’s brochure entitled “Why Do I Write?” In fact, she has fully admitted that the young Julia, headstrong, curious, adventurous, “is myself as a child” and that Julia’s “resentments, her rebellions, her sometimes misguided determination to do what is challenging even if unwise, to find means of self-expression, not to be put down” were also Eleanor’s own traits.

Around 1921, the family moved to a house Eleanor described as a “shadowy stucco box” on Parker Street. There was an empty lot next door and “a hot golden berry garden” later used as the family’s house in That Julia Redfern and Julia’s Magic. Her father, not quite having worked farming out of his system, kept rabbits and chickens in their backyard. Young Eleanor was put in charge of feeding the rabbits every day after school, a task she hated, mostly because she knew the ultimate fate of those rabbits was that they would be killed and eaten. She was a latchkey kid, coming home to an empty house after school, and often filling the time by going down the block to her friend Addie’s house.

It was during this time that Eleanor’s father made his only unequivocally affectionate gesture toward his daughter. Somehow intuiting her as-yet-unexpressed desire to become a writer, he built her a desk. It was “a plain, ordinary table, a large roomy one … on which I could spread all my papers, and it had a drawer in the middle in which I could arrange the appurtenances of authorhood.” The desk became a powerful symbol, a conveyance to a happy future created by the person who was causing her the most misery in the present.

Eleanor always believed in the power of dreams and the unconscious and felt that often deeper understanding arose from them. One of her dreams from this time in her life seems to sum up her feelings about her father and the oppressive home life he created for his wife and daughter. The dream found Eleanor arriving home from school and hearing a voice speaking in the kitchen of the supposedly empty house. It was her father’s voice, which she followed into the kitchen. And there she saw his head, just his head, sitting on the sideboard. She never remembered the words, only the sound of his voice and the horrifying sight of his lips moving on the severed head. “Both my mother and I wanted to escape from the stucco box,” she wrote.

By the middle of 1922, Florence had had enough. She filed for divorce, and it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A Sense of Place (1881–1929)
• Chapter Two: Eleanor’s Great Ambition (1930–1943)
• Chapter Three: The Woolfian Spell (1944–1953)
• Chapter Four: Taking Flight (1954–1957)
• Chapter Five: Branching Out (1958–1961)
• Chapter Six: Fairy Tales (1962–1968)
• Chapter Seven: Critical Acclaim (1969–1971)
• Chapter Eight: The Word Girl (1971–1972)
• Chapter Nine: Firecrackers with a Touch of Dynamite (Late 1972)
• Chapter Ten: Fantastic Reality (1973–1976)
• Chapter Eleven: Forward into the Past (1977–1980)
• Chapter Twelve: The Grinling in the Garden (1981–1985)
• Chapter Thirteen: All the Cool Changes (1986–1993)
• Chapter Fourteen: The Troubles and Wonders of Eleanor Cameron (1993–1996)
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Published Works
• References
• Index