Dispatches from the 60s #5
Ellen Grae, by Vera and Bill Cleaver
“Mr. Fortis Alonzo Gridley died at his own hand. Trying to make people think he was rich enough to have an air-conditioned car. He didn’t have it though and that’s what killed him. The heat and no air at all. I was the one who got to him first the night he collapsed. Gridley’s house was next door to ours and when I saw Mr. Gridley drive up weaving and wobbling I ran over and jerked the door of his car open and he fell out. He didn’t have time to say one word. Just blew a bubble and died.”
—Ellen Grae, by Vera and Bill Cleaver
Eleven-year-old Ellen Grae Derryberry calls her amicably divorced parents by their first names and has a propensity for storytelling. During the school year, she lives as a boarder in town so that she can attend the local school; the rest of the time she lives with her father.
She doesn’t have much in common with her roommate, a rich girl who’s also boarding in town to go to school, and who’s more interested in skincare routines than going fishing. She spends most of her time with her best friend Grover, who also enjoys spinning a good yarn.
And she loves checking in with Ira, a quiet man who lives in a shack outside of town and makes a living selling peanuts. Ira’s seen as an oddity by most of the folks in town—he’s selectively mute and won’t make change when you buy peanuts—but he talks to Ellen, and sometimes, a bit, to Grover.
When Ira tells Ellen a secret—one that’s so big and so serious that she doesn’t know how to carry it—she has to decide whether to keep it or whether to ask for help.
This is a kid after my own heart, my goodness. Her tall tales—and the ones that she spins in tandem with her best friend, Grover—are funny and odd, often macabre and always wonderfully paced, building up and up and up. They’re so much fun that while I was pulling quotes for this I ended up reading a bunch of them aloud to Josh, who ended up doing just as much giggling as I did. Which, considering that I’m writing this as we’re sitting here in our pajamas drinking our tea and coffee, before our day has even really begun—before sunrise, even—says something for the strength of her voice.
It’s truly laugh-out-loud funny:
“Walking down here I breathed three hundred and fourteen times. I controlled it though so it didn’t hurt me. I know a girl who didn’t control her breathing and breathed so hard the wrong way that her eyeballs fell out.”
But it’s also a quiet book, both in terms of the minimal plotting—it’s more a character study than anything else—and a sensitive one. Ira’s secret weighs on Ellen, and through it, the Cleavers create a really wonderfully accurate depiction of depression and anxiety, without ever actually using those words.
There’s so much beauty, too, in the way that the authors describe Ellen’s love of and interest in the natural world. The detailed observations of nature, the way that she notices birds and animals, are truly lovely.
And while it seems to be nature that has her heart, the way she looks at and frames the world is beautiful no matter where she is or what she’s talking about. Her memories of city life with her parents—before, presumably, their divorce—are of being “up so high with just building tops all around and the washes of other moneyless people hanging like tired skeletons on other swinging lines.”
There are people in her orbit who’d rather that she fit more into their idea of what’s “normal,” but there are others who appreciate her for who she is: a bright, curious, creative, observant, sensitive soul. All of those interactions—the ones with adults who Get It—play out so subtly, and again, quietly, so they’re easy to miss: her teacher dings her for her terrible penmanship, for example, but also slides in an extremely non-effusive compliment about her descriptive writing.
There’s so much warmth and care here. And I find it somewhat mind-blowing how much this kid has lodged herself into my heart when we’ve spent less than 90 pages together. Happily, there are two sequel/companions—Lady Ellen Grae, from 1968, also illustrated by Ellen Raskin, and Grover, from 1971, illustrated by Frederic Marvin. So I’ll be seeking those out soon, for sure.
A few more quotes from the book, just because.
Ellen, talking to her roommate about her father:
“My you’re lucky. I wish I had a rich father. But I reckon to be rich you’ve got to want to be and Jeff doesn’t. I reckon he’ll die penniless in a garret.”
“A what?”
“A garret. One of those places where people put all their old magazines and other stuff they’re tired of. People die in them. All artists die in garrets.”
More on her father, with bonus insight into her roommate’s worldview:
“Poor Jeff. I’m afraid he’ll never amount to much of anything. He just doesn’t have enough education. The Sorbonne didn’t teach him how to do anything except paint and speak foreign languages. Does your father ever speak to you in a foreign language, Rosemary?”
“Of course not. He’s an American.”
This is one of those moments with an adult who Gets It:
“It wasn’t a true story, Mrs. McGruder. All of it was a lie. I made it up.”
The shadows in her eyes came out of the corners and darkened all of the white and green in them and her voice softened the way it did when anybody in her house was sick and needed attention. She said, “No, it wasn’t a lie. It was a story. You tell wonderful stories, Ellen Grae.”
And this, from one of the last pages of the book, is such a gorgeous encapsulation of who this child is at her core:
His compliment uplifted me but kind of sorrowed me too—brought a loneliness. For who was going to make me feel better about things? For just a second a pang of self-pity smote me but then I thought, Oh, hell’s afire, Ellen Grae, you wanted to save Ira. Nobody made you. So quit your bellyaching. Maybe a way to make yourself feel better will come to you tomorrow, or the next day or the next. Something will come to you; it always does. Think positive.
I just love her. I’m so grateful to have discovered her, and sad that she’s seemingly been largely forgotten?
Ellen Grae in a nutshell
Talk soon,
Leila
Well you did me a favor! I read this the other day, thought how nice it would be to get a copy, and went on with my day. On Fridays I always help set up a used booksale at the public library (my job is at the community college library) and what do you know, a copy of a double volume of Ellen Grae and Lady Ellend Grae had shown up in a children's box! It's a sad economy printing with no illustrations but better than nothing, and I never would have noticed it if not for your post.
I want "All artists die in garretts" on a t-shirt.