Eleanor Cameron: Dimensions of Amazement

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 was granted in September of that year. According to Eleanor, her mother—five feet and one inch tall with a fine straight nose—was naive, morally conservative, and hardwired to make the best of a bad circumstance (due at least in part to her multiple childhood operations), which partially explains her tolerance of the Ohio situation, and her willingness to stick with her marriage to Henry through so many moves and failed ambitions. That she went forward with a divorce, that she risked the moral judgment and the stigma of personal failure, shows just how oppressive life with Henry must have been. One might imagine the scene where she told him they were through was something like, in spirit if not actual detail, the harrowing moment in To the Green Mountains when Elizabeth Rule finally confronts her husband.

At this point, Henry Butler ceases to be a part of Eleanor’s story; for a while after the divorce he came around occasionally to ask for money, but eventually this stopped. He died in 1938 in nearby Seaside, California. He never remarried nor had any additional children.

Eleanor and her mother moved next to an apartment couched in a brown-shingled bungalow with a white roof and an aviary, located on the corner of Berkeley Way and Grove Street (which has since been renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard). The home was owned by Echo and Frank de Rizzo. Echo’s father, whom Eleanor would come to call Daddy Jefferson, lived there as well. There was a big red house on the corner, a grove of trees in the back, and an old creaking windmill nearby. Eleanor’s little room had a balcony overlooking the garden, windows all along one side, a skylight above, and a space that perfectly fit the desk her father had made her. This is the place where Eleanor and her mother—free from the oppressive presence of Henry Butler—finally found a home.

It’s also where the eleven-year-old girl found her life’s calling. As I read book after book during the summer, after school, and in bed at night before I had to turn out the light, the feeling came to me very strongly that I, too, would like to write and perhaps even see my writings in print. As a child Eleanor thought she would go to art school so she could illustrate her own books, but had never thought seriously about what those books might be about. Freed from her father, finally happy at home, she found the stories coming to her. She planned to write the life story of Queen Elizabeth, and she created many short stories and poems.

From dream to reality, she soon found an outlet for her work. The local paper, the Berkeley Daily Gazette, had a children’s page called The Sunny-side Club, which printed work from readers in its Saturday evening edition. In April 1924, the just-turned-twelve-year-old sent in a letter and a story about May. The letter was published, but the story was not. Eleanor wasn’t deterred. She began to flood the paper with submissions, including another story (this one in installments), riddles (called conundrums on the page), and a poem titled The North Wind. The latter would be her first published piece, appearing in the August 30, 1924, edition. The poem shows glimpses of her innate way with words, as well as her fascination with both nature and fantasy:

The North Wind

Far across the deep blue ocean

Where angry waves are in ceaseless

motion;

Where the storm tossed ships

astray

Are ever wetted by the ocean’s

spray

There roars the North Wind along

the rugged coast

Where the angry foam-capped billows

boom the most.

There she sits on a rocky strand

Far away in a foreign land.

With her mass of jet-black hair

And the four Winds nestling there.

Then slowly she rises to do the

work given her

Lifting her arm she soars on

noiseless wing to set the

forests astir

Her form of giant strength and size,

(As graceful as Diana,) rises to the

skies.

Slowly at first, then faster, she

wings o’er the boundless

deep,

On o’er village, town and hamlet

bathed in sleep.

Just above her the moon gives light

along her way;

All around her in the blue-black sky

the stars play.

On she goes and all beneath her

bends and sways as she

passes over.

Then she comes to a mighty desert

where the sand dunes

roll before her.

Then beneath her a green oasis like

an emerald jewel in the dawn

But on she flies to the rocky mountains

where many an abyss

yawns.

Sinking deep in the mighty cauldron,

she swirls and whirls

about it

Beyond is a mighty volcano and

she rushes upon it.

Then lifting her face with the azure

eyes

She raises her graceful form and

homeward scuds far up in

the skies.

Soon after, Eleanor wrote a letter to the paper reporting her sheer joy upon seeing her poem in print: I guess Mother thought I was going wild or something. This began a streak of success for the young author. She immediately had several riddles published, little two-liners such as:

Q: When a boy puts his socks on wrong what does his mother do?

A: His mother turns the hose on him.

In October she had a Halloween story published under a pseudonym, and in November a Thanksgiving story titled Why Faith and Hope Standish Were Thankful They Were Twins. Eventually she earned enough points to be considered a State Honor Author, which meant she received a silver dollar for her efforts.

Over the next couple of years Eleanor notched seven additional silver dollars for various poems, stories, and conundrums. She recalled using some of the money to buy her mother a present, a set of Japanese bowls with blue lines curling around the corners. But the real reward was being published: It gave me great joy on Saturday mornings to run out to the front of the house, find the paper thrown on the front walk, and kneel down in my pajamas to see if I had my story or poem in the Children’s Page this week. How exciting when I did have, she later recalled. Though certainly this run of publications was a precursor of Eleanor’s future, the fact is that it would be twenty years before she would be published again.

* * *

Around this time Florence Butler began seeing William Earle Warren, her coworker at White Music Company on Shattuck Avenue. As the relationship became serious, Eleanor grew intensely jealous of Earle, and she had an extremely difficult time adjusting to the intrusion on her close relationship with her mother. This will be no surprise to readers of A Room Made of Windows; the emotions Julia experiences in reaction to her mother’s engagement to Uncle Phil were lifted directly from reality. Eleanor’s reaction is especially understandable because she had not long before been extricated from an unloving father figure.

Florence and Earle married on November 15, 1924. Difficult as it was, Eleanor was able to ultimately accept her new stepfather because he was kind and he made her mother happy. Eleanor wrote that she had to acknowledge, if not willingly accept, that my mother was not created solely for my own convenience and pleasure and that she had an existence and needs apart from those interlacing my own. She would later call William Earle Warren a very dear man whom she treated unfairly in the beginning. Eventually she would come to call him Dad.

The new family moved to a house in the hills of Berkeley on Vine Street and Hawthorne Terrace near Live Oak Park. The house was nothing special—a pink stucco box, Eleanor called it—but it boasted a panoramic view that encompassed Berkeley, the bay, and the Golden Gate. In an unpublished essay entitled The Multitudinous Seas, Cameron wrote: My child’s eyes, at home at least, always rested on the sea when I looked out, San Francisco on the left, the hills of Marin County on the right, with the Indian Maiden lying along their summits. There was for me—then—always a sense of calm.

So began her love affair with the ocean and with nature in general. Over the next three years the newly configured family took multiple vacations to Yosemite National Park, the redwood forests in Marin County, and the Monterey Peninsula. Eleanor soaked in these new experiences, and they would stay with her for the rest of her life. I have such memories of Yosemite, she wrote much later. It’s a very special place to me—Mother and Dad and I used to go there when I was eleven and twelve and I was always in a state of almost wordless bliss when we would start out on our Yosemite journey—I couldn’t believe we were actually going, and then to camp beside the Merced in all that peace and quiet surrounded by greenery. In addition, the stories of Earnest Thompson Seton and Rudyard Kipling’s animal tales initiated my bone-deep identification with animals and the natural world, one that determined that I would someday live in a forest.

* * *

Continuing to be deep in books Eleanor moved on to Garfield Junior High and then to Berkeley High School. There, she became involved in the school’s theater department and took drama with Mr. William Winter. Eleanor enjoyed acting in theater and was even chosen to represent her school at a drama festival at the Greek Theater on the University of California campus.

At age fifteen she began volunteering as a clerk at her beloved Carnegie Public Library. Her love of stories had blossomed into a love of learning in general, and around this time she became engrossed in astronomy, especially in the work of Cambridge professor James Jeans. Jeans wrote several books on astronomy; given the timing it’s most likely that Eleanor was taken with his Astronomy and Cosmogony (1928), The Mysterious Universe (1930), and/or Stars in their Courses (1931). She claimed to have not understood half of what she’d read, but she was fascinated nonetheless. Eleanor planned to go with her friends to the University of California at Berkeley once she finished high school. But another move awaited her instead.

In late 1929 the Great Depression hit, but the economic downturn had begun earlier than that. Earle and Florence mortgaged their home in the hills with the beautiful view for a loan to keep White Music Company solvent. It ultimately didn’t help, and the business fell into bankruptcy. Thus they endured the double blow of losing their jobs and their home. Unable to find work in Berkeley, they followed the jobs, which were in Los Angeles.

Eleanor was devastated. She was forced to start over at one of the most delicate times in a person’s life—the teenage years—and leave the city and surroundings she loved, that home she had searched so long to find. And finances being what they were, the first apartment the family rented was dead in the center of Los Angeles, small, with old dirty furnishings. LA itself felt crowded, noisy, and smoggy when compared to Berkeley, a place Eleanor later described as a small, beautiful university city with the hills climbing in gentle folds behind us, with the vast view of land and sea lying out beyond our western windows. She especially missed the ocean, later describing feeling landlocked in LA.

And though she would spend the next thirty-nine years in Los Angeles, she would never embrace life there, would never quite settle in. She would constantly have nightmares of being hopelessly lost and dreams of escaping to the sea. She would eventually try to write herself back to that place she first felt at home.

Eleanor’s Great Ambition (1930–1943)

But if no one listens, Kyri, she burst out, what on earth is the use of singing?

—GRISELDA’S GREAT AMBITION (1945)

As awful as the move from Berkeley to Los Angeles was for Eleanor, she later reflected that the loneliness, unhappiness, and longing for that place and the people one has left behind drove her deeper into her writing. She also sought comfort in a job at the main Los Angeles Public Library on Fifth and Hope, immersing herself in the familiar world of books. She was assigned to the literature department: I was the clerk chosen to clip reviews of books the department would buy and found myself concentrating on those having to do with criticism. This seemingly random assignment of task would have a great impact on Eleanor’s future.

The library was a fateful place for Eleanor in one other major way. As she told it:

I was still seventeen and at my post behind the circulation desk in Literature, when an exceedingly (to my eyes) attractive young man came in and leaned an elbow on it. He was the person, he said, my mother had told me she was sending over from her office because he was old country as she was. Was he the Irishman? I asked. No, he was the Scotsman, but would he do? I studied him seriously and then said, straightforward, with no slightest doubt, that he would.

The attractive young man was Ian Stuart Cameron, a twenty-three-year-old sales representative in printing and a specialty magazine publisher who had immigrated to the United States from Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1926. He did some odd jobs around New York, enlisted in the army, and then ultimately settled in Los Angeles. Ian was tall and athletic, a swimmer and golfer, fun-loving, with a quick, sharp, dry sense of humor. It was that latter quality that especially drew Eleanor to Ian; though she loved to laugh, she had a tendency toward earnestness. Ian had a way of lifting her up when she got bogged down. Ian and Eleanor fell in love immediately and were soon inseparable.

In 1931, Eleanor graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also continued to work at the library, which created a grueling schedule:

I was jolting myself awake in a cold shower at five in the morning in order to have the time for breakfast and for the long journey out to Westwood by streetcar and the Wilshire Boulevard bus to arrive at my first class by eight. After I snatched lunch I took the bus back to Los Angeles to the library to work for either the afternoon, or both afternoon and evening until nine when Ian came to drive me home, after which we stayed together until eleven at the earliest.

She also revealed that on that bus ride she always slept … and felt exhausted, always. But she found her classes stimulating, especially her English class with distinguished professor Dr. Majl Ewing. She reflected: I called his courses, most affectionately to myself, ‘Chaos I and II’ because he connected literature to life, to everything. Dr. Ewing read two of Eleanor’s papers aloud to the class, and she was overwhelmed both times by the recognition, partly with pride, but also with embarrassment, since she harbored a deep crush on her professor.

Meanwhile, working at the library gave Eleanor a broad spectrum of life to observe, and she had easy access to the best teachers possible: great books. She called her heavy reading during her teens, twenties, and thirties a self-given education. She read Chekhov, Kipling, Conrad Aikin, de Maupassant, Mansfield, and Isak Dinesen. "I read Robert Graves, Thorton Wilder, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, James Joyce. I read Rebecca West’s Black Lamb Gray Falcon again and again—for intellectual excitement and her almost incredible ability to draw on all ages, all arts, all climaxes of history in order to point out the most illuminating parallels it has ever been my pleasure to read." She would later state that she found this method of immersion in great writing to be far superior to studying writing via classes or the how-to books she saw frequently requested at the library, such as John Gallishaw’s The Only Two Ways to Plot a Story.

So who was the young woman Eleanor Butler had grown into? She was of medium height and build, and she had a