A Certain Slant of Light

As the month is flying to an end, I thought I'd slide in with some mini-reviews of the latest books I've been reading!

I picked up William John Locke's The Beloved Vagabond because it was one of Maud Hart Lovelace's favorite novels (her copy is actually in a glass case at the Betsy-Tacy Museum), referenced repeatedly in Betsy and the Great World. It is, as it turns out, a very odd book.

For reasons that slowly become clear over the course of the novel, Paragot long since cast aside wealth, education, and name (Paragot is of course an assumed name) to be a feckless drunken wanderer on the face of this earth, who dazzles his acquaintances with brilliant lively talk, but nonetheless holds everyone at arm's length - even the found family that he slowly gathers round himself, which includes our narrator Asticot (who Paragot bought off his mother for half a crown when he discovered the boy reading Paradise Lost; Asticot adores him) and Blanquette the traveling zither player, who finds herself stranded after the elderly violinist who is the other half of her traveling band unexpectedly dies. Paragot, a gifted violinist, flings on the violinist's sequined coat, plays dazzlingly at a peasant weddings, and more or less adopts her.

I can't explain much more without giving away the central mystery, but I will just say that I am fascinated that this was one of Maud Hart Lovelace's favorites, because it's just so different from her own books! But then I guess that's often the case: what you like to write may not be quite the thing that you like to read.

Daisy Hay's Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives was a gift from troisoiseaux and an absolute roller coaster, as any books about the Shelleys and Byron has to be. This is one of those nonfiction books where the title misleadingly focuses on the most famous people involved: a large part of the book actually revolves around the crusading journalist Leigh Hunt, who was a central figure in the web of relationships that drew many of these second generation Romantic poets in contact with each other.

I was also delighted to learn that the man buried beside Shelley in Rome is some raconteur who met Shelley in the last year of his life, enthralled the whole social circle with wildly inaccurate stories about his past, and after Shelley's death insisted on digging him up and cremating him on the beach, apparently because he just thought that would be so metal. Then he bought to adjoining grave plots, one for Shelley and one for himself, where he was interred decades later under a stone that suggests he and Shelley were bosom buddies, WHEN IN FACT this guy is just some chancer who realized he had stumbled onto an opportunity to clutch the coattails of immortality.

Continuing my Audrey Erskine Lindop read (which kicked off memorably with Details of Jeremy Stretton) with The Self-Appointed Saint! I don't want to spoil this one for skygiants specifically so I will just say that it is a WILD ride. Is it a wild ride that actually hangs together in a vaguely plausible manner? IMO no, but also I didn't really care, why bother my little head about plausibility when the whole thing is so entertainingly nuts.

Doris Gates' Little Vic is perhaps one of THE purest expressions of the Boy Meets Horse genre that I've ever read. The main character loves horses so much that he's nicknamed Pony, and the entire book revolves around his relationship with Little Vic, the colt that he raises and trains and adores.

Gorgeous horse illustrations by Kate Seredy, who either could not be bothered to draw humans when there were horses around (fair!), or was told by the publishers to focus on the horses, as illustrations might make it to obvious to the skittish library buyers of 1951 that Pony is Black. This fact only comes into the narrative about two-thirds of the way through the book, which is... perhaps later than it ought to be... it just seems like something that would probably come up at some point before you meet the book's Token Racist, you know?

Lucretia P. Hale's The Peterkin Papers, which is about a family that is very stupid in an Amelia-Bedelia type fashion. One morning Mrs. Peterkin puts salt in her coffee, and the family summons the chemist to try to remove it, and when he can't they summon the old herb-woman to try to disguise the flavor, and when that doesn't work they turn in desperation to the lady from Philadelphia (their only friend with a brain cell), who suggests... that perhaps Mrs. Peterkin could brew a new cup of coffee!

This was published in 1880, and apparently remained popular with children up through the 1950s. Even as a child I scorned Amelia Bedelia and her ilk, but if this is the sort of thing you like, then it is very much that kind of thing.

And another Lindop, Journey into Stone, which I regret to say was a swing and a miss. Like The Self-Appointed Saint, it doesn't quite come together, but as the book is a mystery novel, this is a pretty big flaw, and also I just didn't like most of the characters. Ah, well, many writers have their off novels!

After my visit to Mankato, I’m not quite ready to let go of Maud Hart Lovelave yet. In addition to reading some of her own non-Betsy-Tacy books (about which more anon), I’ve been reading some of the books that her characters read in Betsy-Tacy, starting with Henry Sydnor Harrison’s 1910 bestseller Queed, mentioned in Carney’s House Party.

Queed was evidently THE hit book of 1910. Queed is the name of our unlikely hero, a scholarly young man who is writing a book about sociology - at a rate of twenty hours a day, stopping only for mealtimes. In the chill evenings, he works in the dining room, and irascibly banishes his landlady’s daughter if she dares to intrude to work her algebra, as his work is clearly so important that it deserves perfect silence.

The book is, of course, about his closed bud of a life opening out - at first, somewhat hilariously, mainly through the proddings of wounded vanity. When he finds himself too physically weak to thrash the typesetter who introduced an error into one of his articles, he takes up exercise. When he learns he’s about to be fired from the paper because his articles are so dull, he takes up the art of newspaper writing with the same ferocious energy he has hitherto applied to sociology, determined to show those rascals that he can write just as well as they can!

But, in between exercise, and newspaper writing, and accidentally befriending the landlady’s daughter, and then accidentally making yet more friends, he begins to realize that… perhaps… he needs to allow the principle of altruism that animates his sociological theories to animate his own life, as well? That, in fact, perhaps that principle is worthless if it doesn’t influence his own actions?

This is just an EXTREMELY 1910 plotline: the sound mind in a sound body theory, the idea that active good works in one’s immediate vicinity is the most important thing that human can do, the gently ironic humor with which the story is told. There’s an earnestness about it which I suspect was popular when it came out, and made it sink like a stone when the modernists came in during the 1920s.

Reading it in 2023, it also jumps out at you how thoroughly this book has embraced the white Southern point of view. The book is set in an up-and-coming Southern city (never named), loyal to the United States but loyaller still to its rapturous memories of its Confederate soldiers. Black people appear in the briefest glimpses, always as servants. The end of Reconstruction was an unvarnished joy, and loathing is heaped upon the memory of that villain Henry G. Surface who had the audacity to join the Republicans.

Yesterday was once again devoted to Betsy-Tacy things. First, a trip to the modern library, on the theory that I must have missed the display case of Maud's things that the Betsy-Tacy Society website assures me is there. (In particular, I wanted to see the little glass pitcher that Tacy/Bick gave Betsy/Maud on her fifth birthday party, when they became friends.) However the website must be out of date, because there is no such display case! Alas...

However, the historical society does has a corner devoted to Maud Hart Lovelace, with the statue of Betsy on her wedding day from the promotion of Betsy's Wedding, and photographs of Maud and her family and all the Crowd, and her high school scrapbook - in terribly rough shape now! - scrapbooks are a conservation nightmare, after all.

And then Betsy's Carnegie Library, the Carnegie Art Center now, so the books and the bookshelves are gone - but the fireplace is still there, the fireplace in the children's room where Betsy sat to read about ancient Greece. The kindly curator obligingly set up a chair, and I sat (I had read right up to the library scene that morning, so I would be prepared) and read about Betsy's library trip, and when she looks up from her book and smiles at the fireplace and then around the room, I looked up and smiled too.

"Was that wonderful for you?" the curator asked, as I was leaving.

"Oh, yes!" I told her.

Then up the hill for my tour of Betsy & Tacy's houses! They are right across the street from each other, and I am delighted to inform you that each house has a front-facing window on the second floor, and just as you might hope those are the windows to Maud and Bick's bedrooms!

Actually the tour only takes in Betsy's house, which is mostly done in books and furniture from the period but not actually from Maud's family. Tacy's house is half a display of artifacts from Maud and her Crowd, and early editions of all of Maud's books, and half a gift shop, in which I lingered for ages deciding what to buy... and then after I left, I came puffing back, having decided that this is a case of penny wise and pound foolish, so I might as well buy a few more books, and also ask whether they might have tucked away a couple booklets which are listed on the website, but not as far as I could tell in the store?

And indeed they did! One was "Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Ocean," which is a short story based on Maud & Bicky's 1968 trip to Europe, after they had both been widowed. They find themselves in Madrid, and decide that they must try to visit the King of Spain, since they fell in love with a photograph of him when they were children! ("But didn't Spain have a different king by then?" you ask. "Did Spain have a king in 1968?" Shhhhhhh.)

The other is "Betty and Bick Meet a Hermit," which Maud wrote in high school, and it's fascinating as a proto-Betsy-Tacy story! Betty is Maud (and it's interesting that she'd already settled on a name so close to Betsy for her fictional alter ego), and Bick is simply Bick, her best friend, named unchanged. They go over the Big Hill and meet the hermit, who happens to be a magazine editor, who asks to see some of Betty's stories! (This house also mentions a "telegraph" between Betty and Bick's bedrooms, a string with a basket hanging between their windows. Did Maud and Bick set up such a system, or was this a flight of imagination?)

This adventure at last pushed me to go over the Big Hill myself. The road from Maud's time no longer exists, so I found another route up, and it was QUITE STEEP! If Maud's road was anything like that, she and Bick must have had very strong legs. But I made it to the top, and looked down over the valley - from here you couldn't see the town, just the trees - did it look like that in Maud's day? One suspects that it might have been recently logged at that point. But a lovely view, nonetheless.

And then back to the bench, to read Betsy-Tacy and Tib (out of order, but I'd only just got the copy that afternoon in the gift shop). And a return to the bench after supper, to watch the sun go down, and imagine the girls playing in the street until dusk closed in, and their mothers opened the doors to their two houses, just across the street from each other, and called them in. "Maud! Bick!"

Despite the title, Betsy’s Wedding mostly takes place after Betsy’s wedding. Barely a week after Betsy returns from Europe in the fall of 1914, she and Joe get married in Betsy’s parents’ parlor, after Joe impetuously quit his job at the paper in Boston to take up work in Minneapolis, so home-loving Betsy will be close to her family.

One of Lovelace’s great strengths is the description of physical spaces, making them seem vibrant and real and home-like. Here, we have Betsy and Joe’s first apartment, a little newlywed place with a bow window where Betsy likes to sit and write after wrestling with the housework.

Budget-conscious Betsy wants to do all the housework herself, but Joe insists that Betsy should hire a girl once a week to do the heavy work: two dollars a week might seem excessive on his salary, he admits, but Betsy is a writer and she has to have time to write, and he’s confident her works will in time cover the expense. In general, Betsy and Joe are deeply supportive of each other’s work, and indeed this is held up as a central pillar of a successful romance. Later in the book, when Tib is seeing an unsuitable man, one of the main clues that he’s all wrong for her is the fact that he’s dismissive of her talents.

But events contrive to pry them from this honeymoon bower: Joe’s recently widowed Aunt Ruth needs a place to stay as she contemplates her next move, and of course they need a larger place if they’re going to take her in. But Betsy is initially appalled. Their lovely little apartment! Their delicious privacy! Do they have to give it up to house some woman she barely knows?

This is one of those moments that really encapsulates a change in social expectations. Any advice columnist nowadays would be on Betsy’s side, but Betsy knows that she’s being selfish: her preferences cannot take precedence over Aunt Ruth’s needs. She struggles mightily with herself, and moves past sulky acquiescence to truly welcoming Aunt Ruth.

So Betsy and Joe buy a little house, Aunt Ruth moves in, and although the move was meant to help Aunt Ruth, it ends up helping Betsy and Joe just as much. Joe gets moved to night shifts, and Betsy would have spent many lonely evenings without Aunt Ruth to keep her company. Plus, Aunt Ruth takes over a lot of the housework, leaving Betsy with more time to write.

Through it all, Betsy and Tacy, both blissfully married, are plotting to find a husband for their single friend Tib. Their matchmaking attempts backfire, but at last Tib finds the perfect man on her own!

The book ends in 1917, with all the boys joining up for World War I. But although the war is important, the denouement centers on Tib’s wedding, back in dear old Deep Valley. In Tib’s beloved chocolate-colored house, Betsy and Tacy stand up as Tib’s bridesmaids.

She was in the land of dreams now, Betsy thought. The future and the past seemed to melt together.

Although Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown is forever my favorite Betsy-Tacy book, it’s followed up at a close second by Betsy and the Great World, in which young Betsy heads off for a year in Europe!

She sets sail in January of 1914 , and, despite occasional bouts of homesickness, has a wonderful time. She plunges into a shipboard friendship so enthusiastic that her new friend invites her to stop at the Azores for a few weeks, which she refuses reluctantly: she is on this trip to experience the art and culture of Europe, but oh, the charm of those islands!

Betsy starts experiencing the art and culture of Europe in Munich, where she stays at a student pension where she was supposed to meet a friend of her sister Julia… only to find that the friend has flitted off to Italy! At first Betsy’s terribly lonely, but she’s never down for long, and soon makes two great friends: Tilda, a talented Swiss singer, and Helena, a baroness. The only problem is that the two won’t meet each other! The social gulf between them is too vast, they explain. Betsy, as an outsider, can be friends with them both, but they can never befriend each other.

Betsy loves Munich: the city is so beautiful, so charming, so cozy. But so infested with officers! And the officers are so entitled! The bathtub in the pension is near the officers’ suite, and they refuse to let anyone else use it. But Betsy insists, so one day when the officers are away from the dinner, the entire pension more or less escorts her down to the tub to have a bath… Crazy American!

But Betsy is deeply puzzled by their deference to the officers. Why do the Germans have so many officers when there will never be another war?

Then she’s off on further travels! To Sonneberg, the doll capital of the world; to Oberammergau, home of the Passion play, where she reunites with Tilda, and they agree to meet again in 1917. To Venice, where the nephew of the owner of the pension falls madly in love with her, and they float through the city on a gondola singing hit American tunes, for the young man grew up in America until he was fifteen.

Betsy likes him a lot… but all the time she can’t forget Joe Willard. They were at the U together (that is, the University of Minnesota), but then he went off to Harvard, and in his absence Betsy started going around with a chap named Bob; going around so often that the college paper printed a cartoon teasing them about their devotion. When Joe saw it, he grew icy, and their correspondence tapered off to nothing.

But in Paris, Betsy finds an opportunity to write to him again: she meets a famous author, an acquaintance who crossed on the same steamer as Betsy, and the famous author mentions that Joe Willard wrote the best article about her most recent book. Well! That’s a good reason to write to Joe, isn’t it?

And then off to London, where Betsy falls in with a whole crowd of friends at her boarding house, and they have a wonderful summer boating and walking and laughing in England, until it all comes tumbling down with the declaration of war.

We come to the end of Betsy’s high school years with Betsy and Joe! This is a book that must have presented a challenge for Lovelace, as the title itself tells you how it will end (Betsy and Joe, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G), and how do you spin out that romance for a whole book without silly misunderstandings?

Well, in the first place, this is senior year, and Lovelace takes full advantage of its Janus-faced nature. Excited though she is about her future, Betsy is also a person who savors each stage of life, and passes on to the next only after a long wistful look back. She’s loved her high school years, and to think that this is the last time she’ll have a first day of school - go to a high school dance - gather with the Crowd for a soda at Heinz’s - well, it’s all bittersweet.

The Crowd is a great help, too: of course we need to check in with everyone. Tib’s dating the new football star; Tacy’s developing into quite a good singer (although she suffers terribly from stage fright). Betsy’s neighbor Cab had to quit school at the end of the last book after his father died, but his class nonetheless invites him to all the big senior year events. And how about Betsy’s big sister Julia? She’s studying opera in Berlin, where she’s been invited to stay in a castle! (Her letters home are based on the letters from Lovelace’s real-life sister Kathleen.) And little sister Margaret? Ah, well, she’s cross because Betsy favors Joe over Margaret’s favorite Tony.

Yes, there’s also a love triangle, although really in name only: Betsy knows all along that Joe’s the one she loves, but she doesn’t want to hurt Tony’s feelings by dropping him all of a sudden. As Julia points out on her return from Berlin, it wasn’t actually kind to let him hope when there was no hope, but of course it’s very hard to see that when you’re seventeen.

Of course Joe doesn’t know that he’s Betsy’s secret favorite, so for a while they break up. And while they’re broken up, who should be the first of the Crowd to get engaged but… Tacy! Yes, Tacy who is not interested in boys. (Real-life Tacy did get married, although about a decade after high school. In general, everyone’s marriages seem to have been moved forward five to ten years, probably for reasons of dramatic unity, but perhaps also because getting married young was all the rage in the post World War II years?)

In a different book I might find Betsy & Joe’s break-up contrived, but the execution makes it work for me, because it grows so naturally out of their characters: it’s very characteristic for Betsy to flinch from hurting anyone’s feelings, and also very characteristic for Joe to withdraw when he feels hurt. They both have a little bit of growing up to do before they can be together at the end of the book.

***

There are still two more Betsy books to go (next one up is one of my favorites, Betsy and the Great World, hooray!), but I’m well on track to get them done in the next few weeks, so I’m going to detour through Carney’s House Party, which is next in line both in publication order and in internal chronology. My recollection is that the central romance in Carney’s House Party felt far more reliant on literary tropes than any of the others in the series; we’ll see how I feel about it this time around.

Once the Betsy-Tacy books hit high school, they run together a bit in my mind, so it’s interesting to reread Betsy In Spite of Herself and discover what’s actually there. As it turns out, this isn’t the book with the Okto-Deltas (that must be Betsy Was a Junior), but it does feature Betsy’s visit to Milkwaukee, her first boyfriend Phil Brandish (whom I had forgotten entirely, sorry Phil), and her ongoing struggle to reconcile her serious ambitions with her effervescent social life.

Betsy has known from a young age that she wants to be a writer, and wants to give focused attention to her writing and even, occasionally, her studies more generally. But she’s lively, extraverted, popular in the good old-fashioned sense that everyone likes her; her friends are always dropping by the house, and she's lured away from her work by the siren song of rides in the surrey or fudge-making parties.

But, popular as she is, Betsy frets that the boys don’t like her the way that she wants them to: they see her as a friend, a jolly good companion, not a romantic prospect. If only she could change her personality! If only she were more mature and sophisticated and a little bit bored with everything (awkwardly, she’s one of nature’s enthusiasts), or dramatic and mysterious and quiet…

Over the Christmas holidays, Betsy is invited to visit her friend Tib in Milwaukee, and she thinks that this is her chance: she’ll come home a completely new person! Unfortunately, her natural enthusiasm keeps getting in the way: rather than developing a sophisticated boredom, she’s swept away by the fascinating of visiting a city that was, at the time, still very much a German town, where German is the main language spoken and the whole city pauses in mid-afternoon for the German custom of coffee and cake.

(Lovelace is fantastic at travel writing: she knows just how to pick the most telling and delightful details.)

But when she comes back to Deep Valley, Betsy is determined to give her new personality a spin, anyway. It’s hard to be a new person with her old Crowd, who know Betsy as her usual silly self, so instead she sets her sights on a boy she barely knows: Phil Brandish, who is obsessed with his red automobile, which indeed turns out to be his only topic of conversation. They date for a few months.

This relationship is fascinating to me because Betsy is always aware, at some level, that she’s not at all in love with Phil. She wants to try out her new personality and she wants to have a boyfriend and she picks Phil because he’s an upperclassman with a car, two intriguing signs of high social status.

I suspect that this sort of calculation lies behind a lot of relationships, and not just in high school, but it’s rare to see it in books and especially rare to see a heroine acting this way. But it’s very true to life, and as Betsy’s sister Julia comments, this bit of floundering was actually an excellent growing experience for Betsy. Fascinating a boy (albeit by acting like someone she’s not) has given her confidence; and trying to make herself into a new person has given herself a new appreciation for her own genuine good qualities. It’s all been good practice for when she meets the boy she actually loves - not to mention an excellent experience that will enrich her writing.

***

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but on my road trip I’m going to be visiting Mankato (Lovelace’s hometown, on which Deep Valley is based), and it’s occurred to me that I could read Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown’s library scene in Betsy’s library (now the Carnegie Arts Center). Will they allow this?? I can but try.

I read the first four Betsy-Tacy books as a child, then stopped, because my library didn’t have the fifth book, Heaven to Betsy. Evidently, this is not uncommon: Heaven to Betsy has been controversial since it was first published, as the book features Betsy converting from her original Baptist faith to Episcopalianism.

This sort of thing is the reason why American fiction is so rigidly divided between inspirational fiction and fiction that wouldn’t touch religion with a ten foot pole: who wants to risk getting kicked out of all the libraries? And the Betsy-Tacy series as a whole, and this book in particular, shows why this split is unfortunate: religion is an important thread in many people’s lives, and it impoverishes literature to yank out an aspect of life entirely, or to relegate it to books that are meant to convert readers (or at least strengthen their already-existing faith).

Betsy-Tacy is not trying to convert you to anything. It’s just depicting religion as a part of people’s lives, which it is, and not only on a spiritual level, but also on a social/aesthetic one. In fact, Betsy’s conversion is largely aesthetic: she just likes Episcopalian services better.

But, although the reason behind it is unfortunate, it’s probably just as well that I didn’t continue past Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown in my youth. In Heaven to Betsy, Betsy discovers boys, and I probably would have thrown the book across the room. Boys, boys, boys, boys! Why are even books about girls books about boys!!!

(Betsy’s friend Tacy, the only sensible girl in Deep Valley, remains uninterested in boys. The others tease her about this, but in the kindly good-natured way one teases a beloved friend about, say, having peculiar taste in music. It’s odd, but there’s no sense that anyone is going, “Um, is Tacy a lesbian? Should we be dropping her from the Crowd and spreading rumors all over the school like Regina George in Mean Girls?”)

Reading it now, though, I really appreciate the way that Lovelace treats the romantic elements of the book. As with religion, she takes a down-to-earth view of adolescent romance. There’s no grand romance here. Betsy is genuinely into boys, but she also sees boys as a way to enhance her social status; frets that the boys only like her as a friend, then frets when the wrong boy likes her romantically; gets an enormous crush, suffers greatly when her crush starts going with another girl (there’s a great scene where Betsy, dying inside as she watches her crush and his new girl, repeatedly informs the entire sleighing party that she’s never had so much fun in her life!), and then just gets over it.

(We do also meet Betsy’s future husband, who is of course based on Lovelace’s own husband, whom Lovelace didn’t meet till she was in her twenties, and I think it’s very cute that she loved him so much that she wanted to insert him into her life a decade early. Although this is also very wise from a shipping standpoint! You gotta introduce the real love interest first, even if in this book he and Betsy barely interact.)

Also, reading about Betsy’s social life is just so much fun. She has a large and active group of friends, and they’re always up to something: Halloween parties, bobsled and skating parties, making fudge and singing by the piano and just generally having a wonderful time! A wonderful time for the reader, as well. The Betsy-Tacy books are so many things, but one of them is just plain fun, and that above all is probably why they endure.

Betsy and Tacy and Tib are ten! That was the original title of Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill - well, actually it was just Betsy and Tacy Are Ten, which does roll off the tongue more easily, but poor Tib, always left out of the titles!

Anyway, at the beginning of the book Betsy and Tacy and Tib turn ten, and resolve that from now on they’ll always be very grown up, which resolution lasts exactly long enough for them to go by their full first names for an entire afternoon. Then they go to Betsy’s birthday party and have such a wonderful time that they forget all about being grown-up, although they assure themselves that the party itself is the first part of being a grown-up party: an evening party, after all! That’s practically a ball!

Mostly, though, their world is opening up in a much more gradual way. They’ve begun to take notice of the outside world: Betsy and Tacy fall in love with the photograph of the dashing young King of Spain in the newspaper, and decide to write him a letter offering Tib in marriage. They perform in a school entertainment, where Betsy’s sister Julia recites a poem about the Queen of May, which causes much trouble later when rival factions grow up about who will be Queen of June. And, of course, they go over the Big Hill, where they discover Little Syria, the annex of the town where a group of Syrians have settled down. (These are Syrian Christians from what is now Lebanon.)

Our girls run into Naifi, a little Syrian girl who doesn’t speak any English, but through gestures they manage to have a picnic together. (Betsy and company are always having picnics. I yearn to emulate their intense picnic energy.) Later on, when they are gathering votes to decide who will be the Queen of June, they remember this friendly encounter, and although they know their parents might not like it, they decide to try to get votes in Little Syria…

And discover that the Syrians are quite nice actually! Naifi has told her family about the nice little American girls, so they welcome Betsy and Tacy and Tib with raisins and figs, and take them around the settlement so everyone can sign their petition to make Tib the Queen of June.

In the end, neither Tib nor her rival (Betsy’s sister Julia) are Queen of May: the whole idea has caused such a quarrel that they both refuse. Besides, they’ve learned that Naifi is the granddaughter of an emir, which makes her practically a princess, and who better to be the Queen of June than a real princess!

Naifi’s folks aren’t sure at first: they came to America to get away from all that. But the girls assure him that this will be an extremely American coronation, with flags! patriotic songs! a recitation of the Gettysburg address! Tib, open-mouthed: “When did you plan all of this?” Of course they just made it all up on the spot.

But they carry it out as promised, and crown Naifi the Queen of June with flags flying and patriotic songs playing on the piano. "Why I wouldn't not be an American for a million dollars," Betsy says. (This book was published in 1942, peak World War II.) And the girls decide to celebrate their newfound love of America by writing to Ethel Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's little daughter who is just their age, offering to come play with her in the White House.

It’s been thirty years since I was five, and I don’t remember it nearly as well as Maud Hart Lovelace, and yet rereading her book Betsy-Tacy feels like it unlocks the memories. Not specific memories, mind you, as Lovelace was five a hundred years before I was; but the feeling of being five, of being very small in a world that is very big, and yet is just beginning to open up.

Like many other American classic children’s books (Little House, All-of-a-Kind Family), the Betsy-Tacy series is a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s childhood. Betsy-Tacy is the first in the series, and begins just before Betsy turns five, the first time she meets Tacy.

That first meeting goes poorly - bashful Tacy runs away - but they meet again at Betsy’s birthday party, and after that they become inseparable. Most nights at dinner they take their plates and scamper up to the bench at the top of the street, where they sit together and eat as Betsy makes up stories. My favorite is the one where Betsy imagines that the pink sunset clouds are feathers, and one of the pink feathers drifts down, and the girls climb on and drift upward so they can see across the town.

It’s a delightful, episodic book, full of the goofy fun things that kids do: deciding to build themselves a house halfway up the Big Hill and trying to catch a chicken to provide eggs, making a piano box into their clubhouse (this sounds so delightfully cozy), playing paper dolls before the stove and watching the warm flames flicker through the isinglass. They dress up as grown-ups and go calling at a neighbor’s house, then down to their favorite chocolate-colored house with a turret. No one answers the door, so they leave Betsy’s mother’s calling card in the mailbox.

And there are more serious moments, too. Tacy’s baby sister dies, and Betsy comforts her by telling her a story of her sister up in Heaven, and they leave their best purple Easter egg in a bird’s nest high in a tree for a robin to take up to Heaven for little Bee. It’s so different from the way current children’s books deal with death: Tacy is sad with a young child’s grief, inchoate and anxious and confused. After one chapter, we move on. Just one episode in the larger story.

At the end of the book, a neighbor calls: her family just moved into the chocolate-colored house, and she was so pleased to find a calling card from Betsy’s mother! Fortunately all turns out well: the new neighbors have a little girl just Betsy and Tacy’s age, a fluffy-haired imp called Tib, who will join in all of Betsy and Tacy’s subsequent adventures.