On Harriet the Spy & Louise Fitzhugh

“First she went to the bathroom because she hadn’t in the morning, and when she was sitting there she wrote in her notebook:

I LOVE MYSELF

Then she got up and put on her spy clothes.” (210)

The presence of a notebook or diary in my life has been a constant since childhood. I can trace it back to my love for Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, that classic romance between a girl and her notebook, first published in 1964. Who knows how I old was when I read it. I think ten. Ten feels right. By then I would have also read Little Women and deemed Jo March ingenious for selling her hair. I had definite ideas about who or what I wanted to be: airplane hostess, artist, vet, archeologist, writer. Or all of the above.

Nearly every woman writer I know has a place for Harriet in her heart, for Harriet M. Welsch writes with the confidence of a middle-aged white man, that is to say she has no fear of judgement. She would never be laid low by imposter syndrome. Harriet is so absorbed in her writing - her WORK - that she doesn’t even realise she’s an outsider, and when she does find out, she doesn’t entirely care. As a child I admired her focus and her orneriness. How fun, to go around being disagreeable, to hide in dumbwaiters and be your own Neighbourhood Watch, eye-rolling at the ridiculous adults. I also loved Harriet’s friends in their subverted gender roles: Sport, whose pulp writer-father’s neglect forces him to manage the household, and Janie, who aspires to blow up the school.

When Harriet and Janie’s mothers tried to force the girls to go to dancing classes I joined in their scorn. Mrs Gibbs tells Harriet that her mother is worried about the way she moves, and Harriet replies:

“Fast,”that’s the way I move, fast. What’s wrong with that?”

I was fast too, and I loved it. When I was ten there was no better feeling that being ahead. It didn’t come often, but when it did, it was empowering.

In the second half of the 20th century, Harriet’s creator, Louise Fitzhugh was part of a smart, queer, literary set that hung around New York’s ‘Green Witch’ Village and included writers Marijane Meaker (M.E Kerr), and Sandra Scoppettone. The Fitzhugh and Scoppotone collaboration Suzuki Beane, (1961) a beatnik parody of Eloise, characterises the anarchic wit of their social group: they were renegade ladywriters, hiding in plain sight, the city as their playground; not for them the drudge of suburbia or the dreaded pram in the hallway. Marijane Meaker shared stories with Fitzhugh about her childhood habit of spying, and, after Harriet, accused her of stealing her story. Louise responded with the universal truth: “all kids are spies when they’re little.”

Fitzhugh grew up in the South, an only child, rich and alienated. At the age of two her ‘country gentleman’ father finagled custody, telling her that her ‘flapper’ mother was dead. Fitzhugh’s mother took to haunting the places her daughter might be found. She was eventually allowed back into her life, but never quite to the degree that she wanted. Fitzhugh didn’t want to be a debutante. She abhorred the racial inequality that surrounded her. At nine, she acquired a sketchbook and from then on dragged it everywhere. Seeing herself as an artist was a response to her locative and emotional dissonance. Escape came via college. Her advisor at Bard, the poet James Merrill, remembered Fitzhugh as “a bright, funny, tiny tomboy from Memphis.” Leslie Brody in her biography of Fitzhugh, Sometimes You Have to Lie, writes: “In self-portraits Fitzhugh would draw herself as a lost little boy, or as a comic sort of goblin, or a dumpy middle-aged woman resigned to her fate. It isn’t fair to say that’s how she always saw herself, but gives a hint.”

I did not grow up rich or an only child, but I definitely felt ‘different’ and also thought of art as the antidote to the straight life that seemed to be the only option on offer. The illustration of Harriet in her spy outfit: turned up jeans, hoodie, fake glasses and toolbelt, imprinted on me to the extent that in my teen years I would inhabit it as my own style with a few modifications: blue jeans, white t-shirt and a gentleman’s vest. But I’m jumping ahead. What Harriet’s outfit meant to me at ten was this: self-suffiency, capability and ingenuity. And even to a dud ballerina and a bad brownie, these were attractive traits.

Most alluring was the notebook. When it came to her observations and opinions, Harriet did not hold back:

“CARRIE ANDREWS IS CONSIDERABLY FATTER THIS YEAR. AND LAURA PETERS IS THINNER AND UGLIER. I THINK SHE COULD USE SOME BRACES ON HER TEETH.”

I took great pleasure in Harriet’s unabashed ALLCAPS scribings, and was inspired to write my own. But while Harriet relied on her gift for description, most of my plots came from Columbo. And so the neighbour with the knapsack who walked barefoot was a hippie criminal, and the house with the always-drawn curtains was a hide-out for political agitators. Like Harriet, I explored my neighborhood to its utmost. But Harriet lived in a city - she was a girl flaneur - and I was in deep suburbia. I was always looking out for ladies of the night - I had witnesssed their spandex wondrousness in Nightshift, a favourite inappropriate film (starring the Fonz!) - but they were not to be found in the cul de sacs of the outer eastern suburbs.

Harriet’s notebook is her way of processing the world, it is at once object and place and practice. My notebook was for fabrication, for lists and rants, what I would come to think of as wishful writing - writing (im)possible futures for myself. When Harriet’s friend Sport asks her why she is taking notes on strangers she is exasperated. “because I’ve seen them and I want to remember them.” When Harriet is banned from taking her notebook to school, she swings between violent outbursts and depression. And why not? In another reading, her notebook might be seen as a late-stage ‘transitional object’’. Magic objects are only magic in the eye of the beholder.

Initially Harriet’s notebook is truly private. She writes in it freely and unconsciously until it is discovered by her peers and then she starts to learn what effect her words have on others. It’s only when Harriet’s interest in writing is sanctioned by adults - she is invited to edit the the school paper - that she is allowed back from Coventry. On the advice of her beloved nurse Ole Golly Harriet prints a retraction, learning that “sometimes you have to lie” and crosses the bridge from private writer to public. Her notebook becomes a different kind of magic object then - her notes the rough material for stories, and she moves towards ‘becoming a writer’ (growing up, I guess.)

Lissa Paul, comparing Harriet the Spy with Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, calls the former a successful Künstlerroman (artist’s coming of age), while the latter is a social realist tragedy: “The difference between children and women in literature is that children win, women don’t.” For Harriet, winning means she is allowed to keep her notebook, even if its function has now changed, now that she’s writing for an audience, and considering their needs, instead of being oblivious to them.

Fitzhugh was only forty-six when she died of an aneurysm in 1974. While there are other books, including the sequels The Long Secret and Sport, Harriet the Spy is her legacy. It is recognised as a precurser to the New Realism that would develop into young adult fiction as we know it today. Marijane Meaker believed Fitzhugh to be nothing short of revolutionary: “it was her insistence that children were people, not to be talked down to, patronized, or treated as some special group.” For this writer, she delivered a maxim to live by. “To yourself you must always tell the truth.”