REGARDING HARRIET

Merrill starts his poem by addressing Fitzhugh, then slyly elaborates her story in words that also capture her most famous creation--Harriet M. Welsch, the heroine of Harriet the Spy. To describe one tomboy, humorous and heartrending and uncouth, is to describe the other. Fitzhugh was a petite, boyish woman. just over five feet tall. Harriet is a fast-moving, adventurous, 11-year-old girl. She wears a dark, hooded sweatshirt and old blue jeans, flashlight and knife and spare pens hanging from hooks on her belt. in order to be a writer, Harriet knows, she must be a spy. She eavesdrops from dumbwaiters, stares down through skylights, and always takes notes. "I want to know everything, everything," Harriet screeches, bouncing up and down on the bed. "Everything in the world, everything."

Fitzhugh's alter ego is a mixture of bravado and candor, loneliness and humor, impulsiveness and an insistent delight in such routines as her daily tomato sandwich. No matter how tattered her relations with the world or her family may become, Harriet survives on her inner life, her artistic desire. Tough and vulnerable, she has inspired the sort of devotion among her fans enjoyed by Holden Caulfield. In the late '60s, girls started Harriet the Spy clubs, and were found, in such places as Evanston, Illinois, hiding under tables in the teachers' lunch-room, taking notes. More recently, a series of women's detective stories has been dedicated to Harriet, and an Off-Broadway play named her as a feminist heroine, along with Joan of Arc. "Quite when. one finds it becoming an addiction is hard to pinpoint," said a reviewer for The Junior Bookshelf in October 1974.

The book broke all sorts of barriers, not only in the edgy portrayal of Harriet (one critic called her "one of the most fatiguingly ill-mannered children imaginable") but in its realistic account of parents who drink martinis, lose their tempers, rely on servants, and take their troubled daughter to a psychiatrist. In The Long Secret, a sequel to Harriet, Fitzhugh broached the subject of menstruation, also shocking at the time. Her books brought. a new frankness to children's literature and paved the way for countless "problem novels" addressing controversial subjects from abortion and homosexuality to drug addiction. Fitzhugh's realism may have wowed the parents who buy books, but probably had little do with Harriet's appeal for kids, who relished her defiance. I loved her notebook, and her clothes; after changing into jeans in the school bathroom, I spent my afternoons following people around the Village and writing things down about them,

Fitzhugh was not prolific. In her lifetime, she published only three novels and two picture books, the latter in collaboration with Sandra Scoppettone. She wrote Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret in quick succession, then took nine years to produce another novel, Nobody's Family Is Going To Change, which appeared at the time of her death. Under the guidance of Fitzhugh's executor, Lois Morehead, Nobody's Familywas transformed into an afterschool special and a Broadway musical, The Tap Dance Kid.

Morehead has generated new work from materials Fitzhugh left. behind. Sport, a novel intended as a third in the Harriet series, came out in 1979; it joined a trio of books for young children (I Am Five, which came out in 1978, as well as I Am Three and I Am Four, which came out in 1982 and for which other artists provided illustrations). Morehead also hopes to revive long-stalled plans for a Harriet film (Hollywood executives weaned on Harriet are expressing fresh enthusiasm for the project) and is pursuing a deal involving some of Fitzhugh's books that she is not yet prepared to discuss.

Despite her influence, however, Fitzhugh herself has remained something of a mystery. While her work has been the subject of articles in journals of children's literature, the only full-length study has been University of Wisconsin-Stout professor Virginia Wolf's 1991 Louise Fitzhugh, which analyzes the autobiographical elements in Fitzhugh's work.

This is no easy task since her life abounds in contradictions. Fitzhugh, who created the quintessential New York kid, was a quintessential Southerner. She struggled mightily to escape her family, particularly her father, but depended on a trust fund for financial support. Though she became famous as a writer, she was known for much of her life as an artist. She had a huge circle of friends, but in the publishing industry was considered a recluse. She wrote a character who came to stand for truth, in Merrill's words, but many details of her own life are still hidden in the closet.

Louise Fitzhugh's earliest torments arose from an exceptionally bitter divorce. She was born in 1928 into a wealthy, prominent Memphis family. Her father, Millsaps Fitzhugh, had married Louise Perkins, a young woman from an undistinguished family in Mississippi who wanted to be a dancer. Fitzhugh's grandmother, a descendant of a Civil War hero, was appalled by the match. By the time Fitzhugh was only a few months old, grandmother Fitzhugh had persuaded her son to divorce his wife.

The resulting custody battle was a sensation, covered in the local papers. There was nothing polite about it: Millsaps demanded custody of his daughter on grounds that his wife was an unfit mother. Fitzhugh became a pawn in the battle--according to Wolf, she may have been kidnapped more than once. A childhood friend, Ann Blecken, says photographs of Louise in a muddy dress were used to prove her mother's unsuitability, and friends from Fitzhugh's adult years remember her story that her father threw her hard against a wall during an argument. Fitzhugh also intimated what her father had driven off her mother by means of his considerable judicial and social clout.

Peter Taylor, who was to become Fitzhugh's stepuncle, told Wolf that Fitzhugh's mother had a nervous breakdown, then went off' to Hollywood to attempt a career as a tap dancer. Louise was probably around five when her mother returned to Memphis and began trying to see her, Fitzhugh told friends she'd once watched a woman being turned away from her house, and realized only later it was her mother. Eventually, Fitzhugh's mother was allowed intermittent visits with her daughter.

Fitzhugh seems to have suffered almost as much in learning that she had a mother as she did in believing her dead. "One of the most difficult things in her analysis," says Alice Glas (not her real name), who met Fitzhugh in 1955, "was that she could never relate to her mother because she had accepted she never had a mother." In The Long Secret, Harriet's friend Beth Ellen is confronted with the disconcerting prospect of her mother's return from Biarritz (which Harriet believes to be a mental institution). "Nothing. She felt nothing. What was there to feel? What was one supposed to feel?"

Until 1933, when her father married Sally Taylor, Fitzhugh lived with him in her grandparents' mansion. Years later, Fitzhugh painted a bizarre portrait of that time. "She came from that absolutely gothic South, every bit out of Tennessee Williams or Faulkner," says Frederica Leser, a friend from Fitzhugh's early days in New York. The characters from these tales--which still exist at the level of lore--included a rich, controlling grandmother; a maid who fed dollar bills to the birds; and a crazy obese uncle, a once-published poet who cut up dolls in the attic.

Eulogizing Fitzhugh after her death, Peter Taylor said she learned quickly that if she were ever to know independence, "she would have to wage war--sometimes defensive and sometimes aggressive--against the smothering influence of a large Southern family." But in her youth, there was little public evidence of that struggle. Fit, as she was known, read widely, doodled constantly, played tennis, studied the flute, and went to movies. She was serious but popular, always readily chosen for the best sororities. "She didn't really care, she just got everything," says Peggy Carroll, a classmate at Memphis's elite Miss Hutchison's school. A class photograph shows Fitzhugh at 16, a smiling young woman with a full head of brown, wavy hair. "We both were conformists," says Joan Williams, a childhood friend.

Ed Thompson, now an attorney in Memphis, whom Fitzhugh dated toward the end of high school, "was in love with her, very much so." To this day he remembers her stinging rebuke to a casually anti-Semitic remark--"I said, 'I stand corrected' "--and her tactful but devastating critique of his adolescent poetry--"I stood corrected there, too." Fitzhugh and Thompson ran off for a quickie marriage in Mississippi one night, but she inexplicably brought along Peggy Carroll as a witness- "I've often wondered if she didn't do it out, of fear," Williams says--and the marriage was never consummated. Her parents quickly had it annulled. "I think this was the beginning of Louise trying to break away," says Blecken.

After graduating from Miss Hutchison's in 1946, Fitzhugh bounced from Southwestern College in Memphis to another in Florida. In 1948 she made the leap to New York's Bard College, which her uncle Peter had recommended for its writing program. She persuaded Joan Williams to join her. Suddenly, "there were no restrictions," says Williams, and both women made the most of it. Williams, who had already begun a passionate literary correspondence with William Faulkner, began writing seriously. (She went: on to publish several novels, one of which, The Morning and the Evening, has recently been reissued.) Meanwhile, Fitzhugh stripped away all traces of her Southern accent, cut off her long hair, and plunged simultaneously into her explorations of academia and sexuality. In his memoir, A Different Person, James Merrill wrote:

She was my "advisee" at Bard, this bright, funny, tiny tomboy from Memphis, who brought a villanelle to our first conference. At a roadhouse one evening she asked me to dance. Back in my room she began undressing me. Any "cure" was all at once beside the point; what we found ourselves doing proved to be a thrilling discovery--at least until Louise broke off, pleading pain and fear, and fled. Like Faust upon his first glimpse of Marguerite--O belle enfant, je t'aime!--I was in love. In the days ahead I slipped pleading messages into her campus mailbox, bought prophylactics, sought to waylay her on the paths between dormitory and classroom. For her part she avoided me, left the notes unanswered, changed her major from Contemporary Literature to Child Psychology, and moved in with the lesbian head of that department. So much for heterosexuality. Louise and I met on my return from Europe and liked each other all over again. We even went to bed one sunny, tipsy dusk, but were by then so set in our ways that nothing came of it.

In 1949, Fitzhugh's grandmother died, and Fitzhugh came into what would be the first of her inheritances. Perhaps it was the money (not to mention the affair with the head of the child psychology department) that persuaded Fitzhugh to leave college six months before graduation and head for New York. She lived in Greenwich Village and on the Lower East Side, studying intermittently at the Art Students League and Cooper Union and later in France and Italy, where she told friends she painted murals for food. For much of the '50s she dated both men and women, apparently shocking no one. "Louise always had somebody different," Williams says.

These were the years before Stonewall, when gay life was thriving but largely invisible to outsiders, both pleasurably and painfully secret. "Louise was firmly rooted in the lesbian world," says Marijane Meaker. Fitzhugh took Williams to a lesbian club and joined the revelry at painter Frederica Leser's famous themed costume parties--once dressed in a white suit, as Boss Crump, Memphis's version of Boss Tweed. But many of Fitzhugh's friends were in the closet, and some, to varying complicated degrees, remain there. Some of Fitzhugh's friends, even those who cooperated fully with Wolf, are so discomfited by the book's discussion of Fitzhugh as an artist with a homosexual sensibility that they still haven't read it. When I described Fitzhugh as a lesbian to one woman who had lived with her, the woman snapped, "Was she?"

Gay or straight, Fitzhugh's woman friends--agents, casting directors, artists, academics, advertising executives, scientists--were exciting, talented, and often among the first to thrive in male-dominated fields. Her pals included Lorraine Hansberry, Jane Wagner, Meaker (also known as the young-adult book author M. E. Kerr), and Sandra Scoppettone, now best known as a mystery writer. "It was networking before the term was known," Wagner says.

In a black-and-white photograph from the early '60s, Fitzhugh sits at a table after dinner, a half-empty plate and a glass of red wine in front of her. Her hair is like a boy's, casually styled and so short it exposes her ears. A cigarette dangles from her lips. She's about to strike a match; her hands are small, finely boned, less robust than her face. Her head is tilted to listen, her dark eyes focused so intently one begins to invent the sounds of ardent conversation.

But for all her allure, Fitzhugh could also be sharp and cutting. "She could get very angry and vicious, and it was scary. There was a lot of tiptoeing around," says Scoppettone, with whom Fitzhugh had a brief affair and a lifelong friendship punctuated by angry feuds. Both drank heavily; Fitzhugh often succumbed to despair. "I once found her in front of my door, curled up in the fetal position, and passed out there," Scoppettone says.

Fitzhugh's anxieties found their clearest expression in her art. She sketched the way Harriet took notes--constantly, fluently, without censor. She always painted people, frequently asking neighbors to pose. Her artistic influences included Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, and Edward Munch. She made dark woodcuts of children huddled against baseboards or lost in the woods. She drew from her unconscious, sometimes painting her dreams. In the early '60s, she splashed colorful inks on paper in Rorschach-style patterns, then improvised drawings around the shapes. When she didn't like her work. she cut it up, to keep it from being salvaged.

In one painting Fitzhugh did after a breakup with a woman lover, two stubby, vaguely childlike figures are being ripped apart, literally dismembered by their separation, with only the tips of their fingers still entwined. The dull canvas is splattered with a thin, blood-like red. In another, a self-portrait, she stands shrugging helplessly, the left side of her face disappearing into a kind of mist, as if it were being erased.

In 1960, Fitzhugh and Scoppettone conceived of a picture book for grown-ups, a spoof of their own bohemian milieu inspired by Kay Thompson's Eloise, which was also originally marketed to adults. As drawn by Fitzhugh, Suzuki Beane, a dark-haired beatnik child clad in jeans and black turtleneck, looks very much like Scoppettone herself. In Suzuki Beane, Suzuki makes a friend of Henry, an impossible square from the Upper East Side, and in so doing learns that her own bohemian parents can be every bit as rigid and pretentious as the rich folk uptown. The children attend a poetry reading--an event Fitzhugh used as an excuse to caricature a dandified Merrill while Scoppettone gleefully parodied one of his poems. The book was accepted almost instantly by Doubleday. It became a minor sensation, first among adults (Merrill was annoyed) and later among children.

In 1961, the year Suzuki was published, Fitzhugh and Alice Glas moved into a garden apartment on East 85th Street. The neighborhood that would eventually become the backdrop for Harriet the Spy. The success of Suzuki inspired a flood of writing, which never came as easily to Fitzhugh as painting did, but the early '60s were a very productive time. She worked hard at her analysis, and on several literary projects that dealt explicitly with her childhood and the South. She started a novel called Crazybaby; in 1962, she completed an autobiographical play, Mother Sweet, Father Sweet. Kermit Bloomgarden wanted to produce it, put asked that Fitzhugh make revisions. She refused - the first of many times that Fitzhugh would respond to critisism by abruptly withdrawing or abandoning her work.

She also began Amelia, a novel about two teenage girls falling in love. "It was beautiful," Glas says. The book was named after Fitzhugh's first love a Southwestern classmate who was later killed when she walked into the propeller of a plane. Fitzhugh showed the work to an agent who refused to handle the material because of its lesbian content. Fitzhugh put it aside. (The manuscript has since disappeared. In the late '60s, Fitzhugh told friends it had mysteriously vanished from the attic of her house on Long Island.)

In 1963, at 35, Fitzhugh began drafting Harriet the Spy. Her agent, Pat Myra, sent several pages of Harriet's notebook entries to Ursula Nordstrom, a legendary editor at Harper & Row, who was so excited she called Fitzhugh in and made the highly unusual offer of a small advance. Nordstrom and her associate Charlotte Zolotow elicited Harriet the Spy by the Socratic method. "It was like playing charades ," says Zolotow. "Every time, we asked a question a wonderful new chapter came in." Why was Harriet so angry? "Louise said. 'Like me, she had a nurse that she was very crazy about and then the nurse went away and I never heard from her again. "Why was she keeping a diary? "Louise said, 'Well. that's plain, because she wanted to be a writer.'" Glas, who moved out not long after Harriet was completed, recollects almost nothing of Fitzhugh's work on the book; she says it didn't occupy either of them the way the more personal material had.

"Harriet," Glas says. "was like a game."

With Harriet the Spy, Fitzhugh seemed to nave found her voice. Harriet expressed all the pain and loneliness, curiosity and excitement of Fitzhugh's own childhood, but in a completely different milieu--the sophisticated, affluent New York that Fitzhugh inhabited as an adult. Unlike Suzuki the bohemian, Harriet is an insider who writes like an outsider, subversive because she is part of the privileged classes. She is a critic of her own family and friends, as well as her neighbors. Fitzhugh's illustrations depict even the nice adults as lumpy, angular or strange, veering toward the grotesque.

As Fitzhugh knew kids rarely have any choice but to be listeners in the adult world. Fitzhugh transforms their silence into power, into spying, sending Harriet where she's not wanted to record what she sees. Harriet's father may ignore her because he's obsessed with his work; she can shut him out with work of her own. Her opinions are clearly important, since they're recorded in large capital letters:

Fitzhugh became so engaged with her characters that after Harriet she plunged directly into a sequel, The Long Secret. Part of the second book is told from Harriet's point of view, but it's really the story of her friend Beth Ellen Hansen. The girls are summering in Water Mill, Long Island, where someone has been distributing notes with such biblically inflected messages as JESUS HATES YOU. Harriet becomes obsessed with finding out who's doing it. (The culprit, of course, is Beth Ellen.)

Wolf argues that Harriet and Beth Ellen represent conflicting aspects of Fitzhugh's psyche. Harriet is a writer--angry, independent, and assertive, butting against traditional expectations of femininity no matter what clothes she wears. Beth Ellen is a far more conventional girl, soft and vague, resigned to a future of marriage, children, and affluent indolence. (She's also passive and boring.) Beth Ellen is teetering uncomfortably on the brink of adulthood, but Fitzhugh doesn't even try to make Harriet grow up, at least not in the sense of confronting head-on what society demands of women and girls. It's not Harriet's period but Beth Ellen's that begins in The Long Secret, and not Harriet but her friend Janie, the aspiring scientist, who rebuts Beth Ellen's grandmother's claim that the bleeding is caused by rocks. ("WOW!" says Harriet. "ROCKS!"] At the end of the book, a reviving Beth Ellen throws a decidely unladylike tantrum, a la Harriet, and declares she wants to be an artist.

Harriet the Spy was chosen as one of the best children's books of 1964 by The New York Times and voted a favorite book by the children of 0klahoma. In 1965, The Long Secret got a respectful review in The New York Times from Carolyn Heilbrun--who said the it could even surprise adults. Harriet and The Long Secret became major sellers in paperback, but Fitzhugh refused to make appearances on their behalf. "Ursula used to say that it was just such a waste, because if she had come to conferences and dinners the way other authors did, she would have won an even larger audience," says Zena Sutherland, an influential reviewer at the time. "She hated to be looked at," says Glas.

The year The Long Secret was published, 1965, was a turning point for Fitzhugh. It was the year she became a success, and it was also the year her father died. (Her stepmother died two years later.) Fitzhugh finally came into money--lots of it--and she was free at last of any parental injunction to conform. The woman who had once mocked herself for writing children's books now wrote to Joan Williams: "Writing for children has given me such a wonderful sense of doing good, which I guess I must feel. All other writing had become vanity to me, saying see-how-well-I-write, or worse of course, just writing badly."

Fitzhugh spent her new wealth on a summer house on a bluff in Cutchogue, Long Island, and stepped up her wardrobe. Fitzhugh had always been somewhat butch. Her nicknames over the years had included Sport and Willie, names she also used for boys in her books. She had a female Yorkshire terrier named Peter. But after her inheritance, "she told me she was never going to wear women's clothes again, and then she had all these suits tailored," says Meaker. "She was like a wonderful looking little Victorian boy."

In the Hamptons' emerging gay scene, the women were chic and sophisticated, accessorized with Dunhill lighters and Brooks Brothers clothes. Fitzhugh fit right in. She even dated Pat Hemingway, who ran a swank restaurant and piano bar, the Bull's Head Inn, in Bridgehampton. Leser and other friends, however, remember this as a particularly destructive period in Fitzhugh's life, in which she may have experimented with drugs and drank enough to incur at least one arrest for drunk driving.

She also continued to draw and write, and she did attempt Sport, a story that addresses the insidious power of money. Sport, a friend of Harriet's, is the son of a struggling, scatterbrained writer, whose small earnings Sport must manage carefully to feed them both. When Sport's grandfather leaves him a huge inheritance, his nasty, shallow, socialite mother tries to get her hands on it by kidnapping her son and holding him hostage in the Plaza Hotel. "Sport's character changed entirely. He had been a very sweet kid and in the next one he was not that kind," says Zolotow. Fitzhugh was so upset by her editors' criticisms that she abruptly ended her relationship with Harper & Row; the draft, filled with paste-overs and handwritten scrawl, ended up at Delacorte where an editor painstakingly line-edited it into finished form. Nevertheless, it lacks the intensity of characterization one associates with Fitzhugh.

In 1969, when she was 41, Fitzhugh bought a winter house in Bridgewater, Connecticut. That same year, she and Scoppettone collaborated on Bang, Bang, You're Dead, an antiwar picture book in which a play war escalates into real violence. According to Glas, the battling children resemble the important people in Fitzhugh's life, among them Glas, Lois Morehead, and Scoppettone. Fitzhugh's etchings of bloodied, bandaged children (all but one of whom appear to be boys) struck some critics as heavyhanded. School Library Journal called Bang, Bang "a literary ABM that over shoots its mark."

In 1974, Myra sold Nobody's Family Is Going To Change to Farrar Straus & Giroux. This last Fitzhugh work is about an African American brother and sister. Emma wants to be a lawyer (like Fitzhugh's father); her happy-go-lucky younger brother, Willie, dreams of tap dancing (like Fitzhugh's mother). Their father opposes them both; their mother offers little support. Like Harriet, Beth Ellen, and Sport, Emma strives furiously to maintain a sense of self in the face of a destiny she can rarely control. Unlike any of them, even Harriet, Emma actually tries to change the world around her. But her impotence infuriates her. Emma learns that her family won't change, that activism (in the form of a children's army that seems to be based on the Black Panthers) offers limited support, and her only hope is to love and change herself. She's already so self-hating, though, that it's hard to feel optimistic for her.

To her editor at Farrar Straus, Michael di Capua, Fitzhugh "gave an impression of being a sort of semi-invalid--very frail, withdrawn, interior, drawn in on herself, not comfortable in the world." He thought she had virtually no confidence in her work--an opinion that couldn't have been helped by exceptionally negative advance notice for Nobody's Family from Publishers Weekly, which suggested that Fitzhugh had lost her talent.

On the weekend after the PW review, Fitzhugh had dinner with several friends in Bridgewater. It was a convivial group, given to playing cards, and singing. When they left, says Jan Buckaloo, a guest that evening, Fitzhugh remarked that the stars were shooting. Buckaloo saw nothing herself. "In retrospect I think it was probably the tumor," Buckaloo says. That night Fitzhugh suffered several brain aneurysms and checked herself into the hospital the next morning. She died a day later. As her will had requested, she was laid to rest in a plain pine box well north of the Mason-Dixon line, in a pretty cemetery near Bridgewater. She was buried in a white three-piece suit. As the mourners returned to their cars, there was a sudden, unexpected burst of thunder and lightning. "That's Louise," thought Glas, "angry because she knew she wasn't supposed to be gone."

©Village Voice

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