Spying in plain sight

On Christmas Eve when I was flying with my family to go on vacation, I gave myself a treat. I re-read a book that I loved as a child: Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. Reading a beloved book from childhood has been hit or miss in recent years. I had wildly happy memories of reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, probably around the age of 11 or so. I was still unquestioningly religious (Christian), which accounted for some of the serendipitous feeling I had about Aslan the lion turning out to be Jesus. But the the story’s modern Christian fable quality wasn’t what prevented me from enjoying it as an agnostic adult. It was the fact that the book felt like “children’s literature,” rather than something I could lose myself in and find anything that rang true to my grownup self. (I re-read the entire series and found that the books I liked most were The Magician’s Nephew and Prince Caspian, despite the fact that I couldn’t stop noticing how racist the latter book seemed, particularly in the post-9/11 era of Islamophobia.)

The same was sadly true for A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I discovered that book as an early teenager and fell into the book and in love with L’Engle’s writing, going on to read the rest of the series and her other series too. Upon re-reading several years ago, I discovered ways that the book had seeped into my consciousness and influenced my life, for example, in the likely naming of my son after one of the male characters. But in general, the book felt simplistic, a dated story with limited range, told in a stage voice for children.

I inadvertently bought two copies of Harriet the Spy in the last few months — one for my daughter, now 11, in the hope that she would read it and love it as much as I had. And another, by accident a few months later, for me. Life has been busier than normal this year, mostly because of the baby I am expecting, and both my reading and writing practice have fallen low on the list of things I try to do every day.

But this felt like an errand from the subconscious, so I began the clunky work of reading a book written in 1963 (A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950) about an 11-year-old, privileged Manhattan girl with parents who hardly know her, a cook, a “nurse” (nanny) named Ole Golly, and a shocking (by 2014 standards) amount of freedom to wander around a city alone. Like A Wrinkle in Time, this book practically comes labeled for square peg, preteen girls, which explains part of their appeal to me. As I read, I wondered why my young self, growing up on a farm and then a small city in Wisconsin, felt such kinship to the strange, spoiled, compulsive diarist Harriet.

As I read, I remembered certain details that had never really left my memory. The Boy with the Purple Socks, as Harriet writes about a boy so dull she can’t remember his name. After reading the book the first time, as a child, it was as though a switch turned on in my brain, an impulse to take notes on my peers, my world, and perhaps to turn the note-taking to the past. I rode the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, city bus to Parks and Recreation sponsored swim class and gave the bus driver a secret moniker (“the Eagle,” for his prominent nose). When I was in school, I didn’t carry around a diary like Harriet, but I wrote sporadically and dissected the social strata and types of middle school ad nauseum with a series of like-minded female friends.

By the time I re-read the part of the story where Harriet faces social stigma for what she’s written, I realized that what she was struggling with was a version of what I still wonder about and struggle with as a writer of personal narratives. The impulse to write the cold, clinical truth, always, about what I observe and experience, versus the self-censorship that leads to playing it so safe in writing that I virtually say nothing, in order to be kind to friends and relatives. I realized that, while I’d always been a reader, reading Harriet the Spy over three decades ago was probably what made me a writer. And then I read this passage (excerpted from a letter from the nurse to Harriet), near the end, which I’m still mulling over but suspect I can learn from:

“‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats. And don’t you ever forget it.”

[write the truth in your notebooks, and if they are ever found]

“you are going to do one of two things, and you don’t like either of them:

1) You have to apologize.

2) You have to lie.

Otherwise you are going to lose a friend… Remember that writing is to put love into the world, not to use against your friends. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.”