SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE: EXCERPT

We are delighted to partake in the blogtour for SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet The Spy (Seal Press Hardcover; December 1, 2020; $30) by LESLIE BRODY— an acclaimed biographer known for revealing the stories of delightfully complicated feminists in modern history.

Harriet the Spy, first published in 1964, has mesmerized generations of readers and launched a million diarists. Its beloved antiheroine, Harriet, is erratic, unsentimental, and endearing—very much like the woman who created her, Louise Fitzhugh. In SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE, Brody shares the lively story of the beloved children’s book author who was a progressive, anti-racist, transgressive, smoking and drinking lesbian who believed in the radical power of art.

Born in 1928, Fitzhugh was raised in segregated Memphis, a rebellious daughter of Southern socialites who fled to New York at the first opportunity. There, she discovered the lesbian bars of Greenwich Village and the art world of postwar Europe; her circle of friends included members of the avant-garde like Maurice Sendak and Lorraine Hansberry. Above all else, Fitzhugh valued creativity and honesty.

Her novels, written in an era of political defiance, are full of resistance: to liars, to authority, to conformity, and even—radically, for a children’s author—to make-believe. Fitzhugh herself lived her life as a dissenter—a friend to underdogs, outsiders, and artists—and her masterpiece remains long after her death to influence and provoke new generations of readers.

As a children’s author and a lesbian, Fitzhugh was often pressured to disguise her true nature. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE tells the story of her hidden life and of the creation of her masterpiece, which remains long after her death as a testament to the complicated relationship between truth and secrecy.

From SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LIE: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy by Leslie Brody. Used with permission of the publisher Seal Press/Hachette. Copyright ©2020 by Leslie Brody

EXCERPT

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Like Harriet, Louise Fitzhugh was used to being underestimated. As a young woman, Louise’s smallness — she was four feet, eleven inches — “made many people mistake her for a child and completely misjudge her.” She tried not to misjudge or delude herself. If a decade of therapy left Louise with any particular theme, it was that lying to herself only made matters worse. She adhered to this principle more or less successfully (depending on whether she’d been drinking heavily). The letters she wrote to friends reflect repeatedly, and above all things, her belief that artists have a sacred charge to be completely honest with themselves and with one another about their work.

But a reader of Harriet the Spy who wanted to learn about Louise Fitzhugh would have had precious little to go on. Most of her readers never knew that she was the only progeny of a Jazz Age marriage that ended in rancorous divorce. Her father was a lawyer from a wealthy and powerful Memphis family, her mother a dancing teacher from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Louise grew up in a world where well-educated but unemployed women were tracked to become the wives and hostesses of prominent businessmen and politicians.

She felt trapped in the Memphis high society of her father and despised the violence and prejudice of the Jim Crow South. By the time she graduated from high school in 1946, she was already planning an escape to Paris, where she hoped to study art and be a painter.

By 1950, Louise was living in Greenwich Village, part of a bohemian enclave. There, she socialized with, among others, modernist artist and writer Djuna Barnes, photographer Berenice Abbott, literary critic Anatole Broyard, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and her close friends Marijane Meaker (whose many pen names included M. E. Kerr), and Sandra Scoppettone. The first time Louise ate a macadamia nut, it was in abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler’s Manhattan apartment.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Louise continued to paint, draw, and write plays. She mostly wrote autobiographical comedies of manners, satires, and farces meant to expose inequities and injustices in what she called “This lousy world.” In 1963, after a disappointing gallery show, she began to write a children’s book, which she said would feature “a nasty little girl who keeps a notebook on all her friends.”

In the literary marketplace before Stonewall and for years after, secrecy was the de facto position for a children’s book writer who was also a lesbian. For Louise, exposure could have caused real trouble—not just for herself, but also for her agent, editor, and publisher, all of whom might be publicly hounded, censored, and boycotted and suffer humiliating personal attacks. Louise was a popular and successful children’s author who gave no lectures, interviews, or readings to promote herself in the public sphere.

There was only one canned biography on the flaps of her books, relating only that she had been born in Memphis in 1928 and lived in New York City. And there were her author’s photos— two in circulation, both taken by her friend Susanne Singer. In one, she’s seated on a playground swing, smiling with a sweet, childlike demeanor. In the other, she’s more introspective, holding her female Yorkshire terrier, Peter.

When Louise died in 1974, a New York Times obituary described her as single; as survived by her mother; as an artist of lively and funny drawings as well as realist paintings; and as the innovator of a new realism in children’s fiction. Over the following decades, biographical articles and a scholarly book added tantalizing details: her parents divorced when she was an infant; she spent over a decade in psychoanalysis; she swore off wearing women’s clothing in 1950; she told droll stories about her beloved cats and dogs; and she suffered from wanderlust.

After her death, Louise’s friends were understandably protective of her reputation. The common view was that outing her would be detrimental to her legacy and to the sales of her books. By the 1980s, as the culture inclined slightly more toward tolerance, some of Louise’s friends were beginning to give interviews about the author of Harriet the Spy. One such friend was Alixe Gordin, to whom Louise had considered herself married for almost a decade. Alixe and Louise had been part of a social circle of high-flying career women who in their youth had crashed through literary and artistic ceilings at a rip-roaring velocity: they included not just writers of children’s books, but also writers of mysteries and crime thrillers; editors at glossy magazines and book publishing companies; copywriters, photographers, and illustrators at advertising agencies; theatrical producers and literary agents and casting directors; professors, painters, and actors. One of their friends, the playwright and author Jane Wagner, characterized this extensive network as a collection of “successful, creative, pleasure loving, ambitious, knowledgeable lesbians.” It was a world of downtown gay bars and uptown house parties, and in the summer, shared Hampton rentals.

Louise’s many friends often relied on the language of myth and folklore to describe her. She was a sprite, a fairy, a tomboy. She was like Tom Thumb, Peter Pan, or a Victorian boy, and when she was older, a little man, or a little elf. She was tiny—even her teeth were tiny. With such petite stature came a certain swagger. She was deeply sensitive and hated to be underestimated. She was impatient, often quarrelsome, mischievous, and intolerant of stupidity at home and in the world. She could tell a heartrending, spellbinding tale. She welcomed a battle: she had a trial lawyer’s perspicacity and wore out several sparring partners on the subjects of politics and literature. She defended weaker friends but could be a bully to snobs.

Sometimes she’d assume a sort of Baby Snooks–style speech and vocabulary, catching friends off guard by the “bizarre” infantile voice she’d adopt out of nowhere. She sang beautifully, played multiple instruments, and spoke excellent French. Nobody ever called Louise sunny, but she was certainly funny and gifted and good company. Asked to characterize the woman she’d lived with for five years—and who had left her a fortune—Louise’s last girlfriend, Lois Morehead, said Louise was “intense.”

Her moods could swing in a matter of seconds from cheerfulness to anger. When she was angry, she could be vicious, and when she was good, she was passionate. She believed in love, hard as it might be to preserve, and was always falling in and out of love with women and men, with cars and musical instruments, with dogs and cats. Sandra Scoppettone, coauthor with Louise of their picture book Bang Bang You’re Dead and author of Suzuki Beane, which Louise illustrated, had some “Tremendous feuds” with her, but they always made up because, said Sandra, their friendship was “so worth it.”

In 1995, an article in the Village Voice by the journalist Karen Cook revealed Louise at last to be the multidimensional person Alixe Gordin and other friends knew. It included a previously unpublished photograph of Louise in her mid-forties with a lived-in complexion and cropped hair, smoking a cigarette. She looks smart, skeptical, and real. She had, her friends agreed, a childlike quality, “but she was no child.”

Louise felt a great sympathy for eleven-year-olds. She considered her reading public to be open-minded individuals, not people to be talked down to, patronized, or palmed off with fairy tales. She didn’t write many books and published only two novels and two picture books during her lifetime. Two more novels came out posthumously. Her books are full of resistance—to liars, to conformity, to authority, and even (radically, for a children’s author) to make-believe.

The children she invented were engaged in the zeitgeist as beatniks and cool cats; they were antiwar and civil rights advocates; and they were children’s liberationists. That Louise wrote Harriet the Spy for middle-school readers, catching children before they settled into the powerful grooves of gender that would keep many of them on conventional tracks through adolescence, was radical. Kids who felt they were different could read parts of their secret selves in Harriet, relate to her refusal to be pigeonholed or feminized, and cheer her instinct for self-preservation.

Although she is best remembered today for a commercial children’s book, Louise Fitzhugh was a serious artist. She wrote Harriet the Spy, and all her work, to influence hearts and minds. But she was often insecure about whether what she wrote or painted would ever be found truly meaningful. She waged a gallant battle against her own doubt, her shyness, and a sneaky streak of misanthropy.

Toward the end of her life, she wrote to a friend that the state of the world in the mid-1970s had left her with her mouth “open in horror all the time” at social injustice, prejudice, and poverty. In particular, children were — as they always had been — hostages to the ideological winds. For Louise Fitzhugh, change was what was needed, and her writing for children the best way to put a little love back into this lousy world.

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Leslie Brody

Leslie Brody is a playwright, journalist and well-regarded biographer known for revealing the stories of delightfully complicated feminists in modern history, including Jessica Mitford (Irrepressible, 2010) and Louise Fitzhugh (Sometimes You Have to Lie, 2020). Leslie Brody‘s memoir Red Star Sister received the PEN Center USA West Award in 1998. For over twenty years, Brody has taught Creative Nonfiction in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Redlands. https://lesliebrodyauthor.com/

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing