Jezebel
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer/reviewer/blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'The Long Secret', Louise Fitzhugh's 1965 sequel to 'Harriet The Spy', in which Honorary (Junior) Jezebel Harriet M. Welsch attempts to figure out the mystery of her best friend, Beth, during a summer on Long Island.
The notes were appearing everywhere.At the end of the day, is our instinctive dislike of modern teen chick lit — the unholy spawn of Sweet Valley High, Bridget Jones, and Sex and the City, IMHO — fundamentally due to its craven attachment to AmEx and snagging hotties? (For years, the publishing biz has unofficially dubbed the adult wing of the genre "Shopping and Fucking.") As I read back through my YA library, I am starting to wonder if it may just be that all this saddle-stitched vapidity actually misses the point. Traditionally, in women's fiction, from Little Women to The Women's Room, the spotlight has been squarely on what goes down between the, you know, women. (It's in the titles and everything!) But as The Group begat Golden Girls begat Gossip Girls, we've lost the most important font of all drama.
Which is your friendsssssssssssssss! No, not friends who like the same boy as you do, thereby creating explosive competition. Not friends who turn on you and isolate you among your peers like bitchez. Not friends who stand behind you come what may all the way; not friends who become anorexic / alcoholic / cutaholic; not friends who offer witty quips when you get pregs and attend your teen-mom birth. Just your best friends — who are difficult simply because you are you and they are they.
The Long Secret, the sequel to Harriet the Spy, understands having a BFF is extremely complicated even when no one is blowing the UPS man. (Don't get me wrong. I love SATC and its ilk in a greasy, 1:00 am, fried-chicken-in-a-bag way. I've just never understood how anyone could be friends with Carrie without therapeutic intervention.) But where Harriet the Spy introduces us to, of course, the remarkable Harriet, The Long Secret takes over with Harriet's friend Beth Ellen, who has been her spiritually wispy sidekick for years. When we catch up with them, the girls have hit adolescence and Beth Ellen, whom Harriet has always called "Mouse", is coming out from under her well-meaning thumb whether she likes it or not. Here's them talking about Beth Ellen's inappropriate, itinerant, pot-bellied, piano-playing crush, Bunny (and again: I love these inappropriate crushes where'd they go!):
"I don't want to write about him; I want to marry him," said Beth Ellen.There you have it: just being older than your friend briefly is sufficient betrayal, at the age of 11. (The opposite becomes true at 28, but whatever.) Harriet is also enraged that Beth Ellen cannot think of anything more interesting for her future profession than marrying a rich man and moving to Biarritz. But wait a minute, Harriet! Something far more upsetting is coming up!"Well!" said Harriet, "that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. You're only eleven."
"Twelve."
"How can you be twelve when I'm only eleven?" Harriet looked furious.
Beth Ellen waited.
"Oh, that's right," said Harriet finally. "I always forget that about birthdays. I remember, you just had one."
"MOUSE!" Harriet gave one great agonized yelp.Unanswerable is right. The girls are spending the summer on Montauk, Harriet with her parents and Beth Ellen with her grandmother, whom she's always lived with while her mother, Zeeney, gads about Europe. As Beth Ellen accompanies Harriet biking around on her summer reconnaissance, the sleepy town of Water Mill is being rocked — as rocked as sleepy towns on Montauk can be, that is — by a sneak who is leaving slightly tweaked quotes around for all members of the populace that are, as one recipient puts it, like a "nasty fortune cookie" and, as another admits, "kinda hit home sometimes." Harriet, being Harriet, is of course, ON IT:"What?" whispered Beth Ellen.
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?"
"I'm—"
"WHAT?"
Beth Ellen's voice suddenly found itself and came out so loud she jumped. "I'm—menstruating!"
"What's that?" asked Harriet, awed.
"It's—"
"I just remembered," yelled Harriet. "How come you're doing that and I'm not?"
It was an unanswerable question." "I don't know—" began Beth Ellen.
Harriet hung up on her.
"NOW THE THING IS WHO WOULD LEAVE NOTES LIKE THIS? SOMEBODY WHO READS THE BIBLE BECAUSE THEY ALL SOUND LIKE THEY'RE RIGHT OUT OF THE BIBLE. WHO DOES READ THE BIBLE? DOES ANYBODY? DOES MY MOTHER? CHECK ON THIS."
NOW I KNOW WHERE I GOT MY HUGE ADDICTION TO CAPPING EVERYTHING. More important, mirabile dictu and merci: an adolescent who is not full of preternatural wisdom! (No offense, Rory.) But while Harriet is bursting with questions about what motivates all the adults around her, Beth Ellen is in a similar quandary about herself:
Dear Me:Beth Ellen and Harriet are still in the roles they played as children—not because one is a sap and one is a bully, but because it still shields them from the complications of the world. But the world, as it does, is not going to let their friendship alone long. Jessie Mae, a deeply religious southern girl they meet on one of their spying missions, observes their interaction and neatly dissects it, to Harriet's shock and consternation:Why am I so different? Why am I never happy? Is everybody like this or just me? I am truly a mouse. I have no desire at all to be me.
Goodbye,
Mouse
"You the captain and she the lieutenant?" said Jessie Mae, beside herself with giggles. "If I may say so, you do speak sharply to your friend."It's not that Beth Ellen needs an excuse to start to dislike Harriet — it's just that she needs to stop using her as a security blanket. (Hurrying after Harriet made her feel curiously liberated, as though she could be a child and it was all right. Harriet always gave her this feeling. It was one of the few things she really liked about Harriet, as a matter of fact, because the principal feeling she felt when with Harriet was one of being continually jarred.) Beth Ellen is massively aided in this project by the announcement that Zeeney, who she does not even remember, is returning from Europe to resume her role in Beth Ellen's life:"She's MY friend," said Harriet, appalled.
"Well..." said Jessie Mae, looking away and fanning rapidly, "I do feel that, like the Good Book says, we should honor our father and mother, but I, personally, think we should honor our friends too."
Harriet was stunned into silence.
Try as she might she could not find one emotion connected with this piece of news. She lay back on the bed. She felt the bedspread. It was nice to feel something with her hands, something solid. Was her mother coming to take her away, like something she had bought at a dress shop and couldn't wait to have delivered? Would her grandmother let them take her? Did her grandmother want her to go? Where do I live, she thought, and began to cry. She cried a long time, then fell asleep, her face lying in a white patch of tears.Actually, the only one who is really excited about this development is Harriet, who is practically beside herself that Beth Ellen has a) A REAL MOTHER, b) a FREAKISHLY BEAUTIFUL MOTHER, and c) A MOTHER WHOM APPARENTLY HER OWN FATHER KNEW IN HIS YOUTH, ALTHOUGH HE WILL NOT TELL HER NEARLY ENOUGH ABOUT IT. There is nothing exciting about Zeeney's arrival for Beth Ellen, however, since she mainly regards her as a vaguely irritating presence to be stifled out of all recognition:
....Beth Ellen lay in the bathtub staring at her body. She and her mother had just gotten back from Elizabeth Arden's in time to bathe and dress before they went to dinner. She lay there with a blank mind...I have straight hair. I am called Beth. She had heard Zeeney and Wallace discussing her that morning at breakfast as if she were a piece of toast. Zeeney had said, "I think her head is too little." Wallace had disagreed but said, "No, I don't think that, but she does have curious knees."Between her grandmother who wants to be a lady and her mother who wants her to have straight hair and her body which wants her to grow up and Harriet who cannot stop exploding with frustration at her passivity, Beth Ellen's mysterious activity, when we discover it, is not that surprising. (Well, except to me, like pretty much every damn time I read the books. I am the ideal reader of all mysteries, because I notice, understand and remember nothing.)
Yes! Spoiler! Beth Ellen is leaving the notes. Your basic dutiful sleuth of the third-person indirect would probably handily notice that she is present at every instance of note-discovery and never wonders herself who is leaving the notes whatsoever. But perhaps not. Beth is so successfully blank to her herself, she's a little blank to us too, even if her circumstances are not. Maybe because the long secret of the book is not really that Beth Ellen is leaving all the notes, but that Beth Ellen is angry.
This becomes monumentally clear when Zeeney declares she will be taking Beth Ellen back to Europe with her, and Beth Ellen, in her first act of rebellion, throws an enormous tantrum in the bathroom:
They started banging on the bathroom door. Beth Ellen sat on the tub and pretended she was sitting under Niagara Falls. She hugged her knees. I will flood the house, she thought. Then I will begin to grow and be huge. I will get so monstrously big that I will break the bathroom and fill the house, the yard, all of Water Mill. I will tower over the Montauk highway like a collosus. They will all run away like ants.And just like that, Beth Ellen exits the limbo utero of the bathtub and comes into her own. As the book ends, Harriet has found her out:The cold water ran down on her, on her head, her clothes. It beat around her ears like the safe rain of a summer's day.
"What ever gave you the idea to do it anyway?" asked Harriet with not a little admiration in her voice.I assume by the time "Harriet" did actually get around to doing it, they were friends enough that it still didn't.Beth Ellen smiled and said nothing.
"Well, you could have told me," said Harriet. "I knew it at The Preacher's. I watched your face and I knew. But you could have told me." And flinging the book on the bed, she stomped into the bathroom.
Beth Ellen sat on the bed and looked fondly at the book. I'm a child, she thought happily, and I live somewhere. Nobody can ever take me away.
Beth Ellen laughed, a loud, happy laugh.
"WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?" Yelled Harriet from behind the closed door. "Wait'll you read the story I'm going to write about you and those notes!"
Beth Ellen laughed again. It didn't matter.
* I got a little quote-happy in this piece, just because I love Beth Ellen's rise to personhood more than life, so I had no room to get into the hysterical whole club scene where a barrage of notes are left for everyone or lemonade at the Preacher's which I now realize was basically about Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Rights Movement or the enormous Mama Jenkins going into the water in a black dress as well as many other deeply important instances I treasure as well. So I will simply say THE MICE WILL INHERIT THE EARTH, and leave it to you.
The Long Secret [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]
Earlier: The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
Comments
Umm, what? There was a sequel? I read Harriet the Spy a million times, and would have read anything else about Harriet.
@janna: Seriously. I loved Harriet the Spy so much I used to type it in a Word document like I was writing it myself. And I never knew there was a sequel!
Yay! Yay! Yay!
Now I want to read both of these again. Off to the library!!
Thanks for reminding me how much I loved this book when I was growing up. Time for a re-read!
My entire Friday at work revolves around being the office to read Fine Lines as soon as it's posted . . . yay for another great book added to my list of ones to find at the secondhand bookstore
I still don't know how I never managed to find out about this book anywhere else.
I try not to gush and get ass-kissey with the editors here, but Lizzie, you are fucking hilarious, don't you EVER stop writing this column, even after the apocalypse has hit us and Satan is roving the land eating all of our heads (that happens in Revelations, no?), you better still be writing about YA novels so the adults can dream about what it was like to be 12, wanting to be 22.
I have to say, I work in a children's library and am surrounded by books, and yet Fine Lines wakes up my brain and enables me to bring a fresh and enthusiastic approach to what would otherwise be "stuff I see every day". I heart you, Lizzie Skurnick.
Um, just in case people start thinking I am too serious or something, CEFAD is my second favourite feature.
Harriet the Spy (the movie) is on my Amazon wish list...I am so ashamed to say I have never read the book. Guess I'll be adding that to my list, too.
How have I never read this book?
I need to get it for my 10 year old I watch.
And. yes, the best dramz comes from bffs. Frenemys forever!
@janna: Seconded! The things no one told us as children. I hope Jezebel is still on the internets when I finally get around to having a kid, b/c my kid is reading ALL of these.
THERE'S A SEQUEL TO HARRIET THE SPY?!
I feel so confused. How did I miss this?
It is so sad that I never knew about this book!! After Harriet the spy I took to skulking around my neighborhood taking notes on everyone. My little brother played the role of reluctant sidekick, obviously. SAD! (y'know, for my childhood). I am so reading harriet the spy again!
Saddle stitched? Aren't paperbacks perfect bound?
This book and Harriet the Spy are both pure genius. I'm a big movie buff, and I think they definitely contributed to my love of character-driven films. The characters in Long Secret can sometimes verge on being too broadly drawn (same with Ole Golly's mother and the Italian family in Harriet), but it's completely forgiveable if you ask me. I've read them both dozens of times.
I totally remember loving and re-reading harriet the spy...i always saw myself as her, crazy as she was. i just loved her journal of secrets. and although i recall reading "the long secret," i don't remember any of it. i need to re-read it!
So I basically just joined Jezebel so I could talk about how amazing this book is. I read a ton of books when I was little, but for some reason this one really stuck with me. I remember reading it over and over again in the car and crying every time. It was just really true and it didn't make everything better in the end. Harriet the Spy rocked (especially the movie in that scene where they all dance around to James Brown dressed like vegetables!) but this book was just really perfect.
Harriet the Spy was one of my most favorite books ever, and i'm sure i'm not the only oen who started spying and taking notes on her neighbors because of it. Right? There is another sequel called Sport, about Harriet's male friend. Not as good as H the S or LS, but good for the fanatic.
Fun fact: Louise Fitzhugh also wrote a long-out-of-print book called The Wonderful Adventures of Suzuki Beane: A Lovable Little Hipster, about a little beatnik girl. I have been begging my husband for this book for years.
I loved this book so much! I always combine the plot of this and Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself.
You can't forget about Sport's book!
AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!! I haven't even read this yet because I am so excited I can hardly stand it. I too read Harriet the Spy at least 25 times, each time wishing it was the first and I didn't get the Long Secret till much later, but this is such an incredible, funny, awesome book. Their discussion about the tiger, Janie's contempt for periods, Zeenie's insanity, the probably gay piano player Beth Ellen is in love with and the giant family with the watermelon toe medicine! Priceless. So that I can add something here besides my own inane rambling enthusiasm, my aunt knew Louise Fitzhugh in sixties in the Village--she was quite a character, dressed in men's clothes, drank a LOT. They were part of an informal early sixties queer group of friends (my aunt is a musician). One time, she tells me, she gave Louise a rare guitar and regretted it the next day (it was one of those heat of the moment and booze gifts that one inevitably regrets). Never got the guitar back. She died (LF, not my aunt) from a brain aneurism much much much too soon. I believe there is sort of a tribute site (purple socks.com or something like that?) Now I am going to STOP grading my exams and adore this post.
Thanks Jezzies.
i loved harriet the spy and its sequel, but i never realized how "deep" they were; Beth Ellen's dramz goes way beyond what i got out of it back then. does anyone remember another YA book about a girl who moved into the walls of her house? i just thought of it the other day as a story i accepted as a child, but now would probably disturb me a lot more.
aw, i miss my 12 year old friends. we were the shit.
i don't talk to a single one of them anymore, 10 years later.
Wow--count me among those ignorant of a sequel. Must find now.
Semi O/T: Oddly enough, it seems like this could have been the inspiration for an episode of King of the Hill featuring Bobby and Joseph (two of my favorite characters on the show, naturally)--Joseph comes back from the summer and has hit puberty, and Bobby hasn't changed--he's still the pudgy, but gregarious kid, while Joseph is tall and looks more adult but becomes painfully awkward by it. It's an interesting look at this tension from a boy's POV--especially because so many things are similar between it and this book.
Which means I must find this and read STAT.
I know this book by heart (since I still reread it almost every summer). It is the BEST (even better than H.the S.) What about that toe medicine? And Beth Ellen's relationship with her grandmother (who is so dignified and old-fashioned--the antithesis to Zeeney..."I suppose an old woman gets crochety--but she [the maid] MOVED my perfume bottles"). And Harriet's mother's triumph (in her cool green linen sheath dress) when she meets Zeeney at the country club restaurant--Zeeney says she doesn't remember her as part of the Water Mill teen crowd growing up, and Harriet's mother points out that she was around, but that, of course, she was much younger. (And, "Of course," hisses Zeeney).
I am going to have to reread it again soon; I won't wait for summer.
Love Louise Fitzhugh!
Harriet and Beth Ellen make a brief but hilarious appearance in SPORT (the third book, about Harriet's best friend) which reveals what the pattern of their friendship might be through their teen years.
I'm in my 30s and I still read this book every so often -- I liked it even better than Harriet the Spy. I loved the fact that Beth Ellen was in love with the old queen named Bunny who, I think, played piano at the yacht club or something?
I loved this book when I was a kid, and seriously, have not thought about it in years. Seeing the cover art gave me the best kind of bittersweet nostalgic thrill.
@City_Dater: THIRD book???
You just made my day, I had no idea there was MORE Harriet M. Welsch to be had!
@littlebluebug: Sport is the third book. I haven't read it for a long time, but I remember it as having some fairly depressing themes (Sport lives alone with his dad, and they are barely scraping by).
Wow, I don't think I read this one! What I'll always remember about H the S is reading it on my bunk bed in my dad's little bitty house in Atlanta and wondering what the hell a dumbwaiter was. Also egg creams. Still don't know what those are actually...
Anyone here read Suzuki Beane? It was a Louise Fitzhugh (with Sandra Scopettone) kid's book about a little beatnik and her complicated relationship with her square WASP boy friend, and their respective icky parental units (detached ironic beatnik poet/artists, and alcoholic high society types). Unfortunately appears to be out of print. Best kiddie book intended for adults ever. I read it at six, and figured out all the references fifteen years later.
@crabbit: I thought Sport was the funniest. I read that one like twenty times.
For some reason the adults in Fitzhugh's books really stuck with me, and how they either genuinely treated children's opinions with respect (see: Ole Golly, Harriet's father, Sport's father) or delegated them to objects/nuisances (definitely Sport's mother (Charlotte?), Zeeney, whatever the old lady with the dumbwaiter in Harriet the Spy's name was...).
In particular, there's a contemplative moment from a barbecue in The Long Secret, when Harriet and her dad talk about Beth Ellen's situation. But the best example of this occurs directly after Ole Golly announces her departure from the Welsch household... and she and Harriet take turns shouting likes from "Jabberwocky". Classic comic relief... I wish I had the book still to quote it in its entirety!
@magiciannamedgob: I belive you're thinking of "The Woman in the Wall" by Patrica Kindl. She also wrote "Owl in Love" and "Goose Chase," all of them good.
HARRIET RULES!!!!
That is all.
@Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: "whatever the old lady with the dumbwaiter in Harriet the Spy's name was...)."
I want to say that was Mrs. Plumber. Agatha Plumber.
And of course you know that Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler would have made mincemeat out of Mrs. Plumber. In, like, two secs. Snap snap.
@crabbit: They ended up doing all right, though. Didn't
Do I need regression therapy? Or therapy to combat regression? Or something?
Or do books just suck more once we're "grown-up"?
I remember sneaking and trying to read my mom's Robert Ludlum at, like, 11 or so. Bored out of my skull. Bourne wasn't any fun until he was Matt Damon.
@crabbit: Sorry, crabbit. Didn't Sport end up inheriting everything from the grandfather because he had a head for business and because the mom had to leave for Europe because she was exposed for the kidnapping, child-hating, martini-swilling shopaholic that she was?
@ladeedah: "Harriet the Spy rocked (especially the movie in that scene where they all dance around to James Brown dressed like vegetables!)"
There was a movie? I've read all the books, and I missed that boat.
They used James Brown for the dance scene in the movie? I can't imagine Miss Berry (that was what the dance teacher's name was, right?) permitting that. And wasn't it, like, a dance for Thanksgiving vegetables or something?
I mean, I play James Brown at Thanksgiving, but the holiday celebrations that I give and to which I'm invited are usually not exactly soirees of which I believe Miss Berry would approve.
Not, as Beth Ellen might say, that I give a hang.
Hee hee. I've decided I don't need regression therapy. This will do just fine.
@It'stheRooo: Oh, absolutely! Harrumph.
I need to visit the children's library RIGHT NOW. My idea of a great Friday night has always involved an egg cream soda and random spying on the neighbours... or at least reading about it!
Oh my God, I loved this book so much. Every time I was home sick from school, I would re-read it with the humidifier on "cool mist," so that I could pretend I was in Montauk (though I had no idea where Montauk was).
@ladeedah: That's why I just joined too. Harriet the Spy- I loved this book. Fine Lines rocks!
@Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: Wasn't the dumbwaiter in Sport's house? Or was it in Harriet's?
Must go re-read these, as I, too, LOVED Louise Fitzhugh's books and read them over and over, much to my mother's chagrin.
As for your nom de plume, I nominate that as Lizzie's next book. The Mixed-Up Files of...was also a perennial fave. sigh!
@thatgirlinnewyork: The dumbwaiter was in Mrs. Plumber's house.
Don't you remember when the maid yanked her out and she had to write in her notebook that day "Spies SHOULD NOT GET CAUGHT!" ??
Sport was my favorite too. I think I also read it about 100 times. He was imprisoned in the Plaza hotel by his mother, but he got to eat all the room service steaks he wanted.
@Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: and @it'stherooo
Yes; I do remember that Sport had a happy ending, but what sticks with me is that he was always grubby and hungry and skinny and they ate weird food (and I don't mean tomato sandwiches...I am thinking junk food). Obviously, I am going to have to find it and read it again; that's something to look forward to.
And the last Fitzhugh book (unless there are some I am unaware of...oh, how wish) I think is called Nobody's Family is Going to Change, and that one had many sad parts (mixed in with funny parts), and it ended on a much more yearning note. I need to try that one again, too, to see if it is as wistful as I remember.
I loved "Harriet the Spy" and "Sport" (that one was great), but "The Long Secret" went over my head as an 8 year old. I think it was primarily due to the fact that I lost my place and skipped a big chunk of it not realizing till the end. :-P