Harriet the Spy

Harriet the Spy has been in print for just over 50 years. I read it long ago, and when I saw it on the library shelf I wanted to revisit it.

Harriet M. Welsch is a gifted and curmudgeonly 11-year-old who wants to be both a writer and a spy. She practices both skills by writing down her observations about everyone and everything in a notebook. The notebook is her constant companion, and it’s filled with unsparingly honest details and reactions. Without it, she finds it hard to think. The central plot twist comes when her classmates find the notebook and read it.

There were several things I loved, starting with Harriet’s notebook. I have drawers full of notebooks, most of them only about half full of observations. Harriet is committed, and she’s accumulating quite the mass of starter material for her writerly aspirations, some of which she gets to realize before the novel ends. Ole Golly, Harriet’s nurse, tells her always to be honest in her notebook, but to temper her knowledge with kindness when dealing with real people, a crucial bit of insight for Harriet.

I loved Ole Golly. She’s the only one in the story who really “gets” Harriet, and when she leaves to get married Harriet sorely misses her. Ole Golly is honest and compassionate, and her words of wisdom are a lifeline in Harriet’s world of adults who don’t know what to do with her. She loves Harriet in a no-nonsense, non-mushy, decisive way.

Harriet leads a pretty nice life, complete with a nurse and a cook and cake with milk every day at 3:40. She’s also rather spoiled and behaves rudely to her parents and teachers. She has a spy route that involves sneaking into other people’s property and writing down what they do and say. Her impressions are usually negative, but she has a lot of questions and a genuine desire to learn. There is something very likable and real about her, and the difficult learning she experiences over the course of the story is very convincing.

I loved the variety of characters in the book. Really there are no “normal” people in Harriet’s neighborhood. The people she spies on run the gamut of quirks, and so do her friends. Janie has a chemistry set and wants to blow up the world. Sport cooks and cleans and generally takes care of his writer father. Ole Golly’s mother is handicapped.

The story first came out in 1964, and Harriet’s freedom in her Manhattan neighborhood calls forth a more innocent time. She’s definitely a free-range kid, left to her own devices much of the time, and she makes her share of poor decisions and gets into her share of trouble. Her use of her time is always active and interactive with others, never in isolation with a device. It reminds me of my own childhood, and how much more time I spent away from adult supervision than my own children do. A lot of my sense of who I am grew in those times. It’s a whole dimension of life that’s lost for them… or at least, that doesn’t begin as early in life as it did back then.

Mostly I liked Harriet’s realism as a feisty pre-teen hungry to learn, full of bravado but unsure of herself, piecing together her interpretation of the world. I wonder what she’d write about me:

Janet has a crease between her eyebrows. She must scowl a lot. She tells me it’s a thinking wrinkle, but I don’t see much difference.

Janet takes forever to make up her mind. She’s shopping for a coat, and it’s taking all day. If she asks me one more time which one I like best I’m going to scream and knock over a clothes rack.

Today Janet baked a cake, just because she read several times in the book about me that I have cake every day. I wonder if the book is really great, or if Janet’s really a pushover…