Louise Fitzhugh author of
Harriet the Spy and James Merrill the poet were joined by friendship, craft, and graphomania: the compulsion to write.
Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh’s iconic 1964 novel, appears to be a book with an aspiring writer as its protagonist, but the writer is the vehicle for the actual main character: her notebook. Harriet’s notebook acts like the broom in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Goethe’s fable (made famous by Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney’s
Fantasia). The apprentice animates his broom to do his dirty work, but then he can’t turn off the spell. Like the apprentice’s broom, the notebook initially seems to be Harriet’s helper, a dutiful work of magic under the author’s control that helps the writer learn lots of titillating secrets yet the book soon dominates, the process itself becoming the story, the tool overtaking its master. At its core, then, Fitzhugh’s classic isn’t a novel about a budding writer it’s about the act of wri