Book Review: 'Sometimes You Have To Lie'

Sometimes you have to lie — to get by a sticky situation, avoid hurting feelings, prevent harm. Indeed, as exemplified in “Sometimes You Have To Lie,” Leslie Brody’s biography of “The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, renegade author of ‘Harriet the Spy,’” lying is the mantra of Fitzhugh’s charming, feisty, groundbreaking 11-year-old Harriet.

Fitzhugh was a “renegade” because she went against the grain in writing about and illustrating an innovative children’s book about a precocious, spunky busybody kid from the Upper East Side who spies on people and records blunt and telling observations about them in her journal. The “Harriet” book (1964) and its sequels signaled a realist movement in children’s literature. Harriet took daredevil risks, saw a therapist, did things kids weren’t supposed to do, used adult language. She obviously caught on: by 2019 “Harriet the Spy” had sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.

But “renegade” also applies to Louise Fitzhugh (1928-1974) because she had left her privileged, patrician upbringing in segregationist Memphis (“odious,” “dull”), and her politically powerful Republican father, Millsaps Fitzhugh, who had sole custody of her from the age of 5, to come to New York to paint, write and pursue the bohemian life, including lesbianism. (Louise also saw men and had a brief fling with the late New York Times book reviewer Anatole Broyard.) “Sometimes you have to lie,” Harriet announces, though Brody adds that the adult Fitzhugh was “less inclined to compromise.” Especially when she hit New York.

What a time that was, what a crowd — a world of “downtown gay bars and uptown house parties, and in the summer, shared Hampton rentals.” A time, Brody notes, when “Kafka was all the rage, European film ruled cinema, and to many artists and intellectuals, Freud and his couch still held a fashionable appeal.”

Barely 5-foot Louise fell into the alternative lifestyle culture easily, taking at times a leadership role. She loved opposing supremacy, especially “white, male, heterosexual, abstractionist [only men seemed welcome then] or garden-variety pomposity.”

Brody never met Fitzhugh, but in 1988 was asked by a Minneapolis children’s theater to do an adaptation of “Harriet the Spy.” By coincidence, she writes in an author’s note, she realized that years ago she had lived a few miles from Fitzhugh’s summer home in Quogue, though she knew nothing then about Fitzhugh or Harriet. She was fascinated, however, by what she was learning about the author and the Greenwich Village art scene in the ’50s. Getting primary source materials was not easy because Louise destroyed most of her letters and refused to give interviews, lectures or readings. Nonetheless, Brody was able to interview friends and colleagues, former and current, among them the actress and writer Slone Shelton (d. 2015) and her long-term partner, playwright Jan Buckaloo, who lives in Wainscott, both of whom spent time with Louise in her later years.

The story Brody pieces together reads at times like a potboiler, full of scandal and volatile turning points. Not surprising, though, is that for all the information and recreated or remembered dialogue, Louise never emerges as a consistent, knowable character. Contradictions or ambiguities seem to have defined her personal and artistic life, with various lovers, friends and colleagues offering different facts and interpretations. She was a force of nature — admired, feared, talented, determined, dependent, politically liberal, artistically elitist.

Probably unknown to most Harriet fans, as Brody shows, is evidence that Louise’s first and foremost artistic passion was not writing but painting and drawing. She studied at The Cooper Union, at The Art Students League and attracted patrons and friends, including artists and gallery owners, some of whom gave her valuable advice, though for sure she had a mind of her own. She was not a fan of abstract expressionism when it ruled.

Of particular local interest is what Brody has to say about artistic life in the Hamptons in the latter half of the 20th century. “It was a wonderful scene out there. You could express yourself without going crazy,” though later Louise would write that the Hamptons were being overrun by affluent teenagers taking LSD, hippies who camped on the beaches and drove around in gangs of 20 or more, a “race of giant babies” who were ruining the place. So off it was to Litchfield, Connecticut, a gathering place for intellectuals and literary cognoscenti. And then to Maine.

“Sometimes You Have to Lie” has an obvious but important theme: As Brody writes, “When Louise said she wrote on behalf of kids in this lousy world, she meant, among many other things, this bigoted, homophobic one.” Yes, sometimes you have to lie, but never to yourself.