Harrison Withers' Kitten

What makes you love your work?

Here's a scene from one of my favorite books, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy. Sixth-grader Harriet M. Welsch is in the midst of her regular Upper East Side spying route, and has climbed to the roof an apartment building in order to peer through the skylight at her quarry, Harrison Withers, a builder of fanciful bird cages:

"He sat at his work table before a particularly beautiful cage, a replica of a Victorian summer house.

"Quiet descended upon the room as he sat studying the cage [...] he looked lovingly, his eyes slightly glazed, at the one small unfinished portion of the structure. Very slowly he moved one piece a quarter of an inch to the left. He sat back and looked at it a long time. Then he moved it back."

I have seldom run across such an accurate and affectionate description of an artist at work, have you?

Harriet the Spy is a book much beloved by former — and, I hope, current — children the world over. It's rare these days to find an eleven-year-old female protagonist who is neither a babysitter nor a vampire; who is not concerned with romance or gossip or clothing. In fact, when Harriet goes out to spy, she changes into worn-out jeans, a red-hooded sweatshirt, fake eyeglasses (to make her look smart) and — best of all — a tool belt that holds her notebook, flashlight, and spare pens. Aside: could Harriet even be published today without some righteous protector of American values musing about her sexual orientation?

Harriet does most of her spying within a few blocks of her house on East End Avenue near Carl Schurz Park. This is the 1960s, so she has to work without a BlackBerry and has no public forum on which to post her notes. She can only write them down in her notebook, and she does so, prolifically. Nevertheless, this notebook eventually falls into the not-so-friendly hands of Harriet's classmates. When they read what she — with unmalicious but deadly accuracy — has written about them, they embark on a campaign of bullying that rings true even to my twenty-first century son.

Yet Harriet the Spy is not so much the tale of a smart girl who doesn't fit in, but rather of the early education of an artist. In this case, a writer.

Harriet is raised for the most part by her nanny, Ole Golly, a woman who quotes passages from Dostoievsky and who never simply tells Harriet like it is when she can show her. When Harriet’s parents — a man who works in television and a lady who lunches, respectively — fire Ole Golly unfairly, Harriet is left with no one to turn to for solace when her notebook gets snatched.

Still, Harriet is that most lucky of creatures, a writer who knows at a tender age that she is a writer. Her keen observation of other people’s lives leads her to admire the industrious (those who have a “profession") and to feel a sort of queasy contempt for those who would rather just boss other people around. Or play bridge.


I never considered Harrison Withers anything but a minor character in the book until I re-read it last year. I now feel that he’s something of a grownup döppelganger for Harriet: a working artist whose craft transports him, and who has a plainly visible muse in his twenty-six cats. I don't know whether Fitzhugh chose Harrison’s name specifically to echo Harriet’s, but it's true that his fortunes rise and fall along with hers.

Harrison must hide from the city health department (men who wear hats. None of Harrison’s friends wear hats, and this meant something in 1964.) He lives in a two-room apartment. His cats occupy one room; he works in the other.

“Sunlight flooded the other room but here caught glints from tools, from the tiny shining minarets which topped the cages. Harriet liked to look at this room. The cages were beautiful soaring things, and when he was in this room, Harrison Withers was a happy man.”

As Harriet watches, Harrison comes home to feed his cats. (It's worthwhile to pay attention to the names he's given them. If you ever read Harriet the Spy to a child, you might well be asked about them.)

"'There now, children,' he spoke to them gently. He always spoke very softly. 'There now. We're all going to eat now. Hello everybody -- yes, yes, hello. Hello, David, hello, Rasputin, yes, Goethe, Alex, Sandra, Thomas Wolfe, Pat, Puck, Faulkner, Cassandra, Gloria, Circe, Koufax, Marijane, Willy Mays, Francis, Kokoschka, Donna, Fred, Swann, Mickey Mantle, Sebastian, Yvonne, Jerusalem, Dostoievsky, and Barnaby. Hello, hello, hello.'"

He feeds his cats kidney, but eats only yogurt himself, then goes to his work room. Harriet watches him work and writes: “he loves to do that. Is this what Ole Golly means? She says people who love their work love life. Do some people hate life?”


Later, in a scene that foreshadows Harriet’s own misfortunes, she spies Harrison sitting at his work table, but he is not working. “His face was the saddest face Harriet had ever seen.” The other room has been emptied of cats. “They got him, she thought. They finally got him.” She writes: “I will never forget that face as long as I live. Does everybody look that way when they have lost something? I don’t mean like losing a flashlight. I mean do people look like that when they have lost?”

Harriet, meanwhile, has lost her friends. More importantly, she has lost Ole Golly. Worst of all, once her habit of keeping notes about her schoolmates is discovered, her mother takes Harriet’s notebook away. At this point, even the youngest reader must feel as if her teddy bear has been ripped straight from her arms.

Harriet is completely isolated in school. She does her work, but gets no pleasure from it.

“She found that when she didn’t have a notebook it was hard for her to think. The thoughts came slowly, as though they had to squeeze through a tiny door to get to her, whereas when she wrote, they flowed out faster than she could put them down. She sat very stupidly with a blank mind until finally ‘I feel different’ came slowly into her head […] and then, after more time, mean, I feel mean.”

Harriet’s parents ultimately bring her to a child psychologist. The doctor spends some time observing Harriet — he even lets her write notes about him in front of his face — and ultimately tells the Welsches that there is nothing wrong with Harriet, that she will no doubt be a writer and should be encouraged toward that end, and that, most importantly, she needs to hear from Ole Golly.

Ole Golly writes a letter encouraging Harriet to pull herself together and get to work: “you are eleven years old and haven’t written a thing but notes. Make a story out of some of those notes and send it to me.”

Armed once more with her notebook, Harriet continues with her spy route and comes around again to Harrison Withers’. She expects to find him still moping, but instead he is working away at a cage, humming and even tapping his foot. As she watches he gets up to make himself some lunch: a tuna sandwich (like a cat) and a Coke (like a human being.)

The reason for Harrison’s newfound happiness is a tiny kitten, who walks into the room “as though he own[s] it, to the accompaniment of loud cooing and baby talk from Harrison Withers.”

“It was a funny-looking little black-and-white kitten which had a mustache which made it look as though it were sneering. It stopped, looked at Harrison Withers as though he were a curiosity, and then walked disdainfully across the room. Harrison Withers watched in adoration.”

“So that’s it," writes Harriet. "Wonder where he got that cat. I guess if you want a cat you run into one someplace. Hee hee. They ain’t going to change Harrison Withers.”

Probably there are artists who will tell you that they work just fine without a muse. I don’t buy it. I think they just haven’t realized that they have one. Because a muse can be something as simple as your favorite band or a neighborhood coffee shop where you do your best work. Or, as in the case of William Butler Yeats, a muse can be as complicated as Maud Gonne. And if your muse is of the Maud Gonne variety, you have to work like hell turning summersaults to keep it in your life. If you’re Harrison Withers, you try to keep the hatted men from the health department away from your door — even though they probably do know what’s best for you — and you let your muse wipe its little paws, claws-out, all over your heart. Because as bad as Kitty makes you feel, the bird cages look really, really dull without him.

As for Harriet, she takes Ole Golly’s advice and writes a story – about Harrison Withers – in one solid day of work (10:00 to 3:00.) Then she mails it off to The New Yorker. May your own muse make you as stout-hearted.