The Vernacular Child: Harriet the Spy and Otis Spofford
Via Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
It’s instructive to compare contemporary book reviews of classics with current assessments. When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn first appeared in 1885, good reviews were few and far between (there were a few). More typical was the following from the March 7, 1885 edition of The New York World:
. . . this cheap and pernicious stuff is conclusive evidence that its author has no claim to be ranked with . . . any other recognized humorist . . . Huckleberry Finn is the story (told by himself) of a wretchedly low, vulgar, sneaking and lying Southern country boy or forty years ago. He runs away from a drunken father in company with a runaway negro. They are joined by a couple of rascally impostors, and the Munchausenlike ‘adventures’ that fill the work are encountered in the course of a raft voyage down the Mississippi. The humor of the work, if it can be called such, depends almost wholly on the scrapes into which the quartet are led by the rascality of the impostors, ‘Huck’s’ lying, the negro’s superstition and fear and on the irreverence which makes parents, guardians and people who are at all good and proper ridiculous. That such stuff should be considered humor is more than a pity.
That’s one of the milder reviews. Another, from The Boston Daily Advertiser of March 12, 1885:
one cannot have the book long in his hands without being tempted to regret that the author should so often have laid himself open to the charge of coarseness and bad taste.
Southern and Western reviewers were marginally more likely to recognize the book’s genius; the Puritan Northeast loathed what it so often termed the vulgarity or “coarseness” of the speakers and scenes the reviewers considered disgusting—like when Huck fakes his own death by killing a pig and dripping its blood to the riverbank as part of a plot to make it seem he himself has been murdered and thrown in the river. Later, high praise came from T.S. Eliot and Lionel Trilling. In 1935, Ernest Hemingway said “all modern literature” came from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Nobody—neither those who loved the book or those who hated it—was talking about the 219 times the word “nigger” appears in the narrative.
(And how many fainting couches do we need now that I’ve written the word?)
How long does it take for people to realize that censoring a word fetishizes it? Empowers it? Think of the sword of Gryffindor strengthening itself with basilisk venom after Harry Potter uses it to slay a basilisk. Magic prevents the sword from rusting or being poisoned.
But magical thinking prevents otherwise sane persons from recognizing that a forbidden word tends to become more and more desirable. Exactly what we don’t want. A forbidden word swallows venom like the sword of Gryffindor. Since we’re not living in a magical world, censorship tends to strengthen the venom. We want neutrality, not sensationalism (“You said that word! Oh! I haven’t said that word since 1995!”)
I maintain—I have dug my heels in—that explaining context to students is important. As much as recognizing where your students are coming from. If they like you and they trust you—and you’d better give them a good reason to do so—then you’ll introduce controversies in a way that appeals to them. I’d take one approach with a highly literate woke group and another with a group of weak students whose first language might not be English. I’ve taught both, and everything in between. Every class is different.
But the lesson is the same: context is everything. A word hurled as an expletive—what Countee Cullen describes experiencing here as an eight-year-old boy—is different from a word used to evoke the faults of an entire society. Mark Twain never uses “nigger” to belittle Jim or any other black person. (And just to complicate the plot: there’s an interesting argument suggesting Huck’s ethnicity is black). Twain uses the word to reveal how evil slavery is. One example of many: a steamboat sinks and when someone asks if anyone died, the answer is no—followed by the chilling “just a nigger.” That’s a lesson in itself. One of thousands of ways in which Twain hammered in his point: Can you believe people thought this way? That I did, too? Without using the word, you really can’t make the same point. If the class is hyperventilating about what a racist word it is, then the focus remains on “Look at me grandstanding. I am not a racist because I don’t use this vile word.” How easy life might be if avoiding certain words dissolved racism. The reverse is more likely—the more you suppress a word about race, the more racist people will become.
At an alumnae weekend at my high school, a teacher gave a talk on Faulkner’s short story, Barn Burning. If you want to avoid “the word” then finding another story would be wiser. But perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she wanted an opportunity to show us all she’d learned her lesson about this bad word and just wanted us to know. Halfway through her stirring rendition of a passage in Barn Burning, she paused and said—tremulously, with tears in her eyes—“I won’t say (sob! Choke!) that word!” She then went on reading, omitting the word.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is bad teaching.
The scene reminds me of another. In 1885, as Mark Twain’s masterpiece was landing on American bookshelves, Oscar Wilde, the most famous gay man in the Western world, was studying Classics at the University of Oxford. In one class, he was reading aloud in Greek and just as he was coming to a passage on Greek homosexuality, the professor barked: “Omit! Reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks!”
Censorship makes you hide what you say and even what you think. Often from yourself. My theory: an awful lot of the piety surrounding Words One Must Not Say has nothing to do with race and racism. And much to do with the inner unhappiness and conflicts of those enraptured by the Newspeak of today. One glimpse of those YouTube videos of (mostly women) kissing the feet of black people as a mode of penance reveals how inventively masochism can express itself.
Twain initially thought of his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a children’s book—he saw it as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Over many years and many revisions he realized he was writing a much more serious book, in which humor was anything but pure slapstick; it was a weapon against the terrible injustices of slavery. But initially, many book reviewers thought of it as immoral because the characters were crude and used non-standard English (exactly the American vernacular that we so value now). The “vulgar” vernacular—what defined the book as American—sparked new vernacular classics, among them J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, lauded for its authentic representation of a teenage boy’s voice. Above all, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was considered a book you wouldn’t want your child to read.
That’s just the original fate of two lesser—but still wonderful—children’s books, Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964) and Beverly Cleary’s Otis Spofford (1953)—the latter has been called Cleary’s most overlooked book. Each concerns a child who is—according to many a book reviewer—not a “role model.” As if any children’s book should be about a role model. “Role model” books are almost guaranteed to bore children—I’m thinking of the pathologically optimistic Pollyanna and the nauseatingly self-sacrificing The Littlest Angel.
Harriet keeps a notebook in which she unreservedly recounts her reactions to her friends, her parents, and all the persons she so carefully observes—on the street, on her spy route, in the subway:
MAN WITH ROLLED WHITE SOCKS, FAT LEG. WOMAN WITH ONE CROSS-EYE AND A LONG NOSE. HORRIBLE LOOKING LITTLE BOY AND FAT BLONDE MOTHER WHO KEEPS WIPING HIS NOSE OFF. FUNNY LADY LOOKS LIKE A TEACHER . . . I DON’T THINK I’D LIKE TO LIVE WHERE ANY OF THESE PEOPLE LIVE OR DO THE THINGS THEY DO.
Sneaking into a dumbwaiter and hauling herself up to the second floor of a brownstone, Harriet spies on one of the idle rich. Her commentary is priceless: as the rich woman says the “secret of life” is lying in bed, adding that while she’s there she’s choosing a profession, Harriet observes she “better get going,” since she must be a hundred and two.
Here’s a girl who, in 1964, wants to become a spy and a writer. She breaks rules and hates the idea of going to social dancing school—until her ingenious nanny reminds her that Mata Hari used social dancing in her spying. Harriet is unfeminine by the standards of the day—but even more shocking, she gets angry.
Girls don’t get angry in American books—not until Harriet. Or if they do, anger tends to be mild and they always regret it. Think of Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.(1868-9). Her sister Amy, miffed because Jo won’t take her to the theater with Laurie, incinerates the only copies of Jo’s carefully illustrated short stories. And then gets her comeuppance: following Laurie and Jo when they go skating, she falls through thin ice and is barely saved on time. Contemporary readers may well feel Amy deserved that dunk in icy water, but not Jo: for the next several pages she’s in an agony of guilt, blaming herself for not forgiving Amy, holding herself responsible, and constantly berating herself for even getting angry. The ever-pious Marmee urges prayer and self-restraint; not a soul acknowledges Jo’s right to be angry.
This state of affairs goes on right through Beverly Cleary’s best known Beezus and Ramona, (1955) in which the conventional, ladylike Beezus endures the antics of her younger sister Ramona. When Ramona manages to destroy two birthday cakes on Beezus’ tenth birthday and monopolizes the dinner conversation, Beezus looks glum even after a new cake arrives and after Ramona is (finally!) sent to her room. Much coaxing extracts Beezus’ confession: she sometimes just doesn’t love Ramona, so feels she’s a terrible person. Her mother and her aunt console her with tales of the many times they didn’t love each other during their girlhood. Beezus is astonished.
I can sympathize with Beezus, but Harriet is a breath of fresh air. She might be the first girl in American fiction to get angry and to freely follow her own train of thoughts without feeling she’s a bad girl.
Without Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, however, I doubt there’d be a Harriet. Twain established a purely American vernacular (or vernaculars; he explains in detail how many dialects he’s using and where they come from.) Until this point, it wasn’t the fashion to write just the way people talk. Or to create characters through their individual ways of expressing themselves. Harriet’s personality—her perceptiveness, her empathy, her cruelty—come across in her words, especially those in her notebooks. There is something about the vernacular that annihilates censorship.
Enter Otis Spofford (1953)
in which Beverly Cleary channels the thoughts and voice of a fourth-grade boy, the brainy, provocative Otis. Finishing his arithmetic way before the class, although he was throwing spitballs most of the time at classmates, he feels disappointed when the teacher ignores his antics:
“How do you like that?” thought Otis. Seems to him like the teacher’s not playing fair:
He was even more disappointed when he hit Austine on the back of the neck with a ball of wet paper. All she did was turn around and stick her tongue out at him. There must be a way to make spitballs interesting. With a juicy wad in his hand, Otis looked around . . . Boy, oh, boy, he thought, this really ought to make something happen.
Closing one eye, Otis carefully aimed at a spot one inch from Mrs. Gitler’s left ear. Then he let the soggy wad fly. It whizzed through the air exactly the way he wanted it to, skimming close to Mrs. Gitler’s ear without actually touching it and hitting the blackboard with a splop.
Naturally, the teacher then says he’s been disturbing the class all morning and he pretends innocence. Then she says if he throws one more spitball she’ll do something that will make him wish he’d never thought of spitballs.
What could that be? The challenge is too much for Otis. He chews. He throws. He wonders if she’ll send him to the principal’s office,
and anyway, nothing very bad happened there. The principal just talked to you. Otis considered this possibility but decided against it. Because spitballs didn’t really do any damage, he did not think Mrs. Gitler would ask his mother to come to school, the way she had the time he discovered he could make smoke by rubbing his ruler hard and fast against the edge of his desk. This had been hard on both the ruler and the desk, which, as Mrs. Gitler explained, did not belong to Otis but to the taxpayers of the state of Oregon.
It's at this point that Otis, tortured by the need to know what the teacher will do, launches the spitball hitting the blackboard. The teacher smiles, making him uneasy, and he goes to lunch, bragging about his exploits and saying she’s scared to do anything. When he returns she says she’d like him to throw spitballs for her. The class gasps, but Otis at first eagerly accedes to her command that he sit in the back of the class, make spitballs and throw them into the wastebasket. After a while—during a music lesson in which the class sings songs reminding him of water--Otis’ mouth dries out:
Doggedly he kept at his spitballs, but he worked as slowly as he could. He was wondering how he could make his spit last until school was out. He ran his finger around his mouth. Then he stuck it out as far as he could to see if it were swelling up and turning black.
A brilliant example of contrapasso, or the punishment fitting the crime. In Dante’s Inferno, the adulterers and illicit lovers are blown around in a constant windstorm, (“bufera infernal,” Inferno 5.31) because in life they let their passions rule their reason. The wind in hell throws them around the way their lust threw them around in life. Only now they’re not having fun.
Neither is Otis, further tortured during a fire drill by almost, but not quite managing to drink at the water fountain. Back in the room, he knows his spit will never last.
He tore off another piece of paper and looked at the clock. Another hour to chew and throw. A long, long hour. A minute clicked by and after a long time, another . . . He never wanted to taste paper again.
The teacher figures this out with one look at him and a “Well, Otis?” He tries to lick his lips but his mouth is too dry. Asked if he’s sure he’s done throwing spitballs, he admits he is. But like Huck Finn, trouble seems to follow him. Five minutes later he’s still got that awful paper taste in his mouth and looks for something in the detritus in his pocket to take the taste a way. A bud of garlic—curiosity drives him to chew it—suffices, and drives the girls crazy. Otis is happy.
Apart from showcasing the inventively realistic adventures of a bright boy at loose ends—the school and the town offer his inquiring mind little, and Otis is fatherless—the book is a gold mine for teachers looking for effective, kind discipline. The spitball business is a stroke of genius on the teacher’s part—not that she, or anyone, could always manage Otis.
Alas, the joys of the book are now presented as “casual racism”. Specific sins? Otis’ Oregon elementary school—in 1953, a year before the bare beginnings of the civil rights movement—raises money for the PTA with a “fiesta” featuring Mexican folk dances and a bullfight. Otis gets to be the front end of the bull, making the bull steal the show by knocking over the toreador and holding the boy’s sash down with his hoof. American schools were anything but multicultural, and popular culture’s notions of Mexico were bullfights and—a few years after Otis, by 1965, the Frito Bandito. The white Oregonians in Otis’s school are hardly racist; they accept a world view perpetuated by Hollywood and commercials. For them, Mexico is yet to become a place with people just like them. Available media suggests Mexico means bandits and exoticism; it’s Zorro, a dashing Robin Hoodlike bandit, and figures like the Cisco Kid (played by an actor who was probably Rumanian.) None of this is racism; it is the standard ignorance of a world in which news did not travel fast. No internet. The same goes for Otis’ class reader. In Otis’ disgust you can hear Beverly Cleary’s repugnance for the artificial language of such classroom texts:
Reluctantly, Otis took With Luke and Letty on the Oregon Trail out of his desk. With a feeling of great dislike, he looked at the picture on the cover. Another couple of dopes . . . Boys and girls in readers were always dopes. They were always polite and never used slang and they hardly ever did anything they shouldn’t. Except for wearing old-fashioned clothes and saying, “Yes, Pa” instead of “Yes, Father.” Luke and Letty were just like all the rest. Dopes!
Loving action and having seen the movies of the day, Otis wants Indians on the warpath burning the pioneers’ wagons. Not friendly Indians. Otis pretends to be a warlike Indian in the penultimate scene, yelling “Big chief scalp paleface maiden,” and, almost before he knows it—not before Ellen teases him with “Big Chief Pink Underwear,” since his mother mixed the whites with his neon pink shoestring—he snips off a hank of her hair. He gets his comeuppance, but resolves to tease Ellen just a little less, not stop completely.
The piety censoring the teaching of Mark Twain’s classic and, alas, sometimes the reading of Otis Spofford, stifles one of the most valuable features of good writing—the everyday language of real people. Huck, Jim, Harriet and Otis are among my favorite non-role models. Introduce these heroes to young readers.