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May 28--Now 80, Harper Lee ("Nelle" to friends) has published only one book, "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960), which garnered many laurels including a Pulitzer Prize, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and continues to sell almost 1 million annually.
Until the mid-1960s, Lee generously gave interviews. But after the glare of publicity generated by both the novel and the film adaptation (1962) starring Gregory Peck, she retreated from public life. Given the recent success of the film bio of her childhood friend, "Capote," in which Catherine Keener plays Lee, one might assume she would again be available to the press.
One would be wrong. Charles J. Shields tells us in "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," that though she is no recluse -- Lee has many friends and is active in the Methodist church in Monroe, Ala. -- she vigorously discourages attention. Her reserve may seem refreshing in our time of shameless self-exposure, but it is problematic for an unofficial biographer.
Without any help from his subject, Shields pieced together a life story and produced an engaging book based on 600 interviews and other kinds of communication with Lee's friends, associates and former classmates at Huntingdon College and the University of Alabama plus considerable archival research. Yet without the cooperation of Lee herself, there are tantalizing black holes in the narrative.
Shields' portrait begins in March 1960. Lee is 33. The phone in her New York apartment rings. Agent Maurice Crain is calling with news that her forthcoming novel has been selected by Reader's Digest Condensed Books and also by the Literary Guild. Ecstatic, she hikes with a bottle of wine through heavy snow toward Crain's office to share her joy and show gratitude to him and his wife, Annie Laurie Williams. Soaring, she barely hears a policeman blow his whistle. He asks if she's deaf to car horns, then writes her up for jaywalking. Homeward bound, two hours later, same intersection, same cop -- same thing!
Shields then takes us back 10 years and imagines her being driven to the train station by her father, A.C. Lee, who will be the model for Atticus Finch. A modest, liberal-spirited lawyer and state legislator, he is disappointed with his nonconformist daughter for dropping out of law school to pursue a career as a writer. Why not stay in Alabama and write for the family newspaper, The Monroe Journal?
He is worried she will be lonely, seen by New York sophisticates as a Southern-fried hick. But her friend Truman Capote, rolling with the success of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," is there and ready to help. He finds her a starter job at a bookstore and later she lands a position for twice the pay as a clerk for a British Overseas Airways Corp. Capote also introduces her to Michael and Joy Brown. Michael is a successful Broadway lyricist. Nelle is struggling to find time to write after work. One Christmas at the Brown's apartment, Michael points to Nelle's gift, an envelope on the tree; inside is a note: "You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas." The Browns' friendship and boggling generosity prove decisive.
Also decisive was her lifelong friendship with Capote (the fictional Dill Harris in her novel), which began when they were next-door neighbors, she 5 and he 6. She was big for her age and tough; he was small and soft, a target for bullies. After once rescuing him from a schoolyard drubbing, she became his guardian angel. An accomplished gut-puncher and hair-puller, she could "talk mean like a boy," wore overalls and liked to climb trees (Scout seems a fictional version of Nelle herself). With an office typewriter from Lee's father, they spent days happily making up stories, taking turns typing. Capote wrote "Old Mrs. Busybody," an acid portrait of Nelle's mother that won a children's writing contest and was published in The Mobile Register.
About their unlikely friendship, Lee once said that they were bound "by a common anguish." Because Lee never elaborated on this, Shields can only suggest that they shared the anguish of being gifted nonconformists who failed to appease the small-town expectations of mothers and peers. Capote was gay and brutally rejected by his mother. Lee's mother suffered a deepening mental illness and was coldly distant. Capote's dislike of Mrs. Lee resurfaced late in life when he told an interviewer that she twice tried to drown Nelle in the bathtub. Nelle of course did not respond, but her older sister Alice said it was an outrageous lie.
What makes this friendship even more incredible is that Capote's and Lee's dominant character traits seem diametrically opposed -- she self-effacing, spontaneously friendly and generous; he narcissistic, calculating and malicious.
In the months before "To Kill a Mockingbird" was published, Lee accompanied him to Garden City, Kan., to help research "In Cold Blood," which would become his best-selling "nonfiction novel" about the Clutter family murders of Nov. 15, 1959.
After nearly two months in Kansas, she gave Capote 150 typewritten pages of meticulous notes, carefully organized according to subject. Of even greater importance was her just-folks charm; she opened doors that would have been closed by FBI agents and state police who saw Capote as "uppity," "flaky" and "queero." But with Nelle, he had sources available to no other writers. Her final gift was to proofread his manuscript.
When the book appeared, she was stung to share a perfunctory four-word dedication with his lover.
Fans wonder why Lee produced only a single book. To one individual, she said she intended to write many novels but became overwhelmed with the success of her first, the staggering demands of best-sellerdom. To someone else, she explained that when you are on top, you fear there is only one way to go. One thinks of Ralph Ellison, Margaret Mitchell, even Joseph Heller. There is some evidence that she was well along with a second novel but, according to her sister Alice, a burglar broke into her apartment and stole the manuscript.
Shields has another notion. When Lee began her second novel, too much time had passed. The New York surrogate family -- her editor, Tay Hohoff, who had Lee strenuously revise the novel three times; literary agent and wife; the Browns -- all crucial to nurturing her first novel into being, had come apart with sickness and death. The needed encouragement and guidance were no longer there.
Jacket copy for Shields' biography says that "Mockingbird" is "filled with humor and heart." Unfortunately it is also filled with cliches -- occasionally two or three per page -- that weaken the writing and cause anyone who cares about language to wince: "pregnant pause," "fall on deaf ears," "burned her bridges," "burning the midnight oil" and on and on. After the first chapter, I knew I'd encounter that rancid classic "breathe a sigh of relief" but was surprised it didn't turn up until page 181. Then again on page 239! A shame that Shields has a penchant dead language, but where was his editor? "Asleep on the job?"
(Peter Makuck lives in Pine Knoll Shores. His latest book of poems is titled "Off-Season in the Promised Land.")
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