by Casey Cep
Around the same time, Lee moved into an apartment at 1540 Second Avenue, in the Yorkville neighborhood of the Upper East Side. The apartment was a few blocks from the East River and what must have felt like a million miles from Monroeville: far enough away that she could wear tennis shoes and blue jeans without attracting stares, far enough away that she could forget about the law degree she had failed to get, far enough away that she could try to do something with words. When she wasn’t working for the airlines, she was writing—short scenes and sketches like those from her college days—and when she wasn’t writing, she was whistling Dixie with other southern expats, including friends from the University of Alabama like John Forney, who’d come to the city to work for an ad agency and wound up producing Joe DiMaggio’s local television show.
Those expats did not include Capote, who was still abroad, working on another novel. His first, the one Nelle had parodied in the Rammer-Jammer, had come out in January 1948, under the title Other Voices, Other Rooms. It was a gothic tale set in Louisiana and Mississippi, and Capote quickly followed it with a collection of short stories. Now he was trying to write another novel, this one about Monroeville and the Misses Faulk who had helped raise him. Even though the pages of The Grass Harp would be filled with the china trees, cotton bales, blackberry wine, gypsy moths, dropsy cures, and catfish of Monroe County, Capote mostly wrote it on the island of Ischia, near Naples, while looking at the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco, and in the shadows of Mount Etna on the island of Sicily. He was living with his partner, Jack Dunphy, plus an ever-growing entourage of beasts—two parrots and a Siamese cat, along with a little green frog they considered quite tame—and they were more often away from New York than not.
Capote was writing full-time, and his stories seemed to move effortlessly from his mind to the pages of magazines and the shelves of bookstores. But Nelle was busy earning a living, covering the costs that even the most frugal New York City existence incurs, and she had become distracted by the city itself. Like a lot of small-town bookworms, she was too well-read to be a true country bumpkin, but too country, even after Montgomery and Tuscaloosa, to be anything but mesmerized by Manhattan. She had enough books to read—and movies to see, and museums to visit—to last her several lifetimes. The city overwhelmed and delighted her. In a single letter from those early years, she described falling in love with the Met, even though it was “a mess”; reading a six-volume history of Judaism, because she “just wanted to find out something about the Jews”; and seeing a documentary about Mount Everest that she deemed “sublime.” She was less impressed by a film adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which she improved with her own voice-over, provoking a fit of laughter in a friend and a reprimand by the management.
* * *
—
Nearly two years into her time in New York, Nelle was wrenched back home to Monroeville. Her mother had become sick with something that wasn’t allergies or nerves. Unable to determine what was wrong, her local doctor sent Frances Lee for tests in Selma, where her husband dropped her off on his way to a conference for the Methodist Church. By the time A.C. returned, Frances had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver and the lungs and told that she had only a few months to live.
While Nelle had moved away, all three of her siblings were still in Alabama. Alice was living in the family home and practicing law at the family firm. Edwin, a distinguished pilot who had survived both the European and the Pacific theaters of World War II, had started a family in Monroeville but was called back into active duty at the start of the Korean War, so he was stationed in Montgomery at Maxwell Air Force Base. Louise was living with her husband and their two children over in Barbour County. All three were within driving distance of their mother, but Nelle was a thousand miles away.
Nelle got the call about her mother on a Friday night, but her father told her to wait before making any travel arrangements until they knew more. On Saturday morning, while Nelle waited by the telephone in New York, the rest of the Lees met at the Vaughan Memorial Hospital in Selma, a towering brick building with tall columns out front, not far from the Alabama River. They visited for hours, then finally left to get supper; while they were gone, Frances had a cardiac episode. By the time the family returned to the hospital, she was unconscious; by that evening, only a day after being diagnosed, she was dead.
Nelle was never more grateful for her day job than that Saturday, June 2, 1951, since the airline flew her home in time for the services. She was there for the funeral and the burial, watching as her mother became the first of the Lees to be lowered into the family plot. Nelle was twenty-five years old, and the loss was tremendous. Years later, when everyone in the world thought of her as her father’s daughter, Nelle’s older sister Louise said that Nelle belonged equally to their mother: “Daddy is practical; mother was impractical.” Their mother, an artist of sorts who, by choice or necessity, defied the expectations of southern femininity, had given her daughters permission to be who they were. Although A.C. had made sure that Nelle had “one foot on the ground,” it was Frances, Louise insisted, who had made her “a dreamer.”
The loss of her mother marked the beginning of a difficult stretch for Nelle Lee. She had returned to New York and barely resumed her routine of airline shifts during the day and writing at night when another telephone call came from Alabama, this one more awful than the first. On July 12, only six weeks after her mother’s death, her beloved brother suffered a brain aneurysm and was found dead in his barracks at the air force base in Montgomery. Once again, Nelle flew home from New York in a state of shock and grief. The loss of her mother had been terrible; the loss of her brother, at just thirty years old, was unbelievable, and unbearable. He had been the only sibling she had truly grown up with, the one who had read stories to her and listened to the stories she wrote, who had played with her in the tree house and sat at the table with her for breakfast, dinner, and supper day after day. All her life, she had called him not Edwin or Ed but simply Brother: the only one of those she would ever have. Not long after she lost him, she lost the home they’d shared as well. As if he couldn’t stand to be in the place where they had once been a family, A.C. sold the house on South Alabama Avenue and moved with Alice into a smaller one a few streets away.
Leeched by these losses, Nelle returned to New York and tried once again to pour herself into her work. She had already wanted to write about her childhood, to preserve in words a lifestyle she felt was slipping away; now her desire to memorialize acquired new urgency, and new emotion. But, as seemed to always happen in those years, her oldest friend got there first. Capote had returned from Europe that August, and in October he published The Grass Harp, the novel he had been working on based on his years in Monroeville. Nelle watched as their shared front-porch fables and backyard games charmed the rest of the world, and she longed to do the same thing for her brother and the small-town childhood they had shared.
Instead, Lee struggled to write anything at all. She had never taken a class in creative writing, and although she had written for all those campus publications, she had never produced anything longer than a few pages. Composing a single sheet of prose to her satisfaction could take an entire day. “I am more of a rewriter than a writer,” Lee said, and explained that everything she wrote, she wrote at least three times. She claimed that while there could be “no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence,” there was also “no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed.”
* * *
—
Five years disappeared into that struggle, into the seesaw of perfectionism and despair, with nothing to show for it but the pay stubs from jobs she didn’t like. Lee was still living on the cheap, now at 1539 York Avenue, in a third-floor walk-up that lacked not only hot water but a stove on which to heat any. Worse, as far as she was concerned, it didn’t have a desk, so she fashioned one for herself by dragg
ing a discarded door up from the basement and resting it on some apple crates.
When she couldn’t write, she painted, an outlet for a visual appetite she had last exercised in high school, when she had studied photography and learned her way around a darkroom. It was easier to move a brush than a pen, and Lee calmed the emotional storms of her life by fixing placid images on canvas, imitating Edward Hopper’s barren rooms and bleak natural scenes. A seascape from those days went home to Bear; an empty, expressive bench beneath a window went to Weezie.
While Lee was living off peanut butter sandwiches, her friends were not only finding fame, like Capote, but starting families, like Michael Brown, who had gone, in his own words, from “the gloomiest guy on this side of Charles Addams” to the “Laughing Boy of Tin Pan Alley” after falling in love with the only American ballerina in the Ballet de Paris. Joy Williams wore Michael’s Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck like the Hope Diamond, and once his career took off, the Browns bought a town house and started having children.
All her days, Nelle would seek out the company of married couples and families, delighting her nephews with spontaneous renditions of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and hiding out with the children when she wanted to escape the drear of any adult gathering. Her friend’s brownstone life appealed to her far more than the bohemian one that Capote had made for himself. Truman had first lived in Manhattan, on Park Avenue, but he liked hanging around a house in Brooklyn on Middagh Street that was variously occupied by W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers, and a chimpanzee. When the owner moved into another house on nearby Willow Street and started recruiting similarly unconventional characters, the literary wunderkind and son of a carnival barker took a basement room and started calling Brooklyn Heights home. Nelle could walk down to the end of her street and look south toward Capote’s borough across the East River, but it was Alabama all over again: cliques she wasn’t part of, parties she didn’t like going to, an endless distraction from writing. Like many self-exiled people, she was betwixt and between—wanting to write about Alabama when she was in New York, and wanting to be in New York whenever she was home in Alabama.
And she was going back home more than she ever expected. Her father had developed arthritis and needed more assistance than Alice could provide, and after he had a heart attack, Nelle returned to Monroeville to help. Cortisone shots for his pain had caused internal bleeding, and an ulcer affected his ability to eat; his recovery came one jar of baby food at a time. It was a shock to Nelle that summer of 1956 to see how much her father had aged—and how much, in aging, he had regressed. “I’ve done things for him that I never remotely thought I’d be called on to do for anybody, not even the Brown infants,” she wrote to a friend. Her father, who had been as wise as Solomon when she was small, suddenly seemed as aged as Abraham. “I found myself staring at his handsome old face,” she wrote once while sitting with him at the kitchen table, “and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead.”
But for all that she adored her father, she found being home trying. She started signing letters from Monroeville as “Francesca da Rimini,” after the young Italian woman who, in The Inferno, makes Dante faint from pity when he finds her trapped in Hell, and “The Prisoner of Zenda,” after the hero of a nineteenth-century novel who is drugged and imprisoned on the eve of his coronation to try to keep him from claiming his throne. It wasn’t just her father’s failing health that taxed her. She didn’t enjoy her peers any more at thirty than she had at ten: “Sitting & listening to people you went to school with is excruciating for an hour—to hear the same conversation day in & day out is better than the Chinese torture method.” Even worse, she confessed, “I simply can’t work here.” “Genius overcomes all obstacles, etc., and this is no excuse,” she said with characteristic self-deprecation that summer, but she also wanted, with increasing desperation, to be back at her makeshift desk in her make-do apartment, making things.
In a way, though, Nelle was making things in Alabama. Her city friends were rapt by her missives from Monroeville, and when she came back to New York that fall, Michael Brown demanded that she go talk to a literary agent, or at least the sort of agent he happened to know. “Annie Laurie Williams, Inc.” was actually a drama and motion picture agency, wherein the eponymous Annie Laurie Williams sold stage and screen rights, while her husband, Maurice Crain, worked as a literary agent next door. Crain and Williams, who had met at the Texas Club in New York, favored southern stories and southern storytellers, and Brown thought they might take pity on an aspiring writer from Alabama whose accent was still so strong she claimed to be afraid of consonants.
Nelle showed up at the agency on November 27, 1956. Its offices were on East Forty-First Street in midtown, half a block from the New York Public Library and the grand stone lions that guard it, Patience and Fortitude. Low on both, Nelle had to walk around the block three times to summon the courage to go in. When she did, she was too timid to do anything but mention that she was a friend of Truman Capote’s and leave some stories with Annie Laurie Williams. There were five of them: “The Land of Sweet Forever,” “A Roomful of Kibble,” “This Is Show Business,” “The Viewers and the Viewed,” and “Snow-on-the-Mountain.” None of them survive, but whatever was in them made Maurice Crain, whose time as a prisoner of war in Stalag 17 had left him with a somber demeanor that the agency staff lovingly mocked by calling him “Old Woodenface,” break character and come dashing out of his office, exclaiming over what he had just read.
Crain was particularly impressed by “Snow-on-the-Mountain,” a story about a woman with cancer and her prized camellias, but when he and Lee finally met, he suggested that she stop tinkering with short things and try for something longer. It was easier, he explained, to sell a novel than to place short stories. “Why don’t you write one about the people you know so well,” Crain said encouragingly.
It was the first week of December, and Lee had never been so hopeful, or so hopeless. It had taken her seven years to write those stories; now Crain wanted her to write a whole novel. She didn’t know how to do so, and she barely had time around her airline shifts to even try. She told the Browns about the meeting and then made plans to see them for Christmas, since Advent was a homesick season for her and she wouldn’t be going back to Alabama for the holidays.
She spent Christmas Eve with the Browns in their town house, and when one of their boys woke her early in the morning, as little boys do on Christmas Day, she accompanied him downstairs. It was nice to be surrounded by a family, even if it wasn’t hers, and to be in a real house, even if she didn’t own it. The boys unwrapped their toy rockets, while Nelle honored the family’s tradition of presenting the best gift she could find for the least amount of money, giving her Anglophile friends a portrait of the Reverend Sydney Smith, an obscure English cleric, and the complete works of Margot Asquith, a countess and slightly less obscure English writer. When it finally came time for Nelle to open her gift, the Browns pointed to an envelope hanging among the tinsel and ornaments on their tree. Inside it was a sizable check made payable to Lee, together with a note that read, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please.”
* * *
—
It was the most shocking Christmas gift of Lee’s life and, as it would turn out, one of the most momentous in the history of American literature. The Browns weren’t rich, but they’d had a good year, and they suspected that if Nelle could focus on her fiction as much as she focused on selling airline tickets, she’d be able to write something magnificent. It was an ancient model of patronage, imported to Manhattan—a way to help an artist work without worrying about where her next meal would come from or how to keep the lights on. “They’d saved some money and thought it was high time they did something about me,” Nelle explained years later in an ess
ay about their generosity for McCall’s. “They wanted to show their faith in me the best way they knew how. Whether I ever sold a line was immaterial. They wanted to give me a full, fair chance to learn my craft, free from the harassments of a regular job.”
Nelle promptly quit that regular job and settled in to write. As she told a friend back home, she pulled out three pairs of Bermuda shorts to wear for the entire year, on the theory that she’d be working so hard she wouldn’t leave her apartment. The Browns “don’t care whether anything I write makes a nickel,” she said, “they want to lick me into some kind of seriousness toward my talents.” She wanted that, too, and made plain both her joy and her gratitude. Yet she also sounded a curiously dark note for someone whose greatest wish had just been granted. Taking her writing seriously, Lee wrote, “of course will destroy anything amiable in my character, but will set me on the road to a career of sorts.” “I have a horrible feeling,” she continued, “that this will be the making of me.”
