Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  It was. With the confidence of her friends for a tailwind, she sailed through more pages in a matter of weeks than she had produced in entire years. By the time that she met with Crain again in January, she had already finished a new story for him, “The Cat’s Meow,” that she thought he might be able to place in a magazine. More promisingly, though, and almost unbelievably, she had already drafted the first fifty pages of a novel. It drew its title from a grand bit of Isaiah’s prophecy about the fall of Babylon, but Go Set a Watchman told the story of a small southern town and a lawyer there named Atticus. Its narrator was his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Jean Louise Finch, who went by Scout, and the novel opened with her on a train, leaving New York for home, where she would find her aging father, together with all their white neighbors, up in arms about the mandate from the federal government to integrate their schools.

  Crain loved it and begged for more. Mondays with Maurice became a standing appointment for the young author, and she showed up with fifty more pages the week after that first meeting, and another fifty pages the week after that. She took the first week of February off, but came back the following Monday with pages 153 through 206, managed almost forty more by the next week, and then, finally, on February 27, 1957, showed up with the last forty-eight pages of a now-complete manuscript.

  It was an incredible thing. In seven years, she’d written almost nothing; in two months, she’d written an entire novel. A day after she turned in the last section, on the last day of February, Crain sent it off to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, but an editor there rejected it a few weeks later. In April, Crain tried Harper & Brothers, but a month later they disagreed with his cover-letter claim that “Miss Lee” had written “an eye-opener for many northerners as to southern attitudes, and the reasons for them, in the segregation battle.” The day they declined, he sent the manuscript to J. B. Lippincott.

  While Go Set a Watchman was still out on submission, Lee retrieved her short stories “Snow-on-the-Mountain” and “The Cat’s Meow,” and by the end of May she’d incorporated them into the one hundred and eleven pages and counting of another novel that she was calling The Long Good-Bye. This second novel was better than the first, Crain thought, and he encouraged her to keep working on it. When she finished a full draft by the middle of June, he sent that manuscript along to Lippincott, too. It featured what Crain called in his cover letter the “childhood stuff” of Scout Finch, which was “wonderfully appealing” and he thought “would make a better start than the one you have.” Lippincott agreed, turning down Go Set a Watchman but expressing interest in the untitled book.

  Crain arranged for the editorial staff to meet Lee as soon as possible, but as it turned out, “interest” was, as it often is in publishing, a kind word for a complicated feeling. If Lee walked into Lippincott more confidently than she’d first walked into her literary agency, it was only because she didn’t know how little most of the editors there thought of her manuscript. The house’s lone female editor had been the only one charmed by the characters, and during their June meeting Therese von Hohoff Torrey was charmed by their creator, too. Tay Hohoff, as she was known, wore pinstriped suits and a tight bun; her voice was sandpapered from smoking cigarettes, and her gray hair betrayed how long she’d been in the business of editing. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she had worked with other southern authors, including Zora Neale Hurston, whose novels and anthropological studies of folklore and voodoo had been published by Lippincott two decades before.

  Hohoff wasn’t ready to buy the novel right away, she told Lee, but she was intrigued, and she sent the writer home with some edits. Lee, cowed, hung on every suggestion, said she would make the changes, and yes ma’amed her way back out the door. She sent some revisions in July, though she complained to Maurice Crain and to the Browns about how difficult it was to combine the narratives of The Long Good-Bye and Go Set a Watchman into one novel. Crain had an elegant if infuriating solution: stop trying to make two books into one, and just keep writing Scout’s childhood. By August, she was making headway; by October she had a new version. Impressed that the aspiring author hadn’t chafed at the task of revising, Hohoff read the new manuscript and saw that “the spark of the true writer flashed in every line.” She also saw, however, that structural flaws left it with “dangling threads of plot,” and the draft was “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.” She still loved the characters, and in the end it was chiefly the four of them—Scout, Dill, Jem, and Atticus—who sold the book.

  Hohoff offered Lee a thousand dollars for the manuscript they were calling Atticus—not a large sum for the publisher, but a fortune for the author. By the end of the month, Lippincott had paid her the first quarter of it; she would get the next installment, Hohoff explained, whenever she delivered a version the publisher found acceptable. Lee couldn’t believe her luck, or her life. Only ten months had passed since the Browns had told her to quit her job, and she’d already sold the book they’d made it possible for her to write. Her patrons, however, had no trouble believing it at all. “She was a writer to the depths of her soul,” Michael Brown would later say of that astonishing year. “It would have happened with or without us—all that we did was hurry it up a little.”

  * * *

  —

  All told, it took another two years for Tay Hohoff to convince Lee of the structural, political, and aesthetic changes necessary to rework Go Set a Watchman and The Long Good-Bye into the book that would ultimately be called To Kill a Mockingbird. “We talked it out,” Hohoff said, “sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line.”

  The trickiest thing turned out to be the point of view. The protagonist of the story was always Scout, but how much she knew about herself and the community in which she lived changed significantly between drafts. Lee had first written an adult Jean Louise who returned to Monroeville and suffered the loss of innocence associated with seeing one’s childhood world through grown-up eyes. But Hohoff had correctly identified the scenes with children as the strongest parts of Go Set a Watchman and The Long Good-Bye, and she thought that the young Scout would make the best narrator. Lee, who had written her first novel in the third person, wrote her second in the first, and then finally settled on the stereoscopic first-person voice of child and adult that appears in To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Other choices followed from that one, not always quickly or easily, but necessarily. Although the setting of the novels never changed—it was always a red dirt town in the Alabama Black Belt, modeled on Monroeville; even in Watchman, Jean Louise only thinks about New York—the time frame narrowed and narrowed, until finally, instead of two and a half decades of Jean Louise Finch’s life, the plot was confined to a period of three years in her childhood, from the summer of 1933 through the autumn of 1935.

  Not following the plot forward into the 1950s spared Lee two difficult things. For one, she didn’t have to write a romance—a relief, since the relationship between Jean Louise and Henry Clinton in Go Set a Watchman seemed to have been written by someone who had never been in a real relationship, which, as far as anyone knows, it was. For another, it meant that Lee’s readers would encounter a book set two decades in the past, leaving the civil rights movement to hover virtuously in the novel’s margins instead of clashing with any of its characters.

  That, in turn, enabled the most crucial change of all: unlike Go Set a Watchman, To Kill a Mockingbird could have a hero as well as a heroine. In the first version, Jean Louise goes home to visit the father she has always idolized as humane and egalitarian and is horrified to find him participating in the White Citizens’ Council and opposing the work of the NAACP. By restricting the perspective to the younger Scout, Lee could let Atticus stand as a moral exemplar, the lawyer who defends an innocent black man from a racist mob. To his daughter, Atticus was a man ahead of his time, but in Go S
et a Watchman it not only catches up but passes him by; in To Kill a Mockingbird, he stays heroic forever.

  There’s no question that Tay Hohoff helped Lee make a better book, but Maurice Crain had been right that her first novel, although wildly flawed, was eye-opening in its analysis of southern racism. Hohoff might have found it difficult to imagine segregationists who despised the Klan, but Lee knew that the South was full of them. She had known countless men like the Atticus of Watchman, who would defend a black man in court only to bar him from the ballot box, not to mention the neighboring booth or bar stool. In fact, the majority of whites in Alabama would never have joined a lynch mob, yet openly opposed the integration of schools, or anything else. But Lee’s efforts to convey that complexity had turned Watchman into a didactic stage play between “Enlightened Daughter” and “Benighted Father,” and the characters could not bear their political weight.

  Hohoff wanted to free Lee’s fiction from its sanctimony, and she argued that a palliative plot stood a better chance of reaching readers than a moralizing one. A Quaker who was, at the time, writing a biography of John Lovejoy Elliott, a social activist with the Ethical Culture movement whose great uncle had been murdered by a lynch mob, Hohoff wanted Lee to tell a redemptive story of tolerance. And what she wanted, she generally got: not by accident was Hohoff known around New York as “the Quaker Hitler.” It was easier, Hohoff argued, to structure a plot around someone like Bob Ewell, the poor and shiftless white man who everyone could agree was villainous, than to try to convince naive and self-justifying readers of the racism of seemingly respectable people like Atticus. Better, Hohoff insisted, for the Maycomb County courtroom to host a crusading trial than a racist rally, and best to convert readers to the cause of racial justice with a child’s loss of innocence than to condemn them through the disillusioned voice of an adult daughter.

  During the two years that Lee went back and forth on the page with her editor, she also went back and forth from New York to the Deep South as her father’s health worsened. It was hard on her work, but it meant interacting more with her source material—both the place she was from and the other people who had grown up there. She and her sister took turns with their father, Alice working at the law office during the day and then spelling Nelle at night. “She would go home to look after Daddy, and I would come down here to write,” she said of the Barnett, Bugg & Lee offices. Those offices were right on the courthouse square, in a Monroeville that she was turning into Maycomb while the world around her slept. By then, she had committed to Scout’s perspective so deeply that she was living it. “I was sitting here one night writing the last chapter where the old boy chases the kids,” Lee later said, “and I got so scared I ran home.”

  By November 1959, it was finally all there: Jem’s broken arm, Calpurnia’s church home, mean Mrs. Dubose with the pistol under her shawl, Aunt Alexandra and Uncle Jack, Atticus and his pocket watch, the pint-sized Merlin who lived next door, Tom and Helen Robinson, the ramshackle porch of the Radley house, the oak tree with its knothole full of mystery, the balcony of the courthouse, and Scout, that Hail Mary of a heroine. On the tenth of that month, Lee picked up what she thought might be her last check ever from Lippincott, and waited to see what the world would make of Maycomb.

  | 18 |

  Deep Calling to Deep

  Harper Lee wasn’t Capote’s first choice. He’d wanted to bring along his friend Andrew Lyndon, another young southern writer, but when Lyndon said he couldn’t do it, Capote turned to Lee instead. He was headed out of town for a story, he explained, to a part of the country he barely knew, and he wanted someone to be his “assistant researchist.” It would involve helping him conduct interviews and gather material, and it would require traveling with him to Kansas.

  On November 15, 1959, in the tiny community of Holcomb in the southwestern part of the state, a farmer named Herb Clutter, his wife, Bonnie, their sixteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, and their fifteen-year-old son, Kenyon, were found murdered in their home. The Clutters were a wealthy, well-regarded family, and the news was so shocking that the murders made it all the way into The New York Times, albeit in abbreviated form. Capote had seen that sliver of a story and decided that he wanted to turn it into a bigger one for The New Yorker: not just a description of the crime or a portrait of the victims, but a profile of the entire town.

  “He said it would be a tremendously involved job,” Lee later remembered, and by a coincidence of timing she was tremendously available. The Clutters had been murdered five days after she turned in the final manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird, and she had no idea what she was going to do next. It turned out that handing in a book, like selling a manuscript, still left you a long way from seeing it in bookstores: it was like pregnancy, except that right when you think you’re done, there’s another nine months of waiting. Lee had just begun that long limbo, and she didn’t want to go back to work for the airlines, but she didn’t have many other options. Capote’s “assistant researchist” offer would give her something to do, and helping him with a feature for The New Yorker might make it easier to land her own assignments. “She had been thinking about doing a nonfiction book,” he said, “and wanted to learn my techniques of reportage.”

  Capote, self-aggrandizing as ever, seemed to have forgotten that his friend was the daughter of a newspaper editor and already knew a thing or two about journalism. Although her time in Kansas later proved a kind of trial run for her time in Alexander City, it was no apprenticeship to Capote. Instead, it was more like a return to childhood for them both: once again, although more literally than before, they became partners in crime. “It was deep calling to deep,” she’d say later, quoting the psalmist. “The crime intrigued him, and I’m intrigued with crime—and, boy I wanted to go.” They settled on her fee—nine hundred dollars, almost as much as she’d been paid for her novel, plus expenses—and boarded a train together at Grand Central Terminal, its ceiling of stars a tiny sample of the ones they would soon see over the Great Plains.

  It was a long way from the Manhattan they left to Manhattan, Kansas. Once they arrived there by overnight train, they were still a four-hundred-mile drive from Garden City, the nearest town of any size, to Holcomb, the village of 270 people where the Clutters had been killed. They had plenty of time on the way for talking, planning, and reminiscing. Lee had long been, as she said, “intrigued with crime,” real and otherwise; she’d grown up surrounded by stacks of the magazine True Detective Mysteries, cut her teeth on Sherlock Holmes, and still loved murder stories. She had also watched all those trials from the balcony of the Monroe County Courthouse, and unlike Capote she had studied criminal law.

  Capote, however, was the one who had previous firsthand experience with a murderer. One summer when he was staying in Monroeville, a sixteen-year-old girl had come to visit relatives and took a liking to Capote, much to the annoyance of ten-year-old Nelle. (“I was jealous,” she said later, “of all the time Truman was spending with Martha—the exotic older woman.”) Eventually, the girl convinced Capote to run away with her to a town some miles distant. The caper didn’t last long; Capote got dragged home, and the girl was sent back to her parents. Thirteen years later, Martha Beck committed a series of murders with a man she met through the classified ads, a former inmate and professed voodoo practitioner; together, they became known as “the Lonely Hearts Killers.”

  By the time Lee and Capote got to Garden City, the town where they’d be staying, seven miles down the Arkansas River from Holcomb, which didn’t have any hotels, they were ready to play the roles that his partner, Jack, had jokingly assigned them before they left: Perry Mason and his secretary, Della Street. They arrived just a few weeks after the murders, in an area still so mired in fear that the locals left their lights on all night long. “At first it was like being on another planet,” Lee wrote, “a vast terrain indifferent to the creatures that walked upon it, an untrusting populace suspicious of anyone al
ien to it.”

  They checked into adjacent rooms at the Warren Hotel. Anticipating the limitations of anywhere that wasn’t New York, Capote had packed a whole footlocker full of food. From the get-go, he was wary of Kansas, and Kansas returned the favor: most of the people of Garden City had no idea what to make of the orchid that had suddenly invaded their wheat fields. At first, no one would talk to him. His voice was odd, his clothes were off-putting, and for all the people of Finney County knew, he was connected to the murderers. Capote, indifferent but not oblivious to the impression he made, had been warned by a friend that the people of Holcomb might not appreciate a “little gnome in his checkered vest running around asking questions about who’d murdered whom.”

  Still, Capote hadn’t anticipated the level of resistance he encountered. He’d expected to interview everyone in a few days and hadn’t brought enough food for more than that. He and Lee had planned to set out each morning to report, then convene each night at the hotel to prepare their notes: she planned to type hers out while he wrote his longhand, and then they would review and revise them together, just as they had when writing stories together on South Alabama Avenue. Capote liked to say that he was a human tape recorder (although disproving his own point, he variously claimed to have 95, 97, and 99 percent recall), but Lee was close to being a human video camera: she had an excellent ear for dialogue, but also an eye for scenes and settings. Lee took care to note what someone was wearing or how he held his hands or what was on the television in the background, and it was Lee who drew diagrams, made lists, tracked itineraries, and constructed chronologies from multiple sources.

  They arrived in town on Tuesday, December 15, and began making the rounds the very next day. They went first to the Finney County Courthouse, where they tried to interview Agent Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, who was having none of it. Other reporters had already been on the story for three weeks by then, and many of them were locals. To Dewey and nearly everyone else in Garden City, The New Yorker sounded like some kind of regional publication, and the man claiming to work for it seemed just as likely to be a writer for The New Martian. Dewey told Capote to come back for the regular press conference and to bring his credentials with him when he did.