Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  Mockingbird had been read as a clarion call for civil rights, but Lee’s real views were more complicated than any editor wanted to put in print. She maintained that her novel was more than the sum of its antidiscrimination parts. “My book has a universal theme,” she insisted. “It’s not a ‘racial novel.’ It portrays an aspect of civilization—not necessarily Southern civilization.” Despite the book’s deep roots in Alabama, Lee called To Kill a Mockingbird “a novel of a man’s conscience, universal in the sense that it could happen to anybody, anywhere people live together.”

  Just as her novel sidestepped the debate over integration by retreating in time to the 1930s, Lee herself stayed curiously silent on the subject of civil rights. Although her voice could have been one of the most powerful ones in the country, she did not lend it to the movement, even when it came riding through Alabama on buses, marching on Alabama’s streets, and registering African American voters in rural places exactly like Monroe County. In a private letter, she joked about being a member of the NAACP but she never aligned herself publicly with the organization; although she was at the White House on the day that the Senate ended its long filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, Lee was only there to join Lyndon Johnson in congratulating a batch of high school students who had been designated Presidential Scholars; she said nothing to the press during or after about the monumental legislation. Years later, she would inscribe a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird to Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center—who, she wrote, would “be remembered as the one who spoke when good men remained silent, and the one who acted when good men did nothing.” But she herself did not speak out; she let her novel do the talking.

  * * *

  —

  To be fair, Lee let her novel do the talking about almost everything. In 1964, when Mockingbird was four years old and she was thirty-seven, she embarked on a fifty-year silence. Her final interview of any length was with a book critic named Roy Newquist who had also sat down with Jessica Mitford, Ian Fleming, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Lillian Ross, and scores of other notable writers for his radio program, Counterpoint. Newquist met Lee at the Plaza Hotel, turned on his tape recorder, and, for the next hour, asked her questions about her childhood and education, literary craft and discipline, her life in New York City and her ambitions as a writer.

  “I’ve been writing as long as I’ve been able to form words,” Lee told him. She also said that her vocation was a kind of regional specialty, like grits or collard greens; the South, she claimed, “naturally produces more writers than, say, living on 82nd Street in New York.” But for all that she’d always been a writer, she had been utterly unprepared for the avalanche of praise that greeted her novel; it was like “being hit over the head,” and it left her in a state of “sheer numbness.” That feeling was starkly at odds with the conditions she regarded as essential to writing. Good writers, she said, treated work “something like the medieval priesthood” and sequestered themselves to do it well. “He writes not to communicate with other people,” Lee said of any writer worth his salt, “but to communicate more assuredly with himself.”

  Newquist was the best interlocutor Lee encountered during the handful of years when she obliged publicity requests, and she found herself saying more than she ever had about the demands and difficulties of writing. “Sometimes I’m afraid that I like it too much,” she claimed, “because when I get into work I don’t want to leave it. As a result I’ll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I’ll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that’s it.” Writing, Lee argued, was a never-ending self-exploration for the writer, “an exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

  Her own self-explorations had by then turned into four years of wandering in the wilderness, and by the time Harper Lee gave that interview, it was clear that she had turned in on herself. Although it is true that she was always pounding away at her typewriter, she had nothing to show for it. The summer before, her sisters had both come up to see her, inaugurating what would become a semiannual adventure in which they toured some part of the country together. That year, they went together to New England and then to Quebec, and Lee was finally able to introduce her actual family to her literary family, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain. Unbeknownst to her, however, those two worlds were meeting not by chance but by design: both sides were worried about her. Alice was still handling all of her contracts and royalties, which meant that she had a reason to be in touch with Williams and Crain, and their letters gradually became less about signatures and balance sheets and more about strategies for managing their suffering artist. Together, they began looking after her travels, trying to make sure that she had a place to work and supervision to see that she did so. They shepherded her back and forth between Connecticut and New York as well as New York and Alabama; they let her say no to more and more of the publicity requests that came her way. Yet none of it seemed to be working. Crain and Williams were so concerned that they recommended Lee not be alone for any more winters.

  In January 1965, while Lee was down in Monroeville for the holidays, she burned herself while frying chicken. The grease had caught fire, and when she tried to put it out, the flames seized her right hand. For weeks, it was bandaged, and when she got back to New York, she saw a plastic surgeon, who decided that she needed surgery. Distress of all kinds can manifest itself strangely, and more than a few friends wondered if Harper Lee’s inability to write hadn’t made itself literal in the injury. The accident was bad enough that Lee had to give away her harpsichord; eventually, though, she was able to hold a pen again.

  Truman Capote mentioned Lee’s burn in a letter to Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, but her own correspondence with them had slowed, and when they asked her to come to their execution on April 15—the third anniversary of her father’s death—she ignored their telegram, then refused by telephone when Capote found her at the Old Stone House. That fall, as if trying to revisit her earlier, more unfettered years, she took her high school teacher Gladys Watson Burkett on a trip to England; the pair boarded the Queen Elizabeth on October 7 and spent a month touring the houses of all the famous English writers they’d read.

  While Lee was away, Annie Laurie Williams wrote to Alice to discuss their mutual ward. Before heading overseas, Lee had been on Fire Island for a long stretch of the summer with the Browns and then in Connecticut at the Old Stone House, but there was still no manuscript. “I told her that I thought it was better the way things turned out about her second book,” Williams wrote to Lee’s sister. “It doesn’t have to be written according to the publisher’s schedule.” She went on to suggest that Lee take her time and ignore the book until she had returned to Alabama. “But she is a writer,” Williams added emphatically, as if to convince herself as much as anyone else, “and her next book will be a success too, and will have some of the flavor of the first one. I am saying all of this to you, because I want you to know that she was depressed when she didn’t come back from Fire Island with a finished manuscript.”

  From her agent, from her publisher, from her sisters, that was what the world heard: Harper Lee was at work on her second novel. Every so often, though, the writer herself emerged to say something more grim about her progress. While visiting Sweet Briar College in Virginia for a rare public event, something she agreed to do only because one of her former history professors had been named the college president, Lee told the students, “To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It’s sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Every day. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it’s heartbreak most of the time.” That was in October 1966, just two and a half years after Lee had told Newquist that she couldn’t stop writing because she loved it so much.

  Grief, heartbreak, suffering: it was in that
register of profound loss that Harper Lee now spoke of her work, when she spoke of it at all. That November, when Capote invited her to his famous Black and White Ball, she didn’t go. She did agree to sit on President Johnson’s National Council on the Arts and went to Tarrytown, New York, to attend the meetings, but she seldom spoke in front of the group. She still went up to Vermont and Connecticut to try to write, but even those visits began to slow. Maurice Crain had developed lung cancer, and the kind of sorrow that had plagued Lee in her twenties and thirties returned to join the pain she was experiencing around her writing.

  Crain had survived untold horrors while he was a prisoner of the Germans during World War II, but he would not survive this. A year before he died, Lee drove him home to Texas for the last time, reuniting him with his family and their farm in Canyon before he got so sick that he could not get out of bed. He’d lost his appetite and then his strength; eventually, he required constant care. Crain, who had grown so close to Lee that some said he was in love with her, was happy to have her minister to him during the day while Annie Laurie Williams kept the agency open. It was a different bedside, but a familiar routine: Lee tended Crain the way she had her father, trying to bar the door against death, hoping it wouldn’t find a way inside. Inevitably, it did. Crain died on April 23, 1970, eight years and a handful of days after the death of A. C. Lee.

  The next year, Annie Laurie Williams, doubled over with arthritis, recovering from a fractured rib, and still grieving her husband, closed the offices where the young Nelle Lee had nervously dropped off a batch of short stories fifteen years before. The New York that Harper Lee had known was changing, as it does for so many, one friend and one building at a time. By then, she had lived there for twenty-two years, almost as long as she had lived in Alabama before moving to the city to start a new life as a writer. That summer, she was mugged and confided afterward to a friend that she was planning to spend less time in Manhattan. “I’m tired of fighting dope addicts and too old to pretend that NY is the center of the universe,” she joked. More bleakly, she told him, “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle.”

  * * *

  —

  To anyone who knew her, that had been obvious for some time. Lee wasn’t just struggling with a second novel; she was struggling with everything. For a while, her sister Alice had told an unlikely story about how a manuscript had been stolen from Lee’s Manhattan apartment while she was away, but soon even Alice stopped saying much about her sister’s writing, and eventually everyone but the press stopped asking. There were only a few people left in the world with whom Lee could talk about writing, and soon she would lose one of the most important of them. In early January 1974, Tay Hohoff, who had retired from publishing, died suddenly in her sleep. When her daughter and son-in-law came to the apartment the next morning, they had to rescue Shadrach, the polydactyl kitten that Lee and Marcia Van Meter had found in their basement, now an aged polydactyl cat.

  For Harper Lee, a time of turning inward had turned into a time of losing and being lost. By setting her novel during the Great Depression, she had published a book that seemed two decades older than it was; now its author seemed just as anachronistic. Most of New York had forgotten that she even lived there, or was still living at all. Friends in her building remembered, though, and when someone banged loudly on their door late at night, they knew it was her, because she had done so before, drunk and despairing. Those friends included George Malko, a writer who had learned about the news business from his mentor Studs Terkel, and his wife, a graphic designer named Elizabeth. They had met Lee when they moved into the same building, and like so many they were alternately charmed by her remarkable wit and saddened by the private sorrows that stymied her talents.

  “She was drinking at that time,” George Malko said years later. “It is not for me to wonder about her demons, but we knew they were there and they were brutal.” Morning martinis weren’t unheard of for her, but one night she came asking the Malkos for vodka. When George lied and said they didn’t have any, Lee pleaded her case: “I just threw three hundred pages of a manuscript down the incinerator.” That impulsiveness, part of her temperament in the best of times, could take over when she had too much to drink, as friends could attest after fielding angry telephone calls in the middle of the night. Truman Capote, afflicted by the same demons and more, once confided to a reporter that his friend “would drink and then tell somebody off—that’s what it amounted to. She was really a somebody. People were really quite frightened of her.”

  By then, Capote and Lee were no longer in close touch, but one day in 1976 he called her out of the blue. People magazine was profiling him, not for the anniversary of In Cold Blood, but for his new project—a tell-all of sorts, only what Capote was telling was other people’s secrets. He had signed the contract for the book ten years before and renegotiated it over and over again, but like his friend he hadn’t been able to finish it. He was calling it Answered Prayers, a phrase Lee would’ve recognized because he’d borrowed it from Saint Teresa of Ávila: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

  It took a few telephone calls, but finally Lee agreed to sit with Capote for the interview and meet the photographer Harry Benson near Capote’s apartment at the UN Plaza. The old tree-house friends walked around Second Avenue, talking in what Benson remembers was an almost private language, sweet and loving, like siblings. A lot had transpired between the two of them by then, including no small share of envy and anger and disapproval, but there was no mention of any of it that day: gray-haired now and moving more slowly, the pair walked around New York together as if it were the old, familiar courthouse square. Lee had turned fifty that year, and Capote fifty-two, but they could summon their childhood as if it were yesterday. A kindergarten teacher had whacked Capote’s hand with a ruler for reading too well, Lee remembered to the reporter, a small episode but one that said plenty about the lives of brilliant misfits in their small southern town. It was in that interview that Lee said of them, evocatively and enigmatically, “We are bound by a common anguish.”

  Anguish, shared and otherwise, had constrained and darkened Lee’s life for over fifteen years. Her editor was dead, her agent was dead, and a year after that People interview Annie Laurie Williams died, too. By May 1977, with the exception of the author, everyone who had helped bring To Kill a Mockingbird into the world was gone. If Lee had worked on serious writing projects since then, they had been stolen from her apartment or burned to nothingness or simply hadn’t amounted to much on the page.

  But Lee wasn’t done. Maybe it was the unexpected sweetness of her reunion with Capote, resurrecting the childhood joy of starting to write and wanting to do so forever, or the artistic rivalry between them, stirring in her the desire to do better what they had done before in Kansas. Or maybe it was just a strange story she happened to hear that July. Not long after seeing her friend Capote, Nelle had received an invitation from another Alabama friend, Ned McDavid, to attend a party at his restaurant on the Upper West Side, the Library, where the books were for decoration and the drinks were all that circulated. She showed up, uncharacteristically, and downed gin and tonics with some three hundred other folks from down home, most of them in town to nominate Jimmy Carter for the presidency. It was the 1976 Democratic National Convention, and McDavid was hosting a party on the night before the official events began; friends since their Crimson Tide days, he’d convinced Lee to put in an appearance. Governor George Wallace was a no-show, but every twenty minutes or so the restaurant’s speakers blasted a recording from 1924, when an earlier governor, “Plain Bill” Brandon, nominated another of Alabama’s own for the presidency: “Allabhammah casts 20-foah votes for Oscuh Dubyee Undahwood.” Almost as often, a delegate from Alexander City would tell anyone with ears, “Kennedy broke the religion barrier and Carter is doing the same thing to the anti-Southern barrier.”

  It was Big Tom’s first conven
tion since the nightmare of Chicago, and it was where he first crossed paths with Nelle Harper Lee. The next year, when violence was breaking out in New York under the cover of the worst blackout in the city’s history, he wrote her a summary of the strange life and shocking death of the Reverend Willie Maxwell. Whatever Lee thought of Radney himself, she heard in his case of a lifetime the kernel of a true-crime book and headed home to Alabama to write it.

  | 20 |

  Rumor, Fantasy, Dreams, Conjecture, and Outright Lies

  It began with a bang. Murder in America, at least as far as its European citizens were concerned, started when John Billington fired a musket at one of his neighbors in 1630. Billington had arrived at Plymouth Plantation ten years earlier on the Mayflower and came to resent some of the other residents, including John Newcomen, the unfortunate target of his musket shot. Plenty of people had died by violence in the Americas by then, but no colonist had bothered to document indigenous deaths, whereas the residents of Plymouth noted in great detail the demise of Newcomen, who was shot in the shoulder and, several days later, succumbed to gangrene. Billington was convicted and hanged, thereby earning the dubious distinction of becoming the first recorded murderer in the New World.

  From the time there were murders in America, there were writers trying to write about them. The earliest accounts of homicides were generally produced by those directly involved: the accused penned pardon-seeking confessions, law enforcement officers wrote self-aggrandizing stories of derring-do, relatives wrote tell-alls, and ministers who preached at the gallows published their execution sermons. Court reporters, who weren’t yet salaried, cobbled together wages by printing up their trial transcripts and peddling them directly to the public. Murder, they knew, would always sell, and its early American salesmen found that pamphlets were an ideal form. They could be printed cheaply, distributed widely, and marketed for anywhere from a few pennies to a quarter.