by Casey Cep
By the time Nelle came to visit in 1981, though, Louise was already decades into the sort of life her little sister would never have. Her husband had died just two years before, after more than forty years of marriage, leaving Louise with two accomplished children. Both of her sons would become professors: Herschel H. Conner III, named for his father and known as Hank, taught telecommunications in the journalism department of the University of Florida; Edwin Lee Conner, named for his uncle, was already a fellow at Vanderbilt University and would go on to teach English literature at Kentucky State University. Louise had achieved something that neither of her sisters had: she had built a family. In consequence, she was used to being a disciplinarian, so aside from being able to help with the crosswords and reminisce about their family, she was capable of imposing some order on her baby sister’s writing routines.
In January of that year, Lee wrote a letter to Gregory Peck and his wife, Veronique, to congratulate them on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and to let them know how her work was going. “Louise guards my privacy like Cerberus,” she said after dispensing with the felicitations, “and won’t even let me go fishing until late afternoon, but keeps me shut up in one end of the house a la Collette’s husband.” Lee was being fed and housed and made to write, which was good for her, as was talking with Peck, her old collaborator.
Such conversations were rare for her. With the exception of Capote, Lee mostly shied away from other writers, even though she was surrounded by opportunities to befriend them. Indeed, her distance from literary circles bordered on the comical. As a postwar southern novelist, she was assumed to be close to and influenced by Carson McCullers, whom she barely knew and who resented her for “poaching on my literary preserves”; Flannery O’Connor, whom she never knew and who belittled Mockingbird as “a child’s book”; and Eudora Welty, whom she adored but would later learn regarded her as a one-hit wonder. Even with those writers Lee tolerated, including the southern novelist and memoirist Reynolds Price and the editor and novelist Starling Lawrence, she rarely talked about her work. Like nearly all of her other friendships—which were numerous and varied, ranging from the professor across the street to the receptionist at the doctor’s office—they were predicated on an understanding that she would never speak about her writing and they would never ask. Plenty of people knew Harper Lee for years without ever talking about “the Bird” or “the Book,” and almost none of them ever asked her about what she had written since.
But in her letter that first week of 1981, she thanked Gregory Peck for his “willingness to talk” and wrote, “It is strange, but people not in our game (The Arts, uffle wuffle) have no concept of the intense loneliness of it.” To give Peck a sense of what the last three years of trying to write about the Reverend had felt like, she quoted the journalist Gene Fowler: “Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” Writing hadn’t come easy to her since those frenzied months when she had produced Mockingbird; now the very fact of having done so, triumphant as it was, was making her life more difficult. With her first novel, she told Peck, “nobody cared when I was writing it; now it seems that my neck is being breathed on, but I refuse to let this thing go until it approaches some standard of excellence.” Her new mockingbird was starting to seem more like an albatross, and it weighed on her more heavily the more people knew about her work: “My agent wants pure gore & autopsies, my publisher wants another best-seller, and I want a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the reader.”
Lee was repulsed by the idea of writing anything lurid or pulpy, never mind that true-crime books were generally violent and best sellers were generally page-turners. However intriguingly bloodless some of the deaths in the Maxwell case were, any writer chronicling the story was obliged to begin and end with horrific scenes: a woman bludgeoned to death; a man shot in the face. She didn’t want to disrespect the dead by making their deaths tawdry, but she also didn’t want to disappoint her readers, or let down her publisher. Her first novel had relayed its most violent acts so indirectly that it was deemed appropriate for children, yet, almost impossibly, it had earned critical acclaim and outsold virtually every other book ever printed. Either of those feats, literary accolades or wild sales, would be difficult to pull off again, let alone both, and although people joked that Harper & Row would have published Lee’s grocery list, she didn’t want anything appearing under her name that wasn’t as good as what she’d written before. If it were just a matter of getting another book out the door, after all, she could have handed over Go Set a Watchman, which was sitting in her family’s safety-deposit box at the Monroe County Bank.
Instead, she wanted to write something new, whatever the challenges involved. Those challenges were not limited to the difficulty of writing, the confusion around the case itself, and the expectations surrounding a new book by Harper Lee. Two months later, she wrote to Gregory Peck again, this time from Monroeville, and confided a new concern she had about The Reverend: “Of course I’ll probably be sued and lose my drawers over the book I’m working on now, and will have to sell my soul to keep my body, but we’ll worry about that when the time comes to worry!”
Of all of Lee’s concerns about her new book, this was perhaps the strangest. Capote had worried about a lawsuit when a rival writer claimed that Hickock and Smith had promised him their life stories, and the suit had given him some anxiety while he was writing In Cold Blood, but nothing ever came of it. (Capote was sued for defamation by Gore Vidal, after he claimed that his fellow writer had been thrown out of the Kennedy White House following some drunken transgressions, but that was a self-inflicted wound, and the two writers settled out of court.) Similarly, Lee herself had been threatened with legal action after Mockingbird was published. Although she liked to complain that everyone in Monroe County saw themselves in her novel, one family in particular really did—the Boulwares, of South Alabama Avenue—and they nearly sued her for it.
The legend around Monroeville went something like this: the Boulwares had a young son who had been caught breaking into a drugstore with two older boys. The teenagers were sent away to a reformatory school, but Mr. Boulware arranged with the sheriff to take custody of his son and thereafter kept him locked away in the family home. Like Boo Radley, Sonny Boulware was sometimes seen peeking out from behind their shutters, and when he got older, he was said to skulk around town at night. The Boulwares had an older daughter, and after Mockingbird was published, she had approached an attorney about suing Lee for her portrayal of their family. Lippincott rushed to the rescue with a carefully worded editorial explaining that the novel was a work of fiction and any resemblance to living persons was “coincidental,” but it was after that scare that Lee had asked her father to stop calling himself Atticus in public.
It wasn’t unreasonable, then, for Lee to contemplate the possibility of being sued. But she knew firsthand that publishers had legal teams review controversial projects before putting them in the world and that they assumed some of the liability upon doing so. Moreover, nearly everyone involved in the Maxwell case had seemed excited by the prospect of Lee’s turning their lives into a book. Perhaps she worried that the Radneys would sue her if they didn’t like her portrayal of them, but Big Tom was one of her biggest boosters: he still called once or twice a year to check on the book’s progress, he came to see her in New York to talk about it, and whenever he was asked about her work on The Reverend, he expressed hope that she would publish it soon.
It was also possible Lee thought a member of the Maxwell family might sue her, because some of them had threatened legal action against the press after the Reverend’s murder. But she had interviewed Ophelia Maxwell and knew exactly what the widow claimed had happened—and exactly what she had claimed hadn’t happened—and she would have deployed the requisite “allegedly” and “supposedly” caveats of true crime. For his part, Robert Burns had an
acquittal to his name, and anyway, he had never denied shooting the Reverend. Moreover, he had cooperated with Lee both times she interviewed him, and like Radney he always hoped that she would tell his story.
* * *
—
Whatever had Lee spooked, she found a familiar way of handling that stress and all the others: the shortage of facts, the lack of an ideal protagonist, her unfamiliarity with the lives of African Americans, a certain uncomfortable moral muddiness concerning black criminality in a criminally racist society, and a related discomfort with her own deep delight in the self-serving mythologies of the southern gentry. Lee’s drinking had become something of a scandal, not an overtly public one, but family and friends had long taken notice. The daughter of one of the driest men in Monroe County, whose oldest sister wouldn’t even consume caffeine, had grown into a woman who couldn’t say no to scotch or vodka, or failing that, to whatever happened to be on hand. When she drank too much, Lee had been known to blow raspberries at formal dinners in the presence of strangers and to return angrily to parties she’d been asked to leave to plead for just one more drink. Lee’s friends understood that alcohol had the power to turn their brilliant Jekyll into an unpredictable Hyde, and a few of them—Truman Capote, Tom Radney, and, most transgressively, one of her pastors in Monroeville—had even committed what amounted to a cardinal sin in the Church of Harper Lee, by letting slip to the press that she had a drinking problem. Radney, in particular, had offered, on the record, too candid an explanation for the delayed publication of The Reverend: “I think she’s fighting a battle between the book and a bottle of scotch. And the scotch is winning.”
Like Mockingbird, and writing more generally, drinking was an off-limits topic for Lee, and broaching it could leave those formerly close to her excommunicated, or at least estranged. Lee had drifted away from one friend in New York, Isabelle Holland, after she became an evangelist for Alcoholics Anonymous. Holland’s mother had been the last of seven generations to live in Tennessee; she sent her son to a boarding school in the old state but sent her daughter to one in the old country. Belle, as she was known, had expected to be a Henry James heroine in England but instead found no friends. When she came back to America, she moved to New York, where she became the publicity manager at Lippincott. Holland handled press for To Kill a Mockingbird and went on to write many novels of her own. Her own writing had improved in sobriety, and when she tried convincing Lee the same could be true for her, their friendship grew strained.
Lee had met another champion of Alcoholics Anonymous in Alex City. Along with bringing honor to the state of Alabama in the form of parks and postage stamps, Judge C. J. Coley, the once-sodden son of stern Presbyterian parents, had brought AA to his hometown, convening a meeting so filled with prominent men that it had its own cachet around town. “Anything worthwhile in my life,” the judge said forty years into his sobriety, “can be traced to a decision to climb out of the bottle.” For now, though, Lee was still deep inside it.
* * *
—
Whether or not they talked about drinking, Coley and Lee most certainly talked about their shared love of Horseshoe Bend. In making the case to Congress to protect the battlefield, Coley had made himself into an expert on the Creek Wars; when Lee was in Alexander City, that battle was often on her mind, and not just because the motel she stayed in had been named for it. While working on The Reverend, she returned to the work of her favorite historian, Albert James Pickett, who wrote extensively about the Creek nation. Born in 1810, Pickett wrote newspaper essays for a living while gradually turning himself into a historian. He spent seventeen years collecting the material that would become his masterpiece: History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period.
Published in 1851, Pickett’s book ran through a few editions before lapsing out of print. For amateur and professional historians alike, it was a grave loss, especially in the Lee household, where A.C. had revered its contents like scripture. Pickett was a pioneer of what we now call oral history, and because the events he was writing about were barely the past, he was able to interview many people who had been directly involved in them, including veterans and widows from both sides of the Creek Wars.
Lee adored Pickett’s history, and—partly because she had been reading it anyway and partly to salvage an upsetting situation—she ended up talking about him at one of the only public lectures she ever gave. In February 1983, she wrote to Jim Earnhardt to confirm a rumor he’d heard: yes, it was true, she was on the docket for an event in Eufaula; no, she was not happy about it. Lee then explained how she had been dragooned into agreeing to give a lecture at the Alabama History and Heritage Festival. It had all started with a letter from her sister Louise, who had been asked to join a planning committee for the event, “since Eufaula reeks with History & Heritage.” At the very first planning meeting, the academic organizers of the festival realized “Weezie is Harper Lee’s sister, and it promptly hit the fan.”
Most of the rules that Lee enforced on her family and friends were tacit; no one could quite say how they had learned not to mention Mockingbird or ask Lee what she was working on next. But in her letter to Earnhardt, Lee made clear both what some of those rules were and why people around her tended to follow them. Speaking of her oldest sister, she wrote, “It took all of Alice’s powers of negotiation to get me to speak to Weezie after I received her letter. Betrayed by my own sister was what I felt.” It was apparently genuine fury, not histrionics. Still, that Christmas, upon being made to understand the degree of arm-twisting her sister had suffered, Lee agreed to do the event. “I consented, on my terms, which consisted of NOTS: no evening platform speech, no interviews, no undue publicity, no Star Billing.” One of her nephews, Louise’s son Hank, had been present when she made her list of demands, and seeing how crestfallen the organizers were that she wouldn’t even acknowledge To Kill a Mockingbird, he had agreed to read from his aunt’s novel. She entreated Jim to pray for her and sulked: “If I didn’t feel that I have to get my sister off the hook, I wouldn’t go near it.”
For all that, no one who attended Lee’s lecture that spring would have been able to sense her consternation or her disdain. If anything, the famous author looked nervous, not annoyed. The title of her talk was “Romance and High Adventure,” and she made good on its promise. After disparaging the American habit of throwing away the past either by erasing it or romanticizing it, particular dangers in the South, she shifted to her favorite historian. “It gives me the greatest pleasure,” she said, although it likely did not, “to remind the members of my own generation (who have all read it) and report to the younger ones among us, that although it’s the real thing, Pickett’s History of Alabama is a work so fraught with romance and high adventure that even John Jakes would sit up and take notice.”
Jakes, a wildly popular author of potboiling historical fictions, was nothing, Lee claimed, compared with Pickett and his actual history. His style, she said, “falls somewhere between Macaulay and Bulwer-Lytton,” and his characters were better than anything on television. Lee populated the Little Theatre of the Eufaula High School, as Pickett had his pages, with the ghosts of Alabama history: Hernando de Soto clearing his way through the state’s thickets for the first time in 1540, crossing the land that would become Lake Martin; the British brothers John and Charles Wesley preaching their way around the South; the wilderness woman who claimed to be the tsar of Russia’s sister-in-law; James Adair, who lived with the Creeks for thirty years and emerged arguing that they were actually Jews; Chief Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior who promised to prove the righteousness of his theology of resistance to white perfidy by threatening to make the earth shake, just before the New Madrid Fault unleashed its tremendous earthquake.
But then Lee paused to observe a curious fact: Pickett’s history does not continue past statehood. It ends when Alabama joined the Union in 1819, pretty much when most
Alabamians would have argued that things were just getting interesting. Lee, however, had a theory about why Pickett had stopped writing. “I do not believe that it was in him,” she said, “to write of the eventual fate of the Creek Nation, of the Cherokees, of the Chickasaws and Choctaws, which was decided well within his own lifetime.” Instead his narrative concluded with the “engagements” between Andrew Jackson’s army and the Creeks, which, Lee said, “began to spell the end, which came, as we all know, in a few furious hours at Horseshoe Bend.” Then Lee said something about the historian that was far more revealing than anyone in the high school auditorium might have realized: “I think Pickett left his heart at Horseshoe Bend.”
* * *
—
If so, he wasn’t the only one who had left some crucial part of himself in Tallapoosa County. Lee left something there, too—if not her heart, then perhaps her nerve. For the first time in three decades, she was extraordinarily close to having another book: not an idea for one, not a rumor of one, but the actual meat and bones of it, the research, the reporting, the plot, the characters, even some of the prose. But she was still writing a Watchman that she did not yet know how to turn into a Mockingbird, and no new Maurice Crain or Tay Hohoff had walked into her life to help. In fact, another one of her lodestars was about to abandon her: soon she lost the very reason she had tried writing true crime, and one of the reasons she had ever started writing at all.
On August 25, 1984, a month before he would have turned sixty, Truman Capote died in Los Angeles. He had overdosed the year before in Montgomery while on his way home to Monroeville, but survived. Now the coroner in California who performed the autopsy noted the author’s liver disease, but also the barbiturates, codeine, and Valium in his system; it seemed another overdose had killed him, although there was no way to know if it had been accidental or intentional. When Jim Earnhardt heard the news, he tried to phone Lee, and when she didn’t answer, he sent a telegram. A few hours later, she returned his call but trailed off into a sad silence, saying, “My old friend…”
