by Casey Cep
A month later, at the Shubert Theatre in New York City for his memorial service, Lee followed along in a program printed “Courtesy of Tiffany & Co.” as William Styron, Leo Lerman, Joseph Fox, and Zoe Caldwell eulogized Capote and read excerpts of his work. The pianist and singer Bobby Short performed two songs, including one from a musical for which Capote had written the lyrics. In the final moments, a tape recorder played onstage, letting the author’s famously strange voice fill the hall as he read from “A Christmas Memory,” a short story about his childhood in Monroeville. His words rang the courthouse bell, cracked pecan shells, and made the theater smell of hominy and honey. For Harper Lee more than anyone else at the Shubert, the story was more than story: it was their life, as irretrievable now as he was.
When it was over, the hundreds of admirers and literati who had turned up made their way outside, and Lee joined Alvin and Marie Dewey, who had come all the way from Kansas, for dinner at the apartment of Sandy Campbell and Donald Windham on Central Park South. Their tiny mourning party ate chicken buttered according to Capote’s own recipe and talked of their tortured friend. Capote had tried Antabuse to break his alcoholism and gone into rehab several times, but between those stints he could be found rambling incoherently onstage at Towson State University, popping pills and snorting cocaine at Studio 54, and arguing with a judge in Southampton after being arrested for drunk driving. He had gotten a face-lift and hair transplants, but no cosmetic work could disguise the damage he had done to himself. Harper Lee, who could still conjure him in his irrepressible boyhood, saw clearly what depression and addiction could do to people and to those who loved them. Capote, who had talked about Answered Prayers for over a decade, had never finished it. For years after his death, there were rumors that he had stashed it away in a bus station locker.
There were rumors about Lee’s unfinished book, too, which is why, three years after Capote’s death, a writer in residence at Auburn University contacted her to ask about the Maxwell case. Madison Jones was a year older than Lee and had published seven novels to her one. Like her, he had an interest in crime, and his last book, Season of the Strangler, consisted of a set of twelve interconnected stories based on a series of murders in Columbus, Georgia. Jones had called Monroeville to try to talk with Lee, and after her sister Alice relayed the message, Lee replied with a letter on June 5, 1987.
By then, Jones had talked with one of the Reverend’s nephews, who had also tried contacting Harper Lee. “I know that a book on my uncle the late Rev. Will Maxwell will sell,” Steve Thomason had written to her the month before. “I don’t have any doubt,” he insisted, because “people are still talking about him as if he were alive.” Thomason invited Lee to his house in Alexander City, saying that “without you I’m going to have to take some no name writer or do it my self.”
Lee wasn’t sure if the two men were working together, so she replied to them separately. To “Mr. Thomason,” she declined in three short sentences, thanking him for contacting her, indicating she was “not interested in buying information or entering into a financial transaction with anybody,” and letting him know he was free to do whatever he wanted with his uncle’s story. To “Madison Jones,” she wrote a longer, more thorough reply that included both a tantalizing summary of the work she had done in Alexander City and a discouraging list of the difficulties she had encountered there. After all the time she had spent working on the story, she told Jones, she had learned five things:
(1) that I probably know more about the Reverend Maxwell’s activities than does any other individual;
(2) that I have accumulated enough rumor, fantasy, dreams, conjecture, and outright lies for a volume the length of the Old Testament;
(3) that I do not have enough hard facts about the actual crimes for a book-length account;
(4) that the invitations I received for monetary contributions in exchange for information stretched from Cottage Grove to beyond Dadeville, some of them coming from incredible sources;
(5) that there is no cassette tape long enough to measure human vanity.
A decade had passed between when Lee first heard the story of the Reverend Willie Maxwell and when she finally let it go. Claiming that there were only legends left to be found, Lee told Jones to go ahead and look into it if he wanted. For her part, she was done.
| 23 |
The Long Good-Bye
At the end of the profile that Harper Lee wrote for Truman Capote when he published In Cold Blood, she speculated that “Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalizing game of discovering Truman.” It was an odd claim; Capote loved publicity so much that even before he died, there was little left to discover about his time in Kansas, or anywhere else. Lee, by contrast, was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries: not only what she wrote, but how; not only when she stopped, but why.
For seventeen years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, readers wondered what Lee would write next; in the years during and after she knocked on doors around Lake Martin, some knew exactly what but wondered when. Many people knew the title. One woman claimed to have seen a book jacket. Big Tom had heard from Lee more than once that the book was on its way to the publisher or that the galleys were already back from the printer. A friend of his remembered Lee saying, one night at dinner, that she had written most of it but was having trouble figuring out an ending. A friend of Lee’s in New York had a letter from her in which she said she’d written two-thirds of it before giving up. Someone claimed Louise had read the whole thing at her kitchen table in Eufaula and declared it better than In Cold Blood. An English professor at the University of Alabama heard from Lee’s old friend Jim McMillan that she had written the whole book but her publisher had rejected it because it was “too sensitive a subject.” McMillan’s daughter had heard it was all written, too, but locked away in a trunk, and would not be published until after Lee died.
Lee had arrived in Alexander City with such enthusiasm and chased her story with such determination that The Reverend seemed imminent, but her second book, like the Second Coming, appeared to be delayed. She spent years working on The Reverend, some of them under the watchful eye of her sisterly Cerberus in Eufaula. Three years after that stint in Barbour County, her new literary agent, Julie Fallowfield, said, “It’s my understanding Miss Lee is always working.” Nine years later, Fallowfield told another reporter the same thing: “She’s always working on something.”
That Harper Lee was always writing was obvious to anyone who knew her, if only because they were reminded whenever they opened their mail. Lee’s correspondence constitutes its own archive, not only of her life, the heres and theres and sometimes the nowheres of her adventures, but also of her mind. She might have struggled sometimes with the prose in her books, but in her letters she wrote with the ear of Eudora Welty, the eye of Walker Evans, the precision of John Donne, the wit of Dorothy Parker, and, often, the length of George Eliot. Those letters came and went from friends and family around the country, while admirers and students around the world were thrilled to receive mail in response to their own.
Among other things, these letters revealed that Lee, a fan of small-stakes gambling, was a withering casino critic (“the worst punishment God can devise for this sinner is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City,” she wrote to one friend in 1990), a capable sportscaster (ESPN could have hired her solely on the basis of her 1963 report on the “lallapalooza” that ensued when Wally Butts and Bear Bryant were accused of fixing a Georgia-Alabama football game), a dedicated chronicler of bar ballads from around the world (including Thomas Hardy’s favorite, “Come Where the Booze Is Cheaper,” with its rousing call to “Come where the pots hold more! Come where the boss is a bit of a joss! Come to the pub next door!”), and an amusingly sympathetic homicide reporter (“I know exactly why she did it,” she explained in 1976 of Lizzie Borden: “Anyone burdened
with long petticoats and having had mutton soup for breakfast on a day like that was bound to have murdered somebody before sundown”). Her letters were even known to include appendixes, some of them in verse. She once sent a friend in New York an Edward Lear–like guide titled “Some Sociological Aspects of Peculiarities of Pronunciation Found in Persons from Alabama Who Read a Great Deal to Themselves.” After explaining how she came by her short e’s and soft c’s, she jests, “I was quite correct in every respect, down to wearing goloshes when rainy, / But was looked at askance—like I’d left off my pants—when I ventured to speak of Dunsany.” (Forever a fan of Shakespeare, she’d been horrified in her younger days to have once mangled that place name from Macbeth.) The couplets go on like that for nearly a page, getting funnier at every line but suggesting her chronic failure to fit in, even where she should have: “For in this city the learned and the witty cannot be exactly called snobs— / It’s not how you dresses but the fall of your stresses that tells the Brows from the slobs!”
Lee’s writing voice catches like a briar; it doesn’t tear its subjects, but sticks to them. Both her extensive field dispatches on life in Monroeville and Manhattan and her brief forays into journalism make it clear that Harper Lee could write nonfiction as ably as fiction. What she was writing, though, was always anybody’s guess. “She continued to write,” her sister Alice said of Nelle’s work in the decades after Mockingbird. “I think she was just working on short things with an idea of incorporating them into something. She didn’t talk too much about it.”
Whatever she was writing, Harper Lee wasn’t publishing any of it, but no “wonder” can be dismissed as “one hit” right away. It takes the passage of time for such language to feel applicable, and even then it is a strange and varied category, especially for writers of fiction. Lee wasn’t like Napoleon or Mussolini, whose single novels came early but were eclipsed by other pursuits, and she wasn’t like J. D. Salinger, whose one novel was accompanied by stories and novellas, or like Oscar Wilde, whose one novel hid in a thicket of plays, or like Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, whose novels were but worldly pauses on their saintly processions, or like Lionel Trilling and Harold Bloom, who could be excused for just trying to practice what they preached in the one novel each that accompanied all of their literary criticism, or even like Emily Brontë and other literary wunderkinds who might well have produced additional novels had they not died first.
No, Lee wasn’t like any of those. She was at some point, and then forever after, put in the same literary bushel basket as Margaret Mitchell and Ralph Ellison, who published wildly successful first novels but then were never heard from again. Ellison’s Invisible Man appeared in 1952, and he worked on a second, “symphonic” novel for over forty years, but when he died in 1994, all he left behind was two thousand pages of notes. Mitchell had been a client of Annie Laurie Williams’s and had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her first and only novel, an example that must have struck fear into Williams and Crain and possibly even into Lee herself once it was made known to her. Mitchell was killed in a car accident in 1949, but by then thirteen years had passed since Gone with the Wind. She, at least, had the excuse of “the jitters” brought on by World War II and her time volunteering with the Red Cross, not to mention pleurisy, eye problems, and a predilection for “the humbles,” her term for her awe of other writers. But while Mitchell offered excuses and Ellison offered pages, Lee rarely even pretended to offer either.
Writer’s block is a symptom, not a disease. It describes only the failure to write; it does not explain it. The disorder was invented by the English, or at least first described at length by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but one of the prevailing theories about her own version was distinctly American. Harper Lee came of age in one of the soggiest periods in American literature, when William Faulkner was claiming he couldn’t write without a glass of whiskey nearby and Ernest Hemingway, upping the ante, said he needed a quart of it every day and also liked dry martinis and sweet mojitos whenever he could get them. Her acquaintance John Steinbeck and her friend Truman Capote both were known to drink to excess, and Lee’s taste for coffee was matched by her taste for alcohol.
There’s no question that Lee drank too much and grew difficult when she did so. But there’s also no reason to believe that her drinking was a cause rather than an effect of her inability to write; the two might also have been concomitant symptoms of the same underlying discontent—or, for that matter, symptoms of different ones. Discontent, however, is not itself a sufficient explanation for failure to write either. Other writers, including many Lee knew, had written through their drinking and through their depression and through their perfectionism. No one of these struggles could explain Lee’s failure to produce another book, even if every one of them made it harder for her to do so.
Nor could any one moment mark the time when, definitively, she no longer would. As Kierkegaard observed, we live forward but comprehend backward; in all likelihood, not even Harper Lee knew the specific moment at which she abandoned any of her books. Should a diary emerge—and there are rumors that Lee kept one—it’s unlikely that there will be an entry on some Tuesday morning or Saturday night indicating that she had decided to give up on finishing her second book; even less likely is a thorough autopsy of the emotional or intellectual reasons that led to that decision, or her ongoing fidelity to it. Maybe, as Alice had said, a manuscript had been stolen from Nelle’s apartment in Yorkville, but even if it had, such a theft, while devastating, would not have prevented her from reconstructing the draft. And burning any number of pages would not have barred her from writing new ones.
At one point in her life, after all, Harper Lee had been brimming with ideas. She had written Michael and Joy Brown a letter in 1958, the year after they held what she called “the mortgage on myself,” since she’d insisted on repaying them every dollar of their Christmas gift plus interest, outlining what she believed would be the next fifteen years of her writing life:
(1) Race Novel
(2) Victorian Novel
(3) What Mr. Graham Greene calls An Entertainment
(4) I’m gonna tear Monroeville to pieces (1958 Monroeville)
(5) A Novel Of The United Nations
(6) India, 1910
All but one of those ideas were unfinished; it’s not clear how many were even started. But unfinishedness, like love and loss, comes in degrees. Something can be more unfinished or less: it can be a third of the way done or halfway done, but also halfway done for two years or halfway done for twenty. In a strange inversion, the closer to done a book is, the more unfinished, in this sense, it feels. An idea, like “What Mr. Graham Greene calls An Entertainment,” is evocative, and it’s fantastically fun to imagine what kind of thriller Lee had in mind—say The Confidential Agent, but D. is sent to buy cotton in Alabama, or A Gun for Sale, but Raven returns home to Tuscaloosa. Even if Lee ever started such a book, it would still feel less unfinished than “I’m gonna tear Monroeville to pieces (1958 Monroeville),” which is what she started but abandoned in the draft of Go Set a Watchman.
That is why, of all of Lee’s unfinished works, none feels as unfinished as The Reverend. It was an ambitious project undertaken in the prime of her life, one she didn’t just mention in a private letter to friends but, uncharacteristically, talked about with colleagues and strangers. She spent time and money on the research and altered the geography of her life for long spells in order to do the reporting. Evident in all of that was the sincerity of her intention to write it, and evident in the events themselves was their potential to become a book.
Unfinishedness is an emotional category as much as a chronological and aesthetic one; plenty of artists keep revising and revisiting their work long after the critics and the public have deemed it done. Perfectionists, and Lee claimed to be one, often refuse to call it quits and have trouble handing off their work to editors, ag
ents, and readers. “Do / you still hang your words in air, ten years / unfinished,” Robert Lowell once asked in a sonnet for his friend Elizabeth Bishop, whose fastidiousness was famous; she was known to pin poems on her bathroom mirror and kitchen corkboard with spaces for single words she was trying to find, then leave them literally hanging for years.
It is possible that Harper Lee had decided to write for her own satisfaction or for posterity, not her peers, and that the feelings of incompletion and failure the public attributed to her were incongruous with her own experience. It is also possible she simply never dealt at all with her feelings about writing, or about anything else. “Self-pity is a sin,” she told a reporter in 1963, already frustrated, only three years after Mockingbird. “It is a form of living suicide.”
She was savage, not only with her own emotional needs, but with everyone else’s, too. “I am impatient with people who use psychiatry as a substitute for boredom. It alarms me that women of my own generation decide they are whipped, then go to a psychiatrist—when all they need perhaps is a little more household help.” It was a peculiar diagnosis of what women in the 1960s needed, and it betrayed an adolescent sense of class, mental health, and domestic life. In fairness, her comment came during the American rage for psychoanalysis, and she might well have just been chafing at the tendency to recommend it for everything and everyone, including writers struggling with their second novel. Still, it was a strikingly unsympathetic comment from the daughter of someone whose mental health had been fragile, and whose own emotional stability troubled those closest to her. And while maids had helped the Lee family manage, domestic workers were, for any number of reasons, not a viable substitute for psychological well-being.
