Harper Lee and "To Kill a Mockingbird" - November Donostia Book Club Meeting Part 2

The second part of our November meeting was our traditional book analysis. We talked about Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird” and I have to say, I'm under the impression that this time it was a total success. As far as I can tell, most (if not all) of you have enjoyed the book.

First, a bit about the author:

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, in southern Alabama, a little town with no more than 3000 people, She was the youngest of four children. “Nelle” was a backward spelling of her maternal grandmother's name, Ellen. She dropped it when “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, out of fear that readers would pronounce it “Nellie”, which she hated.

Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a prominent lawyer and the model for Atticus Finch. Her mother, Frances Finch Lee, also known as Miss Fanny, was overweight and emotionally fragile. Neighbours recalled her playing piano for hours, fussing with her flower boxes and obsessively working crossword puzzles on the front porch. Truman Capote, a friend of Lee's from childhood, later said that Nelle's mother had tried to drown her in the bathtub on two occasions, and assertion that Lee indignantly denied. It's very possible that Capote invented that, as his own childhood, opposed to that of Harper Lee, was a very unhappy one. He was also known for confabulating facts of his own biography, so he's not the most reliable source.

Lee, like her alter ego Scout, was a tomboy who enjoyed beating up the local boys, climbing trees and rolling in the dirt. “A dress on the young Nelle would have been as out of place as a silk hat on a hog,” recalled Marie Rudisill, Capote's aunt, in her book “Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by Aunt Who Helped Raise Him”.

Truman Pearsons (later Capote), who spent several summers next door to Nelle with relatives, and Harper became fast friends, acting out adventures from “The Rover Boys” and, after Nelle's father gave the two children an old Underwood typewriter, making up their own stories to dictate to each other. Capote later wrote Nelle into his first book, “Other Voices, Other Rooms”, where she appears as the tomboy Idabel Thompkins. She made a repeat appearance as Ann Finchburg, nicknamed Jumbo, in his story “The Thanksgiving Visitor”. Lee casted Capote in the role of Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

She attended Huntingdon College, a local Methodist school for women, where she contributed occasional articles to the campus newspaper and two fictional vignettes to the college's literary magazine. Both focus on themes that would later find their way into her novel. “Nightmare” described a lynching, and “A Wink at Justice” told the story of a judge who makes a Solomnic decision in the case of eight black men arrested for gambling. After a year at Huntingdon, she transferred to the University of Alabama to study law, primarily to please her father, who hoped that she, like her sister Alice, might become a lawyer and enter the family firm.

Harper wrote a column called Caustic Comments for Crimson White, the campus newspaper, and contributed articles to the university's humour magazine, Rammer Jammer, where she became editor in chief in 1946. After her senior year, she spent a summer at Oxford University as part of a student-exchange program. On her return from England, she decided to go to New York and become a writer.

Harper Lee arrived in Manhattan in 1949 and settled into a cold-water apartment in the East 80s. After working briefly at a bookstore, she found a work as a reservations agent, first for Eastern Airlines and later for the British Overseas Airways Corporation. At night she wrote on a desk made from a door. The local colony of displaced Southerners regarded her with scepticism. “We didn't think she was up to much,” recalled Louise Sims, the wife of the saxophonist Zoot Sims. “She said she was writing a book, and that was that.”

There was only one couple that believed in her: Michael and Joy Brown. She met them through Capote. Michael , a lyricist, had just received a large check for his work on a musical fashion show for Esquire magazine, and on Christmas Day 1956 he and his wife presented Ms. Lee with a check equal to her year's salary and a note that read: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

Slowly Lee developed a small portfolio of short stories, which she took to an agent, Maurice Crain. He suggested she try her hand at writing a novel. Two months later she returned with the first 50 pages of a manuscript she called “Go Set a Watchman.” It told the story of a small-town lawyer who stands guard outside a jail to protect his client against and angry mob, a central incident in the novel-to-be “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

Editors at Lippincott told Lee that her manuscript read like a string of anecdotes, not a novel, but encouraged her to revise. Eventually they paid a small advance and assigned her to work with Tay Hohoff, an experienced editor with whom she developed a clode working and personal relationship. As the novel made its way toward publication, Capote called with a proposal. He was going to Kansas to research the shocking murder of a farm family and needed an “assistant researchist”.

“He said it would be tremendously involved job and would take two people,” she later told Newsweek. “The crimes intrigued him, and I'm intrigued by crime – and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.”

For months, she accompanied Capote as he interviewed police investigators and local people. Engaging and down to earth, she opened doors that, without her, would have remained closed to her companion, whose flamboyantly effeminate manner struck many townspeople as outlandish. Each night she wrote detailed reports on her impressions and turned them over to Capote. Later she read his manuscript closely and offered comments. When the book, “In Cold Blood”, was published in 1966 to much acclaim, Capote repaid her help with just a brief thank you on a dedication page and thereafter minimized her role in the book¡s creation. By then the friendship had already cooled, and it entered a deep freeze after “To Kill a Mockingbird” became a runaway best seller.

Signs of its success were visible almost immediately after it was published in July 1960. Both Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild made the novel one of their selections, and Reader's Digest condensed it. A week after publication, the novel jumped to the top of the best-seller lists; it remained there for 88 weeks. Today, more than 40 million copies have been sold; the book has also been translated into more than 40 languages.

Life magazine accompanied Harper around Monroeville, photographing her with her father on the front porch of the family home, posing on the balcony of the country courthousr and peering in the window of the ramshackle house that served as the model for the home of oo Radley. One photograph bore the retrospectively poignant caption: “At her father's law office where she wrote “Mockingbird”, Miss Lee works on her next novel.”

The next novel refused to come. “Success had a very bad effect on me,” she told The Associated Press. “I've gotten fat – but extremely uncomplacent. I'm running just as scared as before.”

In one of her last interviews, with a Chicago radio show in 1964, Lee talked in some detail about her literary ambition: to describe, in a series of novels, the world she grew up in and now saw disappearing.

“This is a small-town middle-class Southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to “Tobacco Road”, as opposed to plantation life,” she told her interviewer, referring to the Erskine Caldwell novel, and adding that she was fascinated by the “rich social pattern” in such places. “I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing,” she continued. “In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of South Alabama.”

The world waited impatiently, and grew accustomed to disappointment. At one point her sister told the British journalist that the nearly completed manuscript had been stolen from Lee's apartment during a break-in. In the mid 1980s, Lee became fascinated by a part-time preacher and serial killer whose story she intended to dramatize, after the manner of “In Cold Blood”, in a book tentatively called “The Reverend”. She even set up camp for nearly a year in Alexander City, Alabama, the site of the killings, to do research and absorb the atmosphere. But again, nothing reached the public.

She returned to her solitary life, keeping the press and the public at bay. Although reporters imagined luxuries, Harper lived a quiet but relatively normal life in Monroeville (she returned by train), where friends and neighbours closed ranks around her to fend off unwelcome attention by tourists and reporters. She lived with Alice, who practiced law in her 90s and died in 2014 at 103 in a one-story ranch house. Clothes shopping there was usually done at Walmart or a Vanity Fair outlet. Lee traveled to the laundromat in the next town when she needed something clean to wear.

So what did Lee do with her money? She did like to visit casinos – but rather than playing for high stakes, she spent time at the quarter slots. In fact, Lee used much of her wealth for charitable causes, such as funding educational opportunities (true to her publicity – averse nature, this was done anonymously).

Even when Lee had to move into an assisted living facility following her 2007 stroke, her unadorned tastes meant that she still had access to what was important to her. Alice once said about Lee, “Books are the things she cares about.”

Lee also attended the local Methodist Church (built in part from her royalties) and occasionally dropped in on English classes at the local high school when “To Kill the Mockingbird” came up for study. She also spent time in Manhattan, where she maintained a small apartment.

Her last public appearance was in November 2007, when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.

In May 2013, her name appeared in news reports when she filed a lawsuit accusing her literary agent, Samuel Pinkusm of duping her into assigning the novel's copyright to his company after a stroke she suffered in 2007 left her with impaired hearing and eyesight.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” was the first novel Harper Lee had published, but it wasn't the first one she wrote. That first effort, titled “Go Set a Watchman”, was submitted to a publisher in 1957. When the book wasn't accepted, Lee put it aside and ended up writing a “Mockingbird”. News of the rediscovery of “Go Set a Watchman” threw the literary world into turmoil. Many critics, as well as friends of Harper, found the timing and the rediscovery story suspicious, and openly questioned whether Lee, who was shielded from the press by Carter, was mentally competent to approve its publication. Almost 60 years later it was published on July 14, 2015.

It remained an open question, for many critics, whether “Go Set a Watchmen” was anything more than the initial draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, from which, at the behest of her editors, Lee had excised the scenes from Scout's childhood and developed them into a separate book. “I was a first-timer writer, and I did what I was told,” Lee wrote in a statement issued by her publisher in 2015. Many readers, who had grown up idolizing Atticus, were crushed by his portrayal, 20 years on, as a staunch defender of segregation.

In her statement, Lee, who said that she had assumed the manuscript was lost, wrote., “After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication.”

Harper Lee died in her sleep on February 19, 2016, at the age of 89.

About the book:

Published in 1960, it won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for the cinema, winning Oscars for the script and for Gregory Peck (best actor in a leading role), who played Atticus.

The novel arrived amid the growing movement for civil rights and drew much of its resonance from its hero, Atticus, a lawyer who nobly and futilely defends a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman in their segregated town.

The title refers to an incident in the novel, in which Atticus, on giving rifles to his two children, tells them they can shoot at tin cans but never at a mockingbird. Scout, puzzled, learns from a neighbour, that there is a proverb: “It's a sin to kill a mockingbird,” and the reason for it: the birds harm no one and only make beautiful music.

To repeat here the whole analysis we did at the meeting is impossible. Please comment on whichever issue you find worth mentioning!