There are two names connected to MOCKINGBIRD. For me, the author is always going to be Nelle. Perhaps mistakenly, whenever I heard mention of her, I had the impression people called her that. It rhymes with bell, and not belly. Her creation is always going to be Scout Finch. Not Jean Louise.
I write here of Harper Lee out of politeness to Clarity, who is always listening in. Nelle is buried in Monroeville, Alabama. You can take an internet tour of the
gravesite, where you’ll see other members of the Lee family there…with Finch in the name.
Before I revisited Harper Lee’s book, I thought about how I visited it in the first place. Going back, there was the movie. Then I went in search of the book. For those of you who try that sort
of thing, do your best to remember the book is the book and the movie is the movie.
Maybe you encounter those items the other way around. Someone makes a movie, and then it is turned into a book. In that case, do your best to remember the movie is the movie and the book is the book.
Or the movie of the book of the T-shirt of the radio show of the hamburger, and so on.
(That should be the book of the movie of the breakfast cereal. Pardon me.)
I went looking for the book after seeing the movie adaptation. It’s possible that a documentary prompted me into action. A documentary in which she was referred to as Nelle. As for the film, Harper Lee kept an eye on the movie production long enough to know they weren’t going to mess it up. She did her best not to mess the book up herself. For, first, there
was another version of her story. A messed-up execution of one we never needed to see.
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book from the start of the 1960s, which is to say there’s a bit of a hangover from the 1950s to deal with in reading it. But the
setting is very strictly glued to that of Harper Lee’s childhood in the 1930s. By the time the book ends, historically we’re hovering on the edge of the Dustbowl Years and vivid imagery of the Migrant Mother photographed by Dorothea Lange. W. H. Auden puts a bullet to the 1930s in September 1939, in giving his label to a low dishonest decade…
But that’s all later. We start around 1933. The outside world, fixed in the grand arena of history, seems so very far away from small-town America and its quota
of daily small-town Americanisms depicted in the book. (Although, eventually, Hitler does get a mention.) At its core, MOCKINGBIRD concerns racial injustice sieved through the strained community built around it. This is the only way Lee can approach the story.
It isn’t.
There was another version. GO SET A WATCHMAN shows how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD started life. In that earlier manuscript, the character of Scout is grown to adulthood and, as Jean Louise, returns from the big city to view the old home town under a different
light. The author is not particularly kind to her people, there. Lee was asked to work on the tale. She transformed a raw idea into a cooked meal by making the story all about Scout’s childhood days.
Scout is young in both stories. In the rough prototype novel, she’s 26. And in the finished work, she starts the tale at the age of six. The homecoming story of a twenty-something character
doesn’t sound as engaging as the tale of the child in the town surrounded by haunting figures.
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a ghost story, with plenty of fake ghosts in it. Nothing in the vaguely supernatural background of the book is scary. The scary stuff is
left to all those violent adult themes the child struggles to deal with in the foreground. For this is the Deep South in the 1930s; if a black man kisses a white woman, the town’ll hang him as soon as look at him.
I’ve read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but I refuse to read GO SET A WATCHMAN. Sometimes, publication history is a bitch and stands in the way. I refer to the exploitation of a dead author’s unpublished works as necrophilia.
“By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist’s work beyond that artist’s lifetime.”
In this case, the author remained alive when the deal was struck. So this didn’t come across as necrophilia. No bonus points for that. Sharks tasted blood and circled in the water, under a sky
packed with vultures biding their time while the hangman sharpened his axe…which he loaded up with buckshot. Or something like that. Unfortunate exploitation of the artist’s work during the artist’s dying
days is no less a crime against art.
Nelle…
…your honour, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was absolutely of sound body and mind when she gave permission for her prototype manuscript to be published. On the other hand, the author, Nelle
Harper Lee, was subjected to what can only be described as elder abuse, not even comprehending the rights she granted shortly after her sister’s death and not too long before her own.
Why mention her sister?
If you do take an electronic tour of Harper Lee’s grave then you’ll see the name Finch there, just as I said. One of those grave markers notes that Alice Finch Lee was born in 1911 and died in 2014. She’s Nelle’s sister. And, into extreme
old age, Alice looked out for Nelle’s interests.
The chronology runs as follows: Alice dies in 2014, the book comes out in 2015, and Nelle dies in 2016. Alice hadn’t been the guardian of the legacy for the last
three years of her life, retiring at the tender age of 100. Nelle’s manuscript existed the whole time, and she never published it. Conspiracy? The weight of time, reputation, and lack of literary output?
Suppose you do rob a grave. Have the politeness to let the body climb down in there, first.
You and I were not in the room with the writer and the lawyer, so whether cinder-crusted devilry or tedious publishing talk went on…we’ll never know. It’s much easier to look askance
at the publisher for conduct unbecoming. That, we’ll return to.
I tried as hard as I could. But it is impossible to write of one author without writing of the other. I’ll take a detour into the life and times of Truman Capote, the scamp. Nelle and Truman
knew each other as children. He created a tomboyish character based on her in his book, and she created a social oddity of a friend based on him way over in her book.
Did Truman Capote secretly write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or is that hogwash? I tell ye plain, ’tis hogwash. For the last fucking time, no, Branwell Brontë
did not write WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Nelle, with MOCKINGBIRD nesting at the publisher’s, travelled with Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas.
Multiple murder in Kansas interested Truman, and he wanted to write about that. He decided to visit the scene of the crime: to descend upon it. Despite the jaundiced babbling of Gore Vidal, delivering a scabrous view in the opposite direction, Truman Capote had talent. He didn’t use it wisely or well, but he had something
before the booze rented him out and threw him to the bayleaf mob of critics. Baying is hardly the word for poseurs.
The thought of Truman using Harper Lee as a condom to communicate with the local yokels…yes, that would’ve amused Truman. Capote is Italian slang for condom. I sense he knew. Nelle took Monroeville Alabama and turned it into Maycomb. The book was behind her, but only just. Truman lingered there, as the odd little boy. Now she was in Truman’s company, and he was still at heart an odd little boy. Nelle stood on the
ground in another place with comb at the end of the name.
Holcomb. There she assisted Truman in the early construction of IN COLD BLOOD. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lay far behind Truman. He’d dedicated it to his close friend Jack Dunphy. Years in the making, IN COLD BLOOD would be dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in that order.
Capote once acknowledged her contribution and then scratched it out. He had trouble acknowledging her help. “Friend.” Yes. What else? “Assistant.” Capote, in hindsight, diminishing
Lee’s contribution, knew how to publicise Capote. Nelle was there for the first two months. Did Branwell Brontë write WUTHERING HEIGHTS? No. Did Truman Capote write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? No. Did Nelle Lee write IN COLD BLOOD?
There, things get tricky. No, she did not write the book. But did she make the writing of the book possible? Did she pave the way? Nelle broke the ice, right? Let’s be fucking clear, here. Nelle
Lee dynamited the ice so that Truman Capote could have his book and eat it like cake he’d said he made all by himself. From recipe to reception.
A new type of book. (It wasn’t.)
Every word of it true. (A lie.)
George Washington slept here. (He didn’t. But we might as well throw that one in, too.)
Truman didn’t care about the multiple murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Since time out of mind, murder most foul has fascinated us. So he knew he could write about a morbidly evergreen subject. That
had staying power. Truman didn’t care whether or not the murders would be solved.
He and Nelle arrived in town in time for the funerals of the murdered family. Truman made a lot of friends there, in Kansas. That’s according to Truman. Nelle made those connections on his behalf.
She became the long spoon the community relied upon to sup with Truman Capote.
You can read his fiction in depth. But you’d never want to be in a room with him for anything beyond the span of a breakfast, Tiffany’s included or otherwise. He’d entertain you,
and then you’d be a chapter in a book.
Gore Vidal? Someone should gore Vidal. Fuck you, Gore Vidal. And for that, you’d have to buy me dinner first. I was childhood friends with Harper Lee. You couldn’t
be featured in her book, not even as Boo Radley. But I’m in there. Not as Boo Radley, though. Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal. Go back to assaulting Norman Mailer’s fists with your plastic chin, you… (F-slur redacted.)
I made that last paragraph up. But for someone writing A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, Truman made things up, too. True account. Not exactly.
Multiple Murder. Now that bit he got right. Consequences? From a writer who didn’t care. A writer who came to care about all the wrong things, in the end, concerning that case.
Nelle: Truman’s cultural guide, secretary, catch-all assistant, note-taker, editor, and friend, making it possible for people to relate to her as the acceptable face of Truman
Capote’s investigation.
Truman continued without Nelle’s assistance for years after, as the case led to suspects, arrests, trial, convictions, and executions. Capote didn’t care about the justice of it. The Clutter
family, parents and children, were murdered by two men Capote took more interest in.
Capote wanted to be the invisible narrator of his big book on big themes in an isolated place. But with Truman it’s all about him, all the time, every single time. That’s why here, I’ve
only mentioned the murdered family once by name. I want you to know that the star of the show is Truman Capote…first and foremost, and that’s according to him. Not me. The murdered family is sidelined in favour
of contact with the criminals.
I’ve barely scratched the flawed mirror surface of Truman Capote’s life. It hides an ocean of depth, full of nasty vindictive things. My trident has three points to it. One. Truman knew
Nelle in childhood, and served as a model for an oddball character in MOCKINGBIRD. Two. Nelle went with Truman to research the book that would become IN COLD BLOOD. She didn’t have MOCKINGBIRD attached to her name, just then. He was known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three…
Wait. Detour. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote wrote that and lived off the back of it. (He’d dine out far and wide on all of his books, save at the very
end, beyond his death. Stick a pin in that one.) The Breakfast movie appeared a year before the movie adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. Both writers made it big, and made it big at the movies.
Truman danced with Marilyn Monroe. But she’d not be his character, Holly Golightly. Marilyn was warned off playing a prostitute,
and that was that. They should have married, just to give us a disaster-zone as a cautionary tale. But, with Truman, that would be just one more disaster-zone/Tuesday. Let us not dwell on imagined wedlock.
Capote hated the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the part of Holly. She was too pure, in his mind. No depths of darkness or suffering or want.
If you know anything of Audrey’s life in the Second World
War, you’d know she had more than her share of trouble to help inform playing a character in a movie, thank you very much.
Capote, at his bitchiest, in resenting someone for not being tough…and simply not knowing or failing to acknowledge what Audrey went through…is about average for the man. Acknowledging
others is, for people like Truman, simply a bend in the road that curves round, inevitably, back to people like Truman casting light on themselves.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman was not a fan of the adaptation. He’d bend over backwards to point out that Holly Golightly wasn’t really a call girl. She’s
not a prostitute at all. Then he goes and says the thing. Girls like that are American geishas. This comment is deeply offensive to the geisha specifically and to Japan in general. Shocking.
That would be like casting Mickey Rooney to play a comedy relief Japanese character in Breakfast at…oh.
Isn’t Mickey Rooney racist in that movie? TRUMAN: Hold my beer. Let me tell you about Holly Golightly and Japanese culture…
Truman had issues with his movie adaptation. Nelle had no problems with hers. Truman’s book didn’t win a Pulitzer. Nelle’s did. Book and movie combined to make Nell an unlikely star.
She shied from that, quite quickly, leaving her sister Alice to handle the messy business of publicity. Or…lack of publicity.
There’s no such thing as a reclusive author. But there is such a thing as the author who fucks off into a room with a writing machine to do the work alone. To fill the blank page. That writing
machine could be as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a manual typewriter; electronic keyboards are idiot-proof, and, therefore, less fussy.
Nelle didn’t consider success. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death…at the hands of the reviewers. She was spared that. Truman, for his part, entered
into gladiatorial combat with them. Both authors reduced their output. Truman envied Nelle’s success. A pointless envy, as she cared not for it. And so, that friendship ended.
You’ll find them together as Scout and Dill, in MOCKINGBIRD. Truman Capote, at his most amusing, fictionalised by his childhood friend. And Nelle. If I call
her a rebel, that has Southern connotations. Should you hunt for criticism of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it lies in a view that the author looked a little too kindly on her people of the South and let them off the hook. The counter to that is…just plain folks…come across
as far more evil in their racism on account of being depicted as just plain folks. To depict their humanity is to reveal their inhumanity.
Nelle and Truman tasted success. Truman developed an addiction to the fame. Nelle had an allergic reaction to it. Point three of my trident. After big success, MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, that was pretty much the end for both of them. They also faced this problem of a book resurfacing with grim finality. Nelle still had the manuscript of the prototype novel
somewhere. Truman thought he’d destroyed his early book.
The story goes that he left it behind in a place that was taken up by someone else. A magpie of a tenant, who discovered a Truman manuscript, and preserved it. Are some things worth preserving? I
was once told a tale that I reworked into the opening of a novel…
This is the book I shredded. And I destroyed the physical hard drive and all back-up media, too. But I kept the opening. The only good part was the part I’d been told by someone else. This was
a singular lesson in learning to write. And in learning how to vapourise anything you didn’t want to see the light of day.
After their deaths, the two were united by this connection – material resurfacing from the folds of the swamp. Nelle left some short stories in a place in New York. Truman had an early work
bob to the surface. Writers were dead and gone, and books still hit the shops. SUMMER CROSSING. You know. Necrophilia.
In Nelle’s case, THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER collects a bunch of short pieces. Why are there so many “lost” manuscripts to this history? If she’d
wanted to, Nelle could have gone back in and worked up a few short stories to keep the literary beggars away. The hungry crowd of critics, I mean. Nelle gave us one book. Be happy in that.
Scout Finch is a fictionalised version of Nelle. There are books out there with memorable characters. Some of those characters are memorable through description, action, or speech. The truly memorable
characters from classic tales are memorable through all three of those things and one more item: they stay with you.
Knowing how the friendship frazzled – an inevitability, with Truman – I prefer Scout and Dill to remain where they are, staying with memory. Not for me the publishing problem connected
to the later-earlier work GO SET A WATCHMAN. Haven’t read it. Won’t read it. Did enough research on it to make comments here, and that’s that.
It is an earlier work: the prototype. And it is the later work, published in the last days of Nelle’s life. Touted as a sequel, on the basis that it is about Scout returning to town those many
years later, it fired enthusiasm in a great crowd to hear of its existence. Except…there are text passages word by revealing word that are practically the same scenes as they are in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Bit of editing, here, there, marking differences in MOCKINGBIRD. Don’t even pretend for a second that this other book is a sequel. It is not.
Conduct unbecoming of a publisher includes trying to pass this prototype off as the direct sequel. I will grant you we finally discover something the realm of criticism toyed with, as an absent-minded
dog toys with a bone. In the prototype book, the heroic Atticus Finch, Scout’s noble lawyer dad, is anything but. He’s a segregationist: the type to build separate drinking fountains based on skin-colour.
In the prototype, Nelle is not so kind to her people of the South and she doesn’t let them off the hook. The two books could be resolved with expansion and editing of the prototype to turn that
work into a true sequel. But this was not to be. Nelle died. She outlived Truman. He’d outlived his friendship with her. Could he have written more, with his heart, brain, and liver shot through like Swiss cheese from
the wild excess of too much wild excess? With those wearying disadvantages, writing soon drops off into typing. And sloppy typing, at that.
Could Nell have written more? She took a stab at true crime, covering a story that sent her into the writing landscape of IN COLD BLOOD. Familiar territory, for she’d walked that road and gathered many notes on the trail once before. But it was not to be, second time around.
There’s a wanton, libertine, neediness in the literary critic/pundit who cries why couldn’t you give us more than one perfect book, you bastards to all
the writers who only have one perfect book in them. Those poseurs are never fucking happy. You can shit gold for literary types like that, and they’d complain the shit wasn’t diamond-encrusted. Be wanting jam on
it, next.
If you enjoy a book, what more is there to say. We could wax lyrical about what might have been. But we can never truly know. Was Nelle thrown from her horse after riding her first book back to the
stable of publication? If you write of the complacent daughter returning to the small town only to discover her lawyer father had feet of smashed and tainted clay…
And the editorial view is…we can’t go with this book…what, then? Be softer in telling your tale. Focus on the childhood character. So you go away for a time and rewrite the damned thing. Now it’s an Instant Timeless Classic™, and you are set for literary life.
Except. It must rankle that your initial idea, which is not so soft on your people of the South, it must hurt, that the core story was rejected in favour of your classic. What could you do, then?
Take the prototype and rework it so that Scout grows up into Jean Louise Finch, and when she heads home from the Big City, obviously, we see she had a young daughter’s infallible view of the noble lawyer…only to
realise this idolatry doesn’t match the man’s constant juggling of life in the Deep South…
You’d need to gut both narratives to make it work. But once the classic is a classic, you can’t go back and change a single word of the sacred text. So the challenge then would be to rework
and rework and rework the prototype until it no longer resembles much of anything.
Some characters never grow up. And they really shouldn’t. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Even Huck Finn. The Secret Garden is set around the year 1907/08, and features a character – the boy Colin – who cannot walk. Spoiler: he regains the ability. And the children in that story never grow
up. They mustn’t. For Colin is ten years old and infirm. The moment he walks again, well, that’s the moment he’s fit enough to serve in the trenches of the Great War.
Holden Caulfield never grows up. People don’t like it when I say…you know he goes back to the school and shoots everyone at the end, right? Anyone forced
to read Salinger’s fuck-awful book in school soon reaches that conclusion. So it isn’t in the text, so what?
Scout and her brother Jem, even oddball Dill, never grow up. Spoiler: Jem never grows up in the prototype book. There’s plenty of forensic analysis online to show you the word-for-word scenes
that are the same or nearly. MOCKINGBIRD has a layer of polish to the work. The other, no.
I have detoured into talk of a monster: Truman Capote. And I am not the first to express distaste for the promotion of a prototype novel as a sequel to itself. No more of that. What brought me here?
Revisiting Nelle’s tale.
I’ll have to revisit the film. For that sort of story, seen through a child’s eyes, you always hope, desperately, when sitting down to watch…please tell me they employed children who could ACT. I’ve revisited the book in another way…and I haven’t written of that
at all. How remiss.
Now remember, if you are going to tackle such things, the book is the book and the movie is the movie and never the twain shall meet. But somewhere between 1960 novel and 1962 movie there’s a place for a visual adaptation that moves at your own pace: the pace at which you turn the comic book
pages. In 2018, Fred Fordham adapted TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD into a graphic novel.
Take a digital tour of Monroeville and stop by the old court house. Fred certainly went there, for the trial scenes. I now have two copies of this story. One a novel, and the other a comic book. Both start
off with motifs of a fence. By design, if you know the tale. The novel is a towering work. And the hardback comic book does its damnedest to convey the same story.
For reasons of compression, the movie gives you a taste of the novel if not the full range of flavours. Otherwise the movie would be a decompressed TV show. The same compression gives you a taste
of the novel in the graphic novel. Otherwise the comic book would be a whole volume longer.
I recommend all three adaptations. The movie may stay with you, as might the art in the graphic novel. But the book is the one that goes into the most detail and lingers, positively, the longest.
My copy of the book carries an introduction by Albert French, whose own novels are not kind to the oppressor.
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