Rest Well, Nelle Harper Lee. You Changed The World

Such a wistful sadness at the news that Nelle Harper Lee has died. I know she was elderly and frail, but her sister, Alice, lived to 103. I was hoping for much the same for Nelle, and still dreaming that someday, I might meet her, something I've wanted since I first read To Kill A Mockingbird at the age of eight.

For years, as a teenager, I imagined that meeting. "Ms. Lee," I would ask. "What is keeping you from writing more? You are so brilliant. I have read your essays. Your voice, your humor, your insight, we all need it. Only you can give that particular perspective. How I'd love to read more."

And then, miraculously, we'd get to hear read more of her work.

And yes, this year, miraculously, we did--not the mature work that I had hoped for, Go Set A Watchman, but a young woman's passionate, rough-hewn outrage as she discovered that the good, kind-hearted people of her childhood had blinders on when it came to the horrific effects of bigotry.

I am so grateful to have been able to read that. I was so glad to see the world that she came from, and how she revolted against it. I was so intrigued to read in biographies about how she managed to come home to that world whose narrowness her younger self railed against, not only to move back to it, but clearly to find a way to live joyfully there.

What a great lady you were, although you would not have ever wanted to be a  lady. Rest in peace. I hope that you and your whole family: Sisters, Alice and Louise, brother Edwin, your mother Frances and your beloved father Amasa, are all together, with your uncle--maybe not your aunt--who knows. Maybe Truman Capote is there, too, with all his wounds made whole. May your memory be a blessing for us all.

Go Set A Watchman, Editorial Envy, Drool, and Harper Lee

Go Set A Watchman, for all its fascinating insight into Harper Lee, her father, the development of the story, and visible latent talent, still reads like a very rough draft poured hot onto the page and then shipped off to an editor.

And she bought it.  Tay Hohoff, at Lippencott. Bought it with real money, and then spent hours and hours over two-and-a-half years working with Harper Lee to create a very different novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. In one interview, Hohoff spoke of conversations that lasted six hours, as they argued perspective. Six hours. At at time.

Yes, To Kill A Mockingbird is not the Kumbaya novel most people thought it was. Yes, the world took Atticus Finch as their hero without paying much attention to the nuance of his interactions with race.

But I can't imagine anybody denying that To Kill A Mockingbird is not just beautifully written, but intricately written. It is no longer a series of interlocking stories that more or less comment on a fascinating main action (that ends abruptly.) Its exploration of race and other forms of bigotry is complex and nuanced, particularly for its time. (Remember Boo Radley and kindness towards mental illness? Remember Atticus' empathy-bordering-on-pity for Mayella Ewell, trapped in a brutal, short-lived world, trying to make life better for her younger siblings while longing for more? Remember the vicious, racist addict, Mrs. Dubose, and Atticus' respectful compassion toward her?)  Taken together with a hilarious, honest account of a wayward, creative childhood, To Kill A Mockingbird presents a fully realized vision that also deftly, gracefully--no, brilliantly--manages that most difficult balancing act of presenting a child's point of view from an adult's perspective.

Does that ever happen anymore? Does anybody, drawn to a writer's unique perspective, talent and vision, take in a toddling manuscript and help nurse that wobbly critter until it's a full-flown masterpiece?

Hemingway, anybody?

Sigh, Wipe Drool From Chin and get back to writing.

Go Set A Watchman: Hot Grief Poured On The Page Over Atticus Finch

Go Set A Watchman reads as if young Harper Lee went home for a visit sometime in 1955, (one year after Brown v. Board of Education tossed out Seperate But Equal schools for children of color) and back in Monroeville, Alabama, encountered the shock of a potential fiancé and her dad taking blatant racist stands--in her fiance's case, through expediency, and in her dad's, through true belief. 

I would guess Nelle Lee headed straight back to New York and poured her grief and rage onto the page without much editing. This is often painful, powerful stuff, barely shaped. Sometimes, she not even clear which pov she's writing in. She slips into first person then back to close third, Hope to omniscient for a paragraph or two, then back to Jean Louise's perspective again. Some parts read like dialogue pulled  straight from a journal, without Lee going back to the sketch and putting in the grounding details, something she clearly new how to do. 

Her publisher, Lippincott & Co., must have seen value in it, or they would not have spent money to purchase it. Her editor, Tay Hohoff, said, "The spark of a true writer flashed in every line," though she also felt it was less a novel than a string of connected anecdotes. I contend it was shock and betrayal vomited straight onto the page.

There is wonderful stuff in there, much of it beautifully written.  There is also much that provides real insight into Harper Lee, into her father, the times, the town. As strong as a young Harper must have been to see her beloved Amasa so clearly, it would have meant personal disaster for her to publish this novel as it stands in 1957. It would have been the choice to sever her connection with not just her hometown, but her beloved uncle, her irritating aunt, her older sisters, and most of all, her ailing father, who had recently and tragically lost his only son to a brain aneurysm, and who had with exceptional wisdom and grace, shepherded his fierce and wayward daughter to a shining and independent adulthood. I suspect Harper Lee might not have wanted Go Set A Watchman published all these years because of how it showed her father and her uncle, and that Alice Lee kept the family reputation safe by keeping it unworked and unpublished, hidden.

This novel would also have been a shocker to much of the country in those days, both North and South. I don't think anybody anticipated the mammoth, lasting success of To Kill A Mockingbird, but even if this book had been edited as is, its contents, shaking with rage and betrayal, would not likely have sold as well.  Still, it makes me very sad that this once bold, non-conformist, vivid writer was kept from her calling by fear for so many years.  I wonder if the rumor is true and there is another manuscript in that safe deposit box? If so, I'd love to see it.

Go Set A Watchman is very much a product of its time. Nowhere in the novel does Jean Louise or anyone question a paternalistic view of Negroes as childlike. She does not challenge her father's idea that Negroes are too poor or uneducated to vote with the notion that the Old Sarum clan of ignorant white folk would make just as poor and uneducated voters as he fears Negroes would be. She does not challenge Atticus' notion that "more Negroes are gradually registering to vote." She is obviously unaware of the intense voter suppression that had been going on since the Reconstruction, when Negroes had great success in sending people of color to both state and federal Senate and House seats. She does not seem to know that in the ensuing years, those who dared to register to vote were humiliated, forced to answer impossible questions, turned out of their homes, jobs, lynched, had their houses burned, or were even shot on the courthouse steps. She does not explain how busy white folk had been keeping Negroes uneducated, ignorant and immersed in poverty, though she skirts the edges of this notion.

She does not take the time or make the effort to really know any black person beyond Calpurnia, who we see as a half-member of the Finch family even in this novel, where she hovers on the edge, unable to comfort a child Jean Louise in intense pain until Atticus gives her permission to enter. As much as the adult Jean Louise loves her family's ex-maid and feels betrayed by Calpurnia seeming to view her as a White Person, it is as a white person that does not warn Calpurnia against using Atticus Finch as an attorney for her grandson, although Atticus has offered his services to the young man only to avoid having the NAACP take on the case, and thus "stir up" the Negroes further.

Jean Louise, too, is deeply upset by Brown v. Board of Education, though for her, the issue is state's rights, and the Big a guy's bossing the little ones around. There is a lot of flap about individual liberty with a lick and a spit addressing Jeffersonian vs. Madisonian democracy, but she does not really explore these ideas. I wish she had.

Still, for a white Southern woman of that time, I think Jean Louise Finch (and Harper Lee) did a damn fine job of becoming the Watchman of Isaiah's text, keeping a lookout for the betrayal of the whore of Babylon. If this novel had been edited as is rather than drastically changed, I imagine we'd have traveled with Scout on a powerful journey, while the Watchman of the text shifted from the previously all-wise Atticus Finch to a brave and ultimately willing Jean Louise.

One of the most interesting swathes cutting through this novel is the character of Henry Clinton, whose diligent efforts to rise above the label of white trash force him into a bigotry he does not really feel, but chooses, out of ambition, to embrace. Had the editor kept Harper Lee on track to rework Go Set A Watchman, I think this relationship and this character would have been the most enlightening of all--someone who sees bigotry and abhors it, but goes along to get along and get ahead, much like someone joining the SS because it's the best route for advancement.

Also, no one has yet mentioned a most important point, as far as I am concerned, one I wish had been explored in depth: Henry Clinton says that Atticus Finch, his boss, joined the Klan more or less as a spy, to know what he was up against. Was this true? If so, I'd love to know what particularly changed.

Go Set A Watchman--Insight into the Real Harper Lee, and an Ad Hoc critique Group

Despite life intervening--summer, children, teaching swimming and the comedy routine of trying to replace that bathroom faucet Week 3--I am now up to page 75 in Harper Lee's first draft of Go Set A Watchman, which was released yesterday. I'm excited to have Ms. Lee as a member of our ad hoc critique group. In the meantime, it seems, we are all getting to know Ms. Lee better--her real life rather than her fictional life.  It's a strange feeling, almost like spending time in town and slowly coming to know a neighbor, since Go Set A Watchman is obviously far more of a Roman A Clef than To Kill A Mockingbird.

I say this because, for instance, the dramatic center of To Kill A Mockingbird is Atticus Finch's legal representation of Tom Robinson, a black man who stands accused of raping a white woman. In 1919, Harper's father, Amasa Lee, had been practicing law for only four years when he was appointed to represent two black men accused of murdering a white storekeeper. (This is mentioned early in Mockingbird--“His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail. ... Atticus was present at their departure, an occasion that was probably the beginning of my father’s profound distaste for the practice of criminal law.”)

It's also true that, from November 1933 to July 1934, a black man named Walter Lett was arrested and tried for raping a white woman named Naomi Lowery, despite strong evidence that Lett was innocent. Amasa Lee was editor and publisher of the town's newspaper, the Monroe Journal, which covered the case from the night of the reported rape through the trial's end, which occurred when Harper Lee was eight years old. 

In Lett's case, the jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to death, but there was a letter-writing campaign from "many leading citizens of Monroe County," said citizens believing that evidence had not been established to find Lett guilty, and this apparently influenced the Alabama Board of Pardons reduced Mr. Lett's sentence to life imprisonment, which wasn't long. Mr. Lett died in prison in 1937 of tuberculosis, which makes me very sad, since by 1937, penicillin was around for treatment of TB. 

Wouldn't it be fascinating to read the trial transcripts from Mr. Lett's trial? Well, we can't, because they have disappeared. But if some intrepid souls would post online Amasa Lee's newspaper coverage of the trial, the world would be forever grateful. 

I promised that I would approach this like a real critique group, starting with what I liked about the work that I am reading. So here goes:

I love this version of Jean Louise Finch. The possessor of a dry sense of humor and a lovely sense of the ridiculous, she is funny, quirky, battling with technology, getting locked in her train's folding bed, fighting against conformity (insisting on wearing slacks in a town where dresses are de rigeur,) and ducking coming home both to marry, to work and most especially, to care for her father after her brother, Jem's sudden death two years before. 

She also struggles to find her place in the world in ways both direct and indirect. She speaks out softly to an interfering relative-- ("Aunty," she said cordially," why don't you go pee in your hat?") and manipulates her possible future fiancé with humor, finesse and bold strokes. 

At page 75, I don't have any idea what she's doing in New York City, apart from passing commentary when her aunt suggests she return to Macomb to live "you like to paint, don't you?" implying that Jean Louise could dabble in her spare time, but there, the comparison is also stretched--"To Alexandra, there was a distinct and distasteful difference between one who paints and a painter, one who writes and a writer." And our author is not yet specific as to which one Jean Louise is pursuing. 

I'm very impressed with her creation of such a clear and inviting character in Jean Louise. My personal experience with writing characters based on me is that it takes pass after pass and me actually interviewing friends and family about my personality in order to create someone my readers can identify with, yet here she is, showing us this woman in all her quirks, and she seems to make us like her effortlessly. 

I also find myself likely Henry Clinton and Atticus Finch, particularly Atticus as a father. His humor, his patience, his supportiveness of a non-traditional daughter, all come shining through. Of course, I'm only up to page 75, and its clear there are stormy waters ahead for both characters. 

The flashback to childhood is riveting, particularly when the children play at holding a revival meeting in Miss Rachel's fish pond. I can well imagine an editor saying, "This stuff is golden. Can you give me more of it?" 

The character of Aunt Alexandra is clear, funny and irritating. When she begins her aria on the facts of life, the writing soars. "Fine a boy" as Atticus' clerk and Jean Louise' suitor is, "the trash won't wash out of him. Have you ever noticed how he licks his fingers when he eats cake? Trash. Have you ever seen him cough without covering his mouth? Trash. Did you know he got a girl in trouble at the University? Trash. Have you ever watched him pick his nose when he didn't think anybody was looking? Trash--" This stuff is marvelous. 

As are the details about life in the south, the casual things that catch the eye and the heart, like the fact that Calpurnia, the colored maid, who could "speak Jeff Davis' English as well as anybody," drops her verbs in the presence of guests; that the Old Finch House, now a private gambling hell for businessmen from Mobile, was used for years not just for Finch family reunions, but for Negro baseball games, Klan meetings, in the Klan's "halcyon days," and a Knight's tournament "held in Atticus' time in which the gentlemen of the county jousted for the honor of carrying their ladies into Maycomb for a great banquet." 

There are also a lot of descriptions and back story about various locations, family members, the creation of the town of Maycomb, etc that I would prefer to be moved later, condensed, or mentioned each time as illumination of how much history lives on in the lives of Maycombites, so that every corner passed contains a wealth of stories both explaining and placing limitations on the inhabitants thereof. 

I am still fascinated by the fact that Mama is out of the picture. Mental illness, drug abuse, these were the unspokens. Remember, A Long Day's Journey Into Night, which deals so specifically with Eugene O'Neill's family's addictions to alcohol and his mother's addition to morphine, was completed in 1942, but it was not to be published until 25 years after his death--O'Neill had a sealed copy placed in the document vault of Random House with those instructions. It was only because O'Neil''s third wife, Carlotta Monterey skirted the agreement by transferring the rights of the play to Yale University, that the play was first performed in 1956.

 In To Kill A Mockingbird, Scout and Jem's mother is dead, though the real Lee's mother being unable to leave the house and not speaking for many years during one's childhood. Here, so far, there is a passing melancholy, a mention of seeing her mother's things moved to the new house after the grief of a loss--in this case, it seems the sudden death, barely mentioned, of brother, Jem. 

I do have editing mentioned all over the page, as well as, "Love this." I look forward to hearing from others and to sharing more ideas as I am able to read further. 

Go Set A Watchman--Put Away Your Claws and Take Out Your Editing Pencil--We're Inviting Harper Lee to Critique Group

So, I'm about to run over and get my copy of Go Set A Watchman. I'm so excited, and yet, I've been horrified by the responses so far, whether it's from the many readers who haven't yet read it--and swear they never will--or from the critics, like NPR, who called it "a mess." If I were Harper Lee I would feel vindicated that I decided not to publish until I could barely see or hear. The claws are out, baby.

When I was a kid, I was in a play created by The Greats. No matter what they did, the material's flaws were--and remain--unfixable. During rehearsals and previews and our brief run, I remember being shocked by the twisted delight I kept seeing on the faces of their most passionate fans as they leaned in, in the classic pose of a gossip, and say, "so, I hear it's awful." Being really young, I would ask them, "why are you so happy? Do you want them to fail?"  (Of course, they all denied it. Passionately. But immediately, the look would return, along with, "but I hear it's really awful."

So--lets change the dynamic. First lf all, let's acknowledge that this book, like To Kill A Mockingbird, belongs to Harper Lee, not to us.

Then let's read the novel for delight.

And after that, let's follow good critique group etiquette: first, what did you love and why? Second: what could be strengthened with suggestions as to how? Last--be kind to your fellow authors. If she were here, we'd want Nelle Lee to feel like a member of our community, not a target.

Anybody in?

Go Set A Watchman. Readers Brains Read: Permanently Closed

I know, I know, I wasn't going to read anything about Harper Lee's new/old book and felt irritated that there were reviews out already.  I get my copy of the book tomorrow and was eager to read it fresh, blind. 

Then, I went to a kid event yesterday, 89 degrees and seventy percent humidity, but five huge bouncy houses and ten bucks giving unlimited bouncing All Day. While my youngest sweated off face paint and I tried to unglue my soaking pants from my legs, I realized I had left any book at home. So I gave in and read the first section of Go Set A Watchman via The Guardian's website, and commentary from the New York Times, guardian, Wall Street journal and Atlantic.

In comment after online comment, people cried passionately, "I won't read it!" (The equivalent of stamping a sign on their forehead that says "this room is closed and locked forever and then bragging about it.) Me, I don't care if the book is good, bad or indifferent or if it presents characters as different than they are. And, spoiler alert: it appears that it does, particularly with wonderful Atticus. People who use To Kill A Mockingbird as their bible and named their sons after this literary character, (a la King Arthur creating a trend in the name Artie,) would be in for a rude awakening, it seems. They may want to change their kid's names, like Harpo Marx did with his, from Adolf to--yup--Arthur, for obvious reasons. 

Others claim To Kill A Mockingbird is so perfect, they are certain Go Set A Watchman couldn't possibly be as wonderful so they aren't going to look, which is akin to saying South Pacific was such an amazingly realized musical, I will never go see The King And I or The Sound Of Music. 

I, on the other hand, cannot wait for tomorrow, for so many reasons. Does this book give insight into 
what lead an active, passionate, pugnacious young woman to live a life of isolation, basically cut off from the writing she must have loved? Does it provide any hint about her mother's mental illness (apart from the dead mother of To Kill A Mockingbird fame?) Give us any idea why neither she nor Alice ever married? What other observances did this fiercely observant woman make about the Deep South at a time of tremendous unrest? If she didn't, in this version, do the eighty-seven rewrites necessary for a gripping first chapter, does the rest of the book live up to the best of the writing in To Kill A Mockingbird, with its hilarious, clear-eyed vision of childhood, it's compassionate exploration of mental illness, and its detailed vision of a small town during a routine summer that becomes far from routine? 

Most of all, will it be an engrossing read? I could really use an engrossing read through the rest of this heatwave. 

One other thought: Harper Lee's father defended a black man in 1919. After that man was acquired and lynched, Amasa never did another trial. So Nelle had to invent his courtroom manner, the details of his reaction, the trial, everything out of whole cloth. That observation was only shaken loose by the idea that Go Set A Watchman showed us a different version of Amasa Lee. I've already gotten insight into Harper Lee's writing process, and I haven't even read it yet. This mind, at least, remains intensely open. Bring it on, Harper Lee. Make it complicated. I'm waiting.

P.s. I always did wonder why those parents didn't name their kids Amasa instead of Atticus. And nobody has named their daughter Nelle.

Go Set A Watchman--Don't Tell Me Anything. I Want To Read It Myself.

Don't tell me anything about Go Set A Watchman, the frantically awaited new/old novel by Harper Lee that will be widely released Wednesday. Don't point to articles about it or hint that it reframes characters or speak of either shock or joy. I want the shock or joy for myself, uninflected by you, or the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Atlantic Magazine.

To Kill A Mockingbird was one of two first books I bought with my own money. It was sold at a school book fair. I was eight years old. I wolfed it down, though I didn't understand half of it. I read it many times. I memorized the opening, and the long section where the adult Scout reimagined spring, summer, winter and fall with a Boo Radley putting a blanket on Scout's shoulders when the house burns, though I was confused and thought that the He referred to in that section was Scout's daddy.

Sometime later, I snuck downstairs to watch the film--shown on TV past my bedtime--in the reflection on my parent's bedroom windows. I didn't see all the film--they kept catching me and sending me to bed--but I saw most of it, and was stunned by it as well.

In my adult life, I kept running into children named Scout and Atticus. My son went to school with an Atticus (he hates his name) whose little sister is Harper. In Los Angeles, I took a mommy and me yoga class next to a very elegant woman whose son was named Harper--she said the Lees were family friends. I ached with envy, even as her four-year-old tempted my turbo two-year-old with Thomas trains, removing much chance to either speak or do yoga . (I'm thinking now that this was Gregory Peck's daughter and her son, Harper, though I'm not sure.)

Also, as a writer, I longed to know what had harmed Harper so that she stopped writing anything but essays now and then. I scrounged around until I found those essays. (Check those out, people, about the history of the region or whatever. They are deep, warm and brilliant.) Betty Smith wrote of her  challenges after writing A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and how it took her two years and returning from a specially rented room to her cluttered, chaotic apartment before she could write Tomorrow Will Be Better. Was Lee's blockage caused by perfectionism? Was she fearful of airing dirty family laundry? After memorizing parts of To Kill A Mockingbird, with its complex, nuanced understanding and compassionate, poetic narrative voice--and finding those few essays, sporting the same--I had no doubt she could do it, just as I have no doubt this new-old novel is fabulous. There is no way this author would have turned in a manuscript that wasn't publish-ready and brilliant.

And because people have already leaked things to me, I have a very strong feeling that fear of dirty family laundry was the answer and the death of Harper Lee's older sister, Alice, what has sprung Nelle free. Not that I'm accusing Alice Lee of locking her sister down, but A Long Days Journey Into Night and The Glass Menagerie weren't written until the deaths of all characters save the playwrights, while bold Pat Conroy was, for years, persona non gratis after writing The Great Santini and The Prince Of Tides.

At any rate, feel free to speak with me late Tuesday or Wednesday after I have gotten my own reserved copy and joined the Great American Read In of Go Set A Watchman. And Harper Lee, from the bottom of my heart, thank you--for so many things. I hope this late hour I assume vindication gives you joy.