Mockingbird Songs
Page 3
I know this proposal may seem presumptuous, but if you ever have a free day we would love to come down to Monroeville and take you to dinner. We often take Kathryn Windham out to dinner. . . . I know you two are friends, so we would be pleased to bring her down with us if you like. The advantage you have with us is I am no literary critic. . . . I would, however, relish an evening of enlightened conversation with a person whom Dartie and I so much respect. And as I told Louise one time, I wasn’t raised in a family of huggers; though I am trying to do better in that area, for I have often regretted that I never hugged her and told her how much I loved her.
Sincerely,
Wayne
18 February ’05
Dear Wayne:
By this time Harper Flynt (there is no more beautiful child) has entered the first grade and your whiskers have turned white. Before you fling this away w/contempt please let me say that I am deeply sorry for not having written and beg your forgiveness. If you can follow this cack-handed logic my silence has been a great compliment to you: I treat friends this way. Admittedly, they are thin on the ground now, but I don’t write them until I feel I can give them my best. Poor as it may be, I still want to try, even if my best is a list of boring events.
To begin with, the date of your letter, 16 September, was a noteworthy one in our lives here. Ivan nearly devastated us. Monroeville did not get the publicity that Baldwin County, Atmore and Brewton got, but aside from the coastal destruction, Monroe County was one of the hardest hit. In Monroeville, 95% of the houses were damaged (Alice is still waiting for a new roof); the U.S. Engineers stayed here until well into this month, supervising what seemed a perpetual cleanup job. No lights for 10 days, no phones for 2 weeks in some parts of town, no TV for over a month (a blessing) and erratic water mains. All without injury or fatalities. It was almost as if Someone didn’t want to kill us but did want to get our attention.
We spent the greater part of September 15–16 in a bathroom at my nephew’s house, Alice and I, Ed & Marianne Lee plus their teenage daughter. The noise appalling, the darkness visible, the radio stations off, and not even cell phones working (they—the Lees—live in a hole or something and couldn’t call out. I don’t understand the things).
In my time I’ve been in two hurricanes: Ivan on land, and Gloria, in mid-Atlantic. Monroeville was full of pine trees, the Atlantic Ocean was treeless. The noise was exactly the same. I guess it was the wind.
You did not read of Monroeville’s plight because of a star-struck young stringer for The Mobile Register. A rinky-dink film crew was in town using the old courthouse as a set for the trial scenes in their version of the Scottsboro Case (complete with Redfordlike young actor playing fat and bald Sam Liebowitz). Taking no chances, the crew boarded up the windows of the courtroom to protect their investment. The total damage to the square was one fallen rotten oak (downtown was the least damaged). Young stringer reported only that the Historic Old Courthouse was saved, the Register & wire services picked it up and no further enquiries were made. Two weeks later I asked some Register friends, “What happened?” Their reply, “What happened?” (Hey Dr. Flynt: when does something like a building become Historic? There’s not a blessed thing historic about the old Monroe County courthouse.)
Now from hurricanes we move to cataracts (one), heart catheterizations (one) ulcers (one), cholesterol (high), spread over the ensuing months to Christmas—all utterly time consuming and anxiety-making and adding to my disgust with the medical profession which is well on its way to becoming as contemptible as the legal profession.
Christmas and Louise. Wayne, the Louise we loved is lost to us. You were not the only friend who called and whose identity was not acknowledged. Hank says it’s that way with friends and family; he doesn’t know whether she truly can’t identify people or whether it’s an act—at any rate, the result is the same. He says that sometimes she fails to recognize people when she sees them. However, over Christmas she knew Alice and me and we had a most pleasant day together until poor Louise had an embarrassing personal accident and wanted to be taken back to the nursing home. She looks good—that good bone-structure keeps her forever fair of face to me. Hank says she spends her days sleeping and reading—he doesn’t know how much she takes in, but she loves lurid true crime books. She will not walk except to meals. For someone who used to click off 4 miles a day, this is a profound change. She does not seek the company of others and stays in her room, another change. We could see an occasional flash of the old charisma, but it was only a small reminder of a most vivacious lady. I wonder if people will speak of us, Wayne, in the past tense before we die.
The latest is that Alice fell ten days ago and is still at home—at present in her lounge chair in the living room doing exercises ordained (or is it decreed?) by the hospital exercise person. Alice is truly and without a doubt the most remarkable person I ever knew. Totally deaf, with a cochlear implant, the surgery for which left her with no balance at all—a rag doll, yet—she manages to prevail over these handicaps with some sort of other-world serenity, going about her business—law business—as if she’d not a care. Until she falls. She seldom falls, but when she does she simply topples over; until this last time she’s not been injured. This time we fear a fracture somewhere because the pain is still as heavy as on the first day. She will make it, though, because she doesn’t let this sort of thing stand in her way. (Only this time it’s standing and she can hardly get up.)
So I’ve treated you to a Gilda Radner recitative (“It’s always somep’n”) of a semi-annus horribilis and don’t even have a charred Windsor Castle to show for a string of clichés. (Which way does the accent go? I never knew.)
Now to important things: Harper Flynt is correctly named: she is beautiful, brilliant, feisty and without a doubt is a world charmer. She will go far in this world and bring honor and glory to her feeble old grandfather who just happens to be one of the best writers we have. When I say “we” I mean this USA. It is a great honor for me to be an extended member of the Flynt family and I mean that with all my heart.
I do so admire you. Not only your gift for making long ago and the more recent past come alive, but for the assured maturity of your style; here is a man, you think, who is fully grown—who has discarded, if he has ever had it—all bitterness and anger and writes about things with an unclouded clarity. I get so impatient with historians especially, who have an agenda, who can’t just give us the facts without trying to persuade us of something. In the vastly dumbed down world, they don’t seem to trust the reader to have the wherewithal to form an opinion. You do, and you flatter us while you make writing history the work of an artist. As was Macaulay. (Whig, my foot—the most clear-headed of his time.)
These days I must read with a magnifying glass and it takes forever for me to get through something: the one thing happy about this state of affairs is that my affliction has allowed me to savor the delights of Alabama In the 20th Century slowly, carefully, and with an almost palpable delight. It reads as through you had lived through it all. I can’t wait for Alice to read it—she has waited patiently for all these months—because she has lived all but eleven years of the 20th century. She will agree with me that you told us who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going.
It looks like to hell if we don’t get some things changed in this state. I dread the advent of Roy Moore’s administration but it’s coming sure as doomsday. What is wrong with us? Are you old enough to remember when people were less ignorant? I am.
I know another thing: you’ve grown older reading this.
With love,
NELLE
The Flynts rate one of my precious Chas. Rennie Mackintosh cards: Nelle
William Glackens, “Central Park, Winter,” 1905
Greetings of the Season: I’ve owed you a letter for the past 5 years, it seems. If I live 5 more, you shall get one. Much love to you and your wonderful family.
P.S. I have this great new light that almost writes for me.
Isn’t my penmanship elegant?!
3
Imperfect Fathers, Imperfect Towns
Sharing news about ailments is not unusual among friends. It is probably even more common among the aging. Physical problems certainly help explain gaps in correspondence. Nelle’s worsening macular degeneration would leave her nearly blind over time. But though limited vision restricted her reading, it neither sank her into depression nor tempered her opinions.
As a historian of all things concerning Alabama, and the author of ten books on the subject, I recognized early in our friendship that growing up in the house of her father, A. C. Lee—an influential state legislator who was once urged to run for governor—had stimulated Nelle’s political instincts. So, too, had the family’s strong Methodist ethics. Concerns about Klan-sponsored terrorism, the rise of the White Citizens’ Councils (a sort of button-down-collar, better educated, less violent version of the Klan), and the deafening silence of Alabama’s white elites—economic, religious, and educational—left her as cynical about the state’s politics as I was.
The Monroeville she rejected for Manhattan in 1949 smacked of suffocating insularity and parochialism. But after moving to her New York redoubt, she followed in the local newspapers as the situation worsened at home. She read of Alabama’s massive resistance to integration. In subsequent years, White Citizens’ Councils proliferated like kudzu. By 1957, when she stopped work on Go Set a Watchman and began enlarging a single story into To Kill a Mockingbird, her disillusionment with Monroeville had come to center on the town’s racism and increasing violence against blacks. Still later, the state added nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, and a public school system that increasingly enrolled whites in private “Christian” academies while abandoning black children to increasingly underfunded public schools. More puzzling to Nelle than southern society in general was her own father’s recalcitrance in the face of necessary change, and she wrote Watchman as a way of speaking for herself. In the novel, an adult Jean Louise Finch returns to Maycomb and is shocked to discover that her father and boyfriend are affiliated with the White Citizens’ Council. Turns out, Jean Louise’s sense of justice and righteous indignation do not mix well with the complexities of family, community, and church in her hometown, and, reeling in confusion, she again forsakes Maycomb for New York.
In that way, Jean Louise parallels Nelle, who was reconciled in some ways to the imperfections of her father and her town but nonetheless found it impossible to live at home. Not until the publication of Watchman in July 2015, decades after her departure, would local citizens begin to understand the depth of her alienation. Although Alice and Nelle became more conservative politically with the passing years, until they preferred George W. Bush to Barack Obama, the sisters occupied the terrain reserved in Alabama for “progressives.”
Nothing better demonstrated Nelle’s lack of affection for her birthplace than her refusal to use her literary fame to promote the local economy, which faltered after the town’s major employer, the women’s lingerie company Vanity Fair Corporation, moved its manufacturing overseas. By the great recession of 2009–2011, the population of the county had declined by a third, and unemployment had soared to 23 percent. In response, Monroeville’s Chamber of Commerce and educational leaders began to promote the town as “the literary capital of Alabama”—with good evidence. Tiny Monroeville boasted two Pulitzer Prize winners—Nelle in fiction and Cynthia Tucker, an African American who was then editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s editorial page, for editorial writing—plus Truman Capote and two twenty-first-century novelists, Mark Childress and Tom Franklin.
Although Nelle often noted the irony of the town’s proclaiming itself a literary capital even though a local bookstore had closed for lack of patrons, Monroeville found ways to capitalize on its most famous literary resident. Every spring an amateur thespian troupe staged a sold-out production of Mockingbird in the old courthouse; the company even once performed the play in Israel. Piggybacking on that, the Alabama Writers’ Forum began scheduling its highly regarded annual symposium in Monroeville during the theatrical season, attracting a star-studded cast of writers from across America.
One writer the symposium failed to attract was Nelle. She allowed her name to be used for the group’s highest award, but she consistently refused to attend the event (in later years, she made one exception, to be described in future letters). As she writes, “I go to deep earth if I’m home when that thing’s on.” She once told Dartie and me that as soon as officials announced the date of the writers’ festival, she booked a train compartment for California to visit the Pecks. In May 2005 that journey had special significance: the Los Angeles Public Library presented her its annual writer’s award.
Nelle’s busy May schedule did not prevent her from sending a beautiful miniature tea set to Harper Flynt in Seattle, where her grandmother Dartie taught her how to use it. Though Nelle’s fictional ragamuffin, Scout Finch, relentlessly rejects her aunt Alexandra’s efforts to turn her into a proper southern lady, our Harper took to the role like a duck to water.
In September 2005 I told Nelle that I had been invited to lecture at the Brooklyn Public Library about Mockingbird, the borough’s scheduled “Big Read” for the following year, which would allow us to meet on Nelle’s preferred turf. That month, the movie Capote was released, reigniting speculation about the many insinuations of the author of In Cold Blood that he had written Mockingbird. Nelle avoided all the reporters who wanted her to comment, but Melissa Block, cohost of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, tracked me down a few months later, on the morning of the 2006 Academy Awards, for an interview about Nelle and Truman. Luckily I was able to debunk the idea of Capote’s secret authorship by quoting the great man himself. Jennings Carter, a childhood friend of both writers, had just donated a letter from Truman to the courthouse museum in Monroeville. Writing on his return from a 1959 sojourn in Italy, Capote said he had finally read To Kill a Mockingbird as it was being prepared for publication, and proclaimed Nelle to be a writer of exceptional talent. Gregory Peck’s widow, Veronique, recorded the interview and played it for Nelle.
April 13, 2005
Dear Nelle,
I won’t take offense at your delays if you won’t take offense at mine. After savoring every word of your letter, I had wonderful intentions to reply promptly and thoroughly. Alas, it was not to be. And for some of the same reasons that cause your delay. Not long after receiving your letter, my beloved Dartie, a steel magnolia if ever there was one in these parts, grew weary of the worsening pain of five years vintage and consented to her orthopedist’s recommendation of a complete hip replacement. . . .
After arduous physical therapy to prepare for the ordeal (complicated by her Parkinson’s Disease . . . ), she had the surgery on March 16. For two weeks she was in the hospital in surgical recovery, then rehab, returning home on March 29. Slowly but surely, she is regaining her strength, balance, and equilibrium; though patience has not been her strong point (nor mine for that matter).
I have always known that my career was made possible largely by her exertions, but I now have ample evidence of that hypothesis. I have washed and dried dozens of loads of clothes, shopped for groceries, cooked (at least under her careful scrutiny and with her detailed instruction), vacuumed, cleaned toilets and baseboards, made up beds, answered letters, written innumerable thank-you notes, and generally conducted myself honorably if not always happily or competently. This aging stuff is for the birds! And I will be glad to get her back to normal, as the Muslims say “God willing”!
Speaking of foreign religions, I often wonder if living under the Taliban would be much different from living under Roy Moore. Just trading one form of theocracy for another, I reckon. . . . Although I am still Baptist (the moderate Cooperative Baptist variety because the Southern Baptists have gone [to quote the Bible] “whoring after strange Gods”), I can’t imagine a worse fate for America than my brothers and sisters running the count
ry. And nothing gets my infirm Baptist deacon wife more riled than the mere mention of Moore’s name.
The news of your encounters with the medical establishment, not to mention those of Alice and Louise, resonate with our experiences. I do so hope that Alice is better, though I think improvement for Louise is unlikely. With three heart stents, I can identify with your heart catheterization. That is not great fun, especially the hours on your backside after surgery. . . .
. . . I will be in Monroeville for the writer’s symposium the first weekend in May. The organizers have a good lineup this year. . . . Let me know if you plan to be around and about during May 5–7, and I will take you and Ms. Alice out for some catfish if that is your pleasure. . . .
Miss Harper turned one yesterday. I am sending you a sample of photographs with identification on each so you can follow the progress of your namesake. She reminds me of one of James Agee’s magnificent sentences in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: with the birth of every child, all the possibilities of the human race are born again. This grandparent thing is a lot more spiritually satisfying than the Baptist church. . . .