Mockingbird Songs
Page 4
Well there! I matched you page for page and with much inferior content. I guess that lays a bottom rail to our correspondence, so you can feel comfortable writing most anything that comes to mind.
Sincerely,
Wayne
30 April ’05
NYC
Dear Wayne,
A quick letter to say thanks for a wonderful one Alice forwarded to me here in New York, and to say that I’m sorry I won’t get to see you at the conference. (There was no guarantee that I’d see you anyway—I go to deep earth if I’m home when that thing’s on, and so does Alice!)
I am on my way soon—anyway—for California and won’t be back in Alabama until about June or so. Then I will try to do your great letter justice. Of course, Harper’s pictures are super!
In haste, with love,
NELLE
September 2, 2005
Dear Nelle,
Well, I guess you have arrived at status beyond legend or even myth. You have become a subject in what I once called a comic book but what is now called “a drawn novel.” Bert Hitchcock, a dear friend who headed the English Department while I headed history (and who is a great admirer of yours), brought this to me. His son, Eric, works for Diamond Publishers, which is marketing the “book.” This copy is probably an advance copy, so I doubt it is on the market yet. You can test your reality against the author’s mythology. I hope he understands Capote better than [George] Plimpton and [Gerald] Clarke.
As you may have heard, N.Y.C. is reading To Kill A Mockingbird during 2006, so I imagine those good folks will hound you to death. The director of the Brooklyn Public Library asked me to come up in May or June to talk about you and the novel. I told him I would talk about the Alabama context of the novel (Alabama in the 1930s) and the impact of the novel both here and abroad (which is mainly what historians talk about; and I hate literary criticism as well as most people who read that stuff). So I will be parking on your quarter in the “Big Apple” next spring, which will give you a good excuse for spending some time in Monroeville or some other remote, out-of-the-way spot. . . .
Sincerely,
Wayne
20 February ’06
Dear Wayne:
Alice has turned her dining room into something like the Texas Schoolbook Depository, and on the dining table is a stack of manila envelopes containing mostly books sent for jacket blurbs and letters—30 to sixty at a clip—from miserable school children whose teachers command them to write to me, then bundle up & mail their efforts.
At Alice’s command, prior to my departure from NY, I have been going through them, and to my horror/enormous pleasure, have discovered your wonderful letter of last September and the not so wonderful comic book.
Like Mr. Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version, I AM SORRY.
Sorry that the Niagara of mail since Capote and that NY Times piece has me floundering;
Sorry because sorry is what I am—sorry shiftless.
Please forgive me long enough to read that I am so excited by the prospect of maybe seeing you this Spring in NY. No, I’m the very last to hear of these things—can’t imagine sophisticated, cynical NYers reading Mockingbird with more than amused unbelief. You are so right to enlighten these people with history that is not myth or TV movies. You will be terrific; you will bring to your audience(s) material unheard of by them and don’t get me started on the prevalence of ignorance among people with access to instant information. That is one of the things you must explain when we meet.
From what I can make out of the comic book, where do these people get such strange ideas? I do laugh, though, because so much of Truman’s own manipulative talent is being used on him—coming back to haunt him, as it were. I can hear him complaining, “Can they tell the TRUTH about it?”
No more than he could.
Wayne, if you haven’t already memorized and burned these arcana, do so again:
433 East 82 St.
NY, NY 10028
(212) 744-2066
I have a cell phone but do not know how to answer it—just use it to call people.
Again, please forgive but don’t forget me.
Love,
NELLE
March 6, 2006
Dear Nelle,
As much as it pains me to address you in your adoptive home of New York City rather than your real home in Monroeville (even though I know it is excessively nosy and intrusive), I will send this through the mail in the hope that mail still passes from Alabama to New York. What with Roy Moore and his minions rampaging through the state, I am not sure any more what gets in and out.
I am not altogether happy with Brooklyn right now. They just contacted me to announce that the “Read Brooklyn” focus of TKAM has been called off because the library did not receive a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I called Mr. Kaplan and told him that I would come up for free (no grant needed!) if he would launch the program. He replied that, though grateful for the offer, he could not possible take advantage of me in such a shameless way. He plans to resubmit the grant next year, hopefully with better results. I still can’t understand why you need a grant to launch a reading campaign for a book. My daughter-in-laws are so disappointed that I am contemplating coming to NYC anyway and treating them to the exoticism and excitement of the Big Apple. Are you going to be around this Summer? . . . .
Although I refuse to watch the Academy Awards extravaganza, I was glad Hoffman won the best actor competition. . . . Of course you will welcome a little respite from the endless attention renewed by the film and news of the July 1959 letter from Truman to his relatives that he had read your manuscript and liked it very much. Melissa Block, one of the hosts of NPR, called me last week to assure the NPR listening world that his letter did indeed put to rest the question of whether you did indeed write the novel. Can you believe that? I told her that knowing Capote’s ego and capacity for manipulation, his failure (tragically and unfairly, I believe) to win either the Pulitzer or National Book Award, and his jealousy at the success of others, I had no doubt that if he had written TKAM, he would certainly have claimed credit for it.
But at least the letter should end the debate. It came at a wonderful time for me. Exercising my vast authority as general editor of the new on-line Encyclopedia of Alabama, I decided to write the entry on TKAM myself. I am going to emphasize the contribution the novel made to one of the most important issues of our times, the debate over what democratic values public, private, and parochial schools ought to teach. . . . Did I tell you that my son’s supervising teacher in Krems, Austria (where he taught conversational English in an Austrian high school while his wife completed a Fulbright year studying the Roman Legion on the Danube) had him help teach TKAM as the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party rose to power? In the English language bookstore in Vienna, there were tall stacks of TKAM in English, with a special discount price when customers purchased 10 or more copies. How does it feel to be the world’s arbiter of democratic values?
One more item before I allow you to return to reading all those letters from admiring Alabama school children. When Alabama in the Twentieth Century first appeared, you wrote me some extremely kind words about the book. Would you extend me permission to quote that paragraph on the cover of the paperback edition (if the press ever issues one; they tell me the hard cover is still selling so briskly they have no immediate plans for a soft cover edition)? If you have any reservations about this just let me know. All the reviews have been wonderful, and the press can easily find another source.
I hope you thrive in uninterrupted contentment back in NYC until we are favored again by your presence.
Sincerely,
Wayne
10 March ’06
Dear Wayne:
1. By all means use any words of mine if they’ll help Alabama in the Twentieth Century. If you find them insufficient, add a few of your own and put my name on them. I love that book.
2. How much do you charge for all your services to
me? A California friend, Mirabile dictu, stored your PBS interview in her magic machine and played it over the telephone for me! Before I could write to thank you, your great letter arrived. (It takes 4 days from Auburn and 5 from Monroeville, for a letter to travel to New York. For more reasons than one, I wish we could erase Montgomery, through which all mail, it seems, must go.) In his last years when every negative aspect of his character—and there were many—ran out of control, Truman did, I’m told, claim to have written most of TKAM! This in a throw-away whisper to a bored (sorry but in his cups he could be stultifyingly tiresome) band of listeners. I don’t know if you understood this about him, but his compulsive lying was like this: if you said, “Did you know JFK was shot?” He’d easily answer, “Yes, I was driving the car he was riding in.” I think that by the last years of his life, his miseries were so uncontrollable (word?) that he hated everything that crossed his path. He left a nasty little calling-card for all his friends, and Gerald Clarke made sure that, in his biography of Truman, they were delivered. Two come readily to mind: his odious claim that my mother tried to kill me (her reward for having loved him) and putting the words in Babe Paley’s mouth about Slim Hayward: “Slim never really counted, did she?” Truman and his biographer shared some similarities of character: these were gratuitous shafts intended to hurt, and not necessary to Truman’s biography. Oh well, it all comes down to one thing: I was his oldest friend and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold. (Never mind its content—I doubt that he ever understood what was in it.) Not only sold but was still selling in his last years. He nursed his envy for more than 20 years. Which brings me to
1. If TKAM can teach the Austrians democracy, then I’m afraid they might go to a Black-Belt Bourbon brand of it! No, I am so staggered by that news, I don’t know what to say except to thank my translator. It’s really incredible what is read into—or what people find in—that story. I am most thankful that I’m still here with enough sense left to be thankful for what has happened with the years.
2. I’m with you on why it takes a grant to urge people to read a book; and to decline an offer of such importance as yours. It’s no small thing: the living authority on all things Alabama (and Southern Modern), a speaker of such great gifts (you practice an art that’s not dying but dead) offering services gratis—it’s plain LOONY to cancel the project! Wayne, we live in weird times, and they are in Brooklyn.
3. Dear friend, if you & your daughters-in-law (or is it daughter-in-laws? You were in school longer than I) come to town, I deeply regret to say that you must frolic by yourselves. Alas, I’m now good only for lunch & dinner—no longer can I see what’s on a stage or in an art museum or really hear anything. (One thing good: I no longer feel that I have to sit in church and listen to a preacher ½ my age.) That sort of thing is out for me now. But, for any meal—even breakfast, I’m your girl.
Maybe, though, by the time you get here, things could’ve changed: the eye-dr. here is leaning toward Avastin treatments for me. I’ll find out Wednesday what goes, and what’s involved. (Maybe they’ll prohibit baseball, opera, ice skating, but I can’t see any of that anyway.)*
Your verbose but deeply grateful,
NELLE
* When Henry V said old men forget, he forgot to include old ladies: I’m sure I’ve bent your eyeballs about the Mobile eye-drs. Nothing is what they wanted to do.
I don’t know if the NY dr. can help me but at least he’ll try.
If you are very good, Uncle Wiggly will tell you next time about a first experience for both of us (I bet): on my second visit to the 5th Ave. eye man, I was presented with a sweet-potato pie.
Now that’s clout.
March 22, 2006
Dear Nelle,
How very much I enjoy your letters. Is it merely my imagination or has email, with its 30 second mind bite, completely destroyed the art of letter writing? Most letters I receive electronically suffer from a bad case of diarrhea of the intellect—chaotic bursts of something that is devoid of all substance. I miss Shelby Foote, partly because he was a crotchety old curmudgeon who could tell a story the way it ought to be told, but largely because he wrote wonderful letters and constructed his books with fountain pen on a legal pad just like I do. Dear Eudora Welty also wrote grand letters as did Flannery O’Conner (The Habit of Being remains one of my favorite books). . . . And incidentally my friend Suzanne Marrs at Millsaps College has at last done justice to Miss Welty. Her new biography (Eudora Welty: A Biography) sets the record straight. Ann Waldon’s dreadful biography was the Gerald Clarke version of Welty’s life (no one who knew Miss Welty would talk with her, so she (Waldron) just used her fertile imagination to declare Welty an ugly duckling and a Lesbian).
I knew about Capote’s subterranean campaign regarding TKAM. George Plimpton interviewed Pearl Kazin Bell for Truman Capote. Bell parrots the typical anti–Harper Lee argument (if she had really authored TKAM then she would have written something else, etc., etc.). She told Plimpton that Capote “implied” that he wrote a “good part of” TKAM.
Melissa Block, the NPR reporter who interviewed me, . . . wants to do a much larger story. She kept asking me if we (you and I) had talked about the subject, if we were friends, etc. I told her we were acquaintances, had not talked about it, but I had my own theories. Based on Plimpton’s interviews in Kansas with Clifford Hope and Harold Bye, and Truman’s capacity to alienate everyone he encountered, I figured you had a larger role in the final completion of In Cold Blood that he did in TKAM. She allowed as how that would certainly create a firestorm. But I explained that the literary voices in Truman’s book were no more your voices than the voices in TKAM were Truman’s voices. But without your ability to calm the stormy Kansas waters, Truman would never have gotten many of those interviews. . . .
As I told Melissa Block, if Truman had written any part of TKAM, he would not have only hinted the allegations at cocktail parties, he would have flashed the news in neon on Times Square, especially in his hazy twilight years.
Incidentally, Louise was furious at the Clarke biography for claiming your mother tried to drown you and less charitable to Truman than you are. It was the only time I saw her truly outraged. Needless to say, this is all private talk between us. Every time I lecture on TKAM, my wife, Dartie, makes me go over what I discovered on my own and can say compared to what Louise told me and which I cannot say. . . .
I hope you received good news about your eyes. Any Yankee who can present a patient with sweet potato pie has to possess some rare insights. My wife, Dartie, has Parkinson’s, so we know what the Bible means when it commands us to live existentially. This moment is mighty fine, and we rejoice in it.
As for our visit to New York, we are determined to come, book festival or not. . . . Our sons married two brilliant sisters (reckon keeping marriage in families is a southern thing?), and both can’t wait to see the Big Apple. Of course, nothing would please us more than to take you to your favorite restaurant. Dartie has a hearing problem also, so I know how to talk loud to be heard. If the gathering takes place, it will be grand. If not, we will enjoy N.Y.C. vicariously for you. . . . By the way, one of my great regrets is my inability to arrange a meeting for you and Miss Welty while I was Eudora Welty Scholar at Millsaps College in 1992. She really admired your novel, was intrigued to learn more about you, and regretted that we were never able to bring that about. Too bad. You would have liked her. I only regret she did not have your good sense to tell people “no.” She was so accessible that it caused her great physical discomfort and inconvenience. And that is something I never want to be to you.
There. I have written a longer letter than you did. You have my permission not to answer for a year or two, if you need it. I mainly wrote tonight to tell you that . . . little Harper Flynt turned two today. No doubt that little steel magnolia is already plotting how to get even with her parents by moving back to Alabama, living with her old granddad, and writing the sequel to TKAM.
You
r friend and not acquaintance,
Wayne
4
Contemporary Biography, Literary Disputes
Talk of an upcoming biography of Nelle by journalist and former English teacher Charles Shields dominated Lee family correspondence and conversations for months before the publication date. Nelle, furious, complained of the numerous inaccuracies, but I was not entirely sympathetic, though I had not been one of his sources. Given how fiercely she protected her privacy, how the family had declined to cooperate, and how her friends, including me, had refused to talk with Shields, mistakes were inevitable. After the book’s publication, in June 2006, I offered to interview Nelle for an oral history, which she could seal until after her death and deposit in the archives of her choice. I had taught a course in conducting oral history at various universities over four decades and knew that, under provisions of the 1973 copyright law, anything Nelle said would be entirely secure. I even volunteered in absentia the services of her two nephews, Ed and Hank Conner, who would have been better informed than I about family history. I explained that if she refused to talk with anyone about her life, Shields’s narrative would become her biography, whether she liked it or not. But she was adamant: no living person should be the subject of a biography, and especially not her.
I was therefore highly skeptical years later when journalist Marja Mills claimed that during the same period in which Nelle was rejecting my proposals, she had begged Mills to write her “authorized biography.” Nor was Mills’s subsequent memoir, The Mockingbird Next Door, in any real sense a biography. It consisted of a few of Nelle’s anecdotes that had delighted Dartie and me for years, some insightful family history recorded with Alice, and lots of information about Mills herself.