by Wayne Flynt
The Reverend Ray Whatley, who appears in Shields’s book and comes in for criticism in one of Nelle’s letters, briefly pastored Monroeville United Methodist Church. He apparently told Shields that Nelle’s father had had him fired because his racial views were too liberal. Nelle always bristled at criticism of her father, but this claim particularly rankled. She often charged people she barely knew, as she does here, with trashing her parents, family, or friends for sake of their own fifteen minutes of fame. Nine years later, during controversy about the publication of Go Set a Watchman, she became angry at Mills and some Monroeville residents who claimed she suffered from dementia and was exploited by her attorney.
One friendship that did endure for Nelle was with Kathryn Tucker Windham. Both women were Methodists, attended the denominationally affiliated Huntingdon College, and became writers. Windham, who began her career as a police reporter in Montgomery during desegregation, became arguably the greatest professional storyteller of her time. Since by 2006 neither of them could drive, we sometimes picked up Kathryn at her home in Selma and brought her with us to Monroeville, where she and Nelle treated us to stories of their childhoods that kept us laughing for hours.
I sent Nelle a piece written by our son Sean about a controversial election in Austria. She obviously already had strong opinions about the country.
The “academy meeting” Nelle mentions in her July 12 letter refers to the annual induction ceremony of the Alabama Academy of Honor (which claims to enroll the hundred citizens who render the greatest service and make the greatest contribution to the state) and to which I had been elected that year; the other new member Nelle mentions, Dr. Regina Benjamin, was a remarkable African American physician who then operated clinics for the poor in the fishing village of Bayou La Batre near Mobile. She was definitely not the prototypical member of the academy, which tended to favor rich, white, powerful, politically well connected males. Without Nelle’s backing, Dr. Benjamin would have been at best a long shot candidate for election. In 2009 President Barack Obama appointed Dr. Benjamin surgeon general of the United States.
28 March ’06
Dear Wayne:
Hurray!
1. Please let me know when you & dtrs-in-law (sounds Trollopian—or G & S!) will arrive. I think you’ve got my telephone #. I doubt if you’ll need me to get any tickets, etc. because you can get them so much quicker without leaving your laptop.
2. You are the letter-writer, my friend. When better letters are written, you will write them.
3. I’m just now making this discovery and I can’t believe it will last—my handwriting is returning to its former size! I’m still about 2 inches away from the page, am lying cater-cornered on the bed but I’m looking at the page sort of sideways instead of head-on. I hope this means something is happening from that first shot of AVASTIN!! I’ve just got up & roamed around the room (not far in this apt.), but the world looks the same as it always does. This may not last, but I’m thankful for anything I can get!
4. Now you might like to read the book of Job for a light-hearted contrast to what’s coming, and if I’m going over the same territory, please forgive me—old, you know:
I am so glad the Flynts were friends with Louise, because it sounds like she gave you a fairly clear picture of our Mother and our home life.
The creep who has written my “biography” sent me the page proofs and a letter of thumb-your-nose blandness. His descriptions—indeed his information, I guess—of our family & life are bizarre to say the least, and our poor mother comes in for it again. Not that she tries to drown me, but that she stays in a sort of limbo of reality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is simply for openers. I haven’t read it through—this miracle that seems to be happening with my 2-inch vision I don’t think applies to everything—but what I have goes from fiction to nonsense. Firstly, and I guess my friends have held fast and remain silent, his source-material comes from (a) people with an axe to grind (Rev. Ray Whatley, who thinks my father got him fired because he was “liberal” at the wrong time. He may have been but what got him fired—and this doesn’t seem to have occurred to him—was that he was a lousy pastor, totally unsuited for the ministry, who belonged at a desk—where he spent his career, serving his Lord working with pension plans and doing a great job) to (b) acquaintances from early childhood on, some of whom I’ve never heard of, who seem to want their 15 minutes (Catherine Cobb, e.g., somebody who lived in my dormitory at Huntingdon who was offended by my bad language and lack of “finishing touches” never more than an acquaintance, I guess needed to get in a book).
Indeed, it seems that—to paraphrase Mr. Carville on the subject of Bill’s lady friends—it seems that he (Shields) went through the trailer parks of the internet with a sign saying, “GET YOUR FIFTEEN MINUTES HERE.” The response was weird to say the least.
Now this is the most alarming thing in the book: he has printed my NYC address down to apartment number! The only reason I can assign to this is pure spite, payback for my friends’ non-cooperation. Although the book is full of pages of errors—over two pages e.g. of my Oxford experience, wrong year, wrong everything that was some sort of canned account of an exchange program—he took great care to describe my neighborhood, building, and how to get there. Pure spite, or so bush-league he doesn’t know any better.
Now to matters different but no less unpleasant:
(I can’t get over this—I’m SEEING IT!). Let me tell you a small thing about the Ann Waldron Welty bio (and this is for your eyes only—no point in stirring up cold ashes). I’ve known Ann Waldron for some years. Never a close [friend], but warm enough relationship to meet once or twice per annum to celebrate the virtues of a mutual friend, John Luskin (she was his favorite pupil; I was just a friend) at the U of A[labama]. She had done a biography of Hodding Carter (was horrified when she discovered that he wasn’t as liberal as she’d thought) and Caroline Gordon (a fairly good piece of work, I think) and was casting her net. She had hit upon Welty. “But she’s still living,” I protested. “You can’t.” I apprised her of my views on biographies of the living to no avail. She would do it anyway. Since she was my superior in such things—a career in journalism, widow of an NY Times man, prolific output, and I a one-novel wonder, I shut up. Upon meeting her again I inquired how it was going. She let me know her primary sources were almost non-existent. When it came out, I didn’t read it—I did not then & never will approve of full-scale bios of the living. I think (and hope) the reviewers shot her down, because she’s been writing detective novels ever since. It’s been years since I’ve seen her; she lives in Princeton. At any rate, I am so thankful that there’s a fine biography of Welty. She was my goddess, and with Faulkner, I think are the TWO.
Wayne, I’m sorry this has gone on so long, but it’s your fault. I don’t know if it’s the preacher in you that inspires confession—I think it’s because you are everything you are: vastly intelligent with a heart of equal dimensions, you are a rare man in this world.
Now that you’ve finished Job, try Lamentations.
Love,
NELLE
(More)
You deserve a break.
Kathryn Windham (whom I hope you know) can make a cadaver giggle, which she did me in a letter yesterday. It seems that she had heard from her old (87) friend Virginia McNeal. They were best friends at Huntingdon, and when commanded by their formidable English prof., Rhoda Ellison, to write a poem, Virginia’s best (and immortal) effort was:
Dandelion, dandelion
Squatting on the ground;
If I were a dog
I’d like to be a hound.
To commemorate the event, every year Kathryn has sent Virginia the first dandelion from her lawn. Her thank-you note this year was something like “You are so famous and I’m not. I have only 2 claims to fame: I wrote a poem, and I was bitten by Harper Lee.”
That announcement came at the end of a page. Meditation produced no memory of the e
vent. Had I been in my cups?
Not this time: when the legislature was in session one summer, rather than commute on Alabama’s red roads, Daddy & Mother & family spent it in Mtgy., where their friends the McNeals called upon them. Virginia, about 10, “looked after me” while the adults visited; apparently I sank my teeth in her arm, suddenly with no warning. I was 7 months old, but with enough teeth for her to remember it for a lifetime. This began my career of naked aggression.
April 17, 2006
Dear Nelle,
Taxes paid! Nine day visit to Seattle for reunion with two-year-old Harper and five-year-old Dallas . . . over.
Thanks for the wonderful insight to Waldron and the Welty work. I adore Suzanne Marrs, and though her biography of Welty is too dense and convoluted, it is brilliantly insightful and complete.
As for biographies, I just finished Shields’s biography of you on the return flight from Seattle. I learned lots of facts, many of them incorrect based on Louise’s accounts. Worse, he understands almost nothing about Alabama and the context of the novel. At least Catherine Keener, who played you in “Capote,” comes from a family of story-tellers in western Carolina, respects your privacy and tried to use that knowledge in her role (or at least that is what she just said a few minutes ago on NPR’s “Fresh Air”). By contrast, I don’t think Shields understands you or your family (indeed he makes Louise sound like she deserted the family and makes Alice sound like a Marine sergeant guarding the Lee guard post).
But worst of all, his biography is pedestrian. There is no poetry to his writing. Not a single memorable phrase. His prose does not soar. It sinks. As in the first inning of a baseball game, the count on your first biographer is strike three and he’s out.
Have you ever thought of doing an oral history? Allen Nevins invented the sub-discipline at Columbia University in 1948 when he noted in N.Y. Times obituaries how many people who had lived enormously influential lives were dying without historic legacies. So he began interviewing them. The result is the largest oral history collection in the world at Columbia. . . . It is simple for the interviewee, who has to do no preparation, but hellaciously difficult for the interviewer, who has to research the entire life in order to ask the appropriate questions.
Best of all for you, the written transcript and tapes are governed by an iron-clad 1973 copyright law (since amended to make the rules even tighter) that treats both transcript and tape like a joint musical composition where one person writes the score and the other the lyric. Both interviewee and interviewer have to sign a formal legal document (which I circulated to Auburn University’s attorney to make sure it was binding). Both can place any restriction on the transcript and tapes they request. For instance, I have sealed some of my interviews for the lifetime of the interviewer and interviewee (which is not uncommon). Archivists view the seals as absolute (indeed, when one Canadian archivist did not properly seal an oral history the plaintiff won a million dollar settlement; and that is the only “mistake” of that kind I ever heard of). There must be a number of people you know who could conduct the interview, and I could send you one of the legal forms. I know that Samford, Auburn, Huntingdon, University of Alabama, the Alabama State Archives, Columbia U., or any place with a professional archivist and safe, secure archival storage, could care for the oral history until you specify it could be used. That way you can tell your own story in your own words and provide the core element accurately to some future biographer who perhaps has both a grasp for/of research and a capacity to write prose worthy of your life. Even one of your nephews might be a good candidate for the interviewer, and the archives where they would locate it can provide the legal form. But do not give transcript or tape to any archives without the appropriate seals and legal forms.
Perhaps I am old-fashioned about biography. But I still believe a person should have the first option of telling her own story.
Dartie and I are off to Scotland and Ireland next week with our best friends from Hong Kong days . . . we are going to indulge in some superficial genealogy and some serious vacationing. . . .
Sincerely,
Wayne
24 June ’06
Dear Nelle,
We thought of you often in Scotland and Ireland. Knowing as I do that you are as much historian as novelist, I kept envisioning you at the Battle of Culloden or with Sir Walter Scott in the Borders, creating Scotish nationalism in the 19th Century from the historical fragments of Robert Bruce and William Wallace. . . .
Then, of course, in Ireland Yeats, Synge, Joyce, et al., are omnipresent. As is the haunting, thrilling, amazing, life-enhancing music.
John McCracken, Edward Bunting, and other collectors began recording in the late 1700s, and Co. Mayo became for them and Ireland what Sumter Co. became to Ruby Pickens Tartt, John and Alan Lomax, and to American folk music. It was altogether an exquisite evening that we shall never forget. . . . I wish you could have shared the moment with us.
Sincerely,
Wayne
July 7, 2006
Dear Nelle,
I meant to send you these two items by my son, Sean, when he was teaching conversational English in Krems, Austria. . . . Iorg Haider and the right-wing Freedom Party won control of the government, resulting in lots of American criticism of Haider and the Austrian people. Sean mobilized TKAM to implore Americans to adopt a more nuanced rejection of Haider without the typical American self-righteousness about a different culture. These are two of his efforts (the first in USA Today, the second in The Birmingham News).
Incidentally, I enjoyed your “Dear Oprah” letter [an article that appeared in Oprah Winfrey’s O, the Oprah magazine]. It took me back to Anniston in the early mid-1950s. My family were not readers, though my father did faithfully absorb the Anniston Star every day. But for books, I headed for the Carnegie Library with its spectacular collection of stuffed birds peering down from the top of shelves, as if some exotic Hitchcock movie had gotten out of hand and landed in Anniston. . . . I wonder how many first generation college students from my teenage years owe their love of reading to that Scottish émigré and philanthropic capitalist, Carnegie?
12 July ’06
My dear Wayne:
You are surely one of the era’s foremost practitioners of a moribund art; your letters, I hope, will be kept forever, if not between hard covers, then on some sort of celestial computer where they may be down-loaded for all humanity to come. I read them in awe and with gratitude.
Alice has your dissection of Mr. Shields’s work and won’t let me have it back; I have your account of your U.K. and Irish journeys and won’t let her have it. Thank you for that, especially, Wayne. It was like being there again, which I won’t be and your reactions & responses to your experiences so vividly have preserved it for me. You are a treasure.
I must say your children aren’t very dumb. Sean’s account of his Austrian experience shows every bit of his father’s masterly use of words, and he exhibits a similar clear-eyed vision of the world, which makes for fascinating reading. He can write, Wayne. But I don’t have to tell you that.
For another reason, I’m so glad you sent Sean’s article—it dispels a “feeling” I’ve had about Austria because of the following incident.
About 15 years ago, I was bidden by a friend to be “nice” to a young (about 30 years old, note) Austrian, of slightly upper-crust connections, and in town for a month. I duly was, and in the course of a midtown tour we stopped for a rest in Rockefeller Center where Tass (nicknamed) remarked, “They have our flag there. I didn’t expect it.” He pointed to the various national flags around the skating rink. “Why not?” I asked. “Because the Rockefellers are Jews.” I said the last time I checked, they were Baptists. “Oh no, Jews, just like the others.” The others were the people who kick-started the U.S. like Andrew Carnegie, Collis P. Huntington, John Jacob Astor, J. P. Morgan, et al? I asked: Even Henry Clay Frick?? Yes, all Jews. Now this was an educated young man. I didn’t pursue the matter because I knew it
’d be futile to try to convince him otherwise. I felt sure it was an example of an isolated case . . . “the Klan has its points,” but it gave me an irrational uneasy feeling about his country. Had they not changed? Sean’s piece dispelled it, thank God.
Do hope I can get to be with you & your gang at the Academy Meeting! I may have to stick close to Dr. Benjamin, whose nomination I seconded, but I will fight my way through the crowd of your admirers to at least say HEY! (I would have seconded your nomination but you were already spoken for!)
Love,
NELLE
5
Legacy and Change
As founding editor of the online Encyclopedia of Alabama (EOA), I commissioned several entries on Nelle and Mockingbird. For the author’s biography I turned to Nancy Anderson, a professor of English at Auburn with a special interest in southern literature, whose knowledge of Nelle’s career was as encyclopedic as the famous woman’s privacy permitted. I reserved the article about Mockingbird for myself. Now I had finished writing the entry, and with fear and trembling, I sent a draft to Nelle for her critique.
Our correspondence also included her candid opinions about the club of good old white guys who had run the Alabama Academy of Honor from its beginning in the 1960s. When Tom Carruthers, a highly regarded partner in Alabama’s most prestigious law firm, became its chairman in 1999, he opened the academy to the winds of change that were rippling through the state’s political landscape. As each class of inductees more closely resembled Alabama’s real population (including women such as Harper Lee and Kathryn Tucker Windham), they in turn elected an increasingly diverse membership. In August of 2006 I was asked to speak on behalf of the new class of inductees—an occasion that, more importantly, allowed me to introduce my children and grandchildren to Nelle.