“There’s probably no better writer in this country today than Truman Capote. He is growing all the time. The next thing coming from Capote is not a novel—it’s a long piece of reportage, and I think it is going to make him bust loose as a novelist. He’s going to have even deeper dimension to his work. Capote, I think, is the greatest craftsman we have going.”
About her own ambition as a writer, she expressed a desire to write more and better novels in the vein of To Kill a Mockingbird.
I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse. I would like, however, to do one thing, and I’ve never spoken much about it because it’s such a personal thing. I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I hope to do this in several novels—to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to Tobacco Road, as opposed to plantation life.
As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.
And then she added a remark that set the bar high for herself—perhaps too high, in hindsight—but one that seemed plausible for a writer who had already written one of the most popular books since World War II.
“In other words,” she said, “all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”13
* * *
In January 1965, Nelle was involved in a terrible kitchen accident. She “burned herself very badly, especially her right hand. It seems some sort of pan caught fire and exploded,” Truman said.14 Friends called and sent cards from New York and Kansas as word spread that the accident was serious and she was in the hospital.
With her hand wrapped in white gauze from her fingers to her forearm, she was limited to reading and answering correspondence with Alice’s help. It would be months before a doctor could fully determine whether she would need plastic surgery. Perhaps because she was out of action at the typewriter, Nelle accepted an invitation of the sort that she would normally refuse on the grounds that she was “in no way a lecturer or philosopher.”
Colonel Jack Capp, course director of English 102 at the United States Military Academy at West Point, had added To Kill a Mockingbird to the freshman syllabus. With the permission of the department head, he ventured to invite Nelle to address the freshman class of cadets. There was a precedent for this: three years earlier, William Faulkner had accepted a token honorarium of $100 for speaking there. “She was interested,” recalled Colonel Capp, “but deferred acceptance until we could meet her in New York to discuss details. Mid-morning on the appointed day, Mike Cousland, a well-featured, mannerly bachelor major and I went to Harper’s pied-à-terre in Manhattan, a small apartment on the upper East Side.”15 After a nice get-to-know-you chat, a date was suggested and Nelle agreed. Then she insisted they go to Sardi’s for lunch. After which, Major Cousland and Colonel Capp rode back to West Point, chauffeured in an army sedan, mission accomplished.
* * *
In March, the 39-year-old writer arrived on the campus, located 50 miles north of New York on a promontory overlooking the Hudson River. The talk was held in the auditorium, and until Nelle took her seat on the stage, the 700 young men in gray uniforms remained standing. “After the introduction formalities, she began lighting a cigarette,” said Capp, “but, turning to Major Cousland and referring to the cadet on her left, asked, ‘Can he smoke?’ ‘No,’ said Mike, ‘he can’t.’ ‘Then, I can’t either,’ she replied and stubbed out her cigarette in the nearest ashtray.”16
The young men studied her. She was “conservatively garbed in a simple dark dress,” according to former cadet Gus Lee, who later wrote Honor and Duty about his experiences at West Point, “her hair wrapped in a conservative bun atop her head. Her voice was softly Southern, with high musical notes, and crystal clear in a hall that was utterly silent.”17
“This is very exciting,” she began slowly, “because I do not speak at colleges. The prospect of it is too intimidating. Surely, it’s obvious—rows of bright, intense, focused students, some even of the sciences, all of them analyzing my every word and staring fixedly at me—this would terrify a person such as myself. So I wisely agreed to come here, where the atmosphere would be far more relaxing and welcoming than on a rigid, strict, rule-bound, and severely disciplined college campus.”
For the first time since becoming a class, the young men laughed together, and followed this with a roar of applause.
Knowing that the young men were away from home, she made a subtle comparison between aspects of To Kill a Mockingbird and the cadets’ future mission as soldiers.
When we seek to replace family in new environs, we seek to reestablish trust, and love, and comfort. But too often we end up establishing difference instead of love. We like to have all our comforts and familiars about us, and tend to push away that which is different, and worrisome. That is what happened to Boo Radley, and to Tom Robinson. They were not set apart by evil men, or evil women, or evil thoughts. They were set apart by an evil past, which good people in the present were ill equipped to change. The irony is, if we divide ourselves for our own comfort, no one will have comfort. It means we must bury our pasts by seeing them, and destroy our differences through learning another way.
Regarding people who were difficult to accept or respect, Nelle said, “Our response to these people represents our earthly test. And I think, that these people enrich the wonder of our lives. It is they who most need our kindness, because they seem less deserving. After all, anyone can love people who are lovely.”
She paused to reflect on how writing To Kill a Mockingbird had influenced her life. “People in the press have asked me if this book is descriptive of my own childhood, or of my own family. Is this very important? I am simply one who had time and chance to write. I was that person before, and no one in the press much cared about the details of my life. I am yet that same person now, who only misses her former anonymity.”18
* * *
A few weeks after speaking at West Point, Nelle received another request for her presence, one that couldn’t be further in spirit from speaking to an audience of hopeful, forward-looking young men. Perry Smith and Richard Hickock asked her to attend their execution. Nelle replied to Warden Charles McAtee, who had conveyed the request from Smith and Hickock, that she would not attend.
On the night of April 14, 1965, the executioner, an anonymous paid volunteer from Missouri, sped through the rain in a black Cadillac. He wore a long, dingy coat and large felt hat to hide his face. Smith, assuming both Nelle and Truman had denied his request, wrote a hasty note at 11:45 P.M.: “I want you to know that I cannot condemn you for it & understand. Not much time left but want you both to know that I been sincerely grateful for your friend[ship] through the years and everything else. I’m not very good at these things—I want you both to know that I have become very affectionate toward you. But harness time. Adios Amigos. Best of everything. Your friend always, Perry.”19
In a hotel nearby, Truman agonized and wept in his room, trying to decide whether he should go or not. Hickock and Smith had the right to choose witnesses, and they had both named him and Nelle. Finally, Truman hurried to the prison in time to say good-bye. A handful of reporters and KBI agents were waiting in the warehouse. Hickock arrived first, trussed in a leather harness that held his arms to his sides. “Nice to see you,” he said pleasantly, smiling at faces he recognized. He was pronounced dead at 12:41 A.M. When it was Perry’s turn on the gallows, 20 minutes later, Capote became sick to his stomach.
* * *
For the rest of the summer of 1965 in Monroeville, Nelle buckled down to work. It had been five years since the publication
of To Kill a Mockingbird. She had been trading on her first novel for quite some time, although novelists often go years between books. But now she shunned interviews; first, because questions about To Kill a Mockingbird had become redundant. Second, because she had gone on record a number of times that a second novel was in the offing. So far, it was a promise she hadn’t made good on. What she needed was “paper, pen, and privacy,” the formula that had produced her first success.
She made one exception to turning down interviews, however. A young Mississippian, Don Keith, approached her about granting one for a small quarterly, the Delta Review. She consented to a “visit,” not an interview, perhaps because she saw in the earnest young writer a glimpse of herself from her Rammer Jammer days.
Keith, who would go on to become a first-rate journalist in New Orleans, provided a remarkably fresh portrait of Lee, placing her in the context of a writer at work. “When I met her that Sunday afternoon in Monroeville, Alabama, she was the same as I knew she would be. We had spoken twice briefly over the telephone. I had written her two letters; she had written me one. But regardless of the long distance acquaintance, we exchanged hello kisses in that familiar manner characteristic of Southerners. Once inside the modest but comfortable brick house,” they settled down to a “long talk over coffee and cigarettes. She consumes both in abundance.”20
The young visitor was the first to use the term recluse in connection with Nelle, but he did so for the sake of denying she was one. “Harper Lee is no recluse,” he said. “She is real and down-to-earth as is the woman next door who puts up fig preserves in the spring and covers her chrysanthemums in winter.
“During most of our afternoon together, she sat at a card table placed in front of an armchair in the living room. On the table was a typewriter, not new, and an abundance of paper. A stack of finished manuscript lay nearby, work on a new novel.” Nelle explained that she hadn’t set a deadline for it, and that her publisher, Lippincott, didn’t know the entire plot yet. But she hinted that it was set in a Southern town again, perhaps Maycomb. Whether Jem, Scout, and Atticus would figure in the story, she wouldn’t say.
The conversation turned to another literary project that needed her attention. She was scheduled to leave the next week for New York, where she was to read, before publication, Truman Capote’s finished manuscript.
“It must seem a chore,” Keith said.
“But one I’m looking forward to,” replied Nelle. As always, she was Truman’s friend and advocate.
* * *
Besides needing to be in New York to read Truman’s typewritten manuscript of In Cold Blood, it was time for her doctor to examine her injured hand and see whether surgery would be required. Everyone hoped for a good prognosis. “We were all looking at her hand and were pleased and surprised how beautifully it has healed. We hope when she sees Dr. Stark on the 19th [of September] that he will tell her she doesn’t have to have the operation,” Annie Laurie wrote to Alice.21
Nelle could hold a pen or pencil again, but her fingers’ movement was slightly constricted and her handwriting, normally open and highly legible, looked compressed. Perhaps because of this, she jotted succinct comments on Truman’s pages. Regarding a piece of dialogue, for instance, she noted, “Everybody talks in short sentences. Mannered.”
In August, McCall’s magazine published “When Children Discover America,” her first piece since Vogue carried “Love—In Other Words” in 1961. But the new article, just like the Vogue essay, showed none of her hallmark humor or vividness. In fact, a strong whiff of self-righteousness replaced the exuberance that readers would have expected from the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was as if her high spirits and wit were being tamped down by too much self-consciousness now, perhaps a result of being in the public eye.
I don’t think, for instance, that the Lincoln Memorial needs to be pointed out to any human being of any age. I would let children discover the beauty and mystery and grandeur of it. They’ll ask questions later. No child can possibly leave the Lincoln Memorial without questions, often important questions.… Younger children may not respond in words, but they will drink everything in with their eyes, and fill their minds with awareness and wonder. It’s an experience they will enjoy and remember all their lives; and it will give them greater pride in their own country.22
Truman, meanwhile, was certain he was on the verge of volcanic fame, and he was feeling ecstatic about it. The New Yorker would begin serializing In Cold Blood in four consecutive issues. On September 25, 1965, the first installment appeared, beginning with the oft-quoted sentence “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’”
The New Yorker’s circulation went through the roof, and sightseers poured down the elm-lined road to the Clutters’ old house.23
* * *
Nelle’s physician decided that an operation would be necessary after all, otherwise scar tissue would permanently impair her hand. Maurice and Annie Laurie arranged to take her to the hospital, see that she was comfortable, and be there for her when she awoke from the anesthetic.
The operation was a success. “We are so thrilled that Nelle had such a good report from Dr. Stark yesterday,” Annie Laurie wrote to Alice. “She sounds like a different person on the phone because now she knows her hand is going to be all right. She will be able to use it for writing and playing golf.”24
The timing was perfect, because Nelle’s high school English teacher, Gladys Watson-Burkett, was coming to New York at Nelle’s invitation. The teacher and former student were about to embark, on October 8, on a memorable month-long trip to England, and Nelle had insisted on paying for the excursion. “It was a thank-you for editing her manuscript,” said Sarah Countryman, Gladys’s daughter.25
But a completed second novel had not materialized before Nelle left on vacation, and Tay Hohoff was getting tired of the delay. Anne Laurie sprang to Nelle’s defense. “I told [Nelle] that I thought it was better the way things turned out about her second book, as she was under pressure and thought she had to write it this summer,” she assured Alice.
It doesn’t have to be written according [to] her publisher’s schedule and I think she should take her time and not try to work on the book until she gets back down to Alabama with her folks.… Too many people up here ask too many questions and she seems to feel that she is expected to turn in another manuscript, because everybody says, “Are you working on another novel.[?]” I always say “Of course, she is going to write another book but she is not going to be hurried.” It is difficult, as you know to follow Mockingbird as this book was such an all-around success that measuring up to that book is almost impossible. But she is a writer and her next book will be a success too, and will have some of the flavor of the first one.26
Nelle returned from England in November. She knew, as everyone did, that In Cold Blood would be out soon in hardback. The magazine serialization in The New Yorker had served as a drumroll leading up to the book’s publication. For Nelle, it would be the end to a long experience. More than five years earlier, she had supported Truman in Garden City when he felt discouraged. Then, for two months, she had served as his listening post in town and made friends with the folks he needed to interview. Later, she had accompanied him on return trips: once to attend the trial, and two more times just to go over the territory, sifting, sifting for more information. “Without her deep probing of the people of that little town,” Truman told Alabama author Wayne Greenhaw, “I could never have done the job I did with it.”27 And finally, she had tightened up his manuscript while she was supposed to be working on her second novel.
So when, in January 1966, she opened the first edition of In Cold Blood, she was shocked. The book was dedicated, first, to Capote’s longtime lover, Jack Dunphy, and, second, to her. There was no hint of how much she had helped.
Nelle was not a woman who was quick to anger or demanding of attention. But “Nelle was very h
urt that she didn’t get more credit because she wrote half that book. Harper was really pissed about that. She told me several times,” recalled R. Philip Hanes, who became friends with her later that year.28 She was “written out of that book at the last minute,” maintained Claudia Durst Johnson, a scholar who has published extensively about To Kill a Mockingbird. Not even the short acknowledgment page, which mentioned other people, paid tribute to Nelle’s large and important contribution.29
Truman’s failure to appreciate her was more than an oversight or a letdown. It was a betrayal. Since childhood, he had been testing her friendship, because perhaps, deep down, he believed that no one, including her, really liked him—not since his parents had withdrawn their love. He was constantly showing off to get people’s attention and approval, all while gauging their response. But hurting her so unnecessarily, perhaps to see what she would do, spoke volumes about whether she could trust him. She would remain his friend, but their relationship had suffered its first permanent crack.
Truman Capote in front of the Clutter home after In Cold Blood became a sensation. He downplayed Nelle’s role in creating the book. (Corbis)
If Truman suspected the amount of damage he had done to their lifelong friendship, he doesn’t seem to have taken special steps to repair it. For instance, he could have counteracted rumors that he had written all or part of To Kill a Mockingbird, but he never went to any strenuous lengths to deny it.30
* * *
On November 28, 1966, all of New York society was agog with Truman’s “Black and White Ball,” held at the Plaza Hotel. It was, Truman told the press, a “little masked ball for Kay Graham [president of the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine] and all my friends.” It was also to celebrate the success of In Cold Blood, but Truman wasn’t saying that.
Five hundred and forty of his friends had received invitations, but red and white admission tickets were printed only the week before to prevent forgeries. Stairways and elevators were blocked, except for one elevator going up to the ballroom. From its doors emerged the glitterati of the times: politicians, scientists, painters, writers, composers, actors, producers, dress designers, social figures, and tycoons, including Frank Sinatra; William F. Buckley; poet Marianne Moore; Countess Agnelli, wife of Henry Ford II; Mr. and Mrs. Norman Mailer; and Rose Kennedy. Truman invited ten guests from Kansas, too, including Alvin and Marie Dewey and the widow of Judge Roland Tate. Secret Service agents made a mental note of everyone getting off the elevator, and the guests were announced as they entered the ballroom.
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