Scout, Atticus, & Boo

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

  I knew Capote late in his life in the old Studio 54 days, when I was a negotiable young thing who would be whisked past any velvet rope—those were the glory days—and if you weren’t asked in the first time, you just took your shirt off, and that would get you in. At that time, he was near the end of his sociability, and he and Liza Minnelli and Halston and Elizabeth Taylor and all the gang were there. He had a big fedora on a little bitty man, and he was usually just totally stoned, and he was like a puff adder. I don’t even know what a puff adder is, but that phrase made sense. He groped me and all the other boys in that place. It was like a little monkey going from vine to vine. For me, at that age I was just starting out and I was beginning to be published in the New Yorker and various places, and I knew who he was, obviously. But for me he was kind of an object lesson in what not to become. Even though we were partying at the same place, I felt very distanced from him and very sad that he would be publicly seen that stoned and that foolish. And I’m glad to say that, except for six or eight times, I’ve tried to avoid that trap myself.

  But I think Capote’s treatment of her is an indication of where his work stands in relation to hers, except for In Cold Blood, which had the benefit of her extraordinary legwork, her extraordinary political sense, her finesse in covering for him. I don’t think any of Capote’s fiction will last, in the larger sense. It lacks that ethical center that To Kill a Mockingbird has, and it’s obviously not going to be taught to high school students.

  I mean, that’s not to diminish the fact that he was an extremely talented writer. But what he did with his life, he did with his work. That is to say, he went to too many parties, and he was too intent on being flown places in private jets. Unlike her, he didn’t stay home; he went away.

  The beauty of In Cold Blood is that it is about justice, but the more we know about the backstage machinations, which means that you have to execute the protagonist in order to sell the book, the more you realize that he was criminal in his treatment of his subjects.

  I think she was extremely prudent in a way of disappearing the way she did. You pay a kind of price for being on call, and you get to look into the face of your readers, all of them sometimes, it seems, but there’s a kind of privacy, a kind of integrity that you risk losing if you’re not careful. And she had the object lesson of what Capote had done for and to himself.

  When I read To Kill a Mockingbird, it does not seem to me like a first book, and it does not seem to me like an only book, because it seems to be the work of a born writer, not the work of a person who has an autobiographical story to tell and can only tell that one. It seems to me that she must have written books before this, even though she was thirty-five when it was published. It’s a very evolved and sophisticated literary creation. And I have to believe that she must have written books after, because I know, as a writer, if I don’t have a morning’s work, I want to kick a cat around the block. I have to write, or I become intolerable to myself. And I don’t know how you wean yourself from the habit of writing. Maybe you write only letters to fans. That’s what Margaret Mitchell did after Gone with the Wind. She never, ever intended to write another book, though she strung her publisher along to shake him down for money. That was the one book she wrote, and it was about her grandmother. That’s an example. Or Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, which was by far the best thing he ever wrote. It made a huge sensation, and he continued to write. But I honestly think that if Thomas Wolfe pulled a Harper Lee and disappeared, his stock would be much higher than it is now. He wrote much too much, too [uncritically]. He has many volumes but only one book. I look at the example of Salinger, who got terrible reviews for one book—unjust reviews, we now know—and just withdrew from ever letting his work be published. But we know from local rumor that he has installed a safe-deposit vault in his study, fireproof. Now, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this is a guy with sixteen books that will be published someday. I hope I’m alive to see it, because I think it would be a beautiful thing. It must be a very satisfying thing to say, “Nyeh, nyeh, I’m going to take my marbles and go home,” and to continue the saga of the Glass family.

  I think the circumstances of the huge success of To Kill a Mockingbird, winning the Pulitzer, the way Margaret Mitchell did, must have been daunting, and I can imagine drawing back and saying, “What’s my next story?” I know from conversation that she was looking at a kind of murder circumstance, not unlike In Cold Blood, for her next material. And maybe Capote scooped her in the sense that he benefited from her reportage and clearly used some verbatim passages from her, unacknowledged, and maybe she felt that he had somehow preempted her next book. Maybe the death of her agent and her editor, maybe the burning of her writing hand—all these might have contributed to her falling quiet.

  The odd thing about publishing is that you can remain a writer and cease to publish. Publishing is so jangling and so frequently hideous. You subject yourself to scrutiny from people who haven’t really read your book; you’re being trotted around like a dog and pony show, whether you mean it or not. I can understand how people sit home and say, “I’m going to write book after beautiful book, and they’ll be found later”—as long as they have the financial security, which she was allowed by virtue of the first publication.

  I don’t know what writers do when they stop writing. I don’t know what anybody does who is not writing. I mean, I’m sitting in traffic and I look at the person in the next car, and I honestly think, I wonder if she’s writing short stories or a novel. Because, having done it for so many years myself, heedless of publication—I haven’t had a book out in four or five years—I have beautiful things that I will someday publish, but I don’t feel in any real hurry. But if I couldn’t do it, I would feel like a rattlesnake with the venom backed up in me. It’s a form of dreaming, it’s an extra form of dreaming; it’s a kind of algebraic balancing act, a kind of working out of equivalencies. And it’s a place where justice can actually happen. That’s one of the unacknowledged powers of the novel, is that here in this little town, in these two hundred pages, a life is saved, something is salvaged, perfect justice is achieved, however improbably. And I think that that’s one of the reasons we read, is to have our faith in the process renewed.

  David Kipen

  David Kipen was born in Los Angeles in 1963. He was the Director of Literature for the National Endowment for the Arts (2004–2010) and supervised its Big Read program, which includes To Kill a Mockingbird. He is a former book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

  I wish I could say that I was ten years old and it was the book that turned me on to reading. I’m sure if I had been ten, it would have. But I didn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird until [2004], when I found out that I was going to help to run this national reading program [the Big Read] and it was going to be one of the first four books we were doing. I was grateful, because I had always meant to read it. I was half afraid that I’d waited too long, because it’s a book that means a lot to people when they read it at a young age.

  But I was blown away by it. I think it’s a lovely, lovely book. I think it’s a moral book, without being starchy or medicinal in any way. I think it’s a really ennobling book and a great story and an artfully, if not infallibly, interwoven counterpointing of two stories in one.

  One thing that took me a little bit by surprise and I was deeply grateful for was the humor of the book. A lot of people, when they talk about it, and including me a minute ago, tend to emphasize what an uplifting and improving book it is, and it is that. But I think maybe even more of it because it isn’t written like a religious tract. It is a very funny book. Scout’s voice is a very comic voice in the things she says at the expense of her schoolmates. She’s a scamp and hysterically funny, and no less funny as an adult looking back, although in a slightly more fermented and seasoned way. She’s just great company.

  In preparing the reading materials for these cities that are reading To Kill a Mockingbird around the country,
I edited and wrote and ghost-wrote some essays in the material, and the one phrase of my own that I hope will at least almost come back to me was that it’s a book about a young girl surprised to discover her own goodness. Scout didn’t quite know she was as honorable a little girl as she was until she had it shown to her and discovered her own capacity to be compassionate. So it’s not reverential in the way that more didactic moral books can so often be.

  At the NEA, before I even got there, they had decided that the first four books ought to be Fahrenheit 451 and The Great Gatsby and Their Eyes Were Watching God and, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird. I think one of the reasons they chose that was that it’s the most popular City Read book around the country. More cities for their “one city, one book” program chose To Kill a Mockingbird than anything else, and we figured, well, that was a sure thing.

  Now that I’ve been to cities where they’ve read it, I start to see why. I went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and rode in the St. Patrick’s Day parade with the daughter of the local City Read coordinator in a life-size papier-mâché ham costume like the one Scout wears in the Halloween scene at the end of the book. She’s riding in the convertible behind me, not driving, thank heaven. People just adored the book and shared from their lives as they began to talk about it. I sat in the back of the book department of Zandbroz Variety on the main drag in Sioux Falls, bumping from one readers’ circle to another and sitting in on these discussions of it, and people just seem to connect with it. It dredges up things in their own lives, their interactions across racial lines, legal encounters, and childhood. It’s just this skeleton key to so many different parts of people’s lives, and they cherish it, and now I know why.

  I wish I could be one of these people who say, “It’s churlish to want more from a woman who’s already given us so much,” but I’m a greedy reader, and I think a true reader has to be a greedy reader. I wanted the next book, and I will always feel cheated for not having gotten it. It would be nice, it would be lovely, and if only I could get that next book, I promise I would read it gently.

  I think Harper Lee is Boo Radley. People think she’s Scout; I think she’s Boo Radley. In the book, they talk about why it’s the humane thing to let Boo Radley alone and not shine the glare of publicity on him, because he’s just not built for that. It’s Sheriff Tate:

  Maybe you’ll say it’s my duty to tell the town all about it and not hush it up. Know what’d happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb includin’ my wife’d be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin’, Mr. Finch, taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight—to me, that’s a sin. It’s a sin and I’m not about to have it on my head. If it was any other man it’d be different, but not this man, Mr. Finch.

  And that’s Harper Lee, and it would be a sin to drag her into the limelight. I have no problem whatsoever with my own curiosity about her life. I think that’s human and understandable and not to be apologized for. I feel very strongly about this, because I did my senior essay in college on the literature of—not Harper Lee—but J. D. Salinger and B. Traven, the guy who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who was a lot wilier about his reclusiveness, and my favorite of all, Thomas Pynchon. These are very private writers. But I refuse to disavow my own curiosity about their lives. I won’t allow it to displace my love of their writing, but one of the very most important things biographical criticism can teach is how who you are factors in to what you do, how the way you were brought up and what sort of person you are enables you to do the work that you do. Whether you are the man who wrote Gravity’s Rainbow or the woman who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, your childhood is interesting because you are this wonderful artist and that’s what it grew out of.

  The movie is terrific, and I think we should put a word in here for Horton Foote, because a lot of people will tell you, as good as the book is, the movie is better. He found such a lovely way to shape the story. I bow down at his altar; he is really the gold standard for the adapter’s art.

  Knowing a little something about Truman Capote certainly enriched the character [Dill] for me. I think she saw what fame did to a very good friend of hers. She saw how Truman Capote was overtaken by his own mythomania, and didn’t want any part of that. It’s hard to argue with. Capote is a guy who squandered his talent and his life. Maybe Harper Lee had it in her to write more books; that is an opportunity that she passed up. But she’s managed to preserve for herself a zone of happiness and security and friends who love her and respect her privacy. So in the Monroeville happy ending sweepstakes, I think she gets the laurel over her next-door neighbor, because she made up her mind about the life she wanted to have. And when she goes, she’ll go a lot less lonely than Truman Capote was.

  It’s a book, I think, that families enjoy reading together, which may sound like a backhanded compliment, but that’s part of what we’re doing with the Big Read, is trying to come up with books that people of all ages can read together, at least in the initial phases. That’s too much to ask of every book, but when you find a book that does cross, not just gender and racial lines, but ages lines too, it’s a very special thing, because it’s an opportunity for grown-ups to read to children without having to hide their own yawns. So, in common with very few other books, I think it is a true all-ages classic. It affords a terrific opportunity to create cross-generation conversations that a lot of other good books don’t.

  Wally Lamb

  Wally Lamb was born in 1950 in Norwich, Connecticut. A former high-school teacher and professor, he is also the author of four novels: She’s Come Undone (1992), I Know This Much Is True (1998), The Hour I First Believed (2008), and Wishin’ and Hopin’: A Christmas Story (2009). Lamb is the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (2003) and I’ll Fly Away (2007), collections of autobiographical essays that evolved from a writing workshop Lamb teaches at a maximum-security prison for women.

  I think I was about fourteen or fifteen. I didn’t love reading at that age. I read because I had to for school projects, and a book report was coming due, and I‘d already read the shortest books I know—Animal Farm and The Red Pony. So I happened to go into my sister’s room, and she’d been yapping about this novel that she had just read that she’d liked, To Kill a Mockingbird. And I picked the thing up, and there’s a Technicolor picture of Gregory Peck and some little girl in overalls on the cover. I flipped it open and read the first couple of sentences and two days later I, the pokiest reader I knew, had finished the book. It was the first time in my life that a book had sort of captured me. That was exciting; I didn’t realize that literature could do that.

  I did feel kidnapped by that book because I was in Maycomb, Alabama, with those characters, and my life around me just sort of blurred and I just kept turning those pages because I had to.

  I probably didn’t read it again until I was about twenty-one. I had bounced out of college and had gone right back to the high school that I had attended. I was an English teacher, and I remembered that To Kill a Mockingbird was a book that I had loved and also been drawn to emotionally. And I thought, Well, I’ll try it with the kids.

  And I remember working first of all with a group of slower learners, and I’m thinking, I don’t know, these opening passages are maybe a little bit of a hurdle to jump over, but I read that part aloud and then gave the kids an assignment. And little by little, one by one, over the next week or so, it grabbed them. It was probably the first time for a lot of those kids that they became impassioned about a book. There were some pretty heated arguments about characters’ motivations and who said what and why they had said it.

  The most exciting thing when you’re dealing with students is that the kids began to apply it to their own lives and their own observations, and then we were golden. I taught that book just about every year. I taught high school for twenty-five years, and just about every year, I did T
o Kill a Mockingbird with students. It was a book they read because they wanted to, not because they had to. So it cast the same spell for my students as it had for me.

  For a lot of kids, it’s the voice of Scout. It’s certainly not the adult voice of Jean Louise Finch. It’s Scout’s voice. I think the fact that she is a tomboy helps the boys. A lot of the guys, as I recall, liked Jem, too. He sort of spoke their kind of language, and a lot of them had annoying little sisters, so that invited them along for the ride as well.

  This was in the seventies, when I started teaching, and there was a lot of racial turmoil in the country. Because the characters become sort of personally applicable, I think a story can go a lot further lots of times than a headline can or something on the six-thirty news. So for the kids, I think it became sort of a vehicle by which they could begin to think and sort of process some of these emotional reactions that they were having.

  I know one of the things that happened at our high school during that early era when I was teaching was that the African-American kids were demanding a black history course. And the school was not providing one, so the kids staged a demonstration out on the green near the school. I was thinking about this just today. I think, in its own way, To Kill a Mockingbird—and I don’t mean to overstate this—sort of triggers the beginning of change and certainly puts onto the stage the questions of racial equality and bigotry in the way, a century earlier, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sort of stirred things up and got people riled up enough and motivated to change things.