And then, of course, [there is] the inevitable exploitation of a book that means so much to so many people. I know a little bit about Harriet Beecher Stowe because she lived close by, in Hartford. And I know that she was sort of appalled by some of these really cheesy stage productions that started traveling the country. And I saw at one point, maybe three or four years ago up in Montpellier, Vermont, a staged version of To Kill a Mockingbird. It was OK. I wouldn’t say it was cheesy. But it couldn’t even approach that same kind of experience that reading the book is.
The movie, I sort of go back and forth about. When I was teaching high school, the big treat at the end was to see the movie, and it was fun to talk about the choices that a director makes and casting and all that.
So as is often the case when you see the film version of a book that you loved, I really didn’t like it. I loved the performances. I loved the casting of the main characters. I was appalled at some of the casting of the minor characters—Miss Maudie, and Bob Ewell I didn’t think looked nearly as grungy as he should have. But also, there were several other characters who had been edited out—Mrs. Dubose, for one.
That for me is one of the most wrenching chapters of the novel. When I was teaching books like To Kill a Mockingbird year after year, I was beginning to get interested myself in the underpinnings of how novels work. And that was one of the books that really taught me how to write fiction myself, and I remember vividly the description of Mrs. Dubose in the pain of withdrawal. She puts a finger to her mouth and draws it back and has that sort of string of spittle that goes with it. Man, that’s writing! When Jem freaks out and trashes the flowers that she loves so much, that’s a dramatic scene.
The novel was really instructive. It’s beautiful literature, but it’s also a great course in how to write a novel, I think.
I use To Kill a Mockingbird with my inmate students. I do some volunteer teaching in a women’s prison; I teach writing. And I’ll use models from Mockingbird, particularly when I want to talk about sensual language and how you can evoke emotion and reaction through the use of the five senses.
There’s that gorgeous description of Maycomb at the beginning where she says:
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
Now, I teach my students that, forget the adjectives, it’s all about the verbs: “flicked flies,” “sagged in the square,” “sweltered in.” It’s all there. It is a one-paragraph course on writing. Writers evoke things that readers can see and hear, but I think those tactile sensations, like “soft teacakes with frostings of sweat,” those kinds of things—that’s real writing, that’s literature. Now, is it sustained throughout the novel? Not necessarily. But it’s doing other things at different times. So I think it’s a wonderful model.
On some level at least, I think I understand [why Harper Lee hasn’t published another book]. I wrote my first novel, She’s Come Undone, over ten years. I was teaching high school at the time; I was getting up on weekends, rising at four o’clock and driving up to the all-night study room at the local university and writing in longhand. I did that over a number of years. So nine years later I had a novel, and I didn’t think it was going to be published. But then it was, and I was flabbergasted. It was published in 1992. Then in 1997 I got a call from Oprah Winfrey saying, “Gee, we love this book, and we would like to feature it in this book club we’re doing.” So that was wonderful. It was a crazy, wild, and wonderful ride. Suddenly this book that had a little modest success by “Wally who?” hit the top of the charts fueled by the Oprah book-club thing. I’d been working for about six years on a second novel [I Know This Much Is True]; the following year it was ready. Lo and behold, Oprah picks that one for the book club as well. So, as great as that was, as exciting, the way that it gave me a much wider stage and millions more readers than I might have had otherwise, I have found that in the writing of my third novel, it’s been somewhat intimidating to do because of the reception of the first two novels.
Now, I have no idea whether Harper Lee struggled against that kind of stuff. I just know that it does change the equation when people are waiting for a novel or writing you letters saying, “Aren’t you done yet?” So every sentence becomes something that you worry about. The best days for me as a writer are the days when I can get up from the desk and open the door of my office and chase everyone’s expectations out of the room and just write it for myself. But that doesn’t always happen.
Harper Lee had, I believe, role models throughout her life—people who were giving her the message that books mattered. And I think that sort of seeped into your bones after a while. For me it wasn’t like that. But I think, from what I know, that was the case.
And then, of course, she had her friend Truman Capote, who was also doing it. I would guess probably that when they were kids they might have been shooting stories back and forth and telling stories collaboratively.
I believe Capote’s first fiction was published prior to To Kill a Mockingbird. So then she gets to see what that’s like, I would imagine that provides even more motivation, because here’s not only an author who has a book but somebody I know.
Atticus Finch is certainly a paragon. He’s a model that we can all aim toward. In a sense, he is so perfect, and I understand that she modeled the character somewhat on her own father. And, of course, I don’t buy for a minute that anyone’s father, my own included, or me as a father, has achieved that kind of perfection, is always spot-on in terms of what to say and what to fight for. But I imagine [her father] must have been a wonderful man, and certainly the book does seem like a tribute to some really fine values. And fighting when you need to fight.
I started writing fiction late in my life. I was about thirty years old, and most fiction writers start a lot earlier. Very early on, I slammed into the wall of all I didn’t know about how to write fiction. So I entered a program at Vermont College. It was a Master in Fine Arts program in writing, and I had the good fortune of working with a wonderful teacher named Gladys Swan—great writer, terrific teacher. Gladys has these big thick, Coke-bottle-bottom glasses that, I mean, whatever she says, it sounds like the oracle, it looks like the oracle is speaking to you, and in a sense she was. She said to me, “Wally, what would you like to get out writing fiction?” I hadn’t even asked myself that question, so I had to sort of wing it and make up an answer. I said, ‘Well, To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel I love, and it’s a novel I don’t have to work overtime to teach. The kids slip into the stream and allow the story to take them where it takes them. I guess probably my goal would be to write the kind of fiction that teenagers would want to read.” And Gladys frowned at that, and she said, “Well my dear, the first thing that I have to tell you is, Don’t prejudge who your audience is going to be. Don’t write fiction for teenagers or for anybody else. Write it for yourself. Write to explore what you need to explore. Write it to satisfy you, and then send it out, and whoever needs it will find it.”
That proved to be wonderful advice for me. And I came, over the years, to the realization that I bet is true of Harper Lee as well. You start with who and what you know. You take a survey of the lay of the land that formed you and shaped you. And then you begin to lie about it. You tell one lie that turns into a different lie. And after awhile, those models sort of lift off and become their own people rather than the people you originally thought of.
And when you weave an entire network of lies, what you’re really doing, if you’re aiming to write literary fiction, what you’re really doing is, by telling lies you are
trying to arrive at a deeper truth. Your work is no longer factual, but it’s true. It’s true not only for you and your own experience, your singular experience, but it also hopefully becomes true for other people. And your readers are nourished by that.
The opening passages are kind of difficult for high school kids. There’s some pretty highfalutin language there that can be roadblocks for kids, particularly kids who don’t like to read. And beginnings of books often are hard to get past. So when I was teaching high school, what I would very often do is read some of those first passages and get past the history of Maycomb County. The novel, of course, starts with Scout’s voice, but then it sort of becomes the adult Jean Louise, who is filling you in, giving you the exposition. But when Scout’s voice kicks in in earnest and begins to tell you the story of what began that summer and ended three years later, then the kids are OK. What they do is, they dip their foot into the water, and then they ease into the stream, and the story and the language, and the voice in particular, take them down a smooth ride. And then you don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re doing the assignments; they’re reading voluntarily and jumping forward, so you say, “Read chapters twelve and thirteen for tomorrow,” and they’ll finish the book.
Scout’s a blast. I love the fact that she’s a little smart-ass. I love the fact that she can be self-deprecating. I enjoy the fact that she speaks first with her fists and then has to sort of back up three to four steps. She’s, in a sense—and I haven’t really thought too much about this—but she’s sort of an extension of a Huck Finn character. Of course, we love Huck for those same reasons. I think she’s very typically an American character in that she’s poking at the boundaries of good taste, and what’s proper. I love some of scenes between Scout and Aunt Alexandra because she debunks a lot of that phony baloney stuff in ways that readers just love.
Alice Finch Lee
Alice Finch Lee, Harper Lee’s older sister, was born in Bonifay, Florida, in 1911. She has been practicing law at Barrett, Bugg & Lee in Monroeville, Alabama, since 1944.
My father was totally a self-made person. Back in those days, they didn’t have much rural education. He probably went to a school less than a year, all told. But he was one of the best-educated men you ever knew. By sixteen he had read himself, educated himself, and he took the teacher’s examination and taught school at sixteen. His family were all farmers, and my father was determined not to be a farmer. He took math and became an accountant, and he began to get jobs. My father became a bookkeeper for sawmill companies, and he moved around wherever. He came to Monroe County and was bookkeeper for a big sawmill down in a place called Manistee. My father eventually began to keep books for a sawmill company in Finchburg. That’s where my mother lived. That’s where they met. Then my father and mother were married in 1910 and lived in Florida, where he was keeping books for a mill down there, and I was born there. I am the only alien in the family, the only one not born in Alabama.
When I was growing up, [Monroeville] was an all-Protestant community, and now it’s not. We have a flourishing Catholic church. That is one of the differences. When I was growing up, we didn’t have things like the golf course. By the time I was an adult, we had the beginnings of a golf course, which was at the same time used as a landing field for planes to come in. Back in those days, we didn’t have sewers. We had to go to separate facilities to go to the bathroom. And when I was in the fourth grade, a young boy in my room had been excused [to go to the bathroom]. He rushed back in the building and said, “Something is flying around out there.” And with one accord the whole fourth grade rushed out. And there was a plane circling over. And that was the first airplane I could ever remember seeing.
I grew up riding trains. I loved to ride a train. To this day, if they had them, I’d ride them. There were no bridges over the Delta. The railroads were our arteries of transportation. Now when my mother grew up out in the country, the Alabama River was their highway.
Nelle Harper and I were fifteen years apart. We had different childhoods. I was an only child for nearly five years, and I wasn’t too happy when our little sister [Louise] was born. But I adjusted to that. And then, nearly five years later our little brother [Edwin] was born. And then, almost five years later, my baby sister, Nelle Harper, was born. So we grew up almost like only children. We were not companions for each other until we were adults.
When I went to college, she was just learning to walk. I was gone during that early part. Then I came home and stayed here until 1937. She was growing up then. She was a very young child. Despite people wanting to make To Kill a Mockingbird a biography or an autobiography or a true story, we had a mother. We loved both parents.
Nelle Harper grew up quite the little tomboy. The nearest child to her was the brother [Edwin], and he was definitely the big brother, even though that gap was between them. Where we lived there were no small children in the immediate neighborhood when Nelle Harper was born. Most of the people who were growing up there were my contemporaries and not small children. Back in those days, we did not have problems that people face today, and children could go where they wanted within reason.
The Christmas that Nelle Harper was going to be ten, all she wanted was a bicycle. Now, my sister Louise was going to be married on the day after Christmas. Nelle Harper was ten years old. Louise was leaving home. Nelle Harper wanted to know for sure she was getting that bicycle. So she had gone all around to all the merchants and places that carried a bicycle, and she could not find that Mr. or Mrs. Lee had bought a bicycle. She was very disgusted. She was convinced she was not going to get the bicycle for Christmas. So she just said, disgustedly, “Nobody’s having a Christmas except Wheezy. She’s getting a husband.” So she was very downcast. Christmas morning, when she found that bicycle under the tree, she couldn’t believe she had it. She just got on that bicycle and took off, and we didn’t see too much of her during the rest of the day.
At home we were pretty much allowed to go in the direction we wanted to go, unless we were headed the wrong way. But we knew we were expected to go to Sunday school and church on Sunday, which we did. We knew we had to go elementary, high school, whatever it is, through the week. But we were pretty much left on our [own] resources for entertainment.
Nelle Harper was very athletic. She liked to play with the little boys more than the little girls because she liked to play ball. She played football with them, baseball with them, and that was gone when she got up into junior high. But as I said, this was during the Depression, and children basically did not have many store-bought toys. They made their own recreations, and it was not difficult to do.
When I was little, I was a great paper-doll cutter-outer. We would order paper catalogues and make paper-doll furniture out of it. We would have whole paper dollhouses and paper dolls to reside, families and that. Maybe several of us in the neighborhood would go together and do this. I was never much in sports. Not interested, except as a bystander. I liked to watch ball.
I was a child of the Depression. After my first year of college, I had to stop. I came home and worked. There were no jobs around. People think this is the first time our country’s ever been through anything like this. But I can assure them there has been another time like it. I worked at the Monroe Journal. In fact, my father and I bought it and I worked there until ’37. I wanted to go back to school. I got a job in Birmingham at the Internal Revenue. That was the year Social Security had become law, and this whole Department of Social Security was being created as a part of IRS. So I went to Birmingham and I finished pre-law at night. I started taking it, not with the idea of finishing. I started for the improvement of skills in my job, as a number of people that work in IRS did. When I had done a couple of years of that, I had gotten hooked on wanting to go on to law school. So I finished law school there. I was in Birmingham seven years. Nelle Harper was growing up in those years, and during the war years, people who worked for the government were not allowed to use public transportation, and
gasoline was rationed. I didn’t get home too often. I took the bar the summer of ’43 and passed it. My father asked me at that time if I were interested in coming home and practicing with him. He wasn’t pushing or anything. He was just being like he’d always been: “Do your own thing, but do it well.” And I said I would have to have two questions answered. And Daddy said, “What are they?” And I said, The first one is, when you grow up in one town, you are always Mr. Lee’s little girl. Would I be an adult separate and apart from you?” And my father said, “I think you’ve been gone long enough for that not to happen.” And I said, “The second thing is, how is a small town going to react to a woman in a law office?” There were not many around in those days. And my father smiled and said, “You’ll never know until you’ve tried it.” And I decided to try it.
When I came home to build a practice, everybody knew I worked for IRS. They all assumed I’d do income tax. I’d never had done any [income tax] but make my own. Back in those days, not everybody had had to file an income tax. But the government had come up with a Victory tax, which taxed everything above $600. So everybody had to file something. I was of use with people wanting to file income taxes. I didn’t have to depend on Daddy’s practice.
My brother was in the service. He wanted to be in the Air Force, and because he was not twenty-one, which was the age of maturity back in those days, he could not go in without my father’s permission. Daddy wanted him to finish school and then go in, but the youngsters back in those days were just absolutely on their ear to get into the Air Force. Ed was in college at Auburn. Finally my father said, “Go ahead and take the test for the Air Force, and if you pass, I’ll sign it. But if you don’t pass, you’ll go back to school and finish your degree.” Ed failed to pass. He thought he was the perfect specimen, but back then they didn’t take anybody with any little injury. Ed had injured a knee when he played football, and while it didn’t bother him and he was not crippled, he wasn’t perfect. So he went ahead and enlisted as a private from Monroe County so he would be counted against this county’s quota. Then right after that, they sent him to Miami to go to officer’s training school, at which time he would come back to Auburn and get his commission.
Scout, Atticus, & Boo Page 10