Sherry Chandler

Harper Lee surfaces briefly

By way of Sour Duck’s Link Blog, I found this BBC article about Harper Lee’s upcoming letter to O, The Oprah Magazine:

Harper Lee, the reclusive US author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has written a rare published piece - a letter to a magazine about reading as a child.

She tells O, The Oprah Magazine, that in her Depression-era Alabama village “youngsters had little to do but read”.

The 80-year-old adds that in today’s society “where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books”.

…

She says her older brother and sisters read aloud to stop Lee annoying them.

Her mother also read her a story every day and her father read from the four newspapers he went through each evening, she says.

This sounds a bit like my childhood in late 1940s Kentucky, though I am about 20 years junior to Harper Lee. In fact, if she’s 80, by the Depression she should have been just about old enough to read to herself. But probably, in Alabama as in Kentucky, hard financial times didn’t wait to start until 1929.

You should click through just to see Lee looking white-haired and chubby-cheeked as you would hope Scout would grow old to be.

Sour Duck asks, what’s up with publishing one great novel and then falling silent? But then, Truman Capote claimed never bothered to deny rumors that it was he who wrote that one great novel, so maybe she figured, with friends like that, there was no point trying to do another.

On the relationship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote, a correspondent writes with a link to this NYTimes Garrison Keillor review of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

One evening in mid-December, she meets Truman at Grand Central and they board the 20th Century Limited for Chicago. He has reserved a pair of roomettes. He’s on his way to Garden City, Kan., on assignment for The New Yorker, to write about the murders of four members of a prominent farm family, the Clutters, and he’s asked her to help him do the research. They spend a month in Kansas, an odd couple. A short man in a sheepskin coat and moccasins and a long scarf, a rather pushy self-centered New York queer, and a tall gracious Southern woman with a knack for saying the right thing. Their big breakthrough comes on Christmas Day. They’re invited for dinner at the home of Cliff Hope, the attorney of the murdered farmer, Herb Clutter. Also present are the detective Alvin Dewey and his wife, Marie. Dewey is coordinating the murder investigation and he had been put off by Truman at first, but he and his wife and the Hopes are literate people with a high regard for writers and there is a bottle of J&B Scotch and Harper Lee is a steady woman in whose presence Truman shines. And thus Dewey becomes their key source, the man who makes “In Cold Blood” possible.

It’s the beginning of the time of her life. Her book is done, a big relief, and she is getting intimations of the success to come. A lawyer’s daughter, she is on a big murder case. She works hard, takes 150 typewritten pages of careful notes, puts her writerly intelligence at the service of her friend (who will never acknowledge the extent of her help), gets engrossed in the story, feels the thrill of collaboration. She goes back to New York to correct her own galleys, returns to Kansas with Truman for the trial of the killers, then back to New York for the publication of the book on July 11, 1960. She is 34 and in six months she has had her hands on two American classics. Ahead of her is a deluge of success, a potful of money and some sort of vindication in the eyes of Monroeville. Truman will disintegrate and die at 59 and she will persist. The lady looks around at a room full of books, closes the door, and drives off with her sister to an early supper at Dave’s Catfish Cabin, a plate of fish and hush puppies and a glass of tea. Everybody at Dave’s knows who she is and nobody asks her made-up questions about writing or fame or how she explains the long run her novel has enjoyed. She is apparently in good humor and enjoying her food and not planning to go on Oprah or Charlie Rose. And so there, dear reader, you will just have to leave her.

I guess she reconsidered a little bit about Oprah.

Possibly related posts:

Arts, Briefly

Capote

Steel Toe Open Reading

Ashbery in the Gray Lady

Liberty Hall

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.