I Am Scout (12 page)

But it was too late. Walter had been incarcerated on death row in Kilby Prison, near Montgomery. While Walter waited his turn to die three different times, he suffered a mental breakdown. The prison physician wrote to Governor Miller on July
20
: “It is our opinion that he is a mental patient and that his place is not here.”
28
Governor Miller asked the state physician inspector to examine Walter personally. “It is my opinion that the above named prisoner,” the inspector replied a few days later, “the man whose sentence you recently commuted, is insane.”
29

On July
30
, Walter arrived at Searcy Hospital for the Insane, in Mt. Vernon, Alabama. He remained confined to the state mental hospital until he died of tuberculosis, in August
1937
.

*   *   *

The potential of Walter Lett's trial to inspire sympathy, and its power to cast light on a racist judicial system in a small town, made it the better choice for Nelle's novel than the Scottsboro Boys trials. Moreover, she knew the details of it well, as do many older people who still live in Monroeville. And in her imagination, she could see the hero, the attorney in charge of a fictionalized version of Walter's defense, fitting inside the Monroe County Courthouse with ease. She had seen him there many times. It was her father, Mr. Lee.

In fact, Mr. Lee had defended two blacks accused of murder, in November
1919
. He was just a
29
-year-old attorney with four years' experience when he was appointed by the court to argue his first criminal case. He did his utmost, but lost, as he was destined to do, given the times.
30
Both his clients were hanged. He never took another criminal case.

But now, as a writer, Nelle could use this episode in her father's life to create a character—Atticus Finch, who could defend someone similar to Walter Lett, the character Tom Robinson. By using her father as the model for Atticus, his virtues as a humane, fair-minded man would be honored.

*   *   *

With the major elements for her novel in place, Nelle set to work on
To Kill a Mockingbird
in the winter of
1957
. As any successful novelist must do, she needed to create a convincing landscape for her reader to enter. So the setting of
To Kill a Mockingbird
is Maycomb, Alabama, a town similar to Monroeville. The time is the Great Depression of the
1930
s. Maycomb County is so poor that the energy of life itself seems to be on hold. “People moved slowly then,” Nelle wrote. “They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”
31

Nelle's time frame is a three-year period in Maycomb between the summer of
1932
and Halloween night
1935
. Truman Capote later said the first two thirds of the book—the portion about Scout, Dill, and Jem (Nelle, Truman, and a combination of Nelle's brother, Edwin, and Truman's cousin Jennings, probably) trying to coax Boo Radley out of his house—“are quite literal and true.”
32

To populate the streets of Maycomb, Nelle thought back on the inhabitants of Monroeville in the early
1930
s: officials, merchants, churchgoers, and even the local ne'er-do-wells. After the novel was published, some folks believed they recognized themselves and neighbors. Truman made no bones about telling friends, “Most of the people in Nelle's book are drawn from life.”
33

Nelle Harper Lee in the late 1950s when she was writing
To Kill a Mockingbird,
but calling it
Atticus.
(Papers of Annie Laurie Williams, Columbia University)

An interesting twist about
To Kill a Mockingbird
is that there are two first-person narrative voices: the first is Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed “Scout.” She talks, thinks, and acts like a six- to nine-year-old girl—albeit a very bright one—who perceives her world and the people in it as only an insatiably curious (and talkative) child could. The second narrator is Scout, too, now an adult looking back on events with the benefit of hindsight. Sometimes the voices will alternate. For example, the adult Scout will set the stage:

When I was almost six and Jem was nearly ten, our summertime boundaries (within calling distance of Calpurnia) were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose's house two doors to the north of us, and the Radley Place three doors to the south. We were never tempted to break them. The Radley Place was inhabited by an entity the mere description of whom was enough to make us behave for days on end; Mrs. Dubose was plain hell.

That was the summer Dill came to us.
34

Then six-year-old Scout describes the actual moment Dill appeared and drama replaces explanation. The narration provided by the adult Scout is like a voice-over in a film.

A few critics later found fault with this technique. Phoebe Adams in
The Atlantic
dismissed the story as “frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult.”
35
Granville Hicks wrote in
The Saturday Review
that “Lee's problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn't consistently solved it.”
36
W. J. Stuckey, in
The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Look Backward,
attributed Nelle's “rhetorical trick” to a failure to solve “the technical problems raised by her story and whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view, she switches to the other.”
37

The setting of
To Kill a Mockingbird
mirrors almost exactly the neighborhood where Harper Lee grew up. (Yoko Hirose, illustrator)

It may be that Nelle had trouble deciding which point of view was better. She rewrote the novel three times: the original draft was in the third person; then she changed to the first person, and later rewrote the final draft, which blended the two narrators, who live both in the “present” of the novel and look back in time, too.
38

In addition to her struggles with the novel's point of view, the effort of making progress on the story was so awful she almost gave up. A perfectionist, Nelle was more of a “rewriter” than a writer, she admitted later.
39
She “spent her days and nights in the most intense efforts to set down what she wanted to say in the way which would best say it to the reader,” said Tay.
40
While working out of her apartment in New York, she lived on pennies, according to friends. No one “inquired too closely into what she ate,” although now and then, another of Miss Watson's protégés living in New York invited Nelle over for a square meal and the chance to talk about how things were going on the book.
41
Then, for months at a time, Nelle returned to Monroeville to help care for her father, who had been in poor health since the deaths of his wife and son. During those visits, she went to the country club in Monroeville and found a room where she could write without interruption.

When it was necessary, Nelle and Tay met to discuss the book's progress. Tay remembered, “We talked it out, sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of thinking.”
42
(She concurred with Nelle about changing the title to
To Kill a Mockingbird,
from
Atticus,
and about Nelle calling herself Harper Lee. Nelle never liked it when people mispronounced her name “Nellie.”)
43
Tay's main concern was the structure of
To Kill a Mockingbird.
In her view, Nelle needed “professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure. After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision—there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it—the true stature of the novel became evident.”
44

Even now, nearly
50
years after
To Kill a Mockingbird
appeared, the rumor persists that Nelle Harper Lee didn't write the novel herself. Truman Capote, so goes the whisper campaign, wrote large portions—or maybe all of it.

Tay Hohoff's son-in-law, Dr. Grady H. Nunn, said such a deception wouldn't have occurred to Nelle.

I am satisfied that the relationship between Nelle and Tay over those three years while
Mockingbird
was in the making developed into a warmer and closer association than is usual between author and editor. I believe that special association came about at least in part because they worked, together, over every word in the manuscript. Tay and Arthur became Nelle's close friends, sort of family, and that friendship continued beyond the publication of the book. I doubt that the special closeness could possibly have happened had there been an alien ghostwriter, Capote, involved.
45

Also, given Truman's inability to keep anybody's secrets, it's highly unlikely that he wouldn't have claimed right of authorship after the novel became famous. He did say, which Nelle never denied, that he read the manuscript and recommended some edits because it was too long in places.

Without question, the hard work of creating
To Kill a Mockingbird
fell squarely on Nelle, though “she always knew I was in her corner,” said Tay, “even when I was most critical.”
46

Nevertheless, one cold night in New York City the effort of writing and rewriting almost got the better of Nelle. She was seated at her desk in her apartment on York Avenue, rereading a page in her typewriter over and over. Suddenly she gathered up everything she'd written, walked over to a window, and threw the entire draft outside into the snow. The manuscript of what would become one of the most popular novels of the
20
th century landed in the slush. Pages of it blew down an alley. Then she called Tay and tearfully explained what she'd done. Tay told her to march outside immediately and retrieve the pages. They had worked too hard to give up now! Feeling exhausted, Nelle bundled up and went out into the darkness, “since I knew I could never be happy being anything but a writer … I kept at it because I knew it had to be my first novel, for better or for worse.”
47

*   *   *

Besides Tay, there were others in her corner, of course. Her second family in Manhattan gathered around her, giving her creative and emotional support. Michael and Joy Brown continued to depend on Nelle as an aunt to their children, and as Joy's best friend. Nelle's husband-and-wife agents, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain, invited her to their summer place, the Old Stone House in Connecticut, for long weekends. Nelle wrote them chatty letters from Monroeville during her visits home, catching them up on family news and local events.

Finally, in the spring of
1959
, right before the final draft of the manuscript was ready for delivery to Lippincott, Nelle reached out to an inspirational figure in her dream of becoming a writer. She presented her novel to her former English teacher, Miss Gladys Watson, now Mrs. Watson-Burkett, and asked her to critique it.

At night, Mrs. Watson-Burkett would take it out of her sewing basket, jot notes in the margins, and discuss it with her husband.
48
One day after school, she asked a student, Cecil Ryland, to come up to her desk. According to Cecil, Mrs. Watson-Burkett said she had finished proofreading a novel by a former student and would he please run it over to her house. “And so, I gathered up the manuscript in an old stationery box, and took it and went knocking on her door. Nelle Harper Lee came to the door, and I said, ‘Here's your book.' And she said ‘Thank you.' Little did I realize that I held a little bit of history in my hands.”
49