Re-Introducing Harper Lee and the Real Atticus Finch
It was a first draft. Go Set A Watchman, which sold a record-breaking million-plus copies when it was published in July, and this week won the Goodreads Choice Awards of 2015 for fiction, was, essentially, Harper Lee's first draft of her American classic To Kill A Mockingbird.
In Go Set A Watchman, Atticus Finch is not the American hero we thought we knew. He is not the man who used these words to express the importance of empathy and tolerance to his daughter Scout: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
Many of us could not understand how that Atticus Finch could be the Atticus Finch of Go Set A Watchman, a segregationist who spouted racist ideas and joined a White Citizens Council akin to the Ku Klux Klan.
I reached out to Charles Shields, author of the richly detailed and gripping biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. He joined me for this episode of Wavemaker Conversations: A Podcast for the Insanely Curious.
Shields became insanely curious about Harper Lee during the 17 years he spent teaching To Kill A Mockingbird to high school freshmen. This is where his curiosity led.
Nelle & Truman
Nelle Harper Lee grew up in the small Alabama town of Monroeville. Her next-door neighbor was Truman Capote. He wound up there, Shields explains, because his parents viewed him as a burden.
... they deposited him in Monroeville with 3 unmarried aunts. ... This emotional ache for his mother never left him. In fact, one time when she came for a visit and then left rather precipitously, she left behind a bottle of perfume. .... Truman drank the whole thing because he wanted to keep her essence with him, inside of him.
Shields spoke to their neighbors.
As their neighbors told me, Truman was too soft for the boys. and Nelle was too rough for the girls. So they complemented each other. And she was sort of his bodyguard. ... She would beat up people who tried to attack Truman.
Harper Lee went to the University of Alabama for a five-year program that would have produced a law degree. She wrote for both the newspaper and the satirical magazine on campus. She left college a year before graduating. Writing was her calling.
Lee joined Capote and a circle of progressive southerners living in New York. She made ends meet with an easy day job, writing her manuscript nights and weekends.
Atticus
Atticus was the working title. The character who would, one day, become America's fictional hero, Atticus Finch, was modeled after the author's father, A.C. Lee, a man beloved by his children.
Shields shares the following details:
Her father was very much like Atticus Finch. He was a self-educated lawyer. He owned the majority share in the local newspaper. He was on the board of directors for the bank, President of the Chamber of Commerce. Really one of the outstanding civic figures in that part of Alabama.
As a young attorney with only four years experience, he was appointed to defend two young black men accused of murdering a white man. And despite his best efforts, they were both hanged.
Negro justice was the unofficial term in those days. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Everyone knew it.
Harper Lee spent at least eight years of her spare time writing Atticus. But spare time wasn't getting the job done.
Blank Check
On Christmas eve, 1956, some well-to-do friends of hers in New York insisted she spend the night at their brownstone, so she wouldn't wake up alone Christmas morning.
Nelle, as she was called, presented thoughtful second-hand gifts to the family's children. She then was pointed to the Christmas tree and an envelope with her name on the outside. Inside was a letter. Charles Shields relays what it said.
'You have a year off to do nothing except write. From your friends Michael and Joy. And paper-clipped to the letter is a blank check.' And when she asked them, what does this mean, they said, 'well, you can take a writing sabbatical. Make the check out for whatever it would cost you to do nothing except write full time.'
Shields reports that Lee "filled out the check for an amount that she thought would carry her through for rent, and groceries, and utilities, and for the next year she polished off Go Set A Watchman."
Rewrite
The manuscript landed on the desk of an experienced editor at Lippincott.
The feedback to Nelle Harper Lee: "You have a great voice ... but you don't know how to construct a novel."
The editor guided Lee through three complete rewrites over the next two years. The result, set twenty years earlier than her original manuscript, was To Kill A Mockingbird.
Two years after To Kill A Mockingbird was published, shortly after it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the movie was released. Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck, was a moral giant, emphasized, says Shields, by the low camera angles looking up at him.
Two years later, in 1964, Lee returned home to Alabama. Shields says she never really liked talking about the book much. She would never write another one.
A Teacher's Challenge
Now, 59 years after that Christmas morning blank check, Charles Shields says he wishes that people who care about Miss Lee had told her not to release Go Set A Watchman. But he has some ideas about why she might have felt driven to publish what she has called "the parent of To Kill a Mockingbird." He shares those thoughts with me, and other fascinating details of Lee's life, in this Wavemaker Conversations podcast.
He also begins to address a new challenge facing high school literature teachers: How to teach To Kill a Mockingbird in light of "the first draft" -- how to reconcile two conflicting portraits of a man named Atticus, a powerful figure in the American imagination.
MICHAEL SCHULDER is the host of Wavemaker Conversations: A Podcast for the Insanely Curious. You can subscribe for free here on iTunes.
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