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To Catch A Mockingbird
Madonna Dries Christensen
For some 40 years, Harper Lee has embraced a lifestyle reminiscent of Boo Radley, the unforgettable recluse she
created in her only novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
Unlike mockingbirds, Lee sightings
are rare; like Boo, it takes something special to entice her to emerge. In 1993 she and 30 other University of Alabama female
graduates were honored in Tuscaloosa. In 1997 she attended graduation at Spring Hill College in Mobile to accept an honorary
doctorate. Her privacy was guaranteed, and she did not deliver a speech. In May 2005, when she accepted an award from the
Los Angeles Public Library, her only comment was, "I'll say it again; thank you all from the bottom of my heart."
Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, on April 28, 1926, the youngest of Frances Finch Lee and Amasa
Coleman Lee's four children. She maintains that her novel is not autobiographical, that it simply evokes a time and place
she knew well. She called it, "a love story, pure and simple."
Her editor, Tay Hohoff, explained that
the love pertains to Lee's love of the South, a father's love for his children and the love they give in return. Her
father unquestionably inspired Atticus Finch, and Truman "Bulldog" Persons (later Capote), her diminutive childhood
playmate, was clearly the model for Dill, Scout and Jem's peculiar friend. Young Nelle and her older brother Edwin, like
the fictional Finch children, often watched from the courtroom loft when their father tried cases. Many Monroeville residents
thought they found themselves or their neighbors in Lee's book, but so did people in small towns across America. Some
Monroeville townsfolk say Boo was based on Son Boular. Son got in trouble as a teenager and his father thereafter kept him
housebound. Described as gaunt and pale, Boular died at an early age from tuberculosis.
In the early 1950s, just
short of a law degree from the University of Alabama, Lee moved to New York City to write. She once said To Kill
A Mockingbird was like Topsy; it just grew." The J. B. Lippincott editors liked the manuscript, but thought
it shapeless. A Christmas gift of money from friends enabled Lee to take time off from her job at an airline to revise the
book. Finally one editor said, "It might not sell even 20,000 copies, but we love Nelle."
Lippincott
published Mockingbird in 1960, and what followed is every writer's dream; except, it seems, Harper Lee's. Book reviewers
touted 34-year-old Lee as the next William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor. Time magazine hailed
Scout Finch as the most appealing child since Carson McCuller's Frankie in "A Member of the Wedding."
Publication came at the onset of the civil rights movement. Told in honest, provocative, easy to
understand prose, Lee's depiction of racial segregation and discrimination in the South opened the eyes and minds of Northerners
and Southerners alike. Writer Mark Childress believes Mockingbird did more to alter Southern attitudes about race than any
other work of art in the 20th century.
Within a year of publication, over a half million copies had sold. The
book spent 80 weeks on bestseller lists and was serialized in Reader's Digest. Lee won
the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book award and a string of other honors. Today there are 30 million copies of Mockingbird
in print; it has been translated into 40 languages and is assigned reading in many schools. First Editions bring high prices
at auction.
Popular with ninth grade students, the reasons given were that it fit with a growing realization
that life is not a fairy tale, and they admire the moral fiber of Atticus Finch. One Northern Virginia student said,
"It taught me to see other points of view." Another said, "It speaks to small town ideals and racism, important
topics."
Gregory Peck, who played Atticus in the movie, called it his favorite role. Lee gave him her
father's pocket watch, on which she had teethed and once dropped in the gravy bowl. Peck wore and displayed the watch
the night he accepted an Oscar for his performance.
The award winning 1962 movie is as enchanting as the book,
and is itself a classic. The screenplay by Horton Foote compresses three years into one, focusing on the trial of Tom Robinson,
a Negro wrongly accused and convicted of raping a trashy white girl who lured him into her house. The black and white cinematography
lends a vintage authenticity to the Depression-era setting, enhancing the local color of that "tired old town."
The Radley place, with the porch swing squeaking, leaves tumbling underneath, is eerie, shadowy, menacing, and forbidding.
Despite her success, Lee's only other published works were four essays (in the 60s). Recently, she broke her
dry spell and penned a short piece for O, The Oprah Magazine. In 1962, New York columnist
Hal Boyle, in an article about Lee, mentioned a second book. He quoted her as saying, with a smile, "Success has had
a bad effect on me. I've gotten fat, but I'm running just as scared as before." She added, "I'm more
of a rewriter than a writer. I've been writing since I was seven but I've systematically thrown away most of it."
As children, Nelle and Truman wrote stories on Mr. Lee's old typewriter.
In her last interview, in 1964, for
Roy Newquist's book, Counterpoint, she said she never expected her novel to do well, that she
hoped someone might like it enough to give her encouragement. The massive attention, however, "was one of sheer numbness.
It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold."
Asked about the rumored second novel, she said, "It
goes ever so slowly. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I would like to leave some record of the kind
of life that existed in a very small world. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe there
is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said about it, and something to lament in its passing."
Rumors abound about the second novel, among them: Her agent and editor died and she lost interest in the book.
Her sister Alice told a reporter that a burglar stole the manuscript and Nelle didn't have the heart to start over. Given
Miss Alice's penchant for protecting her sister, perhaps Alice is a bit of a southern storyteller, too, and she put the
shuck on the reporter. The book was a nonfiction novel based on the story of an Alabama minister accused of five consecutive
murders. Lee worked for more than a year, telling a lawyer whose files she had that the manuscript was at the publisher or
that she had the galleys. He finally asked her to return his files.
Reportedly, Lee told a friend that she has
forgiven herself and lifted the burden of trying to live up to Mockingbird, and that the people she most admires are those
who are at peace with themselves.
If there ever was another manuscript, perhaps it's tucked away in an old
chifforobe, like the one Tom Robinson broke apart for Miss Mayella in Mockingbird.
When Mockingbird was re-released
in 1993, Lee wrote this Forward: Please spare Mockingbird an Introduction. As a reader, I loathe Introductions. I associate
Introductions with long gone authors and works that are being brought back into print after years of internment. Although
Mockingbird will be 33 this year, it has never been out of print and I'm still alive, although very quiet. Introductions
inhibit pleasure, they kill the joy of anticipation, they frustrate curiosity. The only good thing about Introductions is
that in some cases they delay the dose to come. Mockingbird still says what it has to say, it has managed to survive the years
without preamble.
Atticus once explained to Scout that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird because they harm
no one and give only pleasure with their singing. Later, Sheriff Tate advises Atticus that he plans to tell the townsfolk
that Bob Ewell fell on his knife, rather than reveal that Boo Radley stuck a knife into Ewell to save the Finch children.
Tate says, "I never heard tell that it's against the law for a citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime from being
committed, which is exactly what he did, but 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 bringin'
angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin', Mr. Finch, taking the one man who's done you and this town a great service
and draggin' him with his shy ways into the limelight; to me, that's a sin."
Overhearing this, Scout
tells Atticus that Mr. Tate is right. When Atticus asks what she means, Scout says, "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin'
a mockingbird, wouldn't it?"
If Harper Lee wants no angel food cakes, no interviews, it would be rude
to invade her privacy. Folks in Monroeville refute the notion that she's a recluse, saying that she socializes but simply
does not like publicity. Ironically, at the same time they're protecting their famous resident, they've built a cottage
industry of tourism around her. The 1903 courthouse has a Harper Lee/Truman Capote exhibit, and it's the setting for an
annual play based on Mockingbird. The production is always sold out but, reportedly, Lee has never attended.
The
Alabama Bar Association erected a monument in Monroeville to Atticus Finch, Lee's fictional lawyer. Such is the power
of her writing. The benevolent ghosts of Maycomb hold sway with a tenacious force that frays the line between fiction and
reality.
Despite wearing a mantle of mystery, and with only one book to her credit, Harper Lee remains a literary
giant. Her timeless story, rich in its sense of place, voice, plot and characterization, is everything a novel should be.
Her words give pleasure to first-time readers and to those who read her book again and again. Whether she likes it or not,
she's a curiosity, whose presence fans must conjure through imagination and by borrowing a few of her words.
Envision a pleasant summer evening, after a sweltering day during which, "ladies bathed before noon, after their three
o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."
Children's
voices echo off the honeysuckle scented air. Mockingbirds chatter in a live oak, its branches knit together with skeins of
Spanish moss twisting in the breeze. Wearing a flowered frock, the snowy-haired Miss Nelle glides on the porch swing, hands
in her lap; content.
She's "a proper Southern lady," the kind Aunt Alexandra hoped Jean Louise (Scout)
would become, one of those women the precocious child described as, "fragrant ladies who rocked slowly, fanned gently,
and drank cool water."
[Author's note: I considered it an honor when my book, Swinging
Sisters, appeared on a University of Wisconsin summer writing program's recommended
reading list for historical fiction, along with To Kill A Mockingbird.
***************
Toiling In The Garden Of Memory
By Madonna Dries Christensen
There's
rosemary; that's for remembrance.
* Shakespeare
Writer Robert Ruark often ribbed his friend Truman Capote about his writing ritual. Capote
wrote in longhand, at a slow pace, while lying down. Ruark sat at a desk surrounded by a secretary and several researchers,
and prided himself on producing several thousand words a day. One day Ruark boasted to Capote, "I wrote five thousand
words today. How many did you write with that little quill pen of yours?"
Capote replied, "Just one,
but it was the right word."
Diligent writers strive to put the right words in the right order, to create
well-constructed sentences. Think about a day when your writing wasn't going as well as you'd like; when you couldn't
find the exact words you needed to convey a thought or image. Now imagine you're writing a memoir, while at the same time
your mind is being ravaged by Alzheimer's disease.
That's what Thomas DeBaggio began doing in 1999 at
age 57 after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Aided by family and friends and material he wrote earlier,
the former journalist, commercial herb grower, and author of several books on herbs, combined memoir with a chronicle of his
progressing disease. Now 66, he doesn't remember writing Losing My Mind; An Intimate Look
at Life with Alzheimer's, nor his follow-up
book, When It Gets Dark: An Enlightened Reflection on Life With Alzheimer's. (both by Simon
and Schuster)
Losing My Mind was cited by New York Review of Books
as "Lit with intelligence... For its base honesty, for its awful beauty...it won't go out of date." Other reviewers
called it noble, life-affirming, unbearably poignant, frightening, powerful, and breathtaking.
DeBaggio's
prose is all that and more. It's poetic, intimate, inspiring, sad, warm, humorous, emotional, and richly evocative of
time and place. He described his anger, fears, frustration, sorrow, bewilderment, humiliation, nightmares, and hallucinations
brought on by an accidental overdose of prescribed drugs. He explained how all this affected not only him but his artist wife,
Joyce, and their son, Francesco, who now runs the family herb business in Virginia.
In Losing My Mind
DeBaggio wrote that "AD can isolate you quickly in a cocoon of sorrow," and that most people hide the disease from
themselves and from others. Not long after being diagnosed, after some of the anger and depression waned, he decided that
perhaps some good might come of his illness. He wrote, "After forty years of pussyfooting with words, I finally had a
story of hell to tell."
In the first book he admitted that he spent several minutes trying to remember how
to spell a common word, and realized the day would come when he can no longer write a clear sentence and tell a coherent story.
"That day will be the actual time of death." He referred to his brain as "a jumble of words awaiting order,
with nowhere to go." And, "The words are under control but the letters that form the words squirm in their own direction."
By the time he wrote book two he was spending an hour or more searching his mind for a particular word and how
to spell it. "I sit at my worktable and rub my hand over the hard brown wood. I try to squeeze words onto the clean white
paper. I cannot spill the words hiding in my brain."
Repetition within the two books bears witness to his
fragmented thinking. Yet, scattered throughout are observations so memorable that one wonders how he could have composed them.
"More than sweet recollections are at stake when memories begin to lose their leaves. Fire scours the brain, disabling
mind and body and squeezing what is left of life hanging on a tombstone."
Through his books and multiple
media appearances Thomas DeBaggio put a face on a dreaded disease, the face of a relatively young, thin, wiry man with gray
hair, an unruly moustache and a haunted look in his eyes. He and his family did a series of interviews with Noah Adams for
National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He was mentioned in a New York Times article about AD, and
featured in articles in the Washington Post, USA Today,
the Houston Chronicle, and other papers across the country. He appeared on Good Morning,
America, and he and Joyce appeared on Oprah. HBO cameramen frequently followed him
around for a documentary on AD.
DeBaggio found his voice as a spokesman for himself and others whose minds and
souls are being eroded. In When It Gets Dark he wrote this stunning passage: "It has not been
long since I looked into the chaos of the abyss and cried. Now that tarnished world beckons again. I loosen shards from the
steep walls to begin my long descent into the lonely world of silence. It is a world so secret its vocabulary has not been
written."
It appears, however, that the vocabulary of Alzheimer's disease has been written, word by word,
sentence by sentence, a legacy from a man who wrote, "The only time I feel alive now is when I am writing, under the
spell of work and memories."
Tom no longer remembers his friends, neighbors, and customers, but we remember
him. When my husband was an apprentice Master Gardener in Virginia, he worked for Tom in his greenhouse and they became friends.
Gary came home from work wearing a potpourri of herbal scents; among them my favorite, rosemary. Today, when I walk in the
garden, I pick a sprig of rosemary to carry with me, and I think of Tom. There's rosemary; that's for remembrance.
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