To Catch A Mockingbird
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
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.
[Tom passed away in 2011]
