The unauthorized biography of a recluse
Mockingbird: A portrait of Harper Lee
By Charles J. Shields
Henry Holt and Co.
Paperback $15
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Charles J. Shields’ portrait of one of the most reclusive writers in America, Nellie Harper Lee, was first published by Henry Holt and Co. in 2006. In April 2007 it was released in paperback.
So why review a book that has been on the market for a year?
There are multiple reasons, but primarily because I hadn’t read it until last Friday when it came as a Father’s Day gift. But I probably couldn’t have reviewed it since Charles Shields lives in Virginia and under The News-Review policy a year ago only books written by Northwest writers were subjects for a review.
"Mockingbird" is actually an unauthorized biography of one of the most unique writers in America, Nellie Harper Lee, who wrote a classic first novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," in 1960 which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and continues to sell almost a million copies annually. It has been made into a movie and has been required reading in English classes across America. Shields himself reveals he became fascinated with the author while using Harper Lee’s masterpiece novel as an English teacher.
He is quoted in an interview in Southern Literary Review as saying it took him four years and literally mountains of research to complete the biography. Of course he got no help from the 80-year-old author who still lives in Monroeville, Alabama and had publicly announced in 1964 that she had stopped giving interviews.
In preparing his in-depth biography of Harper Lee, Shields interviewed more than 600 of her neighbors, childhood friends, law school classmates and Kansas residents who became her friends while she helped her childhood chum, Truman Capote, research "In Cold Blood," a non-fiction novel that became an American classic. The results of Shields’ massive research is a book that brings to life this reclusive writer, her family, her friends and neighbors, her writing struggles, yet in many ways deepens the mystery of who is Harper Lee.
The genius of the book is the way Shields was able to ferret out such intimate details about the writer, particularly the bonds of friendship between Truman Capote and herself. Harper Lee was a tomboy. Truman, as a child her next door neighbor, was an effeminate boy who often got beat up by school bullies whom Harper Lee would wade into, fists flying to protect her friend.
She and Truman had a secret hideaway where they would spend many afternoons making up stories and typing them on an old Underwood typewriter.
Truman moved away from Alabama to New York and began publishing some of those very stories he and Harper Lee shared as children. Harper Lee stayed in Alabama and following in the footsteps her father, A.C. Lee, and her older sister, Alice, went to college to study law. She expressed her writing while working on the literary magazine at the University of Alabama and from that was born her dream to go to New York and become a writer.
She did so according to the book, over the stern objection of her father. Shields said that her loyalty to Truman Capote was unwavering, but he slighted her pursuit of a writing career and it was actually her friends Michael and Joy Brown that encouraged her to write.
Shields said the original title of her book was "Go Set a Watchman," later changed to "Atticus," the name of the lead character in her book, the attorney who defends a black man accused of raping a white girl in deeply segregated Alabama. It was Tay Hohoff, an editor at Lippincott & Company that chose the title "To Kill a Mockingbird" based on a line in the book in which Scout says to her father, it is a sin to kill a mockingbird "because mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy."
Shields believes many of the characters in Harper Lee’s book were based on actual people in her Alabama town, including Atticus being based on her father and Dill, one of the friends of Scout and Jem, is based on Truman Capote. Even Capote was once quoted as saying the first two-thirds of the book "is quite literal and true."
Today, at age 80 and hard of hearing, Harper Lee lives in Monroeville with her older sister, Alice, 95, both spinsters, in a house said to be full of books. There are persistent rumors that Harper Lee has written a memoir and it will be published posthumously, but there are always rumors concerning reclusive people.
At the end of the book, Shields may have come close to resolving the mystery about why Harper Lee shuns the limelight when he reveals an unsubstantiated comment that Harper Lee had made at a party in New York:
"I had every intention of writing many novels," but she became overwhelmed by the success of "To Kill a Mockingbird," and as a result every waking hour seemed to be devoted to promotion and publicity surrounding the book. That is said to have caused her to retreat from the spotlight.
If the $25 hardback "Mockingbird" was a little out of your budget, you have to keep in mind that the traditional Father’s Day tie costs as much or more than this $15 great paperback book.
(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times. He writes a weekly column for The News-Review Opinion Page every Thursday.)