‘Mockingbird’ meets ‘Call It Sleep’

Elsewhere in BSR this week, SaraKay Smullens suggests the latter conclusion. Based on the existing evidence as well as her long experience as a family therapist, SaraKay concludes — persuasively, I think — that Harper Lee was muzzled for decades by her domineering older sister (and lawyer) Alice Lee, who had a vested interest in protecting the fantasy image of their fictitious father figure Atticus Finch portrayed in Mockingbird.

Yet the questions persist: Why would a writer — a successful writer, no less — forsake her chosen craft for more than 50 years? And how could a small-town woman who had made it in New York City remain so slavishly in thrall to a provincial sister back home in Alabama?

Should Woody Allen quit?

The explanations offered thus far strike me as less than satisfying:

• Harper Lee was a private person overwhelmed by the spotlight, so she withdrew completely. Plausible. But Harper Lee’s total withdrawal generated its own spotlight, as it did with J.D. Salinger.
• With Mockingbird, she had said everything she wanted to say. Not so, as the discovery of Watchman demonstrates.
• She wasn’t that good a writer to begin with, and she knew it. Possible. But more likely, when Mockingbird appeared, Harper Lee hadn’t yet found her authorial voice, and her sister Alice’s interventions assured that she never would — at least until after Alice died last year.
• She knew she could never write another book as good as Mockingbird, so why even try? This was Alice Lee’s explanation, which strikes me as childish and simplistic. Adults learn and grow from their mistakes and failures. Writers are driven to write. Movie directors are driven to make movies. Peter Bogdanovich, Sylvester Stallone, and Michael Cimino could have achieved cinematic immortality by retiring after The Last Picture Show (1971), Rocky (1976), and The Deer Hunter (1978), respectively. They didn’t, even though their subsequent turkeys demonstrated that their initial masterpieces were flukes. Woody Allen’s films of the past 20 years have largely torpedoed his former reputation as an audaciously original observer of the modern human condition, but making movies is his métier.

Roth’s sexual fantasies

In the quest for answers, it may help to point out that Harper Lee’s experience isn’t unique. Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Henry Roth’s 1934 psychological classic Call It Sleep is told through the eyes of an innocent child modeled after the author. Both narrators confront threatening adult worlds beyond their control: in Mockingbird, a racially segregated Alabama town in the 1930s; in Call It Sleep, New York’s teeming and alien (to Jewish immigrants) Lower East Side, circa 1910. Both books inevitably touched sensitive nerves within the authors’ families (Call It Sleep delves into the narrator’s sexual fantasies about himself and his parents).

Call It Sleep received widespread critical acclaim upon its publication, yet Roth (again like Harper Lee) didn’t write another book for 60 years, instead withdrawing to New England to work as a woodsman, teacher, and psychiatric attendant in a state mental hospital. Roth attributed his writer’s block to depression, ideological frustration, and personal confusion. To sort out his confusion, in 1994 — when he was 88 — Roth finally produced Mercy of a Rude Stream, a monumental four-volume epic whose sexually obsessed protagonist is modeled, again, after Roth himself. Among other confessions, the protagonist describes his incestuous relations with his sister and a cousin.

Needless to say, Roth’s real-life younger sister Rose was outraged when she saw the first two volumes. She threatened to sue, forcing Roth to delete the sibling incest references from the last two volumes of his opus. Both siblings died shortly afterward, and it’s still unclear whether the alleged incest was real or imagined. What is clear is that Rose suffered public embarrassment because of her connection to a famous writer with a compulsion to bare his soul.

Censoring James Joyce

A similar dynamic may have been at work in the Lee household. Both sisters may well have been gay. (Neither married, and Harper’s closest male friend was Truman Capote.) Such a label might not have hampered Harper’s literary career in New York, but it could have destroyed Alice’s legal career in Monroeville, Alabama in the 1960s. Had Harper continued to write, Alice might have been tarnished sooner or later. So Alice had a motive to silence her sister, beyond any desire to perpetuate the saintly image of their fictitious father Atticus Finch.

To be sure, most of us have reason to prevent our relatives from broadcasting the family secrets. But if our most creative minds — James Joyce, say, or D.H. Lawrence or Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf — must censor their innermost thoughts for the sake of peace in the family, what a dull place the world would be. This is the tradeoff that any creative soul — as well as the soul’s relatives — must confront.

An aborted child

Success, Frank Sinatra once observed, enables you to continue doing what you want to do. But Harper’s Lee’s overwhelming success at an early age produced the opposite effect.

Tay Hohoff, Harper Lee’s original editor at J.B. Lippincott, astutely perceived what the book-buying market wanted in 1960, so she sacrificed Harper Lee’s Watchman manuscript to create Mockingbird. Its awesome commercial success in turn created, half a century later, the market that has catapulted Watchman to the top of today’s bestseller lists. What got lost in the shuffle was Harper Lee’s ability to develop her own mature voice over all those years.

“A thought is like a child inside our body,” says Rachel, the minister’s daughter, in Inherit the Wind, the 1955 Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee drama about the Scopes trial. “It has to be born. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too…. Bad or good, it doesn’t make any difference. The ideas have to come out — like children. Some of ’em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don’t you?”

Young Harper Lee had a “baby” that had to be born. It was aborted, you might say, and replaced with a much healthier baby. But that healthier baby wasn’t hers. She carried her original baby inside of her for more than 50 years. Is Go Set a Watchman a healthy baby or a sickly baby? Posterity will decide. But sooner or later, it had to be born.

In the last analysis, though, it won’t do to blame Alice Lee or Tay Hohoff or greedy publishers or fear of homophobia for Harper Lee’s withdrawal. Ultimately we’re all responsible for our actions. (Henry Roth, whatever his neuroses, didn’t blame them on others.) Harper Lee, of all people, must understand that. To Kill A Mockingbird is, among other things, a celebration of obscure people (like Atticus Finch but also the reclusive Boo Radley) who, when confronted with a crisis, rise to the occasion. Surely Harper Lee suffered her shares of obstacles. But she also enjoyed more breaks than most of us do. If she fixated on the obstacles rather than the breaks, that was her choice.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should mention that Julie Fallowfield, Harper Lee’s literary agent from 1970 until she retired in 1996, also represented me from 1975 to 1996. Also, Alan Pakula, who produced the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, was my cousin. But I never discussed the author, the book, or the film with either my agent or my cousin.