GEORGE Best is sitting up in a hotel bed with a gorgeous blonde beside him, when the waiter arrives with a bottle of vintage champagne. The waiter looks at the former soccer star and asks: “George, where did it all go wrong?”
Harper Lee
Best used to tell that story about himself, and oh, how we laughed.
If anybody were to ask that of Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed books in literary history, she could honestly say that she got lucky precisely twice in her life. Once with her sister. Once with a married couple she befriended, in the middle of the last century. Other than that, it has been abuse, invasion, alcohol, and everything else public success has to deliver.
Her older sister was a smart lawyer who took over their father’s legal practice in a small southern town and continued working until she was 100 years old. She looked after Harper’s affairs with a fierce competence that was informed by an intimate understanding of her sister’s weaknesses.
Not that Harper Lee started out as a weakling. Far from it. She was a rough-and-ready tomboy who ‘adopted’ a neighbouring boy. He was possessed of an elegance ill-suited to America’s deep south in the 1950s.
That boy was Truman Capote, and the two of them ganged up on the world. Not that they had much choice. The world had ganged up on them first.
Harper’s mother was nasty and mentally ill, and neighbours said that she had tried to drown the young Harper.
Capote’s family were as hateful and manipulative as it’s possible to find outside of a David Mamet play.
These two kids, abandoned to their own devices, observed their neighbourhood with the eyes of the writers they were to become. In early adulthood, Harper became Truman’s researcher when he sold a publisher the idea of a book based on a notorious murder. The book became In Cold Blood, which clothed the facts in the sensibilities of a novel.
It was a major success and made a profitable brand of Capote.
But not of Harper Lee. Truman’s success was not the rock on which their friendship perished as the monomaniacal greed with which he handled that success that forever drove a rift between them.
Harper had done momentous research for the book, had been, at times when Capote’s energies flagged, the motive force behind its writing, and, some believed, had ghost-written the bulk of it.
None of that was apparent in the acknowledgements, or on the publicity tour on which he joyously embarked.
Harper’s great contribution to Capote’s work was not generally know to readers.
By 20, Harper was the survivor of two forms of abuse, first by her mad mother, and then by her best friend from her earliest days.
It is interesting that, today, Capote’s reputation stands largely on two works: In Cold Blood, written with Lee’s help, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a slight novella remembered only because they made a movie of it starring Audrey Hepburn.
Harper said nothing publicly about either betrayal. Ever. Instead, she went to New York and got a non-writing job.
Then, a screenwriter friend in the city, together with his wife, handed her enough money to live for a year in Manhattan, doing nothing but writing. She laid into the task of producing a novel.
When the publisher’s reader got hold of the manuscript of Go Set A Watchman, structural problems were immediately evident.
It lacked a connecting thread, and read like a series of related short stories.
The publisher picked out one adult character, named Scout, and suggested Lee write about Scout’s childhood.
“I was a first-time writer, so I did what I was told,” Lee remembered later. The end result was To Kill A Mockingbird, which was later filmed with Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, the lawyer who unsuccessfully defends a black man against a false accusation of rape, while somewhat distractedly raising his children, including tomboy Scout.
Harper Lee, the attractive, dark loner with the ever-present cigarette, was an international success. And what did her father — the small-town lawyer widely credited with having served as the basis for the Finch character — say when asked about her achievement?
This man, so self-important and formal that he wore a three-piece suit when playing golf, told a reporter that this success meant that his daughter, Harper, would now have to “do something good”. How’s that for a passive-aggressive put-down? Of your own daughter?
When the patronising tone of her father’s comments were put together with the overwhelming media and literary interest in when her next book would come out, they added to the young woman’s terror. That terror of what critics would do to the first book had yielded to an astonished gratitude when the book took off and continued to fly, as it does right down to the present day (it sells steadily all over the world).
If fame is a double-edged sword, Harper’s old mate Truman Capote ran his life down one side of that blade, becoming what in Ireland we call a media hoor.
Having come from cruel exclusion, Capote couldn’t get enough of being lionised, and spent the rest of his life appearing on TV and radio, doing increasingly trivial writing assignments, and hanging around the rich and famous.
Harper went the other way. She never saw a microphone she liked, never encountered a camera she didn’t hate on sight. She gave no interviews and became even more reclusive than she had been in her university days, when she had no social life.
Alcohol played an increasingly central role in her life, until she sobered up at a relatively advanced age.
The second book never came.
Lawsuits did, however, as one exploiter after another moved in to take a bite of her fame. Her sister had to work overtime to protect her, commenting only a couple of years ago, before she died at 103, that Nelle (Harper Lee’s given name) was too soft for her own good.
Now, Harper Lee lies in bed in an assisted-living facility in her home town, reportedly “happy as hell” that the novel rejected on sight more than 50 years ago is to be published.
Some who are close to her believe that her memory and judgment are shot and that the publication of what may be a markedly poorer novel than To Kill A Mockingbird is the final abuse meted out to a fragile, aged genius.
Terry Prone
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