Scouting the truth

Is publication of ‘new’ Harper Lee novel her desire, or a windfall for opportunists?

File-This Aug. 20,2007 file photo shows author Harper Lee smiling during a ceremony honoring the four new members of the  Alabama Academy of Honor in at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Lee has settled a New York lawsuit against two of the defendants she sued in May to re-secure the copyright to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A court filing Friday Sept. 6, 2013, in federal court in Manhattan says Lee's lawsuit against defendants Leigh Ann Winick and Gerald Posner has been dismissed. A lawyer for the two said a settlement with the remaining defendants is likely to be reached next week. (AP Photo/Rob Carr, File)
File-This Aug. 20,2007 file photo shows author Harper Lee smiling during a ceremony honoring the four new members of the Alabama Academy of Honor in at the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Lee has settled a New York lawsuit against two of the defendants she sued in May to re-secure the copyright to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A court filing Friday Sept. 6, 2013, in federal court in Manhattan says Lee's lawsuit against defendants Leigh Ann Winick and Gerald Posner has been dismissed. A lawyer for the two said a settlement with the remaining defendants is likely to be reached next week. (AP Photo/Rob Carr, File)

MONROEVILLE, Ala. -- Would you like to understand how the "new" Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman, came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird -- one of the definitive books of the American 20th century -- when, by all the known facts, it's an uneven first draft that was never considered for publication?

Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant best-seller, months before anyone has read it?

Pull up a rocking chair, pour two fingers of bourbon -- make it three -- and let's have a little chat, in the gloaming in this little town in south Alabama where Lee grew up with the real-life characters whose fictional counterparts populate the only book she ever had published.

...

First, those delicate questions.

Harper Lee, 88, had a stroke in 2007. She is, by all accounts, almost completely deaf and blind. She resides in an assisted-living facility out on the Alabama Highway 21 bypass in this slow-moving town of 6,500, not all that much different from the fictional Maycomb she immortalized more than a half-century ago.

The high drama around the impending publication of Watchman stems from the fact that Lee had long vowed she would never publish again. She's also one of the most famously private authors in modern publishing history, up there with J.D. Salinger.

Her attorney, Tonja Carter, took over representation when Alice Lee -- the novelist's older sister, housemate, lawyer and lifelong protector -- became infirm a couple of years ago. Carter says her client reversed her decades-old stance after Carter stumbled upon a copy of Watchman last summer. Now, according to Carter, Lee is delighted it has shot to the top of best-seller lists, five months ahead of publication.

People have questioned the story, wondering whether a person in Lee's declining health is capable of having given reflective consideration to a manuscript she wrote 58 years ago.

Carter and Andrew Nurnberg, Lee's international rights agent, say yes.

Carter described Lee as "a very strong, independent and wise woman who should be enjoying the discovery of her long-lost novel," in remarks to The New York Times, the only media outlet to which she has spoken. "Instead, she is having to defend her own credibility and decision making."

Nurnberg began representing Lee's interests in 2013, after her longtime agent was found to have been involved in usurping her copyright. The domestic and international rights to Mockingbird are serious business -- according to 2012 court papers, Lee earns about $3 million per year.

Harper Collins asked The Washington Post to direct its questions to Nurnberg, who requested those questions be sent through email: Does the newly discovered manuscript bear a date? Did Lee read the work and make comments? Back in the day, did the editors and agents involved in publishing Mockingbird see this and approve it for publication? What is Lee's contract for this book? Since she never married, had no children and is the last survivor of her immediate family, were any of her more distant relatives consulted for approval?

A spokesman for Nurnberg said he was traveling and could not answer questions. One of Lee's nephews located by The Post did not return calls. And Carter did not respond to multiple calls, emails and visits to her office and rural home outside Monroeville. When a Post reporter went to the house of her brother-in-law, who lives less than a mile away, asking for assistance in locating the home of Tonja Carter, he politely directed the reporter to the wrong house.

...

In part, questions around the new publication were triggered by friends who have known Lee for 50 years or more -- longer than her current lawyer or agent. They say they have witnessed a stark mental decline in their friend and that her short-term memory is erratic. These friends are also amazed that, after Carter said the book was discovered last summer, Lee appears to have confided that fact to no one else.

"She surprised everybody by coming to the [Alabama] Writers Symposium two years ago," says Mary Tucker, a retired schoolteacher here. "I went to see her the next week, telling her how excited everyone was that she came. And she said, 'Oh, but I didn't go to that.'"

Wayne Flynt, professor emeritus of history at Auburn University and a friend of the author, says Lee was "entirely lucid" when he visited her recently. He thinks the idea that she's being manipulated is "ridiculous."

Yet, he adds, "she has trouble remembering what she had for breakfast, that sort of thing." He also says she never mentioned the discovery of the manuscript in several visits they had since it was discovered, including the day before the announcement.

In the early 2000s, the Lee sisters gave author Marja Mills access to their lives for a gentle portrait -- even, Mills says, agreeing for her to move in next door. But after The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee came out last year, Harper Lee gave a statement that she had never given permission.

In a recent interview, Mills says that Carter accosted her in the parking lot of the assisted-care facility one day -- after she'd stopped reporting but before the book came out -- accusing her of taking advantage of her client.

"She was extremely confrontational when there was no cause to be," Mills said in mid-February.

It was such an embarrassing situation that Alice Lee wrote Mills an apology, dated May 12, 2011, which Mills released to the media. In it, Alice wrote that Carter had written the accusation and coaxed Nelle (Lee's first name) to sign it.

"When I questioned Tonja I learned that she had without my knowledge typed out the statement, carried it to The Meadows and had Nelle Harper sign it. ... Poor Nelle Harper can't see and can't hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence. Now she has no memory of the incident.

"I was talking to Tonja about the matter this morning, and she said to me: 'How are we going to get this corrected?' I replied: 'I had no idea and it was her problem, not mine, she created it.' I don't know what she has done."

She closed with: "I am humiliated, embarrassed and upset at the suggestion of a lack of integrity at my office. I am waiting for the other shoe to fall -- Alice."

Carter has never publicly disputed Alice Lee's letter.

Alice died, at age 103, in November.

Three months later, word about Watchman appeared.

...

Monroeville has never been much more than a bump on the road between Mobile and Montgomery.

The youngest of four children, Nelle ("Ellen," the name of a favorite aunt, spelled backward) was a child during the Great Depression. A.C. Lee, lawyer, moved his family here in 1912 from a few dozen miles away. It was a homely little place: red dirt, pine trees, cotton fields and unpainted houses; a segregated backwater.

The only thing remarkable about Monroeville was Lee and her sometimes next-door neighbor -- Truman Capote.

They grew up wanting to be writers. A.C. gave the children a manual typewriter on which to compose their stories, and they were both "apart people," as Capote would later say.

He eventually settled in New York with his mother and adoptive father. He made a splash with his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which featured a character based on Nelle. He wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's. He was a star.

She -- a high school tomboy, ridiculed at the University of Alabama for wearing men's clothes -- chafed at the suffocating boundaries of her town and state. She dropped out of college, disgusted, and followed her buddy Tru to New York in 1949.

She first worked at a bookstore, then as a ticket agent for an airline. For seven years, on nights and weekends, she wrote fiction -- often short stories -- publishing nothing.

But for Christmas 1956, a wealthy couple who doted on the struggling young writer bestowed her with enough money to take a year off and write. Thrilled, Lee locked herself away, smoking furiously, staying up until midnight, biographer Charles J. Shields wrote in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, a 2006 best-seller.

Three weeks later, she took the first 49 pages of a manuscript to an agent her friends suggested. Annie Laurie Williams was a titan of the era. She had represented the film and dramatic interests of colossal successes such as Gone With the Wind. Her husband, Maurice Crain, represented the literary side of the couple's business.

Williams was a meticulous record keeper, so when Lee handed over the pages, she noted it on a 3-by-5 card and filed it away:

"1-14-57 Go Set a Watchman -- p. 1 through 49 of novel ms -- 1 copy brought in by author"

Writing hard and fast now, Lee returned a week later, thrusting another batch of pages at the agency:

"1-21-57: p. 50 through 103-- 1 copy brought in by author"

Over the next six weeks, Lee brought in batches of pages until, on Feb. 27, she delivered the last of 293 pages.

"Ms is now complete," Williams noted on another 3-by-5 card, now kept with her papers at Columbia University Libraries in New York.

Lee had anchored the tale in the present day. Jean Louise Finch -- nicknamed "Scout" -- was going back to her small Alabama town to talk with her father, Atticus, an aging lawyer.

But Williams and Crain thought the draft was problematic. The Montgomery bus boycott, taking place just 90 miles from Monroeville, had concluded a year before. Congress was wrestling with the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower would sign in the fall.

Crain, taking control of the editing, thought the manuscript should focus on the narrator's father, according to the biographer Shields, and that the title should be changed to reflect that.

Revisions were finished by May 6, according to Williams' records, and they sent it off to the J.B. Lippincott publishing house. The working title was now Atticus.

The Lippincott editors were impressed enough to meet Lee, but they were not overwhelmed.

Tay Hohoff, the eventual editor of the book, later wrote of that first meeting for a corporate history of Lippincott, before it was acquired by HarperCollins. She was in her 60s when she received the original manuscript, a 30-year veteran of publishing. Shields, the biographer, found her account and shared it with The Post.

"First of all, the element in the original manuscript which was unmistakable: it was alive, the characters stood on their own two feet, they were three-dimensional," Hohoff wrote. "And the spark of the true writer flashed in every line. Though Miss Lee had then never published even an essay or a short story, this was clearly not the work of an amateur."

That said, noted Hohoff, who died in 1974, the effort was very, very flawed. "The manuscript we saw was more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel."

Lippincott did not offer to buy the manuscript. The editors sent Lee home to make revisions. They hoped she might come back.

...

All that summer, Lee kept at it, setting her story more in the past than the present. By mid-August, Williams filled out another 3-by-5 card for Lee's file:

"8-19-57: 1 copy of further revised MS brought in by author -- this is the only copy we have on hand -- everything else has been ret'd to author. This is a complete MS."

Hohoff, looking at the revised story, thought progress had been made and that Lee was demonstrating an admirable work ethic, Shields writes in his biography. Lee, living alone, subsisting on pennies, was throwing herself into the novel.

On Oct. 17, Lippincott offered an advance of "a few thousand dollars," Shields notes.

But the real labor was just beginning. Editor and author settled into working together, talking for hours, exchanging ideas, moving things back and forth. Lee would grow so frustrated, she later told audiences, that she once threw the entire manuscript out of her window into a pile of snow.

It took until Nov. 10, 1959 -- another two years of rewrites and overhauls -- before Lippincott accepted the manuscript.

Lee, in a later speech, would say that she wrote the book three times: first in the third person, then in the first, then combining the voices of Scout as an adult and as a child.

What emerged?

The small town of her youth, set over a three-year period in the 1930s. Although Lee would say the book was not autobiographical, the fictional Maycomb was almost entirely drawn from real people and events in Monroeville.

Nelle was clearly the basis for Scout; Capote for Dill; her dad for Atticus (Finch, the fictional last name, was her mother's maiden name); the cruelly tortured neighbor, Alfred Boleware Jr., for Boo Radley; even the misbegotten trial of Tom Robinson was based on a 1933 Monroeville case. The real and fictional courthouses were identical, as were the real and fictional street where Scout, Dill and Boo lived, all within 75 yards of one another.

Here's a famous excerpt from early in the book:

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then. ... Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

That's the adult Scout talking, not the child. This adult Scout looking back was the central conceit of the first draft Lee called Go Set a Watchman. It had been cannibalized into Mockingbird, used, like many a first draft before and since, as a good start on a finished product.

Nurnberg, in describing Watchman to the Guardian, said Lee was "bemused that somebody might be interested in an earlier book," seeming to indicate the manuscript was not rewritten and polished after Mockingbird.

It is "a very, very fine book," he told the Guardian. "Beautifully crafted -- the language and the passion and the humour, and of course the politics, that you know her for."

...

To Kill a Mockingbird, a precocious child's-eye view of race, justice and Southern life, was a mammoth critical and commercial hit upon publication in summer 1960. It sold 500,000 copies in its first year and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Meanwhile, Lee was assisting Capote with his masterwork, In Cold Blood, about the killing of a family in Kansas. Then, for her novel, she did interviews, signed books, gave speeches and tried to answer all of the mail that was flooding in. She was not, by any means, a recluse who declined all interviews. By 1961, the book had sold 2.5 million copies.

She was white-hot. She, her agents and her publishers were all eager for her to write again.

On the first anniversary of publication, her agents sent her a playful but worried letter, pretending to be the book itself:

"TOMORROW IS MY FIRST BIRTHDAY AND MY AGENTS THINKS [sic] THERE SHOULD BE ANOTHER BOOK WRITTEN SOON TO KEEP ME COMPANY DO YOU THINK YOU CAN START ONE BEFORE I AM ANOTHER YEAR OLD? We would be so happy if you would."

Lee sequestered herself, writing furiously, but could not come up with another effort to attempt to publish. Neither Lee, her agents nor her publisher, not even in the long, agonizing drought after Mockingbird, when Lee was desperately trying to write a new book, ever seemed to have considered the first draft, already composed, as a progression of her masterpiece.

Then, as today, a sequel would have been an automatic best-seller.

Nurnberg, in that interview with the Guardian, said that "Mockingbird was actually part of a planned trilogy, according to letters he has seen between Lee and her agents, and that Lippincott had planned to publish Watchman.

Shields, who has never seen those letters, is skeptical.

Although he did not have access to Lee or her personal papers while writing his biography, he says the available evidence suggests a "trilogy" could have been nothing more than a blue-sky conversation between author and agent, for neither the agent nor the publisher left any traces of a publishing plan for Watchman.

"A trilogy is way more ambitious than anything Lee was capable of, or would have the temerity to suggest. ... Watchman, Atticus, Mockingbird -- these were all iterations of the same book."

...

She lived mostly in New York, simply and in near total anonymity in her apartment on the Upper East Side. She no longer gave interviews. Horton Foote, who adapted Mockingbird for film, said she lived within blocks of friends ... and never visited them, according to Shields' biography.

"I honestly, truly have not the slightest idea why she lives in New York," gossiped Capote. "I don't think she ever goes out."

She investigated a murderous pastor in small-town Alabama for a true-crime book in the 1980s, a la In Cold Blood, but lost interest.

When she came back home for a few months each year, she lived with Alice in the family's new home -- a one-story brick ranch house, 2,500 square feet and three bedrooms in an outlying neighborhood of Monroeville. Today, the house is valued at $100,000, according to real estate records, and is visibly in need of repair.

Alice, proficient well into her 90s, worked as a lawyer in their father's firm and looked after her baby sister's business affairs.

They did not have a television, but they would go to a neighbor's house to watch Alabama football games. They went for drives in the country, read voraciously, did crossword puzzles and ate Saturday lunch at David's Catfish House, squabbling over who would get the check.

"They were really quiet. Kept to themselves. They'd send me a Christmas card," says Justin Thorton, a next-door neighbor.

In 2007, Nelle had a stroke while in New York. She moved home for good, settling in an assisted-living facility. Alice eventually faltered, too, moving into a different assisted-living facility three years ago.

In her stead, Carter, a younger partner in their tiny firm, took over Nelle's affairs.

Some of the last few years were messy. There was a lawsuit to get Lee's copyright back from a former agent. Carter helped file a suit against the Monroe County Museum -- set in the same courthouse that provided the model for the trial in the book and film -- for copyright infringement. The museum features exhibits on the lives of Lee and Capote and sells gift-shop items for both. The suit charged they did not have Lee's permission to do so.

The two cases were settled out of court. Lee retained her copyright. The museum still sells Mockingbird items.

Stephanie Rogers, executive director of the museum, takes a breath when asked to describe her relationship with Carter since then.

"I do not have a relationship with Ms. Carter," she says slowly.

...

The discovery of Watchman has been narrated entirely by Carter, now 51, who has answered few questions.

She has said, in a statement and in email and text exchanges with The New York Times, that she was going through some old papers of Lee's and came across Watchman, attached to an old manuscript of Mockingbird. It's not clear exactly where in Monroeville this took place, other than a "secure facility."

"I was stunned," she told the Times. She says she rushed it across town to Lee, who immediately identified it as "the parent of Mockingbird."

Carter is legal guardian of To Kill a Mockingbird and its history was never a secret. Shields' biography describes Watchman on Page 114.

Lee, in a statement released by Carter, said she was "happy as hell" that it was finally being published. The statement also quoted Lee as saying that she recently showed the manuscript to some unnamed friends, who verified its merit, thus convincing her to reverse her long-held decision about not publishing.

In the statement, she said that she was young when she wrote it, so when an editor told her to reshape it, "I did as I was told."

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

Style on 03/01/2015

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