she had been working on for more than a year at that point. The expectations of a second novel were overwhelming.When you start at the top, she told those close to her, there is nowhere to go but down.
Her decision never to publish another book took on the aura of a dramatic decision she had made early on after the overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird . Her choice to live out of the public spotlight and begin a half century of silence seemed equally stark.
But the decision not to publish again was far more gradual than that. As I got to know Nelle and her friends, I learned that, rather than a grand decision, the shape of her life was dictated by a series of small choices made at different points along the way. For many years, she thought there might be a second book.
At age thirty-four, Harper Lee had a stunning achievement behind her, and a world of promise before her. Naturally, she planned to write more. She would turn her keen eye once more to the complexities of character and community. In To Kill a Mockingbird and in future work she envisioned, the rich particulars of her corner of the Deep South could illuminate something universal.
“I hope to goodness every book I write improves,” she told an interviewer, only half in jest, in 1964. “All I want is to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
Then: silence.
“There were so many demands made on her,” Alice recalled. “People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”
Lee withdrew from public view and never published another book.
And so for a half century now, readers and reporters alike have asked the question that drives any good mystery: Then what happened? She wasn’t telling, at least not publicly.
Chapter Five
T he Lees’ onetime pastor and longtime friend Thomas Lane Butts called. He was back from preaching out of town, and he would come by the motel and drive me to dinner. Alice hadn’t wanted me to leave town without talking to him, as he was a close friend to both of the sisters. What was it he would have to say? And why were they asking a good friend to sit for an interview about Harper Lee, on the record, the very thing they usually discouraged?
As a Methodist minister assigned to different congregations in south Alabama and Florida over the years, Tom came to know Alice well back in the 1970s. Like the Lees’ father, she was deeply involved in the affairs of the Methodist Church in Alabama and northern Florida. Tom had been the pastor of the Lees’ church, First Methodist, for several years. Technically, he was then the pastor emeritus, although Alice chided him about his “alleged” retirement.
Tom and his wife, Hilda, became friends with Nelle Harper in the 1980s, when Alice fell into a coma, apparently from a virus that was not responding to antibiotics. Finally, after a few weeks, she regained consciousness. By then, her sister and the Butts had spent long hourstogether at the hospital, getting to know one another over stale doughnuts and endless cups of coffee, worried sick about Alice.
There weren’t many people in Monroeville with whom Nelle could enjoy long conversations about her favorite writers and historians, people like Macaulay and British cleric Sydney Smith, his nineteenth-century contemporary. She found a kindred spirit in Tom, someone whose wit, intellect, and lack of pretense were a good match for her own. He and Nelle were just as happy fishing together and trading stories of their Alabama youth as they were discussing the King James translation of the Bible or Macaulay’s voluminous history of England.
Tom and Nelle grew up just one year and fifteen miles apart. But it was far from assured that their paths as adults would intersect the way they did. He was a country boy growing up in a sharecropper’s home in which the only book for many years was the Bible. She lived in town, the daughter of a lawyer in a family that loved to read. “In one way,” Tom said, “we grew
Her decision never to publish another book took on the aura of a dramatic decision she had made early on after the overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird . Her choice to live out of the public spotlight and begin a half century of silence seemed equally stark.
But the decision not to publish again was far more gradual than that. As I got to know Nelle and her friends, I learned that, rather than a grand decision, the shape of her life was dictated by a series of small choices made at different points along the way. For many years, she thought there might be a second book.
At age thirty-four, Harper Lee had a stunning achievement behind her, and a world of promise before her. Naturally, she planned to write more. She would turn her keen eye once more to the complexities of character and community. In To Kill a Mockingbird and in future work she envisioned, the rich particulars of her corner of the Deep South could illuminate something universal.
“I hope to goodness every book I write improves,” she told an interviewer, only half in jest, in 1964. “All I want is to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
Then: silence.
“There were so many demands made on her,” Alice recalled. “People wanted her to speak to groups. She would be terrified to speak.”
Lee withdrew from public view and never published another book.
And so for a half century now, readers and reporters alike have asked the question that drives any good mystery: Then what happened? She wasn’t telling, at least not publicly.
Chapter Five
T he Lees’ onetime pastor and longtime friend Thomas Lane Butts called. He was back from preaching out of town, and he would come by the motel and drive me to dinner. Alice hadn’t wanted me to leave town without talking to him, as he was a close friend to both of the sisters. What was it he would have to say? And why were they asking a good friend to sit for an interview about Harper Lee, on the record, the very thing they usually discouraged?
As a Methodist minister assigned to different congregations in south Alabama and Florida over the years, Tom came to know Alice well back in the 1970s. Like the Lees’ father, she was deeply involved in the affairs of the Methodist Church in Alabama and northern Florida. Tom had been the pastor of the Lees’ church, First Methodist, for several years. Technically, he was then the pastor emeritus, although Alice chided him about his “alleged” retirement.
Tom and his wife, Hilda, became friends with Nelle Harper in the 1980s, when Alice fell into a coma, apparently from a virus that was not responding to antibiotics. Finally, after a few weeks, she regained consciousness. By then, her sister and the Butts had spent long hourstogether at the hospital, getting to know one another over stale doughnuts and endless cups of coffee, worried sick about Alice.
There weren’t many people in Monroeville with whom Nelle could enjoy long conversations about her favorite writers and historians, people like Macaulay and British cleric Sydney Smith, his nineteenth-century contemporary. She found a kindred spirit in Tom, someone whose wit, intellect, and lack of pretense were a good match for her own. He and Nelle were just as happy fishing together and trading stories of their Alabama youth as they were discussing the King James translation of the Bible or Macaulay’s voluminous history of England.
Tom and Nelle grew up just one year and fifteen miles apart. But it was far from assured that their paths as adults would intersect the way they did. He was a country boy growing up in a sharecropper’s home in which the only book for many years was the Bible. She lived in town, the daughter of a lawyer in a family that loved to read. “In one way,” Tom said, “we grew
Similar Books
