I Am Scout (22 page)

Truman had written all but the final chapter when he stopped off in Topeka to see Nye at his home. It was then that the detective learned that Truman could be ruthless—not about justice, but about his art, his career, his reputation. It seemed as if the process of reporting and writing the book had transformed him into a person who was, more than ever, completely self-centered and willing to exploit any of his friends in his own self-aggrandizing quest for fame and fortune.

While they were talking about the case and the final stages of the book, Nye remarked, “Well, Nelle will certainly play a part in all this.”

“
No
,” Truman said emphatically, “she was just there.”

That response startled Nye. “As well as they knew each other,” he said, looking back, “there is no reason not to give some credit to her.”
11

*   *   *

While she was in New York in March
1964
, Nelle gave one of her last interviews, which also happened to be her best. She appeared on Roy Newquist's evening radio show,
Counterpoint,
on WQRX in New York. A genial and engaging man, Newquist had the ability to put people at ease. And Nelle, normally given to bantering with reporters and deflecting personal questions, opened up as she never had about her work and her aims as a writer.
12

She described herself to Newquist as someone who “
must
write.… I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much.” Newquist asked her to name the contemporary writers she admired most. At the top of her list she put her friend Truman Capote.

“There's probably no better writer in this country today than Truman Capote. He is growing all the time. The next thing coming from Capote is not a novel—it's a long piece of reportage, and I think it is going to make him bust loose as a novelist. He's going to have even deeper dimension to his work. Capote, I think, is the greatest craftsman we have going.”

About her own ambition as a writer, she expressed a desire to write more and better novels in the vein of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse. I would like, however, to do one thing, and I've never spoken much about it because it's such a personal thing. I would like to leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. I hope to do this in several novels—to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to
Tobacco Road,
as opposed to plantation life.

As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.

And then she added a remark that set the bar high for herself—perhaps too high, in hindsight—but one that seemed plausible for a writer who had already written one of the most popular books since World War II.

“In other words,” she said, “all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”
13

*   *   *

In January
1965
, Nelle was involved in a terrible kitchen accident. She “burned herself very badly, especially her right hand. It seems some sort of pan caught fire and exploded,” Truman said.
14
Friends called and sent cards from New York and Kansas as word spread that the accident was serious and she was in the hospital.

With her hand wrapped in white gauze from her fingers to her forearm, she was limited to reading and answering correspondence with Alice's help. It would be months before a doctor could fully determine whether she would need plastic surgery. Perhaps because she was out of action at the typewriter, Nelle accepted an invitation of the sort that she would normally refuse on the grounds that she was “in no way a lecturer or philosopher.”

Colonel Jack Capp, course director of English
102
at the United States Military Academy at West Point, had added
To Kill a Mockingbird
to the freshman syllabus. With the permission of the department head, he ventured to invite Nelle to address the freshman class of cadets. There was a precedent for this: three years earlier, William Faulkner had accepted a token honorarium of $
100
for speaking there. “She was interested,” recalled Colonel Capp, “but deferred acceptance until we could meet her in New York to discuss details. Mid-morning on the appointed day, Mike Cousland, a well-featured, mannerly bachelor major and I went to Harper's pied-à-terre in Manhattan, a small apartment on the upper East Side.”
15
After a nice get-to-know-you chat, a date was suggested and Nelle agreed. Then she insisted they go to Sardi's for lunch. After which, Major Cousland and Colonel Capp rode back to West Point, chauffeured in an army sedan, mission accomplished.

*   *   *

In March, the
39
-year-old writer arrived on the campus, located
50
miles north of New York on a promontory overlooking the Hudson River. The talk was held in the auditorium, and until Nelle took her seat on the stage, the
700
young men in gray uniforms remained standing. “After the introduction formalities, she began lighting a cigarette,” said Capp, “but, turning to Major Cousland and referring to the cadet on her left, asked, ‘Can he smoke?' ‘No,' said Mike, ‘he can't.' ‘Then, I can't either,' she replied and stubbed out her cigarette in the nearest ashtray.”
16

The young men studied her. She was “conservatively garbed in a simple dark dress,” according to former cadet Gus Lee, who later wrote
Honor and Duty
about his experiences at West Point, “her hair wrapped in a conservative bun atop her head. Her voice was softly Southern, with high musical notes, and crystal clear in a hall that was utterly silent.”
17

“This is very exciting,” she began slowly, “because I do not speak at colleges. The prospect of it is too intimidating. Surely, it's obvious—rows of bright, intense, focused students, some even of the sciences, all of them analyzing my every word and staring fixedly at me—this would terrify a person such as myself. So I wisely agreed to come here, where the atmosphere would be far more relaxing and welcoming than on a rigid, strict, rule-bound, and severely disciplined college campus.”

For the first time since becoming a class, the young men laughed together, and followed this with a roar of applause.

Knowing that the young men were away from home, she made a subtle comparison between aspects of
To Kill a Mockingbird
and the cadets' future mission as soldiers.

When we seek to replace family in new environs, we seek to reestablish trust, and love, and comfort. But too often we end up establishing difference instead of love. We like to have all our comforts and familiars about us, and tend to push away that which is different, and worrisome. That is what happened to Boo Radley, and to Tom Robinson. They were not set apart by evil men, or evil women, or evil thoughts. They were set apart by an evil past, which good people in the present were ill equipped to change. The irony is, if we divide ourselves for our own comfort,
no one
will have comfort. It means we must bury our pasts by seeing them, and destroy our differences through learning another way.

Regarding people who were difficult to accept or respect, Nelle said, “Our response to these people represents our earthly test. And I think, that these people enrich the wonder of our lives. It is they who most need our kindness,
because
they seem less deserving. After all,
anyone
can love people who are lovely.”

She paused to reflect on how writing
To Kill a Mockingbird
had influenced her life. “People in the press have asked me if this book is descriptive of my own childhood, or of my own family. Is this very important? I am simply one who had time and chance to write. I was that person before, and no one in the press much cared about the details of my life. I am yet that same person now, who only misses her former anonymity.”
18

*   *   *

A few weeks after speaking at West Point, Nelle received another request for her presence, one that couldn't be further in spirit from speaking to an audience of hopeful, forward-looking young men. Perry Smith and Richard Hickock asked her to attend their execution. Nelle replied to Warden Charles McAtee, who had conveyed the request from Smith and Hickock, that she would not attend.

On the night of April
14
,
1965
, the executioner, an anonymous paid volunteer from Missouri, sped through the rain in a black Cadillac. He wore a long, dingy coat and large felt hat to hide his face. Smith, assuming both Nelle and Truman had denied his request, wrote a hasty note at
11
:
45
P
.
M
.: “I want you to know that I cannot condemn you for it & understand. Not much time left but want you both to know that I been sincerely grateful for your friend[ship] through the years and everything else. I'm not very good at these things—I want you both to know that I have become very affectionate toward you. But harness time. Adios Amigos. Best of everything. Your friend always, Perry.”
19

In a hotel nearby, Truman agonized and wept in his room, trying to decide whether he should go or not. Hickock and Smith had the right to choose witnesses, and they had both named him and Nelle. Finally, Truman hurried to the prison in time to say good-bye. A handful of reporters and KBI agents were waiting in the warehouse. Hickock arrived first, trussed in a leather harness that held his arms to his sides. “Nice to see you,” he said pleasantly, smiling at faces he recognized. He was pronounced dead at
12
:
41
A
.
M
. When it was Perry's turn on the gallows,
20
minutes later, Capote became sick to his stomach.

*   *   *

For the rest of the summer of
1965
in Monroeville, Nelle buckled down to work. It had been five years since the publication of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. She had been trading on her first novel for quite some time, although novelists often go years between books. But now she shunned interviews; first, because questions about
To Kill a Mockingbird
had become redundant. Second, because she had gone on record a number of times that a second novel was in the offing. So far, it was a promise she hadn't made good on. What she needed was “paper, pen, and privacy,” the formula that had produced her first success.

She made one exception to turning down interviews, however. A young Mississippian, Don Keith, approached her about granting one for a small quarterly, the
Delta Review
. She consented to a “visit,” not an interview, perhaps because she saw in the earnest young writer a glimpse of herself from her
Rammer Jammer
days.

Keith, who would go on to become a first-rate journalist in New Orleans, provided a remarkably fresh portrait of Lee, placing her in the context of a writer at work. “When I met her that Sunday afternoon in Monroeville, Alabama, she was the same as I knew she would be. We had spoken twice briefly over the telephone. I had written her two letters; she had written me one. But regardless of the long distance acquaintance, we exchanged hello kisses in that familiar manner characteristic of Southerners. Once inside the modest but comfortable brick house,” they settled down to a “long talk over coffee and cigarettes. She consumes both in abundance.”
20

The young visitor was the first to use the term
recluse
in connection with Nelle, but he did so for the sake of denying she was one. “Harper Lee is no recluse,” he said. “She is real and down-to-earth as is the woman next door who puts up fig preserves in the spring and covers her chrysanthemums in winter.

“During most of our afternoon together, she sat at a card table placed in front of an armchair in the living room. On the table was a typewriter, not new, and an abundance of paper. A stack of finished manuscript lay nearby, work on a new novel.” Nelle explained that she hadn't set a deadline for it, and that her publisher, Lippincott, didn't know the entire plot yet. But she hinted that it was set in a Southern town again, perhaps Maycomb. Whether Jem, Scout, and Atticus would figure in the story, she wouldn't say.

The conversation turned to another literary project that needed her attention. She was scheduled to leave the next week for New York, where she was to read, before publication, Truman Capote's finished manuscript.

“It must seem a chore,” Keith said.

“But one I'm looking forward to,” replied Nelle. As always, she was Truman's friend and advocate.

*   *   *

Besides needing to be in New York to read Truman's typewritten manuscript of
In Cold Blood,
it was time for her doctor to examine her injured hand and see whether surgery would be required. Everyone hoped for a good prognosis. “We were all looking at her hand and were pleased and surprised how beautifully it has healed. We hope when she sees Dr. Stark on the
19
th [of September] that he will tell her she doesn't have to have the operation,” Annie Laurie wrote to Alice.
21