Mockingbird (17 page)

That was the summer Dill came to us.

Then the child Scout describes the actual moment Dill appeared, and drama replaces exposition. In a cinematic sense, the narration provided by the adult Jean Louise is like a voice-over.

It might be that Lee floundered when she was trying to settle on a point of view, or was incapable of maintaining one. She rewrote the novel three times: the original draft was in the third person; then she changed to the first person and later rewrote what became the final draft, blending the two narrators, Janus-like, looking forward and back at the same time.
30

She later called this a “hopeless period” of writing the novel over and over. She “spent her days and nights in the most intense efforts to set down what she wanted to say in the way which would best say it to the reader,” said Hohoff.
31
The writing went at a glacial pace. Her deadline was May 1958 and she wasn't going to make it. She lived on pennies, still typing at the makeshift desk on York Avenue. No one “inquired too closely into what she ate,” although now and then, a friend from Monroeville—another of Miss Gladys Watson's protégés—invited her over for dinner and the chance to talk about how the book was going.
32

One winter night during her “hopeless period” she threw all of her work out the window and called Hohoff, upset. But her editor was never one to suffer fools gladly.
33
The novel was a collaborative effort—Hohoff's figurative fingerprints were all over the manuscript. There was also the matter of the advance, which would have to be paid back. Lee retrieved her still-gestating novel from the snow and kept working.

*   *   *

When the weather was better in the South than in New York City, she went home to Monroeville. A room at the golf course on the edge of town—now a country club her father belonged to—was a good place for writing uninterrupted. Also, just to get away, she would sometimes go to Truman's aunt Mary Ida Carter's house in the country, toting a bottle of scotch, and spend a long afternoon, reading and sipping. Her father and her sister Alice didn't approve of this, and not because they didn't drink. They objected to the amount she drank and the state she worked herself into. Capote's aunt Marie Rudisill claimed that Alice threatened to put her in a program for alcoholics if she didn't straighten up.
34

Perhaps attempts to break through the “intense reserve” that Hohoff noticed about Lee contributed to her troubles with alcohol. Social situations made her uncomfortable, as Dr. Nunn happened to see one evening in 1958. “We were living in Tuscaloosa, and Tay visited us in connection with a Lippincott-sponsored search for promising authors in the writing program there. There were several such visits during our tenure there. As usual a New York–style cocktail party for Tay was included. Nelle was in Monroeville at the time and was invited up for the party. She arrived, was introduced around, and promptly disappeared. I discovered her later sitting on the back steps with our daughter, who was then five. They were there until Nelle left at the party's end. Definitely Nelle was no party lover.”
35

In any case, it was during one of her visits to Monroeville in the spring of 1959 that she completed a circle that had begun when she was still in high school. It was in Gladys Watson's English classes that she fell in love with British literature; and now at last, as her manuscript was in the final stages of preparation, she asked her teacher to critique it.

Miss Gladys Watson (now Mrs. Watson-Burkett) placed what would become one of the most popular novels of the twentieth century in a safe place: her sewing basket. In the evenings she would take it out, read it aloud to her new husband, and write notes in the margins.
36
One day after school, she asked one of her students, Cecil Ryland, to come up to her desk. She said she had finished proofreading a novel by a former student, and asked him to return it to her now. “And so, I gathered up the manuscript in an old stationery box, and took it and went knocking on her door. Nelle Harper Lee came to the door, and I said, ‘Here's your book.' And she said ‘Thank you.' Little did I realize that I held a little bit of history in my hands.”
37

Go Set a Watchman
, renamed
To Kill a Mockingbird
in its third iteration (because “Mockingbird” suggested the South, and “kill” is always a good word to have in a title), had been “heavily edited” by Tay Hohoff and was slated for publication in May 1960.
38
Her role as midwife to the novel, she said, had been merely “an editorial call to duty.”
39
Meanwhile, the manuscript of
Go Set a Watchman
was set aside as a draft, eventually coming to rest for safekeeping in the law offices of Barnett, Bugg & Lee.

*   *   *

That fall, in mid-November, while Lee was waiting for galleys of the book to arrive, Truman called about an article in the
New York Times
, headlined “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.”

Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 (UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy, 16, were in their beds. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut. “This is apparently the case of a psychopathic killer,” Sheriff Earl Robinson said.

William Shawn, the editor of the
New Yorker
, had assigned Truman to use the article as a springboard for writing about the impact of a quadruple murder on a small town. It was going to be a tough assignment. The Clutters' killer or killers were still on the loose. Truman, slight, blond, and bespectacled, was looking for someone to go with him.

To Lee, it sounded like an adventure. “He said it would be a tremendously involved job and would take two people. The crime intrigued him, and I'm intrigued with crime—and, boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep.”
40

 

eight

“See NL's Notes”

She had a down-home style, a friendly smile, and a knack for saying the right things. Once the ice was broken, I was told, Capote could get people to talking about the subject closest to their hearts, themselves.

—Kansas Bureau of Investigation detective
A
LVIN
D
EWEY

They arrived at twilight in Garden City, a town of eleven thousand on the high western Kansas wheat plain, as the sky was turning a deep icy blue-green. The radio kept repeating the same bulletin at intervals: “Police authorities, continuing their investigation of the tragic Clutter slaying, have requested that anyone with pertinent information please contact the sheriff's office.”
1
Driving down North Main Street, Truman and Nelle glanced expectantly left and right for the Warren Hotel. It was supposed to be the best and closest accommodation to the Clutter farm in Holcomb, a village of 270 residents seven miles west on US-50. Nelle noticed that street signs and even traffic lights were hard to see because everything was festooned with Christmas decorations—strings of lights, wreaths of evergreen, and red cardboard bells.
2

The hotel was small but pleasant looking, nothing on the scale of the 1887 four-story Windsor, just down the street. Once called the “Waldorf of the Prairies,” this edifice for rich cattlemen had been ruined by the dust bowl years in the 1930s and was teetering toward bankruptcy. At the Warren, they registered for adjoining rooms and then took the elevator upstairs to rest. The drive from Manhattan, Kansas, had taken eight hours, the last one hundred miles of it across country flat and featureless (“level,” Kansans preferred to call it).

The next day, December 16, they walked a block to the Finney County Courthouse, the headquarters of the murder investigation. The courthouse, built to the same proportions as a gigantic lump of sugar and faced with whitish-gray limestone, was separated from the street by a half acre of lawn, in the middle of which was a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty. The person they needed to see was Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) detective Alvin Dewey, who had been appointed to coordinate the investigation by KBI chief Logan Sanford. Dewey was both a former Finney County sheriff and a former FBI agent. Chief Sanford had given him the additional responsibility of handling the press because he was not easily ruffled. In the field, a team of investigators was combing western Kansas for leads.

Nelle and Truman consulted a hand-painted directory on a dun-colored wall of the courthouse's first floor and took the stairs to the second. A secretary greeted them and escorted them to Mr. Dewey's office.

Alvin Dewey was “just plain handsome,” Nelle decided on the spot, and made a point of saying so in her notes.
3
Dark-haired and dressed in a blue suit, he was seated at a large mahogany desk positioned catty-corner in a cramped room. His mission seemed defined by two prominent items in the room: a large Santa Fe Railroad map of the United States on the wall, and a thick criminal statute book on the desk. Dewey's brown eyes sized Nelle up—“a tall brunette, a good looker,” he thought, an observation that suggests that Nelle had put aside the frumpiness of her college years to help Truman make a favorable impression.
4
Dewey invited them to sit down. His curiosity was piqued: he hadn't seen either of them among the reporters who had been hanging around during the past three weeks.

Truman, about five foot four and wearing a sheepskin coat, a long scarf that reached the floor, and moccasins—his version of Western wear, apparently—acted as if he thought he was pretty important. Nelle took her cue from Truman and waited for him to begin a carefully rehearsed introduction. The forty-seven-year-old Dewey concealed a smile behind a drag on his Winston cigarette when he heard the sound of his visitor's contralto voice.

“Mr. Dewey, I am Truman Capote and this is my friend, Nelle Harper Lee. She's a writer, too.” The
New Yorker
magazine, he explained, had assigned him to write an article about the Clutter case. Miss Lee was his assistant. His friend, Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House books, had contacted Dr. James McCain, the president of Mr. Clutter's alma mater, Kansas State University, who had been very helpful. But now they needed to get down to
business.
They were here to find out the facts about the murder, the family, and how the town was reacting.

Dewey listened noncommittally. Except for the name-dropping, they sounded like your average reporters trying to get the inside scoop. “You're free to attend press conferences,” he said. “I hold them about once a day.”

“But I'm not a newspaperman,” Capote insisted. “I need to talk to
you
in depth.… What I'm going to write will take months. What I am here for is to do a very special story on the family up to and including the murders.”

Dewey indicated that he hadn't heard anything to make him change his original offer: they could attend press conferences with the rest of their kind.

“Look,” Capote said, struggling to separate himself from newspaper men with daily deadlines, “it really doesn't make any difference to me if the case is ever solved or not.”
5

Dewey's face darkened, and Nelle suspected immediately that Truman had just torpedoed the mission. In fact, privately Dewey had been worrying for three weeks about the trail growing cold, and the dread of defeat was starting to gnaw at him: “In homicide, if you don't come up with some answers in twenty-four to forty-eight hours, you get a feeling in your gut that the thing may never be solved.… ‘Anything new on the Clutter case?' folks would be asking me on the post office steps for months to come. And then it would be, ‘Never did find out who killed the Clutters, did you?' for the rest of my life.”
6

Anger suddenly got the better of him. “I'd like to see your press card, Mr. Cappuchi,” he snapped.
7

Truman let the mispronunciation pass, seeing that they were off on the wrong foot. “I don't have one,” he said mildly.

The get-to-know-you meeting had turned into a showdown. Exercising the better part of valor, Nelle rose. Both men got to their feet. Dewey bid them a stiff goodbye and, after they had gone, returned to his work.

The next day, Nelle and Truman appeared in Dewey's office again. “I just wanted to establish my identity,” Truman said in a friendly voice, and presented his passport. Perhaps Nelle, witnessing the earlier confrontation, had reminded Truman that honey catches more flies than vinegar. The detective glanced at Capote's passport and repeated that they could attend press conferences. Truman thanked him as though they had been granted a special favor.

Dewey began seeing the two in the scrum of reporters as he delivered updates on the case. “They were quiet, attentive, asked few questions, and, as far as I could tell, caused no commotion. I did hear they were hard at work, interviewing everyone, people said … in Holcomb, up and down Garden City's Main Street, in farm homes, in the coffee-drinking places, in the schools, everywhere. The New Yorker was getting his story together.” With his practiced eye, Dewey sized up the relationship between Capote and Lee and how important she was to him. “If Capote came on as something of a shocker, she was there to absorb the shock. She had a down-home style, a friendly smile, and a knack for saying the right things. Once the ice was broken, I was told, Capote could get people to talking about the subject closest to their hearts, themselves.”
8