The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee by Marja Mills Read Free Book Online Page B

critics.”
    It was not. Nelle Harper Lee, the onetime tomboy roaming Monroeville by foot and the world at large by vivid imagination, was now Harper Lee, literary celebrity. The New York Times review praised her “level-headed plea for interracial understanding” and her “gentle affection, rich humor and deep understanding of small-town family life inAlabama.” The reviewer, Frank H. Lyell, also wrote, “The dialogue of Miss Lee’s refreshingly varied characters is a constant delight in its authenticity and swift revelation of personality.” Lyell did judge, however, that “the praise Miss Lee deserves must be qualified somewhat by noting that oftentimes Scout’s expository style has a processed, homogenized, impersonal flatness quite out of keeping with the narrator’s gay, impulsive approach to life in youth. Also, some of the scenes suggest that Miss Lee is cocking at least one eye toward Hollywood.”
    I’d sent along a photocopy of the Chicago Tribune review, an unqualified rave of an “engrossing first novel of rare excellence,” with the materials I mailed to Alice Lee before my trip south.
    Whatever her discomfort with public speaking, the Harper Lee of those early years after the book’s publication granted interviews and even, in 1965, gave a speech to several hundred West Point cadets.
    “This is very exciting,” she began that day, “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.” *
    The cadets roared.
    She came across as quick-witted and passionate. In more than one interview, she admitted to being fearful of how a second novel would fare. But she gave little indication of the toll that, privately, was being exerted by the publicity and demands of her success.
    Lee dutifully made the rounds promoting the book. She sat forradio and print interviews and showed a writer and photographer for Life magazine around her hometown. She appeared at press conferences and book signings. Several years after the book was published, she still was fielding questions and replying with a characteristic mix of low-key erudition and self-deprecating wit.
    People wanted to know more about the dark-haired woman from Alabama whose first book was becoming a phenomenon. What were her plans? Did she date? Did the characters’ relationships in the book reflect those in her own life? What would she write next?
    She was also spending long hours responding to fan mail and requests for additional interviews and appearances. Capote wrote a friend that he wished she could enjoy the fruits of her success. Instead, she seemed hassled. He reveled in his literary fame. She endured hers.
    For someone who disliked dressing up and fussing over her appearance, that aspect of life in the spotlight was one more reason to dislike public appearances.
    One reporter at a Chicago press conference to promote the film took note of her weight and the fact that she didn’t curl her hair. “Chicago Press Call” included this description by a reporter for Rogue, a Chicago-based men’s magazine, in its December 1963 issue: “Harper Lee arrived. She is 36-years-old, tall, and a few pounds on the wrong side of Metrecal.” Metrecal was the Slim-Fast diet shake of its day. “She has dark, short-cut, uncurled hair; bright, twinkling eyes; a gracious manner; and Mint Julep diction.”
    Asked if she found writing her next book slow going, Lee answered, “Well, I hope to live to see it published.”
    Questions about her second book began to rankle. She wasn’t making the progress she hoped, and preferred not to disclose the specifics of the novel