Harper Lee: the 'great lie' she didn't write Mockingbird rears its head again
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Version 0 of 1. Two years ago in March I travelled to Kansas to help my friend, the writer Lesley Blume, report a story for Departures magazine. The feature was pegged to the 50th anniversary of In Cold Blood and we were travelling to Holcomb to see how the town was faring five decades after the gruesome murders of the Clutter family that had inspired Truman Capote’s masterpiece and subsequent film adaptations. Technically speaking, Holcomb is located near the exact center of the US. Even so, the six-hour drive from Kansas City through endless empty cornfields and small run-down towns often left us feeling as though we were transporting ourselves to the ends of the earth. Our route was nearly identical to the one Truman Capote and his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee, whom he had hired as his research assistant, had taken nearly half a century earlier. At the time, Lee had finished writing To Kill a Mockingbird, but it had not yet been published. Years of dealing with Capote acolytes and curious tourists had left the handful of Holcomb residents who remembered Truman and Nelle understandably hesitant to open their homes and memories to journalists. But perhaps because we were two women travelling alone (Lesley was six months pregnant at the time), the doors opened more easily to us and we spent the week in the homes of many local people, including Bob Rupp. Rupp had been the high school boyfriend of Nancy Clutter and still lived next door to the Clutter house where the murders took place; he almost never speaks to reporters. Everyone we met with recalled Capote and Lee quite vividly. It was a strange sensation to have two literary luminaries brought down to earth in such a remote, unpretentious place; first-hand anecdotes being shared along with homemade sandwiches and paper napkins. Perhaps not surprisingly, recollections of Truman, even now, were varied and not always flattering: Lee, however, was highly regarded by everyone. In fact, one of the most striking aspects of these conversations was how many of the local residents who had interacted with them personally professed their belief to us, unprompted, that Lee had had a hand in the writing of In Cold Blood. At one point, Rupp told us he often wondered whether she had written Capote’s book for him. These conversations have been on my mind quite a bit in the past few days as the tired old question “Did Harper Lee really write To Kill a Mockingbird?” rears its idiotic head again amid the furore over her new/old novel Go Set A Watchmen. In an effort to bring the speculation – Harper Lee’s sister Alice once called it “the greatest lie ever told” – into the digital age, the Wall Street Journal asked two Polish literary scholars to use a computerised text-analysis tool to compare Go Set a Watchmen with To Kill a Mockingbird and In Cold Blood to see if there was any algorithmic support for these rumours. I will save you the read and tell you there was not. Here is a far better question: Why is it only women who are ever accused of not writing their own books? (Notwithstanding our current president; when I Googled to see if any men had suffered similar suspicions, the top results were articles questioning Barack Obama’s authorship of his own memoir.) For instance, I’ve long wondered why this particular speculation about Capote and Lee only runs in one direction. There is very little evidence that Capote had any hand in To Kill a Mockingbird beyond being friends with Lee and providing the inspiration for the character Dill. Indeed, considering everything we know about Capote’s life – his self-promotion and determination to befriend those at the highest levels of New York society – it’s nearly impossible to imagine that had he had any hand in Mockingbird, he would have kept quiet about it. There is, however, plenty of evidence that Lee contributed to In Cold Blood. Not only did Lee accompany Capote to every interview he conducted in Kansas – at the end of each day they would return to their hotel rooms and write down separate versions of their interviews and then compare them over dinner. Said Lee of this process: “Together we would get it right.” And yet despite this well-documented collaboration, Capote’s book has not been plagued by speculation that it had been ghostwritten by his childhood, Pulitzer prize-winning friend. The Capote/Lee urban legend may be the most prominent example of a woman’s authorship being undermined, but it is certainly far from the only one. Writer and aviatrix Beryl Markham, who penned the extraordinary memoir West With the Night about her solo trip across the Atlantic – “she can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers,” said Hemingway, after describing her as a “high-grade bitch” – and is the subject of Paula McLain’s new novel Circling the Sun, has long been the victim of rumours that her third husband, a ghostwriter and journalist of little repute, was behind her book. She could fly better than men, train race horses better than men (she was the most successful trainer in Africa in her day), but write well? Impossible. Beloved children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder has faced claims that it was not she but her daughter, writer Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote the Little House series. Lane was a successful writer in her own right and there is indeed plenty of evidence that Lane collaborated with her mother on the books, but if collaboration were a disqualifier for authorship, there is an entire canon of literary masterpieces we may have to reconsider. Editor Robert Gottlieb, for instance, was so involved in the rewriting of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 that Gottlieb once described the editing process as “two surgeons working on the same patient together”. Neither is this sort of second-guessing limited to writers. Courtney Love has long faced assertions that Kurt Cobain ghostwrote the album Live Through This. “It would be just as accurate – and misleading – to say that Courtney Love wrote most of Nirvana’s third album,” said music journalist Everett True. What all these cases have in common is women with singular voices writing defining stories about how to live unapologetically in a world that has little interest in making space for them. Men, or rather white men, factor into the stories, wonderfully and influentially so much of the time, but the stories and the viewpoint remain powerfully in the hands of the women telling them. We do not yet live in a world where we like women to have singular voices about their experiences separate from men. And this silly myth about the origins of To Kill a Mockingbird, arguably the most influential American book of the 20th century, persists, I imagine, because since its publication Lee has remained almost entirely silent. We know very little about Lee the person beyond her writing, and on to that blank slate we’ve been allowed to place all our assumptions about women’s voices and their proper place. Which in the end says a great deal more about us than it ever has about Lee. |