Newly released Harper Lee letters give insight into the real-life Atticus – her father
The intimate letters provide a window into her life during a period of tumultuous change
About the same time To Kill a Mockingbird made Harper Lee a best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, she was still fighting for creative control.
“I must say it’s increasingly difficult for magazine articles to be written any other way than a magazine editor standing over your shoulder telling you what to write. You know how well that sits with me,” the native of Monroeville, Alabama, wrote to her New York friend Harold Caufield (affectionately referred to as “Darling Aitch”).
The newly released letter was from 1961, a year after the book was published, and tells of Esquire rejecting a piece she had been asked to write.
“I didn’t confirm to their image (or the one they wish to project) of the South. My pastiche had some white people who were segregationists and at the same time loathed and hated the KKK. This was an axiomatic impossibility, according to Esquire. I wanted to say that according to those lights, nine tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.”
Lee’s letter is among six donated to Emory University by a Californian collector, and made public yesterday. The typed letters are from the mid1950s – when she began writing Go Set
a Watchman, the precursor to Mockingbird that unexpectedly came out in 2015 – through the early 1960s. They touch on everything from politics and writing to religion and dating. They also describe her caring for her ailing father, Amasa Coleman Lee, the lawyer and newspaper man who was the basis for one of literature’s most famous characters, Atticus Finch.
“This correspondence from Harper Lee provides wonderful insight into her life during the critical years when she wrote what would be her only two novels,” said Joseph Crespino, an Emory professor and author of the upcoming Atticus Finch: The Biography.
“They provide a window into her life and her views during a period of tumultuous change in southern political life.”
Lee died in 2016 at the age of 89. As Crespino writes, she revered and rebelled against her father, whose image formed by To Kill a Mockingbird and Gregory Peck’s performance in the 1962 film adaptation was upended by the portrait of Atticus as a stubborn reactionary in Go Set a Watchman.
Harper Lee argued with her father about the rising civil rights movement, but remained close to him. In the mid-1950s, she moved from New York back to Monroeville when he became ill.
“Daddy is sitting beside me at the kitchen table, fully clothed, and eating his 4 o’clock meal. He gets around the house with a walking stick,” she writes to “Dearest H” in 1956. “While thinking of something to say to you I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me, which I think was an echo of the fear and desolation that filled me when he was nearly dead. It has been years since I have lived with him on a day-to-day basis, and these months with him have strengthened my attachment to him, if such is possible. If he gets along every day like he has this day, it won’t be long before I’ll be back with you.”
In another letter from 1956, she notes her amazement that she is capable of helping her father.
“Sugar, I guess we all somehow rise to occasions: I’ve done more things for him that I never remotely thought I’d be called on to do for anybody,” she writes. “But I suppose there’s truth in the adage that you don’t mind it if they’re yours. I sho’ don’t: you will discover that your Nelle Harper is a much less squeamish individual.
“But the one thing I don’t think I’ll get used to if I live to be 100 is a needle. They fed him through his veins for 10 days after he was stricken, and I gagged every time I saw him hooked up to that thing.”
Daddy is sitting beside me at the kitchen table, fully clothed, eating his 4 o’clock meal. These months have strengthened my attachment to him
Lee avoided the media for much of her life, but in private spoke her mind. She is candid in her letters as she gets a kick out of Elvis Presley, and knows well that she stands apart from her home community. In a letter dated “Sunday”, she expresses frustration that she cannot work on her books in Monroeville and longs to be back in New York, where she has “a chair, a table and a typewriter, and no people.”
In one of her 1956 letters, she notes the romantic interest of a Presbyterian minister but adds she is “just not up to it”.
“Besides, Presbyterian theology is about the gloomiest Protestant dogma I know of, and I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut: if I feel moved to express myself thereon, it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the NAACP, which god forbid,” she writes.
“They already suspect this to be fact anyway, because I said some strong words to one of our good Methodist brethren about my views on picture shows, dancing, dining, etc – in short everything but worshipping – in a Methodist church. I also told him it would be a good thing if the Methodists seceded again, which damns me.”