Two women who got it write on the first try
THE PBS “American Masters” series navigates tricky waters nicely Monday with a doubleheader on two women who each wrote only one novel, but saw their books help define a generation of literature.
And that’s not the only thing Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” share.
They are both Southern novels by Southern writers addressing sticky questions. For Mitchell, it’s the honor of the South in the Civil War. In Lee’s case, it’s the mid-20th century’s deeply ingrained racial divide.
Both novels seemed to come from nowhere and both were made into acclaimed movies that spread their message well beyond what print would have reached.
Then, having achieved acclaim beyond any fantasy, both writers receded into a quieter, less public life in which neither wrote another novel, or at least never submitted one for publication.
While this left the rest of us with a lingering wonderment over what might have been, these “American Masters” productions at least assure us that neither writer became an angry recluse à la J.D. Salinger.
Mitchell stayed active and outgoing until her death in 1949, a dozen years after “Gone With the Wind” was published. The 48-year-old was hit by a taxicab while crossing a street in Atlanta. Lee turns 86 next month. She has continued to live her life with family and friends, her sister says, and has made an occasional public appearance. Sometime in 1964, however, she decided she was through with the media and has never reconsidered that decision.
A fellow author here says Lee used her “Mockingbird” windfall to buy the private life she decided she wanted after she’d had a taste of public life.
Both of these biographical looks spend considerable time on the authors’ early days, when each showed the brains and talent that would later inform the novels.
Mitchell was a Southern belle who became a Southern rebel. Born in 1900 while the memory of the Civil War was still fresh, she joked that she was 10 before she realized the South had lost the war.
She absorbed the attitudes of the culture around her even as she became a flapper and later a reporter, two things that traditional Southern belles would not have considered.
She wrote “Gone With the Wind” over many years, and the final version reportedly was much revised from earlier ones — though we don’t know just how much, since her husband burned most of the early drafts, per her wishes, after her death.
Lee, conversely, grew up a tomboy, much like the narrator Scout in “Mockingbird.” Friends call her funny, smart and perceptive. Fellow writers marvel at her book and how honestly it handled Southern culture and human relationships.
In the end, we got what we got. There are worse things for any writer than to leave readers wanting more.