Harper Lee’s voice heard in ‘Mockingbird Songs’
Harper Lee: What a mess it’s all been.
For starters there was the author’s publication of Go Set a Watchman, a piece of juvenilia that should never have been chivvied into the public’s consciousness, and The Mockingbird Next Door, an unsettling memoir about Nelle — as friends called her — by Marja Mills, and in between endless speculation about the high-handedness of Tonja Carter, the controlling figure behind Lee’s estate.
But then, it falls to very few works of art to change a culture, and To Kill a Mockingbird is one of them.
Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee (Harper, 210 pp., eeeg out of four), a slim volume of correspondence and remembrance offered by an Alabama historian named Wayne Flynt, is probably the most well-informed and clarifying book that has emerged from the Lee-industrial complex.
It resolves many of the questions that have lingered since the author’s death in February 2016; more gratifyingly, in the handful of letters it contains by Lee herself, it offers a sharp, salutary reminder of how effortlessly gifted a writer she was.
The most important thing Flynt has on his side is that he was very definitely Nelle Lee’s friend. In a 2008 letter, she writes to him and his wife, Dartie, “You are two of the treasures of my life and I love you.” Her letters to them are at first amiable, then familial, and finally adoring. They traded visits. She respected his work as a regional historian, cherished his grandchildren. He delivered the eulogy at her funeral.
This closeness grants credibility to the information Flynt offers about Lee’s final years and final publication, so that while it’s a short book, it appears to answer several difficult questions.
For instance, he is absolutely clear that Lee was in full control of her faculties when she approved the publication of Go Set a
Watchman. Carter — the focus of some controversy — appears in a favorable light.
Flynt’s depiction of Lee is also persuasively dismissive of Mills’ insinuations that Lee was troubled, depressed and drank too much. More than half of Mockingbird
Songs is comprised of the professor’s own letters, which, depend- ing on your perspective, will either seem gracious, witty and Christian, or unctuous, calculated and personage-collecting.
Similarly, his approach to the notoriously reclusive author was so gradual — he was friends with her sister Louise for more than a decade first — that it can only be chilling or perfectly natural, nothing in between.
This is the peril of literary afterlives.
But Lee’s voice! (On the city of Houston, for instance: “No past, no future, just NOW in all its tastelessness.”)
And how valuable to learn which writers she considered to be “the two” (Eudora Welty and Faulkner), or which Bible verse she was most likely to cite (Hebrews 13:8).
Mockingbird Songs contains just enough information, just enough of Lee herself, just enough, taken all in all, to transcend its equivocal participation in the ugly and no doubt unfinished fallout of its subject’s final years.