Lee letters reveal her thoughts on race, fame and getting old
Few authors were as intensely private as Harper Lee, who was rivalled perhaps only by Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger in her aversion to publicity.
When Lee died in 2016 at the age of 89, she hadn’t given a substantive interview in decades, and her reticence added to the mystery of why she decided to publish “Go Set a Watchman” in 2015, a novel she had set aside in the 1950s. But she was known to be a prolific letter writer, and in recent years, more of her correspondence has trickled into public view as it has come up for auction, offering a rare glimpse of the author in unguarded moments. Now, a batch of letters written by Lee between 2005 and 2010 offer a new window into the last decade of her life. The letters provide some context for her views on religion, politics and race.
In several letters, she shares her skepticism about Christianity. In a letter dated Jan. 20, 2009, she refers to the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and cites a conversation between actor Gregory Peck, who played Atticus Finch in the movie “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and President Lyndon B. Johnson, in which they discussed the possibility of a black president. “On this Inauguration Day I count my blessings,” she wrote. “I’m also thinking of another friend, Greg Peck, who was a good friend of LBJ. Greg said to him, ‘Do you suppose we will live to see a black President?’ LBJ said, ‘No, but I wish her well.’”
In one letter from 2008, she discusses the frustrations of aging and her declining faculties, writing, “I haven’t got bat sense — I blame drugs, but it’s probably senility ... Everybody here is in dementia of some sort + I am no exception.”
The letters, which were written to her friend Felice Itzkoff, who died in New York in early 2011, are being sold by Nate D. Sanders Auctions, which has set a minimum bid of $10,000. The opening price tag is significantly lower than that of a previous batch of Lee’s letters, which came up for auction in June 2015 at Christie’s, and were estimated to be worth between $150,000 and $250,000. (They failed to sell at that auction, when the bidding stopped at $90,000.) That collection, which consisted of just six letters addressed to Lee’s close friend, architect Harold Caufield, came up for auction shortly before “Go Set a Watchman” was published. Her private letters reveal that she was sensitive to what was being said about her, despite her deep distaste for publicity. In one of her letters to Itzkoff, Lee references criticism levelled at her for publishing just one book, by one of her literary heroes, Eudora Welty.
“I once heard her say something about ‘Harper Lee’s case’ — talking about one-novel writers. I could have told her: as it turned out, I didn’t need to write another one.”