Harper Lee was 34 when she published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. The novel was an instant hit, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and being successfully adapted into a film in 1962. The book has now sold some 40 million copies around the world and is still widely taught in schools.
However, Lee published nothing else for the next 55 years and refused all interviews and appearances. Then, in 2015, when she was 89, in a wheelchair in a residential care center, almost deaf and blind after a stroke, somehow a new novel suddenly appeared: Go Set a Watchman.
Although presented by the publishers as a standalone title, it soon became clear that Watchman was the precursor to Mockingbird, completed in 1957 and purchased by a publisher at the time.
In this novel, Scout, Lee’s alter ego, returns to Maycomb in the mid-1950s at the age of 26 to find her father Atticus a segregationist—racist, in fact—instead of Mockingbird’s cute white savior.
An editor, Tay Hohoff, felt that the best parts of this otherwise unpublishable novel were the flashbacks to when Scout was an impressionable child, and she encouraged Lee to rewrite the story from her point of view and in her voice, setting it all in the 1930s, resulting in the nostalgic, feel-good story still offered to millions of schoolchildren.
The influence of Truman Capote
The damaging impact of Go Set a Watchman on Lee’s status has yet to be fully digested. And the problem remains why she never published again. When I reviewed Watchman, I wondered if her childhood friend Truman Capote had a bigger hand in it than was ever acknowledged.
Now here is Lee’s third book, an embarrassing takedown by her publisher, which can only further damage her reputation.
The Land of Sweet Forever contains eight bad short stories that Lee wrote in the decade before To Kill a Mockingbird, some set in Alabama and some in New York, none of which were accepted for publication at the time.
Only one of them, The Cat’s Meow, deals with race in an uncomfortable way. The story’s narrator dodges the issue after her sister makes a racist comment, explaining, “I suppose a lot of people like me these days have mastered the first lesson of living at home: If you don’t agree with what you hear, put your tongue between your teeth and bite down hard.”
Eight more meaningless pieces of non-fiction follow. These include a terrible 1961 essay on Love for Vogue (“without love, life is meaningless and dangerous”), brief tributes to Gregory Peck and Capote, a grateful recollection of how friends sponsored her to do nothing but write for a year, and a 1983 lecture celebrating Alabama’s 19th-century history.
There is also a short “Letter from Harper Lee” for O, The Oprah Magazine from 2006, in which he advocates for printed books. “Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Crying over Anna Karenina and being terrified of Hannibal Lecter… some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.” It’s the only good thing I’ll remember from this mess.
A response to Lee’s silence
And why the silence for life? The best answer came in a 2015 blog post about Watchman by Ursula K Le Guin. “I wonder if the reason she never wrote again was because she knew her terrifyingly successful novel wasn’t true. By obeying the dictates of popular success, by allowing wishful thinking to corrupt honest perception, she lost the credibility she, an honest woman, needed to write.”
David Sexton was literary editor of the London Evening Standard from 1997 to 2020
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