The Mockingbird Next Door
Life With Harper Lee
By Marja Mills
(The Penguin Press; 278 pages; $27.95)
In 1964, when Harper Lee was still issuing public statements, she told an interviewer: "All I want is to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama." Lee turned out, instead, to be the J.D. Salinger of Alabama, a one-shot novelist who spurned celebrity. Austen wrote six novels (two of which were published posthumously), but Lee completed only one, though that solitary novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," won the Pulitzer Prize, sold more than 40 million copies, and remains one of the most beloved novels of the 20th century.
Published in 1960, the story of Atticus Finch's attempt to defend a black man unjustly accused of rape and of Finch's daughter's lesson in the humanity of a misfit named Boo Radley became the perfect emblem of the nascent civil rights movement.
Though fame came to Lee, who spent most of a decade laboring over her manuscript in a cold-water Manhattan flat, as a refreshing novelty, the unrelenting attention soon became oppressive. By the time Charles J. Shields came calling to gather information for his 2006 biography "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee," his subject had withdrawn from public scrutiny. She refused to respond to Shields and instructed friends and family not to cooperate. Lee was not quite a recluse, but, like Thomas Pynchon, she rejected the trappings and entrapment of literary renown.
In 2001, when Marja Mills, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, was assigned to write about the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," which had been selected for citywide reading in the One Book One Chicago Program, she did not expect cooperation from Lee herself. Mills dutifully knocked on the door of the modest house in Monroeville, Ala., that Harper Lee shared with her older sister Alice Finch Lee, but she assumed that she would soon be back in Chicago embroidering the legend of Lee the misanthrope.
Instead, she was befriended by Alice, and, eventually, Harper Lee herself. With the sisters' blessing, Mills rented the house next door (at $450 a month) and for 18 months made almost daily contact with them.
"The Mockingbird Next Door," which grew out of Mills' feature assignment more than a dozen years ago, offers no startling revelations. It does not explain why Lee never followed up on her spectacular debut. It does not even presume to understand why Lee, who scorned all other reporters, trusted and encouraged this Yankee interloper. Instead, it is a fan's notes, the memoir of a middle-aged admirer's encounters with a formidable old lion.
By the time Mills came to know her and call her by her first name, Nelle, Lee was 75 (She signed her book with her middle name, Harper, to avoid confusion over pronunciation). Alice was 89, though she was, according to Mills, "as observant a person as I've ever met." Alice continued to practice law in their late father's firm, though both she and her sister were deaf enough that "their hearing made small talk a hassle." Because telephone conversations were unreliable, Mills and the Lees communicated by sending faxes between their houses.
Because of Mills' anxiety that she might say or do something to cause banishment from Nelle's splendid circle, "The Mockingbird Next Door" seems less hagiography than an audition. Grateful for being assigned the role of confidante to a great author, Mills is eager to prove worthy of the privilege. Though the book does not mention it, Lee appeared to withdraw her favor when, after Penguin announced the book's forthcoming publication, she stated through her lawyer that she had not "willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills."
Mills dwells on banal activities shared with Nelle - fishing, churchgoing, dining, attending exercise class, watching the Patriots defeat the Panthers in the Super Bowl. Mills marvels that the legendary author of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is "the woman who was feeding quarters into the washing machine at the Excel Lauromat with me on a regular basis."
Occasionally, Nelle offers brief comments on literary connections. About Truman Capote, a childhood friend who betrayed her with catty comments, she says: "Truman was a psychopath, honey. ... He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn't apply to him."
Mills admires Nelle for her feisty determination to live on her own terms but, skittish about disturbing her, never presses on why she abandoned a second novel, "The Long Goodbye," as well as a true-crime book about a minister accused of multiple murders to collect insurance. She merely alludes to rumors about a drinking problem.
A stroke in 2007 caused Nelle, her memories fading beyond the reach of interrogation, to move into an assisted living center. For most of her life, she divided her time between Alabama and an apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. With little to say about her as a New Yorker, Mills examines the changing face of Monroeville, the model for Maycomb in Lee's enduring novel. Mills' congenial book is an intimate portrait that does nothing to invade the privacy of Harper Lee.
