The escape artist

HARPER LEE is the Greta Garbo of novelists. Since her last interview in March 1964, the 79-year-old author has been sighted mostly at the First Methodist Church in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., or perhaps on East 82nd Street in Manhattan, where she lives for part of the year. Her only novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” however, needs no publicist or writer to keep it alive. Since its publication in 1960, the book has sold more than 30 million copies; it continues to sell at a rate of roughly 1 million a year. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and inspired a classic film starring Gregory Peck, released in 1962. A 1991 survey by the Book of the Month Club revealed that the only book Americans read more frequently than “To Kill a Mockingbird” was the Bible.

Charles J. Shields’ “Mockingbird” is the first biography of Harper Lee, and it is unauthorized. (Lee checked some of the facts by mail and advised her friends not to speak with the biographer.) Like Emily Dickinson (with whom, Shields assures us, Lee has hardly anything in common), the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” has long existed as a kind of ghost in the culture, represented by a skimpy autobiographical sketch in which she famously claims nothing less than the desire to “become the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

With this as an ambition, it seems fair to ask what happened. Why did Lee disappear after “To Kill a Mockingbird”? For Shields, the answer has its genesis in the publication of the novel, which he describes as having emerged out of a crucible of writer, editor and agent -- a collective endeavor as much as an individual one. To his credit, Shields reveals the depth of these relationships, although he lacks the necessary access to verify certain stories, such as Lee’s rumored affair with her literary agent, Maurice Crain (who was married to her film agent, Annie Laurie Williams). When Crain died in 1970 and Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff at J.B. Lippincott, retired in 1974, there seemed little reason to go on pretending that a second novel would ever emerge.

In a 1974 BBC interview, Lee’s older sister Alice let slip that a second, almost completed novel had been stolen from the author’s apartment by a burglar, a story that seems implausible given the avalanche of other more believable reasons not to write another book. “I had every intention of writing many novels,” Lee reportedly told a waiter at a New York party, “but I never could have imagined the success “To Kill a Mockingbird” would enjoy. I became overwhelmed.” Shields continues: “Every waking hour seemed devoted to the promotion and publicity surrounding the book.... She claimed to be inherently shy and was never comfortable in the limelight.”

Shields also sheds light on Lee’s relationship with Truman Capote, her childhood friend and the model for Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” At 6, Capote was unceremoniously dumped on his aunts, who lived next door to the Lees in Monroeville, when his mother and her ne’er-do-well husband separated. Lee’s mother, Shields reports, was a reclusive, overweight woman prone to fits of emotion and probably bipolar (although she did not, as Capote claimed later in an interview that infuriated Lee, try to drown her daughter in the bathtub).

The two had a fierce, lifelong friendship until Capote’s death in 1984. This was cemented when Lee’s father, who inspired the character of Atticus Finch, gave them an Underwood typewriter and advised them to put their stories about neighborhood characters on paper. (In 1949, Lee disappointed her father by moving to New York to be a writer like Capote instead of a lawyer like him and Alice.) Stories about Lee defending her friend from schoolyard bullies who saw him as an overdressed, effeminate crybaby are well known. Yet Capote depended on Lee in other ways, hiring her as a research assistant for “In Cold Blood,” an experience also documented in the movie “Capote.” Shields interviews many of Capote and Lee’s sources to show how impossible it would have been for Capote to write “In Cold Blood” without her, although she received virtually no credit when the entire 135,000-word narrative was published in the New Yorker in 1965. “Truman’s failure to appreciate her,” writes Shields, “was more than an oversight or a letdown. It was a betrayal.”

Lee was an outspoken tomboy from the get-go; she was not well liked but was feared and respected by many people in her life, from Monroeville to the University of Alabama. Some with whom Shields spoke were surprised that Lee could have written a novel like “To Kill a Mockingbird”; she never seemed sentimental about her hometown. According to Shields, he was often asked if Lee was gay. (She never married and never seemed to have boyfriends, a reason to be regarded as eccentric in 1930s and ‘40s Alabama.) Yet “Mockingbird” offers no answer to this question, and it is doubtful that one will be forthcoming from Lee.

Shields does a fine job of re-creating Lee’s inspiration for “To Kill a Mockingbird”: her childhood neighborhood (including trees, plants, streets and buildings), its characters (many of whom appeared in part or in pieces in the novel) and the dynamic of her family itself. He does less well, however, describing the book’s historical context, which is crucial for our understanding of why the novel hit such a deep nerve in the American psyche.

To be sure, it is extremely difficult to cover all the bases, especially for an unauthorized biographer, who faces what is, at best, an elusive paper trail. Lee did, Shields reports, grow up in an era of change, particularly in the area of civil rights. Her father and her sister worked on a number of significant cases, including the 1931 “Scottsboro boys” case, in which nine young black men were accused of raping a white woman, and the 1933 trial of Walter Lett, a black man accused of a similar crime in Monroeville. Shields writes, as well, about Lee’s response to the banning of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in Richmond, Va., schools in 1966. “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence,” she wrote in the Richmond News-Leader in a rare print appearance, “that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is ‘immoral’ has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.”

Perhaps what assures “To Kill a Mockingbird” its place in American literary history is not just its code of honor or conduct but the many threads that, woven together, create characters we recognize, remember and even turn to when questions arise in our own lives. “You never really understand a person,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter, “until you consider things from his point of view.... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” This, of course, is what Shields attempts to do in “Mockingbird.” In the process, he offers a set of glimpses of a writer who produced a novel highlighting the intelligence of children, the value of spiritual epiphany, the threat of political and social injustice and a host of other issues, while remaining elusive, enigmatic and unapproachable even now.