To Complete A Story in 55 Years

Harper Lee to publish a sequel to her best-selling novel To Kill A Mockingbird

Almost fifty-five years after American writer Harper Lee published her groundbreaking novel To Kill A Mockingbird, comes the news of an impending sequel, to be published later this year. As is to be expected, the world of letters has responded with feverish excitement: Lee, after all, is nearly 90. The sense of giddiness, however, owes more to the fact that after Mockingbird’s publication (and eventual stardom) in 1960, Lee never published another book. Mockingbird’s movie adaptation in 1962 came close on the heels of the book, and the resulting glare of popularity, celebrity and acclaim proved too much for Lee; after 1964, she shied away from all public events and stopped talking to the press.

The new novel, Go Set A Watchman, is expected to be released on July 14, 2015. Print run is already expected to run into millions, accompanied by the kind of hype Lee seemed to have detested all her life. The story will be set in the 1950s, with an adult Scout Finch (the young child narrator of Mockingbird) returning to her hometown Maycomb to visit her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch.

The ‘discovery’ of the sequel is no less dramatic: the manuscript was found last autumn, attached to an original typescript of To Kill A Mockingbird. Though technically a sequel, it was written earlier. The publisher’s press release quotes Lee saying, “In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Go Set a Watchman. It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.” While Mockingbird went on to make history, the original Go Set a Watchman was lost and forgotten.

Perhaps because it followed the book within a brief span of time, the movie adaptation, directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, will always be inextricably linked in the popular imagination to Lee’s literary efforts. Finch, the father of Scout and her older brother Jem, is the moral centre of the narrative universe, a role model of courage and conviction as he takes up the defence of Tom Robinson, a black youth accused of rape by a white girl named Mayella Ewell. He eventually loses the case, and the nuanced depiction of racial tension and prejudices is one of the reasons that turned the book into a classic, often inspiring the Civil Rights activism that followed the publication of the book.

Lee, of course, did not write just a timely and pertinent morality play. Her lyrical, evocative descriptions of a small town in Depression-era South carries elements of the universal, and one cannot read of Maycomb without being reminded of any other small town one might have encountered in some forgotten part of one’s life. “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day, bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square…People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with…”

In an interview she gave in the early 1960s, Lee is reported to have expressed a desire to “to leave some record of small-town, middle-class Southern life”. Yet fame intimidated her, and she never wrote again. Like any writer who refuses to jump through the hoops and carefully orchestrated manoeuvres of publishers and literary agents, Lee’s authorship was gradually brought to question. Did she really write the book? Or was it her childhood friend, the far greater literary success, the flamboyant yet intellectual heavyweight Truman Capote who wrote it for her? Why would a small town woman write a book that shakes her country (and the world at large), sells millions, becomes compulsory textbook material in schools, wins her the Pulitzer, only to shy away from the pageantry and retire to lead a private life? Why indeed?

And with too many years having elapsed between the first and the second work, the next obvious question has already arisen: does Lee know what she’s doing? She is advanced in years, wheelchair-bound, her vision and hearing both impaired ; her one staunch loyalist and supporter, her advocate sister Alice Lee who fiercely protected her privacy, passed away last year at the age of 103. In 2013, Lee (the novelist) had filed a lawsuit in New York, alleging that she had been cheated out of her copyright to her novel by the son-in-law of her former literary agent, a document she does not remember signing. So is the Mockingbird sequel the biggest books news of the decade, or is it just a hapless old woman being taken advantage of by wily agents and publishers?

The questions that have dogged Lee through her life till now bear a resonance to other writers too, in every part of the world. A creative pursuit like writing requires years of solitary struggle, with the attendant lack of finances that most writers face. While rejection is routine, publication does not ensure success, recognition or fame. But in the odd chance that her book makes it, a writer should be immediately able to put the years of lonely, introspective toil behind her and take to the limelight like a fish takes to water, flitting between literary festivals, book launches and promotional events as if permanently wedded to success. Those unable to straddle both these worlds, as is the case with Harper Lee, must prepare to have their life, thought and works questioned, constantly reminding themselves and others that they may be shy, but not fake.