Looking for Harper Lee

She did. To see, then, an erudite biography of Lee invites contradictory sentiments. There is, first, curiosity. Who is this woman, writer of America8217;s most widely read novel ever who still divides an inquiring life between her native Al-abama town and New York City? There is hesi-tation.

Isn8217;t it intrusive? In the years after the novel was published to such success in 1960, Lee fast came to respect her book8217;s special sta-tus and decided to let it command centrestage.

It is to Shields8217; credit that he honours both sentiments. He profiles Lee as the author of a beloved novel, but never does he implicate the reader in intrusive speculation and gossip about a woman who has spent all of her post-Mockingbird years dodging requests for inter-views and talks.

There are two movements in this book 8212; in-deed in Lee8217;s life as a writer. There is first the making of the writer8212;her childhood, her friendship with Truman Capote on whom Dill in the novel is based, her remarkable lawyer father model for Atticus, her own non-con-formist instincts, her abiding confusion about her reticent, depressive mother. There is her uneasy8212;and in the end inconclusive8212;pas-sage though university, trying to realise her fa- ther8217;s dreams for her to be a lawyer, but drawn to the solitary life of the writer. There is her flight to New York, and years of odd jobs to sus-tain herself, till friends put her to her task by committing to finance one year of her life.

All this leads to the main event, publication of the book, after many rewrites and much delving back into her childhood and the great modernising debates of the Deep South that resonated in the Lee household. In the months before the book was published, Lee enlisted as research assistant to Capote for a magazine story that eventually yielded In Cold Blood. Her contribution to that work is little acknowl-edged.

As they went around the Kansas town investigating the murders, 8220;Nelle8217;s job was to listen and observe subtleties that Truman might be too busy to notice. Then they would return to the hotel and separately write down everything they could recall. Nelle8217;s gift for cre-ating character sketches turned out to comple-ment Truman8217;s abilities to recall remarks.8221;

The second movement is Lee8217;s writing life after To Kill a Mockingbird. The book was such an instant success, it got the Pulitzer so unani-mously, that Lee was quick and dignified to come to terms with how much ahead of her the book already was. She was brimming with ide-as for future ventures. So, there is immense sadness in the fact that she eventually chose to retreat. Shields details the retreat. Indeed, the aftermath helped her pace the retreat. It could be argued that the Gregory Peck-starring scre-en adaptation, in which she was intimately in-volved, paced the retreat. It must have given her a sense that no matter what she attempted now, the novel would be taken as an instant comparison. Lee now is a voracious reader. She keeps up with New York8217;s museums. She ob-serves life pass by on the street.

Maybe one day she will write of all this, of a life that got defined and contoured by one great book. Till then, there8217;s this touching biography.