“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, published in 1960, was for generations the only known work of the late writer. When the book was made into a movie in 1962 (starring Gregory Peck), it became an opus familiar to Americans of every political and ethnic stripe.
But Lee had actually written “Go Set a Watchman” years before she wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird” and it was published in 2015. (Lee died in 2016.) It’s the reader’s good fortune that more of Harper Lee’s work has been uncovered and published in the current book “The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays.” Some of the pieces are taken directly from Lee’s life and even the fiction is autobiographical.
As stated, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is familiar to all Americans. It even boasts a worldwide audience. All of us know Atticus Finch, the wonderful father and brave attorney who defends the innocent black defendant accused of assaulting a white woman in Depression era Alabama. Yet this romantic perception of Atticus Finch is rocked in “Go Set a Watchman” when we are introduced to Atticus Finch, the ardent segregationist who clings to his southern culture as it slips away.
Atticus stays in the background in “The Land of Sweet Forever” as Lee features herself in both fiction and prose. She captures the culture of the south in her first story in which she features a girl in the sixth grade who believes a woman has to be married in order to become pregnant. The poor girl is also traumatized by the physical shock of female adolescence.
Lee’s southern background is paramount. But she also includes her years as a young woman and aspiring writer during which time she had lived in New York City. And her time in New York is interrupted by trips home to Alabama to visit Doe (her sister). What Lee reveals is that whereas she has a more reflective view of race than her fellow southerners, she is still a daughter of Dixie who maintains the firm and typical position that those of the north don’t understand the south and should mind their own business.
The most profound story in the collection involves Lee on a visit to Alabama and encountering Methodist ritual upset by the denomination’s northern brethren invoking an Anglican tone to the song selection. Lee proclaims that her beloved south of the 1950s is under siege not only from an activist U.S. Supreme Court, but that even its religious traditions face a northern threat.
An important segment of “The Land of Sweet Forever” is Lee’s tribute to Gregory Peck in 1989. Legend has it that on the set of “To Kill a Mockingbird” Lee became emotional when a scene was shot featuring Atticus and his daughter Scout (based on Lee herself). Peck later asks Lee if the scene had reminded her of her own father. Lee is said to have answered with sarcasm that Gregory Peck had the role of her father mastered with her daddy’s bald head and pot-belly.
But in this tribute to Gregory Peck, Lee embraces the contrast between her father and Gregory Peck, noting how miraculous it was that on the movie set she was thrust back into rural Alabama and the world of her father despite the contrasts between him and Gregory Peck. She applauds Gregory Peck for putting everything he had into the role, including himself.
It’s also necessary to acknowledge Lee’s treatment of Truman Capote, the eccentric and prolific writer who penned classics like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood.” Capote was a childhood friend of Lee and it is on Capote which the child Dill in “To Kill a Mockingbird” is based. Lee marvels at what the two of them have in common, both accomplished and recognized authors who had little use of formal education. Lee makes much of the fact that she never completed her studies at the University of Alabama, thereby disappointing her father (who entertained the dream of his daughter following in his footsteps into the legal profession).
For over a generation, literary observers (myself included) would speculate as to why Harper Lee had only produced “To Kill a Mockingbird” and followed with nothing else. We were to learn with “Go Set a Watchman” and now with “The Land of Sweet Forever” that Harper Lee was a prolific author. That she decided not to publish her wealth of writing until late in life and even on a posthumous basis in “The Land of Sweet Forever” has perhaps made her work even more precious.
John O’Neill is an Allen Park freelance writer.
