The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee - Couverture rigide

Mills, Marja

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1594205191 ISBN 13 : 9781594205194

Editeur : Penguin Press, 2014

Synopsis

Journalists have trekked to Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where she has lived with her sister Alice for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation and a great friendship. In 2004, with the Lees' blessing, Mills moved in next door to the sisters and spent the next eighteen months there, sharing their lives as they slowly revealed their life stories and their love of literature and the South.

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One

Do you want to take a trip? You can say no.”

Tim Bannon, my editor at the Chicago Tribune, stood at my cubicle. He ran the daily features section on the fifth floor of the Gothic Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago and was pleasantly low-key by newspaper standards. Tim knew I liked to travel for stories, and that if the story took me to an unusual part of the country, so much the better. I had loved spending time at a monastery in rural Missouri for one story and at The Citadel, the military college in South Carolina, for another. Tim also knew I had been out sick a lot that year, 2001. In 1995, I had been diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune condition that frequently left me fatigued. I wanted him to know I was still able to do my job. I purposely accepted before finding out more.

“Sure. Where to?”

“Monroeville, Alabama.”

Tim saw my quizzical look and smiled.

“It’s Harper Lee’s hometown. We know she doesn’t give interviews. But I think it’s worth going there anyway.”

Enough said.

A couple of weeks earlier, the Chicago Public Library had chosen the elusive author’s To Kill a Mockingbird as the first selection in its One Book, One Chicago program. The idea was to get Chicagoans in every corner of the city reading and discussing the same book. It didn’t hurt that To Kill a Mockingbird happened to be the favorite of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, as he told me a couple of months earlier for a story I wrote about his reading habits. That he was a reader at all surprised some folks. His press conferences were hard to follow. He didn’t necessarily exit the same sentences he entered. But he loved books, and he especially loved To Kill a Mockingbird. In that, he was part of a phenomenon that began in 1960 and continues to this day.

When the novel was published in July of that year, Harper Lee was a few months past her thirty-fourth birthday. From the beginning, Lee was a collection of contradictions. She was an Alabama native whose love of the state’s back roads was matched only by her love of New York City streets. Her public shyness masked a wicked wit. During the publicity engagements for the novel’s publication, when she wasn’t averting her gaze, her dark eyes could alternate between a penetrating stare and a mischievous gleam. She was a distinctive blend of engaging and elusive.

Lee labored for several years to produce the novel. She coaxed the story out of a Royal manual typewriter in her small Manhattan cold-water flat and on visits home. Atticus Finch is a principled attorney and the widowed father of two children. As the novel begins, his tomboy daughter, Scout, is about to turn six. Her older brother, Jem, is almost ten. With their father, they endure the suspicion and outright hatred directed at Atticus when he defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell, in their segregated town. In the novel’s climactic scene, Bob Ewell, father of Mayella, comes after the children. Boo Radley, the neighborhood recluse who has frightened and fascinated the children in equal measure, saves them.

Through the experiences of Scout, Jem, and their best friend, Dill, Lee paints a vivid picture of small-town childhood in the segregated South. She also explores complex themes in the lives of her characters, from mental illness to addiction, racism, and the limitations society imposed on women.

The story of small-town childhood and racial injustice in Depression-era Alabama garnered glowing reviews and stayed on the best-seller list for nearly two years. In 1961, Lee won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Academy Award–winning 1962 film version of the novel, starring Gregory Peck, became a classic in its own right.

It was a stunning debut. With time, Lee’s novel became something more: a national touchstone in a culture becoming ever more fragmented. In a 1991 survey, the Library of Congress asked readers which book most influenced their lives. Only the Bible outranked To Kill a Mockingbird. It has sold an estimated forty million copies or more and been translated into three dozen languages, from Swedish to Urdu. It is required reading for at least 70 percent of U.S. high school students.

The novel became a classic at the same time as it defied Mark Twain’s definition of one: “a book people praise and don’t read.” References to the work appear in movies, on television, in countless other books, and in comic strips, cartoons, and lyrics. People cite the novel as the reason they became writers or lawyers. The characters’ unusual names have a comfortable familiarity even to those who haven’t read the novel in years, or perhaps never did. Atticus Finch. Scout. Boo Radley. The unusual names from Depression-era Alabama now populate the glossy pages of People and Us Weekly, as celebrities, as well as plenty of regular folks, name their children Harper, Atticus, or Scout.

As the novel’s cultural influence grew, so did Lee’s mystique. A few years after the book was published, she essentially stopped giving interviews. The second novel she had once discussed never appeared. Her rare public appearances made headlines. Her speeches, when she did accept an occasional award, usually consisted of two words: “Thank you.” When she was loquacious, she went on twice as long. “Thank you very much.”

Given her long public silence, in fact, plenty of people assumed Harper Lee was dead. At age sixty-six in 1993, she made dry reference to that fact in the foreword to yet another printing of the novel. Lee told her readers that she was “still alive, although very quiet.”

By the time I was given my assignment in 2001, she was seventy-five. In the modern world, she was as beloved and unknown as a person can be. She divided her time between Manhattan and her Alabama hometown. That much was known. Her full name was Nelle Harper Lee but she was simply Nelle to the tight circle of friends who protected her privacy. Periodic “In Search of Harper Lee” articles over the years offered glimpses into the author’s life, if only from afar. One newspaper story described the log cabin exterior and linoleum floors of David’s Catfish House, on the outskirts of Monroeville, and passed along intelligence gleaned from a waitress. The author and her older sister, attorney Alice Lee, always sat at a back table. They were quite hard of hearing, both of them. The waitress could report, firsthand, that they squabbled about who got to pay for the other. Not much else seemed to be known about her life after writing one of the most cherished novels of the twentieth century.

Lee’s responses to the never-ending requests for interviews ranged from “no” to “hell, no.” Usually, her literary agency and publisher declined on her behalf. In Monroeville, Alice practiced law with their father’s old firm, Barnett, Bugg & Lee, and also served as gatekeeper for her sought-after sister.

I expected that I would be turned away as so many reporters had been before. If nothing else, I could write about the small town that produced the author and inspired her fictional Maycomb. But first, I had to find it on a map. I pulled out my atlas.

Like Maycomb, Monroeville is a southern Alabama county seat located well inland. It is an out-of-the-way place, near no major airport or even the interstate. Nonetheless, the town of sixty-five hundred draws literary pilgrims from around the world. People want to visit the courthouse replicated in the movie. They want to run their hands along the polished banister of the balcony where a young Harper Lee watched her father try cases just as Scout does in the novel and the film. They want to walk past the spot where Lee climbed a chinaberry tree with her childhood friend and next-door neighbor Truman Capote. Devoted fans of the novel, the ones who can recite favorite lines by heart, want details. Do the tree’s poisonous yellow berries still fall to the earth along Alabama Avenue? Is the tree even still there, or those two childhood homes? Does the feeling Lee captured of a small-town, Southern childhood still exist?

For this hastily planned trip, I’d submit, meekly, the standard request for an interview, knowing that was as likely as a blizzard in August. Then I’d fly down and try to give Chicago readers a sense of the town that produced Harper Lee and annually sells out the two-act play adapted from the novel.

For One Book, One Chicago, the library system was gearing up for an onslaught of interest in the book. The city’s seventy-eight libraries were stocking their shelves with nearly two thousand additional copies of the novel, including some Spanish and Polish translations. Lee declined the city’s invitation to speak, but sent a rare statement in support of the program. She wrote, “When the people of Chicago assemble in various parts of the city to read and discuss To Kill a Mockingbird, there is no greater honor the novel could receive. People of all backgrounds and cultures coming together to put their critical skills to work—nothing could be more exciting!”

Like millions of others, I had read the book in school, as a shy fourteen-year-old who loved English, feared math, and ran on my high school cross-country team in Madison, Wisconsin. From the first pages, I was transported on a snowy afternoon to the red clay streets of an Alabama county seat during the Depression.

Now I had an assignment, a plane ticket, and a colleague, photographer Terrence James, also assigned to the story. I hadn’t worked with Terrence before but I’d seen him around the paper. He was African American, wore black jeans and boots, and had cornrows to his shoulders. He seemed enthusiastic about this assignment, as I was.

Terrence and I got better acquainted on the flight to Atlanta. We mapped out our assignment, where we wanted to go, and whom we wanted to see. In Atlanta, we rented a car for what turned out to be a nearly six-hour drive to Monroe County. Atlanta was a rookie mistake: I could have booked a flight into Montgomery, Mobile, or Florida’s coastal Pensacola. All were closer. But the Atlanta flight was cheaper. It didn’t look as far on the map as it turned out to be. The drive, however, gave us a chance to put Monroeville in a geographic context we could picture. Parachuting in, as journalists often do, you miss something.

We got off the interstate about a half hour from Monroeville. Along Highway 84, the foliage gets thicker. Elsewhere, in fact, kudzu drapes over hundred-year-old oak trees. It crawls up ravines. It creeps across the caved-in tin roofs of abandoned country shacks. It forms an intricate web of green so dense it seems to be hiding something.

We drove up hills, wound around curves. Trucks with bundles of freshly cut lumber thundered past. Terrence gripped the steering wheel tighter. We saw the “patchwork sea of cotton fields and timberlands” Lee describes in the novel. Large machinery now does the picking. It’s faster and cheaper. In To Kill a Mockingbird times, rows of men, women, and children did the picking. It was oppressively hot, back-breaking, finger-stinging work, plucking the tufts of cotton off the plant and putting them into burlap sacks.

We passed the occasional gas station and general store with “Coca-Cola” in fading white script on peeling red paint. We stopped at one of them. It was the kind of place that looked like it might still have Coke in those little six-and-a-half-ounce green bottles, the kind my grandfather used to have at his one-man Coca-Cola bottling operation in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. I checked. No, even here it was cans and plastic bottles only. Next to the cash register and the March of Dimes box was a giant plastic jar of hard-boiled eggs in vinegar. Beside that was another big jar with something vaguely pink floating in the brine. Pickled pig’s feet. I’d never tasted either. I’d stick to Diet Coke for now.

As we got closer to Monroeville, NPR faded. Now the choices were country music, conservative commentary, or fiery preaching on a couple of stations. Around every other bend was a redbrick church or a tiny white one with a steeple stabbing blue sky and a cemetery out back. Most of the churches were Baptist, but we also saw ones that were Methodist, First Assembly, and Pentecostal.

In a clearing between a redbrick school and woods dripping in kudzu, we spotted a basketball court. Young men playing. Young women watching.

Terrence slowed the car and looked at me.

“Yes, let’s,” I said.

We pulled into the area of trampled grass where other cars were parked, our rental conspicuously shiny and new among the old wide-bodied Chevrolets held together with spare parts and ingenuity. People stared openly at Terrence and me as we walked to the sidelines. Terrence carried a large camera around his neck. He is fairly tall. I stand fully five feet three and a half inches, with blue eyes, blond hair, and what’s charitably called alabaster skin, a whiter shade of pale. Mine was the only white face in the crowd.

We explained why we were there. We were just chatting, mostly. This was our first chance to get acquainted with the area, see what people had to say about life in this part of the country. Had they been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in school? A few had. Most had not. This also was the first of many times I was glad we had our bases covered between the two of us: male and female, black and white. Of course, once we opened our mouths and spoke, our accents lumped us together in one important way. We were Yankees.

As we spoke with the young men and women, the harshness of the sun gradually faded. I glanced at my watch. It was 6:35 P.M. This was what photographers call the golden hour, the magical interlude when everything is bathed in a soft light and, in the words of the painter James Whistler, “common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty.”

Terrence crouched down to photograph a couple of the pickup ballplayers from that vantage point.

A light rain began to fall. In the muggy August air, it was gentle relief. As it picked up, Terrence returned the lens cap to his camera. I closed my notebook against the falling drops. One of the young men waved at us. “Come back anytime.”

Terrence and I made our way back onto the two-lane highway to Monroeville. We’d have to find our way in the dark to the Best Western on the outskirts of town and then be up early to cram as many interviews as possible into our first day there.

Nearing the city, the feeling of a place out of time ends abruptly. Familiar chains pop up. At the Best Western, our rooms had an uninspiring view of parking lot and fence. Across a large field, the lights from David’s Catfish House glowed softly.

For dinner, I fed quarters into the outdoor vending machines. I retrieved peanut butter crackers from the well of the snack machine, and held a blessedly cold can of Diet Coke to my forehead. I smelled an odor I could not place. It wasn’t coming from the big garbage can in the alcove; it was carried on the faint breeze blowing over the field. It smelled like paper mill with a sour finish, like boiling cabbage. It was fertilizer, I later learned.

This was a poor county in a poor state. Where were the jobs now that the Vanity Fair plant had scaled way back? The apparel manufact...

Revue de presse :

Washington Post:
"There are many reasons to be grateful for The Mockingbird Next Door, Marja Mills’s wonderful memoir of Harper Lee and her sister....Sympathetic and respectful it may be, but The Mockingbird Next Door is no sycophantic puff piece. It is a zesty account of two women living on their own terms yet always guided by the strong moral compass instilled in them by their father.... It is also an atmospheric tale of changing small-town America; of an unlikely, intergenerational friendship between the young author and her elderly subjects; of journalistic integrity; and of grace and fortitude.... Mills doesn’t avoid prickly issues, but she approaches them obliquely and accepts partial answers. Despite her enervating illness, Mills’s writing is energetic. The Mockingbird Next Door is warm yet wistful, a lament for the books Harper Lee never wrote. It ends on an elegiac note, since by the time Mills was able to complete it, the Lees were fading fast, in separate assisted-living facilities. The world she depicts is sadly gone, but—lucky for us—she caught it just in time."

USA Today:
“A lot of people have a lot of ideas about what it means to be American, but here’s one more: To Kill a Mockingbird . . .That fact alone makes The Mockingbird Next Door, a memoir by Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills about her friendship with the book’s author, Harper Lee, a valuable artifact. It’s also a thoughtful, sweet-tempered, witty piece of work . . .  The Mockingbird Next Door offers a winning, nuanced portrait. Indeed, given Lee’s deep privacy and advanced age, it seems unlikely we’ll ever have a better record of a remarkable American life.“

People:
“[Marja Mills] has written an intimate, moving book about a rare talent.”

NPR Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan:
“Charming . . . The Mockingbird Next Door offers a rich sense of the daily texture of the Lee sisters’ lives . . . The world that Mills was invited into over a decade ago has disappeared: both Alice (now 102) and Harper Lee (now 88) are in nursing homes, memories faded. Fortunately, in Mills, the sisters found a genteel family chronicler knocking at their door at the eleventh hour.”

O, The Oprah Magazine:
"Mills has done what no writer before her could: She got Harper Lee to open up about her life, her work, and why she never wrote another book.”

Boston Globe:
“A rare, surprising, and respectful look at the Lees and their milieu.”

New York Post:

“It’s a testament to one-time Chicago Tribune reporter Mills’ skill—and being in the right place at the right time—that she befriended Lee and her lawyer sister, Alice, in the author’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala., and was chosen to set the record straight on Lee. A wonderful, insightful and long overdue tale about the author of one of the greatest American novels."

Vanity Fair:
“Hot Type: The Mockingbird Sings: More important than these answers, however, is the voice of Lee herself—and her message, which we still need to hear.”

Huffington Post
“I’m grateful for the time Marja Mills spent with both Lee sisters and their perceptive hometown friends . . . a gentle and evocative portrait of Monroeville today . . . Ms. Mills’ brief, charming memoir offers a rare picture of the reclusive author in her later years, a valuable addition to Harper Lee lore."

Elle:
“In telling their story in The Mockingbird Next Door, Mills writes with the amazement of one who feels kissed by fate. We in turn are blessed with an intimate portrait of Lee.”

Shelf Awareness:
“The development of trust and friendship between Mills and the Lee sisters took time, but even in those first minutes, the relationship was nearly unprecedented ...Told charmingly in the Lees’ southern drawl and with the affection and closeness that the story reveals, The Mockingbird Next Door is quietly admiring and satisfyingly intimate, and will captivate not only fans of Lee’s great American novel, but fans of real people living modest lives in small-town Alabama, or anywhere.”

Southern Living:
“Reading The Mockingbird Next Door is like opening a window into Harper Lee’s private world. As the window closes on the last page, we’re left with nostalgia for one of literature’s greatest talents and the feeling we had the very first time we read her remarkable novel.”

OWN, The Oprah Winfrey Network:

“Another real discovery ... This intrepid journalist ... learned more about the stories behind To Kill a Mockingbird and Harper Lee than anyone  before, after or since.”

Good Housekeeping:

“This glimpse of a rare bird is delightful.”

BookPage:
“A winning and affectionate account..... The Mockingbird Next Door offers a tender look at one of our most beloved and enigmatic writers, as well as the town that inspired her.”

Flavorwire:
“Marja Mills’ engrossing first book...is an extraordinary account of roughly a decade in the day-to-day life of the reclusive writer behind one of America’s seminal texts: To Kill a Mockingbird....The result is a gentle read, best enjoyed over a mint julep, say, or some sort of sipping drink, that sheds some necessary light on a persistent literary mystery....This one-of-a-kind work may stand as the closest thing to an autobiography that we’re getting.”

Garden and Gun:
“[Mills is] a skilled writer and storyteller...The Mockingbird Next Door has a near perfect combination of story and fact.”

Books & Culture
“...[U]nlike the masses that went before her, Mills pulls off a journalistic coup by getting first Lee’s sister Alice to open doors for her and then Lee herself . . . Mills has enjoyed unprecedented access to Lee, and we should be grateful for the tidbits she throws our way.”

Houston Chronicle
"For To Kill a Mockingbird fans it's a must-read."

Book Reporter
"Mills's book is remarkable."

LibraryReads, Top 10 of July 2014
“A warm and engaging telling of the life story of Harper Lee. Like no other biography, this book offers insights directly from Lee’s point of view as shared with the journalist she and her sister embraced in friendship late in their lives.Informative and delightful!”

Booklist (starred):
“As she portrays the exceptional Lee women and their modest, slow-paced world with awed precision, Mills creates a uniquely intimate, ruminative, and gently illuminating biographical memoir."

Publishers Weekly (boxed review):
“A must-read for fans...thoughtful, witty, and rich in feeling.”

Kirkus Reviews:
“In her first book, a journalist offers a gentle, loving portrait of a reclusive writer.... Mills portrays Nelle as a grown-up Scout, the feisty and defiant heroine of Mockingbird.... [A] charming portrait of a small Southern town and its most famous resident.”

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barack Obama and First in His Class
“The Mockingbird Next Door is quirky, honest, unpretentious, delightful, insightful, and moves at its own sweet pace. It is wholly unlike anything I’ve ever read, a reflection of both the author and her sympathetic subject. We should all be glad that Marja Mills went down to that Best Western in Monroeville in search of Harper Lee.”

Elizabeth Berg, New York Times bestselling author of Open House 
“You might come to The Mockingbird Next Door to find out why Harper Lee never wrote another novel. But you’ll stay with it for its lush evocation of the South, and for the insight into what made this reclusive author the person she became. In these pages, you’ll see the book-crowded house where Harper Lee lives with her sister, Alice. You’ll go along on outings, sit in living rooms and at restaurant tables with the Lees, read faxes they and the author send back and forth, and appreciate the small and not-so-small revelations they offer: life when they were growing up with their father, who was the model for Atticus Finch; how reading sustains a person for a lifetime, how deeply embedded values don’t change just because the times do, why it’s a good idea to regularly count the ducks you feed. I suppose we all thrill to the notion of learning personal things about a deeply private but world-famous person. What we don’t necessarily expect to see is how gently, respectfully and, above all, naturally it can be done. While I appreciated getting to see and hear the ‘real’ Harper Lee, I enjoyed as well the chance to meet Marja Mills, the woman who did what no one before her had because of her guileless trustworthiness, kindness, and care.”
 
Andrew Carroll, New York Times bestselling author of War Letters
“In The Mockingbird Next Door, Marja Mills offers readers a rare gift, the opportunity to know an American icon. We all know that Harper Lee made a singular impact on American culture and letters with her classic To Kill a Mockingbird. But, we have never had the opportunity to know the great lady herself. I’m so glad that she and her sister Alice Lee decided to open up their world to Mills. I promise that the real Harper Lee is more than worth the wait, and Alice Lee emerges as a fascinating character in her own right. Mills was lucky enough to be invited into the lives of the Lee sisters, and it’s a treat for all of us to join her there.”

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Press
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1594205191
• ISBN 13: 9781594205194
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 288