Harper Lee and Truman Capote: A Collaboration in Mischief
One summer about 85 years ago in a small
Alabama town, a scrappy tomboy named Nelle met her new next door neighbor, Tru,
a bookish, dapper dresser with a high-pitched voice and a mischievous streak.
They made an unlikely pair. She often went
barefoot in overalls while he dressed so fastidiously that a teacher said he
stood out like a bird of paradise in a flock of crows. But both were oddballs
who took refuge in detective novels, and they quickly bonded over their mutual
love of Sherlock Holmes and the Rover Boys, spending long afternoons reading mysteries in
their treehouse sanctuary. To entertain themselves, they started writing their
own stories on her father’s Underwood typewriter, taking turns as one of them
narrated while the other typed.
They grew up to be two of
the South’s greatest writers — Harper Lee and Truman
Capote — and
their lives and work were intertwined long after that first summer. Ms. Lee
drew on their friendship in her portrait of the characters Scout and Dill in
“To Kill a Mockingbird” and in her newly released novel, “Go Set a Watchman.”
Mr. Capote based the brash, sharp-tongued tomboy Idabel Thompkins in his debut novel,
“Other Voices, Other Rooms,” on Nelle. They worked together on Mr. Capote’s
true crime book “In Cold Blood,” then drifted apart after Mr. Capote failed to
credit her properly.
Photo
Greg Neri
Credit Edward Linsmier
Their broken friendship has
been restored — in fiction, at least — in a forthcoming middle-grade novel,
“Tru & Nelle,” by Greg Neri. Though Ms. Lee and Mr.
Capote have each individually been the subject of numerous biographies,
documentaries and feature films, “Tru & Nelle” is the first book to focus
primarily on their childhood bond.
“It was just kind of
sitting there, and I couldn’t believe no one had taken it on,” said Mr. Neri,
author of six books for teenagers, including “Ghetto Cowboy.” “Both she and
Truman used their real lives as fodder for their fiction, and I figured if they
did it, maybe I could do it too.”
“Tru & Nelle,” which is
to be released next spring, will follow the release this year of previously unpublished
works of fiction by both Mr. Capote, who died in 1984, and Ms. Lee, 89, who
remains in Monroeville, Ala., her hometown, in an assisted living facility.
Last month, HarperCollins
released “Go Set a Watchman,” a novel Ms. Lee wrote and set aside nearly 60
years ago. In October, Random House will publish a collection of lost short
stories that Mr. Capote wrote when he was a teenager and young man. Both books
shed new light on these authors’ creative development, their coming of age and
their ties to the South.
“They used the same town
and people and events, but used them differently and saw them differently,” Mr.
Neri said.
“Go Set a Watchman,” which
takes place 20 years after “Mockingbird” when Scout is an adult, is punctuated
by flashbacks to her childhood adventures with her brother, Jem, and her best
friend, Dill, the Capote figure: “He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed
individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat,” Ms. Lee
wrote. “He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.”
In one scene of “Watchman” that parallels an
actual childhood incident, Dill, Scout and Jem put on a mock Baptist revival,
culminating with a baptism in the fish pond. To their mortification, their
antics are interrupted by dinner guests, the minister and his wife. In reality,
Nelle, Truman and his cousin put on a mock carnival sideshow on a similar
occasion, shocking the visitors, an episode woven into Mr. Neri’s book.
The forthcoming collection by Mr. Capote also
features stories set in a small Southern town like Monroeville, where they both
lived as children. Peter Haag, owner of Kein & Aber, which publishes Mr.
Capote in German, stumbled upon them while doing research in the Capote archive
at the New York Public Library. Some pieces had appeared in school magazines,
but most had never been published. A few were printed last year in German in a
German magazine.
“The stories provide ample evidence that Capote
had found his own voice by a very early age and, at the same time, had to work
hard to develop it,” David Ebershoff, who is editing the book of stories for
Random House, said in an email.
Born a year and a half apart, the young Harper
and Truman both had active imaginations and distant mothers. Neither of them
fit in especially well in a small Southern community.
“Nelle was too rough for the girls, and Truman
was scared of the boys, so he just tagged on to her and she was his protector,”
a family friend, Charles Ray Skinner, recalled in “Mockingbird,” Charles J.
Shields’s biography of Ms. Lee. When schoolyard bullies ganged up on Truman,
who was small for his age, Nelle, who was younger, got in fistfights to protect
him.
Ms. Lee, who stopped giving formal interviews
in the 1960s, once described feeling bound to Mr. Capote by “a common anguish”
and said of her childhood, “We lived in our imagination most of the time.” Mr.
Capote recalled in an interview that the two often felt like “apart people.”
He started researching
their lives, reading biographies and interviews. Some of the richest material
came from Jennings Faulk Carter, Mr. Capote’s cousin and a frequent
co-conspirator during Tru and Nelle’s escapades. Mr. Carter gave a detailed
oral history to Marianne Moates Weber for her book, “Truman Capote’s Southern
Years.” “These stories were amazing — they were colorful and outrageous and
funny and tragic,” Mr. Neri said in a telephone interview from Tampa, Fla.,
where he lives. “Tru & Nelle” hews closely to history. It opens with their
first encounter one summer in Monroeville, when Nelle was 6 and Truman 7, and
ends with a dramatic scene with hooded Ku Klux Klan members arriving at a
Halloween party that Truman was hosting. According to an account given by Mr.
Capote’s cousin, Klan members came because they heard African-American guests
had been invited to the costume party, and left after Nelle’s father, A. C.
Lee, confronted them.
The novel ends on a
bittersweet note, when Truman leaves for New York not long after the Halloween
party, when he is about 8 years old. The real story was much messier, though.
Mr. Capote continued to
visit Monroeville in summer. He published his first novel in his early 20s. Ms.
Lee, encouraged by his success, moved to New York to write when she was 23,
despite her family’s misgivings.
But their friendship was
strained by bitterness and rivalry. Mr. Capote envied the success of
“Mockingbird,” which won the Pulitzer Prize. Rumors spread alleging that he had
written “Mockingbird” for Ms. Lee. She was stung when Mr. Capote relegated her
to the acknowledgments of “In Cold Blood,” after she helped to research it and
contributed 150 pages of typed notes. Toward the end of his life, Mr. Capote
drank and used drugs heavily, alienating many of his friends, including Ms.
Lee. He died of liver disease at the age of 59. “Drugs and alcohol did not
cause his insanity, they were the result of it,” Ms. Lee wrote to an
acquaintance.
Literary influence is hard
to measure, and it’s impossible to say how Harper Lee and Truman Capote might
have developed creatively in isolation, had they not spurred each other on as
young writers.
Mr. Neri offers a theory
toward the end of his novel, when Tru proposes a pact: “ ‘I’ll make you a
deal: I’ll write, but only if you promise to write as well. Then we can mail
each other our stories,’ he said, hopeful.”
Correction:
August 10, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the date when Greg Neri came up with the idea for the book about Harper Lee and Truman Capote. It was February 2014, not this past February.
An earlier version of this article misstated the date when Greg Neri came up with the idea for the book about Harper Lee and Truman Capote. It was February 2014, not this past February.
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