When To Kill a Mockingbird, the classic coming-of-age novel set in the segregated Deep South, was published in 1960, it seemed to arrive perfectly formed. In telling the story of a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Harper Lee, an unknown writer from Alabama, sparked widespread conversations about justice and Black oppression.
The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961, would go on to sell 42 million copies, becoming a staple in school classrooms. The following year it was made into an Oscar-winning film, with Gregory Peck as lawyer Atticus Finch and Mary Badham as the book’s young narrator, Scout.
All of which meant that Lee – who died in 2016 – was set for life and never needed to write another book. And, technically, she didn’t. In 2011, a friend of Lee’s, Dr Thomas Butts, revealed how the author had told him there were two reasons why she gave up her literary career. She said: “One, I wouldn’t want to go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again.”
So what should we make of it when the publisher of a cherished writer who is clear about having said all she wanted to say releases two further books under her name?
The first, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, was an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird discovered by Lee’s lawyer in a safe-deposit box. Then aged 88, Lee was losing her hearing and sight and suffering from cognitive decline. Though the book is alleged to have been released with her consent, the details of her involvement in the process remained murky. The reviews of Go Set a Watchman, meanwhile, were damning: the novelist Philip Hensher declared it “an interesting document and a pretty bad novel,” concluding it should never have seen the light of day.
What should we make of it when the publisher of a cherished writer who is clear about having said all she wanted to say releases two further books under her name?Now comes the posthumous The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of unseen short stories, written by Lee in her twenties, alongside previously published magazine articles written after To Kill a Mockingbird. The book, which comes with an introduction by Lee’s biographer Casey Cep, is best seen as the literary equivalent to a B-sides and bonus tracks album, an assemblage of curios published with the assent of Lee’s nephew Dr Edwin Conner, who, along with his siblings, is one of the beneficiaries of his aunt’s estate.
Of the short stories, two stand out. The first, “The Water Tank”, tells of Abbie, a 12-year-old Alabamian not au fait with the birds and the bees who listens in on a classmate, Maybelle, gossiping about a schoolgirl who has become pregnant. Getting increasingly anxious, Abbie wonders how it happened. “Listen, honey, you can have a baby any time after you’re twelve,” Maybelle tells her. “Hell, I coulda had one at eleven. You have to have a man against you and – Abbie, ain’t you started yet?”
Abbie has indeed started her period – and she has also had a boy against her, after a fashion: a boy recently asked to see what a girl’s private parts looked like and Abbie obliged, which must mean she is carrying a baby. At this realisation, Abbie passes out and is sent home.
Similarly striking is “The Pinking Shears”, which concerns a young girl called Jean-Louie Finch, a name that will give a jolt of recognition to readers since Jean Louise Finch is the real name of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. In this story, Jean-Louie visits a local Methodist family with her father where she meets one of the younger children, Matrid, who is frustrated that her parents won’t let her cut her wild, waist-length hair. And so Jean-Louie grabs a pair of scissors and does it herself, prompting uproar and a stand-off between their fathers.
Both these tales offer a child’s eye view of life in small-town Alabama in the mid-20th century, where a fear of God is matched only by the fear of one’s father. Clearly, drawing on settings from her own childhood, and using a child’s viewpoint to reveal truths about the adult world, was a method Lee would put to good use later on.
There are further fictional stories: “The Cat’s Meow”, which tells of a woman returning south to her hometown, shows Lee’s anti-racist stance taking shape; “The Binoculars” sees a pre-schooler watching the rhythms of a schoolyard from her home; and “A Roomful of Kibble” focuses on a single woman making her way in New York (where Lee herself would spend her twenties and thirties) where an eccentric friend from university shows up. Though these are not without charm or insight, they feel slight, reflective of a young writer still feeling her way around a literary form.
If the short stories are uneven, there is more confidence and fluency in Lee’s journalistic efforts. A meditation on love for Vogue magazine, published in 1961, summons the spirits of Shakespeare, St Paul and Handel as it builds to a rousing paean to the ways love informs invention and creativity: “Avarice never wrote a good novel; hate did not paint The Birth of Venus.” Elsewhere, a recipe for crackling bread – a cornbread that incorporates crispy pork rinds and which, in To Kill a Mockingbird, is Scout’s favourite snack – begins amusingly with “First, catch your pig.”
Mary Badham and Harper Lee n the set of the film ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in Monroeville, Alabama in 1961 (Photo: Leo Fuchs/Getty)Of Lee’s last two books, this is undoubtedly the better one. Where Go Set a Watchman was a flawed work-in-progress never intended for public consumption, The Land of Sweet Forever has more obvious merits, allowing us to see the before and after of a literary sensation.
And yet. After the controversies that beset the release of Go Set a Watchman, you might think Lee’s publishers and family would shy away from further ventures in her name. Books published posthumously, without clear directions from the author, can leave a nasty taste: think of Notes to John by the late Joan Didion, a book drawn from the author’s journals that got a critical drubbing earlier this year; or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Until August, an abandoned novel published against its late author’s wishes by his sons.
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We will never know if Lee would have objected to her short stories being made public, though we are at least on safer ground with the essays that she herself put out into the world. And if there is one in The Land of Sweet Forever that reveals something about the author, her aspirations and those she cared about, it is Christmas to Me, where she recalls one of her annual visits to two dear friends, a husband and wife, in Manhattan over the holiday season.
Instead of giving Lee, who was working for an airline at the time, the usual throwaway Christmas gifts, her friends gave her something priceless. They would pay her a salary for a year so she could devote herself to writing “free from the harassments of a regular job”. Lee was simultaneously overjoyed and alarmed; to write a book had been her dream but she was worried about risking her friends’ investment. What if she failed? But the couple had already observed something in Lee that she had yet to realise in herself. “No, honey, it’s not a risk,” they told her. “It’s a sure thing.”
‘The Land of Sweet Forever’ is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£22)
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