The correspondence of Nelle Harper Lee and Wayne Flynt

By A.M. | ATLANTA

THE middle-aged narrator of “Quicksand”, a zany novel by Steve Toltz, gloomily reflects that “though I could always make friends, I could never again make an old friend—that time had passed for me forever.” One of the pleasures and consolations of “Mockingbird Songs: My Friendship with Harper Lee”—and there are many—is that it refutes that seemingly ironclad observation. Even at a reasonably advanced age, if two people share as much in taste and background as Nelle Harper Lee and Wayne Flynt, a depth of feeling can develop, a kind of melding of minds and lives that is worth a lifetime’s intimacy.

Mr Flynt, an eminent historian at Auburn University in Alabama, got to know Nelle (as friends and family called her) through her sister Louise. In “Mockingbird Songs” Mr Flynt has collected their correspondence, which began in 1992 when she was 66 and he 52, but was concentrated in the years from 2004 to Lee’s death in 2016. There are a few letters here by Dartie, Mr Flynt’s wife, and by Alice, Lee’s other sister, which offer another glimpse into the sisters’ mutual devotion, and mutually dependent decline.

There is nothing in Lee’s own letters about the scandal that blew up in the last year of her life over “Go Set A Watchman”, the belatedly published forerunner to “To Kill A Mockingbird” that portrays Atticus Finch as racist. Mr Flynt, however, clears up any remaining doubts about her mental competence and wish to publish it in the sketches of the friendship that, along with some helpful contextual notes, he weaves between the letters. When officials from the state’s Department of Human Resources come to investigate charges that Lee was being abused, “she reportedly dismissed their intrusion into her private life by telling them to go to hell and leave her alone.”

We do hear some of her thoughts on “Mockingbird” itself. “I wonder,” she writes in 2006, “what [readers’] reaction would have been if TKAM had been complex, sour, unsentimental, racially unpaternalistic because Atticus was a bastard.” (She found out, in a way, when “Watchman” came out.) We hear her views on Truman Capote and his occasional claims to have had a hand in her mega-seller. “I was his oldest friend and I did something Truman could not forgive: I wrote a novel that sold.”

More important, though, is the sense that comes through of the woman behind the story. Lee is spiky, opinionated—“if you did not want to know her candid opinion of anything,” Mr Flynt remembers, “better not to ask”—but also generous, warm, protective of her reputation but even more so of her family. She doesn’t like biographies of living people, including her own. She loves New York but can’t escape Monroeville, Alabama, and ultimately doesn’t want to. “I guess old places and people hold tenaciously onto us,” says Mr Flynt, who likewise once intended to put Alabama behind him, but couldn’t. She doesn’t like the internet: “don’t get me started on the prevalence of ignorance among people with access to instant information.” Above all, she is fiercely funny, inventing a silly secret club—the Society of Usual Suspects—and inducting Dartie into it.

And, rather than being reclusive, she comes across as picky and shy. She explains her reluctance to attend the many events at which she is honoured and fêted:

“I’m so terrified by these things that I’ll be anything I’m asked to be if I can just get through it without revealing the idiot behind the smile…nowadays I follow a mantra of great egotism: I’m older than anybody here, I know more than anybody here, so why should I be so afraid of anybody here? It works for about 15 minutes.”

The walls gradually come down as, invisibly, Lee decides to trust Mr Flynt. Or not quite invisibly: the trajectory of their relationship can be charted in the etiquette of their letters. She progresses from the formality of “Dear Mr Flynt” to “My Dear Wayne” and “Dear ones”, from “Sincerely yours” to the halfway house of “With love”, then to unhedged “Love” and finally the bluntly declarative “I love you”. “We are not prepared to offer you one crying morsel,” she says in advance of one Flynt visit to Monroeville, “but love you”. For his part, Mr Flynt remains stuck for a while on “Sincerely”, but eventually gets to “We love you”.

Those “I love yous” express an urgency of feeling but also the press of time. Lee is old, Mr Flynt is on his way, and both know it. People around them are fading. Louise is lost to dementia: Lee wonders “if people will speak of us, Wayne, in the past tense before we die.” When Louise dies, Mr Flynt, an ordained minister as well as an academic, says that “she has left the land of shadows for the realm of light.” (Mr Flynt quit the Southern Baptist church over its retrograde social attitudes: his is a stoic, tolerant Christianity rather than the hypocritically judgmental kind that both he and Lee detest.) They swap details of ailments and surgeries, as elderly friends tend to. And—friendship’s final service—together they contemplate their own deaths. When Lee did die, Mr Flynt delivered her eulogy, which (as per her specification) consisted of a lecture he had given a decade before on the abiding resonance of Atticus, Boo Radley, Tom Robinson and the other denizens of Maycomb.

This little book, then, contains multitudes. It exemplifies the wisdom, and the frank, unguarded honesty, that can crystallise with age. It is an insight into the chemistry and alchemy of friendship, in this case late-developing, but beautiful in its lateness. It is an oblique reflection on the tumultuous Southern history that its correspondents lived through. And it has the desirable effect of introducing readers to a major Southern writer. Not the author of “Mockingbird”—with whom anyone who picks it up will already be familiar—but Mr Flynt, an unmatched chronicler of moral gradations in a place where doing the right thing has been risky, and a man who, like the Atticus of “Mockingbird”, was himself always on the right side.