Harper Lee and Truman Capote: A Collaboration in Mischief - The New York Times - 0 views
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”