Book review: Pinhole view into icon’s life

Harper Lee über-fans and readers interested in examining early work from a noted literary figure will likely get a kick out of the fiction here — but the stories are uneven

Author Harper Lee: 'Around the edges of her nine-to-five work, she lived off peanut butter sandwiches while drafting stories.' Picture: Rob Carr/ AP

• The Land of Sweet Forever 
• Harper Lee 
• Hutchinson Heinemann, €24.99 

The Land of Sweet Forever presents unpublished stories and uncollected essays by much-loved author Harper Lee, who died in 2016 at the age of 89. 

To be tasked with evaluating newly discovered, previously unreleased material from a legendary author feels a bit like watching grainy home video footage of a pop icon rehearsing for her school musical — her skill is evident, and it’s not necessarily fair to criticise her technique.

“From somewhere in the hall a bell rang,” Lee writes in a story named The Binoculars, about a precocious child eager to start education, “and the low hum from the schoolyard spattered into sentences as children came into the room.”

There are lots of stirring sentences spattered on the pages here, but the challenge with unearthed literary drafts is that an editor, for the most part, often hasn’t been nigh or near the texts. 

Editing is an invisible skill — when it’s done well, the writer gets the credit, when it’s inept or absent, they incur the blame. 

Assembling material that lacks editorial intervention almost always results in an off kilter reading experience, no matter how big the name.

Harper Lee über-fans and readers interested in examining early work from a noted literary figure will likely get a kick out of the fiction here, some details even betoken the novels, but the stories are uneven, studded with moments of greatness yet lacking the showstopping power of her multi-million selling classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. 

This is not a failure of talent, but an inevitability of spotlighting material that, although impressive, is seemingly unripe.

The book’s captivating, informative introduction by Casey Cep bodes well for the biography of Lee that Cep has been entrusted with. 

In addition to acting as Lee’s appointed biographer, Cep has written about her before, in the well-received non-fiction book Furious Hours, which details Lee’s abandoned attempt to pen a true crime novel.

A fascinating and notoriously private author who scarcely gave interviews, The Land of Sweet Forever does offer us a precious pinhole view into Harper Lee’s life.

In the foreword, Cep tells us: “Around the edges of her nine-to-five work, she lived off peanut butter sandwiches while drafting stories at a desk she made for herself with two old apple crates and a door she found in the basement of her building.” 

We discover that Lee tried to get her stories published in magazines, recording her Manhattan addresses on the manuscripts, and kept her rejection letter from The New Yorker.

The book’s second half is a gathering of non-fiction pieces that appeared in outlets such as Vogue and McCall’s. 

A prose poem-like contribution to The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook, in the form of a short, humorous recipe for Crackling Bread, is a delight. 

The jewel of the book is Christmas to Me, in which Lee describes how an unexpected patronage from friends resulted in her being able to leave that nine-to-five and devote a year to solely writing fiction:

“Whether I ever sold a line was immaterial. They wanted to give me a full, fair chance to learn my craft, free from the harassments of a regular job. Would I accept their gift? There were no strings at all.” 

This encouragement was perhaps instrumental in aiding the literary phenomenon that was to follow, and Lee’s telling of it grants us a glimpse of her bohemian New York era.

The essays and stories are presented in a handsome hardback volume complete with royal blue accents and a ribbon bookmark — for admirers of Harper Lee, it would certainly make a nice Christmas gift — not a life-changing one, but heartwarming all the same.

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