Scout and Dill: Apart People

I just finished reading I am Scout: the Biography of Harper Lee by Charles Shields. I didn’t realize until I was well into it that this book is the YA version of Mockingbird, Shield’s full-fledged biography of Lee.  [The tip-off was a few of the facts the author felt necessary to explain, such as what morphine is.] Since I haven’t read Mockingbird, which is about 150 or so pages longer than I am Scout, I can’t really tell what Shields didn’t deem suitable for a younger audience. But, the YA version doesn’t seem like it’s dummied down for kids. The tone is serious and informative.  I can imagine teachers reading Mockingbird to better teach the novel but assigning I am Scout to give the students a better understanding of the author.

I am Scout sheds light on many parts of Nelle Harper Lee’s life, including why she never wrote a second book, but I’ve always found the friendship between Harper Lee and Truman Capote rather fascinating. And, I’d wondered what happened to that friendship in later years. For those who don’t know, Lee and Capote—who wrote In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s—grew up on the same street in Monroeville, Alabama during the Depression. Capote later moved to New York when his mother remarried. The character of Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird is, as Capote proudly proclaimed, based on him.

Neither the young Lee or Capote fit in with their classmates in Monroeville. She was a headstrong tomboy who really didn’t care what other people thought. Capote was a target of bullying because of his clothes, size, and other factors.  Most of those classmates were surprised they became fast friends.  Shields describes them:

She was a female Huck Finn, with large dark brown eyes an close cropped hair. Whereas he—as surely every child at Monroe County Elementary knew that night followed day—was a sissy, a crybaby, a mamma’s boy, and so on. (22)

Yet, the two were inseparable.  Both had their own theories as to what bound them together. Lee called it a “common anguish.” Capote said they were both “apart people.”  They were in their own little world, and their world loved words.

The “apart people,” though, had contentious relationship. Lee was always quick to defend her friend to others, but she wouldn’t take crap from him, at least when they were young. And, he always tested their friendship as if he were sure that someday even Nelle would give up on him.

He finally went too far, though, when he cut her out of In Cold Blood. Harper Lee had helped him research the case, accompanying him to Kansas. She was his paid research assistant—all the while To Kill a Mockingbird was being published. Her notes (and support) were instrumental in the writing of his book.  Her novel was published in July 1960 to dizzying praise, which no doubt irked Capote. The movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, came out two years later, also to much acclaim.   When In Cold Blood was finally published in 1966,  Harper Lee was shocked to discover Capote had only briefly dedicated the book to her and his longtime partner. There was no acknowledgement of the work she had put into his book. One of her friends said, “Nelle was very hurt that she didn’t get more credit because she wrote half that book.”(188)  She felt betrayed.  The two apart people grew apart from each other after that.