Harper Lee on Writing

Recently I came across a link to a 1964 interview with Harper Lee, one of the last she gave before withdrawing from public life. It’s an interesting read, and a few passages particularly struck me. For instance, Lee’s response when asked what she most deplored about modern American writing (and this was over fifty years ago!):

I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing, and especially in the American theatre, is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this—the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea. It takes time and patience and effort to turn out a work of art, and few people seem willing to go all the way.

I see a great deal of sloppiness and I deplore it. I suppose the reason I’m so down on it is because I see tendencies in myself to be sloppy, to be satisfied with something that’s not quite good enough. I think writers today are too easily pleased with their work. This is sad…There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.

This bit about developing imagination in childhood, one of the things Lee captured so well in To Kill A Mockingbird, in many ways reminds me of my own childhood—make-believe and storytelling was always front and center, whatever toys I may have had to play with.

This was my childhood: If I went to a film once a month it was pretty good for me, and for all children like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn’t have much money. Nobody had any money. We didn’t have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers, and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama.

Did you never play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you never tramp through the jungle or refight the battle of Gettysburg in some form or fashion? We did. Did you never live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branches of a chinaberry tree? We did.

In retrospect it’s odd, and perhaps a little sad, to read this interview of an author apparently in the midst of her career and talking freely about future ambitions and novels, while knowing she never wrote another. It makes one wonder what might have been.

I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better… In other words all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama.

You can find the full interview here.