Furious Hours

 

Any Good Books, May 2023

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

Casey Cep (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours is a story about a story, a book about a book that didn’t happen. It’s a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book about loose ends, ambiguous heroes, and lost drafts. This befits its subject, Nelle Harper Lee, who achieved literary success beyond her wildest dreams, only to find the fame deeply burdensome, and the wealth expensive.(The top tax rate was still 90% in 1960, when the royalties for To Kill a Mockingbird began flooding in. The book has been in print ever since.)

Cep’s book opens in Alexander City, Alabama, in 1977, at the trial of a man, Robert Louis Burns, who shot another man in front of three hundred people. The shooter and the victim, the Reverend Willie Maxwell, were black, as were most of the witnesses; the jury, the judge, and all of the lawyers were white men. Harper Lee sat among the press. She was there at the invitation of the defense lawyer, Tom Radney, whom she’d met in New York at a party connected to the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

The man who was shot, the Reverend Willie Junior Maxwell, lived a lavish life for a part-time preacher living in the wide spot in the road that was Nixburg, Alabama. In addition to preaching, he worked in a rock quarry, reducing rock to gravel and dust, and ran a pulpwood crew, delivering soft Alabama pine to paper mills, possibly the only man ever to do so in dapper three-piece suits.

In 1970, Maxwell’s wife, Mary Lou, was found beaten to death in her car, a short way from home. Her life was unusually well insured, and her husband was the prime suspect. The Reverend had policies with companies all over the country, not only on his wife, but on “...his mother, his brothers, his aunts, his nieces, his nephews, and the infant daughter he had only just legitimated.” The initial charges were dismissed for lack of evidence; the following summer, new evidence and a new indictment led to a not guilty verdict. Meanwhile, Tom Radney was helping the Reverend sue for Mary Lou’s death benefits, and taking a hefty cut when he won.

His first wife’s was not the only unresolved death. In the next two years, his older brother and his second wife also met suspicious ends. Some insurance companies had begun to refuse his business, but others paid some $80,000 on Mrs. Maxwell’s death. Then a nephew who worked on the pulpwood crew was found dead in a car; and then a teenage girl his third wife had taken in. It was at her funeral that Robert Burns drew a gun and shot Willie Maxwell three times at close range.

The trial chapters are riveting. “Two hundred people had come to watch the trial of Robert Burns, and the Alexander City Courthouse was packed tight as a box of crayons. The onlookers gasped at the coroners, laughed at witnesses, and whispered among themselves during any new testimony, their benches squeaking every time they leaned over to talk with their neighbors.”

Here was a story, after all those years, that called out to Harper Lee. She had grown up watching her father in courtrooms. She had gone to Kansas with Truman Capote to dig into the murders of the Clutter family for In Cold Blood. Her interview notes, and the way people opened up to her who found Truman Capote too exotic to deal with, contributed immeasurably to the success of that book. In Alex City, she spent time with Tom Radney, and became friendly with a young local journalist named Jim Earnhardt. She interviewed everyone who remembered Reverend Maxwell, including his killer. Burns had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity, but passed through the state mental hospital in short order, and was already home. She went home to New York to start writing with a hefty valise full of Radney’s files, and Earnhardt’s reporting scrapbook.

And then… what? “Nothing writes itself. Left to its own devices, the world will never transform into words, and no matter how many pages of notes and interviews and documents a reporting trip generates, the one that matters most starts out blank.” The tale was, in the first place, exceedingly tangled; where she needed facts, she had rumors, conjectures, and lies. She was lacking the help her first agent and editor had given her on Mockingbird. Those people were dead, and no one could replace them. And was the public ready for the story of a black serial killer, from the author of such a beloved book?

Casey Cep has done an exceptional job reconstructing all of this, especially the social and economic fabric of Alexander City. If we can’t have Lee’s book, I’ll gladly take this one.

The Art of the Wasted Day

 

Any Good Books, July 2023

The Art of the Wasted Day

Patricia Hampl (Penguin, 2019)

The never-ending to-do list seems to be a fundamental problem of modern life; I’m never averse to reading about how to manage it better. That said, what Patricia Hampl is after here is harder than that: what is the actual alternative? What did Michel Montaigne know that we have forgotten? Come to that, what did she know as an eight-year-old girl, lying in the shade of a backyard beechwood tree, that we have forgotten? “There is no language for this, not then, not even now, this inner glide, articulation of the wordless, plotless truth of existence.” That girl will grow up to be a daydream believer, though she has already been told by the nuns that daydreaming is ‘an occasion of sin.’ It just may be delicious enough to be worth going to hell for.

Of course, she also grew up to be an ordinary adult with a to-do list, which is pleasant enough in its academic and household details. “Whole decades can go this way–and have–not just in domestic detail, but awash in the brackish flotsam of endeavor, failure and success, responsibility and reward.” Assuming that the end of toil does not coincide with the end of life, there’s still the problem of what makes life worth living. Yoga and meditation, offered as solutions, seem like a peculiarly American approach, inasmuch as they seem to be material for an ever more highly evolved to-do list.

So Hampl, following the death of the man she lived with and loved for more than three decades, sets out to visit some settings of legendary leisure. First, she went to Llangollen, Wales, the retreat of a couple of ladies from Ireland. They moved in together in 1778, when Lady Eleanor Butler was about forty, and her companion, Sarah Ponsonby, was twenty-four. In their day, they were famous for their seclusion, which is an inconvenient thing to be famous for. “...[B]oth Shelley and Byron turned up to talk and ‘stare,’ apparently flummoxed by the orderly cloister life of the Ladies. Charles Darwin came as a child in the company of his father; Lady Caroline Lamb (the novelist and lover of Lord Byron–and a distant relative of Sarah) made a visit. As did Sir Walter Scott.”

What did the famous and fashionable find at the secluded cottage? A sort of secular cloister, ordered by a System of daily times for walks, correspondence, reading, and study. “They seemed to experience liberation precisely because of the limititation of the System. This insistence on the ideal use of time was the point of their life together. The tournaquet of the System was a saving ligature.” Within it, for fifty years, they had all the time in the world. Similarly, the Ladies chose to wear black riding habits and men’s top hats, and never had to think about clothing again. They’d prefer to think about books, and gardening. This is obviously a way of life also made possible by a live-in servant and scrounged funding from the families back home in Ireland; still, it shows the possibilities.

As she travels, Hampl is reading Montaigne, whose tower is the later object of her pilgrimage. He lived and worked in a tower on the grounds of the family château, thoughtfully furnished with a private chapel on the ground floor, which he could listen in on from his upper room. He thought of his essays as ‘meddling with writing,’ though surely he labored over that informality, rewriting and polishing his one book. But Montaigne was right: all he had to do was describe what he was thinking. “Sit there and describe. And because the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, the world lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued, comes to life. The little world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit, angles into the great world.”

If the thirst for narrative drives your reading, this book is not for you, but I’m glad to read an argument for the rest of what impels my reading, since I wouldn’t have known just what to call it. “What characterizes the rise of memoir in recent times is precisely the opposite condition–not a gripping ‘narrative arc,’ but the quality of voice, the story of perception rather than action.” Those voice and their descriptions bring me to places I haven’t seen just as surely as tales of climbing Everest would. Actually, there is a thread of narrative, not only in the journeys to stand in the places her subjects stood, but the filament of her relationship, remembering the things her beloved said and did, and the warmly humorous regard he held for her. Even in flashes, it’s a lovely thing to witness.