Review of Forever Sweet Land by Harper Lee – Newly Discovered Stories from an American Great | Harper Lee

WWhen a new book is published by a writer who has been dead for a decade, there is always some suspicion that the bottom of the barrel has been scraped. When the writer is Harper Lee, there’s also the unpleasant aftertaste of the release of her second novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman, which was promoted as a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, when in fact it was a shapeless early draft. The post was also surrounded by controversy over whether the elderly Lee, who was seriously disabled at the time, had actually consented to its publication.

This new book, Sweet Land Forever, is a much more traditional project: a collection of Lee’s previously unpublished short stories and essays. No deception is being practiced here, and if people want to read the little scribbles of a favorite author, it is certainly a victimless crime. However, like most of these books, it doesn’t have much to offer those who aren’t die-hard fans.

The short stories Lee wrote in his youth are all largely underdeveloped. Most of them fail to work even with short articles. One focuses on trying to find a place to unload a truck in Manhattan; Another about a temporary change in the way doxology is sung in the Methodist Church. A little piece about the quirks of the New York movie crowd is billed as a story, but it reads more like a newspaper sketch. Young Lee seemed to have no idea what the story was.

On the plus side, there is indeed a wit and charisma to the voice. One narrator, returning to her southern hometown, recognizes “a tall young man whose face belonged to the Wade family, but whose body showed a widespread Talbert influence. It was Talbert Wade, of course.” This may be simple, but it’s done elegantly. There are also hints of rebellious rage struggling to emerge, especially in the water tower, where a 12-year-old Mississippi girl mistakenly believes she is pregnant. Since being an unwed mother would destroy her entire family’s life, she decided that the only way to save them was to destroy her shameful body. With another draft or two, this story could have been really painful. But the version we get is meandering and clumsy, and fades inconsequentially. Perhaps the most powerful story in the collection, “The Cat’s Meow,” deals with the mass incarceration of black men in the Jim Crow era. Here, the ignorant white people’s dialogue is painfully compelling, but the narrative continues to fall incongruously into the conventional peeps of mid-century women’s magazines.

If the stories are events, the essays are routine outings on topics like “Love is the most important thing,” “Reading is important,” and “My happiest birthday.” The essay on love includes such insights as “Man is on his way to Venus, but has not yet learned how to live with his wife… Man now has the power to destroy himself and his planet: it will depend on it—if he stops loving.” The overwhelming feeling in these matters is that Lee had been pestered by a publicist or friend to write something, and was struggling to meet the minimum word count. It is initially interesting to note an article about Truman Capote, a close childhood friend of mine. But this turned out to be just a short article written for the Book of the Month Club newsletter, consisting of things like: “Kansans will spend the rest of their days in a puzzling game of discovering Truman; and what Truman finds in Kansas will cause people everywhere to discover themselves.”

If we consider this book as literature, it is an absolute failure. But we would do well to look at it – and we will certainly read it – for the light it sheds on Lee’s life. As such, it is indirectly fascinating, largely because it radiates oppression. There is often a feeling that we are seeing a side of Harper Lee that is not exceptional, but represents a generation of women who were mostly muzzled. Time and time again, the narrative chokes when things start to get challenging. The gender non-conformity of the protagonists – all thinly disguised versions of Lee – is often evident but never explicitly stated. The traditionally cheerful tone is an almost hostile presence, drowning out and monitoring Lee’s true thoughts. Beneath the surface, we often sense the stubborn rise of the excluded. “I suppose a lot of people like me have mastered the first lesson of living at home these days: If you don’t agree with what you hear, put your tongue between your teeth and bite down hard,” Lee writes in The Cat’s Meow. We feel those aching teeth on every page of this book. In a time of increasing censorship, it is useful to remember that an author as important as Harper Lee came very close to being silenced entirely.