I have to confess up front that when it comes to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird I had always wondered what all the fuss was about. Last winter, when an otherwise compos mentis friend from Alabama asserted that, next to the Bible, TKAM (as it seems to be called by those in the know) “is the most widely read book in the English language,” I couldn’t help myself, called a timeout and asked for a footnote for that assertion. She hemmed and hawed a bit and said that she’d get back to me. In due course, I was told that this  finding came from a professor at Auburn who surveyed students in his Alabama  history class  and found this student population to be enamored of TKAM, in second place, I assume, behind the Bible.

 Mystified and intrigued at how I could have been denying myself the pleasure of this Universal Literary Good, I read it. Couldn’t swear that I’d ever tried it before. Probably not. Then, my wife and I read it aloud at our evening reading hour. And we watched the DVD with Gregory Peck. A good enough read, and, perhaps, an even better watch. But hardly a ULG and not good enough, in my opinion, to account for its place as one of the top-10 selling American novels of the 20th Century. Now there’s a superlative I have come to believe to be true, even if I have not contributed personally to the statistic.

 Primed as I was with this fresh interest in TKAM and Harper Lee, I therefore took up Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields (Henry Holt, 2006) with keen anticipation. And well primed by Atticus, I determined to start off by climbing into Shields’ skin and walking around in it as I read the book. After all, in Mockingbird he is attempting to do what no one else has done  before with absolutely no cooperation from his subject and working with the scantiest of publicly available materials. Shields says that he himself wondered whether there was the stuff of a book-length biography in Lee, but he rose to the occasion, he tells us, by seeking to  locate via bulk emails anyone who may have known Lee and be willing to talk, by assembling quantities of material using Google (the title produces, or did when I last checked, over 6,730,000 hits) and even by purchasing some Lee-related artifacts via eBay.

    Janet Maslin, in reviewing Mockingbird for The New York Times, refers disparagingly to Shields’ methodology as taking “the art of the cyberclip-job to bold new heights.” But what’s a biographer to do when faced with a  paltry quantity  of biographical raw materials? And Shields is forthright about documenting much of his text with footnotes to personal recollections by octogenarians, newspaper clippings and the like. We know, therefore, that the picture he paints of Nelle (who is said to have used the name “Harper”  for her novel because she was apprehensive about having her name mispronounced “Nellie”) is one which is built up from common threads of what may very well be faulty or self-serving memories. We know where we stand.

 Reading Shields’ book, we construct the image of a bright, very independent, tough and tough-minded child who follows the beat of her own drummer. A person bound and determined to pursue a writing career  by leaving her beloved Monroeville against her family’s wishes and taking her lumps in New York, just like her childhood friend and next-door neighbor Truman Capote. A person who slaved away writing, and rewriting… and rewriting a book inspired by love, as Shields puts it, “love for the world of the South, for her little town, for her father and her family, and for the values she found among the people she most admired.”

     Even more fascinating is the picture Shields gives us of Lee’s life after TKAM. Although she appears to have worked hard on a second novel, her heart may not have been in it. Or, more precisely, she may have come to realize that she had written  the best  novel that she had in her and that anything in the way of a TKAM follow-up would have been a letdown. At some point in her life (that’s as specific as Shields is), she told a cousin inquiring about another book: “Richard, when you’re at the top there’s only one way to go.” How many writers, how many people in any career for that matter, have the good sense, and discipline, after having achieved success, to say, “Enough is enough.” And the financial rewards from TKAM were more than enough to support Nelle’s quiet, very private life.

     The real success of Mockingbird is in giving the reader a feeling that Shields genuinely  has an appreciation for what makes Nelle Harper Lee tick. And that’s no small success. Shields says that his book “aims to capture a life but is not a conventional biography, because - despite her novel’s huge impact - Lee’s writing life has been brief, and her personal life has been intensely private.” He knew what he was trying to do, and I think he did it.

     Another thing Shields has done for us is to put to rest (although like most conspiracy theories, it may never be totally eliminated) the suggestion that Capote actually wrote, or even had a major hand in,  TKAM. Doing that has done the world of letters a real service.

     So what’s not to like about Mockingbird?

     Shields, a former English teacher who taught TKAM to high school freshmen, sometimes falls victim to the sort of hyperbole TKAM idolaters are prone to. In doing so, he reveals the probable source of my friend’s claim that got me interested in TKAM in the first place: “In a ’Survey of Lifetime Reading Habits’ conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1991, researchers found that To Kill a Mockingbird ranked second only to the Bible 'as making a difference in people’s lives.' ” I’ll accept that, considering the source. What I won’t buy is that it is “the most popular novel in American literature in the 20th century.” Who’s to say? And that it is “the bestselling novel of the 20th century.” Simply untrue, although the precise identity of that record holder is elusive.

     Forget mere hype. Of more substance are the ridiculous errors like having Nelle enroll in the Women’s College of Alabama in 1928. At the age of two? Or saying that “On December 31, 1942, the federal government had passed the first income tax law in United States history, named the Victory Tax.” Off by almost 30 years. Come to think of it, without the last comma in Shields’ sentence, this statement might be true. Shields has a New York Public Library branch “a block” from the door of Nelle’s 1539 York Ave. apartment. It’s actually three-plus blocks away. No, Nelle has not been maintaining her current New York apartment at  433 East 82nd St. for 45 years (p. 3) if she moved there in 1967 (p. 264). Unless this is 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court  hands down  decisions, not “acts.” And so on. These bloopers are in the context of a book which puts the dreaded [sic] after Truman Capote’s misspelling of recieved and by an author who says that he has limited the scope of his work  so as not “to  risk producing errors that might find their way into future accounts of Lee.”

     Shields also has a habit of showering the reader with irrelevant detail in attempts to obscure understandable gaps in relevant information or to augment his scanty sources.  Do we really need to know the daily schedule for recruits at Maxwell Airfield to understand Nelle’s life at nearby Huntingdon College?

     Another quibble I have is with his tendency to use quotations from Lee’s fiction to flesh out his biographical narrative. Although educated in a hotbed of New Critics, I have learned that biographical detail can indeed be useful in explaining a literary work. But I don’t believe it’s a two-way street. Authors do make things up and embellish their “facts.” So, I’m mighty leery of his using passages from fiction to  provide biographical details. At this point, I suppose I should once again remember to climb back  into Shields’ skin and acknowledge the paucity of biographical materials which may have pushed him over the edge in this respect.

     But I come, not to drown Shields in a sea of pedantry, but to praise him for giving us a fascinating, if imperfect,  and very personal introduction to Nelle Harper Lee, the author of a novel taught in 74 percent of the nation’s public schools, with only Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and  Huckleberry Finn assigned more often.  But isn’t  this where I came in?

William S. Kable Having decided that enough is enough, Bill Kable reads to the blind one-on-one and practices his pedantry in New York City.