How Lucky Was Harper Lee?

Thanks to a very high-profile controversy over the recent publication of "Go Set a Watchman," most fans of fiction have been well-reminded of the story of Harper Lee.

In 1957, she brought to the publishing house J. B. Lippincott a problematic manuscript that was read by an editor named Therese von Hohoff Torrey ( known as Tay Hohoff) who saw potential in Harper's writing and worked closely with the author over the next couple of years. The end result was "To Kill a Mockingbird," which won a Pulitzer Prize and has been for decades one of the best-known and most loved works of American literature.


"Go Set a Watchman" is said to be, aside from some very light editing, the draft that Hohoff first saw.

Suppose someone else had received the manuscript -- just for the sake of argument, well-known American author Paul Theroux.

In a recent New York Times author interview, Theroux was asked whether he remembered the last book he had put down without finishing.

"I read the first chapter of "Go Set a Watchman" and thought, 'Good God, no,'" he responded.

Well, one could argue that if Theroux had been working as a Lippincott editor, he would have had to read more than just the fiirst chapter and perhaps as a result, the "no" would have become a "maybe." But there is also a very good chance he would have immediately turned to his typewriter and banged out a rejection letter. (Now, of course, he would turn to his computer and simply hit the F1 function key.)

Theroux isn't the only prominent literary figure to have found "Watchman" significantly devoid of merit. Reviewing it in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik said the book was "a failure as a novel." Would anything approximating "Mockingbird" have ever seen the light of day had Lee delivered her draft to Gopnik?

My guess is that she was exceptionally fortunate to have fallen into hands of Hohoff, who among other things, was clearly very patient.

There is a lot of luck in life, bad as well as good, and Lee wasn't the first author to have experienced it.

The more one reads of T.S. Eliot, for instance,  (I'm thinking of Robert Crawford's recently published biography of Eliot's life up to publication of "The Waste Land," entitled "Young Eliot" ),  the more one senses that Eliot was extraordinarily fortunate to have made friends with Ezra Pound, not so much because of Pound's multitude of connections in the avant-garde publishing world, but because of the exceptionally fine job of editing Pound performed on what he recommended should be called "The Waste Land."  (Eliot's working title had been the far less resonating and perhaps readership-killing "He Do The Police In Different Voices.")

But Pound's changes went far beyond the title. Eliot's manuscript was arguably rather a mishmash, or maybe even a mess, before Pound attacked it, cutting out enormous amounts of it and, in collaboration with Eliot, reworking parts of the remainder, reportedly without adding a word of his own.

The result: an epic event in the world of poetry, propelling Eliot towards his eventual Nobel Prize in Literature.

What's the point of all this?

Virtue is not always rewarded. Sometimes you need a little luck -- or more than just a little -- too. If you are trying to get something published, or reviewed, may luck be with you. That mess you're holding in your hands? It could be the next "Mockingbird" or "Waste Land" if the right person sees it.