I was fascinated by the way things are done on a studio lot. A small-town, Southern neighborhood, vintage Early Depression, was being assembled, and I was shown how some of the houses would serve a dual purpose. On-camera they would comprise Maycomb, Alabama. Off-camera they would serve as dressing-rooms for the actors, plus a schoolroom for the children in the cast.

  As I watched the crew bring in huge trees and set them in place, the director said, “We need a knot-hole in that one.”

  “I’ve got one at home,” said the assistant director. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

  When I was taken to a sound stage, I found reproduced, on a much smaller scale, the courtroom from my own hometown in Alabama. Exactly right in every detail, but I pointed out that Gregory Peck at 6'4" would scrape the balcony. When I looked into the camera, though, the courtroom had somehow grown larger to fit the people in it.

  Portable knot-holes, expanding courtrooms—all in a day’s magic.

  At the wardrobe tests, as the actors walked past the camera, I marveled that the cast had been so carefully chosen; they looked so nearly like my own vision of the characters. Great so far, but what about Atticus? As I pondered, the front door of the Finch house opened, and he appeared.

  A light summer suit, watch-chain across vest, a straw hat and horn-rimmed glasses, a lithe, still-youthful Gregory Peck had somehow grown heavier and solidly into his fifties. The illusion was complete.

  As complete as could meet the eye. When filming began, I was relieved to hear that the non-natives in the cast had made no special attempt at Southern accents. Nothing empties a Southern movie house faster than tin-eared actors. Gregory Peck was showing admirable restraint. In rehearsal and in the few scenes I watched with the camera rolling, he permitted himself one harmless indulgence, an unobtrusive Southern you. There was a lesson here for all young screenwriters—when spoken, lines written in implacable Southern idiom create the illusion of Southern voices.

  I left California feeling fortunate indeed. A great cast, a great director, a screenplay that was a work of art in itself. A group of highly intelligent professionals who respected my work—what more could any novelist hope for?

  I hoped for no more. Later in the year when I saw the completed film, I got a surprise that remains one of the high points of my life.

  I watched an inspired performance.

  In some mysterious way, Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch transcended illusion.

  Actors are reluctant to give away their trade secrets. With the passage of time, with more than twenty-five years of his friendship, the mystery of that performance has steadily unfolded, to my great reward and on-going delight. I know what Gregory Peck, gifted and consummate professional, brought to the part—he included himself.

  When Children Discover America

  McCall’s, August 1965

  WORDSWORTH WAS RIGHT WHEN HE said that we trail clouds of glory as we come into the world, that we are born with a divine sense of perception. As we grow older, the world closes in on us, and we gradually lose the freshness of viewpoint that we had as children. That is why I think children should get to know this country while they are young.

  I do not think the youngest or even the most jaded citizen could go to Washington and through the Capitol or the Smithsonian Institution without having the feeling of yes, we are something; yes, we do have a history. It may be a short one, but every bit of it has worked to make us what we are, and it’s there to be felt in Washington.

  I would take children to the South, perhaps to Charleston, a small city of great character and great historic interest—a seaport town with a distinct air of something that was. In the Far West I would show children San Francisco. The Chinese people there are such wonderful Americans. They are people with their own ancient culture, and yet they have become part of our civilization. New England, of course—i n autumn, you can get drunk on maple trees. And that first sight of the Rockies from the plains in Colorado. You go through miles and miles of flatland country—and then suddenly, there they are, snow-capped in all their majesty. Oceans and beaches . . . the Gulf side of Florida, down around Naples and Sarasota, with green, green water. And my own part of home—pine-forest country, dense and beautiful.

  I would like to show children my own town, my own street, my own neighbors. I live on the corner. My next-door neighbor is a barber, and his wife owns a dress shop. My down-the-street neighbor has a grocery store, and my neighbor down the hill is a teacher. My neighbor to the rear is a doctor; behind him is a druggist. If children were visiting—from abroad or from other parts of the country—they would have cookies and ice cream for them, and take them to the park with the lake and the swimming pool, and my cook, Mary, would make them an enormous cake covered with caramel frosting, and for dinner give them fresh vegetables from the garden and Southern chicken cooked right.

  And then we would let them alone, to explore on their own. It’s stifling to have adults with you all the time when you are a child, to tell you about everything and explain things away for you. There is no sense of discovery for a young, exploring spirit when adults are with you all the time to give absolutely straight answers to everything.

  I don’t think, for instance, that the Lincoln Memorial needs to be pointed out to any human being of any age. I would let children discover the beauty and mystery and grandeur of it. They’ll ask questions later. No child can possibly leave the Lincoln Memorial without questions, often important questions.

  If more young people traveled with their eyes and minds open and saw this country, they would have a deeper feeling about it. Adventuring across the country is out of style. Whatever happened to working after school in a grocery store to get enough money to hitchhike to California during your vacation? My youngest nephew may be one of the last to do that, and he did it when he was fifteen. His parents were terrified, but he got himself to the World’s Fair. His mother had thoughtfully sewn a bus ticket into the cuff of his trousers, but he swore he would never use it. He ended up in Chicago and lived on milk and rolls for three days because he didn’t have any money. When he finally got home, he had lost thirty pounds; but he was the happiest boy I had ever seen in my life. He had discovered America for himself. It will mean something to him for the rest of his life.

  Younger children may not respond in words, but they will drink everything in with their eyes, and fill their minds with awareness and wonder. It’s an experience they will enjoy and remember all their lives; and it will give them greater pride in their own country.

  Truman Capote

  Book of the Month Club Newsletter, January 1966

  ON A CHILLY FALL DAY in 1959 Truman Capote set out for Kansas armed with a footlocker of comestibles sufficient to support a few weeks of life in that forbidding land, little knowing that he was to devote the next five years to a work infinitely tantalizing and a true challenge to his genius.

  At first it was like being on another planet: a vast terrain indifferent to the creatures that walked upon it, an untrusting populace suspicious of anyone alien to it, bone-cracking winters turning to dust-choked springs to parching summers. Nevertheless, in the due course of time Truman became as much a fixture to Finney County, Kansas, as are the roadside signs proclaiming its many virtues.

  What he found in Kansas is on the pages of In Cold Blood. What did Kansas find in Truman Capote? To begin with, looks that are deceiving. One sees a beautifully modeled head, sensitive hands, a graceful carriage, blue eyes behind thick glasses. One’s impression is suddenly modified by the casual strength his handshake conveys, and rightly so, for beneath the elegant lines of his suit are hidden a hard body and the stamina of ten battalions.

  When one encounters his tough-mindedness first impressions fade altogether: here is an acute intelligence, a highly trained sense of observation, an intuition that makes accurate assessments with lightning speed. If one is conscious of an impersonal gaze, one is equally aware of total commitment and single-minded sense of purpose—qualities shared, oddly enough, by criminals and geniuses.

  Truman was born in New Orleans in 1924, and after an unhappy, nomadic childhood published his first work at the age of 16—not surprising when one considers that he began writing the moment he began reading. As a child Truman was interested in little else. It was then that he developed the vocation, the disciplines of language and self necessary to his art; he was born with the rest. He produced his first novel (unhappily lost to posterity) at the age of 10.

  He never really had a childhood: his astonishing intelligence was mistaken for foolishness; his boredom with formal education was thought to be listlessness; his insatiable interest in human motivations was called unhealthy curiosity. But he kept his own counsel and in his apartness he quietly pursued his craft. Over the years Truman made himself the master of any literary form he chose to employ.

  He is a short-story writer of the first rank: “Miriam” is already a classic. He was 23 years old when Other Voices, Other Rooms established his reputation as a novelist. Then followed (not necessarily in this order) more short stories, a joyous adventure in screen writing called Beat the Devil, the musical play House of Flowers, The Muses Are Heard and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, among other works. All are different, each is stamped with the same sensibility and craftsmanship.

  He is a born wanderer. Since adulthood he has lived in various parts of the world—France, Haiti, Italy, Sicily, Africa, Greece, Russia, Switzerland. Always sensitive to his surroundings, Truman first settled down on the western plains with the wryness of General Grant: he proposed to fight it out on that line if it took all summer. It took longer.

  In addition to receiving his literary gifts with sometimes maddening innocence, rural Kansas made the pleasant discovery that Truman Capote’s personal characteristics are accented by an irrepressible capacity for enjoyment. He is never bored and is never boring. His conversation is astringent; his mordant wit softens into easy laughter. He likes nothing better than to split the landscape in fast sports cars. When given the opportunity he will swim a mile out into the ocean. He plays jazz records loudly and with no encouragement will perform a twist of his own invention called I’m Beside Myself. He seldom goes to films, but when he does he will see three in one day. He likes to be comfortable; he collects antique paperweights; his household includes a fat bulldog and a thin cat, both travelers, both spoiled.

  When its inhabitants drew close enough for a less superficial inspection, Kansas found him to be, in spirit, an aristocrat: Truman pursues excellence; he suffers fools only when necessary; he is impatient of bad taste and cannot tolerate mediocrity in writing or in people. By instinct he is a democrat—his friends come from every station in life and speak in a bewildering variety of tongues. People always react sharply to his presence, sometimes with stirrings of envy, most often with the feeling that when he comes into their lives he gives them his best.

  For over five years Truman Capote gave Kansas his best—identification complete, involvement total. His task was epic: the material he assembled in the course of his labor is the size of a sand hill (in Kansas, a modest mountain). H is sense of estrangement was at first acute, but slowly, with infinite patience, he wove himself into the fabric of the country, becoming at one with the land and looking with his unique gifts into many hearts.

  Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalizing game of discovering Truman; what Truman found in Kansans will make people everywhere discover themselves.

  Romance and High Adventure

  Lecture Delivered at the 1983 Alabama History and Heritage Festival; published in Clearings in the Thicket: An Alabama Humanities Reader, 1985

  ALBERT JAMES PICKETT WAS BORN in 1810, in Anson County, North Carolina, and moved with his family to what is now Autauga County, Alabama, in 1818, where his father established a plantation and trading-house. He received a “gentleman’s education,” which meant a military academy in Connecticut and Stafford County Academy in Virginia. In 1830 he returned home. Although he acquired extensive acreage in the vicinity of his father’s plantation, Pickett was no farmer. Agriculture, he said, “did not occupy one-fourth of my time. Having no taste for politics, and never having studied a profession, I determined to write a history.” It was lucky for us that he did.

  After spending more than seventeen years collecting the material, Pickett began writing his History of Alabama in 1847. It was published in 1851 and, after having gone through several editions to 1900, was out of print until 1962, when it was republished as a sort of historical curiosity.

  We Americans like to put our culture into disposable containers. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we treat our past. we discard villages, towns, even cities, when they grow old, and we are now in the process of discarding our recorded history, not in a shredder, but by rewriting it as romance. We are eager to watch docu-dramas on television; we prefer to read a history of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of Mad Anthony Wayne’s last mistress. Now there is nothing wrong in reading historical fiction—perhaps two-thirds of the world’s classics are written in that form. But these are impatient days; more than ever it seems that we want anything but the real thing: we are afraid that the real thing might be dull, demanding, and worst of all, lacking in suspense.

  So it gives me the greatest pleasure to remind the members of my own generation (who have all read it) and report to the younger ones among us, that although it’s the real thing, Pickett’s History of Alabama is a work so fraught with romance and high adventure that even John Jakes would sit up and take notice.

  In what would occupy a few paragraphs of an American history survey, Pickett took 669 pages to unfold a story that is more hair-raising than anything yet seen on television. Indeed, in today’s terms, it is almost as though Pickett trained a camera in relentless, unblinking close-up on a period of Alabama history that we seldom think about any more, a period that sometimes seems to live only in our place-names and on roadside markers. (Where was Maubila? On the Tombigbee somewhere? Where was Tukabatchee? On the Coosa, or was it the Tallapoosa? Maybe it was on the Alabama. There were the names of separate and distinct peoples, with their own history.)

  In a prose style that falls somewhere between Macaulay and Bulwer-Lytton, Pickett’s history opens with a blood-curdling account of Hernando de Soto’s progress through our state, in which he destroyed nearly everything in his path, including the Mobilians and their giant chief, Tuscaloosa, the Black Warrior.

  Had he been a modern historian, Pickett would have gone straight on from there, but “as our soil remained untrodden by European feet for nearly a century and a half,” Pickett passed the time between de Soto and the arrival of the French with five chapters of what makes for compulsive reading. In a long digression describing the native inhabitants of what is now Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, he wrote a miniature social history that can hold its own with any modern work. For these chapters alone, I think Pickett deserves a place in American literature.

  We meet them all, but the most prominent tribes were the ferocious, insolent Chickasaws, who put paid to de Soto somewhere in Mississippi; the silver-tongued Choctaws, who could not swim, who were unaggressive when not defending their own turf, and who were notable even among their own kind for their revolting burial practices. In the northeast were the comparatively genial Cherokees, and in the west the aristocratic, despotic Natchez. On center stage were the Muscogees, later known as the Creeks, who, after pushing into the state in the vacuum created by de Soto, formed a confederation with the Alabamas and remnants of the shattered smaller tribes. Pickett’s history is essentially the story of the Creeks and the people who destroyed them.

  The Creeks were a remarkable people. Their social and political structure was as complex as anything in Europe, and in some ways was far more advanced than that of the earliest settlers. Divorce, for example, was at the choice of either party and with only a slight advantage to the man: He could remarry immediately, but the woman had to wait until The Green Corn Dance was over. “Marriage,” said Pickett, “gave no right to the husband over the property of the wife, or the control or management of the children he might have by her.” Adultery, however, was another matter. The pains and penalties for that sport rendered its practice infrequent.

  They were a gregarious people. “Their most manly and important game was ‘the ball play,’” said Pickett; it seemed to be a version of lacrosse. The warriors of one town challenged those of another, and “for several days previous to the time, those who intended to engage in the amusement took medicine, as though they were going to war.” In the presence of multitudes, the players “rushed together with a mighty shock . . . were often severely hurt, and sometimes killed, in the rough and unfeeling scramble which prevailed. . . . In the meantime, the women were constantly on the alert with vessels and gourds filled with water, watching every opportunity to supply the players. It sometimes happened that the inhabitants of a town gamed away all their ponies, jewels, and wearing apparel. . . .” Does that sound familiar? Every fall and winter weekend finds today’s Alabamians at similar pursuits.

  Their religion, an integral part of everything that they did, was so complicated and structured as to delight the heart of a pharisee. Indeed, Pickett delights us with the theories of one James Adair, who lived among the Indians for more than thirty years and emerged from the forest in 1775 with an enormous volume that sought to prove that the Creeks and their neighbors were in fact Jews. After observing the intricate similarities of the two religions, the clincher for Adair was in watching the warriors dance “around the holy fire, during which the elder priest invoked the Great Spirit, while the others responded Hallelu! Hallelu! then Halleluiah! Halleluiah!”