The invisible hand that nurtured an author and a literary classic

New York

In the spring of 1957, a 31-year-old aspiring novelist named Harper Lee - everyone called her Nelle - delivered the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman to her agent to send out to publishers, including the now-defunct JB Lippincott Co, which eventually bought it.

At Lippincott, the novel fell into the hands of Therese von Hohoff Torrey - known professionally as Tay Hohoff - a small, wiry veteran editor in her late 50s. Ms Hohoff was impressed. "(T)he spark of the true writer flashed in every line," she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott.

But as Ms Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel".

During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.

Now, this week's publication of Go Set a Watchman offers a rare glimpse at the before and after of a book widely regarded as a masterpiece.

The main characters may be the same, but Watchman is an entirely different book in both shape and tone from Mockingbird. Scout is not an impressionable child in Maycomb, Alabama, looking up to her heroic father, but a young woman from Maycomb living in New York. Her father, the great Atticus Finch, is a bigot.

The release of Watchman, which has been only lightly copy-edited, also leads inevitably to the question: who was the invisible hand guiding Lee as she transformed this book into Mockingbird?

Maybe more to the point, how big a role did she play in reconceiving the story from a dark tale of a young woman's disillusionment with her father's racist views, to a redemptive one of moral courage and human decency?

And, for that matter, how would Ms Hohoff have felt about the decision, more than a half-century later, to publish a prototype of Mockingbird?

Publishing lore is filled with stories of famously headstrong editors imposing their will on authors.

Maxwell Perkins, the long-time editorial director at Charles Scribner's Sons, told Ernest Hemingway to "tone it down", and cut 90,000 words from Thomas Wolfe's debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

Gordon Lish rewrote entire passages of Raymond Carver's stories, and later boasted about it to friends.

Ms Hohoff, who died in 1974 at the age of 75, was in a different mould. "I suffer from some sort of mother-complex, so that I always want to make paths smooth for the people I am fond of and of whom I have a high opinion," she wrote in 1969 in a letter to Edward Burlingame, who was at that time the new executive editor of Lippincott.

"She was closely attentive and tough, but I never felt manhandled by her," Nicholas Delbanco, who worked with Ms Hohoff as a young author in the late 1960s, said recently in an interview.

But by all accounts, Ms Hohoff, a chain-smoker with a deep, gravelly voice, was also a strong-willed and forceful editor when it came to the text. She cut Delbanco's second novel, Grasse 3/23/66, from 500 pages to less than 200 - an effort for which Delbanco remains grateful.

As far as Ms Hohoff's influence on Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird goes, signs certainly point to a close collaboration and intimate relationship.

Lee had lost her mother, who suffered from mental illness, six years before she met Ms Hohoff at Lippincott's offices. (Her father, a lawyer on whom Atticus was modelled, would die two years after the publication of Mockingbird.)

Like many unpublished authors, Lee was unsure of her talents. "I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," Lee said in a statement this year about the evolution from Watchman to Mockingbird.

Ms Hohoff offers a more detailed characterisation of the process in the Lippincott corporate history: "After a couple of false starts, the storyline, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision - there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it - the true stature of the novel became evident." (In 1978, Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins, publisher of Watchman.)

There appeared to be a natural give-and-take between author and editor. "When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours," Ms Hohoff wrote. "And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country."

Raised in a multigenerational Quaker home near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Ms Hohoff attended a Quaker school, Brooklyn Friends. Such an upbringing suggests certain progressive values.

She joined Lippincott in 1942, and eventually became a senior vice president at the company. At the time, it was rare for a woman to have such a senior editorial position at a major publishing house.

It appeared, though, Ms Hohoff comfortably inhabited the role. "She was a powerful gray-haired lady who knew her own mind and spoke in a frank sort of way," Mr Burlingame said recently.

As for her relationship with Lee, it's clear that Ms Hohoff provided more than just editorial guidance.

One winter night, as Charles Shields recounts in Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Lee threw her manuscript out her window and into the snow, before calling Ms Hohoff in tears. "Tay told her to march outside immediately and pick up the pages," Shields writes.

After Mockingbird, author and editor remained close. When Lee found a 12-toed kitten huddled against a pipe in the basement of her apartment building, she brought it to Ms Hohoff and her husband in a wicker basket. "He needed a home," Ms Hohoff wrote in a memoir about her pets, Cats and Other People. "She knew us very well and pulled out all the right stops."

Year after year, Ms Hohoff tried to gently coax a second book out of Lee, while at the same time fending off her impatient colleagues.

By the time Ms Hohoff retired from Lippincott in the early 1970s, it had been more than a decade since To Kill a Mockingbird was published. There was still no second book.

When Ms Hohoff died in her sleep in 1974, Lee was devastated, according to Shields.

Mr Burlingame said that in his years at Lippincott, there was never any discussion of publishing Go Set a Watchman.

We can only speculate about how Ms Hohoff would have reacted to the book's release. Would she have considered it a valuable literary artifact with the potential to deepen our understanding of Lee?

Or would she have tried to talk her author out of it, arguing that Watchman could forever change how people read Mockingbird?

"Will Atticus Finch still be the heroic and inspiring character we've so admired all of these years?" Mr Burlingame asked.

"Perhaps it was these concerns that, over the decades, caused Nelle and Tay, while she was alive, to refuse to have it published?" NYT