Twice Blessed: Harper Lee's Novel

I am sorry to read that Harper Lee has died. She wrote one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, thetis standard fare in high schools, and is an undisputed classic. She played a major part in the creation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

And then decades of silence.

Last year, Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of the novel that became Mockingbird, was published, giving rise to questions of exploitation and legacy tainting. After all, the Atticus of Watchman is a cranky old racist, whose daughter catches him betraying his own values on the very courtroom in which he embodied them.

But this is the Atticus we all love to think of:



Through the glories of pre-ordering, I got a copy of Watchman on the day of publication, and read it immediately. For what it's worth, I think that while Mockingbird is the more artfully crafted of the two, it also has the easier lift. Ultimately, it's reassuring--Tom Robinson dies, but if he hadn't broken and tried to escape, Atticus liked his odds on appeal, we're told. Even more reassuring, the Judge who assigned Atticus, and the Sheriff, Mr. Heck Tate, each try to even the playing field, and Atticus himself, the ultimate avatar of the lawyer as hero, leaves everything on that field, pulling out all the stops to save his client. Mockingbird is a beautiful, funny, tender book--but it isn't challenging.

Watchman, by contrast, undermines the heroism of Atticus's younger days--Robinson is acquitted and survives, the trial is accorded only a few lines--but, worse, confronts us with the awful identity of the racist: Someone we love. Someone who helped form us, a parent, a good and wise person in so many ways--but the oppressor and racist. He betrays Calpurnia, by representing her grandson, intending to steer him into a guilty plea. He both is and is not the Atticus we love. He did give Scout her moral compass, but his own has gotten distorted somewhere.

It's an extraordinary achievement, if you read the books together. The flaws Atticus demonstrates in Watchman don't contradict the man in Mockingbird. If you trim the lines in Watchman about the trial to harmonize with the events of Mockingbird, they're the same man--Atticus in Mockingbird has a paternalistic superiority that is not edifying, if you look close enough.

That's in fact how I read the two: together. The rough edges of Watchman work for me, because the writing is good enough to carry me along, and to bridge the distance between the nostalgic hindsight of Scout's childhood memories, and the baffling complexities of the adult Jean Louise struggling with the aging, flawed man before her.

Together, the books have greater life than either on its own.

Harper Lee wrote one novel, after all. A two volume classic, with both the soft-focus, hopeful story of heroism a child discovering the harshness of the world needs, and the moment when we let go of reassurance, and see our parents in the round, flaws and all. It's a novel that will live.

The Summer of Lost Literature

For all of his admitted flaws, Karl Marx was smart enough to almost say that history repeated itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."[1]

This summer poses an admirable example of the phenomenon in the literary world. It began with the release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, in which we had the tragedy of Atticus Finch's declining years, and were forced to question simple assumptions about the virtues of the finest Southern gentleman in literature. Now, as summer nears--well, let's not rush things, and call it the end yet, but, as Labor Day begins to hove menacingly into view, we are confronted with the return of Ayn Rand:

The movie-star heroine of Ayn Rand’s “Ideal” is a legendary, enigmatic beauty named Kay Gonda, paid a fortune by Hollywood for her work and worshiped by the faceless multitudes. Her press agent writes: “Kay Gonda does not cook her own meals or knit her own underwear. She does not play golf, adopt babies, or endow hospitals for homeless horses. She is not kind to her dear old mother — she has no dear old mother. She is not just like you and me. She never was like you and me. She’s like nothing you rotters ever dreamt of.”

In short, Kay Gonda is one of Rand’s Nietzschean protagonists — an über-frau who has fans, not friends, and who thinks that she towers above all the losers and “second-handers” who populate the world. She is also, it turns out, a close relative of Dominique Francon in the early portions of “The Fountainhead” (a character Rand once described as “myself in a bad mood”)— a pessimist radically alienated from a world she regards with disdain.

he premise of “Ideal” is that Gonda is on the run, suspected of murder and seeking refuge with a succession of fans who have written her mash notes; most turn out to be hypocrites and weaklings who pledge undying loyalty and love but betray her in her supposed hour of need.

***
The story is an ugly, diagrammatic illustration of Rand’s embrace of selfishness and elitism and her contempt for ordinary people — the unfortunate, the undistinguished, those too nice or too modest to stomp and roar like the hard man Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead.” It underscores the reasons that her work — with its celebration of defiance and narcissism, its promotion of selfishness as a philosophical stance — so often appeals to adolescents and radical free marketers. And it is also a reminder of just how much her didactic, ideological work actually has in common with the message-minded socialist realism produced in the Soviet Union, which she left in the mid-1920s and vociferously denounced.

Ah, sounds bracing, doesn't it? I remember once in college taking a course on Soviet Foreign Policy (I did this in 1987, showing that I was not prescient.) Anyway, among the works we read was a Communist Party approved treatise, which had been translated into English. It had the same stilted, purportedly welcoming tone, as it rumbled over clunky usages and improbable syntax that no human mouth ever spoke, as does Rand's dialogue. The review gives several risible examples, but my favorite occurs when Gonda is tasked with having been complicit in a young man's suicide; "she coolly says it was 'the kindest thing I have ever done.'”

That's our Ayn. A self-proclaimed philosopher who took all the paradox and irony, the wit and sarcasm, out of Nietzsche, and solemnly explicated the practical implications of his stark parables, as though they were an instruction manual.[2] Leopold and Loeb did him more credit as disciples.

NOTES:

[1] Actually, the quote is "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle."

[2] One cannot miss the opportunity to quote the great John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Watchman: The Shadow Side of a Classic

Well, I've read Go Set a Watchman, and I see what all the angst is about.

The novel is in its first half sweet without being cloying--Jean Louise Finch, 26 years old, living in New York, makes her fifth annual return to Maycomb to see her ailing father Atticus. He's icing from severe rheumatoid arthritis, and some days he's in such pain, he needs his sister (Aunt Alexandra, as starchy as in To Kill a Mockingbird, has, rather surprisingly, spared Jean Louise moving back home by moving in herself with Atticus) to help him dress. His brother, Dr. Jack, has fashioned specially large-handles utensils to help Atticus eat.

Jem has been dead for two years.

It's the characters you know, for the most part--we get a visit from Dill in a flashback, even--and they're mostly the same.

Certainly in that sunlit first half, with flashbacks to Scout and Jem and Dill playing together, Uncle Jack being amusing, and Atticus facing disability and mortality pretty much as you'd expect him to.

--And then Harper Lee shatters the cozy little world of Maycomb. Jean Louise stumbles on a racist pamphlet among her father's books and papers, and blames Aunt Alexandra for it. Aunt Alexandra holds her tongue, but is innocent. Jean Louise follows her father to an unusual gathering in the courthouse--the same place where he heroically defended Tom Robinson--and finds that he's a leader of the Maycomb Citizen's Council.

It hits Scout hard, and the reader, too. Lee has done such a grand job of evoking the Atticus that lives in our hearts (extraordinary, really, because Go Set a Watchman was written before Mockingbird) that we are hit as hard as Scout.

I won't spoil the book for you; the first half has all the magic of the innocent comic scenes in Mockingbird, and yet virtually no overlap. The Robinson trial is portrayed in a quick two pages, and is less heroic, and less tragic than in the first-published book.

The "back 9" of the book depicts Jean Louise's reaction, her anger and sense of betrayal. She finds an unlikely ally, has a wrenching confrontation with her father, and one with her uncle.

Scout dies, but Jean Louise lives.

Any more, and I'll end up spoiling the book.

But let me say, if Mockingbird is important to you, read this book.

Harper Lee is saying something important about racism (oh, Calpurnia!), about growing up, about fathers and daughters--and about human frailty.

It is an extraordinary achievement, even though you can see the seams, as the editorial process led to the abandonment of Watchman and the creation of Mockingbird--one critical scene is too talky, though most of the talk is good talk. Most of it.

Atticus is not, at the end of the book, a hero. He's a man. Flawed, loving, wrong-headed, passionately just-- a mass of contradictions.

Like many of us. I'm reminded of my favorite passage from C.P. Snow, with his protagonist, Lewis Eliot, engaged in a debate with a young Nazi official in 1938:

"No one is fit to be trusted with power," I said..."No one. I should not like to see any group of men in charge--not me or my friends or anyone else. Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. If he does not know it, he is not fit to govern others. And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate, I am not speaking of you specially, you understand; I should say exactly the same of myself."

Our eyes met. I was certain, as one can be certain in a duel across the table, that for the first time he took me seriously.

"You do not think highly of men, Mr. Eliot."

"I am one."

Atticus, in either novel, would, I think, understand and approve.

Watching for the Watchman...

So, the benefit of pre-ordering is that my copy of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman is arriving tomorrow. There's been more commentary about the novel, including thisinteresting piece about Tay Hohoff, who edited the book that became To Kill a Mockingbird. But then there's this, from CNN: "But now, some fans are saying they might not even read Lee's new book because of the racist revelation. They say ignorance can be bliss."

On Saturday, I pushed back against this a bit, on purely literary grounds. I stand by those, but let me add a little more.

Atticus Finch is a hero, no matter what he's like in decline. In the CNN piece linked above, filmmaker Mary Murphy points out that much of the Atticus we know is still there, including the warm, loving relationship with Jean Louise (no longer called Scout). But all the best heroes are real. Which means that they err, they sin, they fall.

That's what makes them, whether fictional or real-life, inspiring. If Theodore Roosevelt, the sickly, timid, boy, can grow up to be a great President--that gives us hope. Someone for whom courage comes easily--well, we can admire him or her, but what hope do they give? Samuel Clemens had to become a better man--he was born with the racism of his time and place, and learned to see it and call it out for the evil that it was; the resultant creation, Mark Twain, embodied that better man. John Donne, the coruscating witty love poet, developed to become one of the best devotional poets in the English language. William O. Douglas was one of the most passionate defenders of the rights of minorities and the marginalized in the history of American law. He was, quite often, not a very nice man. Holmes's faith in humanity was shot out of him on the battlefields of the Civil War. And yet he tried to honor the ideas he had once held in his life.

The list goes on. I'll add one, known to me personally. My late friend Bud was a difficult man. Certainly not a hero, Bud was tetchy, disappointed in life, and had to struggle to maintain the lines of communication with the members of my family, whom I know he loved. Maybe more of a hero than we gave him credit for, thug, because, despite his drive to isolate himself--he never quite managed it. He found reservoirs of warmth in himself, and, scowling to hide his amusement, would trade quips with me.

I think we all do that to some extent, try to recreate ourselves with the virtues we lack, and overcome our baser selves. Sometimes we relapse. And, so I'm glad I'll get to make the acquaintance of the shadow side of Atticus Finch, that rare lawyer of virtue.

He gives me hope.

Return to Macomb: Atticus Finch's Dark Side

The release of Go Set a Watchman isn't until next week (July 14, to be precise), and it's already controversial. From the New York Times review:

We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.

Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

"Go Set A Watchman," a follow-up to Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird." Credit HarperCollins
In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”

In “Mockingbird,” Atticus was a role model for his children, Scout and Jem — their North Star, their hero, the most potent moral force in their lives. In “Watchman,” he becomes the source of grievous pain and disillusionment for the 26-year-old Scout (or Jean Louise, as she’s now known).

Cue the consternation of the legion of Atticus admirers, some of whom speak of boycotting the new book to escape disillusionment. No, really. I'm not kidding.

The story is news--big enough that it has the prime real estate in this morning's paper:



I am going to push back against my fellow Atticus admirers, here. Historically, a great many of those who championed legal equality reflected in their lives the racism of their times--Hugo L. Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth; Abraham Lincoln was, as Frederick Douglass said, by turns "emphatically, the black man’s President,” in fact, “the first to show any respect for their rights as men,” and, alternately,“preeminently the white man’s President.” Douglass noted that both views were true.

Harper Lee struggles with this in Go Set a Watchman, and I'm glad of it. It adds a layer of nuance, of realism that the child's eye view of To Kill a Mockingbird can allow us to obscure. It's easy, but facile, to treat Atticus as a plaster saint among sinners. But hold on. In Mockingbird itself, most of the characters are flawed--Miss Dubose (the "wicked old hell-cat" as Scout calls her, before weeping for her), Uncle Jack, Aunt Alexandra, and, yes, Atticus himself. The noble lawyer portrayed by Gregory Peck is there, but there are indications of depression, of bewilderment in his widowed status, in the younger Atticus. And yes, he can be patronizing toward his social inferiors. Just ask Bob Ewell. Or Mayella.

My copy of the book hasn't arrived yet, and I look forward to reading it. But I don't start off from the place that a depiction of a flawed, even morally tainted, older Atticus is by its nature a bad thing. If it is done well, it can enrich the character of Atticus profoundly, allowing us to see him more in the round. A very Trollopian view, frankly. As I said at the Trollope Society's Annual Dinner this year:

Trollope influenced my own view of human nature more than his more pyrotechnical peers, more than the writers of my own era, who all too often seemed to me to oversimplify, to not quite get it.

From him I learned that we are none of us just our worst moments, and that we cannot live on the summit of our best moments, either.

Phineas at Bay is a thank you to the great psychologist who taught me about human nature, who gave me the understanding to endure the myriad small betrayals and wounds we experience from those who love us both before and after they hurt us--and to forgive them, and accept forgiveness for the hurts we have inflicted in our own turn.

And people surprise for good as well as for bad.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

We cannot be reduced to our worst moments. Or even our best.

Add Atticus Finch to the roll of Trollopean heroes--too complex to reduce to a cardboard figure of nobility, more alive than that.

Good on Harper Lee for challenging us to look the complexity of human nature in the eye--to risk her "brand" and offer us a more complex, difficult reality.