Since the first hasty not our Gregory Peck Atticus! media “shock,”, there’s been some excellent reviews written about Go Set A Watchman. Many of them make the point that To Kill A Mockingbird (along with Catcher in the Rye) were the first novels sold explicitly as YA, young adult — a new marketing category, basically fairy-tales-for-teenagers. People feel very strongly about Mockingbird, just as people feel strongly about Harry Potter and the Hunger Games; apart from any literary critique, such books capture a permanent place in people’s memories that will always remain tender.
But the review that I most agree with is from Catherine Nicols, at Jezebel, on “Why Go Set a Watchman Is No Surprise“:
The final tableau of To Kill A Mockingbird has always given me a sour feeling toward the book—it ends with the black man dead, the poor white man also dead, the law uninterested in prosecuting their murders. The white gentleman and his children are sadder and wiser, but the wisdom imparted is essentially about the hopelessness of defending black people and poor white people from one another. I used to think Mockingbird was a shameful book to hand out in a high school classroom, all things considered, given that it’s a race story that scarcely passes the black-person version of the Bechdel test. It’s about white people within white culture making Tom Robinson’s life and death about themselves.
So, when the news broke about Go Set a Watchman’s Atticus being racist—in contrast as people said, to Mockingbird’s Atticus, I went back to read both books, wondering: hasn’t it always been this way? Hasn’t he always been racist? As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in the New Yorker, his defense of Tom Robinson is based on segregationist principles—he works for “accommodation, not reform.” The new book gives the impression that Lee knew what much of her audience didn’t: that her character’s principles didn’t constitute justice. By itself, I thought To Kill a Mockingbird was a racist book. Now, with the publication of Watchman, it stands to be redefined as a book about racism not just in Maycomb County, but within the Finch household itself…
Throughout Mockingbird, Atticus is engaged in the foundational moonlight-and-magnolias Southern delusion that so swayed Ashley Wilkes and Ellen O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. He fought with the genteel cruelty of the slaver, in service of the other American dream, which is the idea that a man can be the ultimate patriarch: the cultivated master of the lower orders, the head of a family that extends through his wife and children down through the slaves. Everyone but the patriarch, it’s assumed, is slowly developing out of moral infancy—and as such, the patriarch is charged with leading everyone in religion, work ethic and cleanliness. Atticus is the son of slave owners, and he’s acting the part of one when he argues that Tom Robinson is from a clean-living family, and the black servant Calpurnia can be trusted raising white kids—this is the race equivalent of chivalry, the imperiled pedestal…
Joseph Nobles
Here’s what I said over at LG&M:
OK, I’ve read it, and my hometown of Demopolis, Alabama was mentioned in Chapter Five. Such are my credentials in speaking about the book.
Glib reactions: The !ast person out of the 2015 Republican clown car turns out to be Atticus Finch. (Seriously, it’s depressing that the Socratic dialogue into which the book lapses for its latter third is still the stuff of modern conservative outrage. Lee wrote this in the 50’s!)
And it turns out Jean Louise is her father’s daughter. She was just as aggravated by Brown v. Board of Education as Atticus was for Tenth Amendment reasons. Yes. The only difference is that Jean Louise knows she’s right that something must be done about the treatment of blacks in the South. For this knowledge she discovers she is the dictionary definition of a bigot. And Atticus is not. Yes.
But Jean Louise is not begrudged her knowledge of what must be done. She is admonished to come home and see it done in humility, and not let scoundrels like the NAACP lawyers do it for her. Yes. The substitution of “Al Sharpton” for “NAACP lawyers” throughout the book is the only needed thing to run verbatim on Fox News.
There is poetry and power here. A memory of Jem at the end of Chapter 11 broke my heart. And Lee certainly has a wicked sense of humor. I highly doubt Monroeville will allow their sanctified courtroom to be used for the scene written within it this go-round.
This humor is why I believe she was content to release the novel as is. Mockingbird is a second attempt at the story, and far the superior. But Jean Louise must reverse the wedding of Atticus Finch and her conscience performed by young Scout. And since both infantilize black people, the mockingbird doesn’t fall very far from the nest.
What these two novels need is a third, one Harper Lee could not write even if she still could. I want this sequence of events as told by Calpurnia, the long suffering maid to the Finch household. All it would take is a female black novelist who would be interested enough to do so. Whoooo, you think people are upset now, though!
Anyway, that’s off my first reading. Boo Radley doesn’t exist in this novel, unless that what Uncle Jack turned into. Atticus got Robinson off as well, and Mrs. Dubois is still alive. Those are the major continuity issues between the two. Otherwise, the books fit well enough together. It even works as a first draft of a sequel at times, not a first draft of Mockingbird.
But the strongest compliment they make to each other is how the material develops. Jean Louise has no answer when Atticus’s actions are explained as what a man does when facing a shotgun to his head: he reaches for any weapon available, be it another gun or a citizen’s council. In Mockingbird, however, Scout disarms the mob with her innocent recognition of all the men as her neighbors.
It is the superior answer for which Go Set A Watchman is only the question.
Joseph Nobles
And another thought has occurred to me, reading the Jezebel review: Jean Louise marvels at her blindness in Watchmen. How could she be so blind as to not see what was in front of her? It could not be that all of her family and friends changed. The fault was in her.
Mockingbird is an exploration of that blindness.
Major Major Major Major
Catcher in the Rye is not young-adult. I don’t know why they let teenagers read that. Holden is a cautionary tale and an antihero, a simpering whiny prep-school rich brat (but I repeat myself). You’re not supposed to like him.
Roger Moore
I was genuinely impressed with Gladwell’s analysis. Ultimately, too many whites are eager to see racial redemption, so that they see Atticus as a hero rather than a slightly less ugly part of an ugly society.
KG
@Joseph Nobles:
And permission from Lee, as any such novel would be considered a derivative work and thus a violation of copyright laws.
Major Major Major Major
@KG: Fanfic’s legal.
I mean, don’t go around selling it…
Chris
Haven’t followed the links yet, but I remember reading To Kill A Mockingbird and cringing a bit at the part where Atticus, just before saying “there is ONE institution before which all men are equal and that is a court of law,” inserts the obligatory “now, of course, I’m not one of those crazy Yankees who believes in equality in ALL things…”
(I also remember reading the book and thinking Atticus was actually quite lucky in the end: there were towns where the sheriff not only wouldn’t have been all polite and understanding about Bob Ewell’s murder, but would’ve attempted the stabbing himself).
Betty Cracker
@Joseph Nobles: I too read the book and was struck by how little the framing of the debate has changed in 60+ years too. Depressing. I found much of it cringe-worthy. (For example, “She was born color-blind!” Nope! Not so much!) Overall, it may be truer than “Mockingbird” in that it acknowledges the racism in which the main characters swim, but it’s a crappy book. It is interesting (to me, anyway) only as an artifact.
KG
@Major Major Major Major: depending on how much of an asshole a copyright holder wants to be, even if you publish but don’t sell, you can get hit for damages. there’s a statutory damages provision ($750-$30k per the court’s discretion, could be $150k if found to be done willingly) plus attorney fees (and since you’re dealing with federal court, those tend to be “a lot”).
ETA: even assuming fanfic falls under fair use, fair use is determined on a case by case basis, which can be very expensive for a fanfic author.
Brachiator
I’ve been reading that Go Set A Watchman was a first draft, and that Harper Lee did not want to see this version published. If that is the case it is somewhat unfair and almost certainly pointless to compare it too deeply to Mockingbird. It is also absurd to treat Finch as a real person whose nature is more truly revealed in the new book.
Over the weekend, I was listening to a number of lawyers and judges, some men and women of color, speak about how they were inspired to enter the law by the book, an odd response if the book is “certainly” racist.
It is also bizarre to deride Mockingbird because it is YA, a fairy tale for teenagers. It holds up better than tons of more supposedly serious novels.
@Major Major Major Major
It’s more that you cannot prevent teenagers from reading the novel and being drawn to Holden.
Bill
@Major Major Major Major:
Holden is mentally ill. At the very least deeply depressed. He is a cautionary tale, but it has nothing to do with “brattiness,” and everything to do with neglect.
While people may not instinctively like him, many teenagers can relate to him. Which is why Catcher is a YA novel.
Major Major Major Major
@Bill: That’s not how YA is supposed to work. He doesn’t grow, the world doesn’t change, he sacrifices and learns nothing, even after he’s raped or whatever happens in that scene. He’s not an educational or inspirational figure.
Just because I can identify with Ray Carver doesn’t mean I should drink and smoke myself to death. These works require a certain level of sophistication that most high school freshmen just don’t have.
Chris
@Joseph Nobles:
This is the part of the story that I find interesting and the reason I want to read the book despite the lukewarm reviewing. I can relate to that; I’ve had a similar, slow, years-long awakening myself about how various members of the (extended) family I’d looked up to as a kid were really, well, raging right wing assholes whose life lessons were really not something I wanted to follow. The kind of thing you don’t notice as a kid and that kind of slaps you in the face as an adult.
kc
Here’s how Sarah Palin repays John McCain for making her rich and famous.
BGinCHI
This really should not be news about Mockingbird.
It only is because the novel has been taught by too many white HS teachers who lack self-reflection or any historical sense of racial injustice.
Maybe that can stop now and the two books can start a much better conversation for students. That would be progress.
Goblue72
We are all Huck Finn.
Joseph Nobles
@KG: Please see The Wind Done Gone lawsuit. Thanks.
Kropadope
@Brachiator:
I couldn’t tolerate that book in high school. Haven’t tried since.
Anne Laurie
@Brachiator:
That’s not derision. It’s not an issue of “quality” or “seriousness” we’re discussing; the point is that readers hold Mockingbird to a different standard, because it spoke to them in a particular way. Nicols says that the “Once upon time there was a fine upstanding Southern lawyer, who had a strong son and a charming smart daughter… “ tone of Harper Lee’s first book was never intended to present Atticus Finch as a staunch NAACP supporter hero; that was a gloss (made much glossier in the movie) because it charmed so many readers to think that #NotAllSoutherners were complicit in racism.
I’d further add that I suspect this is why Harper Lee’s original editor had her rewrite the original Go Set A Watchman “draft” so extensively. That editor didn’t see a market for ‘White college girl goes back to her small Southern town, realizes they’re all racist and she’s not much better’… but ‘Little girl rhapsodizes about her charming small-town roots, with extra regional charm, plus scary monsters who all get their comeuppance in the last chapter’ might be (was!) a much easier sell.
Bill
@Major Major Major Major: Right. So well written novels, with characters young people are drawn to, which address issues important to young people are not YA books?
Got it.
I read Catcher for the first time when I was 12 years old. I understood Holden felt abandoned by those who were supposed to be there for him. That he was not well and didn’t yet have the tools to survive the world, but was trying to figure it out…..and failing. If you don’t see Holden trying to overcome and learn in that book, you must have read a different novel than I did.
Mike J
The biggest problem with Mockingbird isn’t really a problem. People get angry when the protagonist isn’t perfect. It would be deeply unrealistic if Atticus were morally acceptable to us.
Lincoln never considered black people to be his equal, even if he did come to believe they deserved equal protection. In spite of his flaws, we still think Lincoln was, on balance, a pretty good guy.
Major Major Major Major
@Bill: YA is a manufactured genre nowadays.
I liked The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I was 12, does that make it YA?
I liked A Separate Peace when I was a 16-year-old gay kid, but I wouldn’t recommend that to anybody prepubescent. I’d say it’s YA.
I liked Ender’s Game when I was 11, is that YA? It did win the Nebula. And the Hugo… usually reserved for “non-YA” works.
YA is not just any book that a young person finds compelling, even if the character is young.
Life of Pi, is that YA?
KG
@Joseph Nobles: there’s also the Catcher in the Rye pseudo sequel case where the court issued an injunction prohibiting publication in the US. again: it’s determined on a case by case basis. there are a lot of factors involved in whether it is a violation or not, the Gone With the Wind case involved the “transformative” element.
eemom
@Brachiator:
The evidence for that is pretty overwhelming, as set forth in this excellent piece.
The real — and utterly disgusting — story here is the publication of the thing.
Another Holocene Human
@Major Major Major Major: Wrong social class but I related big time in 9th grade. (To be fair, most of the class hated the book.) It’s pretty dated, though, his slang is ossified and he and his teachers are racist as fuck.
Linnaeus
@Major Major Major Major:
You don’t have to like Holden Caulfield, but I wouldn’t say that he’s failed to learn anything. He’s still in the process of doing so in the book.
Another Holocene Human
@KG: Or a transformative work and protected by copyright laws.
TaMara (BHF)
I am waiting for a quiet moment to read the new book. To Kill a Mockingbird was MY book of childhood. I must say, I never saw it as anything but an exploration of the time, I love Atticus as a father and a moral compass, but I always thought it was clear that all the white folk, including him, were representative of the time – unable to see the black people around them as equals. Not to mention a bigotry of country folk vs. town folk, suspicion of anyone outside their circle and the horrible treatment of the impoverished. Imperfect people in an imperfect world.
I guess I always hoped that it was Scout who grew to understand equality. But that was probably because I was hoping I would grow to understand equality in a still imperfect world.
I much prefer a novel that tells the story of its time, warts and all, not some revisionist version of: everyone around us were bigots, but me and mine were above all that….
KG
@Another Holocene Human: yeah, but as i’ve said, to establish that it’s a transformative work, that’s going to (literally) require a federal case. that’s one hell of an added cost
Another Holocene Human
@KG: https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/%E2%80%98wind-done-gone%E2%80%99-copyright-case-settled
So the answer is get a big girl publisher with big girl lawyers.
Major Major Major Major
@KG: @Another Holocene Human: Or just put it up on fanfiction.net like everybody else.
eemom
@Anne Laurie:
Another reason, as explained in the series I linked to above, is that it was indeed just a first draft, and not a very good one.
JDM
Apologies to Jezebel, but I find it hard to take seriously any piece which unironically uses the phrase “as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out”.
KG
@Major Major Major Major: which is fine, unless/until the copyright holder requests that it be pulled, which happens a lot. the fanfic sites routinely pull works at the original author’s request.
TaMara (BHF)
This has been my thought. And in the most recent update to the “Hey Boo” documentary, it was pretty clear that not only does Harper Lee still have all her faculties but was involved in the idea of publishing the book. This from one of her closest friends, not caregivers or agents.
Another Holocene Human
@Major Major Major Major: psssh, all the cool kids are on Ao3 these days. ffnet is so 2003.
Another Holocene Human
@JDM: lol, me too! otherwise it was a great essay and worth breaking my gawker media embargo for
Bill
@Major Major Major Major: Any book that widely appeals to people between the age of 11 and 17 fits in to the category of YA as far as I’m concerned. You seem to have some notion that YA literature must teach some higher lesson about inspiration and overcoming. I’m just not buying it.
Sure, some books are intended for adults when written but have broad appeal to kids. That doesn’t make them less YA in my mind.
We may just be disagreeing about semantics. But having bought books for my four kids, YA to me is a lot more broad than Twillight and Harry Potter. (Although my kids read those too.) You mention Hitchhikers Guide. My 13 year old has read it twice already, Loves it. It’s as much YA as HP is.
And for the record, Life of Pi is crap no matter who is reading it.
srv
The Major reviews Catcher
Major Major Major Major
The Onion:
Elmo
@Chris: Hi! How did I miss you at family dinners? What was your name again?
robo
If you can stand another take from a Southern-raised male of a certain age:
Major Major Major Major
@Bill: Hate Life of Pi, we can agree on that lol.
I’m a librarian by training so semantics is my thang. When deciding what to shelve as “Young Adult” more factors go into play than what a teenager might enjoy reading. It’s not like they aren’t allowed into the “Science Fiction” or “Fiction” sections if they so choose.
Roger Moore
@JDM:
Try reading Gladwell’s piece before dismissing it because of its author. It’s well thought out and well written, and short enough to be worth giving a shot.
jeffreyw
cookie pls n thx
FlipYrWhig
Usually when I’m in the mood for another “That Thing You Always Liked Is Actually Deeply Racist And Probably You Are Too” essay I go to Salon.com.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
Wow. The editor may have suggested a softer, more commercial approach. Big deal. Harper Lee was not only able to deliver, but also delivered something that was stronger and more lasting than perhaps the original editor could have suspected.
To what standard should the book be held? Romeo and Juliet is not Shakepeare’s greatest play, but it speaks to its audience in a way that the only plays do not. A first folio edition of the play has long been the most read in Oxford, and lovers still write letters to Romeo and Juliet. Not too bad, for a YA drama.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: Romeo and Juliet isn’t YA either for gods’ sake, have you read it? It’s about how 13-year-olds are stupid and die sometimes in stupid ways because they don’t know how to communicate.
aimai
@Anne Laurie: I never read the book,and only saw the movie once or twice. I always hated the end “Stand up, honey, your father is passing.” It made me sick.
eemom
@TaMara (BHF):
uh, I’m not seeing anything in that link that supports that statement….can you elaborate?
chelsea530
Big deal. Harper Lee was not only able to deliver, but also delivered something that was stronger and more lasting than perhaps the original editor could have suspected.
That white men are racist? We already knew that.
Mockingbird was a lesson we hoped our students would learn. Some surely did
This other is a sad reminder of the racism that still exists today.
The former is a much better teacher.
TaMara (BHF)
@eemom: It’s in the documentary.
MomSense
Interrupting to say there are two hummingbirds in my garden. They are so delightful.
Cacti
Atticus Finch wasn’t a racist.
He was the best friend that black people ever had. And calling him a racist would have just played into the hands of the racists and would have been counterproductive.
TaMara (BHF)
@TaMara (BHF): Sorry wouldn’t let me edit. The documentary directly addresses the controversy with on the record statements by good friends of Harper Lee’s. It sounded more credible than anything I’d read to date. And just the title and first page of the article you linked to sounds like a lot of speculation that has already been written about and debunked.
FlipYrWhig
@Cacti: Hey waitaminit are you still talking about Harper Lee?
Dolly Llama
@kc: God damn, that’s funny.
Cacti
@FlipYrWhig:
I thought I was still in the BLM/Bernie Sanders thread.
Another Holocene Human
@Cacti: ISWYDT
Mike J
@MomSense: Go Set a Hummingbird.
eemom
@TaMara (BHF):
Fair ’nuff, I’ll have to watch the documentary.
However, please also provide links for this:
As I said, I’ll watch the documentary, but I still think the article I Iinked to makes a pretty compelling case….so I’m very interested in seeing exactly where those allegations have “already been written about and debunked”.
eemom
….for example, I have read in other sources that that vile lawyer controls access to the lady now that her sister is gone, and I have not seen those debunked.
TaMara (BHF)
@eemom: I’ve read them several times since the announcement – first in April. Sorry don’t have the links, but you can probably google it and get the articles. Nothing in the first page of the New Republic article was breaking news and as I said, is addressed directly in the documentary.
TooManyJens
@KG:
Is that true though? The Wind Done Gone got published and survived a legal challenge.
Edit: oops, I missed where Joseph Nobles beat me to it.
Darkrose
@Joseph Nobles: I was just about to mention that.
Emma
I can’t understand the frenzy this has caused.Perhaps because I didn’t grow up in the States and by the time I read Mockingbird I had no expectations. But the whole “it was only a draft and she shouldn’t have published it” crap really pisses me off. She owes nothing to your hurt illusions, folks. She wrote was seems to be a fairly autobiographical story that was changed into a good-versus-evil story by a canny editor. Guess what? Watchman might be considered the “lesser” story but it was the real adult woman’s experience. Who the hell are you to tell her she shouldn’t publish it? You grew up, so did Scout. Belt up and deal.
And no, don’t give me the “she’s senile” bs unless it comes with a doctor’s certificate. It is my understanding that several friends have spoken up and said she’s fine.
Omnes Omnibus
@Emma:
It makes a difference whether the book is a stand alone novel or if it is an early draft of a well known novel.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
To throw a little fuel on the fire of the YA controversy, S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders” is generally considered the first true YA novel — written by a teenager (she was 19 and a freshman in college) for teenagers. You need more than a teenage protagonist to make a YA novel.
TaMara (BHF)
@Emma: I think I kinda love you. ;-)
eemom
@TaMara (BHF):
here’s what I found by googling. The WaPo may be a piece of shit in general….but this now makes two RECENT sources, with zero incentive to misrepresent anything, who say that Carter’s story is suspicious.
ETA: both citing direct evidence of that assertion.
LesGS
@Major Major Major Major: Damn, I remember back in sixth grade I had to get special permission from my mother before the library would let me check something out that wasn’t specifically from the Children’s Section. I hit the science fiction hard once I was allowed into the adult stacks. (I had had already gone through all the “juvenile” stuff.)
I think my kids needed my permission to get a library card (I think to ensure late/lost fees could be paid), but the library had no restrictions on what they could check out.
Emma
@Omnes Omnibus: Or you can look at it as a story in two parts, from the perspective of a child and then through the eyes of an adult. But it really doesn’t matter. It’s her work. Her choices. Unless you find that medical certificate.
TaMara (BHF)
@eemom: You seem to want some kind of fight. I’m not taking the bait. You want to believe this, go right ahead, no one is stopping you. Personally, IMHO, I find her friends much more credible.
MCA1
@Roger Moore: Agreed, and I’m not a fan of Gladwell on the whole. He’s always been better in thought-provoking essay form than rigorously thought out and researched full length book subject form, and that essay was right on the money. In the end, Atticus Finch was decent and fundamentally kind and honest, and yet compromised, as every Southerner of the time (and perhaps every white American ever) was by the legacy into which they were born. Finch’s route of grappling with that legacy, despite having limited effect on the culture and society as a whole compared to actual activism, and despite being capable of being characterized as an easy way out without confronting one’s own prejudices or the systemic nature of it all, still required a sizeable amount of courage. As evidenced by the fact that 95% of his fellow whites wouldn’t have acted as he did. I don’t find it that hard to reconcile the character from one book with the character in the other.
Omnes Omnibus
@Emma:
Where did I say it wasn’t? But knowing which of the two it is would color one’s reading of the book.
eemom
On another note, I’m curious as to why TaMara and Emma take such umbrage at the question being raised of whether Lee really did want this thing to be published? That has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of Mockingbird itself, or to any issue of racism.
Emma
@Omnes Omnibus: Would it? The timeline wouldn’t change, nor the reasoning. A young woman wrote a book about (most likely) her own experiences growing up in the South. An editor pointed out that the best parts of the story were about the young girl, and suggested she rewrite the book from that pov. She did. It went from looking at the world through the eyes of a disillusioned adult daughter to the eyes of an innocent girl who loves her father without reservations. The adult came first.
eemom
@TaMara (BHF):
whatever. As noted above, I don’t get why it’s so important to you to believe her “friends”, and dismiss all evidence to the contrary. Do you work for Tonja Carter?
Emma
@eemom: Because it seems that the question is always asked by people whose illusions about the saintly Mr. Atticus have been crushed by Southern reality and are trying to cling to the illusion that the author feels as they do. Are all her friends in on it with the lawyer?
eemom
@Emma:
No, that’s a bunch of bullshit. Read the TNR piece I linked to above and its sequels….that author tears down the Atticus character much more eloquently than anything I’ve read in this thread.
For myself, I don’t have strong feeling about the book one way or the other. I’m just horrified at the spectacle of a sick old lady being exploited by money grubbing thugs….which, again, there’s every reason to believe is going on here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Emma: In my view, it certainly would. Hence my statement. As stand alone novel, it would stand or fall on its own merits. As a published first draft, it is primarily of interest in comparison to the work it became.
gwangung
@Omnes Omnibus: Huh. If the protagonist’s journey is different in the two and she ends up in different places, learning different things, I find it hard to consider WATCHMEN a first draft, as opposed to a a different story.
Emma
@eemom: Let’s just agree to disagree. I didn’t even like Mockingbird and the movie was.. jeez. As I’ve said, not having the American obsession with the White Savior, I could see the seams.
So her friends are all on the side of money grubbing thugs? Good to know.
Curious. Would you have objected if it had been published by her heirs after her death?
eemom
@Emma:
Well, that might depend on how her “heirs” got to be her heirs…..e.g., if her “heir” was Tonja Carter, named in a will of questionable authenticity. If her heirs became such through the law of intestate succession — as I believe was the case with Margaret Mitchell’s asshole nephews — I don’t think there’s any legal argument against the publication.
Once again, you miss the point — subject to watching the documentary, which I haven’t done yet, I question the account I’ve been given of the testimony of her “friends”, and/or how credible it is.
And, again, what I’m saying has absolutely nothing the fuck to do with “seams”, “white saviors”, or any substantive issue in connection with the Mockingbird/Watchman story.
IF it is true that this thing was published against the old lady’s wishes, do you not see any problem with that?
sigaba
@Roger Moore:
Gladwell has a lot to offer along these lines, he is actually a minority, a Jamaican, and he always has interesting anecdotes. I remember on RadioLab he once gave an extended explanation for why he thought all the great recent olympians, particularly track runners, seem to come from Africa. It was interesting to him because he himself was an All-Canadian track runner in high school, and everyone on his team in Toronto was from Jamaica. TL:DR, becoming an olympic athlete is basically the only way people born where they are can ever attain a modicum of fame or economic self-sufficiency.
Well, that, or writing faux-intellectual neoliberal glurge. That works pretty well for Gladwell :)
I watched Mockingbird again on Saturday actually and it’s interesting how ambivalent Atticus is actually written, but Peck’s performance actually gives the moral spin everyone seems to remember. He defends Tom because the county judge makes him; the Ewell girl has broken “our code,” which Peck seems to elide ironically, as if, “this code is old nonsense,” but it’s really all just in the read. Atticus could just as easily mean in flat, on the page it’s up to the actor to decide.
In the end is Atticus defends Tom not really to get him off the hook, but because everyone deserves a trial and a lawyer. That the trial’s outcome is pre-ordained is problematic but not at all fatal to the enterprise, as far as Atticus is concerned, and he only really is revolted by Tom’s death, not by his conviction, which he seems to consider a fait accompli. He already has his appeal ready, but Sidney Poitier seems to know better.
(Also, see Poitier in this, then In the Heat of the Night. Different man.)
RSA
@sigaba:
Indeed. Brock Peters. :-)
Stella
“What these two novels need is a third, one Harper Lee could not write even if she still could. I want this sequence of events as told by Calpurnia, the long suffering maid to the Finch household. All it would take is a female black novelist who would be interested enough to do so. Whoooo, you think people are upset now, though!”
You are so right Joseph Nobles. It’s interesting, in all the words that have been written about Watchman, you’re the first person to make this point or suggestion. I haven’t read Watchman yet but this story from Calpurnia’s POV is definitely a story I would be interested in reading.
sigaba
@RSA: EFF EFF EEFFFFFFFF. Of course, Admiral Cartwright.
I shall now retire to private life.
RSA
@sigaba:
No! It was a great comment, just with a “thinko”.
sigaba
@RSA: No, I think the They All Look Alike trope has fallen off the hopper, and that’s a red card for the game. Up stumps and to the pavilion for me.
Emma
@eemom: If. If. If. You believe the lawyer’s detractors. I believe the woman’s friends. Further evidence will tilt the playing field. And yes, I do, in that case, think there would be a case for prosecuting the attorney.
The problem for me comes down to this. A sizable number of the “anti-publish” comments I’ve read (some in previous threads here) have come down to “I want my unblemished hero back!” And that pisses me off. People are rejecting a complex reality in favor of the Heroic White Man Who Rides To The Rescue Of A Good Colored. Jesus Christ on a Harley, doesn’t that get old?
eemom
@Emma:
Yeah. The other thing that gets old is the insistence on conflating two different issues by someone who obviously has the sense to know better.
I’m out.
Emma
@eemom: And here I thought agreeing with you (yes, if the attorney is as you perceive her, she should be prosecuted) would actually please you.
Whoever said upthread you were just trying to pick a fight… I should have listened to him/her.
FlipYrWhig
@Emma:
Yeah, see, thing is, from the perspective of when Harper Lee was writing, it wouldn’t have been a hackneyed trite trope, because, you know, plenty of white men didn’t give a shit about even the good colored folks. It’s a fable for the moment just before the civil rights movement really took off. It made white people care in a way they didn’t before. I’m sure Uncle Tom’s Cabin is treacly and not properly intersectionally enlightened by 2015 standards either. But people read it and felt something. That’s sort of important too.
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
Actually it kinda is YA, especially to the extent that it easily resonates with younger people. It used to annoy and astound me that many high schools would teach Julius Caesar as their sole Shakespeare play, but there are historical reasons for this, all of them stupid.
And yeah, read it, performed it, taught it.
You make it sound like a lame after-school special. But you are partially on to something. It is probable that Shakespeare’s audience knew an earlier version which much more clearly was a cautionary tale about how children should obey their parents, especially about marriage. But Shakes turned it around and made Romeo and Juliet more correct about love than their parents.
And oh yeah, the Baz Luhrmann version is pretty damned good.
@Emma
I knew a little about the controversy that seemed to be brewing over control of Lee’s published works, but never really followed it. But it sounds even more complicated, and I also think as you suggest here that what her friend say has to be given due consideration.
Lots of good links here. When I have more time, I will have to chase it all down.
MaryRC
@eemom: Yes. The author didn’t want it published when she was younger and in better health. Now she is nearly 90, partly blind and deaf, has suffered a stroke and lost her sister (her most trusted advisor), it raises many questions about whether the book was published with her permission.
eemom
One other observation: the hilarity of folks on this particular blog dismissing the concerns I’ve raised, because they trust the account of a LAWYER published in the WSJ.
ETA: Sorry, I guess that would be Ms. Lee’s “friend”.