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Atticus Finch

I'd thought the title "Go Set a Watchman" was a cynical publisher's ploy. I thought some dick in a suit in Manhattan wanted to create an "echo" of "To Kill a Mockingbird," so he found another four-word title with the word "a" in Position Three, and he tacked that on to some old draft of Harper Lee's. (TO KILL *A* MOCKINGBIRD. GO SET *A* WATCHMAN.) That's not true at all.

Lee invented the title "Go Set a Watchman." And she wrote the book before "Mockingbird," and the two books do not tell one story. "Watchman" concerns an adult, or adult-ish, Harper Lee; "Mockingbird" is about Harper in childhood. You might think: If "Mockingbird" had been the childhood saga, why hadn't Lee written it first, long before "Watchman"? But I can think of at least one other case where a writer chose to tackle the recent past before tackling the distant past. That's Augusten Burroughs, who wrote "Dry" before he wrote "Running with Scissors." ("Scissors" was published before "Dry," oddly, just as "Mockingbird" was published before "Watchman.")

-Lee was able to write both "Watchman" and "Mockingbird" because of a generous gift from NYC friends. They wanted her to have a year to herself, so they funded her. Lee recognized that this was an act of love, not charity; this was an investment, not a hand-out. "Watchman" flowed out very quickly, and then Lee began to splice together various stories of childhood to make "Mockingbird." It was evident, fairly early, that the childhood stories were the real "seat of Harper Lee's heart." (It's also notable that, in college, Lee was already describing a lynching from a child's point of view. She seemed to have an enduring preoccupation with the idea of childhood innocence running up against evil. The child apprehends some things about the sordid "adult" world, and not others. In this way, Lee may have been influenced by Henry James's "What Maisie Knew.")

-A.C. Lee, Harper's father, was a bizarre man, full of contradictions. He had very little education, but he willed himself to take an interest in the world. He wrote editorials; he despised the idea of absolutism, particularly in the form of Louisiana's Huey Long. He wanted to like FDR, and did for quite a while, but eventually he just couldn't sign on to the New Deal. A.C. recognized the threat of fascism in Europe long before many American writers, and he disliked Charles Lindbergh because of the issue of isolationism. A.C. Lee was not the paragon that Atticus Finch sometimes seems to be. One of the jarring passages in "Atticus Finch: A Biography" has A.C. praising a Jewish businessman in his area (which seems all well and good), and then you realize this love is in spite of the fact that he--the businessman--sold to various "Klansmen" the white fabric they used to make their "robes."

-Truman Capote went around insisting that the first two-thirds of "Mockingbird" were "basically true." Also: "I AM Dill." In Capote's own novel of childhood, "Other Voices, Other Rooms," he seemed to find a role for Harper Lee. That's the role of Idabel. the tomboy, who is told: "March now....and don't come back until you put on some decent female clothes." It seems that Capote and Lee bonded over the idea of being an outsider. A.C. Lee encouraged both in their curiosity; he gave them games to play. Harper Lee was continuously studying her father--his schemes for self-betterment, his intellectual labors. A.C. Lee attempted a scrim of neutrality, when it came to campaigns, but once he did have to speak up against a Huey Long-ish "tyrant," and he lost at least one subscription because of this. The idea of people rubbing up against one another, the struggle for civility in a hot, small town, the sense of a big outside world intruding on apparently "simple" lives: Each of these themes would find its place in Lee's famous novel.

-Miscellany. In her recent NYT piece about "Mockingbird" (and about a work of criticism regarding "Mockingbird"), Roxane Gay worries that a longing for real connections--a movement away from "screens"--is code for nostalgia for America's racist past. I don't see it that way. (And yes: I understand that we also live in a racist present. To allude to America's racist past is not to deny that we also live in a racist present.) It seems to me that you can wish Americans would look at one another and talk to one another without also wishing that Americans would return to the practices of "the heyday of the Klan." (I do apprehend that Gay is underlining some insidious, exclusionary qualities of communities from the past--and suggesting that these insidious qualities are easy to overlook. But, to me, the fact that communities can become insidious is not a reason to stop striving for the idea of a healthy community. Surely the idea of a community does not have to be inherently bad.)

Two: There are striking passages in Crespino's "Atticus Finch" about Frances's--Mama's--mental illness. This was a topic Harper Lee seemed to work, for many years, to bury. (Silliness--and understandable.) Frances had a "nervous condition"; when one of her children would not sleep through the night, Frances was forced to spend a year away from the family, in some kind of "rest" facility. It's notable that, in "TKAM," there's no mother figure. The mother is simply dead.

Three: It's striking that, long ago, a woman gave conventional names to all of her children but one, whom she chose to call Amasa. That kid became A.C. Lee, Harper's father. Amasa was a military commander in the Hebrew Bible, well-versed in shouldering burdens. Harper's own name--"Nelle"--came from a family doctor whom the Lees felt especially indebted to. There was a class issue in the Lee family; Frances had more money, and more formal education, than her husband.

And that's all for now. You can fault "TKAM" for its many flaws. Calpurnia isn't a fleshed-out character; we never really know Tom Robinson. Fair enough. But "TKAM" is also the product of an extraordinary mind; an unusual woman studied her own complex father, and the problems America faced, and she thought at length, and in private, and she combined talent and (generally-unheralded) ambition to make a haunting book. Like many other readers, I can't stop thinking about Scout.

P.S. When I say "generally-unheralded," I don't mean to suggest that *the book* "TKAM" is unheralded. Of course the book has had a long, long day in a bright, bright sun. Here's what I mean. When you're talking about a classic, you feel a temptation to believe that the book just appeared in the world; it just arrived, one day, almost on its own. But that's not true. A writer has to do many things to make a book "happen." She has to convince herself she has a story, and that she is entitled to tell that story. She has to persuade herself, then, that the story is worth reading; she has to step out into the world and do all she can to secure, for the book, "a readership." That's ambition--and that's what we sometimes overlook when we talk about Ms. Lee. Lee wasn't just a storyteller; she was also an astute businesswoman and an energetic, smart curator of her own legacy. People sometimes forget about the business angle, and the need for self-promotion, when they talk about artists.

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