Atticus Finch: Racist

[Ecurb]

According to "Go Set a Watchman", Harper Lee's "new" novel due for release on Tuesday, Atticus Finch is a racist. Gregory Peck is turning over in his grave. Here's the New York Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?_r=0

[Calidore]

It's worth noting that Watchman was not only written first, but was then itself revised into Mockingbird, in effect serving as an early draft of the latter book. I've been wondering if Watchman itself was ever subsequently finished by Ms. Lee suitably for publication on its own, or if it's just being released mostly as-is as a cash grab by the publisher.

[Ecurb]

It's worth noting that Watchman was not only written first, but was then itself revised into Mockingbird, in effect serving as an early draft of the latter book. I've been wondering if Watchman itself was ever subsequently finished by Ms. Lee suitably for publication on its own, or if it's just being released mostly as-is as a cash grab by the publisher.

You're not the only one wondering about that. Harper Lee has been certified "competent" to make the decision, but there are evidently some doubts (or such certification would have been unnecessary). ON the other hand, take the money and run (I vote). I also read an article that stated that Lee is still raking it in from "Mockingbird", to the tune of several million dollars a year.

[TRIGGERSIDEWYS]

I saw something on TV about this today, not even on channel 1000 too.

I wonder if it gets more publicity once it comes out? The times are changing in civil rights.

[ennison]

Racist hmm. Well in TKAM he was certainly an elitist. I doubt if I'll be reading this.

[Sancho]

I'll read it if for no other reason than to get a glimpse of the process that went into creating To Kill A Mockingbird.

[tonywalt]

"Go set a Watchman" is likely closer to reality (a place readers typically would prefer NOT to escape to) and although set 20 years earlier, "Mockingbird" is a very unlikely scenario(but a scenario the reader would prefer to believe).

[Bustrofedon]

Watchman is a draft, right? I'll go with the author's original decision to change it and accept what she published as the finished work. Taking a pass on Watchman.

[Pompey Bum]

Unfortunately the decision to change it seems to have been the publisher's. I believe Lee herself fought to keep a black student out of her college sorority (or maybe her entire school?) So much for that PC hero! This is why we need to understand people's minds rather than using the intellectually lazy concept of icons.

[ennison]

Hmm I find that a bit hard to believe. Wtf is a sorority? It sounds damnably like an ulcer.

[Eiseabhal]

It's a clique for American females. Like a coven.

[JBI]

It's been well discussed in publishing for decades now that Mockingbird is as much the project of great editors as a skilled author, still the contrasts may show what made a challenging, perhaps problematic book into a schoolroom book - that is, the most accessible book a white person can read to make themselves feel ok with their racist pasts. Editing genius right there, whitewashing hundreds of years of bigotry in the form of a brave lawyer and innocent child - now defrocked and dismembered publicly for posterity. Perhaps burning the manuscript would have been a better idea, or perhaps the problems with the new book encourage it into a place as being more mature, or wholesome and less didactic and proselytizing.

[Pompey Bum]

It's been well discussed in publishing for decades now that Mockingbird is as much the project of great editors as a skilled author, still the contrasts may show what made a challenging, perhaps problematic book into a schoolroom book - that is, the most accessible book a white person can read to make themselves feel ok with their racist pasts. Editing genius right there, whitewashing hundreds of years of bigotry in the form of a brave lawyer and innocent child - now defrocked and dismembered publicly for posterity. Perhaps burning the manuscript would have been a better idea, or perhaps the problems with the new book encourage it into a place as being more mature, or wholesome and less didactic and proselytizing.

That would be nice, but since the curriculum that brought these reader-identification characters to the classroom was didactic and proselytizing in the first place, I doubt its retreat will be very gracious. Maturity may be beyond educational administrators. :)

[Emil Miller]

I haven't read the book as I don't like preachiness in literature or anywhere else. Another reason to give it a miss is the name Atticus Finch which equates with that other ludicrous contrivance Bilbo Baggins in another book I have no intention of reading.

[UlyssesE]

Go Set a Watchmen has been such a trial for me. To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my top ten books so naturally I would want to read anything else Harper wrote. But the whole situation of the books release, and circumstances, and the story changes... I am still torn over whether to read it.

[ennison]

TKaM is I believe widely read in schools so it should be obvious to many who read it in that context that the characterisation is very well done. There are no modern "saints" in the book. Politically Atticus is a Conservative - read even just the words giving his opinions on education. Would he have been a supporter of someone like T W Higginson? Nae chance. Would he have voted for the likes of Bryan? Naw - his type didn't do that. The characterisation is one of the best done parts of the novel. Whether that chimes with the first draft I couldn't say. As I understood it Lee spent a lot of time on rewriting it and to doubt that she did that is a modern jealousy. That said I think it is a big wide-ranging text. I like it for a lot of reasons. I didn't read it until I was in my early twenties and I was struck by its portrait of a community and its humour.

[Eiseabhal]

But who, Ennison, would there have been like TWH in the USA in the thirties? (If there was such a person in the USA today some right winger would shoot him) I see what you mean by the conservative views in the novel. Conservative perhaps to us Scots. But remember radicals can be racists or looneys or unpleasant and conservatives can be quite stable and sometimes pleasant to others. Unless you are of the John S Mill mind as regards conservative intellect? You cannot say that the views expressed by Lee in that novel are unintelligent. Would you agree that the character of Miss Maudie is probably the main mouthpiece for Lee's views on social issues?

[ennison]

Well I used these famous Americans as examples of well-known radicals. My intention was to suggest that although TKaM is radical in terms of 1960 race relations in the USA the central character is pretty conservative in several other ways. I admire the book. I wasn't really thinking about JS Mills but now that you bring him up I probably do share his opinions on that. I take your point about radicals but then people are only politically radical on individual issues. There is no such thing as a radical personality. Unless the inmates of some asylums might be radical in that way! I don't use the word in the modern post-hippy slang manner.

I would never say or even suggest that Lee was unintelligent. TKaM is a novel of ideas. Some are profound. Some challenging. It may be that the modern tendency to identify racism as the evil above all other evils has led to misreading a of the earlier text. But it is probably not a very good text brought out for a quick cash fix.

[Ecurb]

Here's a link to Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker I just received:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/sweet-home-alabama

By the way, here's the current New Yorker's brilliant cover of Donald Trump belly-whopping into a pool of candidates:

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-yorker-cover-donald-trump-2015-7

[AuntShecky]

This so-called "second" novel of Harper Lee is actually her first, in effect a first draft of the novel that became To Kill a Mockingbird. Since the publication of and publicity for this "watchman" book have surfaced, people around the country apparently have a sense of disappointment and disillusion, if not betrayal. Many have expressed their outrage without having read the book.

Neither have I read the "new" book yet, but I am reluctant to call out Harper Lee for depicting the society of the time exactly as was, bigoted warts and all. When an editor (or someone) convinced Miss Lee to rewrite the novel casting Atticus Finch as a kind of civil rights champion, the subsequent novel became what's called an "icon," held up as an example of how to change society. To Kill a Mockingbird became a way for well-meaning middle class white people to feel good about themselves, not to mention how high school teachers across the country held up the novel as a kind of literary chalice with Atticus as a model of rectitude (that is, back when actual novels were part of the curriculum until they were replaced by short reading passages as preparation for Common Core tests.)

I still believe that To Kill a Mockingbird is a good book, but in terms of lighting a fire for social change, I'm skeptical. Like Mississippi Burning and The Help, there is something not completely kosher in propping up a white person as a "savior" of black people; it seems condescending at best and at its very worst seems as if it's clutching the last (?) remnants of structural racism: that progress won't happen unless white people step in. Underneath it there's an assumption that black people can't succeed on their own which is totally, undeniably wrong.

If you're looking at literature and movies to solve social problems, no doubt they can be a force to win hearts and minds. Even so, there are other books far more powerful -- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison--books with the voices and hearts of black people themselves. But even when a film or a novel can influence social attitudes, it is a by-product, not the raison d'etre.

One more thing that sticks in my craw: again and again we come back to the essential question: what is literature "for"? It is right to expect good literature is be good, to have "meaning," but it is essentially wrong
to ask art and literature to sing for its supper, no matter how nourishing the meal may be.

[Ecurb]

The anti-bigotry theme of "To Kill a Mockingbird" always appeared to me to be, "Poor White Trash are even worse than black people". After all, the black people in Maycomb participated in white, middle class society and traditions, while the PWTs did not. Calpurnia (the kids' nanny) even had a classical name, just like Atticus, and demanded that Scout learn middle class manners.

I found it strange that the novel was held up to be anti-bigotry, when it clearly reinforced such stereotypes. (I haven't read "Watchmen" either. Also, I like "Mockingbird" despite what I wrote above.)

[Scheherazade]

All said and done, it is #1 both on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk

All the kids must be reading it!

[sandy14]

Buying a book is one thing, actually reading it is quite another.

Hundred of copies of the Booker Prize winner sells every year, and I doubt that even half of them are read.

[Munshie]

tonywalt

I saw the Mockingbird film although I never read the book. I am fully aware how many liberal minded White people received the book, but as the member of a much discriminated against racial minority (in the UK) and a politcal activist on matters of racial equality, I am also aware of how many people of colour/African-Americans perceived the book. I'm sure the new book (Watchman) will upset some people but I agree with you, it is probably more realistic and less idealised about 'race'.

[Munshie]

Ecurb

You're probably right to suspect the anti-bigotry credentials of Mockingbird. As a former political activist on issues of racial equality in UK, I find it interesting that racism is reduced to mere prejudice.

[Eiseabhal]

Remember the lawyer, who was more concerned with the trial as a matter of justice than a social struggle, was not successful in TKaM. Any progress in social matters was seen as a "baby step" - and that was actually said by a character other than the protagonist.(As was remarked on above) . Yes the word "trash" is used in the novel. For those who are hyper-sensitive that could be an irritant. Although it is often read in some schools it is not a children's book. Coming out at the time it did in the USA I have no doubt it contributed to the "climate of opinion" in what I would regard as a positive way.

[Methinks]

Attiticus being racist is intolerable. I am all for authorial intent to a degree, but when a book has become a national classic, as Mockingbird was and is, and informed multiple generations through a simple human story, with characters now indelibly iconic, I see no reason for what is essentially an early, different era first draft of that novel to be published, unedited, decades later. Except thoughtless profit, of course.

[Gutted]

I still believe that To Kill a Mockingbird is a good book, but in terms of lighting a fire for social change, I'm skeptical. Like Mississippi Burning and The Help, there is something not completely kosher in propping up a white person as a "savior" of black people; it seems condescending at best and at its very worst seems as if it's clutching the last (?) remnants of structural racism: that progress won't happen unless white people step in. Underneath it there's an assumption that black people can't succeed on their own which is totally, undeniably wrong.



If institutionalized racism was a barrier to success, then how could black people have succeeded on their own, under those conditions, without help from sympathetic people from the ruling class? Such as, I don't know, white people, maybe?

[prendrelemick]

Wasn't Atticus Finch based on Harper Lee's own father? Which doesn't help the debate at all, but makes the second book seem a bit jucier.

[Eiseabhal]

I take your point about some of the ideas in the novel being radical Ennison - for it's era. I also see it as a very traditional "conservative" novel too. I suppose an American with a social conscience could still be both radical and conservative in those days. Look at the clown with the toupee nowadays as an example of American conservatism! Didn't his mother come from your island Ennison? By the way I hope you're off the grog, I'm booking my accommodation for the Northern Meeting tomorrow

[ennison]

I am. It was a short intense burst. Indeed I've been practising 2/4s. Saighdairean a Choigich, John Campbell of Castlebay and Mairi John Alec Iain Ian Ruaidh. Still got fumbled grips from top to low hand. Tha m chorragan fas cam - mar mi fhein. I hope I'll have some in manuscript for you by end of month. Yes indeed Trump's mother came from here. Imagine that f-wit with his finger on the nuclear button. If the West was to melt I would be ashamed to think anyone with our genes was responsible! Coming back to the text. There were rumours that it was Lee's friend Capote that structured the novel for her. I do not believe that. I may have said that I admire the novel but it is for a whole series of reasons. Her English is robust without being fancy. It has the ring of the educated woman that the narrator would have grown up to be. But perhaps I like it best because it feels full without being massive. If you knew very little about The South and America before, you would get a grand introduction to lots of its history in this book in a very painless way for there are dozens of passing references and allusions for the inquisitive reader to follow up. The reader should get the feel that it is a portrait of a community at a particular time. No doubt the main issue is racial prejudice but there are ideas on childhood, education, religion, the weight of history, poverty, alienation, snobbery, masculinity etc etc. it is an intelligent novel without it being a puzzle.

[Sancho]

Okay, I've read it. Has anybody else here read it?

Also, do we need to nail down the difference between a bad toup' and a bad comb-over?

[Scheherazade]

Okay, I've read it. Has anybody else here read it?

Come on... Since when do we need to read the books to discuss them???

[Sancho]

Good point, Scher, but as you know, I like to read. It's why I joined this illustrious club.

So here's my 2 cents on Go Set A Watchman:

But first I'd like to adjust my assessment of The Donald's hairdo. It's not a bad toup' or a bad comb-over, it's an AMBITIOUS comb-over. Ambitious, like the man.

Anyhoo -

In Watchman, Scout is now Jean Louise, she's 26 years old, and she's on a visit back home to Alabama from New York. Jem is dead, Dill is in Europe (most likely), and Atticus has crippling rheumatoid arthritis. Although the book doesn't specifically say it, it is evident that the U.S. Supreme Court had recently ruled on Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, which made public school segregation in The United States unconstitutional.

It didn't seem like a draft of To Kill A Mockingbird. It seemed like a sequel, which of course it sort of is. As for Atticus, he seems to have reacted to the court's decision exactly the way a lawyer like Atticus would - with indignation and controlled rage. Therefore much of the book becomes an eloquent (if unsatisfying) argument for the literal interpretation of the 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. It's the State's-Rights argument.

Which is fine...but BORING.

The parts of the book that are fun to read are the flashbacks Jean Louise has of her childhood. This is the Scout we know and love: the tomboy who likes to hangout with Jem and the boys, and is being raised by her widowed father. When she has her first menstrual cycle she has no clue what's going on and is convinced she's dying. (I would too if I had one of those things and I started bleeding from it for no apparent reason. In the novel Atticus wisely delegates this delicate discussion to Calpurnia) When a boy at school slips her the tongue with a kiss she is mortified because she's been led to believe that's how babies are made. She calculates the exact due date and resolves to throw herself from the town's water tower the day before in order to save her family the embarrassment of an illegitimate child. For her first school dance she goes to town and buys the nicest dress she can find, but when she stretches it over her young body she looks exactly like a - bowling pin (which is exactly the way a fourteen-year-old girl should look in a dress like that).

Great stuff.

And evidently the original editors thought so too, which is why they made the astute request to have Ms Lee rewrite it from young Scout's perspective.

Good call, eh?

[Ecurb]

I'm going to read it, and I read the first chapter, because I bought the book as a birthday present for a friend and had it in my possession only long enough to read the first chapter. The first chapter, by the way, supports my theory that "Mockingbird" is (in part at least) about class prejudices as well as racial ones. Jean Louise is met at the train station by a suitor, and muses about how she is expected to (and expects herself to) marry someone of the "right" social standing.

[ennison]

Here's what I'm wondering about Mr A Finch as imagined by miss (MHz? Mz? Naw) Lee, did he have a sex life? It's time some feminist bint with an unground axe wrote the novel which has A Finch in a Montgomery whorehouse sniffing cocaine from between the tits of some big bootied slut. I mean if you're gonna smash an icon smash the effing thing properly and hey it's 2015

[Scheherazade]

Good point, Scher, but as you know, I like to read. It's why I joined this illustrious club.I realize that, Sancho.

I was just trying to express my vexation with those who are determined to criticize the book without even reading it first. Quoting news articles or others who have read is hardly enough basis for forming such strong opinions, in my view.

I have a copy at home now and will get to it by the end of next week hopefully.

[Sancho]

I agree, Scher. In fact I refused to read any criticism until after I'd read the text itself. I didn't want anybody else's opinion to influence mine. I've read the two linked reviews now (NY Times, and The New Yorker) and I've gotta say - not bad. At any rate, I think you'll like the book if you decide to read it. It loses some of its zip now 60 years after those events took place. I mean we know how Brown v Board of Education played out. They did not. They only saw the upheaval it was causing in their time and place. "People who once trusted each other now watched each other like a hawk."

As for Atticus as a racist. Atticus is still Atticus but his circumstances have changed. I think he's true to his character, perhaps not the character we want him to be, but certainly to the character Harper Lee created. What has changed in Watchman, or is changing, is the South. Atticus is a patrician, and whereas we love him when he is defending a poor black man against a trumped up rape charge, we hate him when he is defending the old social order in the South against a Supreme Court decision (Brown vs Board of Education) and outside agitators (NAACP).

The only thing that makes him a compelling character at all in Watchman is having known him in Mockingbird. Had I read Watchman first I wouldn't give a rip about him. He'd just be another angry old white dude.

[Sancho]

Concerning outside agitators, or for that matter any group of people pointing their finger at another group of people without first engaging in a little self examination, here's Jean Louise on what New Yorkers expect of her as a Southerner:


New York. New York? I'll tell you how New York is. New York has all the answers. People go to the YMHA, the English-Speaking Union, Carnegie Hall, the New School for Social Research, and find the answers. The city lives by slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist. The best minds in the country have told us who you are. You can't escape it, and we don't blame you for it, but we ask you to conduct yourself within the rules that those who know have laid down for your behavior, and don't try to be anything else.

She answered: please believe me, what has happened in my family is not what you think. I can only say this - that everything I learned about human decency I learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn't know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day. They even had to pass laws to keep you from hating. I despise your quick answers, your slogans in the subways, and most of all I despise your lack of good manners: you'll never have 'em as long as you exist.

Scout's got a little fire in her belly now that she's grown.

[Ecurb]

I realize that, Sancho.

I was just trying to express my vexation with those who are determined to criticize the book without even reading it first. Quoting news articles or others who have read is hardly enough basis for forming such strong opinions, in my view.

I have a copy at home now and will get to it by the end of next week hopefully.

An adage advises: "If something's worth doing, it's worth doing well." I disagree. Many things are worth doing which are NOT worth doing well. A great many games and sports (for example) are fun, they're healthful, and they're "worth doing", but perhaps not "worth doing well"(because of the hours and the obsession that doing them well would entail).

Many other things are worth doing whether we do them well or not. That includes reading novels and discussing novels. Obviously, we are "better" at talking about novels we have read than about those we have not read. Nonetheless, we (or I at least) haven't read even these novels as carefully as a scholar who is studying the novel. Doesn't your reasoning, carried to its conclusion, Scher, suggest that it would be reasonable to say we shouldn't discuss novels unless we have read them carefully, or unless we have studied the literature about said novel, or (whatever other criteria we could think of)?

Discussion is as discussion does. I haven't read "Go Set a Watchmen", except for the first chapter. But I've read about it, and it's perfectly reasonable (even in your terms) to discuss those critiques we HAVE read. Why wouldn't it be? We can always complain that such discussions come from a point of ignorance -- but ALL discussions come from a point of ignorance, compared to some ideal.

This thread (which I started) isn't the most brilliant thread on these boards, but it hasn't been the most boring, either.

[Sancho]

It's a pretty quick read.

One misconception you get by reading the reviews rather than the book concerns Atticus's attendance years earlier at a Klan meeting. It is stated quite clearly in the book that the only reason he went was to see who was under the hoods. Turns out the Methodist Minister was under Grand Wizard Hood.

But there are other very problematic passages in the novel.