'Go Set a Mockingbird', or 'Don't Kill the Watchman'

I suspect I wasn���t the only person who *thought* he had read ���To Kill a Mockingbird��� . When the squabble erupted about Harper Lee���s other book ���Go Set a Watchman��� , I decided that I had better read ���Mockingbird��� again, the better to judge the new work. I searched the house. It wasn���t there. It dawned on me, slowly but shamefully, that I had never owned or read it in the first place, so couldn't re-read it. I had seen the film, several times, and persuaded myself that I had read the book on which it was based. Check your own memory. If you sort-of think that Gregory Peck is the same person as Atticus Finch, and are quite surprised to see a picture of the real Atticus Finch, then you���re probably a victim of the same false memory.

 

 

Well, I���ve read it now, and have to say that the film is an astonishingly accurate depiction of the book, closer than almost any film I can think of apart from David Lean���s heartbreakingly good version of ���Great Expectations��� . Both films, of course, have to leave a lot out. But neither leaves out anything essential. 

 

And I���m a little baffled by all the fuss about the revelation that Atticus Finch was not in fact a politically-correct 21st-century American liberal. The book is not in fact about political opinions. It is about courage and goodness.

 

For those who don���t know, let me summarize. Atticus Finch, a respected but fairly poor lawyer from an old family, in a hot and humid, wholly segregated Alabama town in the 1930s, is landed with the awkward and unwelcome job of defending a black man against a plainly false charge of raping a white woman.  He decides to defend him properly, rather than (as expected by most of his neighbours) feebly going through the motions.

 

I won���t tell you the outcome, as it would spoil book or film for you to know. But I will tell you that Finch���s actions and attitude put him and others close to him in peril of their lives and earn him the spite and hate of many of his neighbours, most especially of the chief prosecution witness who he cross-examines devastatingly but wholly courteously (this is typical of Atticus Finch, a large and passionate soul, concealed by exquisite good manners). I will also mention that his own decision to do the right thing influences several others (who the reader might at first have expected to be on the other side) to do the same. He does not act alone.

 

It���s that courtesy you have to understand. Atticus Finch has not, back in 1935, realised which opinions and attitudes will be beloved and popular 50 or 60 years later among fashionable liberals. He fears, as the more intelligent white Southerners of the time rightly did, that they will one day be paid back for their treatment of their black neighbours, though he has no grand theory of how the wrong should be put right. But he is, in the most profound sense of the word, a gentleman.  He is guided by the principles of chivalry. He reminds me a bit of Arthur Conan Doyle���s great creation, the mediaeval knight (Sir) Nigel Loring, whose elaborate, courtly good manners deceive a number of foes into underestimating him.

 

As a gentleman, Finch defends the weak as a matter of duty, and desires justice for its own sake. He loathes violence and coarse language. You would regret swearing or using the n-word in his company, for you would know that you had sunk permanently in his estimation. He is (for example) a superb shot but will not, except in cases of great need, so much as handle a firearm, and hates it when his children shoot birds.

 

It is when he���s explaining this that he says he knows they will shoot birds with the airguns he has given them, but tells them that even so they must never kill a mockingbird. For the mockingbird does no harm.  All it does is sing beautifully, so to kill one is an undoubted sin . This exchange gives the book its title.

 

He is polite and forgiving to those who are horrible to him, or just horrible, and tries to educate his children to do likewise. When he goes to church, he sits alone, so as to be able to think. He reads a great deal, and laughs softly at a lot of things.   Such people do actually exist (generally I think they are the most courageous among us) and Gregory Peck did a wonderful job of portraying one such, and of helping the rest of us to imagine how we might be if we became better people, which is why both book and film are morally important.  

 

The key to the book is of course in the trial, as it has to be. Here all the strands knit together into a thick cord of moral power and truth. We have already experienced the pitiable misery of the poor whites, the grim, subject lives of the poor blacks, the plump, thickly-powdered smugness of the southern ladies, the dense cloud of humidity, gossip, unspoken secrets and inbreeding in which the little town sits and stews in the insufferable damp heat of Dixie.  It���s all very picturesque in its way, observed through the pages of a book or the flickering pictures of a film. Now we see how very nasty it can get. 

 

In the midst of it, Atticus Finch gives away the fact that he is no sort of radical.  In his speech to the jury, he explains what he thinks Thomas Jefferson meant when he said that all men were created equal

 

������a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the executive branch of Washington [Eleanor Roosevelt in case you hadn���t guessed, the Hillary Clinton of her day] are fond of hurling at us��� .

 

Note that ���us��� a, defiant identification by Atticus Finch with Dixieland.Whatever he may think of some of his neighbours, he still abhors a Yankee. .

 

I found the next bit particularly striking, for it is a marginally relevant attack on crude egalitarianism in education.  In an earlier scene, in Scout Finch���s classroom, we see a bitterly satirical attack on the egalitarian education experiments of the kind, already well under way in that era, which end by Scout going home and asking her father to stop encouraging her to read, because it is getting her into trouble . These nonsenses are blamed in the book on the theories of the American radical educationalist John Dewey (who, by the way, is not connected to Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System of library classification, though Scout thinks he was).

 

 

It seems to me that British left-wingers who have hero-worshipped Atticus Finch, and have now dropped him because in ���Go Set a Watchman��� he is outed as a racialist,  might now have *two* reasons for not liking him. But if they���d read the book, they���d have known about his views on egalitarian education anyway, which just goes to show they haven���t read it.

 

Here���s the key bit:

 

 

���There is a tendency in this year of grace 1935 for certain people to use this phrase [all men are created equal] out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious ��� because all men are created equal , educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority.��� 

 

��� We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe ��� some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they���re born with it. Some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others - some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men���.

 

Which is of course a simple statement of the facts.

 

But it is followed by a great, pealing plea ( alas, not actually true most of the time)  for real equality in the conduct of justice: ���But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal ��� there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court.���

 

Well maybe. But in any case these are conservative pleas. This is not an early Martin Luther King come to demand equality. It is a decent man, limited by his time,  seeking to do right according to his lights.

Personally I think it absurd that, in ���Go Set a Watchman���, Atticus Finch is said to have joined the Ku Klux Klan or to have taken a passive uncritical part in meetings in which racially bigoted sentiments are expressed. It doesn't fit with the one we see here. 

 

For example: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?_r=0 (Multiple spoiler alerts)

 

These don���t seem to me to be the acts or thoughts of the sort of chivalrous gentleman we see portrayed in ���To Kill a Mockingbird���.  Maybe after a few years in New York City  a liberal-minded ��migr�� Southerner might pretty much lump all 1950s Dixieland conservatives together. Perhaps it���s just and fair to do so. I wasn���t there. I don���t know. It just seems strange to me. Atticus Finch wasn���t that advanced in 1935, and he wasn���t that backward in 1955. But when tested once in his life (which is more than happens to most of us), he sought to do what was right.