Another Take on Atticus Finch

A friend sent me this review of Go Set a Watchman. It’s really about what it’s like to live in a racist society after you become aware of how wrong racism is, and yet find yourself involved and implicated in it by the people and the society you love. This, the author Ursula Le Guin suggests, was the young Harper Lee’s subject, until an editor derailed her and set her to write a naive, white-liberal-self-congratulating book. She thinks the failed, earlier book (the one just now published) was actually a lot more truthful than the beautiful and famous later book.

Myself, I appreciate books written from a child’s perspective. That’s what To Kill a Mockingbird is: a child’s memory of her father, the epitome of goodness. Children see their fathers as heroes in a way they almost never do as adults, but the child’s perspective is a valuable one. We could do worse than to see the world through the eyes of a little child.

There is also a more adult tale to be told, far more complicated and troubling. As a matter of fact, no white man in Harper Lee’s society was ever as good as Atticus Finch. I say that having read a great deal of civil rights history. I am aware of only one or two candidates for the Good White. Almost invariably those who sought to be Good (and there weren’t many of them) got hounded out of town.

Today, when we have become alerted all over again to the persistence of racism in our society, we need both children’s tales and adult tales. We need to hope, and we need to deal with complex reality.