IN DEFENSE OF ATTICUS FINCH

boblonsberry.com ^ | 07/15/15 | Bob Lonsberry

[shortstop]

Don’t throw away your copy of “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Atticus Finch didn’t betray you.

Your childhood admiration was not misplaced, and your hero is not fallen.

Be still, gentle reader, and let me explain.

Atticus Finch is a fictional character. He was created to communicate a message on behalf of his creator, Harper Lee.

You met him on the pages of Mockingbird.

And some think they have re-met him this week in the unfortunate publication of an early effort titled “Go Set A Watchman.” The new Atticus, instead of being a paragon of fairness and equality, is one more racist old white man. He spews the garden variety enlightened white chauvinism of his day.

Black people are people, the new Atticus would reason, but they’re not our kind of people. They are junior people, somehow now as evolved as they rest of us. Not as capable of operating the levers of society and assuming its rights and responsibilities.

It’s a noxious view.

And heartbroken readers, recalling their ninth-grade admiration, have cursed the fallen Atticus for it.

But there is no need.

He is fine, and so is Mockingbird.

I am not much of a writer, but I’m writer enough to understand and explain this matter.

A long time ago, an ambitious, inexperienced, earnest crusader set out to write a book to right a wrong.

That would be Harper Lee.

Like all writers, she had something she wanted to communicate. It wasn’t a storyline, it was a principle. A principle of truth. That was her objective. The principle. The storyline was a tool, a technique, a means to an end.

I suspect that the point she wanted to make was that people are people and are deserving of equal dignity, respect and love.

It’s an ancient but oft-forgotten point, particularly in her Jim Crow day.

So she concocted characters and a story and put together her first novelish work. It was “Go Set A Watchman.”

She took it to a publisher.

The publisher didn’t like it.

The publisher suggested that Harper Lee back up and try it again.

Why?

Probably because it sucked. Because it wouldn’t sell. Because it didn’t add anything to the body of American literature.

Or maybe because Harper Lee’s muse needed a do-over.

So she went back to Square One, and she took her characters with her.

To see what happened, let’s remember the purpose of writing – it is not to tell a story, it is to make a point. The story is just a device.

In Watchman, Harper Lee makes her point by showing the ugly.

It didn’t work.

So in Mockingbird she makes her point by showing the beautiful.

She salvages Atticus as protagonist, but she recasts his heart, as the deliverer of light instead of dark. Instead of exemplifying the problem, as he did in Watchman, the Atticus of Mockingbird exemplifies the solution.

And the contrast between him and the society around him is stark and powerful – communicating exactly the point Harper Lee set out to communicate.

That is who Atticus Finch is, the carrier of Harper Lee’s message. The Atticus of Watchman is a pencil sketch erased when it failed to convey her message effectively.

These two books are not a serialization. They are not two-thirds of a trilogy. We are not meeting Nick Adams at various stages of his life, we are not following along with Alex Cross. Atticus Finch is not a Huckleberry Finn popping up the same fellow in a couple of books.

“Go Set A Watchman” was a throwaway.

That Atticus Finch is not the Atticus Finch.

It was a failed effort, which a Harper Lee in her clear mind never would have allowed to be made public. But in these last days of her life, with her decades of protection stripped away by her sister’s death, she has fallen prey to folly.

The publication of this book is folly.

It does not illuminate Mockingbird, it sabotages Mockingbird, by confusing readers.

And that is something Mockingbird has never done.

It took Harper Lee two licks to get it right. But she got it right. And her finished product is “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

She told first and best the story of racism’s evil and illogic, and that point and its wonderful making should not be clouded by confusion over this publishing stunt.

Atticus Finch speaks in Mockingbird.

Nothing is communicated in Watchman.

You were right in the ninth-grade. “To Kill A Mockingbird” is a great book by a great writer whose masterwork is not diminished by this indecent peeping at her rough draft.

Atticus Finch didn’t betray you.

And neither did Harper Lee.

[shortstop]

There was a very relevant comment in lonsberry's comment section I thought I'd pass on:

Most writers have projects they have abandoned for a lot of reasons. Great painters paint over paintings, writers shelve books. Lee's manuscript sat unpublished for over 50 years because that's how she wanted it. Harper Lee should have burned Go Set A Watchman. Instead, a money-grubbing lawyer (Tonja B. Carter) and publisher (HarperCollins) are cashing in on her senility and her name. It's not right.

[DoodleDawg]

That Atticus Finch is not the Atticus Finch.

And the Atticus Finch is not even THE Atticus Finch. People are up in arms not because they can't see Atticus Finch as racist but they can't see Gregory Peck as racist. He's Atticus Finch in the minds of most people.

I haven't read "Go Set A Watchman" yet; pre-ordered weeks ago and I expect it any day. But I've read "To Kill a Mockingbird" dozens of times and I can't think of a single line in that book that gives insight into Atticus Finch's racial views. He's an intelligent man, a refined man. A gentleman and a good father. And a lawyer who believes that justice could be colorblind. There is nothing on segregation or integration. Nothing that indicates opposition to Jim Crow or social mores of the time. In other words nothing that indicates that the Atticus Finch of the 1930's could not be the Atticus Finch of twenty years later.

[Cowboy Bob]

I have found most liberals to be extremely racist. They pander to the blacks when they need their support. But when the blacks don’t behave as expected, the liberals start using language that would embarrass a KKK member.

Same it true regarding queers.

[yoe]

Watchman was written years before Mocking Bird......Watchman was turned down in the beginning as I understand it, but only recently did that manuscript come to light.

[Sans-Culotte]

There was a very relevant comment in lonsberry's comment section I thought I'd pass on: Most writers have projects they have abandoned for a lot of reasons. Great painters paint over paintings, writers shelve books. Lee's manuscript sat unpublished for over 50 years because that's how she wanted it. Harper Lee should have burned Go Set A Watchman. Instead, a money-grubbing lawyer (Tonja B. Carter) and publisher (HarperCollins) are cashing in on her senility and her name. It's not right.

I agree with Lonsberry. I figured as soon as I heard what details have emerged that Go Set A Watchman is an earlier draft of the Atticus character and that the two versions would not meld.

On a side note, why does Lonsberry feel compelled to write every one of his sentences as a separate paragraph?

[Anitius Severinus Boethius]

To see what happened, let’s remember the purpose of writing – it is not to tell a story, it is to make a point. The story is just a device.

As a writer, particularly a sci-fi/fantasy writer, I seriously disagree with this. When "making a point" becomes more important than telling a story, then everything becomes political (look at what is happening to the Hugo's because "the point" is more important than the story.)

For decades it was known at Harper Collins that "Go Set a Watchman" had existed, but it was assumed that all copies of the manuscript had been lost.

Harper Lee obviously knew the story in it's editable draft existed, because she submitted it back in the 50s. But she likewise thought that all copies were lost.

So it is more than disingenuous to suggest that Harper Lee never wanted this story published. Of course she did, back when she submitted it for publication.

Would she have had a change of heart later? Maybe. But this is like discovering a lost play by Shakespeare, or a poem by Keats. If they wanted it "known" they would have made sure it was "known", but it is still fascinating to find and read.

But modern political oriented people feel that "the point" is more important than the story, so they can't separate what they like from what they appreciate. (i.e., if I don't like "the point" of the story, then the story can't be artfully done.")

I haven't read "Go Set a Watchman" yet, but I'm sure I will see flashes of "To Kill a Mockingbird" throughout it. We will see the raw imagery and powerful prose that Harper Lee gave us in her second try. We will even see weaknesses in her craft that she shored up in her masterpiece.

And none of these things have anything to do with "the point". We need to let politics be politics, and stop trying to infuse that flavor into everything we take in.

[notdownwidems]

I read the first fifty or so pages of this Go Set a Watchman book last night; mother-in-law bought it, along with about a billion other people.
Don’t waste your time, it is dreck.

[blueunicorn6]

We want to live in a black and white world.

We want to believe that a good person is 100% good and that a bad person is 100% bad. The reality is that nobody is 100% one way or the other.

We are human beings.

To Kill A Mockingbird is fiction. It comes from the author’s mind. It may be influenced by a real event, but it is not real.

Watching the reaction to Lee’s book is amazing.

People are going through the stages of grief because their fictional hero has fallen.

Amazing.

[Dilbert San Diego]

I’ve heard that Harper Lee is ailing and in an assisted living facility. And that she didn’t authorize this publication.

Did she sell the rights to this book years ago, and now whoever owned the rights decided now was the time to publish it? How did this get published here and now, without the author’s consent?????

[Kirkwood]

Atticus Finch I and II certainly could be the same character. Consider some of our founding fathers who fully believed that all men were created equal and who disparaged slavery, and yet they were not ready at that time to abolish slavery. It is kind of ironic that liberals who normally see everything as shades of gray, can’t see this fictional character in that way.

[windcliff]

ping

[Zionist Conspirator]

Black people are people, the new Atticus would reason, but they’re not our kind of people. They are junior people, somehow no[t] as evolved as they rest of us.

But I thought all white racists were against evolution? I thought creationism "caused" white racism?

Now I'm all confused.

[ek_hornbeck]

I have found most liberals to be extremely racist. They pander to the blacks when they need their support. But when the blacks don’t behave as expected, the liberals start using language that would embarrass a KKK member. Same it true regarding queers.

Elite liberals love blacks and collectively, as an abstraction, but have no more use for them as concrete individuals. They feel exactly the same about every group they try to recruit as political "clients." They condescendingly talk about how much they "feel the pain" of the inner city black or the Mexican migrant worker, while in the meantime living in places and sending their kids to schools where they never have to interact with any of either.

Interestingly, the liberal elite used to pretend to be the champions of working and middle class whites, too, and they had the same condescending "support for the common man" (i.e. love the abstraction, despise the concrete reality) as they do for minorities today. Once the majority of these working/lower middle class whites started voting Republican and the strength of labor unions started to fade, Liberals had no need to maintain a pretense of solidarity. So poor/middle class whites are written off while blacks and hispanics are pandered to.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I’ve heard that Harper Lee is ailing and in an assisted living facility. And that she didn’t authorize this publication.

Did she sell the rights to this book years ago, and now whoever owned the rights decided now was the time to publish it? How did this get published here and now, without the author’s consent?????

Monday or Tuesday there was an article - op-ed - in the Walls Street Journal by a lifelong friend (taking her word) of Harper Lee, claiming that she was present when Lee’s Safe Deposit Box was opened, and that the two people who wanted it opened had Lee’s consent. They had Lee’s consent - she lives in an assisted living facility, but apparently is coherent enough for her consent to be meaningful.

According to that telling, the two seekers were after the manuscript of Mockingbird, but apparently weren’t very diligent/determined, for they came up empty. The op-ed author says that it was later that she heard other info which led her back to that lockbox (with Lee’s consent) and to her discovery of the manuscript of Watchman. Having been enthralled by it, she got Lee’s consent to show it to Lee’s agent - and that agent got Lee’s consent to publish Watchman.

The same article asserted that the writer had gone back to the lockbox a third time “Thursday” - making it “breaking” news - and found the original manuscript of Mockingbird, tightly wrapped in a package which had not been (fully) opened when received, and - on the basis of the fact that it could not as a practical matter have been reinserted into such a tight package without damaging it - obviously had not been opened by the two original seekers for that manuscript.

I don’t even have a clear recollection of having ever read Mockingbird. only reviews of it, and I think I caught a snatch of the movie on TV. So I hardly consider myself an expert, but based on the reviews it appears that in both Mockingbird and Watchman the central voice (i.e., the voice of Harper Lee) is that “Scout.” “Scout” is the same person, in Watchman grown up to be an aspiring painter ( in “contrast” to the writer Harper Lee) as she was in Mockingbird. I see no reason to assert that Atticus Finch is not the same character, either. Dedicated to fairness and the rule of law - but in the 1930s of the then-conventional opinion that blacks negroes, as the polite term then was were not “ready for white ways.” Same character not necessarily out of place in showing hostility to Brown v. Board of Education.

On the basis of the reviews, it does not seem at all necessary to consider the Atticus Finch of Watchman to be a different character than the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird. The “problem” presented by the Atticus Finch of Watchman is that “liberals” are invested in Atticus Finch as portrayed by Gregory Peck - and they don’t want him to be the Atticus Finch of Watchman. It’s their problem, not mine. As I see it. Watchman shows the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird to be a “liberal” cardboard character.

[Ventilator on]

An "article" where every sentence is a declaration that ought to end with an exclamation point.