Writing Right with Dmitri: The World as It Is, or As It Should Be?
Created | Updated Aug 2, 2015
Writing Right with Dmitri: The World as It Is, or As It Should Be?
The literary world is a-chattering these days. Small wonder: Harper Lee, one of the US South's most famous novelists, has published a 'new' novel after 55 years. Go Set a Watchman has set the cat among the pigeons – and there's a lot for us to learn as writers.
Why did I put the word 'new' in what my editor calls scare quotes? Because Go Set a Watchman isn't really new. The novel was written in the 1950s. Harper Lee first offered this semiautobiographical novel about life in the Deep South to the New York publishers back then. It was rejected. But the publishers noted that Ms Lee was an amazingly gifted writer – which she is, breathtakingly so. And so they encouraged her to rewrite her story to focus on the part of it that interested them…race relations in the Depression-era South. Particularly, a brave instance of civil courage witnessed by a young child. The result of Lee's rewrite effort was To Kill a Mockingbird, a book which won the Pulitzer Prize, inspired an award-winning film, and became required reading in schools from the 1970s on. The New York editors' judgement was spot-on: they managed to get this talented writer to produce what they – and everybody else on the planet – wanted to read: a book about the evils of racism that united people in the fight for civil rights. And that was a very good thing.
Oddly, though, Nelle Harper Lee (the author's real name) never published another book. And she didn't like to give interviews. Now, at 89 and in a nursing home, she decided to let her original book be published. Go Set a Watchman concerns the same characters, the same locale (southern Alabama), and the same problems. Only the story is set 20 years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird, and the main character, Jean Louise Finch, is a grown woman now. And she has a grown woman's ability to see past the oversimplifications of most people's historical understanding.
And readers, schoolteachers, and literary critics everywhere are having a hissy fit. That's probably the way Harper Lee's characters would describe it. It is certainly the way this writer would describe it, as this writer was a child in the same part of the world as Harper Lee, and knows what Ms Lee is talking about.
What is the cause of this public hissy fit? Why, discovering that the fictional character Atticus Finch, the moral paragon of To Kill a Mockingbird, was a racist.
'Why, honey,' I can hear some talcum-scented lady in Maycomb, Alabama say, 'didn't you know that already?' As one astute commenter to The Guardian pointed out, if he weren't a racist – at least by our modern standards – Atticus Finch could no more have existed as a practicing lawyer in the Deep South at that time than a unicorn. Of course his attitudes were wrong. The point of To Kill a Mockingbird was that, in spite of the poisonous atmosphere of those wrong attitudes, Finch did a brave thing. (See my comments last week about jumping over your own shadow, difficulty thereof. And I wrote that before the book came out. Before I even heard of it.)
If reading a more nuanced version of the story causes massive trauma to the millions of self-indulgent readers who found To Kill a Mockingbird 'heartwarming' and 'charming' (quoting The Guardian here), I say…good.
Serves you right for misreading that book. Which I found at fifteen to be evocative, honest, and somewhat conducive to paranoia. I don't know what the schoolteachers have been reading into it, but that book is a beautifully vivid description of real life. On the first day of school, the teacher, a hothouse flower who 'looked and smelled like a peppermint drop', practically faints dead away because one of the kids has cooties1. The children comfort her. A poor child, Walter, has no food, so Jean Louise's father Atticus makes her bring him home to their house to eat. When the boy, who was almost literally 'brought up in a barn', pours corn syrup over everything in his plate, Atticus does likewise so as not to embarrass the child.
Does that warm your heart? Or does that tell you a great deal about a complex and suffering society? Why did Atticus pour corn syrup on his dinner? Because he lived by an honour code. The boy was a guest in his house and could not be shamed, lest it bring dishonour upon the house. For the same reason, unlike a Northern do-gooder, Atticus did not start a free lunch programme at his daughter's school. That would separate have from have-not. No, sir: he took the child to his house, fed him, and covered for his social awkwardness. This is neither good nor bad. It is true life.
Harper Lee's observations are as anthropologically sound as those of Haldór Laxness. And just as fascinating, instructive, and compassionate. Laxness wouldn't know a cotton boll if it bit him, and probably never had to worry about rabid dogs on the main street of Reykjavik on an August day (both because it's not hot there, and because there are no dogs allowed in Reykjavik), and Harper Lee probably wouldn't know what to do with a freshly-caught shark (bury it in volcanic soil for about a decade). But I'll bet those two could have had a productive sit-down. What makes literature great is where it takes us, and what it teaches us about how humans handle their problems.
The school people will now be busy rewriting the curriculum around To Kill a Mockingbird. They will be cursing Harper Lee, her publisher Harper Collins, and the lawyer who unearthed the manuscript in the safe deposit box. Not to mention all old people, for not dying soon enough and leaving them alone with their 'modern' delusions.
Lying isn't new, honey. It's as old as Adam's excuse for chomping on that apple2.
So what does that teach writers, besides 'don't monkey with a hit'? That you have a choice to make. Do you want to write stories about life as it should be? Then write what the people think they read in To Kill a Mockingbird, a story about impossible characters who 'know better' than everyone around them, and always behave perfectly…i.e., the way the author and her audience want them to.
Or you can write about reality: messy, three-steps-forward-and-two-back, horrible, painful, gut-wrenching reality. You can write about the sudden realisation that your nearest and dearest harbour thoughts in their bosoms that make you sick to the pit of your stomach. That is just about the worst feeling of betrayal there is. I've felt it, and maybe, so have you. That's worth describing. But it's not charming to do so, nor is it particularly heartwarming. It is, however, what makes literature worthwhile.
As the wisest person I ever knew used to say to me, 'You pays your money, and you takes your choice.' Yes, indeed, you do(es) . Go read that book, or listen to it on audiobook with Reese Witherspoon, an actress with an authentic accent. Make up your own mind. I guarantee that whatever you decide, it will affect your future writing.
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