Mockingbird (25 page)

This month we offer our members another discovery—
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee. It is a first novel and shows the sincerity and intensity that so often marks an author's first book. The author calls it ‘a love story pure and simple,' and it is the story of a small town and of a way of life that were close to the author's heart. Harper Lee was born in a small town in Alabama, and as she writes, the reader feels she is writing about people and places at once dear to her and unforgettable.
2

After putting down the phone, Nelle hadn't been able to sit still. Torpor would have been a sign of ingratitude—the only thing that would do was for her to take the Lexington Avenue express subway down to Crain's office and share her happiness. “I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little.”
3

The temperature was in the upper twenties, and she had a five-block walk to Lexington Avenue. She turned north to get the Eighty-sixth Street express stop, startled by a police officer blowing his whistle and pointing at her. She glanced around uncertainly.

“Yes, sir?” she said reflexively, her southern manners coming to the fore.

“You walked against the light. Couldn't you hear the cars?”

“Cars?”

He made her recite her name and address, then ripped off a ticket from his pad and handed it to her with a peremptory “Be careful.”
4

The incident rankled for a few minutes, but by the time she was standing on the subway platform with the train swooshing in front of her like a grimy silver dragon, the effect had worn off.

Five months before, in November when she had turned in the final version of her manuscript to Hohoff, there had been no indication that she should expect to be so happy. Lippincott's publicity department had slipped a note inside advance copies sent to reviewers. “Please set aside an evening or two real soon to read
To Kill a Mockingbird.
I'd be very happy to know your reaction.… We are rushing this paperbound copy to you so that you may share with us the rare fun and lift in the discovery of a new, fresh talent.” Capote had contributed a blurb for the review copy. “Someone rare has written this very fine first novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life, and the warmest, most authentic humor. A touching book, and so funny, so likeable.”

Hohoff, while confident, had some reservations. A novel set in the South at the center of which was a rape trial might not send readers rushing to bookstores. “Don't be surprised, Nelle, if you sell only two thousand copies—or less. Most books by first-time novelists do.”
5

But now, suddenly,
To Kill a Mockingbird
was in impressive company: some of
Reader's Digest
's recent picks had included Fred Gipson's
Old Yeller
, John Hersey's
A Single Pebble,
and
A Rockefeller Family Portrait
, by William Manchester. Being selected by the Literary Guild, Crain said, practically guaranteed that her novel would be a commercial success. At the prepublication party he and Annie Laurie threw for her, she expressed her gratitude in a presentation copy especially for them. “Maurice and A.L.: this is the charming result of your encouragement, faith and love—Nelle.”
6
Then guests gathered around a cake in the dining room, frosted to look like the novel's cover—a leafy tree stood against a light brown background; the title in white letters in a black band across the top. As Nelle cut the first piece, everyone toasted her and the book, which already felt like a success.
7

In Monroeville, the news of a local girl making good led to an exuberant item in the
Monroe Journal
: “Everybody, but everybody, is looking forward to publication … of Nelle Harper Lee's book,
To Kill a Mockingbird.…
It's wonderful. The characters are so well defined, it's crammed and jammed with chuckles, and then there are some scenes that will really choke you up.”
8
Ernestine's Gift Shop, on the town square, scored a coup when the owner announced that Nelle would be holding a book signing there just as soon as she was back in town.

Within a few weeks after the publication party in New York,
To Kill a Mockingbird
hit both the
New York Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
lists of top ten bestsellers in July 1960. Reviewers for major publications—who would generally cast a skeptical eye on tales about virtue standing up to evil and peppered with homespun verities about life—found themselves enchanted by
To Kill a Mockingbird.

“It is pleasing to recommend a book that shows what a novelist can do with familiar situations,” wrote Herbert Mitgang in the
New York Times.
“Here is a storyteller justifying the novel as a form that transcends time and place.” Frank Lyell, in another
New York Times
piece, breathed a sigh of relief that “Maycomb has its share of eccentrics and evil-doers, but Miss Lee has not tried to satisfy the current lust for morbid, grotesque tales of Southern depravity.” The
New York World Telegram
predicted “a bright future beckoning” the author, and the
Tennessee Commercial Appeal
announced the addition of “another new writer to the growing galaxy of Southern novelists.” The
Washington Post
began its review by praising the novel's power to carry a moral theme: “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title
To Kill a Mockingbird.
”
9
Annie Laurie Williams, who had been dumped by Capote as his agent for film and drama rights, couldn't resist gloating to him, “We are so
proud
of Nelle and what is happening to her book is thrilling.”
10
Alden Todd, another one of Williams's young author-clients, strolled into the Francis Scott Key Book Shop in Washington, D.C., and learned that the owner had hand-sold two hundred copies of
Mockingbird
in less than a week.
11

A few critics later found fault with the double-narrator technique whereby Scout and Jean Louise Finch—Scout as an adult—both tell the story. Phoebe Adams in the
Atlantic
dismissed the story as “frankly and completely impossible, being told in the first person by a six-year-old girl with the prose style of a well-educated adult.” Granville Hicks wrote in the
Saturday Review
that “Lee's problem has been to tell the story she wants to tell and yet to stay within the consciousness of a child, and she hasn't consistently solved it.” W. J. Stuckey, in
The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look
, attributed Lee's “rhetorical trick” to a failure to solve “the technical problems raised by her story and whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view, she switches to the other.” (On the other hand, the reader wonders how it will all turn out; there's a feeling of suspense, of “continual mystery” since Jean Louise is recalling the past with fondness.)
12

*   *   *

In hindsight, reviews of the novel when it was published say a great deal about American culture then, especially prevailing attitudes about race. What was not discussed about the novel is more revealing than what was.

To begin with,
To Kill a Mockingbird
divides people and behavior into good or bad. Democracy, justice, and courage are good; racism, incest, and false allegations of rape are bad. Good white people like Atticus get respect from blacks who get to their feet in the colored gallery when he passes below, and the implications of this aren't questioned. Bad white people get what they deserve and die or disappear. There are no bad black people at all, which is simultaneously a stereotype and a subtle endorsement of racism. Black characters are one-dimensional, leaving readers feeling that they understand Calpurnia, Helen Robinson, Zeebo—for that matter, all blacks.

Racism receives tacit endorsement from Atticus, too. He overlooks the racism of characters such as Mrs. Dubose, while praising the “courage” she shows in breaking her drug addiction. Lynch mobs, such as the one that confronts Atticus outside the jail, are made up of decent people who can be shamed by a child out of their desire to torture and mutilate. Mr. Cunningham, Atticus says, is “basically a good man … he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” And he assures Scout that the Ku Klux Klan was “a political organization more than anything” that briefly emerged “way back about nineteen-twenty” but “they couldn't find anybody to scare.”

He's resigned to certain things as a wise man because good or bad behavior is often the fault of “breeding.” The poor white-trash Ewells are irredeemable, because their kind are dirty, incestuous, and drunken; they belong at the dump. Bob Ewell has raped Mayella all her life but “what my pappa do don't count,” and no one in court finds that abhorrent—that's just white trash for you. In the same way, nothing can be done about Boo Radley, held prisoner by his father for years, except to leave him alone, says Atticus.

Folks in Maycomb County get along because people have sense enough to stay in their lane, so to speak; by this logic, racism and segregation sound like a civic duty. The real problem in the South, according to the novel, is a mystery disease; just as rabies can produce a dog who's out of his mind, so racism is a form of confusion, or a result of being raised poorly, or a matter of not having any manners. Scout sails into her cousin Francis for calling her father “a nigger-lover”; she doesn't quite know what he means—it's how he said it, she explains. It was rude.

As Francine Prose wrote, albeit almost forty years later, “To read the novel is, for most, an exercise in wish-fulfillment and self-congratulation, a chance to consider thorny issues of race and prejudice from a safe distance and with the comfortable certainty that the reader would
never
harbor the racist attitudes espoused by the lowlifes in the novel.”
13
Yet had
To
Kill a Mockingbird
not
reflected the political and social sensibility of the 1950s, even though it's set much earlier in the 1930s, it wouldn't have been as popular or talked about.
14

*   *   *

Americans wanted to see themselves as justice-loving and believing in freedom, for example, especially in the face of communism, but the Emmett Till trial of 1955 in Mississippi was a notorious example of the opposite. An all-white, all-male jury deliberated sixty-seven minutes before acquitting two white defendants of murdering fourteen-year-old Till for whistling at a white woman. Hence the injustice of Tom Robinson's trial was greatly amplified in reader's minds in 1960 because it seemed much nearer in time, not an event from an earlier, benighted age in American history.
15

Also, sexual intimacy between blacks and whites had always been an incendiary issue; but it was never was more violently opposed than after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
threatened to violate sexual taboos by mixing black and white schoolchildren. An exhaustive 1947 study of southern culture by Gunnar Myrdal asked whites to choose among six categories in gauging what they believed blacks most desired by asserting their civil rights. First in ranking came “intermarriage and sex intercourse with whites.”
16
From his research, Myrdal concluded that “sex was the principle around which the whole structure of segregation … was organized. And it was because of sex that racial segregation … was intended to permeate every aspect of society.” By putting interracial sex and injustice at the center of her fictional trial, Lee made the adult concerns of the novel simultaneously present-day and enduring, too.

And perhaps that's why Atticus Finch had to lose in court; because had the law triumphed over “the secret courts of men's hearts,” in Scout's phrase, meaning their fears and prejudices, the verdict would have been abhorrent to segregationists. What the law threatened to make them do, they could resist so long as they stood their ground. But the novel provides hope. Atticus and Sheriff Heck Tate choose not to have Boo Radley arrested—a subversive ending, an act of justice in spite of what the jury decides in the Tom Robinson case. It gives strength to the belief that people of good conscience can change society.
17

In American culture,
To Kill a Mockingbird
would become like
Catch-22
,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
,
Portnoy's Complaint
,
On the Road
,
The Bell Jar
,
Soul on Ice
, and
The Feminine Mystique
—books that seized the imagination of the post–World War II generation. A novel that played a part in questioning the “system.”

*   *   *

A torrent of requests for interviews and book signings left Nelle breathless. Sacks of fan mail arrived at Lippincott. Capote wrote to friends: “Poor thing—she is nearly demented: says she gave up trying to answer her ‘fan mail' when she received sixty-two letters in one day. I wish she could relax and enjoy it more: in this profession it's a long walk between drinks.”
18
Most of the letters lauded the book, but a few were angry. “In this day of mass rape of white women who are not morons, why is it that you young Jewish authors seek to whitewash the situation?” complained a reader. Lee was tempted to reply, “Dear Sir or Madam, somebody is using your name to write dirty letters. You should notify the F.B.I.” And she planned to sign it, “Harper Levy.”
19
Another outraged letter read: