Killing To Kill a Mockingbird

It’s been an interesting 50th anniversary for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It was to be the next in a string of arbitrary holidays, like celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday or J.D. Salinger’s death – the subject isn’t invited, but is celebrated by renewed praise and the feeling you should go read that thing they did. We were going to throw such a casual festivities for Ms. Lee’s book of childhood lessons, but an unusual thing happened: party crashers.



Last August, Malcolm Gladwell took to the pages of The New Yorker with a befuddling argument. He began with a history lesson of the real politics in the Deep South, suggesting things were more optimistic than how Lee portrayed them by describing racial progressive James Folsom. Yet paragraphs later Gladwell trumpeted lynching and the power of the KKK. He panned Lee’s “hearts and minds” approach to change. He demanded a political approach, though he failed to explain why that would be better and tenuously ignored that political changes often come through winning hearts and minds.

Gladwell closed by comparing Lee’s approach to George Orwell’s criticism of Charles Dickens: that Dickens pointed out problems without fixing them. But he had forgotten his earlier complaint. Lee gave us the solution: change as people and the systems made up of those people can work for good. Her solution was “hearts and minds.” It was an initiative still hailed today by millions of people who recall having their views changed or emboldened by the book. His criticism was typical Gladwell: a startling premise, entertaining research, and unconvincing logic.

Since then several prominent papers have published broadsides. The most interesting one came in June of this year, from Allen Barra of the Wall Street Journal. Barra was rebuffed for primarily being a sports writer. As someone who is pro-Lee and who has written about rednecks experimenting to see if shit would literally roll downhill, I hope to neutralize that sad ad hominem argument.

Instead, let us deal with Barra’s grievance. He claimed To Kill a Mockingbird was not intellectually open-ended. “In all great novels,” he wrote, “there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained.” It rings somewhat true. Certainly college kids can stay up late arguing Homer’s opinions on the divine, or the thesis of Candide, or why Tom Sawyer returned at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

But it only rings somewhat true. Most of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain’s social satires can be grasped in seconds; it’s not their ambiguity or complexity that impresses us. And Barra’s ideal disqualifies all the dystopian classics: George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 are pretty obvious about everything they’re jabbing at. Every canto of Dante’s The Divine Comedy is easily grasped; we analyze it for autobiographical and cultural details, but such avenues are still open with Harper Lee as well.

There are ways in which the obviousness of intent can make us reject art. Repugnance of intent might stir us to hypocritical rejections; State of Fear's anti-global warming agenda turned the SciFi community against Michael Crichton. When theme overrides fiction, it can break the deal; Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy gets too preachy even for many atheists. But To Kill a Mockingbird is about Scout growing up under a father figure she never quite clicked with, and his attempts at lessons and paternal authority are entirely germane to the plot. If the novel's anti-racism fills up Barra’s memory, he misses that while it is the theme of the final act, it is not the entire book. The book is about the life of children in a small Alabama town and Scout's relationship to her passive father.

The prodding of To Kill a Mockingbird continues. There is some iconoclasm to it; editors probably didn’t mind getting more clicks and attention. Flannery O’Connor’s insult that it was only a children’s book was quoted over and over; and a dozen called it a collection of aphorisms (Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw’s best features are quotability, but okay). There were callow complaints that it was too liberal, or its perceived liberalism was too flimsy.

The novel's liberalism has taken a particularly half-hearted beating. Nobody wants to support Jim Crow. The mantra of these critics is that the novel exposes the “limits of liberalism.” No writer has yet explained this one very well. It’s a self-effacing throwaway, written by liberals who should (and probably do) know better. Liberalism, especially the touchy-feely-make-life-better variety, has no limits. It’s responsible for a chunk of the U.S.’s trillion-dollar-deficit and, if you ever think liberalism can’t fail any worse, turn on Fox Radio to hear their next nightmare scenario. To avoid wasting anymore time, here’s one more sentence about whatever "limits of liberalism" might have to do with this novel:

A nice guy (not a patented liberal idea) takes a case for a minority (more of a liberal thing) and shows his daughter an ideal of bravery (not a patented liberal thing) and staunch moralism (sort of a conservative thing), before the book ends without him running for mayor, governor, senator or president (the sorts of offices where the powers of liberalism are tested closer to levels one might consider limits), and with no legal policy changing (absence of liberalism).

There was also iconoclasm in defending To Kill a Mockingbird, and its defenders could be equally baffling. For instance, Jesse Kornbluth at The Huffington Post cried feminism. Harper Lee is a woman and so may be targeted for more mistreatment than her male peers. There is anti-femininity in some of literary academia; accusations that Truman Capote had to write this book for her certainly feel tinged with chauvinism. Yet there is something inauthentic to the anti-female defense. Fellow southern ladies Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor never had their classic status attacked with the vehemence Lee is seeing. Alice Munro is treated as one of the foremost living short story writers, and the offbeat critics are just as fond of Lydia Davis. Women are very accepted in best-selling mainstream fiction, with representatives like Anna Quindlen, Patricia Cornwall, Agatha Christie, J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer. At its most plausible, an anti-feminine bias would leave Lee more likely to be criticized, but not to cause this criticism.

Kornbluth also asserted that Atticus Finch was “a feminized man.” His personality appeared tempered by the better angels of feminism: in touch with idealism and feelings, willing to stand up for the right thing. If it seems messed up to you that those items are thought essentially feminine instead of human, well, you’re right and I agree with you. Yet post-feminism in America, it is marginally more acceptable for men to be in touch with our feelings, and post-cynicism, we’re told to shelve our ideals for pragmatism. These conflict, and so the feminized Atticus Finch would rile even more people.

That feels incomplete. We have popular idealist characters even in today’s post-cynical media. It may be less the feminized component to his ideals, and more the geographical. To Kill a Mockingbird is small town, Middle America and Deep South all at once. Many people on the coasts bear an irrational hatred for such locales. No number of megachurches in New York City and Los Angeles dissuade them from bashing the South’s religiosity. Iowa can legalize gay marriage before New York and the stigma stays. Harper Lee can write a novel where a white guy defends a black guy, and he’s dismissed as “folksy” and “down-home.” The same month, we watched race riots in Oakland. Atticus Finch’s problem isn’t that he’s feminized. It’s his accent. He’s affirming Sarah Palin’s notion of a Southern parent who knows what’s right. Never mind that he was invented fifty years ago, his creation had nothing to do with the current culture war, and that his existence in no way suggests people from other regions can’t be deeply moral (a proposal Finch would probably find mortifying). It is not an all-conquering bias, or else millions of people on the coasts would not love the book as they do, but it is there.

Something else is there. The more you read of this debate, the more you sense the essence of most debates. A lot of people read a book that affected them deeply. Other people weren’t affected that way. Both groups clad themselves in the aesthetic of reason to defend how they felt. When it becomes difficult to substantiate their position, they attacked the other (heck, I nearly damned my home state a paragraph ago). The only people likely to change sides are those who were utterly oblivious that there were any other sides at all, and in their surprise, trip over the line. We’ll see how things shape up for the 75th anniversary, or whenever Harper Lee passes away – whichever bizarre holiday falls first.