About fifteen years ago, when Harper Lee was still living in a small rent-controlled apartment in Yorkville, I sat next to her at a dinner party. She was, I had been warned, partially deaf. She spoke very little, listening carefully to whoever was talking. Now and then she smiled or nodded her head. Intimidated by her silence, I barely spoke myself. By the end of the party, I had begun to reproach myself for not truly encountering her. I was about to reluctantly join the other guests, who were standing up to leave, when she leaned toward me. In a soft, mellifluous Southern drawl, without the slightest slyness or irony, she said, “Sir, you are one of the most delightful dinner companions I have had the pleasure to sit next to.” She had given me, you might say, the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve been thinking about her graciousness and generosity over the past few days, as news that a sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be published has provoked outrage, anger, and concern. The outcry, from people who have not even set eyes on the sequel, seems wildly out of proportion to the impending event.
It’s understandable, of course, to feel protective toward the author of a book that has cherished status in the imaginations of so many people. Appearing in 1960, in the roiling dawn of the civil-rights movement, “Mockingbird” was the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its day. Its central black character even bore the name Tom, and, just as Stowe’s character saves a white girl from drowning, Lee’s Tom Robinson helps a lonely, impoverished white girl with her errands because he pities her. It is intolerable to think that figures of authority—Lee’s lawyer, her publisher, and all those who stand to gain from a sequel to the phenomenally lucrative “Mockingbird”—might be manipulating and exploiting the creator of a work of art that itself is about how an official mendacity abets a system of inequality. That the aged and infirm Lee either cannot or will not speak publicly about the sequel has only reinforced the suspicion of shady doings.
Yet beyond the social context, and even if people’s darkest fears are confirmed, it’s hard to see what harm the publication of the book, somewhat oddly titled “Go Set a Watchman,” would do. If the novel is inferior to “Mockingbird,” Lee’s classic of American literature will not suffer. William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” was not invalidated by the deservedly forgotten “Pylon.” The posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison’s disappointing “Juneteenth”—reorganized by one of Ellison’s friends—has not diminished the power or importance of “Invisible Man.” Like those other works, “Mockingbird” has created its own inviolable space; the sudden appearance of a second-rate work from Lee would hardly discredit the book that made her famous in the first place. The worst that could happen would be for a mediocre “Watchman” to make it seem that “Mockingbird” was a fluke. In that case, “Mockingbird” would be all the more remarkable.
Toward the end of his life, Willem de Kooning, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was declared mentally unfit to manage his estate, and his executors began to sell off at high prices a stream of works that many critics considered greatly inferior to de Kooning’s earlier work. Their fears were similar to those aroused by the announcement of “Watchman” ’s publication. De Kooning’s value as an artist—not to mention the monetary value of his art—has not been tainted in the slightest degree.
But perhaps the comparisons to de Kooning, and to Faulkner and Ellison, are overblown. Perhaps the more apt comparison would be to novelists like Pearl S. Buck and James Michener, writers who once occupied a now defunct space somewhere between literary and popular fiction. Though “Mockingbird” won a Pulitzer Prize, like Buck’s “The Good Earth,” it is not typically considered part of the “serious” canon of literature. It might seem insulting to call a beloved book like “Mockingbird” middlebrow, but such works—“Gentleman’s Agreement,” “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” “Exodus,” and “Fear of Flying,” to give a few examples—are the ones that shape public consciousness. If you concede that Lee’s book belongs in that category, then the publication of an inferior sequel would be nothing new. With such a book, what matters more than the style and sensibility of the author is that it crystallizes its moment. Considered in this light, “Mockingbird” is not primarily a work in Harper Lee’s oeuvre, so to speak. Rather, the author is a footnote to her achievement, a humbling fact that may even help account for Lee’s near-reclusiveness.
That an inferior sequel would not have the power to undermine the status of “Mockingbird” seems fairly obvious, particularly given that the so-called sequel was actually written before “Mockingbird.” But the uproar over “Watchman” doesn’t seem to be subsiding, even as “Watchman” itself remains shielded from public view. On the face of it, the situation seems absurd, yet there are cultural currents afoot, beyond the book’s iconic power as a social document, that give the absurd situation a rational aspect and keep it going. One is the fear of the helplessness of old age. Lee, who is eighty-eight years old, has no family to protect her. She is relying, truly, on the kindness of friends who could well be behaving like strangers now that large amounts of money are at stake. The spectacle of an author—and a beloved American author at that, one who has abided in our deepest feelings since many of us read her in childhood—being taken advantage of in old age is chilling at a time when so many people are living long lives. There is a collective anxiety about how we will survive as our faculties weaken, and as our existence becomes depopulated of friends and family and even familiar faces.
The ascendance of money as the dominant social value adds to the concern over Lee’s true situation. In every corner of the culture, money has increasingly become the sole criterion of success. Museums falter, dance companies close their doors, mid-list authors are cast adrift, newspapers and magazines contract, decent public servants are repelled from political life—all because they cannot meet an ever more draconian bottom line. And here is the author of the great American novel of cruelty and decency, of racial hatred and the sympathy that blurs racial difference, perhaps being robbed and degraded, all for the sake of the almighty buck. L’affaire “Watchman” is the perfect emblem of every cultivated person’s nightmare: the ongoing devaluation of art and literature in an impossibly overheated, aggressive, and exacting marketplace; and the callous trashing of the past.
Or is it? The indignant outcry over the fate of “Watchman” could just as well prove the opposite. It could mean that the very possibility of Lee’s distress possesses the power of her masterpiece. Somewhere in the hysteria that has greeted news of the sequel there is an acute awareness of artistic value, of the past and of what we owe the past, and of an individual’s precious singularity. When all the hysteria dies down, and those fine sentiments come to the fore, “Watchman” might well receive the same gift that Atticus Finch gave to Tom Robinson, and which Lee, in such a trivial context, once gave to me: the benefit of the doubt.
