![]() Capote’s endorsement of his friend’s book read: “Someone rare has written this very fine first novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life, and the warmest, most authentic humor. Even Updike, who in five dreadnoughts and one slimmer volume of literary criticism hardly leaves a necessary book untouched by his golden pen, says nothing of it. In fact, upon the novel’s publication and in the ensuing decades, the best American critical minds seem not to know that it exists-Granville Hicks, at one time a relevant (albeit Marxist) critic, gave it three short paragraphs in the Saturday Review, and in the 1990s Harold Bloom penned an abbreviated introduction for the Mockingbird installment of his “Modern Critical Interpretations” series. Edmund Wilson’s final journal, also 900 pages, goes from 1960, the year Mockingbird was published, to 1972, and not a peep. Ralph Ellison lived another 34 years after Mockingbird was published and nowhere in his collected essays, all 900 pages of them, does he see fit to mention it either. James Baldwin lived 27 more years after Mockingbird was published and nowhere in his collected essays, and nowhere in any interview I could find, does he see fit even to mention it. The one word that shows her hand? Buying.Ĭuriously, those most qualified to comment upon Mockingbird chose not to do so. O’Connor, but I’ve got to say: Those lines hit my ear as distinctly bitter. Somebody ought to say what it is.” I’m loath ever to be at odds with Ms. ![]() It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. ![]() In a letter to a friend in October of that year, Flannery O’Connor had this to say: “For a child’s book it does all right. Since the appearance of Mockingbird in 1960, some have had a hard time taking it seriously. Curiously, those most qualified to comment upon Mockingbird chose not to do so. The New York Herald Tribune complained: “The charm and wistful humor of the childhood recollections do not foreshadow the deeper, harsher note which pervades the later pages of the book.” That goes out of its way to miss the point, since the first act of the novel is the crucial imaginative prelude to the moral reckoning of the second act: The childhood sublime must be celebrated if its later defacing by adulthood horrors, its asphyxiation by injustice and race hatred, is to have any effect. A smattering of early critics and reviewers were irked by the plot’s bifurcation. You won’t find much literary comment on Mockingbird, and what does exist doesn’t much care about how Lee carpenters her prose. For me it happens in chapter seven (a bit later than most, maybe): “The second grade was grim.” I imagine every reader must have his Scout moment, that satisfying click in the mind, the paragraph or line in which she does or says something, after which he is helplessly hers: He’ll follow her not only to the end of her book but to the end of the earth. And Scout: the ceaseless charisma and comedic lean of that little girl. Jean Louise Finch is consistently shrewd: “I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen”-with that sentence and others, you see you aren’t dealing with an obedient and blindly pious Southern woman. The narration of Mockingbird belongs to the adult Jean Louise Finch the eyes, however, belong wholly to the child Scout. Lee, “one-hit wonder”: most novelists are no-hit wonders. ![]() Twain said it: the best way to catapult a book into best-sellerdom is to tell people they can’t have it. And you know about the rabid popularity: the novel’s pervasiveness in American middle and high schools, its still yearly robust sales figures, the one-time efforts to ban it-efforts that always achieve the inverse effect. You know about the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird, the two-part architecture: the Wordsworthian childhood sublime of Scout, Jem, and Dill, their summertime beguilement by Boo Radley, followed by Atticus Finch’s defense of the wrongly accused black man Tom Robinson. This piece is the second in a three-part series we’ll be publishing this week on Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman. ![]()
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