Death of Harper Lee at 89 Spurs Talk of Legacy

Harper Lee’s beloved classic To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 and won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The zeitgeist novel depicted in bare terms racism in America and reaffirmed the values of equality and unity. The book has sold more than 40 million copies globally and has become a staple of high school curriculums. But despite the book’s acclaim and instant success, Lee repeatedly vowed never to publish a novel again. For the next 56 years, she lived a private life in small-town Alabama and an anonymous one in New York City, her career a single gem.

Not long before she went dark to the public — just four years after the publication of Mockingbird and two years after the film version — Lee recast her literary objectives in a 1964 interview with Roy Newquist, the editor of a book titled Counterpoint. Perhaps because of the rarity of such encounters with Lee, the Newquist interview has become one of the few sources of material that illuminate her mystery. In it, Ms. Lee clearly stated her literary ambition: “to describe a disappearing way of small town, middle class Southern life. In other words, all I want is to be the Jane Austen of south Alabama.”

Less often quoted than this statement is her explanation of it. She wanted to “leave some record of the kind of life that existed in a very small world. She hoped to do this “in several novels, to chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain.”

Lee said she was always fascinated with the “very definite, rich social pattern” that makes up the tiny towns of the South. “I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.”

Beyond Harper Lee’s crowning achievement of Mockingbird and her lone interview with Newquist, the front-page obituary of Lee in Saturday’s New York Times recalled the literary world’s biggest story of 2015: the publishing of her second novel, Go Set a Watchman. The book, in all its controversy, is crucial to considering Lee’s legacy, which had been fixated for more than half a century on one work. Watchman was met with a considerable amount of backlash, with some accusing Ms. Lee’s publisher of taking advantage of her in her old age.

They raised eyebrows at the timing of the manuscript’s discovery and the announcement that it would be published, which was only weeks after the death of her sister, Alice Lee, who had long been Harper’s confidante and whom many considered to have been her protector. Skeptics use reports of Lee’s deteriorating state at the time the manuscript was discovered as evidence that she could have easily been coerced into agreeing to something she had not wanted for 56 years. “It would be very difficult to prove this one way or another,” Bertolini said.

In a New York Times column, Joe Nocera called the book a “fraud” and “one of the epic money grabs in the modern history of American publishing.” Jonathan Sturgeon wrote in Flavorwire that Watchman is not Mockingbird’s sequel or prequel, but rather its prototype. Lee herself described the book as her first book’s “parent.” Sturgeon points to wholesale passages in Watchman that were later reworked for Mockingbird.

Pieces of literature have been published against some authors’ wishes, noted John Bertolini, Ellis Professor of English and Liberal Arts. He noted Vergil and Franz Kafka as examples. “Of course the same thing happened with Kafka: he ordered that all his works be destroyed, but they weren’t. Fortunately for all of us, Vergil’s orders orders on his manuscript of the Aeneid weren’t followed either.”

With all the debate over the origins of Watchman, the biggest bombshell turned out to be an explosive plot twist that no one saw coming. Atticus Finch, the crusading lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, whose principled fight against racism and inequality inspired generations of readers, is depicted in Watchman as an aging racist who has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, holds negative views about African-Americans and denounces desegregation efforts. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” Atticus asks his daughter, Jean Louise — the adult Scout.

Bertolini said he was astonished by the reaction to the book. “It involved one of the most colossal misreadings of a book that I’ve seen. It was said that it turns out Atticus is a racist after all, and that’s not, I believe, the point Harper Lee was making in that book. She was demonstrating that Atticus was continuing to educate Scout, and that he thought it was a flaw in her that she idealized him so much. He did that precisely to provoke her to think about his having a flaw, about his not being a perfect man.”

The very fact that the manuscript exists, he said, means a lot. “The book makes an important statement that should be read — about not blindly idealizing somebody, not expecting perfection from all human beings under all circumstances. Atticus may have done that deliberately to help to Scout grow up, to become a mature, understanding, forgiving human being. This is, after all, what he spent his whole life doing.”

Claire Borre ’18, an English major, said that Watchman complicates the emphatic depiction of Atticus as a hero and exposes his flaws to modern readers. “I read Go Set a Watchman as a completion of Scout’s coming-of-age that was started in To Kill a Mockingbird,” she said. “Having read Mockingbird as a young girl and then reading Watchman this past summer, I connected to both in very different ways. Scout’s first attempts at understanding the world, like my own, were heavily influenced by those around her, whereas Jean Louise, and myself as a college student, must learn to look inward for her own value.”

Borre continued: “The more adult perception world presented is not as strictly good or evil as in Mockingbird, and Lee reveals a more nuanced worldview that makes people reevaluate their perception of the hero Atticus. It is a shattering of the hero image of Atticus.”

Bertolini pointed to the strength of her first novel as a lasting part of her legacy. “To Kill a Mockingbird, both the book and the film, had an influence in the Civil Rights Movement that was analogous to the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in persuading people to be against slavery. I first encountered it when I was in high school, first the book and then the film, which had a big influence on me. I will never forget that.”

The general consensus among book critics is that Go Set a Watchman is not as well written as the masterpiece of Mockingbird is. “Isn’t that true of all the secondary books by great authors?” said Bertolini. “They’re usually much better than the best of the ones being published today, because true artistic talent and genius is a rare thing.”

For all the excitement, confusion, surprise, drama and controversy, the world nevertheless has another Harper Lee work.