Truth and Integrity: We Need every Atticus Finch We Can Find

Never mind the hype. I will not read “Go Set A Watchman.”  Call me a narrow-minded, sentimental old lady. I still won’t read it.

The Sunday Times Book Review states, “Though it”—“Go Set A Watchman”—“does not represent Harper Lee’s best work, it does reveal more starkly the complexity of Atticus Finch, her most admired character." ( Do they forget that Harper lee made both characters up out of her head? We're not talking history here.) ‘“Go Set A Watchman”’ demands that its readers abandon the immature sentimentality ingrained by middle school lessons about the nobility of the white savior . . “

 “Immature sentimentality?” Mea culpa. Only I was no middle school kid reading that book when it came out in the 60s. The mother of three, I was up to my armpits in the civil rights movement in Toledo, O, where I lived. I needed to believe that at some time, somewhere in our messed up 60’s world, that an Atticus Finch, or, please, God, a whole bunch of Atticus Finches existed. Men with some power—women had so little then—who did the right thing regardless of personal cost.

I need to believe that still.

My father was an Atticus Finch. Different time: different circumstances. An attorney in Bridgeport, during the mid-1950s, he was appointed by a federal judge to be the lead defense in a federal trial against eleven card-carrying communists. This was the McCarthy/ Smith Act/hate communists era when being a card-carrying communist automatically meant that you were committed to the violent overthrow of the United States government, therefore subject to federal prosecution. My dad knew that accepting the appointment would mean losing many of his regular clients.

Family discussion ensued. I remember him saying, “Everyone has a right to a fair trial. I am willing to do the best I can to see to it that happens.” Labeled “pinko” in Fairfield County, his private practice dwindled.

Not a single review I have read has praised “Go Set The Watchman.” Not The Times, nor NPR, whose reviewer’s final words about the book were: “It’s a mess.” There may be good reviews out there somewhere, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I doubt it.

I ask: why was it published? Over the years Harper Lee has repeatedly insisted that she would never publish another book. Lee’s lawyer found the manuscript in a safety deposit box and took it to Harper Collins. According to Wikipedia, “Lee’s sister and protector from public scrutiny, who died in November 2014, wrote in 2011, that Lee ‘“can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put in front of her by anyone in whom she has confidence.”’

Further along in Wikipedia: “A court investigation in February 2015 found that claims of coercion and elder abuse—toward Lee--were unfounded.” Why were there claims at all? On what grounds? Who brought them?

After winning in court, “according to Lee’s lawyer, Lee is ‘“happy as hell”’ with the publication.”

I don’t normally have a suspicious mind. But the lawyer finds the early manuscript in a safety deposit box and takes it to the publisher? Lee, who is entirely on record as saying she was never going to publish again, is now both blind, deaf and elderly but, presumably, according to the court findings, competent to agree to publication of this much earlier rejected work?

 I can’t help but think that someone, perhaps several someones, are taking a nice trip to the bank. A trip paid for by a book by Harper Lee that isn’t very well written, but attacks the mega-hero Atticus  and that, just that icon-smashing controversy alone, will sell this book by the millions.

Do we think Harper Collins and Lee’s lawyer didn’t know this?

Where is Atticus when we need him?