The Big Read -- To Kill a Mockingbird

This month I re-read To Kill a Mockingbird as part of the Big Read. I've always loved this novel and reading it again was as enjoyable as the first time I read it years ago. There have been a number of scheduled discussions in the area and I planned to go to one on Tuesday night at one of the independent book stores, but the snow and ice kept me at home.

I've said before that I really love this novel.

I didn't grow up in a small town, but until a few years ago I used to visit a small town in southern Missouri regularly. Southern Missouri is very ... southern. It is southern in its speech patterns and attitudes. When my father first started dating my mother she took him down to visit her aunt and cousins. This was in the late fifties, about the time that Harper Lee was writing this novel, and he said they were still growing cotton in the fields, picked by field hands who were all black. He was a city boy and he said he felt as if he had stepped back in time to another world. Not a particularly good world in many ways.

As a child I remember being in the back seat of the car as we drove into town on the two lane black top, past what can only be called shanties. I never stopped to think about it at the time but they probably had no indoor plumbing and may have had no electricity. I just remember wondering why no one helped the people in them, all black people, build better houses. They were eventually torn down and publicly assisted housing was put up. But I remember it. And I remember walking from my great-aunt's house down past the courthouse to the stores in town. And playing in her yard among her azaleas. She was a lovely lady - and racist as many people in the south were racist in those days, casually racist. There was no political correctness in her (or in her sister, my grandmother). They weren't bad people but they thought that whites were superior. They really did. And although they were intelligent people, intelligent enough to know that an injustice was being done to someone like Tom Robinson, they would never have tried to change the system that perpetrated that injustice.

It isn't that I read this novel with nostalgia; it is that I feel that I know this town and these characters. They are very real to me. I find myself nodding my head as I read. The shades of gray in the novel are very real to me - there are some really good people in this world, people like Atticus, and there are some really bad people in this world, people like Mr. Ewell. But most of the world exists in shades of gray and I think this novel does a good job of showing that.

Favorite Line. My favorite line in the entire novel has always been and still is this complaint by Scout about the education system:

"I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what, I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me."

Favorite Scene. I have many favorite scenes out of this novel, but one of my favorites has always been when the children go to church with their cook/housekeeper Calpurnia. Here's my favorite portion, when the singing starts :

Zeebo rose from his pew and walked down the center aisle, stopping in front of us and facing the congregation. He was carrying a battered hymn-book. He opened it and said, "We'll sing number two seventy-three."

This was too much for me. "How're we going to sing it if there ain't any hymn-books?"

Calpurnia smiled. "Hush baby," she whispered, "you'll see in a minute."

Zeebo cleared his throat and read in a voice like the rumble of distant artillery:

"There's a land beyond the river."

MIraculously on pitch, a hundred voices sang out Zeebo's words. The last syllable, held to a husky hum, was followed by Zeebo saying,

"That we call the sweet forever."

Music again swelled around us; the last note lingered and Zeebo met it with the next line: "And we only reach that shore by faith's decree."

The congregation hesitated, Zeebo repeated the line carefully, and it was sung. At the chorus Zeebo closed the book, a signal for the congregation to proceed without his help.

On the dying notes of "Jubilee," Zeebo said "In the far off sweet forever, just beyond the shining river."

Line for line, voices followed in simple harmony until the hymn ended in a melancholy murmur.

I looked at Jem, who was looking at Zeebo from the corners of his eyes. I didn't believe it either, but we had both heard it.

Gender Roles - Ladies. This novel is always evoked as a coming of age story in a time of deep racism, but it is also a novel about the coming of age of a woman and all the limitations, both legal and social, that women had to battle early in the 20th century, especially in the south. Early in the story, when Scout doesn't want to do something that might get the children into trouble she is accused of being "a girl." The arrival of the children's Aunt Alexandra is the turning point for Scout - a Southern Lady who is intent on turning Scout into a Southern Lady. There follows a number of scenes of ladies being ladylike that have a certain historical charm to them but which, Harper Lee makes very clear, were very boring in real life. At one point, as Aunt Alexandra argues with Atticus about Scout's upbringing, Scout feels "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary" closing in on her.

But there is a difference between being a "lady" and being a lady. When the children ask Calpurnia why she speaks ungrammatically when she is with the people in the black church, she tells Scout "It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike." This is the true lady - someone who uses simple manners to make sure that others are not uncomfortable. And later towards the end of the story, when Aunt Alexandra and Miss Maudie carry on with their tea in spite of the terrible news of Tom Robinson's death, Scout picks up the cookie tray and emulates them: "After all, if Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could I."

Other Gender Issues. But Scout's issues are small compared to the issues of Mayella Ewell, the alleged victim of rape. The town is outraged when a black man is alleged to have raped Mayella; but the town is indifferent (or at least willing to turn a blind eye) to the abuse Mayella receives from her own father. When Tom Robinson testifies at his trial he occasionally say things that disturb the listeners in the courtroom. But this statement does not evoke any response and is simply buried in the middle of one of his answers: "She says she never kissed a grown man before an' she might as well kiss a nigger. She says what her paps do to her don't count."

The defense of Tom Robinson contains, in Atticus Finch's closing argument, the age old argument that the woman tempted the man. Not that Tom Robinson rose to the bait, but that Mayella Ewell broke a social code. Mayella broke the code that a white woman may not tempt a black man. When caught, Mayella needed to destroy the evidence - Tom. Woman as temptress however is the underlying gender depiction here.

And, of course, only men hear this temptress argument because the jury is composed of all men. Jem asks Atticus why someone like Miss Maudie is never on a jury and Atticus points out that women aren't allowed on juries.

Racism. Of course this is a novel about racism and the trial of Tom Robinson is engrossing and sad. But it is the depiction of casual racism that is, in my opinion, even more important. Those who study basic history might know that it would not be unusual for a town to try to reap its own justice on a black man accused of raping a white woman; but too often we forget the casual racism that even good people exhibit. During the trial, Dill is sickened by how the prosecutor treats Tom Robinson and Scout says "Well, Dill, after all, he's just a Negro." Aunt Alexandra thinks of Calpurnia as one of "them".

This is a novel of small steps. The mere fact that the jury took hours to come back with a guilty verdict is seen as a small step forward in the right direction. And the casual racism throughout the novel shows how far there was to go. Sometimes it is overwhelming. At one point Jem says to Scout: "Scout I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time ... it's because he wants to stay inside." But despite the bad things that happen in this novel it is a novel of hope. Atticus is constantly telling his children to try to see things from the point of view of others. At the end, when Scout stands on the Radley porch and looks down the street and literally sees the street the way Boo Radley had seen it all these years she begins to understand this lesson. And at the end Atticus tells Scout that most people are nice, once you finally see them. A true message of hope considering that there have been some not-so-nice people in the story.

Fathers. This is a novel about the importance of fathers. Mothers play very little role in this story. Scout and Jem's mother is dead. Mayella Ewell's mother is dead. Boo Radley had a living mother but the only thing we know about her is that she watered her canna lillies with dishwater. Dill has a mother but she sends him off each summer to Maycomb to stay with a relative. Even Walter Cunningham, the one child that comes home from school with Scout and Jem, is a child whose mother is not mentioned but whose father plays a role in this story.

It is the father that is key in the lives of the children. Even Dill, who has no father, spends his time making up stories about who his father is and, when his mother remarries, it is his lack of a relationship with his stepfather that incites him to run away to Maycomb. Atticus is, of course, the perfect father. He is calm, understanding, principled and knows how to pick his fights. Walter Cunningham has the father who is a shade of gray - a poor but proud farmer, prejudiced but able to evolve a bit. Mr. Cunningham is the "ordinary man" in the story. Mr. Ewell is a bad father - his children live in poverty and he abuses his daughter.

But as bad as Mr. Ewell is, Harper Lee seems to be saying that he is not as bad as Mr. Radley. Mr. Ewell neglects and abuses his children but Mayella Ewell's red geraniums are a testament to her pursuit of independence from him and there is a general feeling that Mayella Ewell will end up , if not all right, at least no worse off than she is. Mr. Radley, on the other hand, appears to have ruined Boo Radley's life, turning him into a recluse. There is, perhaps, a certain classism in Harper Lee's portrayals of these families. Perhaps we hold Mr. Radley to a higher standard than Mr. Ewell because the Ewells are "white trash" and the Radleys live on a nice street, although Harper Lee makes clear that the Radleys are not the same as their neighbors. Mr. Radley does not work and his home is not kept up. But the key difference between Mr. Radley and his neighbors and, indeed, between Mr. Radley and Mr. Ewell is that Mr. Radley is driven by religion. Mr. Ewell never tries to justify any of his actions; he acts out of his own sense of entitlement. Mr. Radley is never heard to justify his actions, in fact is seldom heard to speak, but it is the understanding of the neighbors that the Radleys are of a religious sect with strict rules that are somehow abnormal and it is this atmosphere that pervades the Radley House and in which Boo Radley is caught. It is, in fact, the comparison between Atticus and all the other fathers in the story that shows us how special Atticus is.

On the Sentence

I have often said that the most important thing for me in reading a novel (or indeed in reading anything) is the writing.  A good sentence can make up for a bad plot twist.  This is, of course, a gross generalization.  A novel with a bad plot is a bad novel.  But a novel with a good plot is not, in my view, necessarily a good novel.  A good novel needs a good plot and it needs good characterization, but mostly it needs good writing. 

But I never get any farther in that analysis because it is hard for me to define what I consider good writing.  Today I found the transcript of a speech given by the short story writer Gary Lutz to the students of Columbia University's writing program last September.  In the speech he talked about how he evolved as a reader and eventually learned to love reading and he said, far better than I ever could, what he was looking for when he read:

As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.

Yes.  A novel with sentences that are works of art in and of themselves, even when separated from the rest of the work.  That is my favorite kind of novel.

The rest of Lutz' speech was about sentences.  I found much of it interesting, although I am not a writer. 

The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.

This is how I feel about much of what I read.  That the writer has a good idea for a novel but hasn't spent nearly enough time and effort on the sentences that make up the novel.  As Lutz goes on to describe, even if the syntax and grammar are correct and the sentence conveys the idea that the writer wants to get across, it will not be a great sentence without more.  

These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.

I buy books that I hope will make me a pausing, enraptured reader. I am disappointed when I find, instead, that I have purchased a page-turner. Lingering over a poetical sentence is my idea of heaven.   At last, someone has described my heaven for me.

Re-Reading Still Life

After I finished reading The Virgin in the Garden I did move on to Still Life, the sequel. I had forgotten that Virgin ends so abruptly, with all the characters left hanging:

That is not an end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as good a place to stop as any.

I had also forgotten how strong an author's voice there was in these books. Or maybe that's not the right phrase. At certain points the narrator of the story (who may very well not be intended to be the author) talks to the reader, as above. This is even more pronounced in Still Life.

Many people I know don't really like Byatt, or don't really like any Byatt except Possession. They think her other works are too "wordy" and they want more narrative. I'm always reminded of the film Amadeus in which the Emperor tells Mozart that there are too many notes and he should just cut a few. It isn't that Mozart isn't melodic, but melody isn't the key to Mozart. Mozart is about notes. Mozart is about how notes create and envelop melody - so sometimes the melody is very strong and sometimes it is enveloped in ... lots of notes. For people who like music from a structural sense, Mozart is heaven. All those notes to listen to and marvel at how they relate to each other while still carrying the work forward. For those that like a brief simple melody, Mozart is boring.

Likewise, it isn't that Byatt doesn't have narrative, but that the narrative is enveloped in lots of words. Byatt is about words. Words, literally, are the key to Byatt; not only what the words represent but the mere fact that words are representational. She has said: I write novels because I am passionately interested in language.

In Still Life, she juxtaposes the representational nature of words with representational art, specifically the art of Vincent van Gogh of whom the character Alexander Wedderburn is writing a new play. Alexander becomes obsessed with how to use words to describe color.

How would one find the exact word for the color of the plum-skins? (There was a further question of why one might want to do so, why it was not enough to look at, or to eat and savor the plum, but Alexander did not wish to address himself to that, not just now. It was a fact that the lemons and the plums, together, made a pattern that he recognized with pleasure, and the pleasure was so fundamentally human it asked to be noted and understood.) There was a problem of accurate notation, which was partly a problem of sufficiency of adjectives. Do we have enough words, synonyms, near synonyms for purple? What is the greyish, or maybe white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine? How do you describe the dark cleft from stalk pit to oval end, its inky shadow? Partly with adjectives; it is interesting that adjectives in a prose or verse style are felt to be signs of looseness or vagueness when in fact they are the opposite, at their best, an instrument for precision.

A writer aiming for unadorned immediacy might say a plum, a pear, an apple, and by naming these things evoke in every reader's mind a different plum, a dull tomato-and-green specked Victoria, a yellow-buff globular plum, a tight, black-purple damson. If he wishes to share a vision of a specific plum he must exclude and evoke: a matte, oval, purple-black plum, with a pronounced cleft.

You may use the word "bloom" for the haze on this plum, and it will call up in the mind of any competent reader the idea that the plum is glistening, overlaid with a matte softness. You may talk about the firm texture of the flesh, and these words will not be metaphors, bloom and flesh, as the earlier "cleft" was certainly not a metaphor but a description of a grown declivity. But you cannot exclude from the busy, automatically collecting mind possible metaphors, human flesh for fruit flesh, flower bloom, skin bloom, bloom of ripe youth for this powdery haze, human clefts, declivities, cleavages for that plain noun. The nearest color Alexander could find, in his search for accurate words for the purple of the plum, was in fact the dark center of some new and vigorously burgeoning human bruise. But the plum was neither bruised, nor a bruise nor human. So he eschewed, or tried to eschew, human words for it.

In the end, Alexander is

... troubled by the sense that it was possible for, say, Vincent van Gogh to get nearer to the life of the plums than he ever could. Both metaphor and naming in paint were different from these things in language.

In order to write a passage about Alexander's thought process over describing Vincent Van Gogh's plum in words, Byatt had to ... use words.

In many of her books Byatt is writing about people who do most of their living in their own minds - thinking. This fits in with her theory of novels. She says:

' Novels are works of art which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in solitude by one person - by many different, single people, it is to be hoped. So I am also interested in what goes on in the minds of readers, and writers, and characters and narrators in books. I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating. This doesn't mean I want my books to be cerebral or simply battles of ideas.

In Still Life much of the "action" takes place in the minds of the characters as they think, and yet there is still a narrative. Byatt's principle characters in this Novel are people who naturally think about and create words - not necessarily as an exercise in creative writing, as Alexander's play is, but simply as a natural part of their being. Because they are people living daily lives their lives are not wholly in their minds, there is a narrative. But the life of the mind defines their character. This is a novel that is, in part, about people thinking in words about words.

One of the strongest images I retained from my previous reading of this novel, years ago, is of the pregnant Stephanie Potter at her ObGyn appointment, reading. She is reading, or trying to read, and think about William Wordsworth's words and meaning through all the indignities of the public health system, even including propping the book against her distended "baby bump" to read while she waits for the doctors. This image was so sharp in my mind that I was surprised to find, on re-reading, that it takes up only a few pages in this novel.

I had been struck in Virgin with how Byatt described the first phase of the Gift of creativity and even the offering of the Gift to the public. In Still Life she examines the second phase of the Gift - in which the will is worked upon the original gift, in order to create what may be eventually offered.

And Byatt makes clear that will, alone, is not enough. Frederica Potter, who has tremendous talent in thinking about and analyzing words, cannot write a novel. Frederica spends winter as an au pair in Provence. As she explores the French countryside, she decides, as many a traveler before her, to become a writer.

Frederica was also enough a child of her time to suppose that what she should write should be fiction. "The novel is the one bright book of life," Lawrence had didactically exclaimed and Bill Potter didactically reiterated. "The novel is the highest form of human expression yet attained." If anyone had challenged Frederica directly as to whether she believed that, she would have argued the toss. But -- however Wordsworthian the roots -- in the 1950's the recording compulsion took Lawrentian forms. And she had no plot. Or did not recognize those plots she had. And was not, primarily, in those days concerned with invention.

Frederica eventually gives up. "She was a good critic, despite her egocentricity, and decided briskly and miserably that writing was not her metier." Frederica has not received the first Gift and so she has nothing to work her will on.

Alexander is a contrast to this. He is staying in the south of France in order to write another big "historical" play set in World War I, perhaps using the poems of Rupert Brooke. But the work is going nowhere. It is a work that he feels he should write, not one that he necessarily wants to write. His host has also asked him to write a fun little piece about a local medieval troubadour named Cabestan, or Cabestainh, that could be performed by those staying at the villa. But Alexander has found himself obsessed with the letters of Vincent Van Gogh and keeps coming back to the idea of writing a play about him.

A writer is a man haunted by voices. Alexander, walking to and from the water tank in Crowe's kitchen garden, where balloon-like tadpoles, the size of half crowns, dived and plashed their lips, unable to emerge and metamorphose into frogs, was amused sometimes by the counterpoint that wailed in his mind: Cabestan's heart, Vincent's ear, gassed soldier's throats, Brooke's poppies, the troubadour's lady like rose and gillyflower, Vincent's irises, jealousy rage and fear, fear jealousy and rage, fear and indignation and pity. Sometimes, before he drank the fourth or fifth glass of Cote-du-Rhone that would incapacitate him, he thought with guilt of the Flanders fields, with impotence of the forests where wolves ranged, with the sense of temptation, secret delight, and energy welling up from unknown sources of Gauguin's cold bluster, of Vincent's two choices.

The choice is made after Alexander has a long conversation about it with Frederica who says that he of course must write about van Gogh. And Byatt writes: Paradoxically the release of tension enabled him, in the next week, to run up, turn out, patch together, a romantic melodrama about Cabestainh with which the house guests had some civilized fun.

So, in the end, although the narrative of this novel follows the chronological lives of the Potter siblings and their friends, the ideas of this novel follow thought processes. Alexander's creative process - the will he works to find the words to bring forth the creation. Stephanie's process of trying to find time in her life, despite husband and children, to think about words. Frederica's process through Cambridge and her ability to analyze and understand the words and creative process of others.

What I remember most from my first reading of this novel was the story of Stephanie. I remember the end of this novel, which is very much of the real world and not the world of the mind. (I originally wrote "grounded in the real world" but that seemed a horrible but unintentional pun, as those who know the ending would recognize.) As with Possession, and perhaps all of Byatt's novels, the title of this novel is the theme for all parts of the novel. Stephanie is a person who keeps still and calms everyone around her. Her mental life which has always been vibrant is now stilling. She is pregnant and there is always the fear of a still birth. The narrative of this novel is concerned with births and death. Death is, of course, the ultimate stillness. But after a death others still have life. I was aware of all those narrative themes the first time I read the novel.

It is nice, this time, to focus on the non-narrative parts of the novel. It's nice to focus on the ideas as ideas, not as an interruption in the narrative but as means of shaping character.

Bragging

My honorary niece Anna is a dancer in New York and also works as a cheerleading coach at NYU. She recently was given the opportunity to work on a music video for Ryan Starr (who I've never heard of). Anna says:

"He was on the CBS reality show Rockstar: Supernova where he competed to become the lead singer for Supernova. After leaving the show he was signed as a solo artist by Atlantic Records and will be releasing his first studio album soon in 2009. One of his songs from the album has already been featured on the soundtrack to the movie P.S. I Love You."


His first released song for his new album is "Right Now" and when they decided to shoot the video they realized that part of the song lent itself to a cheerleader theme. So they searched around for a choreographer and found Anna. In the end she did more than choreograph, she cast the cheerleaders, found the costumes, conducted rehearsal, and jumped in for a few shots while filming, all of which earned her an associate producer credit. She had some good stories about the shoot when I saw her at Christmas. Since he's just starting out, this was not a big budget shoot. But it still took a lot of effort.

The actual video can be seen here. I'm not sure why it isn't on youtube - it seems like poor marketing to me not to put it on youtube. But here's a "making of" video that is on youtube, Anna is at 1:58 (she will be the dark haired cheerleader on the left):