Celebrity spotlight kills the mockingbird
Conflict pauses Hackers hit US Lazarus comeback Bali airport shut
The release next week of the newfound sequel to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird will be the publishing event of the decade – equivalent, in cosmic terms, to the discovery of an important new planet in our solar system.
Two million copies of Go Set a Watchman have been printed already. At 89, Lee herself attended a gala lunch in Monroeville, Alabama, surrounded by the great and good of literary America: ‘‘Harper Lee Seen for the First Time in Nine Years,’’ reported People magazine, the celebrity bible. ‘‘Fascinating Glimpse of America’s Beloved Writer.
‘‘Like millions of others, I will buy the book on the day it appears, and then devour it avidly.’’
Mockingbird changed my life in the way that only a novel can when you are a young teenager; it entered my soul. I felt it was written for me.
Yet something saddens me about this moment: the ‘‘discovery’’ of the new novel, the re-emergence of the invisible author, the cameras and the carefully scripted quotes.
Harper Lee was the last great standard bearer for a principle that has been entirely undermined by our hunger for celebrity: the right of a writer to write and not to speak, to let the words on the page do all the talking.
The clarity and consistency of Lee’s retreat from the public world was, for me, almost as uplifting and moving as Mockingbird itself.
The book made her instantly famous in 1960. At first, she played the game: the publicity tour, the Pulitzer prize, the flood of royalties and the Hollywood film.
Then she stopped. She did not reject the world, but insisted on maintaining her ordinary life with her sister and her books. With perfect Southern politeness, she turned interviewers away, exercising her absolute prerogative to write, or not to write, in solitude, emancipated from the bondage of fame.
Fiction writing was once understood as a solitary occupation, requiring tranquillity and reflection. Indeed, many of the greatest writers have been shy or socially awkward, recoiling from attention, finding more honest expression on paper.
Jane Austen ( By a Lady) and the Bronte sisters ( Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell) discovered freedom behind the invisibility cloak of pseudonyms. Philip Larkin defended and demanded his private, quiet world: ‘‘It’s terrible the way we scotch silence and solitude at every turn.
‘‘But the hermit writer, the anonymous writer, the nonwriting writer is intolerable to the modern world, where success means round-the-clock availability, and anyone of note must be no more than 140 characters away.’’
Writers who reject publicity’s glare are dubbed ‘‘reclusives’’, an affronted word that, as Thomas Pynchon, one of their number, observed, is ‘‘a code-word generated by journalists meaning ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’.
‘‘JD Salinger refused to publish new work, demanded that his photograph be removed from Catcher in the Rye, and retreated to his New Hampshire compound: he was hounded and harried, forced to resort to lawyers in his attempts to stay hidden.
‘‘A writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him,’’ Salinger said (the first being his talent). But even after death, the public continues to poke and pry into Salinger, most notably in the recent, intrusive documentary about his life.
Thomas Pynchon declined to be photographed, and was pursued by television cameras.
Cormac McCarthy makes no public appearances and is regarded by some critics as cold and distant as a result.
The artist Banksy shields his identity and is accused of marketing his own anonymity.
Any artist who declines to become a public figure is so out of kilter with prevailing culture as to be freakish.
As ever, Orwell caught the brutal bullying of a society that requires social interaction, and abhors and distrusts the urge to be alone: ‘‘To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.
‘‘But in a business where writers are increasingly forced to share and emote, to appear on television and at festivals, to explain, perform and, above all, to write, Harper Lee seemed to protect her ownlife with astonishing dignity.
In 2006 she briefly resurfaced to accept an honorary degree; she wrote to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine insisting that while others might wish to spend their days with cellphones and iPods, ‘‘I still plod along with books’’.
Perhaps Go Set a Watchman will be as good as Mockingbird, but Lee’s own description (‘‘a pretty decent effort’’) suggests something slighter; perhaps she was genuinely ‘‘surprised and delighted’’ when the manuscript was produced by her lawyer. But it is hard not to see the publication as a capitulation after more than half a century of spirited resistance to the demands of fame.
Lee was never striking a pose. She was quietly standing up for an increasingly embattled minority who shrink from recognition.
She said she had nothing more to say after Mockingbird, but now it seems, with the limelight turned up full beam, she has.
The world has gained a new Harper Lee novel, but in the process it has also lost something.
Mockingbird is a book about the value of solitude. Boo Radley, the unseen neighbour, resists every effort to draw him out of seclusion. At the climax, he finally emerges, achieves one remarkable feat, and then heroically disappears once more – as did Harper Lee.
‘‘He went inside,’’ narrates Scout Finch. ‘‘And shut the door behind him. I never saw him again.’’
The Times
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