Killing the Mockingbird: A publishing industry lament

(799 word)

I’ve had a number of people ask me if I’m going to read Harper Lee’s newly released 1957 novel “Go Set a Watchman.”

I will not.

Reading belatedly that Atticus Finch hates blacks would have the same effect on me as watching a newly released “Lone Ranger” program and seeing the Masked Man say his horse Silver sucks.

Lee, 89, is now the author of books that will be remembered for defining two American epochs.

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” published in 1960, is the story of how one strong man can make a difference in a town crushed by racial hatreds.

“Go Set a Watchman,” published this month, is ostensibly the story of Scout’s return to Macomb to find the father consorting with Klansmen and bereft of the moral honor she so idealized.

In fact, “Go Set a Watchman,” is a tale of how greed and slimy corporate manipulation can supersede the wishes of a once-vital 89-year-old woman to manufacture a phony literary event in order to enrich Rupert Murdoch.

Ain’t that America?

If Harper Lee had wanted “Go Set a Watchman” published, she’d have done it decades before she wound up in a nursing home with a security guard at her door charged with admitting only those on the pre-approved “trusted” list.

She’d have taken steps to do so while her caretaker sister was still alive, not suspiciously two months after she’d died.

She’d have done it, surely, before she became wheelchair-bound, partially deaf and blind and suffering from acute memory loss.

And here I’ve always thought the publishing industry was only ruthlessly cruel to those of us who hadn’t published one of America’s greatest novels.

What’s next?

Will HarperCollins exhume Twain’s corpse, squirt it with perfume, and prop it up for a Times Square book signing?

“To Kill a Mockingbird” has been a beloved novel for most Americans for more than 50 years.

It’s been that way for me for two.

The admission, I understand, makes me a bit a literary Lilliputian. But I just skipped that assignment and never picked it up.

In fact, you could say I inadvertently came to Harper Lee through Alistair MacLean.

As literary titans go he’s not in Lee’s class, but he was pivotal to my early love of books. MacLean was the old WWII Royal Navy torpedo man who wrote the stories that thrilled my youth.

Anyone remember these titles?

“Where Eagles Dare,” “Ice Station Zebra,” “Breakheart Pass.” MacLean authored more than 30 novels — take that Harper Lee — and all were riveting tales of evil Nazis, crooked despots or maniacal terrorists.

Many of these were made into blockbuster movies. Clint Eastwood’s role in “Where Eagles Dare” remains his highest body count.

Then there is maybe the best of them all, “The Guns of Navarone,” starring the peerless Gregory Peck.

To this day if I see it on, I’ll record it just so I can see Peck brandish a pistol and shout at pasty David Niven, “Now, you’ve got me in the mood to use this thing and, by God, if you don’t think of something I’ll use it on you! I mean it. Now, go on.”

It led me to want to see everything Peck’s filmed.

Bob Dylan understood this when in 1986 he made Gregory Peck the focus of his sprawling, 11:05 epic, “Brownsville Girl.”

“Yeah, I’m standing in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck

But you know it’s not the one I had in mind.

He’s got a new one out now.

I don’t even know what it’s about.

But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line!”

Of course, I eventually saw Peck in his greatest role, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” playing the character he loved above all others.

And, finally, I read the book. It is magnificent.

Peck became close friends with the author. His son Stephen told reporters he wishes his father was still alive so he could have protected her from the Murdoch greedmeisters desecrating her legacy.

“He so deeply felt the words he said in ‘Mockingbird’ you could barely separate the two,” Stephen said. “That was his best self. Those were his deepest, most closely held ideals. He was thankful everyday he got that part.”

Would Peck have played Finch in the new book?

“I’m not at all sure my dad would have played that one.”

So, no, I won’t be reading “Go Set a Watchman.”

I’ll instead re-read again and again and again “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

I’ll do so until I become competent to write a fitting sequel to the prequel, one that will again elevate one of America’s greatest characters to his rightful pedestal.

That will obviously leave one task to restore Lee’s legacy.

Resurrect Peck!

Related  . . . 

I buy books

Obama hater turns me into Atticus

Dylan does Sinatra & why I’ll never remarry

Ordering justice for Rupert Murdoch

Bring back duels & the art of the draw

“Trouble with the Curve?” Trouble with the critics

Two handsome devils, me and the stranger

The two looked like what we in high school used to call “burn outs,” dingy, cloudy-eyed inhabitants of my high school’s smoking area.

And consider that for a moment: at one time many of us attended high school in a not-too-distant age when enlightened school administrators actually had designated areas where teenagers so disposed could go out and smoke their butts off.

When you think about it, it was an age of great liberty, one the Founding Fathers would surely have approved of, even as the Founding Surgeon Generals gave their scolding disapproval.

But back to the burn outs. They were standing and, yes, smoking outside of a local tobacco shop while I was approaching during my afternoon stroll.

“Mr. Shellhammer?” one of them called out as I was about 20 paces away. “Is that you, Mr. Shellhammer?”

I turned around and saw no one. They thought I was Shellhammer, and for a still-lingering instant I was wishing I was.

Shellhammer’s a great name. Surely the guy had to be some kind of butt-kicking private eye -- Shellhammer P.I.! -- and for purposes of clarity, I’m talking about anatomical butts, not nicotine-laced ones.

“Aren’t you Mr. Shellhammer? The guy who teaches at Latrobe Elementary?” he asked.

“Nope, sorry, fellas. Wrong guy,” I said.

“Oh, sorry. You look just like him.”

Now I’m dying to find Shellhammer for a plethora of reasons, one of which is to thank him that our physical similarities allowed me to reach in my brain’s thesaurus and pull out the rarely used word plethora.

We are forever at the mercy of those whom we resemble.

If someone tells a beautiful woman she resembles the lovely Kate Winslet it’s an enduring compliment that’ll brighten her every day. Years from now, grandchildren on her knee, she’ll be flipping through old photos and telling the little sprouts that strangers used to tell her she was a ringer for the ravishing Winslet.

It won’t matter even a tiny bit when the bored kids say, “Who the hell’s Kate Winslet?”

But tell the same woman she looks like drug-ravaged crooner Amy Winehouse and she’ll dive for her iPhone to start researching face transplants.

Is Shellhammer handsome and dashing, the way I picture myself? What if he’s a pointy-headed nerd?

I think it would be a great Twilight-Zone sort of gift if for just one afternoon we could see ourselves the way others, particularly strangers, see us.

I guess I’ve always had a chip on my broad, muscular shoulders because everyone always said my older, taller brother looked just like Tom Selleck, Magnum P.I.! They always said I looked like I never got enough sleep.

Once I met an accountant whom I’d been told I resembled and I was floored by what I perceived was a gross insult. He was dumpy, had bad teeth and walrus-like jowls. Plus, for heaven’s sake, the man was an accountant. I didn’t know whether to punch him, myself, of the handful of people who’d said we were look-a-likes.

I gaze in the mirror -- and I do an unhealthy amount of that -- and see a rakish face with a dashing devil-may-care smile. I say outloud, “Why, if it isn’t Rhett Butler! The ladies in the parlor are breathlessly awaiting your arrival!” Then I turn serious, searing the mirror with a look the romance novelists call penetrating. “When people see this face,” I say, “they must immediately think of Gregory Peck in “Mockingbird” or “The Guns of Navarone.”

I do this almost daily for nearly 10 minutes until the exasperated mirror finally blurts out, “Would you get the hell out of the bathroom and for heaven’s sake try and earn a little money, you vain ass!”

So, of course, I’m nervous about someday meeting my Shellhammer doppelganger -- and what a fun combination that is to say! Go ahead, take a little reader break and try it three times outloud.

Fun, huh!

I told a good buddy of mine, one of my most steadfast blog readers (Hi, Ronnie!), about it. Well, he knows Shellhammer and sees the resemblance. Turns out my twin’s a retired art teacher at the local elementary school. He hunts, too.

That’s encouraging. With art, he has a sensitive side and I hear that’s a plus with the ladies in the parlor, but the hunter bit gives him a rugged outdoorsy edge. The guy’s probably good in a bar fight.

And he’s a teacher, too, and I have a great and enduring affection for anyone who devotes their lives to educating our youth, and that even goes for all those tyrannical dolts who tried to fill my head with so much math and crap (another fun word combo!) all those years ago.

Sounds like Shellhammer’s a great guy.

That’s good. It reduces the chances I might one day get dragged into the police station and shoved in front of some trembling crime victim whose addled brain will instantly cause her to shriek, “That’s him! That’s the Latrobe Flasher!”

On the contrary, if he ever does an anonymous good deed, I might get credit, which I’ll certainly hog.

But none of that matters to me. I could care less if Shellhammer’s a good guy or a demonic, pants-dropping fiend.

I just hope he’s gorgeous.