“The Long Summer Of The Mockingbird”

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—7/26/10—Exactly 50 years ago, on July 11, 1960, Harper Lee’s now universally famous and acclaimed novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was published.

An instant and unqualified success, it was a bestseller, a book that appealed to scholars and children and casual beach readers alike. It has even been read with enthusiasm by non-readers. (One young man I know claims that To Kill a Mockingbird is the only book he has ever read. And he has read it twice.)

A few short months after its publication, it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. It has since been required reading in classrooms all over the world, released in beautiful, illustrated, collectors’ volumes (such as the Folio Society edition), and never out of print in the 50 years of its existence. It still sells more than a million copies every year, more than any other 20^th-century American novel.

Two years following its release, in 1962, the book was made into a highly-acclaimed Hollywood film, which brought an Academy Award to Gregory Peck as the book’s hero, Atticus Finch, plus an Oscar nomination for young Mary Badham, the real-life Alabama girl who played his daughter, Scout. Fortunately, the movie was so good that, instead of “ruining” the book, as many of its devoted readers (including me) initially feared it might, it only enhanced the novel and served to bring it even more fame. It is a much-loved story all over the world.

And, in its quiet way, To Kill a Mockingbird has changed the world.

This summer, 2010, the book’s 50th anniversary has become something of a gala, international celebration. Its author, Nelle Harper Lee, of Monroeville, Alabama, is now in her 80’s and is, happily, still with us to see it all. She must be marveling at where this fantastic journey has taken her.

Among the tributes coming out now for her quietly brilliant masterpiece is an interesting new book from HarperCollins, edited by Mary McDonagh Murphy, called Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. It is a collection of interviews with famous people, most of them writers, all discussing their relationship to and love for To Kill a Mockingbird. Among those interviewed are Rick Bragg, Allan Gurganus, Wally Lamb, Jon Meacham, Mark Childress, James Patterson, Lee Smith, Anna Quindlen, Scott Turow, Oprah Winfrey, and Mary Badham, among others.

Each has his or her own story to tell about Mockingbird. Most remember where they were, how old they were, and what they thought when they first read the book. Some, like Mark Childress, who grew up in Monroeville, knew Harper Lee and her family personally. Others, like James McBride and Richard Russo and James Patterson, read the book on the other side of the country, far removed from the small-town South that Lee so lovingly and honestly describes. Nearly all of them, interestingly, read the book for the first time in high school, surprised to discover how good it was (for an assigned book). For some, the story of this novel nudged their own stories into being, memories triggered by that first reading.

Probably, most people who have read this great book, who have been moved by it, as many have, could have contributed to Murphy’s collection of interviews. I remember very well my own introduction to the book. Like most, I first read it in high school.

In the summer of 1960, I was a 16-year-old Army brat living in Europe. To Kill a Mockingbird was published and out in the book stores months before I knew anything at all about it. But, four months later, in November of that year, my parents and I returned from Europe and were relocated to Columbus, Georgia, where my father was stationed at Fort Benning.

I was enrolled in Columbus High School—a new kid, entering the 11th grade there about a third of the way through the school year. As a transplant, fresh from Europe, you might think that I would have been an object of some interest, perhaps an exotic, but, no, not at Columbus High School. My arrival caused no stir of curiosity at all. I was met with indifference and, occasionally, even with hostility.

Columbus High School in 1960 was a snobbish, unimaginative, and mean-spirited place, a school of tight cliques and even tighter prejudices. Military kids were not particularly welcome there, though we made up a large part of the student population. I was dismissed at best as an outsider, at worst as a “Yankee,” which really irritated me, since I was a Southerner, born in Virginia, of rabidly Southern parents. But I had lived several years previously in Cleveland, Ohio, and then three more years in Europe before arriving in Georgia. My accent was a weird hodgepodge of those places and not at all the standard Georgia drawl. So I was pegged as different—a true curse, if ever there was one, for a 16-year-old in 1960.

Twenty years earlier, Carson McCullers, the famous novelist, had attended Columbus High School. In fact, she and I even had some of the same teachers. None of our mutual teachers would ever admit, at least not that I ever heard, that McCullers had been interesting or brilliant or admirable. She was dismissed as “weird.” They did acknowledge that she had “certainly achieved high acclaim for her writing,” though they could never quite understand why, and they never were able to forgive her for having fled (with passionate haste, immediately upon her graduation from high school) from the town and the school that had labeled her an oddity.

She had decamped to New York City, where she had lived a notorious life among bohemians and beatniks and poets and moral degenerates of all sorts. The brilliant, the gifted, the unique, the original, were not really wanted at Columbus High School in those days.

I had gone to the Columbus High library to check out the books written by this fellow sufferer  as soon as I heard about her. I remember reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding with fascination. They were set in Columbus. I knew the places she described; I knew well the people she wrote about. I sought out the house where Carson Smith (later McCullers) had lived and remember standing outside it, like a lovestruck stalker, for much of a humid afternoon, trying to imagine the unhappy girl, much like Mick Kelly and Frankie Addams in her novels, who may have been a soul-mate.

But there were some good things going on at Columbus High School. One of the best was my 11^th-grade English class, taught by Mrs. Lanier. Mrs. Lanier, like me, was a newcomer and an outsider, though she was not so far out as I was. She was an Alabama girl, a recent graduate of Auburn University, quite young, and in her first year of teaching. She was, perhaps, in her early or mid-twenties then, a soft-spoken, gentle woman with quiet, rather sad eyes.

I have never forgotten Mrs. Lanier for two reasons: she once returned a paper I had written, adorned with the lavish scribblings of her red pen, with which she wrote: “Wayne, you write like a professional. I hope you will develop and pursue this talent.” That was the first real praise I had ever gotten from a teacher about my writing. I usually did well in English classes, but rarely received such words of high praise.

Then came an afternoon when the bell rang to dismiss the class and Mrs. Lanier stood up and said, “Wayne, will you see me after class, please?” The usually indifferent eyes of my classmates for a moment turned to me with interest. They assumed I must be in trouble. For what other reason could my teacher want to talk to me? I was busted, no doubt, for some Yankee plot against the social elite of Columbus.

But when I stood before Mrs. Lanier, she smiled and looked up at me with her sad, brown eyes and handed me a hard-back book, a slim volume, with a brown slipcover, titled To Kill a Mockingbird.

“Do you know this book?” she asked me. No, I had not heard of it. She then went on to explain that the author, Harper Lee, was from Monroeville, Alabama. Columbus, Georgia sits right on the Alabama-Georgia line, and Monroeville is not so very far down the road. Therefore, even in Columbus, Harper Lee was considered a local writer.

“Take this book,” she said, “and read it when you have time. I think it is a wonderful book. And, of all my students, you are the only one that I think would really understand it.”

Gratefully, I took the book, went home and read it in two days. Afterwards, Mrs. Lanier and I discussed the book at some length. I can remember riding the late bus (also called the activity bus) home some hours after school had ended because I had stayed late to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird with Mrs. Lanier. I remember telling her that I had loved the book, but that it had caused me some concern. I had loved and admired Atticus, but yet, I wondered at his authenticity. I did not know any white Southern men of middle age like Atticus. Every man I knew, even my own father, good and admirable though they might have been in many ways, was still basically racist. My father, for example, used the n-word lavishly in his speech, and though he did not preach hate of any sort, he made it clear that he believed Blacks were inferior and should know their place as such. I confessed that I feared that Miss Lee’s Atticus might be simply an idealized being.

I remember that Mrs. Lanier thought long and hard about that, sitting quietly. I think it was springtime by then and, in those days before air conditioning, the classroom windows were open and I could hear the birds chirping in the trees outside her room. Then, at last, she spoke.

“I don’t believe you are right, Wayne,” she said. “I think there are men like Atticus, even here in the South. Especially here in the South, where they are needed. And, maybe you don’t know any now, but I’m sure you will some day. And, you know, Wayne, you may even grow up to be one. If you admire Atticus, you could emulate him. You could be him some day. That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

Those were the days before Martin Luther King had risen to prominence; years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, before the Selma riots, before the bombings in Birmingham, before the freedom riders, before Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

The Black characters in To Kill a Mockingbird were quiet and gentle; the revolution which later came to be called the Civil Rights Movement had not yet happened. At that time, at Columbus High School, the most popular event in the school year was the celebrated annual Minstrel Show, in which students auditioned to perform songs and dances and comedy skits in Black Face, recreating the most blatant and racist of Jim Crow-era stereotypes.

I attended the Minstrel Show that year and could not believe my eyes. It was long before we all became educated to the subtle (and not so subtle) evils of racism, yet even then, I could not believe my eyes and ears. White kids in Black Face scampering around the stage, mimicking Stepin’ Fetchit and Aunt Jemima, and telling the most offensive of jokes while their parents and teachers roared with laughter and approval from the audience.

I had not yet had my own consciousness raised, but I knew, even then, that this comprised some kind of vicious outrage. When I mentioned it later to Mrs. Lanier, she looked at me with her sad brown eyes and said, “Wayne, what on earth are you doing here?”

I returned Mrs. Lanier’s copy of To Kill a Mockingbird to her and thanked her profusely for introducing it to me. When I graduated in 1962, I decided that I needed to begin my own personal library. Until my graduation, I had satisfied my book obsession with trips to the library and to the local newsstand to purchase affordable paperbacks (which sold for 50 cents back then!).

But a young man, a high school graduate, I decided, needed books of his own, real books, hard-back books. I gathered together my graduation money and my lawn-mowing money and took the bus downtown to Columbus’s only bookstore, White’s Book Store and Office Supplies, and there I special-ordered half a dozen of my favorite books. In those days, unlike today, publishers kept hard-back books in print long after their initial publication. I had a list of my favorite books that I had checked out of the library over the years. I special-ordered Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Raintree County, by Ross Lockridge, Drums Along the Mohawk, by Walter D. Edmonds, and Anthony Adverse, by Hervey Allen. (Yes, I had a penchant for historical epics.) All were still available in hardback and came in due time.

But two books I bought right then and there: they were happily in stock and displayed on the shelves. They were, in fact, the first two hard-back books I ever owned: Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger and, you guessed it, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.

I still have all of those copies, perched on my special shelf of all-time favorites, along with others now, such as The Saga of Gosta Berling, by Selma Lagerlof, War and Peace, by Tolstoy, and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King.

By the way, Mrs. Lanier was right. (Your teachers usually are.) I have, in the years since, met and come to love many an Atticus Finch, in many forms. And I suspect that they all read Miss Lee’s lovely book and were changed by it forever.

NOTE TO READERS:  A few columns ago, I wrote about Selma Lagerlof’s great Swedish novel, The Saga of Gosta Berling. I stated in that column that it had been unavailable in English translation for many years. I am happy to report that this is no longer the case. It was brought to my attention that, in 2009, Penguin Books published an English translation by Paul Norlen. I have recently read this new translation and I can recommend it highly to anyone who wants to track it down. Check your local booksellers or contact Penguin Books, if you are interested  (us.penguingroup.com).