Few 88-year-old one-hit wonders could expect more than a shrug if they announced they were producing their second piece of work in 55 years. But news that Harper Lee is publishing what is essentially a sequel to her great novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was greeted as if it were the second coming.

It was swiftly followed by some significant concern for the author herself — though, it hardly needs saying, the welfare of writers is not usually at the forefront of the public’s mind. Try to imagine such concern for, say, Ernest Hemingway to see what a unique place in the public heart Lee occupies. But the unusual reaction to the publication of Go Set a Watchman is of a piece with the anomaly that is To Kill a Mockingbird and, most of all, Lee herself.

To Kill a Mockingbird is the seemingly simple novel, written by a total unknown, that went on to win the Pulitzer prize and become what is widely agreed to be America’s unofficial national novel. To this day, it still sells more than a million copies a year. And this is not simply because it is on the school syllabus in many English-speaking countries: it outsells by hundreds of thousands other classic school texts such as The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. Its fascination lies in its seemingly still surface — a straightforward and sweet narrative about racism in Alabama through a child’s eyes — that conceals great depths. It’s like the freckle-faced young girl who turns out to have far more to say than her bigger siblings who strive so visibly for profundity.

The easy cynicism that has greeted the sudden emergence of Go Set a Watchman should be resisted

This sweetness is why, 55 years after publication, the names of its characters and author are so popular with a certain type of parent (Bruce Willis and Demi Moore named their daughter Scout, the Beckhams opted for Harper, and a Brooklyn-based friend told me there are three boys named Atticus in her child’s nursery.)

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an essay about Atticus Finch, the father in the book, in which Gladwell claimed that, far from being a champion of civil rights, Finch represents “the limits of southern liberalism”. Gladwell’s stonkingly wrong-headed argument lies primarily in Finch’s lesson to his daughter that it is never OK to hate anyone, even racists. This, according to Gladwell, proves he is “about accommodation, not reform”, which would have come as news to that ol’ accommodator Martin Luther King, who voiced similar arguments as Finch. But the fact that Gladwell, the most zeitgeisty writer of all, fancies starting a quarrel like this about a book written half a century ago goes some way to exemplifying its enduring appeal.

And then there’s Lee herself, who wrote one perfect novel, then vanished, and whose rejection of publicity led the public to fill the vacuum of her actual presence with the spectre of a saint. In the 2005 film Capote and the 2006 film Infamous, both of which depict Truman Capote’s struggle to write In Cold Blood, Lee, who was Capote’s lifelong close friend, is the moral centre, pushing him to see the story to the end and rolling her eyes at his personal failings.

This deification stems partly from Lee’s remarkable but rarely remarked-upon achievement in writing a Great American Novel when critics normally save that accolade for books written by men. Not that Lee has been spared sexist nonsense. For years it was rumoured that Capote actually wrote Mockingbird, a theory that will sound absurd to anyone with even a skating knowledge of the man himself. The idea that the fame-hungry Capote would keep schtum about his contribution to a Pulitzer winner is, frankly, laughable.

Lee had seen what fame did to her friend Truman (renamed Dill in her novel), and that is part of the reason she tried all her life to stay anonymous. “I’m really Boo,” she told Oprah Winfrey (truly, nobody turns down Oprah). But not even reclusiveness can keep tigers from the door of fame: in 2013 she filed a lawsuit against her agent, Samuel Pinkus, claiming he duped her into granting him the copyright to her book when her health was failing. So it’s understandable that the arrival of a new book has sparked some concern that the largely infirm author is being exploited again. Lee’s editor at HarperCollins, Hugh Van Dusen, said in an interview on Tuesday that there was no direct contact between the publisher and Lee, and that it was all done through her lawyer, Tonja Carter, which at the very least sounds unusual. That the manuscript was discovered a mere three months after the death of Lee’s protective sister adds to the concern. But Van Dusen stressed: “Was [Lee] unwilling to have it published? No, no, no, no. We would never do that. She’s too valuable an author to fool around with that way. It would never happen.”

It is tempting to be cynical about the venality of lawyers and publishers. But it should be remembered that Lee wanted this book, which she wrote before Mockingbird, to be published originally, and she thought it lost for decades. She herself said of Go Set a Watchman that it was “a pretty decent effort”. So until there is proof that Lee is being exploited, and not mere assumption stained with well-meaning condescension for an elderly woman, we should make like Atticus Finch, see the best in people, and treat the new book as a cause for celebration.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2015

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