Examining a set text--To Kill a Mockingbird fifty years on.

Peters, Mike

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New York, 1958. A woman in her early thirties scrabbles in the snow for the pages she has just thrown out of her apartment window in a moment of frustrated madness. Her name is Harper Lee, newly arrived to the city from a small Alabaman town, in order to work as an airline clerk for BOAC. Eventually, she manages to re-assemble the disorderly manuscript of what will turn out to be one of the most culturally and educationally influential books of recent times--To Kill a Mockingbird.

Initially entitled, Go Set a Watchman, the novel, published fifty years ago in July 1960 and never out of print since, will remain in the US bestseller lists for a record-breaking 80 weeks, will feature prominently in international surveys of people's favourite reading and become one of the most commonly taught texts in high schools across the world. Ranked ahead of the Bible in a 2006 UK librarians' survey as the one book every adult should read before they die and identified by Bill Clinton's campaign manager as the work that changed his views on race--'I just knew the minute I read it that she was right and I had been wrong'--Mockingbird, set in Lee's loosely fictionalised home town, is not an obvious candidate for literary stardom. Why this novel, with its small cast of simply drawn characters--both children and adults--and slow-moving plot built around a children's game involving the goal of making contact with a local recluse and an allegation of rape against a local black labourer, should have exerted such a strong and pervasive influence during the last half-century is an intriguing question.

Certainly, To Kill a Mockingbird hasn't always had an easy ride. Judged to be 'immoral' by a number of US school-boards in the 1960s and attacked more recently by educators in Illinois, Kansas City and Nova Scotia for its stereotypical depiction of black characters, some readers, at least, have felt intense antagonism. Yet, for the most part, in spite of the controversies, the book has continued to feature on examining boards' set-text lists and English teachers have, on the whole, remained faithful, recognising that its traditional values--'Christian', according to Harper Lee herself in a rare defence of the novel--and politically liberal, according to others, in its heroic depiction of the individual struggling against injustice, continues to resonate with contemporary teenagers.

'I've never had a class that didn't love it,' says one enthusiast. 'There are few books like it for raising issues surrounding responsibility within the community,' claims Caroline Sharpe, an English teacher from London's Lilian Baylis Technology School, who goes on to say that the character of Boo Radley and the court-case 'raise passionate views from students ... It's the best device I can think of for illustrating the atrocious treatment of black folk at the hands of a white only judicial system at that time in history.'

Even when there is a recognition of the problematic nature of certain aspects of the novel--for example, Atticus's willingness to tolerate the racism that surrounds him or the author's choice of a white child to tell the story of black oppression--few seem to doubt the novel's ability to speak to young readers. One teacher, for example, comments, 'Sadly, there's still enough racism in this country to keep the book relevant.'

Yet the appeal of To Kill a Mockingbird is not merely to do with its strong opposition to racism--an opposition informed by the author's local knowledge of a long and dishonourable tradition of racial persecution and discrimination in the southern states of the US. In apartheid South Africa, where the novel was a surprisingly popular choice in white high schools, teachers' emphasis on the themes of courage and growing-up enabled both white and black pupils to find something in Mockingbird which spoke to them. However, although the pressure on progressive teachers, through exam questions and supervision, was to marginalise the potentially dangerous race theme, occasionally it erupted into the classroom, as when pupils in one high school were prompted to associate the black labourer, Tom Robinson, as well as Boo, with the mockingbird--the novel's symbol of innocence and vulnerability. According to Leo Marx, a teacher in apartheid South Africa, 'chaos broke loose', with two warring camps developing.

And as we read the book now, another mockingbird comes into view--Harper Lee herself, for whom To Kill a Mockingbird is her only significant intervention in the public cultural world. After its appearance in July 1960, in spite of a few odd publications, minor appearances and a single significant interview, there is just silence. Instead of the expected future best-sellers and expected celebrity, we are only offered glimpses from occasional critics, journalists and tourists of the author's unassuming life, divided between small-town Monroeville, Alabama and New York City. How calculatedly unassuming is suggested by the way she manages to avoid the BBC's John Humphries recognising her when he stalks her for a TV programme; her ordinariness is the ultimate disguise.

As with the fictional Boo Radley and the recently deceased JD Salinger, the tighter and longer the doors are closed, the more intense the fascination grows. We are left to wonder at the mystery of a creativity that appears to have dried up and at the possibility of the stories that might have been. Explaining what she felt in her last press interview in 1964, after Mockingbird's phenomenal success was firmly established, Harper Lee gives us a clue as to the reason for her long silence. Her fame, she says, 'was just as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.' Substitute 'fame' for 'recognition' and the words could just as easily be spoken by Boo Radley himself--if Boo would choose to utter so many words. Surely, this transition from sociable and public personality, eager to help friend and rival Truman Capote with his researches for In Cold Blood, to secretive and mysterious recluse--the transition from Scout to Boo--is, in this age of celebrity, one of the strangest and most thought-provoking cases of life imitating art.

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