Second Harper Lee novel found

[MsGuy]

White folks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, RA1.

And no, not all of them are racist.

But some are.

Some.

[RA1]

To clarify: What I meant was I was shocked to learn that racists were not all talk. I grew up hearing a lot of racist talk but no actual violence (this was before 1965). It bothered me a lot about Evers and Meredith and others. Of course, MLK bothered me in general and because it happened in MEM. I now believe it was a political assassination.

Best regards,

RA1

[lookin]

OK, here's Robert McCrum's ten best opening lines from The Guardian in 2012.

You can always give me Wodehouse:

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.

- The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

[AdamSmith]

Opening line of Finnegans Wake: "riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's,

from swerve of shore to bend of Madam's.

-- Richard Armour, Punctured Poems

[AdamSmith]

Go Set a Watchman review: more complex than To Kill a Mockingbird, but less compelling

Scout has lost her swagger and Atticus fans will be shocked by a satisfying novel that nonetheless vindicates the direction taken by Harper Lee's classic debut

...For many readers, large stretches of Watchman will be like discovering an alternative version of The Catcher in the Rye in which JD Salinger casts the story of the adolescent Holden Caulfield as the dream of a paedophile Republican senator...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/12/go-set-a-watchman-review-harper-lee-to-kill-a-mockingbird

[MsGuy]

...like discovering an alternative version of The Catcher in the Rye in which JD Salinger casts the story of the adolescent Holden Caulfield as the dream of a paedophile Republican senator...

I'd probably read that.

Depending on the illustrations and cover art, of course.

[TotallyOz]

Here is a great review by one of my favorite authors, Madison Smartt Bell.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2015/07/11/lee/VVGcqMJNpx5VR0SL0E2toL/story.html

[AdamSmith]

That is a great review. Its last paragraph resounds:

Admitted that these old issues have some very ornery complications, Lee and her then-editors made a canny decision to roll the story back two decades and put the rape trial (covered in two paragraphs of Watchman) center stage. Portraying that drama through the innocent eyes of Scout created a classic for children of all ages -- all the really hard questions have been smoothed out of it. Mockingbird's Atticus is a fantasy figure; we wish we had people like him, but we dont. Jean Louise's crisis in Watchman effectively tears down the icon Mockingbird erected -- and this ordeal is also inflicted on the book's vast readership. To regain her psychological health and become a whole person, Jean Louise must find a way to accept and even love her father as a deeply flawed human being. However hard that is for her, it will be a lot harder for the rest of us.

That phrase about Mockingbird -- "a classic for children of all ages" -- echoes that cut by Flannery that I love & quoted in a post above.

[lookin]

I'd probably read that.

Depending on the illustrations and cover art, of course.

Summa, Ah say summa mah bes' friends are chickenhawks!

[AdamSmith]

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee – digested read

‘Oh Atticus. If you won’t defend a Negro, at least help an old lady whose publishers are cashing in’

John Crace

The Guardian

It was an elegantly written first sentence worthy of the most earnest unpublished first novel. Jean Louise sternly repressed a tendency to boisterousness as the train clacked through Alabama. She did, though, allow herself a knowing smile when it came to a halt in the miserable gerrymander of Maycomb that, for many years, she had called home. “How is Atticus?” she asked.

“His rheumatoid arthritis is playing up,” said Hank.

“Shame your brother died a few years back.”

“Isn’t it just?”

“Will you marry me?”

“No. But I might have an affair with you.”

Jean Louise settled back into a sophisticated New York silence, breathing in the fragrance of the heavy southern air. How she hated everything about this small town with its inbred population and inbred values. As the automobile pulled into the driveway, she saw Calpurnia, her father’s faithful cook, standing by the door.

“I love Negroes,” Jean Louise declared loudly.

“Yessum, Missy Scout. Can I take your bags?”

With an all too familiar sense of foreboding, she inwardly steeled herself in preparation for seeing her father.

“How are you Atticus?”

“I’d be a lot better without the niggers.”

Jean Louise couldn’t believe what she was hearing. What had happened to the nobility of the equal rights campaigner?

“But Daddy, how can you say that,” she sobbed. “Please can we just sit down and talk for hours and hours about how you defended the Negro Tom Robinson 20 years ago.”

“What’s that?”

“You know. The famous rape case.”

“Remind me, what was the nigger’s name again?”

“Tommy Robinson.”

“Sorry. It’s not ringing any bells.”

Only the singing of a few startled finches broke the heavily pregnant silence. The next morning a desperate Negro came running to the door.

“Oh help us please, Mr Atticus. Our son has run over and killed a white man.”

“Sure. Happy to help.”

The bright southern sun came out and lit up the room. Jean Louise’s heart filled with joy. Atticus was a good man after all!

“Thing is, Scout,” Atticus said later. “It’s far better for me to come along and take the case than leave it to some civil rights lawyer. Them lawyers are causin’ a whole heap of trouble round here.”

“Oh Daddy. This is all going so badly. If you won’t defend a Negro properly, then at least come to the aid of an 89-year-old lady who has had a stroke and is almost totally deaf and blind. Poor Miss Harper was determined not to let anyone read another word she’d written and then just two years after her sister died, her lawyer and publishers have decided to cash in by printing a piss-poor, first draft manuscript. They’re even claiming to have found a couple of other unpublished novels down the back of her sofa.”

Atticus yawned. His rheumatoid arthritis was tiring him out.

“It’s not one for me, Scout. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a Ku Klux Klan meeting to go to.”

A storm broke and the intense southern rain battered the tin roofs of the Negroes’ dwellings. Jean Louise had to get away. She drove to Mobile and then drove back again, her mind awhirl with the sort of not very interesting observations that so often pass through the minds of characters in unpublished fiction.

With just 30 pages left, she summoned the courage for a final confrontation with Atticus.

“You’re a racialist.”

“Sure I am. But it’s easy for you in New York. You don’t have to live with the niggers on a daily basis. They’re all a bit primitive and they go mad if you’re too nice to them. We have to adapt them slowly. It’s what Cardinal Newman would have wanted.”

Jean Louise pondered this deep in her heart. Perhaps Atticus did have a point after all.

“OK,” she announced. “I’ll stay here after all. But I definitely won’t marry Hank.”

“That sounds like a very good idea, Scout. And while you’re here, why don’t you see if you can turn that paragraph about the rape case I don’t remember into a novel?”

Digested read, digested: To Kill a Golden Goose

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/19/go-set-a-watchman-harper-lee-digested-read