A beautiful article from the NY Times about Harper Lee, the writer of that 10,000,000 copies (and still counting) bestseller To Kill a Mockingbird, a book often derided as a simplistic novel fawned over by high school teachers of English: HERE
Any novel has its specific faults and its share of critics, some of which and whom are reasonable and balanced, but Tequila often seems to attract particular venom, probably more so from (a) those who can’t write, and (b) those who can’t (or won’t) teach, and especially from (c) those into “literary fiction” who’ll never get 10,000 buyers, let alone 10,000,000.
Year after year, I had classes in Year 10 or 11 English who grew to love this book, its child characters and its quietly heroic protagonist; they learnt to appreciate some of the most expressively crafted English ever written on either side of the Atlantic and the Pacific: the more alert among them, for instance, fully appreciating such vignettes as the exquisite understatement of the description through a young girl’s eyes of what Mr Avery did early in chapter 6, with its faux-naive ending “as I was untalented in that area”. They quietly wept during the film’s trial scenes and at the story’s final meeting.
Nearly annually, from 1986 to 2002, Harper Lee’s unique gift to those who love reading was one of the first semester joys to look forward to. Every year, there’d be a question or a comment, a remark or an insight from a student who’d give me, and the class, something new. Most years, there’d be something current — a news item from the USA, a parallel situation in Australia or elsewhere, a personal anecdote or reminiscence — that would give that year’s teaching an added current distinctiveness. Every year I’d park myself down the back of a darkened classroom while the Gregory Peck film played, not wanting to be seen too obviously teary, and absolutely never with the attitude “Oh no, I’ve got to sit through this again”^. Interesting that in this NY Times article, Harper Lee reckons that this film adaptation was the most perfect of a novel-to-screen ever done — one might add, who says computer-generated sfx are compulsory ? (A few others come close, such as, say, Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet, Liza Minelli’s Cabaret, David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot — there’s no point in anyone trying again, is there ?)
Works of art
In teaching such works of art, while teachers need to be aware of the genuinely relevant insights of post-modernist deconstruction, loading lessons with ideological polemic and ramming personal biases down students’ throats ought to be seen to be just as discriminatory and prejudiced as any of the -isms that have so often vitiated our culture, such as sexism and racism: thought-crimes such as these should not be combated by other thought-crimes — a new wrong, in such cases, not making old ones right.
When all the formulaic jibes from herd-thinking self-styled intellectuals are long forgotten, there’ll still be knowledgeable and committed teachers, practised in the craft of teaching and having declined a down-grading to “facilitators”, and classrooms of lucky students who’ll be opening up to Harper Lee’s Maycomb, Alabama, “an old town, but … a tired old town when I first knew it”.
And perhaps, after being advised that “you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk round in them”, they’ll finish it with a finer appreciation that, whatever race, colour or creed they may be, most people are “real nice … when you finally see them”.
^ in 1818, John Keats wrote in the opening lines of his Endymion that “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / … it will never / pass into nothingness”. Occasionally, a worn-out teacher will demand that a classic such as Macbeth, or R&J, or To Kill a Mockingbird, be changed, “because I’ve done it and I’m sick of it”. Should not the initial response to that be “But your next lot of students haven’t, and aren’t” ? Then, instead of depriving a class of one of these “joys forever”, this real-life Mr/Mrs/Ms Avery should be assigned other duties, where this misery-guts approach can do less harm — perhaps taking over the Department of Deconstruction ?
Leonard Colquhoun 7248
