Book Review - Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee

I have just read Go Set a Watchman, the first novel that Harper Lee ever wrote. To Kill a Mockingbird functions as a sort of prequel to it, exploring its themes in greater depth; but this was Harper Lee's original sketch of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch and her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch.

Harper Lee has a very distinctive writing style; yet as I was reading, I had the feeling I'd read something similar from a different author. Then it hit me: James Baldwin. Whether either of them ever read the other, I do not know, but the resemblance between the two writing styles is striking: frank, wisecracking without resorting to cynicism, presenting history as a series of events that no one is really happy with and the most entertaining part of life is trading stories about why we don't like to do as we're told. Almost every conversation is a series of minor incongruities over one's ideas of how we ought to live our lives, spoken between characters who are trying earnestly to understand each other but know that in the end it's just not worth all the fuss. I have the feeling that, at some point in her life, Lee discovered to her immense disappointment that life is not half as tragic as some people make it out to be. Not a discovery I recommend making, if you are an author (since I think the tragedy is an excellent form of literature); but once you stumble upon this sort of conviction it does not go away easily.

Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, this novel takes place within a very short space of time, approximately four days (with a few flashbacks, to earlier events). Scout (called "Jean Louise" for most of this novel, although Atticus still calls her Scout on occasion) is now twenty-six years old and has been living in New York for several years. She comes back to Maycomb County by train, anticipating a restful two-week stay with her friends and family, and instead finds that the town has changed greatly. Rest does not come easily.

The book is ambitious yet cautious; it tries to tackle a great number of issues and encompass an enormous scope, yet remarkably little happens in the entire story. Jean Louise spends time with her boyfriend, Hank, who has trained with her father Atticus to be a lawyer; she finds out that Calpurnia's grandson, Frank, accidentally ran over a man and Jean Louise is anxious over what sentence Frank will receive in court; she attends a tea party with women of her own age and finds that she has nothing in common with them; and, apart from a few passionate dialogues that erupt between Scout and the key male figures in her life, that is it. The novel hints at court cases, but none is witnessed or concluded; jibes at the NAACP and the SCOTUS, but a full history of their actions is never outlined; showers the reader with emotional sparks that result from a major turning point in Jean Louise's life, but barely examines where she came from or elucidates where she will be going. The novel is powerful, but disorganized.

Although it does not dabble in "sit-ins" or peaceful protests, Go Set a Watchman is a novel about the civil rights debates of the 1950s. Scout has been living in New York, an overwhelmingly metropolitan center of world communication, where people of all different races and religions and backgrounds have learned to tolerate (or ignore) one another in every context - in school, on subways, in public restrooms, in the office, etc. She returns to Maycomb and finds out, during a citizens' council meeting, that several prominent officials of the town are racists and treat the "Brown vs. Board" decision as an infringement upon their rights. What is far more horrifying is that Atticus, though unsympathetic to the racists' viewpoints, does not denounce them; Atticus sits calmly, and he quietly defends the black man whose crime is the subject of their debate. Disgusted, Jean Louis leaves the courthouse. Later she attends a tea party held by her Aunt Alexandra, and she hears young ladies sharing many of the same opinions, mostly parroting what their husbands say. The novel finally comes to a boil when Jean Louise confronts her father Atticus and scolds her for raising her to be "colorblind" when she should have been exposed to these racist opinions earlier in her life. Jean Louise discovers that her father is not a deity, but wholly human, and that he cannot simply elevate all people to the same level of intellect at which Jean Louise was bred to live. Though Atticus justifies all of his actions with reason, the image we had of him from To Kill a Mockingbird is shattered.

The title of the novel is derived from a passage in the book of Isaiah, one that tells people to "set a Watchman" who will stay at a city's gates and report what he sees. Jean Louise's Uncle Jack warns her that she must form her own conscience, her own set of beliefs, which can function as a frame of reference when she determines what is right and what is wrong in the world. In short, this is a sort of final nudge in a series of nudges toward womanhood in Jean Louise's life - one final illusion to be shattered before is capable of being her own woman in society. It is a microcosm of a coming-of-age story, one that begins at the very end (kind of like a cross between Jane Eyre and "The Cask of Amontillado," if Virginia Woolf had written it).

The shades of gray in the novel are unsettling, but the novel itself fails to form a coherent whole. There is no Boo Radley, no Tom Robinson, no character whose plight is so terrible that it distracts Jean Louise from her own personal doubts and drives her to transcend her internal struggles. The novel has many powerful moments, but if it had not been written by an author who is now famous, those powerful moments would not have been enough to merit widespread publication. Nonetheless, they were enough for me. Go Set a Watchman is an admirable first novel. It lacks the ingenuity of construction that a mature writer would possess, yet it is a stunning look at the conflict between different ideologies of 1950s America. Uncle Jack holds Jean Louise up to a mirror and says to her, "What do you see?...I see two people." He then adds, "What was incidental to the issue in our War Between the States is incidental to the issue in the war we're in now, and is incidental to the issue in your own private war." I don't claim to know precisely what he means, but my guess is that he refers to a struggle between the "New York" Jean Louise and the "Maycomb" Scout - a struggle between the desire to keep everyone living in harmony, and the assumption that harmony is already a natural occurrence between people. What is our natural state of mind? When we try to treat everyone as equals, do we actually want to make everyone equal, which then reflects an innate human dislike of those who are not already equal to us? To put it more simply - when we try to integrate the races, does that mean we really would prefer that the human race was all one color with no exceptions? Can human beings ever really live with diversity, and be genuinely happy? These are questions the novel does not answer. No definitive answers for these questions exist, of course, but some novels have produced at least a few tentative answers, i.e. Invisible Man, Huckleberry Finn. Go Set a Watchman leaves these questions unanswered, and I would have loved to see another part written - one where Jean Louise Finch, as a mature adult, confronts the world and finds out whether she is strong enough to make her ideas a reality. Alas, a trilogy that will never happen.

Book Review - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

I have just finished reading the oddly enjoyable Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Graham-Smith. It is the first novel of his I have read, although I have certainly heard of his other works.

The novel is written with a biographer's dispassion, summarizing the defining episodes of Mr. Lincoln's life, based on a series of well-repressed journals that Lincoln penned throughout his life, as well as on interviews that the narrator conducted with several unnamed people - who, I suspect, are vampires.

What follows is a nearly seamless blending of American history and dark, gothic fantasy. It is at once a brilliant satire on revisionist history, a wonderful tale of mythological creatures, and a subtle set of jabs at what we think we know about our beloved 16th president. Lincoln is, after all one of the most controversial presidents in our history. He led an attack against what was essentially one half of his own country; he was the first president to be born in poverty, with very little formal education; he was the first president to be successfully assassinated; and in spite of the fact that more books have been written about him than about any other president of this country, he remains today a subject of debate, inspiring authors even today to raise new questions about him, attacking his supposed rational for trying to "preserve the union." There is even a webpage - and I apologize in advance for bringing this up - that questions the existence of Abraham Lincoln:

http://www.reasonsforgod.org/2013/03/did-abraham-lincoln-exist/

But, enough about that. What about the vampires?

Lincoln's hatred of vampires began with an event that took place before his very conception: his father, Thomas Lincoln, witnessed his own father, Abraham Lincoln Sr., being brutally murdered by a vampire. Thomas Lincoln tells young Abe of this terrible day, and then Abe watches in horror as Thomas Lincoln suffers at the hands of another vampire who demands redress (Shylock-style) for a loan which Thomas failed to pay back. Abe makes a wooden stake, confronts the vampire, and stabs him through the heart. But Abe's thirst for vengeance is not quenched, and so he sets off on a journey to rid the country of vampires - only to find that this mission is far more difficult than he would ever have imagined. Abe (thus the author refers to Mr. Lincoln throughout the book) eventually finds help, from the most unlikely source: another vampire.

Henry Sturges, vampire and 16th-century Englishman, claims to be the only survivor of the doomed Roanoke Colony. He carefully advises Abe that some vampires prefer to be left alone and to do as little damage to society as possible, while other vampires crave dominance over the human race. "Judge us not equally," he tells Abe; "We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others." After this life-changing encounter, Abe begins to receive letters from Henry, instructing Abe to hunt down certain vampires who threaten innocent citizens of this country. These letters increase in number, and this crescendo is paralleled by another crescendo, that of slavery spreading and gaining political justification (as with the Dredd Scott Case, which is mentioned briefly).

Eventually the two issues meet, in a revelation that is at once horrifying and strangely logical: the vampires are in league with the southern confederates. Vampires are planning to take over the country, and the southern slaveholders have agreed to help them in return for a few positions of power in the new undead regime (actually, I do not think Grahame-Smith ever gives a name to the supposed new country that the vampires wish to create; perhaps it would just continue to be called the U.S.A., and other people around the world would come to think of "America" as synonymous with "Vampire"). The vampires like the slaveholders, because the partnership gives them first dibs on the flesh of slaves. Thus, it is with the help of super-powerful "vampire soldiers" that the South successfully fends off Lincoln's armies for four blood years.

Now, I can see a problem here. So easily we can come to the conclusion that we might already be seeking: here's the proof that the Confederate States of America was evil. They were allied with vampires! Aha, I knew it! Those damned slaveholders had a deal with the devil, right there, it's finally just black and white. Yes, it's very easy to say that about a lot of things. Maybe it would be better to think of all southerners as people who are bedfellows with vampires. Swap "southerners" with "Jews," and you would more or less have what a certain Austrian said eighty years ago. The book approaches this idea of absolutism, but does not carry it through entirely, and this ambiguity is one of the book's finest qualities. "Judge us not equally," Henry's refrain goes. There are shades of grey in the humans of the story, just as there are shades of grey in the vampires. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's rival, eventually comes to support Abe. Jefferson Davis is portrayed as a vile man, but also as a victim of supernatural creatures who give him very few options.

Whatever its messages, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a splendid novel. It is fast-paced, brilliantly researched, and includes many early "daguerreotypes" that show the dark-eyed vampires lurking in the midst of our history. I do not think there is much didactic intent in the novel. The vampires are not models of virtue, nor are they evil incarnate. They are simply higher forms of life (or "un-death"), making attempts here and there to interfere with human society for their own gain. Abe's rashness to kill the vampires gets him in trouble more than once. Toward the end of the novel there is heartbreaking scene. Abe, having just lost his youngest son to a poison administered by a vampiric assassin, admits an apologetic Henry Sturges to his office. Yet anything Henry says will only incense Abe more, reminding Abe of how vampires, whether southern or abolitionist, have taken over his life and turned it into a waking death. Abe grabs his axe and tries to kill Henry, and Henry takes the icon and snaps it in two. When a man has lost so many things that used to define him, what is left? Where does the man begin and his surroundings end? When Abe resolved to spend his life destroying vampires, did his life become a force of destruction, dooming any possibility of peace for the man?

Because that image of destruction, however fantastical, epitomizes Lincoln's plight when he became president. In order to keep his country, he had to attack it. Can this plan of action ever be truly justified? The killing of approximately one million American people, just so that a few more million people could be free? If southern slaveholders were so narrow-minded as to enslave their fellow man, then why did Lincoln want so badly to keep them a part of his own country? Might we have been better off without them? Most of the countries in Europe had already abolished slavery by the 1860s; I'm sure the Confederate States would have freed them eventually, though every day of slavery was another day of godlessness.

I think Grahame-Smith's reason for choosing Lincoln as his novel's vampire hunter (as opposed to, say, Jack Kennedy, or Alexander Hamilton, or Cab Calloway, or Regis Philbin), was to show that resolution is simply a part of life. We have to make decisions sometimes. Lincoln made a great and terrible decision when he chose to wage the Civil War. Grahame-Smith focuses on that decision, enhances and exaggerates it, when he portrays Lincoln as a man who has accepted a double-life. I think that, in a way, Abraham Lincoln was the 19th-century Peter Parker, pushing himself to do more than one man would ever be expected to do, while still trying to lead a normal life. No one will ever know if he did the right thing, but one thing is certain: he will never be forgotten.

Judge us not equally. Because how can we ever be sure who a person really is?

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

I have just been rereading, as is my custom every year on this holiday, the essay "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a wonderful essay, and a virtual textbook on constructing an argument and defending it with a combination of concrete examples and logical conclusions.

In this essay, Mr. King writes on the natural of laws, and how people can follow or not follow them: "Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest."

Much later in the essay, he adds: "It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather 'nonviolently' in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: 'The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.'"

What I get out of these two passages is how easy, to the point of being a subconscious decision, it can be to do or say something that is technically "correct" but use it in a way that hurts a person rather than helps that person. In our meeting last Friday the 16th with Nancy Miller, we were shown again and again that library staff members must be able to communicate and empathize with each other, and with all who interact with us. We must use our knowledge to help the community, and never to limit it.

The quotation from T. S. Eliot is from Murder in the Cathedral, a play that was first performed in 1935.

December 10 - What should we celebrate?

December 10th is Human Rights Day.
For books about constitutional law and history, see 342.
For books about civil and political rights, see 323.
For books about public schools and state education, see 379.

On this date in 1684, Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper "On the motion of bodies in an orbit," was read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.
For books about mathematical physics, see 530.15.
For books about gravity, see 531.5.
For biographies of physicists, see 530.92.
For books about astronomical objects and astrophysics, see 523.
For books about planetary orbits, see 521.3.