[W]ise paterfamilias Atticus Finch emerges as one very sleazy lawyer. He does not merely provide competent defense for Tom Robinson, he gratuitously defames the poor girl Mayella Ewell. With no real evidence at hand, he weaves a tale in which she lusted after a crippled black man, and seduced him into fornication. It’s a hair-raising, lurid tale, but it is completely unnecessary. . . . Atticus knows they’re not going to acquit his client, so he makes up an unpleasant tale about Mayella, all the while feigning pity for the pathetic lass. But it’s all invention and false sentiment, just like the fantasies that the Daily Worker conjured up about Willette Hawkins and Willie McGee.
Of course, sacrificing the White trash so that one can preen over one’s moral righteousness is a trait Scout has, unknowingly, inherited from her father—childhood pal and sometime suitor Hank can be dismissed as White trash as soon as he starts with the racism, even though he’s working alongside her father.213 But then that’s White privilege for ya.
This is the kind of moralistic shystering that modern lawyering has become: drunk on Mockingbird and other pop legal memes, today’s law schools are full of so-called “idealists” who don’t intend to practice law so much as “overturn the system, man,” using any kind of legal trickery—theories far more sophisticated that Atticus’ courtroom shenanigans—to establish Liberal dogma as the law of the land, whatever the masses may think about it.214
It amuses me that two generations of lawyers apparently claim to have been “inspired” by Atticus Finch. Two generations of sanctimonious scumbags, who, from “freedom rides” to “marriage equality” to “sanctuary cities” have, as Jack and Atticus would predict, ripped the legal system, and the country, apart, all in the name of some unseeable—because always receeding into the perfect, abstract future—notion of “fairness.” And now they, along with their hero, stand revealed as the shysters they are; at least, the handful who get jobs “a-tall.”215
It’s hard to tell what upsets the Lib-elite more: having the truth about race exposed, or having Atticus Finch show up with his pants down.
I suspect they fall back on the Mark Twain strategy and ban it from the schools for use of the N word.
Let’s return now to the issue of style, and look at some touches that seem purely aesthetic, rather than carrying any message.
In a nod to Modernism, or the avant-garde, Lee renders several passages which Scout can’t bear to listen to—a “racist” rant, the inane chatter of grown and married childhood friends—as a sequence of broken sentence fragments. It’s an interesting effect, which, if it represented the narrator’s own exasperated consciousness, would suggest Céline. It also suggests William Burroughs at his most refractory, the period of the so-called “cut-ups.”216
Moreover, at least one passage of ordinary prose suggests a parallel to no less than Naked Lunch itself:
At the end of the table, sitting like a great dropsical gray slug, was William Willougby. . . . William Willoughby was indeed the last of his kind. . . . There were mutations, like Willoughby [who] chose to run the county not in its most comfortable office, but in what was best described as a hutch—a small, dark, evil-smelling room with his name on the door, containing nothing more than a telephone, a kitchen table, and unpainted captain’s chairs of rich patina.
It seems, to me at least, very reminiscent of the “County Clerk” section, although I can’t really find any verbal parallels, just a kind of tone:
Lee listened in horror. The county clerk often spent weeks in the privy living on scorpions and Montgomery Ward catalogues. On several occasions his assistants had forced the door and carried him out in a state of advanced malnutrition.
Could Burroughs have had an influence on this beloved middle-school classic? I’m sure it would delight him.217 Alas, further research shows that Mockingbird was in the stores before the County Clerk sections were generally available.218
Ironically, some have speculated that Capote wrote some part of Mockingbird.219 If Lee—which was also Burroughs’ pen name, e.g., for the pseudonymous Junky, as well as the characters “Lee” in Naked Lunch and “Inspector Lee” of the Nova Trilogy—was influenced, at least unconsciously, by Burroughs,220 it’s clear not only why her publishers would have deleted such “far-out” writing, but also why Lee never mentioned it: Burroughs and Capote hated each other. Burroughs, in fact, put a curse on Capote—in a letter of 1970, after the success of In Cold Blood—which reads like it could just as well suit Harper Lee:
The early work was in some respects promising—I refer particularly to the short stories. You were granted an area for psychic development. It seemed for a while as if you would make good use of this grant. You choose instead to sell out a talent that is not yours to sell. You have written a dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker—(an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth).
You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn.
Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.221
Indeed, Capote never regained the level of talent or success shown by In Cold Blood, and Lee never wrote another book at all.222 And the line about
You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers . . . to deal with the situation they have created.
Sounds today like exactly the strategy one might attribute to the Civil Righters and disciples of Saul Alinsky—force desegregation and then expand the Police State to deal with the inevitable chaos resultant—although that would have been not at all Burroughs’ meaning. But then, that’s the thing about curses and magick: it works, but often not the way you intended.223
Is this a “rejected first draft”? Whatever the answer, Go Set a Watchman is an interestingly written first novel that addresses race in a realistic manner. The “classic” Mockingbird is New York’s response: dumbed down for kids and retconned into a “saintly blacks” narrative as part of Operation Destroy the South.
Forget about setting a watchman. Atticus Finch was a freakin’ prophet.
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
July 27, 2015
SOUR CREAM:
MICHAEL NELSON’S A ROOM IN
CHELSEA SQUARE
Anonymous (Michael Nelson)
A Room in Chelsea Square
Richmond: Valancourt Books, 2014
“Well,” said John, “I’m thought queer because I have more brains than most children. Some say I have more brains than I ought to have. You’re queer because you have more money than most people; and (some say) more than you ought to have.”
—Olaf Stapledon, Odd John
I’ve long enjoyed reading almost exclusively Old Books; not “the classics” as such, but books from a recognizably modern period, but prior to the cultural upheaval of the ‘60s—say, from 1920 to 1965. Although it’s a personal predilection, I think I can recommend it as an interesting and instructive exercise. Such books reveal, innocently and therefore reliably, a whole world in which PC attitudes were unknown—and everyone was perfectly OK with it. It’s a world alt-Rightists would do well to contemplate, if only for encouragement.
It’s a world where it was perfectly natural for James Gould Cozzens—a Gentile!—to write Guard of Honor, a no
vel not so much “pro-military”—since its dialectic opposite, the “anti-military,” was unthinkable prior to the “black comedy” of Catch-22 or Dr. Strangelove—but simply realistic; a novel in which honest men—and women—try to do what’s necessary at a homeland base during wartime, with greater or lesser levels of competence, rather than cartoonish psychopathy; where running a minor military base in a segregated county is a problem for men of good will to work out more or less satisfactory arrangements, rather than a moral imperative to be shoved down the throats of inbred cracker colonels. And not only win the National Book Award, but get his picture on the cover of Time!224
By the time you get deeper into the ‘50s, even the Young Lions become problematic. These are the books that keep troubling the PC gatekeepers in the media and especially the academy; still “relevant”—i.e., anti-White—but loaded with land mines that keep springing up anew as the cultural goalposts keep changing—progressing ever onward to ever greater liberation! As the PC crowd grinds on relentlessly, one “radical” after another becomes a “cretinous reactionary” the embarrassed teacher needs to justify to the outraged student, and ripe for reclamation by the alt-Right.
We all know about Mark Twain and “the N-word”—as if Twain were a whip-cracking straw boss—but consider the way the Beats, like Kerouac or Burroughs, presented “Negro,” Mexican, or Arab cultures with a fetishistic relish that was intended to “stick it to the Man” but now appear to the cultural overseers as “racist,” “essentialist,” and “Orientalist.” Reading Burroughs’ letters makes him seem less Wise Old Junkie and more the embarrassing old fart at Thanksgiving who rants about the darkies stealing from him at the home. And yet this was the Avant Garde that scared all the old fogies!
Another aspect of this process: as a condition of their joining the Rainbow Coalition of the Left’s culture destroyers, homosexuals have accepted—clung to—their own version of the Judaic’s “lachrymose history,” in which a tiny, wholly innocent, constantly harassed but courageous little minority struggles against The Man. As I’ve pointed out for some time, the reality was quite different; asking only a little discretion, the Establishment was happy to welcome the talents of such men as Sir Noël Coward, J. Edgar Hoover, Whittaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, and Francis “Franny” Cardinal Spellman, who, in turn, became pillars of the Establishment.225 Conversely, it’s the in-your-face outrageousness of “camp” and other aspects of “liberation” that creates, now, violent homophobia that liberationists then anachronistically—and opportunistically (donate money to us or else the bad old days will return!)—read back into the past.226
Apart from the Beats and a tiny selection of acceptably “modern” works, most of these naively non-PC books are almost entirely forgotten, certainly not to be recommended for reading or reprinting by the PC academics. The internet, however, has made them easier to find; and some offbeat publishers are still to be found, operating under the radar of the New York cabal. One such, Valancourt Books, a plucky little outfit—a “specialty micropress,” if you will—gives us a rare chance to glimpse the normal life of the 1950s British homosexual world; it’s not a pretty picture, but not for the reasons you probably think. It’s a world in which not repression, but social dominance, has curdled the cream of Wilde’s wit into the sourness of “camp.”
In recent years Valancourt has put us all in their debt with lovely little editions, some quite scholarly, of the most obscure sort of Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries (“Many of the titles in the series existed in fewer than five copies worldwide before our new editions; scholars and readers interested in reading these wonderful texts were forced to travel thousands of miles to a university rare book room or pay thousands of dollars to obtain a copy from an antiquarian bookseller”) and “decadent” or “weird” British and European literature from the turn of the last century, concentrating on either obscure authors or obscure works by the well-known, such as Ann Radcliffe’s posthumous Gaston de Blondeville (1826), Arthur Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp (1894), and Forrest Reid’s The Garden God (1905).
For example,
[T]he first-ever scholarly edition of Le Fanu’s novella [Carmilla] follows the rare original text as it appeared serially in The Dark Blue in 1871-72 (including the original illustrations) and includes a new introduction and footnotes by Jamieson Ridenhour. Also featured in this edition is a wealth of contextual material, including texts by Yeats, Coleridge, Stoker, Padraig Pearse, and others, and the complete texts of Le Fanu’s “The Child that Went with the Fairies” and F. G. Loring’s “The Tomb of Sarah.”
More recently, they’ve been moving into the area of our topic by delving into British fiction from the 1950s, including “angry young men” that are more familiar to us stateside from films, authors such as Keith Waterhouse (Billy Liar), John Braine (Room at the Top), John Wain (Hurry on Down, a somewhat more interesting book than Braine’s that takes on the reverse theme of deliberate downward mobility), and the late Colin Wilson (the Gerald Sorme trilogy as well as the Lovecraftian pastiches).227 It was the Wilson books that got my notice, but I confess I stayed to explore the others not only because of the vague sense of seeing the film or recalling Colin Wilson’s discussion in one of his many memoirs.228
One book which they advertise as “coming soon” is one I already have: A Room in Chelsea Square, first recommended to me years ago by Jeremy Reed.229 I must confess I never found it engaging enough to finish years ago, but having kept it around—due to its vintage Edward Gorey dust jacket, of which more anon—I was inspired by Valancourt’s notice to give it another try. I found it to be rather dull and surprisingly unpleasant.
Valancourt tells us:
Patrick, the book’s opening line tells us, is ‘very, very rich’. He’s also single, and he has his sights set on Nicholas Milestone, a handsome young provincial journalist. Having lured Nicholas to London with the promise of a job on a tabloid magazine, Patrick moves the young man into his suite at a posh hotel, where he lavishes money and expensive gifts on him. Nicholas enjoys his luxurious new lifestyle and meeting Patrick’s amusing and fashionable friends, but he soon understands what Patrick’s really after. Knowing he won’t be able to resist the older man’s advances forever, the greedy Nicholas will have to choose between his conscience and his newly acquired love of money.
It’s the virtuous provincial girl plot, familiar since at least Richardson’s Pamela, continuing through the wolfish Mad Men salivating over a new secretary, given a twist by setting it amidst the metropolitan London branch of what Auden described as the Homintern. And therein lies the problem.
Valancourt adds that Nelson’s book, “was published anonymously both because of its frank gay content at a time when homosexuality was still illegal and because its characters were thinly veiled portrayals of prominent London literary figures.”
I rather suspect the latter was more important than the former. As for the “gay content,” it’s not really all that “frank.” I mean, it’s obvious what’s going on, but no one really does anything. That the traditional roles are all played by men is no more shocking than a school pantomime or “authentic” period production of Romeo and Juliet. The closest we get is Patrick telling a tired out Nicholas that, “An hour on your back with your legs up will do you the world of good.”
Otherwise, it’s about as offensive as Auntie Mame.230
Moreover, the reviewers at the time were quite enthused, treating it more like, well, Auntie Mame than Last Exit to Brooklyn:
Consistently diverting, this may be the novel about homosexuality to end all novels on the subject . . . [W]ill make many a reader’s day.
—Julian MacLaren-Ross, Punch
Talented, amusing . . . the story is told with sustained suspense: the various men in it are not merely types, but flesh and blood, even if one wishes that Patrick had never been born.
—John Betjeman, Daily Telegraph
Odiously funny and delightfully unwholesome . . . a distinct re
lief after the ponderous treatment homosexuality has tended to get in some recent novels.
—Sunday Times
Nor did it have any trouble finding a major American publisher, Doubleday, who assigned the dust jacket to its now-famous in-house illustrator, Edward Gorey.231
The problem must have been in that “not merely types, but flesh and blood” bit, given England’s famously generous libel laws. An Amazon reviewer clarifies matters for us:
“Patrick” is a thinly veiled portrait of Peter Watson: associated for a long while with Cecil Beaton, co-founder of the ICA and wealthy homosexual sponsor of Bacon, Colquhoun, MacBryde, Vaughan, Minton and other homosexual painters. Michael Nelson (the “Nicholas” of the book) was in reality pursued by Watson, who bought him Picassos and Sutherlands as part of his seduction technique. Nicholas—like the real life Nelson—is prevented from starting at his Tabloid newspaper by the dangling of a greater carrot, a job on a new arts magazine “Eleven” (which was “Horizon” in real life) together with his friend Michael, Christopher Pyre (Stephen Spender in reality) and a former protégé of Patrick’s: the bon-viveur Ronnie Gras (Cyril Connolly). It is Nicholas’ constant prevarication as to whether to succumb to Patrick’s gentle but lavish onslaught that eventually causes his downfall.
I suppose a modern equivalent would be one of those post-campaign romans a clef, like Primary Colors, since we no longer have public intellectuals (to use that ghastly neo-con term) or an intellectual public, to experience the frisson of scandal behind . . . founding a cultural magazine.
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 9