I am not much of a Fisher man, but then I have no private Idaho. If I did, I would beg this of my neighbors: Pull for Boise State football, but know that homegrown Idahoans make up just 20 percent of the Broncos’ roster. Read Hemingway, but admit that flighty Mariel and model-suicide Margaux are the Idahoans, not their grandfather. Thank Senators William Borah and Frank Church for fighting in their own ways to preserve the Republic, but deplore that not a single member of your congressional delegation—including Larry Craig, the Mr. Goodbar of the airport stall, just another of the numberless D.C. Republican closet cases—has the guts to vote against these damned wars.
What I am trying to say, Idaho, is shield your eyes against the coastal glare and look homeward, for there are rare and wild flowers pushing up from your untended graves.
Don’t Shoot That Mockingbird!
The American Conservative, 2010
Collin Wilcox died last October, just as I was about to settle in for an annual viewing of To Kill a Mockingbird. Wilcox was the North Carolina actress whose surly white-trash ejaculation Gregory Peckwards—“A chiffarobe!”—is one of several lines from the movie that have entered our family lexicon. (It’s just ahead of “He’s gone and drownded his dinner in sirrup” and behind “You wrong, man—you dade wrong.”)
I don’t think any American is permitted to exit teenagerhood without visiting the “tired old town” of Maycomb. My daughter’s tenth-grade class has gotten around to Harper Lee’s novel, though she and I read it together a couple of years ago, for in my own high-school days I dodged the Mockingbird draft, lighting out instead for the era’s Kurt Vonnegut-Richard Brautigan territory.
An uprooted Southerner once told me that TKAM was the Southern novel for people who hate the South, but I don’t think so. The racial injustice done Tom Robinson disfigures Maycomb, but it doesn’t define Lee’s town. Besides, the harshest criticisms of any place come from those who truly love and belong to it. For American examples, see Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson, William Appleman Williams, Sinclair Lewis, and Edward Abbey.
Harper Lee, who turned eighty-four on April 28, still resides in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, an act that says everything that needs to be said about her loyalty to her place. A mutual friend tells me that she is a witty lady with a generous streak and a fondness for Christian charities.
What struck me about the novel was young Scout’s love of her father, the noble lawyer Atticus, and that father’s love of his town. In one of the book’s loveliest lines—not uttered in the film, alas—Atticus asks Scout to “remember this, no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.” There is a world of meaning in that sentence.
Lee told the story of Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson and the recluse Boo Radley not to damn her people but to commemorate them. She confessed her desire to “chronicle something that seems to be very quickly going down the drain. This is small-town middle-class southern life as opposed to the Gothic, as opposed to Tobacco Road, as opposed to plantation life.”
“As you know,” said Lee in the early 1960s, “the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing.”
Late as we are in the American derangement—or are we early in its salutary realignment?—this cherishing of the small-town South, even while acknowledging historic cruelties, is all to the good.
I must have seen the movie twenty times, and spare me your sneering about arrested middlebrowism. Was there ever a more startling film debut than Robert Duvall’s turn as Boo Radley? Has there been a better children’s ensemble than Alabama actors Philip Alford and Mary Badham and Connie Stevens’s half-brother(!) John Megna as Dill, little Truman Capote? (Megna went on to chant “bonk bonk on the head” in a famous “Star Trek” episode.) Ever hear the word “chiffarobe” used in another film?
The occasional cringe-inducing moments of liberal fantasy—as when the black citizenry, packing the segregated courtroom balcony, stands as one when Atticus passes by—I chalk up, perhaps unfairly, to the vanity of Gregory Peck, who, as Charles J. Shields revealed in his 2006 Harper Lee biography Mockingbird, complained at diva-ish length that his character didn’t have enough screen time. Peck’s sanctimony works very well in the film, however; it infuses, rather than embalms, Atticus Finch. Thank the casting gods that Universal’s first choice—Rock Hudson—didn’t get the part.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever read the book again, but many elements of the movie repay repeated exposure, from Elmer Bernstein’s superb score to Horton Foote’s screenplay, a model of concision and concinnity from which extraneous characters in the novel (such as annoying Aunt Alexandra) are wisely excised. And the supporting performances are magnificent. James Anderson, who played the malevolent Bob Ewell, was a drunken Alabama-born method actor so lost inside his part that he came to hate Gregory Peck.
For all this we can thank the tomboy who worshipped her father and aspired to be “the Jane Austen of south Alabama.” Happy birthday, Nelle Harper Lee.
Shelter from the Storm
The American Conservative, 2010
The week that Wisconsin voters threw out Russ Feingold, the only stepgrandson Fighting Bob La Follette had left in the U.S. Senate, I went to hear an Upper Midwesterner of similar pedigree, Bob Dylan of Hibbing, Minnesota.
I actually saw some heads without hoarfrost, a pleasing contrast to the last time I paid a column’s wages to sit in a hockey arena and listen to music. When my brother and I attended a Bruce Springsteen concert a couple of years ago, we surveyed the crowd and figured we must have wandered into a tour stop by the Ray Conniff Singers.
Lord knows I loved Bruce back in the Darkness on the Edge of Town/Nebraska days, after he had shed his early Dylan mimicry and set out to be the John Steinbeck of Freehold, New Jersey. My buddy Chuck and I would snake around town in his old jeep yowling, “If she wants to see me/You can tell her that I’m easily found. . . .” Unfortunately, while we were easily found, she sure didn’t want to see us.
Politically, Bruce was nowhere near as interesting as the early punks or even that Mormon-Jewish hybrid Warren Zevon. (From Crystal Zevon’s warts-aplenty 2007 portrait of her ex-husband, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, comes this account of the Zevons’ child-custody dispute: “Warren got on the phone; he was obviously drunk. . . . He said, ‘I’m to the right of your father and Ronald Reagan and if you think I’m going to let my daughter be raised by some fucking Communist hippie, you’re sadly mistaken.’” But really, who can resist a songwriter who begins a lyric, “I went home with the waitress/The way I always do/How was I to know/She was with the Russians, too?”)
Dylan, on several other hands, has been a Goldwater admirer, born-again Christian, and proponent of agrarianism as the “authentic alternative lifestyle.” He was formed in Minnesota before he ever saw Greenwich Village. In his memoir Chronicles, the singer, mindful of his roots in that frozen ground, writes of Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eddie Cochran, Sinclair Lewis, and Roger Maris as men he “felt akin to,” freethinking sons of the North Country who “followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed them.”
Lindbergh’s congressman father, whom the New York Times tagged the “Gopher Bolshevik,” was a fierce critic of Wall Street, Woodrow Wilson, and the war machine. Charles Lindbergh Sr. was a progenitor of a vigorous Minnesota antiwar tradition that found expression in men such as Senators Henrik Shipstead and Eugene McCarthy before degenerating into the