When I was asked to do a book signing of my critique of To Kill A Mockingbird at Russo’s Books because of the novel being featured through the Bakersfield reading program I willingly agreed. But this brought to mind the fact most knew of the novel only through the film version, and had the scriptwriters and editors known it was destined to be named one of the most influential films of all time they would have paid much more attention to what they were doing and not allowed some of the poorly done scenes and glaring inaccuracies and contradictions to slip by them.

However, lacking prescience those responsible for the final cut of the film did not pay attention to these details and it suffered accordingly. But the timing of the film brought it much critical acclaim despite its weaknesses, and were it not for Lawrence of Arabia might have won the award for best picture.

There is no discounting the film deserving the praise heaped upon it and the honored place it now holds. But the film is far short of the real story Harper Lee told in her novel, and in my opinion is the reason she never wrote again. This needs some explanation from the opening words of my critique:

The weather is moderating here in the Kern River Valley around Lake Isabella. It has been a beautifully mild day with abundant and glorious sunshine. This evening after sundown, I was able to take a turn around the grounds of my little cottage. An occasional bat would flit about the oaks while a coyote barked in the distance and was answered by some closer neighbor’s hound. Doves, quail, and other assorted birds had roosted for the night. It was time for the bats, raccoons, skunks, owls, and other nocturnal occupants of this small corner of my world to take their turn in company with me and begin their rounds.

The soft mildness of the evening following the mild weather of the day was a real tonic to me. It was good to be able to be outdoors so late and enjoy the reflective mood such weather and such an evening always calls me to. For some reason, I found my mind dwelling on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

As I watched the first stars begin to appear, a slight, night breeze began to stir the leaves of the trees with enough hint of a chill to remind me that winter had not yet had its full say. In fact, a storm is being forecast for this weekend.

I most reluctantly went back inside, pausing only to look up once more at the stars through the now black-silhouetted branches of the tall old pine next to the cottage, and settled down to the writing.

My favorite non-fiction book is Thoreau’s “Walden.” My favorite novel is “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It, together with Walden, occupies a space on the table next to my bed. And perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to give both books to college graduates along with their diplomas.

One reason for my keeping Harper Lee’s wonderful and masterful novel so close at hand is the fact that I was a contemporary of the era Miss Lee describes; and I was born into, and raised in, the identical culture with the identical kinds of people straight out of the Dust Bowl and Grapes of Wrath with the identical ignorance and prejudices all around me (and diet and idiomatic dialect), described in the novel, which is not to discount the very best of civilized manners and behavior portrayed by Harper Lee characteristic of the South.

And thanks to my maternal great-grandmother and grandparents, I am most familiar with the best of the values, sense of justice and fairness, good manners, and civilized behavior so characteristic of the best of Southern people like Atticus Finch. And I am ever grateful loving people so representative of him raised me.

But I am also well acquainted with what cruel poverty and ignorance can do to any people of whatever culture or race.

I repeatedly watch the film as well as read the novel, never tiring of the film with its marvelous score by Elmer Bernstein nor failing to gain inspiration from hearing the little girl’s singing to herself, and her happy, giggling laughter during the introduction of the film, for there is no sweeter and joyful music this side of heaven than a child’s singing and laughter. And I don’t doubt God chooses children for His heavenly choir.

The poignant, heart-tugging scene of a little girl drawing, and tearing, her crayon picture of the mockingbird accompanied by her singing and laughter, is an unforgettable adumbration of the events to follow, the ugly events in contradiction to the singing and laughter of children which have been, without let throughout human history, so successful in inevitably stifling, silencing, the voice of children’s singing and laughter.

God knows how badly, how desperately, children (and adults) need the Miss Maudies and Calpurnias, the Heck Tates and Atticus Finches! And we desperately need them far more than all the great men and women of history, far more than all the great philosophers and artists of history, none of whom, including all the manufactured deities, messiahs, religions and prophets, have provided the wisdom that would deliver the world from the continued abuse and murder of children or led the world to peace.

Few people know of Harper Lee’s childhood association and friendship with another child, Truman Capote, and her using that childhood friendship in her novel. For that matter, few seem to know that Miss Lee’s first name is Nelle.

When I first read the book so many years ago (it was published in 1960), and then saw the film starring Gregory Peck, it never occurred to me that a madman, Boo Radley, would become so influential and important to me.

Long before I was able to fully appreciate the true social implications of the book, I was taken by the charm of childhood Miss Lee made so convincingly real through the eyes of little Scout. Nor was I aware when I first read the book that I would be going through a similar metamorphosis as Miss Lee in my own writing, trying to awaken the child both in myself and in others.

For those who have seen the film but never read the book, you have cheated yourself of some of the most important points that make it a truly great story told in a masterful way, and you will never be able to understand how truly powerful the message of the story is; a message told in such a way that removes it far from being the usual morality play. And told in such a way as to be so very deserving of the Pulitzer Prize Miss Lee was awarded.

But what the film did not do was capture Harper Lee’s real, authentic South in many ways she does in the book. This is not to denigrate the film, for the film is recognized by all as great in its own way. But the film is very, very far from the whole story Miss Lee has told in the book, a story that in its entirety was worthy and deserving of the Pulitzer. The film, while addressing the monumentally important issues of racial prejudice and injustice, could not, due to its brevity, tell the whole story in spite of Peck’s Oscar-winning performance. But I will always believe little Mary Badham should have received an Oscar for her role as Scout. At least she was nominated.

This makes me think of Judy Garland’s Oscar for her part as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. And Judy certainly deserved the award, though it was given for the special category of Best Performance in a Juvenile Role. But in 1939 we Americans were much more given to the joy and laughter of children in those decades past. There was Snow White for example in 1938 as a precedent for the marvelous fantasy of Oz.

And I often ask myself when I reflect on those years past, where did we as a society lose our love for children, our love for the joy and laughter of the children and the joy and laughter they used to bring to adults?

I do know that in 1939 we knew the magic of childhood and music, and honored it in a way that was no longer possible in 1962. The song Somewhere Over A Rainbow in Oz won an Oscar; It Might as Well be Spring in State Fair of 1945 won an Oscar for best song; but in the 60s and thereafter? We seemed to have lost our way as a nation and the music of the laughter of children, the music of the ideals of love and romance declined making way for the cacophony of noise that is called “music” today.

As is common with great writers I believe Harper Lee wrote better than she knew when she used a madman to balance the scales of justice. Certainly she knew this of the children and Boo Radley, of Tom Robinson, and the evil Mr. Ewell. But that such a madman as Boo would be needed to balance the scales of justice for the children of the world against all the Ewells?

The whole point of such “madness” is to free children so that boys can be gentlemen and girls can be ladies. And this is the responsibility of madmen, not madwomen, since it is men who bear the primary guilt of the decisions that prevent children from becoming ladies and gentlemen; it is disproportionately men that are responsible for the laws passed that either protect children, or protect the monsters that prey upon children.

What inept civilized law and law-abiding citizens could not do in confronting evil with determination to win in order to protect children, only a madman could and would do.

Mr. Dolphus Raymond does not appear in the film. After all, the makers of the film were not thinking in terms of saving the children of the world. Their attention was on the adult issue of racism, apparently not realizing, or ignoring, the fact that racism is a children’s issue long before it becomes an adult issue.

But to let the reader know how important the real point of the novel is, here is an excerpt as little Scout relates it of Mr. Raymond:

I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetrated a fraud against himself. But why had he entrusted us with his deepest secret? I asked him why.

“Because you’re children and you can understand it,” he said,” and because I heard that one—“

He jerked his head toward Dill: “Things haven’t caught up with that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being - not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.”

“Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?” Dill’s maleness was beginning to assert itself.

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people - without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people too.”

Harper Lee knew that there were things children understand that adults don’t. She knew children weep over injustice and lose this wisdom as they grow into adulthood. Adults excuse this loss, this forsaking of wisdom, by claiming it is a part of growing up, a part of the real world, never realizing that their real world is a world of their choosing and making, a world that has ever failed to attain unto wisdom, the wisdom they, in fact, had as children. And the forsaking of such wisdom contributes so much to this loss in the resulting failure of good people to confront injustice, to confront evil with absolute determination to win!

Harper Lee, since she was very well educated, prefaces her book with a quote from one of my favorite essayists, Charles Lamb: “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”

Granting the difficulty we face in giving lawyers any credibility of being children once, Miss Lee nevertheless chose Atticus Finch, the model for whom was her own father, as the preeminent humanitarian and a man who even as a lawyer kept the best part of the child alive in himself.

But Atticus had the extreme good fortune of having little Scout (Jean Louise) to keep him honest. It is Scout who, innocently, and because of such innocence that must be cherished, is the best part of her father’s life and compels him to stand up and be counted for truth and justice. Being a good man, how could he ever betray such believing and saving faith, trust, and innocence as that of his little girl!

I haven’t forgotten Jem (Jeremy) in this. But Jem is growing up. And Miss Lee gives Jem a lot of credit for his own sense of truth and justice. But Harper Lee knows how little girls differ from little boys. As she has Scout say at one point, “I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.”

Harper Lee epitomizes the need to include women and children in The Great Conversation: Philosophy, the King of all Disciplines. There is indeed some skill involved in being a girl. And boys and men are in desperate need of such skill on the part of girls and women. The constant refusal on the part of men, who were once little boys, to accept women and children as of equal value to themselves is at the heart of the problem which has kept the world at war and without wisdom, and as a result without peace, throughout history.

Harper Lee must have recognized this. But it must not have been as conscious to her as a grown woman as it was to her as a little girl. And how could it be otherwise when men still exclude women and children from The Great Conversation?

To say she has forgotten is not a criticism of Harper Lee. The little boy in me is far more aware than the man of the things Harper Lee’s little girl knows that she had forgotten as a woman, the things that are in fact the well-spring of intimations and hope of immortality.

I mentioned the social implications of Harper Lee’s novel. But what was the real impact? Certainly it had an impact on me, both because of my own background and because it wasn’t long after the book was published that I found myself teaching in Watts at Jordan High.

The results of the Watts riot were fully in evidence and I was a part of the whole milieu of that time in our history. You might say I was at Ground Zero during the 60s.

But decades after the riots, what has changed for the better? Nothing. If anything, things have only gotten worse in respect to Negroes in America; and for children, the future of America and the world.

Riots and rhetoric, films like To Kill a Mockingbird, A Woman Called Moses, Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi, A Time to Kill, The Tuskegee Airmen, Miss Evers’ Boys, and Amistad, have not changed things for the better. And the world lacking wisdom, with evil seeming to be ever in the ascendancy how can they? Nor can Hollywood have it both ways; pretending to fight discrimination on the one hand and hypocritically supporting violence and perversion on the other.

Nor can we ignore the fact that so many Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning works have failed to make any substantial changes for the better, including To Kill a Mockingbird.

But to quote the Chicago Tribune (one of many sources of praise) about the book: “Of rare excellence ... a novel of strong contemporary national significance.” A reviewer for the Minneapolis Tribune wrote: “The reader will find ... a desire, on finishing it, to start over again on page one.”

And so I have; many times.

Abundant and well-deserved praise was heaped upon Harper Lee and her extraordinary novel. But far too often do great themes such as hers concerning inequities, injustices and discrimination, find the deserved applause and rewards of good people while never accomplishing the avowed goal of righting these inequities, injustices, and discrimination.

And one can go back into the furthest distant past to find the same themes being declaimed by good and wise men (there must have been equally good and wise women, but they weren’t allowed a voice). There is nothing new in these themes.

Yet, in spite of the great works of so many great thinkers throughout history, the world has yet to know peace. It is as Emerson noted, Socrates, Jesus, Washington left no “class,” and the disciple is never above his master.

But doesn’t it puzzle you, as it did me, why this should be so? Perhaps the answer may be found in the following.

In Harper Lee’s novel Tom Robinson was convicted of a crime that he did not commit, and died by the ugly and hateful mechanism of racial prejudice in 1935. And sixty-three years later in 1998, more than a generation later, a Negro was dragged to death behind a truck driven by monsters posing as human beings solely on the basis of his being a Negro!

What, any civilized person has to ask him or herself, has changed for the better in this respect for Negroes in the last sixty-four years to date? Or since 1960 when the novel was published?

The sustaining of racial and religious prejudice is by no means peculiar to America. It is, in fact, far, far worse in other parts of the world where Caucasians are killing Caucasians, Negroes are killing Negroes, Christians kill Christians, Moslems kill Moslems, and Jews and Moslems continue to kill each other.

Knowledge is abundant. But Wisdom is, as ever, conspicuously absent, an orphan from knowledge. Since true wisdom is derived from love and compassion with an instinctive hatred of evil, it isn’t surprising that the world lacks wisdom and people continue to torture and murder for the sake of ideological differences and in the name of God.

It should not be surprising that the same crimes and cruelties continue to be repeated without end in spite of all the great books and apologetics designed to overcome the hatreds, ignorance and prejudices that continue to make their contributions to an increasingly demon-haunted world.

The point that knowledge is confused for wisdom is made by even the best attempts to meld knowledge and wisdom without facing the fact that until women and children are accepted as of equal value to men, and until children become the priority of nations, wisdom will continue to be orphaned from knowledge and unachievable! Nor should it be surprising that knowledge dictates we must become wise or we will most assuredly destroy ourselves!

But at the same time we are reaching out to heaven, hell is abundant throughout the world, a world as much and even more of a demon-haunted world as it ever was on the basis of ignorant and prejudicial hatreds thousands of years old! Wisdom? Where?

Too often I find myself having to point out the obvious: If children are the closest thing to the heart of God, how is it that so many live as though there was something of greater importance? And all too often things done in the name of God are absolutely contradictory to the welfare of children! The time would fail me to list such things.

Harper Lee makes some very good points concerning this in her novel. For example, she recognizes the religious animosity toward women. That of the Moslem and Jewish religions is patently obvious. But when Harper Lee points out the preaching of the “Women are unclean and a sin by definition doctrine of Christianity,” she strikes at the heart of the matter. And most ministers would certainly get their backs up over her accusation that ministers are preoccupied with the subject. But I believe she, and all thinking people, realize why this is so.

Sex by any definition is still sex, whether cloaked in religiosity or not, whether God is profaned in the process of preaching such damnable doctrine or not. Consider how many preach women and children are of lesser value than men. Of course, men don’t come right out and say it; but it is there nonetheless. Such an abuse of religion is a bullying tactic of men, too often supported by women themselves, designed to keep women appositionally inferior to men. Such tactics led Thoreau to write:

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymnbooks resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.

While Henry put his finger on the problem, and while he had Margaret Fuller as a prime example of the equal value of women, due to the era in which they lived neither he nor his renowned friend Emerson understood nor recognized that such bullying by religion had a primary focus on women and children.

The wisdom of childhood causes children to separate from bullies if at all possible. Children will not play with bullies. And it is the bullying of religion, as much or more than that of education and politics toward women and children, that led Sam Clemens to comment, “He was as happy as though he had just gotten out of church.”

In respect to the kind of madness and bullying that seems all-pervading and prevents good people from seizing the initiative in acquiring wisdom, Harper Lee has Calpurnia telling the children, “You’re not going to change any of them by talkin’ right; they’ve got to want to learn themselves. And when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”

And sure enough most do not want to learn; they not only have no interest in talkin’ right, they want to bully others into talking their language no matter how ignorant or self-serving, to be polite to their idols, myths and superstitions no matter how harmful to wisdom. The worst of these insist on everyone either talkin’ their language or they will mount a jihad in order to destroy anyone who does not!

In spite of how very, even selfishly, ignorant their own language may be, they not only do not know better, like the ignorant Ewells of the novel, they have no interest in doing any better.

When the jury in the novel due to ingrained, ignorant prejudice find Tom Robinson guilty of a crime he so very obviously did not commit, Dill and Jem cry. Scout would have cried if she had been just a little older. She was just old enough to realize a great injustice had been perpetrated, but still young enough to not understand and cry about it. She would learn to cry about such things later.

And when Jem asks his father how the jury could have done such a thing, his father tells him, as Mr. Raymond told Dill, “I don’t know ... when they do it - seems only children weep.” (to be continued)