REVISITING A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Upon revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird, reading the graphic novel, I decided to revisit another story adapted by the same artist – Fred Fordham. And so…
   I turned to A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. No Tolkien world-building here. Her creation is made of earth and sea rather than a vast continent, and features a mighty wizard in the days when he was not so mighty. It takes hard work to furnish a tale that’s an easy read. And I’d throw in the use of heavy thought to create a world as though made with a light touch.
   It wasn’t made with a light touch. Ursula used sleight-of-pen to give the impression that it all came easily to her. There’s no Gandalf here, or any of that wizard’s predecessors. No Merlin. And yet…
   Ursula gave herself over to the notion of a very famous magician. What was he like, back when he wore short trousers? Merlin, the Boy Wizard. How do you tell adventures of Gandalf the Kid? Do you just let the youngster magick his way around the world, or is there some mystical college you send these young enchanters to?
   Her story is not a story of Gandalf. More of a question. Where do all these Gandalfs and Merlins and Väinämöinens come from? Earthsea is about getting away from the overly-familiar story of a powerful wizard, especially in using the basic building blocks of wizardy tales. The quest, in Ursula’s fiction, is internal.
   Gandalf serves the rhythm of a mighty quest against relentless evil. And that’s a tale of Frodo’s exploits more than it is a tale of Gandalf’s. Merlin is a frequent visitor to another character’s story: Arthur – the Boy King.
   Strip that powerful wizard stuff away. Start with the foolish youth who has a point to prove to the world and to himself by showing he is no foolish youth. Watch as the future legend falls flat on his face in the early days, the youthful fool.
   Ursula’s story is one of magic. Magic comes to the forefront of this book. Authors are notorious for writing stories packed with magic rules…that serve the plot at the time, flash-in-the-pan style. Very much of the moment. The moment passes, and the rules of magic are altered, misplaced, forgotten, revived, reversed…
   Maybe there’s precious little magic in the fantasy world. There’d still be a place for wizards. And they’d be powerful, no matter how little magic they made use of.
   Bill Seligman, in a piece published in 1977, put rules to the framework of Tolkien’s magic by slotting Gandalf into the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. Going by Gandalf’s exploits in the books, and turning to the D&D magic system, Seligman proposed that Gandalf was no more powerful than a fifth level Magic-User.
   (March, 1977. The Dragon: GANDALF WAS ONLY A FIFTH LEVEL MAGIC-USER. I’ve sworn off footnotes. There’s an overwhelming sense of wanting to use them for comedy purposes alone, and no good would come of that.)
   Some context, for non-gamers. Your wizardy chappie starts out at first level and, through adventure after adventure, rises in level, power, and stature. Broadly, the first three levels of the character’s game-life are about survival. The next three levels offer more options for adventure. Truly powerful world-altering characters are of much higher level. So, in a game sense, at fifth level, Gandalf would be versatile, but not awesome.
   This doesn’t track with the reputation Gandalf wields in Tolkien’s world. There’s a very good reason for that. Roleplaying games are not novels. The concept of the hobby as a business did not exist when Tolkien finished writing The Lord of the Rings.
   Tolkien died in 1973 as Dungeons & Dragons was being put together for publication in 1974. Several Tolkien-based references appeared in early D&D and had to be removed on pain of litigation. Hobbits were out. Halflings came in. It was that or pay Saul Zaentz a load of money.
   Official Tolkien roleplaying games came and went, as rights were rented out or expired. (While I sat typing this, an advert for a Tolkien-themed roleplaying game dropped into my e-mail.) Each new game offers a magic system. Magic exists in Tolkien’s writing. But it doesn’t match the magic system used in D&D. That takes inspiration from the writing of Jack Vance.
   D&D magic has literal rules to it. Much of the spellcasting is flashy. You’d increase the movie budget significantly just by welding D&D magic onto The Lord of the Rings. There’s before The Lord of the Rings in terms of fantasy stories and there’s after. There’s also before Dungeons & Dragons and after.
   Today, if you feel like writing a fantasy novel, you might delve into a game rulebook or two for ideas on how magic works in a setting. D&D magic is casual. Magic = spells, and spells are plentiful. You’d ignore how spells distort the world, only concerning yourself with how spells save the characters, or else you’d embrace the chaos…
   Do you need hospitals in your fantasy world if magic healing is plentiful? If you can create water on a whim, the Great Inaccessible Desert doesn’t sound so uncrossable after all. Turning lead into gold will flood the market. So the magician who can do this is a threat to society as a whole. He must be stopped. Or bought off. Not with gold, though. I see a flaw in there, somewhere.
   Magic has rules. Story demands structure.
   Back to Ursula. She, too, was writing before the first copy of D&D was sold, and didn’t need to consider the game of magic. Incidentally, if Gandalf is only fifth level in a game…which edition of the game would that be? Just let it go.
   All a writer has to do is consider the blank page. Ursula had to rewrite the wizard story, rather than just write it. And so. Our hero, Ged, is powerful. He’s heading places. The future is awesome. But first, the early years. Conflict. Drama. Tension. Mistakes. Learning from some of those mistakes. Making more mistakes.
   Magic, in Earthsea, comes at a price. There is balance. And if you push the balance in your favour, the balance shoves back. In this way, Ursula doesn’t trap herself into writing up a D&D spellbook. (Though, if she’d done that, Gary Gygax would’ve certainly perked up his ears and started scribbling notes.) Instead, she shows that magic is about making choices. Also. Actions have consequences.
   The magic in Earthsea is one of the most elegant depictions of magic I’ve encountered. Edward Eager, let’s call him an American disciple of E. Nesbit, gave us Half Magic. Magic wishes abound in the tale, but only at half-strength and for comedy. Characters wishing to benefit from full wishes have to double the description to gain the full wish. This also leads to comedy, and trouble. Yes, Hijinks. Shenanigans. Misadventures.
   Eager controls the rules with an iron glove. Tolkien has a loose hand on the tiller. C.S. Lewis provides this bit of magic here and that bit of magic there. Some of the magic is very old and deep, and woe unto ye if you seek to quote the rules of magic to any entity who was there when the deep magic was written.
   Ursula…gives us balance. A quest for equilibrium in an ever-changing world. Action and reaction. She sciences this up. There is a cost to making magical alteration. You could see an ecological theme in here. (For it exists.) What does magic cost the magician? Is there anything in the awkwardness of a young wizard’s journey that’s going to teach the much older character when looking back?
   A Wizard of Earthsea barely reminds me of anything else. It feels fresh. New. There are, perhaps, a few touchstones. Ursula wasn’t born when John Masefield wrote The Midnight Folk. Susan Cooper’s magical cycle, The Dark is Rising, shares something with John Masefield and Ursula le Guin. There’s a sense of flow.
   Random events in The Midnight Folk tune themselves into a sense of flow. And that goes on in Susan Cooper’s books. It seems to be everything in Ursula’s story. Granted, the flow is aided by the maritime nature of the tale.
   It’s not something I can put a finger on, and point to, in an illuminated manuscript. I sensed it, and I recognised something similar in the writings of Masefield and Cooper. Tolkien’s world is too vast, detailed, and intricate to give me that particular sense of flow. The gears grind slowly and relentlessly in Tolkien’s grand design.
   C.S. Lewis offers a mosaic feel to the tales set in far-off Narnia. Not this vague notion I’m trying to convey. Perhaps the vagueness in conveying it is part of the atmosphere. But even here, in good company, Masefield and Cooper, there’s a distinction worth making.
   Tolkien, certainly with The Hobbit, where his saga began, E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis, John Masefield, Susan Cooper…all have had this label applied at some point. They wrote books for children. To some, the Earthsea books are seen as for children.
   No. Recreating a story of wizards and magic so that it seems new, fresh, and hard to pin down…was not something Ursula did for children. Granted, children weren’t banned from reading those books. If you had the stomach for it as a child, maybe you gained something from The Lord of the Rings. And if you discovered The Chronicles of Narnia as an adult, you weren’t breaking any laws.
   Some books read in childhood may interest you enough to return to them when you are older and supposedly wiser, it’s true. I realise I’ve not mentioned the plot. Haven’t I, though? Ged is a young wizard, in need of training.
   He magicks his way through a maritime world, and learns the hard way that magic has a cost. Ged learns that striking the right balance is a difficult thing, hard to pin down. He heads off on a quest of his own making, for he is his own worst enemy and must leave to confront the error of his ways.
   Oh, yes, and something about a dragon. I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself if you haven’t read the book. The graphic novel adaptation is another John Fordham work. What to say of adaptations? I’ve seen adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the sequel to The Midnight Folk – The Box of Delights – some stuff by E. Nesbit, nothing by Edward Eager…and I’ve only seen the trailer for a fucking awful attempt at The Dark is Rising.
   Yes, I can judge the movie as quite awful based entirely on the atrocious trailer. It would make you reach for a Susan Cooper book if you felt in need of an antidote to the travesty on screen. Which takes me…nowhere. Certainly not in the direction of adaptations of Ursula’s works.
   I haven’t watched any of that stuff. And I won’t watch any of that stuff. If you seek an adaptation, try the graphic novel. There’s a sense of scale to the world, an atmosphere of menace in even considering the use of magic. And character aplenty.
   What level of wizard would Ged be, in a Dungeons & Dragons game? He wouldn’t be in a D&D game at all. (Ged faces the challenge of a dragon in one book. And there’s a dungeon later, but we mustn’t run ahead of the story sequence.) As I type, there is no commercial roleplaying game based on A Wizard of Earthsea. There’s the book, and a graphic novel adaptation. Steer clear of the moving image for now. Perhaps someone with passion for the story will take a decent crack at the whole series, one day. On big screen, or small.

 

REVISITING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There are two names connected to MOCKINGBIRD. For me, the author is always going to be Nelle. Perhaps mistakenly, whenever I heard mention of her, I had the impression people called her that. It rhymes with bell, and not belly. Her creation is always going to be Scout Finch. Not Jean Louise.
   I write here of Harper Lee out of politeness to Clarity, who is always listening in. Nelle is buried in Monroeville, Alabama. You can take an internet tour of the gravesite, where you’ll see other members of the Lee family there…with Finch in the name.
   Before I revisited Harper Lee’s book, I thought about how I visited it in the first place. Going back, there was the movie. Then I went in search of the book. For those of you who try that sort of thing, do your best to remember the book is the book and the movie is the movie.
   Maybe you encounter those items the other way around. Someone makes a movie, and then it is turned into a book. In that case, do your best to remember the movie is the movie and the book is the book. Or the movie of the book of the T-shirt of the radio show of the hamburger, and so on.
   (That should be the book of the movie of the breakfast cereal. Pardon me.)
   I went looking for the book after seeing the movie adaptation. It’s possible that a documentary prompted me into action. A documentary in which she was referred to as Nelle. As for the film, Harper Lee kept an eye on the movie production long enough to know they weren’t going to mess it up. She did her best not to mess the book up herself. For, first, there was another version of her story. A messed-up execution of one we never needed to see.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book from the start of the 1960s, which is to say there’s a bit of a hangover from the 1950s to deal with in reading it. But the setting is very strictly glued to that of Harper Lee’s childhood in the 1930s. By the time the book ends, historically we’re hovering on the edge of the Dustbowl Years and vivid imagery of the Migrant Mother photographed by Dorothea Lange. W. H. Auden puts a bullet to the 1930s in September 1939, in giving his label to a low dishonest decade…
   But that’s all later. We start around 1933. The outside world, fixed in the grand arena of history, seems so very far away from small-town America and its quota of daily small-town Americanisms depicted in the book. (Although, eventually, Hitler does get a mention.) At its core, MOCKINGBIRD concerns racial injustice sieved through the strained community built around it. This is the only way Lee can approach the story.
   It isn’t.
   There was another version. GO SET A WATCHMAN shows how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD started life. In that earlier manuscript, the character of Scout is grown to adulthood and, as Jean Louise, returns from the big city to view the old home town under a different light. The author is not particularly kind to her people, there. Lee was asked to work on the tale. She transformed a raw idea into a cooked meal by making the story all about Scout’s childhood days.
   Scout is young in both stories. In the rough prototype novel, she’s 26. And in the finished work, she starts the tale at the age of six. The homecoming story of a twenty-something character doesn’t sound as engaging as the tale of the child in the town surrounded by haunting figures.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a ghost story, with plenty of fake ghosts in it. Nothing in the vaguely supernatural background of the book is scary. The scary stuff is left to all those violent adult themes the child struggles to deal with in the foreground. For this is the Deep South in the 1930s; if a black man kisses a white woman, the town’ll hang him as soon as look at him.
   I’ve read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but I refuse to read GO SET A WATCHMAN. Sometimes, publication history is a bitch and stands in the way. I refer to the exploitation of a dead author’s unpublished works as necrophilia.
   “By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist’s work beyond that artist’s lifetime.”
   In this case, the author remained alive when the deal was struck. So this didn’t come across as necrophilia. No bonus points for that. Sharks tasted blood and circled in the water, under a sky packed with vultures biding their time while the hangman sharpened his axe…which he loaded up with buckshot. Or something like that. Unfortunate exploitation of the artist’s work during the artist’s dying days is no less a crime against art.
   Nelle…
   …your honour, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was absolutely of sound body and mind when she gave permission for her prototype manuscript to be published. On the other hand, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was subjected to what can only be described as elder abuse, not even comprehending the rights she granted shortly after her sister’s death and not too long before her own.
   Why mention her sister?
   If you do take an electronic tour of Harper Lee’s grave then you’ll see the name Finch there, just as I said. One of those grave markers notes that Alice Finch Lee was born in 1911 and died in 2014. She’s Nelle’s sister. And, into extreme old age, Alice looked out for Nelle’s interests.
   The chronology runs as follows: Alice dies in 2014, the book comes out in 2015, and Nelle dies in 2016. Alice hadn’t been the guardian of the legacy for the last three years of her life, retiring at the tender age of 100. Nelle’s manuscript existed the whole time, and she never published it. Conspiracy? The weight of time, reputation, and lack of literary output?
   Suppose you do rob a grave. Have the politeness to let the body climb down in there, first.
   You and I were not in the room with the writer and the lawyer, so whether cinder-crusted devilry or tedious publishing talk went on…we’ll never know. It’s much easier to look askance at the publisher for conduct unbecoming. That, we’ll return to.
   I tried as hard as I could. But it is impossible to write of one author without writing of the other. I’ll take a detour into the life and times of Truman Capote, the scamp. Nelle and Truman knew each other as children. He created a tomboyish character based on her in his book, and she created a social oddity of a friend based on him way over in her book.
   Did Truman Capote secretly write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or is that hogwash? I tell ye plain, ’tis hogwash. For the last fucking time, no, Branwell Brontë did not write WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Nelle, with MOCKINGBIRD nesting at the publisher’s, travelled with Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas.
   Multiple murder in Kansas interested Truman, and he wanted to write about that. He decided to visit the scene of the crime: to descend upon it. Despite the jaundiced babbling of Gore Vidal, delivering a scabrous view in the opposite direction, Truman Capote had talent. He didn’t use it wisely or well, but he had something before the booze rented him out and threw him to the bayleaf mob of critics. Baying is hardly the word for poseurs.
   The thought of Truman using Harper Lee as a condom to communicate with the local yokels…yes, that would’ve amused Truman. Capote is Italian slang for condom. I sense he knew. Nelle took Monroeville Alabama and turned it into Maycomb. The book was behind her, but only just. Truman lingered there, as the odd little boy. Now she was in Truman’s company, and he was still at heart an odd little boy. Nelle stood on the ground in another place with comb at the end of the name.
   Holcomb. There she assisted Truman in the early construction of IN COLD BLOOD. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lay far behind Truman. He’d dedicated it to his close friend Jack Dunphy. Years in the making, IN COLD BLOOD would be dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in that order.
   Capote once acknowledged her contribution and then scratched it out. He had trouble acknowledging her help. “Friend.” Yes. What else? “Assistant.” Capote, in hindsight, diminishing Lee’s contribution, knew how to publicise Capote. Nelle was there for the first two months. Did Branwell Brontë write WUTHERING HEIGHTS? No. Did Truman Capote write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? No. Did Nelle Lee write IN COLD BLOOD?
   There, things get tricky. No, she did not write the book. But did she make the writing of the book possible? Did she pave the way? Nelle broke the ice, right? Let’s be fucking clear, here. Nelle Lee dynamited the ice so that Truman Capote could have his book and eat it like cake he’d said he made all by himself. From recipe to reception.
   A new type of book. (It wasn’t.)
   Every word of it true. (A lie.)
   George Washington slept here. (He didn’t. But we might as well throw that one in, too.)
   Truman didn’t care about the multiple murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Since time out of mind, murder most foul has fascinated us. So he knew he could write about a morbidly evergreen subject. That had staying power. Truman didn’t care whether or not the murders would be solved.
   He and Nelle arrived in town in time for the funerals of the murdered family. Truman made a lot of friends there, in Kansas. That’s according to Truman. Nelle made those connections on his behalf. She became the long spoon the community relied upon to sup with Truman Capote.
   You can read his fiction in depth. But you’d never want to be in a room with him for anything beyond the span of a breakfast, Tiffany’s included or otherwise. He’d entertain you, and then you’d be a chapter in a book.
   Gore Vidal? Someone should gore Vidal. Fuck you, Gore Vidal. And for that, you’d have to buy me dinner first. I was childhood friends with Harper Lee. You couldn’t be featured in her book, not even as Boo Radley. But I’m in there. Not as Boo Radley, though. Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal. Go back to assaulting Norman Mailer’s fists with your plastic chin, you… (F-slur redacted.)
   I made that last paragraph up. But for someone writing A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, Truman made things up, too. True account. Not exactly. Multiple Murder. Now that bit he got right. Consequences? From a writer who didn’t care. A writer who came to care about all the wrong things, in the end, concerning that case.
   Nelle: Truman’s cultural guide, secretary, catch-all assistant, note-taker, editor, and friend, making it possible for people to relate to her as the acceptable face of Truman Capote’s investigation.
   Truman continued without Nelle’s assistance for years after, as the case led to suspects, arrests, trial, convictions, and executions. Capote didn’t care about the justice of it. The Clutter family, parents and children, were murdered by two men Capote took more interest in.
   Capote wanted to be the invisible narrator of his big book on big themes in an isolated place. But with Truman it’s all about him, all the time, every single time. That’s why here, I’ve only mentioned the murdered family once by name. I want you to know that the star of the show is Truman Capote…first and foremost, and that’s according to him. Not me. The murdered family is sidelined in favour of contact with the criminals.
   I’ve barely scratched the flawed mirror surface of Truman Capote’s life. It hides an ocean of depth, full of nasty vindictive things. My trident has three points to it. One. Truman knew Nelle in childhood, and served as a model for an oddball character in MOCKINGBIRD. Two. Nelle went with Truman to research the book that would become IN COLD BLOOD. She didn’t have MOCKINGBIRD attached to her name, just then. He was known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three…
   Wait. Detour. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote wrote that and lived off the back of it. (He’d dine out far and wide on all of his books, save at the very end, beyond his death. Stick a pin in that one.) The Breakfast movie appeared a year before the movie adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. Both writers made it big, and made it big at the movies.
   Truman danced with Marilyn Monroe. But she’d not be his character, Holly Golightly. Marilyn was warned off playing a prostitute, and that was that. They should have married, just to give us a disaster-zone as a cautionary tale. But, with Truman, that would be just one more disaster-zone/Tuesday. Let us not dwell on imagined wedlock.
   Capote hated the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the part of Holly. She was too pure, in his mind. No depths of darkness or suffering or want.
   If you know anything of Audrey’s life in the Second World War, you’d know she had more than her share of trouble to help inform playing a character in a movie, thank you very much.
   Capote, at his bitchiest, in resenting someone for not being tough…and simply not knowing or failing to acknowledge what Audrey went through…is about average for the man. Acknowledging others is, for people like Truman, simply a bend in the road that curves round, inevitably, back to people like Truman casting light on themselves.
   Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman was not a fan of the adaptation. He’d bend over backwards to point out that Holly Golightly wasn’t really a call girl. She’s not a prostitute at all. Then he goes and says the thing. Girls like that are American geishas. This comment is deeply offensive to the geisha specifically and to Japan in general. Shocking. That would be like casting Mickey Rooney to play a comedy relief Japanese character in Breakfast at…oh.
   Isn’t Mickey Rooney racist in that movie? TRUMAN: Hold my beer. Let me tell you about Holly Golightly and Japanese culture…
   Truman had issues with his movie adaptation. Nelle had no problems with hers. Truman’s book didn’t win a Pulitzer. Nelle’s did. Book and movie combined to make Nell an unlikely star. She shied from that, quite quickly, leaving her sister Alice to handle the messy business of publicity. Or…lack of publicity.
   There’s no such thing as a reclusive author. But there is such a thing as the author who fucks off into a room with a writing machine to do the work alone. To fill the blank page. That writing machine could be as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a manual typewriter; electronic keyboards are idiot-proof, and, therefore, less fussy.
   Nelle didn’t consider success. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death…at the hands of the reviewers. She was spared that. Truman, for his part, entered into gladiatorial combat with them. Both authors reduced their output. Truman envied Nelle’s success. A pointless envy, as she cared not for it. And so, that friendship ended.
   You’ll find them together as Scout and Dill, in MOCKINGBIRD. Truman Capote, at his most amusing, fictionalised by his childhood friend. And Nelle. If I call her a rebel, that has Southern connotations. Should you hunt for criticism of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it lies in a view that the author looked a little too kindly on her people of the South and let them off the hook. The counter to that is…just plain folks…come across as far more evil in their racism on account of being depicted as just plain folks. To depict their humanity is to reveal their inhumanity.
   Nelle and Truman tasted success. Truman developed an addiction to the fame. Nelle had an allergic reaction to it. Point three of my trident. After big success, MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, that was pretty much the end for both of them. They also faced this problem of a book resurfacing with grim finality. Nelle still had the manuscript of the prototype novel somewhere. Truman thought he’d destroyed his early book.
   The story goes that he left it behind in a place that was taken up by someone else. A magpie of a tenant, who discovered a Truman manuscript, and preserved it. Are some things worth preserving? I was once told a tale that I reworked into the opening of a novel…
   This is the book I shredded. And I destroyed the physical hard drive and all back-up media, too. But I kept the opening. The only good part was the part I’d been told by someone else. This was a singular lesson in learning to write. And in learning how to vapourise anything you didn’t want to see the light of day.
   After their deaths, the two were united by this connection – material resurfacing from the folds of the swamp. Nelle left some short stories in a place in New York. Truman had an early work bob to the surface. Writers were dead and gone, and books still hit the shops. SUMMER CROSSING. You know. Necrophilia.
   In Nelle’s case, THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER collects a bunch of short pieces. Why are there so many “lost” manuscripts to this history? If she’d wanted to, Nelle could have gone back in and worked up a few short stories to keep the literary beggars away. The hungry crowd of critics, I mean. Nelle gave us one book. Be happy in that.
   Scout Finch is a fictionalised version of Nelle. There are books out there with memorable characters. Some of those characters are memorable through description, action, or speech. The truly memorable characters from classic tales are memorable through all three of those things and one more item: they stay with you.
   Knowing how the friendship frazzled – an inevitability, with Truman – I prefer Scout and Dill to remain where they are, staying with memory. Not for me the publishing problem connected to the later-earlier work GO SET A WATCHMAN. Haven’t read it. Won’t read it. Did enough research on it to make comments here, and that’s that.
   It is an earlier work: the prototype. And it is the later work, published in the last days of Nelle’s life. Touted as a sequel, on the basis that it is about Scout returning to town those many years later, it fired enthusiasm in a great crowd to hear of its existence. Except…there are text passages word by revealing word that are practically the same scenes as they are in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Bit of editing, here, there, marking differences in MOCKINGBIRD. Don’t even pretend for a second that this other book is a sequel. It is not.
   Conduct unbecoming of a publisher includes trying to pass this prototype off as the direct sequel. I will grant you we finally discover something the realm of criticism toyed with, as an absent-minded dog toys with a bone. In the prototype book, the heroic Atticus Finch, Scout’s noble lawyer dad, is anything but. He’s a segregationist: the type to build separate drinking fountains based on skin-colour.
   In the prototype, Nelle is not so kind to her people of the South and she doesn’t let them off the hook. The two books could be resolved with expansion and editing of the prototype to turn that work into a true sequel. But this was not to be. Nelle died. She outlived Truman. He’d outlived his friendship with her. Could he have written more, with his heart, brain, and liver shot through like Swiss cheese from the wild excess of too much wild excess? With those wearying disadvantages, writing soon drops off into typing. And sloppy typing, at that.
   Could Nell have written more? She took a stab at true crime, covering a story that sent her into the writing landscape of IN COLD BLOOD. Familiar territory, for she’d walked that road and gathered many notes on the trail once before. But it was not to be, second time around.
   There’s a wanton, libertine, neediness in the literary critic/pundit who cries why couldn’t you give us more than one perfect book, you bastards to all the writers who only have one perfect book in them. Those poseurs are never fucking happy. You can shit gold for literary types like that, and they’d complain the shit wasn’t diamond-encrusted. Be wanting jam on it, next.
   If you enjoy a book, what more is there to say. We could wax lyrical about what might have been. But we can never truly know. Was Nelle thrown from her horse after riding her first book back to the stable of publication? If you write of the complacent daughter returning to the small town only to discover her lawyer father had feet of smashed and tainted clay…
   And the editorial view is…we can’t go with this book…what, then? Be softer in telling your tale. Focus on the childhood character. So you go away for a time and rewrite the damned thing. Now it’s an Instant Timeless Classic™, and you are set for literary life.
   Except. It must rankle that your initial idea, which is not so soft on your people of the South, it must hurt, that the core story was rejected in favour of your classic. What could you do, then? Take the prototype and rework it so that Scout grows up into Jean Louise Finch, and when she heads home from the Big City, obviously, we see she had a young daughter’s infallible view of the noble lawyer…only to realise this idolatry doesn’t match the man’s constant juggling of life in the Deep South…
   You’d need to gut both narratives to make it work. But once the classic is a classic, you can’t go back and change a single word of the sacred text. So the challenge then would be to rework and rework and rework the prototype until it no longer resembles much of anything.
   Some characters never grow up. And they really shouldn’t. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Even Huck Finn. The Secret Garden is set around the year 1907/08, and features a character – the boy Colin – who cannot walk. Spoiler: he regains the ability. And the children in that story never grow up. They mustn’t. For Colin is ten years old and infirm. The moment he walks again, well, that’s the moment he’s fit enough to serve in the trenches of the Great War.
   Holden Caulfield never grows up. People don’t like it when I say…you know he goes back to the school and shoots everyone at the end, right? Anyone forced to read Salinger’s fuck-awful book in school soon reaches that conclusion. So it isn’t in the text, so what?
   Scout and her brother Jem, even oddball Dill, never grow up. Spoiler: Jem never grows up in the prototype book. There’s plenty of forensic analysis online to show you the word-for-word scenes that are the same or nearly. MOCKINGBIRD has a layer of polish to the work. The other, no.
   I have detoured into talk of a monster: Truman Capote. And I am not the first to express distaste for the promotion of a prototype novel as a sequel to itself. No more of that. What brought me here?
   Revisiting Nelle’s tale.
   I’ll have to revisit the film. For that sort of story, seen through a child’s eyes, you always hope, desperately, when sitting down to watch…please tell me they employed children who could ACT. I’ve revisited the book in another way…and I haven’t written of that at all. How remiss.
   Now remember, if you are going to tackle such things, the book is the book and the movie is the movie and never the twain shall meet. But somewhere between 1960 novel and 1962 movie there’s a place for a visual adaptation that moves at your own pace: the pace at which you turn the comic book pages. In 2018, Fred Fordham adapted TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD into a graphic novel.
   Take a digital tour of Monroeville and stop by the old court house. Fred certainly went there, for the trial scenes. I now have two copies of this story. One a novel, and the other a comic book. Both start off with motifs of a fence. By design, if you know the tale. The novel is a towering work. And the hardback comic book does its damnedest to convey the same story.
   For reasons of compression, the movie gives you a taste of the novel if not the full range of flavours. Otherwise the movie would be a decompressed TV show. The same compression gives you a taste of the novel in the graphic novel. Otherwise the comic book would be a whole volume longer.
   I recommend all three adaptations. The movie may stay with you, as might the art in the graphic novel. But the book is the one that goes into the most detail and lingers, positively, the longest. My copy of the book carries an introduction by Albert French, whose own novels are not kind to the oppressor.

 

MORBID THOUGHTS, DOOM, GLOOM, AND THE END OF ALL THINGS.

In my country, I’m classed as an optimist.

   WRITER? MADE A WILL? IT ISN’T ENOUGH. Once more I run over the concept in my head. On the internet, typing in block capitals is considered SHOUTING. Leading me to conclude that using italic type is leaning into the wind, and underlining a word means I’m walking on a tightrope. ^Superscript denotes the use of uppers, _subscript the ingestion of downers. Bold writing…I’m unsure. Perhaps the paint is just thicker there.

   I felt like a SHOUT. Of gloomy intent. I’ve become interconnected, and leaving important documents inside a fireproof safe is no longer enough. Images of actresses adorn the wallpaper on my computer’s desktop, reminding me that I take an interest in things beyond typing stories. I go off and watch stories, too.

   There is a rectangular black hole on that desktop where a photograph of an actress once resided. A flash of yellow invades the darkness. My gloomy beacon, my lighthouse of mortality. It signifies the end of all things.

   The canary colour belongs to a folder icon. In blogging it’s best to avoid using white type against a dark background for the main body text, though this design element works well in limited form – for titles and headers. I use white on black for titles and headers, not the main show. For I am human, have limits, and can only read white-on-black text for so long.

   This large black patch on the desktop is meant to be noticed. The yellow folder, with its white title, is also meant to be noticed – by anyone else. Some random person. Not by me. The great danger in life lies in being more organised than anyone else in your life.

   I am disorganised. With the best will in the world, I hope to avoid criticism of those close to me. Bless them, faults and all. Those faults make those people worth knowing. I am the most organised person out of the whole bunch. And must leave a signpost for chance.

   Chance is a fine and unfine thing. In the week that I published my third e-book, LYGHTNYNG STRYKES, I avoided becoming roadkill. Chance, infrequency of traffic, plays its part in that. I continue to avoid becoming roadkill, as that sounds like the best policy to me. Highlight of that week?

   I had a few highlights. The top spot goes to chance. I leave my office and head for the kitchen. Plan. Dump some rubbish. Go! Time spent on the act is short. I face the window for a few seconds. In that thin slice of my life, a massive magpie lands on a post. It gives a shake of the old wings, sorts itself out, then launches into the cold wet day.

   Not an earth-shattering event. I see this by chance. And it makes my whole week. I have that writerly mind, lodging the incident in the rusty memory banks. Might come in handy, one day. I return to the office, with its computer, computer display, desktop, desktop icons, and. My lighthouse of mortality.

   At the time of writing, in the year of the Maya calendar’s last gasp, my published work carries © protection lasting seventy years beyond my demise. Something I must prepare for. We pretend existence goes on for all time, but no one gets out alive.

   If I am killed unexpectedly by some drunk or undrunk driver, my blog will cease. Unless it’s been set to automatically publish while I’m on a holiday that results in my death. If I suddenly stop blogging unannounced, have I gone to join the Choir Invisible? Perhaps.

   Internet contacts will tentatively e-mail, noting that I’ve been quiet of late. How am I doing? Have I given any thought to the latest publishing news? Afraid to open the box, and discover whether or not this particular cat is still alive. Leading to the old joke.

   Is he dead?

   I hope so – they buried him.

   Though in my case, instead of burial, my ashes should be scattered where deranged and non-deranged devotees cannot find me. I long-ago concluded that my fate was to become a cult figure’s cult figure. Not guilty of crimes, war or otherwise, I’ll still be lumped in with those whose last known rest remains determinedly unknown. Barring accident, presumably somewhere in Sunny Scotland.

   (I’ve noted that writing on the internet cleanses my work of irony and filters sarcasm from the end-product. Using Twitter to describe LYGHTNYNG STRYKES as epic porn robbed the statement of all humour, and made the declaration seem as though brought down from a mountain on stone tablets. Which made the whole thing so much funnier – to me, if no one else.)

   If I am the most organised person out of the whole bunch, it falls to me to arrange a trail of breadcrumbs for distraught persons to follow. Dealing with death is not pleasant. Unknown contacts must be located.

   I speak, in general terms, of helping an author on the internet. What does that actually mean, to those I leave behind? Nothing much. That fellow-scribbler could have engaged in minor contact with me. Who to contact, with bad news?

   Multiple e-mail accounts and social networking appearances are phantom shapes in the misty terrain of my life. I must determine a list of business contacts worth bludgeoning with the grim knowledge. And I must place that list inside the fireproof safe.

   The list is of no immediate use there. It is useful to the one who has instructions to retrieve the fireproof safe from my abode, on being informed of my departure. So, for reasons of immediacy, the list of contacts must go inside an envelope left sitting prominently on an actual desktop.

   That information is repeated inside the electronic file folder glowering in the black space where an actress used to linger on my computer’s digital desktop. And the folder is marked IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH. Same as the envelope, sitting on the black desk behind me.

   E-mail addresses, and what to say to those who should be informed. Not precisely. Loosely. I can’t very well be asked to note the nature of my own passing in advance. Not without ploughing a very deep furrow of morbid humour.

   Here lies RLL, telling lies about a demise that happened before or after sunrise. It was quick/slow, quick, quick, slow. Painless. Sudden. Agonising. Drawn-out. Delete as inapplicable. Died a hero. Wasn’t missed. Endured death by a thousand (and three point five) cuts. Didn’t feel a thing. Victim of a tragic sequence of outré events, considered funny under other circumstances.

   The legacy? Championed the words arcane, outré, #unhashtagging, and whom. Will be remembered for writing EPIC porn. Had no sense of internet humour, though was marginally funny in unreal life. Believed the best villains had a V or K lurking in their names. Remained hostile to the Net Book Agreement. Like Nelle Lee, praised the repeal of the Corn Laws. Until the last, held an irrational fear of irrational fear.

   The reality is that my death will be late in getting to those who should be told. It’ll run perfunctorily, with a slot in the subject line taken up by SAD NEWS. You were one of RLL’s business contacts, and it falls to me to note…

   Wisely, unwisely, I hold an empty view of my literary legacy. I consider my writing disposable. It is supposed to earn money to pay bills. If someone somewhere in the world gains a degree of entertainment from my writing, I’d say that’s good. Well, I would. Wouldn’t I?

   Will my writing change the world? No. Inspire other authors? Too soon to tell. I hold stern views on SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. If I inspire other authors, it’ll be nice of me to take the blame. I don’t think in terms of literary legacy. All writing is experiment, to me. I haven’t the time to plan a monument to myself. You’ll find me in the lab, not in a studio carving narcissism in marble.

   In the meantime, I’ll continue to dodge large white vans that appear from virtually nowhere. Recently, I tried one

Tried one what? I have no idea. The Man from Porlock haunts this blog. I speak of Sam Coleridge, composing poetry. (The blog entry on FREEFALL opened with a reference to Coleridge. Must be something in the air.)

   In Xanadu did Coleridge write. Until his epic poem was interrupted by a knock at the door. Enter Porlock Man, who engaged Coleridge in banter that has gone missing from the history books. The poem Kubla Khan ends with the milk of Paradise because Porlock Man broke Coleridge’s chain of thought.

   My blogging was interrupted by a telephone call from the Red Queen. She almost appears in Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords. If I’m not hit by a white van, she’ll feature in other stories. Though SOURCES OF INSPIRATION ARE MEANINGLESS, that particular source of inspiration is meaningful. I’m unexpectedly forced to blog about the Red Queen.

   Next time. For now, I am left wondering what I recently tried. I know I tried one. Something tells me I didn’t try two. Maybe I did. Who knows? Damn the Man from Porlock. Robbing us of the rest of that poem. Damn the Red Queen? Never. My writing has no lasting literary worth, and whatever I was about to say is lost, shot to hell, without a scrap of thought for its importance.

   The Red Queen works her magic, and all is right with the world. For the first time in my life, I speak about the unspeakable topic that I consider unleashing on my blog. She thinks everything will be fine. It’s a vote of confidence that tips the balance in favour of open discussion. Stay tuned.

   To end, I’d just like to add this. Recently, I tried one. Good job I wasn’t killed after writing that, as I haven’t left instructions for dealing with the rest of the sentence. I wonder what it was I tried. Can’t have been important. Unless it was.

NEXT BLOG: WON’T BE ABOUT TRYING ONE.