The Story of Books

During my trip to London in July, there were three books that I had wanted to get. They were Muse by Jonathan Galassi, Why Grow Up by Susan Neiman click and A Work in Progress  by Connor Franta.  When I entered the London Review Bookshop, I immediately spotted Muse and Why Grow Up  which were on display on top of  the table in front of the cashiers. On the last day of my stay in London, I bought Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee click and I ended up reading it before reading the non-fiction by Susan Neiman. Muse has taken me longer time than it should to finish reading  as I had not been able to give my undivided attention to it. Muse is a roman à clef   by an author who had a career in the publishing industry. Jonathan Galassi is the president and publisher of Farrar, Strass and Giroux. The novel is set against the backdrop ‘when men were men, women were women and books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers , with beautiful or not –so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell; when books furnished many a room, and their contents, the magic words, their poetry and prose , were liquor , perfume, sex, and glory to their devotees. These loyal readers were never many but they were always engaged , always audible and visible, alive to the romance of reading. Perhaps they still exist underground somewhere, bidden fanatics of the cult of the printed word….’ The story ends with the changing landscape of the traditional book trade when the books become accessible on electronic devices .  In the story, there is Ida Perkins, a poet who is made to be larger than life. The protagonist is Paul Dukach the heir apparent at Purcell & Stern, one of the last independent publishing houses in New York. He learns the ins and outs of the book world from his boss, Homer Stern and also Sterling Wainwright, Homer’s biggest rival who happens to be cousin, lover and publisher of Ida.

Paul is the youngest son and the bookworm in the family. He has a football star father and  three older brothers‘ all obsessed if only moderately talented athletes vying for the largely withheld approval of their college football star father, now the local district court judge.’

‘ As an introverted teenager desperate to escape from the rah-rah bell jar of Team Dukach, Paul had had one saving grace : Pages, the rambling, heavily stocked bookstore housed in an old brick office building on Hattersville’s run-down town square where he worked afternoons and Saturdays all through high school.  Morgan Dickerman, Pages’ owner, was  a woman of kindess and discernment, statuesque if not conventionally pretty, with prematurely graying hair; a long , elegant neck; and an assured stylishness that stood out in Hattersville , which still felt stuck in the Eisenhower era.’

Morgan is the bookseller  who first introduces  Ida Perkin’s poetry to Paul and since then Paul has read every single one of Ida’s work and eventually he meets the elusive poet who entrusts  him with the manuscript that  changes all of their lives forever.

Galassi writes,

‘Morgan was an extremely canny bookseller who’d outsmarted the chains by making Pages the heart and soul of the community in and around Hattersville. She had local and visiting authors give readings weekly; she had children’s hours on Saturdays; she was the den mother to a hundred book groups; she supplied books for events at Hattersville State and Embryon, the local private college. Besides , she was Morgan Dickerman, and people naturally gravitated to her the way Paul had (he wasn’t self-deluding enough to believe he was her only protégé , though he liked to flatter himself that he was still Number One.) So Pages was still doing all right. But some of Morgan’s perhaps less talented or less energetic colleagues were not faring nearly as well. The chain store across the square had gone out of business, too, which , paradoxically, hadn’t helped matters at Pages.’ 

Pages sounds like a delightful bookstore  to be spending Saturday afternoons . When I read Muse, I think of jazz, books and Venice.

The Winner Takes it All

When we are young, our parents tell us what the world is and that we have to accept the world as it is. When we grow up we have to face the fact that we will never get the world we want and our outlook will change. While I do not want to get cynical nor be naively idealistic, I try to adopt an open mind and attempt to see things from various angles as I believe that there are many sides to every story. Not all black is black nor white is white.

Free will is an illusion as we live in an informed world with both unsolicited and solicited information. We  live with what we have been told since infancy days. Those who manage to lead  tell the other people what they actually want. In order to progress you cannot assume that you have things all figured out as that might stifle your growth. I can never be certain of my perceptions of things nor think that I  know all about the workings of the world. All I know is one must be able to break free from  social expectations and all those rules that have been implemented by people who think they can make you think the way they want you to think. You do not necessarily know  the stuff of thought others carry in their heads and their intentions and they may not think like you. What matters is you must know the thoughts you carry in your own head and where your sentiments lie. 

We grow up and live in a world that is full of prejudices and bigotry.  I so want to  avoid acting  unjust and  be more tolerant than most people around me and  I often find myself failing in such attempts. In Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee writes, " Every man's island, Jean Louise, everyman's watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience." 

When I first read about Harper Lee’s new book and all the write up about how the character, Atticus Finch had become a different man in his old age, my first response was : “ I do not want to spoil the image of the heroic character from Mockingbird and I probably should not read Go Set a Watchman” . A couple of days  after  Watchman was launched,  I  rationalized that Atticus Finch was after all a fictitious character and  I could not possibly idolize a fictitious character. I have always been one who finds inspirations from reading fictions and I learn things from watching movies and reading fictions. Fiction writers  tell us who we are as human beings.

La Sagrada Família, Barcelona

The novel Go Set a Watchman has courted much controversy.  While I am certainly not in the position to comment about its writing, I find that the writing could do with some editing as it feels raw unlike Mockingbird that was extremely well crafted. Mockingbird moved me to tears when I read it while Watchman made me ponder. I read from the news articles that  the original manuscript now published as Watchman was first  written in the mid-1950s. The editor then persuaded Harper Lee to rewrite the story from the voice of young Jean Louise aka Scout hence To Kill a Mockingbird, the Pulitzer prize winner and the lawyer character, Atticus Finch that we came to love by reason of  the ideals he represents, integrity, kindness, a loving father and a fearless lawyer who believes in justice and fairness for all men.  In Watchman, Jean Louise Finch is now 26 years old and practises law in New York city. When she makes her annual visit to her hometown in Maycomb, she has an  awakening as she comes to know about her dad’s racist stand at a time of early civil unrest. She feels cheated and becomes hysterical when she realizes that her dad is not what he has stood for in her life. It is all a little confusing at times but as her uncle explains to Scout ,

‘Dr Finch stretched out his legs. “It’s rather complicated,” he said, “and I don’t want you to fall into the tiresome error of being conceited about your complexes-you’d bore us for the rest of our lives with that, so we’ll keep away from it. Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”

   This was news, coming from him. But let him talk, he would find his way to the nineteenth century somehow.

   “ ….now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings – I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ‘em like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers.”

      She listened to the figure on the sofa.

    “ When you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the antithesis of his conscience – your conscience –you literally could not stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You had  to kill yourself, or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a separate entity.”’

La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Dr Finch calls his niece a bigot.

‘Dr Finch bit his under lip and let it go. “ Um hum. A bigot. Not a big one, just an ordinary turnip-sized bigot.”

 Jean Louise rose and went to the bookshelves. She pulled down a dictionary and leafed through it. “ Bigot,” she read. “ Noun. One obstinately or intolerably devoted to his own church, party , belief ,  or opinion.”  Explain yourself, sir.”

‘ I was just tryin’ to answer your running question. Let me elaborate a little on that definition. What does a bigot do when he meets someone who challenges his opinions? He doesn’t give. He stays rigid. Doesn’t even try to listen, just lashes out. Now you, you were turned inside out by the granddaddy of all father things, so you ran. And how you ran.

    You’ve no doubt heard some pretty offensive talk since you’ve been home, but instead of getting on your charger and blindly striking it down, you turned and ran. You said, in effect, ‘ I don’t like the way these people do, so I have no time for them.’ You’d better take time for ‘em, honey, otherwise you’ll never grow. You ‘ll be the same at sixty as you are now – then you’ll be a case and not my niece. You have a tendency not to give anybody elbow room in your mind for their ideas, no matter how silly you think they are.’

In the book, Harper Lee describes Scout’s uncle:

‘Dr  John Hale Finch was no taller than his niece, who was five seven. His father had given him a high-bridged nose, a stern nether lip, and high cheekbones. He looked like his sister Alexander, but their physical resemblance ended at the neck : Dr Finch was spare, almost spidery; his sister was of firmer proportions. He was the reason Atticus did not marry until he was forty – when the time came for John Hale Finch to chose a profession, he chose medicine. ‘

‘Dr Finch became a bone man, practiced in Nashville,played the stock market with shrewdness, and by the time he was forty-five he had accumulated enough money to retire and devote all his time to his first and aiding love, Victorian literature, a pursuit that in itself earned him the reputation of being Maycomb County’s most leaned licensed eccentric.’

Word on the Water, London

Scout’s  uncle was  the other aging man ‘who saw her through her loneliest and most difficult hours, through the malignant limbo of turning from a howling tomboy  into a young woman.’  I can imagine that the eccentricity of the uncle can make him seem like a borderline case.  There is something else the uncle says that resonates with me .

“ Remember this also : it’s always easy to look back and see what we were, yesterday, ten years ago. It is hard to see what we are. If you can master that trick , you’ll get along.”

Though her perceptions of what her dad stands for have crushed drastically, Dr Finch shows Jean Louis that she has to figure out her own conscience and also the fact that despite all the terrible things she has said to her dad including calling him a 'double dealing, ring-tailed old son of a bitch', the love of her father remains unchanged. Nothing is absolute.  Humanity is complicated. Maybe that is what  Harper Lee is telling us. To me both To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman are  about  growing up and coming of age. There is an excellent article by Randall Kennedy under Sunday Book Review in New York Times that says  '"Go Set a Watchman" demands that its readers abandon the immature sentimentality ingrained by middle school and the film adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird"'.http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/books/review/harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman.html?emc=edit_bk_20150731&nl=books&nlid=54605499&_r=0  

Go Set a Watchman is definitely more ambitious and the constant presence of  ambivalence is real and not only in fictions. As I write this, Abba’s song ‘The winner takes it all’ is ringing in my head and next to me is the new book “Why Grow Up” written by Susan  Neiman. Go Set a Watchman is the winner of the 2015 Goodreads Choice Awards  for fiction.

Law and Order

Two friends walking through a graveyard passed by a headstone inscribed : “ Here lies a lawyer and an honest man.” They say to each other, “ Times  are  so bad that two people have to share a plot of burial ground.”

With all the lawyer jokes being spun around, admittedly lawyers are  not one of the most beloved professionals.I still remember what my primary school English teacher said. Lawyers are liars. I was only nine years old then. Until today I wonder why he said what he said, he could not have thought that the words would rhyme and I do not think that was his intention. I do not know where he is and I  only remember that  my classmates had given him a nickname “King Kong” that sounded like his real name “Kim Kong” and I cannot recall his family name. As children, we were all very much in awe of him because he was stern. I was in standard four and once he had punished me for not knowing my tenses. Perhaps if not for him, I would not have paid attention to my grammar. I do not think it is a figment of my imagination that I have his words ingrained in my brains and despite hearing what he had said, I grew up and became a lawyer.

Like every other profession, there are always good and principled people and there are also unscrupulous and dishonest  ones. Should lawyers be judged more harsh than any other person by reason of the fact that they are lawyers ? Perhaps. By reason of  their legal training, lawyers are expected to uphold the rule of law and have a strong sense of propriety. Also lawyers are  in a fiduciary position where they are often  entrusted with the power to act on behalf of and for the benefit of their respective clients, thus they owe an utmost duty of care to their clients.  Law is a business like any other businesses. The public must understand that unless you qualify for some kind of legal aid, legal services must be adequately remunerated. All too often, clients may be willing to pay exorbitant sum to physically own some material goods, they do not want to pay for services that are intangible. Most consumers are willing to pay for  some services such as health and medical services as they want to get well and stay healthy but law is the kind of services that clients would engage only when it is  absolutely necessary.

Law and DisOrder  Confessions of a Pupil Barrister  and Law and Peace  are  written by Tim Kevan who has practised as a barrister for ten years and he first created the persona BabyBarista through a blog that was subsequently turned into the book Law and Order. BabyBarista faces competition  right from  his first day, he has to win ,by foul means or fair, the sought-after prize of a tenancy in chambers.  Law and Peace is the sequel when BabyB has made it and gained tenancy in a proper barristers’ chambers and yet  he is far from “You made it Baby B…You need never worry again.” Both novels are  fictional accounts of a pupil barrister at the English Bar. Since  his pupilage, BabyB encounters unscrupulous lawyers like his first pupil master  and  he also encounters senior lawyers with decency and integrity like the characters, OldRuin and TheBusker. The pupil barrister’s journal is hilarious and there is more than a kernel of truth in the stories.

In the epigraph of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee quoted Charles Lamb   : “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”.

 

Tim Kevan  also quoted Charles Lamb:“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”. in the epigraph of Law and DisOrder.

Being a lawyer is not an easy job. If only the general public could appreciate that lawyers were once children too. Hence they are just as human and flawed  as every one else on this planet. We also meet shifty characters, various kinds of individuals, financial institutions and corporations which definitely only have their own interest and profit margin in mind.  We have got to be even handed when dealing with these clients.

Supertrees, Singapore

Juggling Words

Colosseum or Coliseum also known as the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome

What do lawyers do? As we juggle words and shuffle papers, we render our services in helping  our clients to get out of whatever legal troubles they land themselves in and carry out their endeavours by obeying the law.

A woman walked into the office half an hour before our office closed. She needed some legal advice. I decided to see her as I thought that should not take long. As it turned out , I had to ask one of my staff to stay back to type a letter and photocopy the documents which she had brought with her. These days, I find that I have become less independent at work in the sense that I no longer wish to attend to the clerical part of the work. The woman’s problem was to do with her husband’s and as he  had suffered a stroke, she had to deal with a legal problem  that  was to do with a property that he had rented out years ago. After listening to her story for some twenty minutes, I told her that in order to stop the execution proceedings that are already set in motion, it would be practical to offer a good sum of money as ex-gratia payment to the claimant that happened to be the Electricity Board. She had brought along all the necessary documents and it was apparent from those documents  that  they had engaged a solicitor as soon as they got wind of what the tenant had done before absconding years ago. Notwithstanding the correspondences between the previous solicitor and the Electricity Board, the latter had gone ahead and obtained the judgment without the couple’s knowledge. Even though she claimed that the  electricity had been tampered with by her previous tenant, as the subscriber for the particular account, her husband would be liable to settle the outstanding charges for all intents and purposes. I could tell that she was not a push over though she acted like she was just a housewife who needed legal advice and she was apologetic. That reminds me of another incident where the wife had acted like she was merely taking instructions from the husband and that her husband would be very furious with her if she had not executed the instructions given by the husband properly. I could not recall what exactly happened in my other case but all I remember was that it had left a bad taste in my mouth and yet I never learnt simply because I believe that it is our professional duty to render legal help to these ordinary folks.

When I asked the woman how she ended up walking into my firm, she said she happened to be in the vicinity when she went to the bank a few doors from our office and she decided to walk into our firm. As we were preparing the letter for her, one of my office partners returned to the office after a meeting. When I saw that they acknowledged each other, I asked her why she had not mentioned that she knew my partner. Later on I found out from my partner that he had already handled a couple of matters for her. Maybe I should give the woman the benefit of the doubt that  she was just confused. While I do find that clients do not  usually give you the complete picture, I still feel that it was quite unnecessary for her to be evasive about how she ended up coming to our firm for consultation. She must have figured out that since my partner said he would not be available  on that day, she did not have to mention the fact that she knew and had consulted one of our firm lawyers on other matters before. To me, all these are tell tale signs as to whether a client is being completely honest with you. I
became less sympathetic to her plight upon knowing that she had not been completely honest with me.

To Kill a Mocking-bird is  a book that I had been meaning to read for years . There is a copy of the novel sitting on one of the bookshelves in my house and my husband tells me that the book belongs to me. I cannot remember buying the book. As a bibliophile, I have not read all the books that I have  bought  over the years and with a few exceptions, I usually  remember having bought them. Anyway I was very glad that I finally got round to reading the book at the end of my recent trip. When I finished reading the novel on board the flight home , I was touched and moved to tears. I  wonder  whether the story would have affected me as much as the present if I had read it before I started practising law. The author, Harper Lee is indeed a very good story teller. She gradually led us into the story through the voice of Scout Finch who had recalled her growing up years in Maycomb when she  and her brother  who was four years her senior were both children. While the core of the story is about racial injustice,the author painstakingly took us through the scenes and the characters in  Maycomb to help us understand the neighbourhood and their inhabitants. Atticus Finch is a widower and he had to single handedly bring up two young children with the help of Calpurnia, their cook who had been with the family since Jem Finch was born. Lemonade in the morning was a summer-time ritual for their household as Calpunia would set a pitcher  and appeared in the front door and yelled  ‘Lemonade time ! You all get in outa that hot sun ‘fore you fry alive!’ Scout had felt her tyrannical presence as long as she could remember and Atticus always took the side of Calpunia and  ‘Atticus said Calpurnia had more education than most coloured folks.’  Atticus played and read to his children , and treated them with courteous detachment.

 

‘Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself’  is  how Lee describes Maycomb.

‘ Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it . In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the court- house sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering  shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were life soft tea-cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.’

Atticus went to Montgomery to read law and returned to Maycomb to begin his practice after being admitted to the bar. His first two clients were the last two persons hanged in the Maycomb County jail . As there was nothing much Atticus could do for his clients who refused the state’s generous offer to escape the gallows if they pleaded guilty to second- degree murder, he had a distaste for the practice of criminal law. He practised economy more than anything. Scout started going to school and one day,  someone in school announced that Scout Finch’s daddy defended niggers so she had to ask Atticus.

“‘Do you defend niggers, Atticus?’ I asked him that evening.

‘Of course I do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.’

‘’s what everybody at school says.’

‘From now on it’ll be everybody less one – ‘

‘ Well if you don’t want me to grow up talkin’ that way, why do you send me to school?’’

Scout had wanted to avoid school but her dad would not let her quit school as it was the law. She had a profound distaste for school since the first day of school when the teacher discovered that she could read and her teacher had ordered that she should ask her dad to stop teaching her to read.

Atticus explained to Scout about why he had to defend Tom Robinson.

‘Atticus sighed.

“I am simply defending a Negro – his name’s Tom Robinson. He lives in that little settlement beyond the town dump.  He’s a member of Calpurnia’s church, and Cal knows his family ell. She says they ‘re clean –living folks. Scout, you aren’t old enough to understand some things yet, but there’s been some high talk around town to the effect that I shouldn’t do much about defending his man. It’s a peculiar case-it won’t come to trial until summer session. John Taylor was kind enough to give us a postponement…’

“ If you shouldn’t be defendin’ him, then why are you doin’ it ?’

For a number of reasons, he told Scout.

 ‘ Because I could never ask you to mind me again. Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine, I guess. You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for me if you will :you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change….it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.’

‘ Atticus, are we going to win it?’

‘No , honey.’

‘Then why-’

‘Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,’ Atticus said.

…….

‘Come here, Scout,’ said Atticus. I crawled into his lap and tucked my head under his chin. He put his arms around and rocked me gently. ‘It’s different this time,’ he said.’ This time we aren’t fighting the Yankees, we’re fighting our friends. But remember this , no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends and this is still our home.’

The character, Atticus Finch is inspiring and his courage and principles are what  everyone of us must try to  emulate and uphold.The story is brilliantly told.