37: Harper Lee & Gregory Peck: When Two Destinies Meet

37 

Harper Lee & Gregory Peck

When Two Destinies Meet

“For thus hath the Lord said unto me,

Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he sees.”

Isaiah 21: 6      

          Harper Lee, the author of what has been considered to be one of the ten best novels of the century (some have even declared To Kill a Mockingbird the best novel ever written, which is a presumption I could never live with despite how much I love the story), has followed up her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel 55 years later with Go Set a Watchman, which Harper Lee has called the “parent” of To Kill a Mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird was made into a movie, starring Gregory Peck as the lawyer Atticus Finch who defended a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, for which he won an Oscar and helped to immortalize Harper Lee’s classic 1960 novel of racial injustice that sold 40 million copies, translated into 40 languages, and taught in schools throughout the world; but the saintly image of Atticus Finch has been tarnished by Lee’s sequel, because young Scout’s father Atticus Finch turns out to be a bigot and a racist in Go Set a Watchman.

But whatever the back story may be for Harper Lee’s sequel—one being that it was her first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird which the publishers rejected but which her insightful editor at J. B. Lippincott Company that finally bought it, Teresa von Hohoff Torrey, known professionally as Tay Hohoff, guided the 31 year old Nelle, as Harper Lee was called, into rewriting Go Set a Watchman, which she miraculously transformed into her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird—I got a vision the other day as I read the early reviews of Go Set a Watchman that Harper Lee’s destiny beckoned her to write To Kill a Mockingbird as a warning to the world of man’s hypocrisy and cruelty, which in turn beckoned Gregory Peck to immortalize the imagery of her prophetic novel in the movie that gave society an archetypal ideal in Atticus Finch that helped to further raise social consciousness on racial injustice that continues to rear its ugly head in the Southern States today, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird was published; and that’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing. 

There’s always a back story to the lives of people of destiny, like the now classic story of Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin, which I’m going to relate simply to lend credibility to my vision the other day that Harper Lee and Gregory Peck were destined to meet to serve humanity with their individual talents, Lee with her gift for writing and Peck with his gift for acting, because I now believe that as free as we may be to choose the life we live our life is also chosen for us for a higher purpose—as I tried to illustrate with Gregory Peck's life in my spiritual musing “When We’re Ready, Life Comes Calling.”

Winston Churchill was a man of destiny. He even boasted at an early age that he was destined to lead England one day; but he didn’t come to his destiny lightly. This suggests to me that the greater one’s destiny, the greater the price one pays to serve the gods, which life seems to bear out when we study the lives of people who have changed the course of history.

So the story goes that a poor Scottish famer named Fleming while trying to eke out a humble living on his farm one day heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the boy from what could have been a slow and horrible death.

The next day a fancy carriage pulled up to the farmer’s humble abode, and an elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy that farmer Fleming had saved. The nobleman expected to pay the farmer for saving his son’s life, but the humble Scottish farmer replied, “No, I can’t accept payment for what I did.”

Just then the farmer’s son came to the door, and the nobleman asked the farmer if that was his son. “Yes” replied farmer Fleming.

“I’ll make you a deal,” said the nobleman. “Let me provide him with a level of education my son will enjoy. If the lad is anything like his father, he’ll no doubt grow to be a man we both will be proud of.”

And he did. Farmer Fleming’s son attended the best schools and graduated from St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London, and he went on to be known throughout the world as Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin.

Years later, the same nobleman’s son who was saved from the bog was stricken with pneumonia. What saved his life this time was Penicillin. The name of the nobleman was Lord Randolph Churchill; and his son’s name, Sir Winston Churchill, the savior of England.

Destiny works in mysterious ways, and it played as mysterious a role in the lives of Harper Lee and Gregory Peck as it did in the lives of the humble Scottish farmer and his fortunate son Alexander and Lord Randolph  Churchill and his valiant son Winston.

Winston Churchill was called by destiny to lead England to victory in WW2, and Harper Lee was called to write To Kill a Mockingbird which idealized the best in human nature in the humble lawyer Atticus Finch, and Gregory Peck was destined to play the role of the good and decent lawyer who inspired millions to a higher purpose and epitomized his career, starting with the Oscar that he won for Atticus Finch who was named by the American Film Institute as the greatest film hero of all time.

But in Go Set a Watchman Atticus Finch’s noble character is gravely infected, because Harper Lee has Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who lives in New York City, return to her hometown in Alabama at the age of 26 to visit her father, who is 72 and crippled with arthritis, but only to learn that her hero father, the most potent moral force in her life and only person she ever trusted, has become a racist bigot, which shatters her reality and breaks her tender heart; but that’s another story for another musing, if and when all the dust that Go Set a Watchman has stirred up ever settles. 

───