The recent deaths of Umberto Eco and Harper Lee throw into contrast the modern literatures of Europe and the United States in an interesting way.
Umberto Eco (84) made his name overnight as a novelist with the publications in 1980 of The Name of the Rose, a sort of medieval Sherlock Holmes tale, which carried a heavy burden of symbolic nuances.
Eco’s imagination was suffused by philosophy, religious ideas and morality – hence the elaborate medieval scenery of The Name of the Rose, a novel which introduced many readers to the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages.
His Italian publisher printed some 30,000 copies of the first edition, which Eco himself thought wildly wrong: eventually it became a worldwide success selling 10 million copies.
Not everyone loved it. L’Osservatore Romano said it was a “narrative calamity that deforms, desecrates, and offends the meaning of faith” – a criticism which in an odd way was shared to some extent by more secular critics as Eco played further games with history, scholarship and philosophy in his later books.
Eco, who kept some 30,000 volumes in his Milan apartment, with another 20,000 in his Urbino manor house, was a literary man to his core. He was much in demand as a commentator on all sorts of topics, and as semiologist he was only too delighted to oblige editors around the world. Though later novels received attention, they were never as successful as the first one.
His sixth novel, The Prague Cemetery (2010), about The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-semitic hoax of the Tsarist secret service, dismayed many because of the foul-mouthed attacks on Jews by some of the characters.
L’Osservatore Romano was again dismissive: “Forced to read disgusting things about the Jews, the reader remains tainted.” The critic thought too that is was possible that some readers might think them true, a fear others shared. Others thought it his best novel since The Name of the Rose.
By contrast to this European uber-intellectual, Harper Lee (89) was a model of provincial modesty. She too sprang to fame with an immediate best seller, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960. This too became a worldwide bestseller, eventually a total of 30 million copies worldwide. It became in many English speaking countries a popular classroom text for schools, and must have been read by nearly every child in the US.
Success
After this major success she returned to her native town Monroeville, Alabama, from New York, and settled into a quiet life. She claimed her favourite reading was the lives of Victorian clergy men.
But she was not a recluse. Between 1960 and 1966 she assisted her friend Truman Capote – they had been such since childhood in Monroeville – to research a Kansas mass-murder for his “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood.
The infant Capote is the model for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird, while Idabel Thompkins in Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), is based on Harper Lee.
The recent controversy over Miss Lee’s “new” novel Go Set a Watchman – a first and very different draft of her material which many feel should never have been published – sees the quietly heroic Atticus Finch altered into a bigot – a sort of betrayal of Mockingbird many thought, but this is because they want to see the first book in a context of Black civil rights.
However the childhoods of Harper Lee and Truman Capote belong to another world, better found in the Boo Radley passages of Mockingbird and in Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and his second, The Grass Harp (1951), which can best be characterised as “Southern Gothic”.
Harper Lee is true part of American literature, in which the touchstone is real life. How different this from Umberto Eco, who seems in his allusive manner so anciently wise, yet may only be intellectually elusive.
It is only with the death of an artist that their careers can be seen whole. One suspects in the cases of Umberto Eco and Harper Lee, readers will still be arguing about, and perhaps still enjoying, their writings a century from now.