At last--Harper Lee is giving us another masterpiece

Fifty-five years after “To Kill A Mockingbird” Lee's second novel “Go set a watchman” is coming out in July. It's already No. 1 on the Amazon best seller list, sight unseen. It confirms something the English critic Cyril Connolly advised authors, “only write masterpieces” Easier said than done. Today it's all volume; the James Patterson-Nora Roberts machine is churning out volumes of junk that isn't as good as a single page of “Mockingbird”. I read that Lee's first novel was up for the National Book Award in 1960. It was won by a novel and an author I've never heard of which is why I detest awards of any kind. Citizen Kane didn't win an Oscar either and I'll bet you can't name the picture that beat it out. And don't get me started on the Nobel Prize for Literature. You get Wm. Golding instead of Orwell, Pearl Buck instead of Scott Fitzgerald, and mostly authors nobody has ever heard of or read. There is a cruel Euro-centric saying, “Who is the Zulu Shakespeare?” It's usually a guy who has just won the Nobel Prize. I was watching the film version of Fitzgerald's “The Last Tycoon”. There were no opening credits so I had to wait till the end to see what hack had done such a slow and turgid screenplay. It was Harold Pinter, director of the only play in London I've walked out on and, oh yeah, a Nobel Prize winner. That's the trouble with giving third parties the right to judge creative people. Woody Allen is right. If you give them the right to reward you then you've also given them the right to reject you.