Maverick Life

Maverick Life

The Book Corner: Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is both an instant bestseller and a controversy

The Book Corner: Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is both an instant bestseller and a controversy

The publication of Go Set a Watchman has triggered debate over author Harper Lee’s real intentions with this work, even as critics line up to take a shot at the book as it defiles the myth of Atticus Finch. J BROOKS SPECTOR has read it and offers some initial thoughts.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has been one of those charmed events that comes along only rarely for a novelist – any novelist. When it was first published in 1960, it was almost instantly hailed as a masterpiece. The film made of the book featured Gregory Peck in the role of a lifetime – offering a perfect embodiment of Atticus Finch, the white southern lawyer who takes on the defence of Tom Robinson, a black man wrongfully charged with the rape of a young white woman, even though their entire town of Maycomb, Alabama, is dead-set on having Robinson convicted for this heinous crime. Seen through the eyes of Finch’s preternaturally thoughtful, observant young daughter, Scout, the book has sold more than 40-million copies in numerous languages, as many more millions of students and adult readers have made the acquaintanceship of the Finches – as well as the evils of the South’s segregationist universe and the bravery of an honest man.

For decades, readers learned to treat Mockingbird with the kind of love and respect that goes with any truly precious, even unique, artistic creation. Author Harper Lee was understood to have put down her pen after this work was completed and to have gone on living quietly with her sister in their hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, the small town that was the model for the fictional Maycomb. But eventually there were rumours that Lee had written more than just this unique, slim, but compelling novel – a work that had set out the social evils – and how they needed to be combated – of southern segregation and the human degradation that inevitably came out of that system.

A few years ago, certain rumours began to emerge: there was a second Harper Lee novel and some day readers would have a chance to see it. Maybe. As things happened, there was a second manuscript, not quite an entirely new novel but not quite a separate work either. Instead, it was apparently the original manuscript novice novelist Harper Lee had submitted to her editor back in the 1950s, and this manuscript had been attached to a copy of the eventual Mockingbird manuscript and had been kept, seemingly forgotten, in a file cabinet for decades. Way back when her editor, Tay Hohoff, had read this first text, she had advised Lee to shift the focus and perspective of the work away from the more straightforward descriptive novel of Atticus Finch’s life Lee had first written. Instead, Lee should extract the sections that had been written from Scout’s vantage point and then structure the novel entirely around that crucial change of perspective and attitude.

Years later, when Lee’s sister and lifelong attorney had passed away, and the author was now increasingly frail and in a nursing home, publishers HarperCollins obtained the rights to the second (or first, depending how one looks at things) manuscript and whipped it into shape as a “new” novel – and sequel to Mockingbird. This book was entitled Go Set a Watchman from the biblical quote from Isaiah that winds through the book as a cautionary note. While some in the literary community were truly eager to get their hands on this work, there are those who see a rather more awkward set of developments here, along with the mean-spirited hand of Rupert Murdock in manufacturing a faux literary event. Joe Nocera recently wrote about all of this in the New York Times and it is worth quoting at length:

So perhaps it’s not too late after all to point out that the publication of Go Set a Watchman constitutes one of the epic money grabs in the modern history of American publishing. The Ur-fact about Harper Lee is that after publishing her beloved novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960, she not only never published another book; for most of that time she insisted she never would. Until now, that is, when she’s 89, a frail, hearing- and sight-impaired stroke victim living in a nursing home. Perhaps just as important, her sister Alice, Lee’s longtime protector, passed away last November. Her new protector, Tonja Carter, who had worked in Alice Lee’s law office, is the one who brought the “new novel” to HarperCollins’s attention, claiming, conveniently, to have found it shortly before Alice died.

If you have been following The Times’s clear-eyed coverage, you know that Carter participated in a meeting in 2011 with a Sotheby’s specialist and Lee’s former agent, in which they came across the manuscript that turned out to be Go Set a Watchman. In The Wall Street Journal (a Murdock property) — where else? — Carter put forth the preposterous claim that she walked out of that meeting early on and never returned, thus sticking with her story that she only discovered the manuscript in 2014.

But the others in the meeting insisted to The Times that she was there the whole time — and saw what they saw: the original manuscript that Lee turned in to Tay Hohoff, her editor. Hohoff, who appears to have been a very fine editor indeed, encouraged her to take a different tack. After much rewriting, Lee emerged with her classic novel of race relations in a small Southern town. Thus, The Time’s account suggests an alternate scenario: that Carter had been sitting on the discovery of the manuscript since 2011, waiting for the moment when she, not Alice, would be in charge of Harper Lee’s affairs.

That’s issue No 1. Issue No 2 is the question of whether Go Set a Watchman is, in fact, a “newly discovered” novel, worthy of the hoopla it has received, or whether it something less than that: a historical artefact or, more bluntly, a not-very-good first draft that eventually became, with a lot of hard work and smart editing, an American classic.

But again, an alternative scenario suggests itself. Lee has said that she wanted to write a race novel. Though her first effort had some fine writing, like many first-time novelists she also made a lot of beginners’ mistakes: scenes that don’t always add up, speeches instead of dialogue, and so on. So she took a character who was a racist in the first draft and turned him into the saintly lawyer Atticus Finch, who stands up to his town’s bigotry in defending a black man. He becomes the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird.” (Which is also why it’s silly to view the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman as the same person as the Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, as many commentators have done. Atticus is a fictional character, not a real person.) Lee still wound up with a race novel, which was her goal. But a different and much better one.”

Especially given the contested origins tale of Go Set a Watchman now in play, a sense of the actual book’s merits is crucial. Like so many other books that represent voyages of discovery over the real meanings of things, those voices from behind the curtain, Watchman begins with a journey home from the big city up north and as a voyage back in time to recover what was half forgotten. Jeanne Louise, the young career woman who was the young girl Scout in Mockingbird, finally reaches Maycomb after an overnight journey by train where she is reunited with her now aging father, Atticus; a lifelong friend and might-be suitor Henry Clinton, now working as a junior attorney with her father; her aunt Alexandra who is now matron of Atticus’s home; her eccentric physician uncle Jack; and Calpurnia, the long-time domestic servant for the Finches, and all the other denizens of a typical mid-century southern town.

Events in Jeanne Louise/Scout’s short, tumultuous visit home quickly undo her carefully constructed and carefully nurtured illusions about her town, her father, and her friend Henry, as her visit comes amidst the early years of the American civil rights struggle in the Deep South. She has a thoroughly disconcerting, picaresque coffee morning with women of her town as they voice the clichés of communists and African Americans plotting to take over the South and mongrelise the races. Such encounters increasingly unhinge Jeanne Louise’s sense of who and where she is, now that she is home.

She surreptitiously follows Atticus and sees both her father and her would-be fiancé participating in a meeting of their town’s White Citizens’ Council – that more genteel, white-gloved version of the Ku Klux Klan and a particularly vulgar, race-baiting speaker thoroughly nauseates her with his speech. Leading out from these events, Jeanne Louise eventually forces an acrimonious confrontation with her father as she attempts to reconcile what appears to her to be two irreconcilable sides of his mind and soul. One is the saintly advocate of moral virtue and truth from her childhood memories, while the other is a defender of small town racism, disguised as the urge for stability in an increasingly unstable social and political landscape.

The key to this puzzle is that in Watchman, the fictional but now older Atticus Finch is trying to come to terms with a South that has now moved well beyond the older verities from the 1930s. That was a time where blacks knew their place at the bottom of the heap, as did the “white trash” sharecroppers and working men just above them. And the whole system was lorded over by a small caste of patrician whites who held the reins of control over that largely agrarian economy, like medieval lords of the manor. In that society, Atticus Finch could be Scout’s “saint”, defending a man from a dreadful judicial wrong while demonstrating resolute virtue, morality, and rectitude. But the Atticus Finch the adult Jeanne Louise encounters is sitting atop a volcano poised to erupt. He knows it, but as age and weariness have crept in, Finch has less and less strength to control the tectonic changes under way, save by aligning himself with the bigots of Maycomb’s White Citizens’ Council to hold the old order intact for a while longer, until Maycomb’s black residents can embrace a more civilised way of life.

Despite its flaws as a work of narrative fiction, what with its sometimes clunky dialogue, its didactic, polemic speeches masquerading as conversation, and sudden, even explained plot turns, Go Set a Watchman, more than To Kill a Mockingbird, actually fits neatly into the distinctive, southern literary tradition of the 20th century. Watchman begins in much the same way as Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece, All the King’s Men, with a journey back to origins. And that book, too, is about the decay of a patrician social class in a southern state.

Similarly, many of the stories in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County function as acrid portrayals of the decay of that old patrician class, with its increasingly desperate desire to hold onto the last shreds of the old order. And other southern “agrarian” writers of the 1930s and 1940s also looked longingly back to a time when the old order had not yet passed away under the pressure of population migrations, the first stirrings of the nation’s civil rights revolution, growing industrialisation, and post-war societal upheavals – all in ways that would have been deeply familiar to this now-older Atticus Finch and to Henry Clinton as well.

Kathryn Stockett’s book The Help, and the critically acclaimed film made from it recently, also offer an acid-tongued version of this southern patrician world, right at the moment the civil rights revolution is about to strike. And even Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, what with its pastoral fantasy of an antebellum southern life in 1861, could be read as a precursor to the dilemmas and predicaments that have finally come home to roost for a now elderly Atticus Finch in Watchman.

For readers who find it important to absorb a writer’s entire oeuvre – like Charles Dickens’ vast shelf of tales of an early Victorian England being shaken by the growing power industrialisation, or George Orwell’s fist-shaking over the terrors of the state against the solitary man – Watchman helps deliver a much more nuanced portrait of Atticus Finch well beyond what readers found in Mockingbird. He is no longer the popularly embraced saint or god who walks on Earth.

In truth, legal scholar Monroe Freedman had written an article in Legal Times back in 1992 that argued that Finch had simply upheld due process, and had done nothing to challenge the oppressive prevailing racial inequality or all-encompassing segregation. Not surprisingly, given the success of book and film, this contrary view had been poorly accepted by Mockingbird’s multitudes of fans.

However, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy, in writing about Lee’s “new” volume, says: “Dismissed by some as the ravings of a curmudgeon, Freedman’s impression of Atticus Finch has now been largely ratified by none other than his creator, Harper Lee herself. The most dramatic feature of her ‘new’ novel, Go Set a Watchman — written before To Kill a Mockingbird but published 55 years afterward — is the revelation that Atticus, the supposed paragon of probity, courage and wisdom, was a white supremacist.” Kennedy adds that with the emergence of this “new” book, “Go Set a Watchman demands that its readers abandon the immature sentimentality ingrained by middle school lessons about the nobility of the white saviour and the mesmerising performance of Gregory Peck in the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird”.

Now, with the publication of this uneven but compelling sequel novel, Atticus Finch, regardless of the machinations of just how the book has become a global bestseller in a matter of days, has now acquired a whole collection of character flaws, prejudices, fears of an uncertain future, and an awkward assortment of night terrors. In the process, warts and all, Finch has become that much more human for readers. DM

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee, ISBN 9781785150289, published by Penguin Random House in the UK, and HarperCollins in the US.

For more on this book, read:

  • At the bar; to attack a lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird: An iconoclast takes aim at a hero in the New York Times;

  • Atticus Finch – right and wrong, from the Hofstra University Law School;

  • Racist Atticus Finch has a lesson for Jews at The Forward;

  • The Harper Lee ‘Go Set a Watchman’ fraud at the New York Times;

  • Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee review – a literary curiosity at the Guardian;

  • Sweet Home Alabama – Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, a review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker;

  • Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee: review of reviews at the Telegraph;

  • Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’, a review article by Randall Kennedy in the New York Times.

Gallery

Please peer review 3 community comments before your comment can be posted

We would like our readers to start paying for Daily Maverick...

…but we are not going to force you to. Over 10 million users come to us each month for the news. We have not put it behind a paywall because the truth should not be a luxury.

Instead we ask our readers who can afford to contribute, even a small amount each month, to do so.

If you appreciate it and want to see us keep going then please consider contributing whatever you can.

Support Daily Maverick→
Payment options

Become a Maverick Insider

This could have been a paywall

On another site this would have been a paywall. Maverick Insider keeps our content free for all.

Become an Insider