Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

Go Set A Watchman

by Harper Lee

HarperCollins, 2015

ISBN: 978-0062409850

288 p.p.

It’s an intimidating task to enter into what’s becoming highly contested territory made by this book. As I anticipated the publication of Go Set A Watchman this summer, things did not look good. Many people were dismayed at the book’s characters’ acceptance of racism. What I wasn’t prepared for was—and I should have been, since this is supposedly a largely-unedited first draft originally rejected by multiple publishers—was the lack of craft in this work. It’s always hard to write a negative review, and it’s immensely harder when the review is of a 50-year-old manuscript that was mass-published when it wasn’t meant for mass consumption. What I don’t want to do is merely repeat the oft-heard lamentations that this book destroys our icon of Atticus Finch; what I do want to do in this review is explore what role this book should play in the legacy of Harper Lee.

The story itself is one of a young woman who comes home, and discovers how much has changed. It’s a narrative that feels comfortable in its discomfort. The last time Scout, now known as Jean Louise, had been home was two years previous, to bury her elder brother Jem. She’s nervous, and much of the first half of the book deals with Scout, who’s never really fit in (we knew that even when she was 8 years old in To Kill A Mockingbird), with navigating her small southern hometown, with all its expectations of propriety. It’s fun to see how the adult Scout navigates things at home no better than the child Scout did, although she seems to navigate New York City, where she lives as an adult, just fine. And it’s also exciting to see what has and what hasn’t changed in her hometown. Anyone who’s moved away from home knows that feeling—new houses, a new road, a store that’s closed—and this novel immediately speaks to a universal experience of longing and anxiety. There’s a possible beau, and an Atticus Finch, for whom infirmities of aging are beginning to get the better of him. He’s sent his daughter Jean Louise off to live in the world, to make sure she has learned how to navigate the world on her own and can survive when he’s gone. He’s clearly still the independent thinker, willing to break the iconoclasm of his small town.

When I picked up the story to read, the day it came out, I’d heard the Internet tales of woe that Atticus was a racist, and people were unhappy with the book. Nothing prepared me for my disappointment. The story devolves around the halfway point. Jean Louise has gone to the courthouse, which serves as a gathering place for the men of Maycomb. And from the Colored Gallery, where she and Jem had watched the trial of Tom Robinson in Mockingbird, Jean Louise now watches a Citizens’ Council meeting of the men of Maycomb. For those not familiar with Southern history, we’re dealing with the mid-1950s South: Brown vs. Board of Education has just been decided, and southern states would have to integrate, effectively ending the “separate but equal” facilities that were often far from equal. The Citizens’ Councils were meetings of white men dedicated to preserving white traditions, privilege, and separation. Jean Louise is surprised to see her father and suitor there. She knows the same Atticus we knew from To Kill A Mockingbird. This, though, is the seed of my disappointment: the rest of the book becomes a series of philosophical discourses with Dr. Finch, her father’s brother, her father, and her father’s sister Alexandra, along with others. It reads like a series of dogmatic speeches, and loses the character of a novel. The second half of the book is ostensibly concerned with Jean Louise making peace with people who have become less tolerant, and also with explaining how each individual has come to hold the views that they do. I’ll admit: it was hard to get through the second half of the book, because of all the varieties of racism present: from theories on evolution of the races, to the intellectual capabilities, to their moral and religious tendencies. But I want to base my review of the book on more than just philosophical ideas, although the philosophical ideas were very off-putting. And I think the big issue here is the lack of craft in the second half of this novel.

One thing which To Kill A Mockingbird does much better than Go Set A Watchman is give us a sense of Maycomb, its inhabitants, and the sense of history and identity. When reading Mockingbird again this summer, I was struck by how well the bounds of Scout’s abilities to know things as a young girl helped with the portrayal of place: we get to know her neighborhood, and each of the houses on the street. We know about the landmarks important to her, such as the courthouse, the Jitney Jungle supermarket, the school. In Watchman, the feeling is much more fragmented. Her father no longer lives in their original house, but we get no clear sense of their new location in Maycomb. If you did not already know Maycomb, you won’t get a clear sense of it in this book. Jean Louise is unmoored from these surroundings. Even at a women’s coffee, Jean Louise can’t find a group of women in the room that she feels comfortable talking to, or whose lives she cares to idly chat about. Sadly, it’s when having a philosophical discussion with her father in the second half of the book that we see Jean Louise make her connection again: but it’s in admitting that she thinks African-Americans are not yet ready to be equal to whites. And moments like this were what turned me off to the book: To Kill A Mockingbird moved forward because of the actions and events of the book; Go Set A Watchman moves through philosophical turns, rendering it a much headier and weightier and less engaging book. For someone who finds philosophical nuances to be the undergirding of strong plotting, this is a great book. For those of us who want the characters to do things, and not just talk, the second half of the book is boring.

Reading Watchman, I found myself questioning the current story of its provenance, the story that this is a draft manuscript, which was eventually rewritten and would become To Kill A Mockingbird. The received story (which, granted, has been told various ways by the lawyer and editor), is that this was the first draft of what would be greatly rewritten to become Mockingbird. In reality, there seem to be places in the narrative where it assumes we know the story of Mockingbird, and slight inconsistencies, as well as some passages that track identical in wording to the famous work. It seems a lot more complex than the received story, and at least in the form we have, seems to imply a working knowledge of Mockingbird in order to understand some relationships and past events, so it seems it might not stand as a stand-alone novel. But if it assumes a knowledge of the other novel, it couldn’t be a predecessor. So I found myself confused by whether I was reading a first draft or a later text. I’ll enjoy seeing how scholars can discern the textual history of this story as they study it further.

In many reader reactions I’ve seen, people have said they were surprised Atticus Finch was now a racist, or they felt one of their heroes of tolerance had been destroyed. I think the question of how this book’s racism differs from To Kill A Mockingbird is a side story to the issue of whether the book’s a good novel. The question of the racism really at its core has to do with how it changes our sense of Harper Lee’s legacy. Her legacy as a writer had been one of being a quiet champion of viewing all as equal. So many of us had been taught in schools to think of her central message vis-à-vis the message of Atticus Finch, the main adult of Mockingbird. We were to see her story as one in which people should be tolerant, even when others around were not. By publishing this at the end of her life, HarperCollins is trying to revise that narrative, and encourage us to see her as something else, if we still equate Atticus Finch as Harper Lee’s mouthpiece.

I find it interesting that this book, which didn’t find an audience in the 1950s, finds an audience today. It’s a book that looks very directly at racism, both overt and covert, and it deals frankly with the reasons that various white people in Maycomb give for why they do not want integration. That we’re at a stage when people need to be reminded, and often need to shout through all means possible that Black Lives Matter, suggests that the unsavoury white supremacist philosophy in the second half of the book is going to be appreciated by some readers rather than be disdained. And this is perhaps why I’m most disgusted: that the publishers would mass market a supposed draft that they thought would be the “final word” and would undo the legacy of Harper Lee, by printing a novel which seems to tarnish the reputation of her beloved characters from To Kill A Mockingbird.

A lot of people I know have asked if I’d recommend their buying the book, and I’d have to say “no.” I feel iconoclastic saying that, since To Kill A Mockingbird is, I think, one of the Great American Novels. And I think Go Set A Watchman might serve a useful tool for scholars, as a yardstick of deep south attitudes towards integration, and it might serve well for helping scholars to learn more about the textual history of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book Mockingbird, provided we can figure out which of the stories are true about its discovery. But Watchman lacks the craft of the other book, and the purposes for which I think the book is best suited are not purposes for which it needs mass marketing. I do not think the general reading public is the right audience for the book, not because of the ideas, but because mass marketing this book makes it look like this is meant to be Harper Lee’s final legacy, rather than her first attempt. I still think her legacy ought to be To Kill A Mockingbird, which she produced as a careful, thoughtful rewrite. And let’s hope that rumor of a third manuscript isn’t true.

***

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a classic of American literature and a bestselling novel since 1960. After several revisions, her novel of growing up amid social tensions in the American south was published in 1960 to great acclaim and robust sales. It won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a successful film. Although she published short pieces in magazines since Mockingbird, Lee did not publish another novel. Then in 2015 came the surprise announcement that Harper Lee's lawyer and friend Tonja Carter had found the manuscript for a sequel titled Go Set A Watchman, which Lee had written in the distant past and assumed was lost.