Go Set a Watchman is a nasty surprise for Harper Lee fans

David Sexton reviews the long-awaited parent book of To Kill A Mockingbird.
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill A Mockingbird (Picture: AP Photo)
AP Photo
David Sexton17 July 2015

PLENTY of ageing authors have disastrously tried to revive their best characters long after they first appeared. For example, in 1963, Evelyn Waugh published a terrible novella called Basil Seal Rides Again, recalling a character last seen in Put Out More Flags of 1942, which he sadly but correctly admitted to be “a senile attempt to recapture the manner of my youth”. It only damaged his reputation.

Yet there has perhaps never been as strange a case as Go Set a Watchman. For although it is effectively a very late sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, presenting its heroine Scout (Jean Louise Finch), her father Atticus Finch and the small town of Maycomb, Alabama, in a setting some 20 years after that of the original, it was actually written before it. So in some ways it has prior authority. It could just be the truer story, the ur-text.

Harper Lee originally submitted the manuscript of this book, her debut novel, apparently then called just Atticus, set in the mid-1950s with a heroine aged 26, to an editor called Tay Hohoff at the publisher JB Lippincott & Co in 1957. Recognising the flashbacks to Scout’s girlhood in the mid-1930s as the heart of the story, Hohoff persuaded her to rework the text completely, setting it back into that period when Scout was just a kid, no more than six at the start, and giving her the whole narrative to voice, in the first person, not the third. Editorial genius, this. These changes helped create that iridescently nostalgic work which so many people around the world have come to feel deeply nostalgic about themselves, having first read it when young.

The classic that we know as To Kill a Mockingbird was published to immediate acclaim in 1960, when Harper Lee was just 33, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and by 1962 had been made into the terrific film starring Gregory Peck. Lee then published nothing else for 55 years — 55 years! — while the book grew steadily in stature and sales. She gave no interviews after 1964. In 2007, on being given yet another award in Alabama, she said only: “Well, it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.”

In 2014 her lawyer discovered the typescript of Go Set a Watchman, formerly thought to be no more than an early draft of Mockingbird, in a safe-deposit box. This year Lee, now 89, nearly blind and deaf after a 2007 stroke and living in an assisted facility back in her home town of Monroeville, the real life Maycomb, agreed to its publication, which she had never suggested in all those years of health and mental competence while she lived in New York. She can hardly have forgotten its existence, though, can she?

Whatever the explanation, the splashy publication of this new book is certainly going to impair, not enhance, her reputation. That’s a shame, since it couldn’t have stood higher before it appeared, what with both George W Bush and Barack Obama presenting her with medals, Oprah Winfrey proclaiming To Kill a Mockingbird “our national novel” and sales continuing at a million copies a year.

The cry has instantly gone up that Atticus Finch, that archetype of heroic and impartial justice — “My gosh, did I want a dad like Atticus!,” said Winfrey — has been revealed to be a racist. And it’s true, it’s undeniable. He is, here, by any current definition of racism whatsoever, racist. Funnily enough, it was that stately galleon of political correctness, the Guardian, that bought the rights to serialise the book’s first chapter and run an embargo-breaking first review. As a prize poisoned chalice, that’ll take some beating. The paper’s readers have reacted with consternation, some insisting it must be a hoax or a fake, others proclaiming that, come what may, they will never read it, to protect their precious memories, or, as it might be, cherished illusions. Twitter’s really upset too, howling that it’s like discovering Santa’s a psycho.

No less damaging in some ways, though, is the realisation of how much less well-written GSAW is than TKAM. The prose is clunky and the structure all over the place, being more a collection of autobiographical anecdotes than a purposeful novel. Although conventionally narrated in the third person, it sometimes slips into a mish-mash of the first and second.

Jean Louise (“Scout” as she was known as a child) comes back from New York to Maycomb to stay for two weeks with her 72-year-old father Atticus, now crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and being looked after by his bossy sister, Alexandra. After Scout’s brother Jem (a main character in TKAM) died young from the inherited heart condition that also killed their mother, Atticus has unofficially adopted as a son, and his protégé in his legal practice, a poor local boy, Henry “Hank” Clinton, who is in love with Jean Louise and wants to marry her.

Harper Lee in 1957
Random House

Jean Louise, although fond enough of Hank, dreads the prospect of small-town life and is generally pretty rude and grumpy about what she finds in Maycomb, including the more distant relations between the races these days, changed by growing civil rights campaigning and the 1954 Supreme Court decision that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

Then she discovers that both Atticus and Hank are themselves shockingly racist, watching them, in the same Maycomb courtroom as in Mockingbird, indeed from the same “coloured balcony”, participating in a white supremacist meeting, “The Maycomb Citizen’s Council”. She’s so upset that she’s physically sick, repeatedly, and she believes Atticus has “betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly”.

The book culminates in protracted, only slightly dramatised debates between Jean Louise and Hank, and her clever Uncle Jack, and finally Atticus himself, in which it is explained, very offensively to current sensibilities, why race equality in the South is not such a simple matter as campaigners in the North suppose. Interspersed with this main plot are digressive, flashback stories of Jean Louise’s earlier years, such as a comic problem she had with falsies at the high-school prom and the time she thought a kiss had made her pregnant.

Two questions, then. How is the qualitative difference between the two books to be explained? Perhaps Tay Hohoff was even more ruthless and creative an editor than Gordon Lish was, it turned out, for Raymond Carver? Perhaps.

But I think there is another explanation: Truman Capote. Capote, two years older than Harper Lee, owned that she was his best friend in childhood in Monroeville and freely acknowledged that he was the character Dill in Mockingbird (Dill scarcely appears in this new book, just passingly remembered as having “the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat” but said to be in Italy). It’s been generally accepted that Capote helped Harper Lee with her writing but it is not known precisely to what extent.

In George Plimpton’s 1998 book about Capote there is a very telling story from another childhood friend. She remembers that one hot day they all three went into Harper Lee’s father’s office at home. “There was an old typewriter on the desk in the room, and Nelle [Harper Lee] grabbed some paper and put it in the typewriter. Truman started telling a story, and while he talked Nelle typed it.” Perhaps that dynamic never entirely changed? So much in Mockingbird, not only fey Dill himself but the boyish girl Scout too, seems in Capote’s vein.

In later life, Capote — who provided what now seems rather a sly jacket quote for Mockingbird, “someone rare has written this very fine novel” —became increasingly irritated that Lee won a Pulitzer and he never did. Perhaps she could have acknowledged him more generously, as Eliot did Pound for his help with The Waste Land (il miglior fabbro)? Plimpton, incidentally, contented himself with noting merely: “Astonishing that two writers of such world renown had come out of a small town two hours of hard driving from any place one had ever heard of.” Astonishing, indeed.

Second question: accepting that the fictional character Atticus is racist, is the book itself also unacceptably racist, given how strongly Jean Louise repudiates him for it, at least until the very end? Tricky. For it’s not what the town’s ordinary people say, however ugly, it’s what Atticus says and Jean Louise accepts, that’s most problematic.

“You realize that our Negro population is backward, don’t you? You will concede that? You realize the full implications of the word ‘backward’, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You realize that the vast majority of them here in the South are unable to share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship and why?”

“Yes sir.”

…“Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?... Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?”

And so forth. Jean Louise presents herself as having been “born color blind”, telling locals that it’s all very different in New York: “I don’t know that a great big fat Negro man’s been sitting beside me on a bus until I get up to leave. You just don’t notice it.”

In her big peroration, our heroine tells the hard-liner Atticus: “We’ve agreed that they’re backward, that they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one thing and we never will. You deny that they’re human… They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”

Then she suggests a simple practical measure. Change has to be slow, she knows. “I wonder what would happen if the South had a ‘Be Kind to Niggers Week’?” Not one for the Guardian, perhaps.

Last question. If you value Harper Lee, should you read Go Set a Watchman? Yes, I’m afraid so, unless you want to play the ostrich.

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee (Heinemann, £18.99)

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in