HARPER LEE
WHEN IT WAS ANNOUNCED IN FEBRUARY THAT A “NEW” Harper Lee novel had been “discovered,” called Go Set a Watchman, there followed the expected gale of media giddiness, the widespread convulsions of joy, a gyrating and ejaculating all across the Net. Pulling up alongside the jubilant ones were the judicious ones, those who questioned how such a thing came to pass, how the publicity-shyest author on earth, she who vowed never to publish another novel after her spirit was jolted by the galactic success of her debut, she who fled Manhattan for the asylum of her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, how this monastically private writer agreed—in her eighty-ninth year, post-stroke, confined to an assisted-living establishment—to bless the reading world with what was clearly the first, failed draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. During the initial sortie of coverage in February, a Newsweek headline bellowed “Friends Say Harper Lee Was Manipulated,” but you didn’t need that deflating headline or any other because you already had those unignorable inner murmurs: they were your conscience saying that something is rotten in Monroeville.
On February 3, HarperCollins posted a press release that relayed how Ms. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter, had recently “discovered the manuscript in a secure place where Ms. Lee keeps her archives.” There’s also a statement attributed to Ms. Lee that reads, in part: “I hadn’t realized it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer Tonja Carter discovered it. After much thought and hesitation I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years.”
Those crafty touches—“much thought and hesitation,” “my dear friend,” “people I trust”—are trying a tad too hard, wouldn’t you agree? The spotlight-shunning Lee is “amazed” that she will once again be subjected to a freshet of attention, the very soaking she’d organized her life to avoid. The only thing amazing here is the expectation that sound and literate people would be hoodwinked by attributed language that bears the unmistakable hallmarks of subterfuge. Another statement released by Carter in February has Ms. Lee saying: “I’m alive and kicking and happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman”—and this from an author who was known to walk away from you should you be unheeding enough to mention To Kill a Mockingbird, who at a party would rather sit on the back porch and speak to a child than endure your effusions about her novel. (See Charles Shields’s superb biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.)
In the press release, Michael Morrison, whose title is the dizzying caravan President and Publisher of HarperCollins US General Books Group and Canada, believes, in lines that manage to be both tautological and cliché-sodden, that Watchman is “a brilliant book” and a “masterpiece” that “will be revered for generations to come.” Jonathan Burnham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, believes that Watchman “is a remarkable literary event,” although he obviously means publishing event: big difference. In early June, Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp, the parent company of HarperCollins, dubbed Watchman a “fascinating, captivating, important book”—I bet he did—and then added: “It’s the most pre-ordered book in HarperCollins history,” a non sequitur to anyone but a CEO of a global corporation. Businessmen holding forth on literature is a rare kind of comedy.
That same day, February 3, The New York Times told of how Jonathan Burnham had announced that his company “had never spoken directly to Ms. Lee about the book and had communicated solely through her lawyer, Ms. Carter, and her literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg.” The lawyer/agent pas de deux: speaking solely to them and not once to the author of the book he was buying is rather like consulting the egrets while ignoring the hippo. Burnham also said that he was “completely confident” that Ms. Lee had consented to the publication of Watchman: of course he was. Consulting the novelist on which his outfit was about to make many millions of dollars “wasn’t necessary,” he said, and you see why the presidential wings of corporations continue to enjoy such glowing reputations. Writes the Times: “The statement Ms. Lee provided expressing her delight that the new novel will finally be published was delivered through her lawyer, Mr. Burnham said.” That lawyer again.
Will finally be published. Novelists don’t forget the larval stages of their books; they are usually bad enough to brand themselves onto memory. If Lee had wanted the world to have Watchman, she had decades of good health in which to unearth it from whatever bottom drawer she’d buried it in, and if she’d thought it lost, all she had to do was look.
The February 3 article in the Times also quotes Marja Mills, friend and neighbor of the Lee sisters, commenting on Harper Lee’s ostensible consent to the publication of Watchman: “I have some concerns about statements that have been attributed to her.” Alice Lee, the counsel and caretaker who steadfastly bodyguarded her sister’s interests, and who’d died just three months before the announcement of Watchman—note the timing—wrote to Marja Mills in 2011 saying that, since her sister’s stroke in 2007, she “can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence.” She apparently has epic confidence in her “dear friend” Tonja Carter. In March, The Atlantic Monthly quoted Alice Lee saying this about her sister in 2010: “She doesn’t know from one minute to the other what she’s told anybody . . . She’s surprised at anything that she hears because she doesn’t remember anything that’s ever been said about it.”
The Times was back earlier this month, on July 2, with ripe information about Watchman and Tonja Carter, “yet another strange twist to the tale of how the book made its way to publication.” In February, Carter had told the Times that she “was so stunned” by the discovery she’d just made. The article continues:
But another narrative has emerged that suggests the discovery may have happened years earlier, in October 2011, when Justin Caldwell, a rare books expert from Sotheby’s auction house, flew to Alabama to meet with Ms. Carter and Samuel Pinkus, then Ms. Lee’s literary agent, to appraise a “Mockingbird” manuscript for insurance and other purposes.
That inspection of the manuscript happened in a bank: fitting, when you consider the money that was going to be made by what everyone saw in that vault. Except that Carter claims she didn’t see anything at all, claims she was “sent from the room to run an errand before review of any of the materials occurred.” Both Pinkus and Caldwell affirm that Carter was indeed there when they discovered Watchman in 2011: “Ms. Carter was present in the safe-deposit room and . . . read the manuscript pages,” said Pinkus. “A HarperCollins spokeswoman said that, while Ms. Carter had not previously mentioned the 2011 visit by Sotheby’s, it believes her account of stumbling onto the manuscript last year.” It would believe that, yes. It has many millions of reasons to believe it.
“It is unclear why, if the manuscript was found in 2011, Ms. Carter might have delayed bringing it to publication. Some have questioned whether Alice Lee would have approved of the decision to publish. . . . By the time the ‘Watchman’ release was announced, in February, she had been dead for three months.” In other words, not unclear at all: Alice Lee, loyal protector of her sister, was alive in 2011, and so no Watchman. In 2015, Alice Lee is dead, and so along comes Watchman. About the Sotheby’s visit in 2011, Carter has “declined to answer additional questions.” I bet she has.
If Ms. Lee had in sound mind consented to the publication of Watchman, speculated the Times, it would mean “an abrupt turnaround for an author who had said she did not intend to publish another work and then, late in life, agreed to venture out with a book that had initially been dismissed as an ambitious but disjointed first draft.” Abrupt turnaround is one way to put it, I suppose, and that use of “late in life” might be courteous to Ms. Lee but it rather deemphasizes what we’re talking about here: an octogenarian about to turn nonagenarian, post-stroke, who, by her own sister’s admission, cannot see or hear and is frightened enough of her frailty to sign anything by anyone she perceives as a friend. In April, some functionaries in Alabama found Ms. Lee capable of making her own publishing decisions, but regarding the competence and incorruptibility of functionaries, you might find it helpful to call upon your own experiences with them.
Here’s a short version of what you would have to believe in order for the lawyer’s official story to make even a shard of sense: For over fifty years, as Alice Lee protected her sister’s interests, she refused to allow her to publish Watchman. Then Alice Lee died, and the lawyer showed up at the nursing home and said something similar to: “Lordy me, you just won’t believe what I found, quite by accident, Ms. Lee. Your long-lost novel that you’ve been looking for and always wanted to publish!” To which Ms. Lee, the most publicity-shunning author in America, would have had to reply, “Oh, goody, let’s finally publish that thing and get us some more money and attention.”
All this current festiveness—the celebrity readings, the PBS American Masters documentary, the bookstore promotions, the most preordering on Amazon during all of 2015—and it’s happening most probably without the author’s awareness and, I think, most certainly without her ability to be festive, too, or even to understand that it’s happening. The epigraph of To Kill a Mockingbird by Charles Lamb, “Lawyers, I suppose, were once children,” takes on a somewhat different meaning now that we have that novel’s gestational version through what look like the duplicitous machinations of a lawyer, the dollar-sign salivating of the lawyer-agent-publisher trifecta.
In a shady, bad-faith move, HarperCollins placed “the strictest of embargoes” on Watchman. With a few exceptions—cherry-picked, one guesses, for the safety of their pedestrianism—the publisher wouldn’t release advanced copies to the critical community. Strictest of embargoes? Are we talking about a book here, or plutonium? Whenever the suits at a publisher resort to language such as that, you can rightly suspect that the underhanded is under way. They’ll no doubt maintain that they didn’t want the book to leak online before publication, but no publisher wants any book to leak online before publication.
So as the lot of us waited, with the rest of the world, until the July 14 release date, there seemed little else to do but return to the novel upon which the current commotion depends. It hasn’t happened often, but when an American novel sells in excess of forty million copies, when for fifty-five years it has been promiscuously bandied around our culture, when it’s become a beloved cultural institution, and you wish to reread the novel afresh, unhindered by the easy familiarity of that institution, then you somehow must shut out the choric approval while mustering a fairly strong state of amnesia. It helps if you’ve never seen the Oscar-earning film or the stage production, as I haven’t, and if you didn’t register your middle school teacher’s well-meaning but simplistic pronouncements, as I didn’t.
Just how good is To Kill a Mockingbird?
YOU KNOW ABOUT THE PLOT, the two-part architecture: the Wordsworthian childhood sublime of Scout, Jem, and Dill, their summertime beguilement by Boo Radley, followed by Atticus Finch’s defense of the wrongly accused black man Tom Robinson. And you know about the rabid popularity: the novel’s pervasiveness in American middle and high schools, its still yearly robust sales figures, the onetime efforts to ban it for whatever depressed or tormented or titillated that silly breed of citizen who tries to ban books—efforts that always achieve the inverse effect. The best way to catapult a book into bestsellerdom is to tell people they can’t have it. And as for that oft-repeated slur against Ms. Lee, “one-hit wonder”: most novelists are no-hit wonders.
The narration of Mockingbird belongs to the adult Jean Louise Finch; the eyes, however, belong wholly to the child Scout. Jean Louise Finch is consistently shrewd: “I was confronted with the Impurity of Women doctrine that seemed to preoccupy all clergymen.” With that sentence and others, you see you aren’t dealing with an obedient and blindly pious Southern woman. And Scout: the ceaseless charisma and comedic lean of that little girl. I imagine every reader must have his Scout moment, that satisfying click in the mind, the paragraph or line in which she does or says something, after which he is helplessly hers: he’ll follow her not only to the end of her book but to the end of the earth. For me it happens in chapter seven (a bit later than most, maybe): “The second grade was grim.”
The unsigned Time magazine review in 1960 saw that “Lee’s prose has an edge that cuts through cant,” and that’s nicely put. Test if your ear can detect the one discordant note in this otherwise euphonic passage, from the novel’s lovely first act:
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
Those are beautifully modulated lines: the surprise of “red slop”; the faultless verb for the courthouse, “sagged,” and for shirt collars, “wilted”; the marriage of “sweltering” and “shade” when you expected “sweltering heat”; the unforgettable image and cadence of the simile “like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.” The one misstep is the closing of the second and third sentences, the repetitious clang of “the square.”
Mockingbird is consistently rife with such fluvial prose, its balanced and balancing rhythms. Listen to the melic timbre of this line: “The night-crawlers had retired, but ripe chinaberries drummed on the roof when the wind stirred, and the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs.” See the expertly placed and surprising adverb here: “The remains of a picket drunkenly guarded the front yard.” Notice the “shook” in this line where a lesser stylist would have chosen “shed”: “Tall pecan trees shook their fruit into the schoolyard.” Notice the near onomatopoetic richness of this line: “We bounded down the sidewalk on a spree of sheer relief, leaping and howling.”
For a novel of almost four hundred pages, it’s been blessedly inoculated against common prose germs. There is only the occasional cough of cliché: “snow white,” “ramrod straight,” “blaze of glory,” “good graces,” “jet-black,” “snail’s pace”—and only the occasional deafness of phrase: “the courthouse outhouse,” “the bounty of the county,” “denim-shirted and floursack-skirted,” “dinner in the diner,” “sundry sunless county cubbyholes.” As some novelists know better than others, keeping paragraphs free of knee-jerk jargon and toneless formulations is the work of round-the-clock vigilance, and Harper Lee has always deserved more applause for the smooth stride of her style.
You won’t find much astute literary comment on Mockingbird, and what does exist doesn’t much care about how Lee carpenters her prose. A smattering of early critics and reviewers were irked by the plot’s bifurcation. The New York Herald Tribune complained that “the two themes . . . emerge as enemies of each other. The charm and wistful humor of the childhood recollections do not foreshadow the deeper, harsher note which pervades the later pages of the book.” That goes rather out of its way to miss the point, since the first act of the novel is the crucial imaginative prelude to the moral reckoning of the second act. The story’s structure is much more than mere bildungsroman: the childhood sublime must be celebrated if its later defacing by adulthood horrors, its asphyxiation by injustice and race hatred, is to have any effect.
Since the appearance of Mockingbird in 1960, some have had a hard time taking it seriously. In a letter to a friend in October of that year, Flannery O’Connor had this to say:
I think I see what it really is—a child’s book. When I was fifteen I would have loved it. Take out the rape and you’ve got something like Miss Minerva and William Green Hill [a popular children’s book about small-town Southern life]. I think for a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.
I’m loath ever to be at odds with Ms. O’Connor, but I’ve got to say: Those lines hit my ear as distinctly bitter. The one word that shows her hand? Buying.
Of course, she wasn’t wrong, and perhaps she had some cause to be bitter. Five years before Mockingbird appeared, in her collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, O’Connor’s faultless story “The Artificial Nigger” handed down a damning indictment of the South’s racial odium, and it, too, contains a child whose clear-eyed innocence overwhelms a widespread adult stupidity. Four years before Mockingbird, Elizabeth Spencer’s novel The Voice at the Back Door was intrepid in its punishing portrait of racial struggles in the South. (The surname of that novel’s protagonist is, coincidentally enough, Harper.) Both O’Connor and Spencer lacked Lee’s propensity for spoon-fed moral veggies: theirs was a black-and-white that accommodated the necessary gray. Their refusal to court the hero/villain dichotomy was really a refusal to scratch the simplistic itch.
It’s curious that those most qualified to comment upon Mockingbird chose not to do so. James Baldwin lived twenty-seven more years after Mockingbird was published and nowhere in his collected essays, and nowhere in any interview I could find, does he see fit even to mention it. Ralph Ellison lived another thirty-four years after Mockingbird was published and nowhere in his collected essays, all nine hundred pages of them, does he see fit to mention it, either. Edmund Wilson’s final journal, also nine hundred pages, goes from 1960, the year Mockingbird was published, to 1972, and not a peep. In fact, upon the novel’s publication and in the ensuing decades, the best American critical minds seem not to know that it exists. Granville Hicks, at one time a relevant (albeit Marxist) critic, gave it three short paragraphs in the Saturday Review, and in the 1990s Harold Bloom penned an abbreviated introduction for the Mockingbird installment of his “Modern Critical Interpretations” series. Even John Updike, who in six dreadnoughts of literary criticism hardly leaves a necessary book untouched by his golden pen, says nothing of it. (His first important novel, Rabbit, Run, was published the same year as Mockingbird, so perhaps Updike could smell a lingering whiff of resentment.) Capote’s endorsement of his friend’s book reads: “Someone rare has written this very fine first novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life, and the warmest, most authentic humor. A touching book, and so funny, so likable.” That’s a somewhat neutered statement for Capote, redundant if true, and perhaps worth as much as any blurb.
In 1966, a scholar with the unimprovable name of W. J. Stuckey, in a book about Pulitzer-winning novels, impugned Lee for Mockingbird’s mobilizing of the child’s perspective in an adult’s language, tagging it a “rhetorical trick,” which gives those two terms quite a workout. “Whenever she gets into difficulties with one point of view,” writes Stuckey, “she switches to the other.” But the point of view doesn’t actually switch, not in the way Stuckey suggests. As in the early books of Wordsworth’s Prelude, where the child’s vista is crooned in a poet’s tongue, the sophisticated Jean Louise Finch is free to summon and animate the Scout who breathes in her still. I don’t claim that as the ideal execution for a novel, nor that the liabilities of doing so aren’t legion, only that Lee’s method is consistent: there’s no clumsy juggling of the sort Stuckey perceives.
His suspicion is warranted but his diagnosis is wrong. The one great flaw of Mockingbird is not an inconsistent point of view, but the fact that Scout can’t be the moral agent of her own story, an honor which goes to her father. That remains one of the pestering inevitabilities of the child-as-protagonist: morality isn’t yet fully codified because apprehension and language are both constricted, which is precisely why so many child narrators must be cast as prodigies of verbiage and perception. Scout isn’t cast as that: she’s not a child narrator and she’s not a prodigy. She’s a shrewd kid who can often apprehend the world’s oscillation from beauty to injustice and back again—and we get most of that apprehension in her dialogue, as we must—but the deepest seeing comes from the adult Jean Louise Finch. It is she who narrates Mockingbird, not her girlhood self, even though that girlhood self presides over the plot like a kindly tyrant. Harold Bloom puts it this way: “The crises of [Scout’s] book confirm her in her intrinsic strength and goodness, without wounding her sensibility or modifying her view of reality.” There’s the crux of the problem with the novel’s execution, and a problem not limited to Scout.
In 1957, the title of the book suggested by Lee’s first agent was Atticus, and you have no trouble seeing why: the portrait of Atticus Finch is a hymn of love to Harper Lee’s father, an attorney who in 1919 tried unsuccessfully to defend two black men from charges of murder. If Atticus strikes you as bloodless and wooden, that’s because he speaks in sermons Lee has prepared for him. He’s a walking soapbox for moralistic, often simplistic bromides, incapable of talking to anyone without unburdening himself of some principled platitude. (Stuckey refers to the novel’s “simplistic moral,” to its being “self-consciously cute.”) “Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand,” he says. But the answer to his puzzlement is clear enough: those people aren’t really that reasonable. It’s true that Atticus snaps to life in the courtroom while defending Tom Robinson—and it’s thrilling to watch him work on behalf of truth, even when you know the truth won’t matter—but that’s because the courtroom presents the perfect forum for his naturally grand exhortations.
The book’s superego, Atticus contains equal parts preternatural tolerance and rigid composure; he’s never not hyperaware of showing his children all the upstanding ways to behave. He’s insistently sincere, and you’ll remember Wilde’s declaration: “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.” Ever sunny toward the organic goodness of humanity—and ever Christic: “I do my best to love everybody,” he tells Scout—Atticus never suspects that his true moral duty might be to marshal an intolerance of intolerance. The day after Scout disperses the lynch mob on the steps of the jail, Atticus tells her and Jem that the leader, Mr. Cunningham, is “basically a good man . . . he just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.” That good man was about to murder an innocent human being: that’s quite a blind spot. Jem doesn’t let his father get away with such poltroon babble: “Don’t call that a blind spot,” he says. “He’da killed you last night.”
A vigilante and a bigot, Mr. Cunningham is not a good man, and Atticus’s refusal to say so, his refusal to acknowledge how the cretinous turn murderous, amounts to something of an intellectual crime against his children. He has all the right motions of the principled man but none of the fervor, the fed-up disgust required to assault the toxic tropisms of an entire segment of our society, those entrenched inequalities that cause the innocent to suffer. His courage is laudable—and never more so than on the steps of the jail when he blocks the lynch mob from reaching Tom Robinson—but without the stamina of a mobilizing conviction, courage counts for little, a mere gesture. This is part of what Twain means by: “We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.” In Twain’s 1923 essay “The United States of Lyncherdom,” a slap-down of the inherent, unthinking imitator a human being can be, he writes: “Nothing but the martyr spirit can brave the lynching mob, and cow it and scatter it.” If there’s such a thing as an inactive martyr, Atticus is it.
The correlatives of Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn usually contain Scout and Huck, but look instead at Atticus and Huck, because Atticus is the moral nucleus of Mockingbird just as Huck is of his story. Huck’s decision not to give up Jim to the authorities, and to consign himself to hellfire as a result, is the transformative moment in American consciousness: after that display of mercy, of moral fearlessness, nothing can ever be the same. So if it’s morally feel-good fiction we’re looking for, you’d think we could do no better than Huckleberry Finn. But we don’t have the same sentimental attachment to Twain’s nation-shaking novel as we do to Mockingbird for the simple reason that Twain’s book isn’t sentimental. What Huck does takes much more courage than what Atticus does: Huck puts his own freedom in jeopardy. Atticus just follows his assignment.
Huckleberry Finn isn’t feel-good because it demands action of us, petitions us for sacrifice, and sacrifice is something the typical American has a hard time mustering. Mockingbird, meanwhile, doesn’t ask anything of us: just sit back and be charmed by that little girl, be pleased by the rectitude of her father. Loving and lauding Mockingbird assuages our self-blame, and in doing so, absolves us of responsibility. It feels good, feels downright correct, to cherish this novel: it feels, come to think of it, rather like an honest day’s work. It performs its magic first by suctioning itself to your own nostalgia and then by satisfying your limp conscience: as long as there are Atticuses in the world, all will be well, and you yourself can sit back. We Americans prefer our morality reductive, and so the easily sloganized ethics of Mockingbird were and remain palatable for millions.
The debilitating flaw in Lee’s construction of Atticus is having him assigned by the court to defend Tom Robinson rather than having him insist on serving as the innocent man’s counsel: not because it’s his profession but because it’s his obligation. He tells Scout: “Every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine, I guess.” Well, all right, but being affected is the very least one should expect. Tom Robinson’s dooming by the jury should have shredded the very fabric of Atticus Finch. Where are the spiritual upheavals of this man, the vital defilement of his composure? “Murder,” wrote Graham Greene, “if you are going to treat it seriously at all, is a religious subject,” and what are we talking about at the hub of Mockingbird if not murder? Hanged by a mob or hanged by the state, or shot attempting to escape, Tom Robinson is murdered. Atticus has no religious quandary as a result: he’s dutifully upright and, in the final assessment, perfectly passive.
The Finches’ housekeeper and surrogate mother, Calpurnia, is well drawn because she’s multiform: she hops from the white world to the black and back again, tweaking her speech, asserting her intelligence with the Finches and humbling herself among her own. But Tom Robinson—don’t discard the significance of his forename—is little more than a cipher, the gentle “Negro” of lore. W. J. Stuckey refers to the novel’s “sentimental and unreal statement of the Negro problem. Miss Lee is so determined to have her white audience sympathize with Tom Robinson that, instead of making him resemble a human being, she builds him up into a kind of black-faced Sir Galahad, pure hearted and with a withered right arm.” A bit of a stretch, that calling up of Galahad, but you take his point. The stereotypes aren’t confined to Maycomb’s black population: Robert E. Lee Ewell is melodramatically sinister enough to be kin to the cartoon villain Snidely Whiplash. (As one critic has asserted, you can almost hear “evil” in his name.)
Here’s Harold Bloom:
Palpably, the book retains its pathos, but does it move us mostly through and by nostalgia? Is it now primarily a sentimental romance, touching but a shade childish, or is it . . . our classic romance of American childhood? . . . Is Scout’s narrative of her ninth year persuasively childlike, or is it essentially childish? . . . Is her view of human nature adequate to a mature sense of the complexities of our existence?
Bloom rarely asks a question without giving away the answer, and when he presents you with an either/or, you know his choice: “Mockingbird will someday seem either a sentimental romance of a particular moment or a canonical narrative.” Toni Morrison dismisses the novel as a “white savior” story, except that Atticus fails at saving Tom Robinson: he tries, and I suppose that’s savior-making enough. Incidentally, I’ve never believed the official line saying that Tom Robinson was killed trying to escape from the prison yard. Seventeen bullet wounds aren’t needed to keep a man from climbing a fence. “They didn’t have to shoot him that much,” Atticus says, and the truth is that they didn’t have to shoot him at all, not unless they are white guards murderous with rage over the alleged raping of a white girl.
In the novel’s best-known sentiment, Atticus says: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Already in chapter three you see the simplistic and naïve ethos that animates Atticus Finch: that use of “skin” is important, but otherwise, he doesn’t wish to admit that some points of view are heinous: they don’t need to be “considered,” they need to be quashed or else people suffer and die.
Jean Louise Finch says: “In the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed”—except that those secret inner courts aren’t so secret. When Mr. Raymond, the town’s pretend drunk more enlightened than others, appears outside the courthouse with the children—Dill is weeping from the heartquake of what he’s witnessed at the trial—he speaks of “the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking . . . the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they’re people, too.” And after the trial, Atticus tell his children this: “There’s something in our world that makes men lose their heads—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins. They’re ugly, but those are the facts of life.”
As we had to witness recently with George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, and with Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, those ugly facts from the 1930s have proven their loathsome durability, except in those cases we didn’t have the words of the black men (boys, really) because they’d been shot dead. Go Set a Watchman is being published during a summer when the wounds of Ferguson still suppurate, when the city of Chicago is a weekly hecatomb, when ashes still darken the air of Baltimore, when a South Carolina police officer awaits trial for the on-camera killing of Walter Scott, and when the representatives of that state have just packed up an omnibigoted and insurrectionist flag.
It took an imbecilic warp (I will not utter his name) assassinating nine peaceful human beings at a church in Charleston in June for South Carolina’s leaders to sprout a conscience: a nauseating cost for the packing-up of an emblem stale by 150 years. That butcher, by the way, repeated the same inherited and scurrilous falsehood that dooms Tom Robinson in Mockingbird: “You rape our women,” he is reported to have said. In the aftermath of the Charleston disaster, we saw, as we’ve seen again and again across history, the coming-together of the decent and the loving and the determined. We saw that the depths to which the depraved can sink will always be outshone by the heights to which the humane can rise.
WHEN HEMINGWAY’S unfinished novel True at First Light was published in 1999, there was a brooding of editorials and essays about the ethics of publishing it, about what the author might think of the tarnishing caused by a lusterless draft he wouldn’t have let anyone glimpse. Some Hemingway disciples were irked and hurt on behalf of the once-heroic craftsman, but that irk and hurt seems somewhat mirthful when you compare it to what crowds of readers are feeling this week on behalf of Harper Lee. Hemingway had been dead nearly four decades when True at First Light appeared. Harper Lee is still alive in Monroeville, Alabama.
According to the meticulously researched biography by Charles Shields, in January of 1957 Lee went to see her agent, Maurice Crain, with “the first fifty pages of a novel, Go Set a Watchman”:
A week later, she was back again, this time with a hundred more pages. From then on, she dropped off about fifty new pages with Crain every week through the end of February. Two months of back-and-forth revisions followed between author and agent until, in early May, Crain judged that the manuscript was in suitable shape to send out. But he had never liked the title Go Set a Watchman.
Crain sent the book to the publisher J. P. Lippincott. Tay Hohoff, the editor, later said of that draft: “It was more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel,” but she was interested enough to give Lee a contract. After Lee rewrote the book based on Hohoff’s suggestions, the next draft “was better. It wasn’t right. . . .There were dangling threads of plot, there was a lack of unity.” It then took another two and a half years to make what we know now as To Kill a Mockingbird.
That “series of anecdotes” with the “dangling threads of plot” and the “lack of unity”? That’s the novel our nation is rejoicing over this week. In a deliberate confusion of purity for quality, HarperCollins boasted that they were publishing Watchman unedited—as if they could have done anything else, short of rewriting it themselves: if the author cannot see or hear she certainly can’t revise a manuscript—and everywhere in the book’s plinths and prose you see the fruits of that confusion.
The story is slender: Jean Louise Finch, now twenty-six years old and living in New York, trains home to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her ailing seventy-two-year-old father, Atticus Finch, and her childhood love and maybe future husband, Henry (Hank) Clinton. Her brother, Jem, so beloved by readers of Mockingbird, has died of the same heart calamity that killed their mother. There follow sedating, brochure-like stretches about the history of the county and the town, and numbing banter between Jean Louise and her Aunt Alexandra. You’re then subjected to a tour of the town and some of its more Colorful Characters.
Then Jean Louise finds a booklet on her father’s desk, The Black Plague, the cover of which shows a drawing of “an anthropophagous Negro.” Incensed, she rushes off to the courthouse, where Atticus and Henry are taking part in a citizens’ council meeting. Hidden in the balcony—you’ll be reminded of how the children sat in that very balcony during Tom Robinson’s trial in Mockingbird—she eavesdrops on a cataract of white-power propaganda, of which her father and sweetheart seem to approve. She then spends the rest of the book obnoxiously outraged, hysterically haranguing her father and her beau, flitting about with all the crusading zest of the holier-than-thou, the affectations of an adolescent who’s just discovered the idealism of social justice.
Just as she’s about to leave town for good, her Uncle Jack backhands her in the mouth and feeds her whiskey, and this, against everything you know about human behavior, brings Jean Louise Finch straight back to her senses. In an epic unloading of casuistry, both her father and Uncle Jack have convinced her that Maycomb’s new white-on-black animus isn’t really bigotry, just (white) citizens rightly concerned about their own heritage and not keen on Washington or the NAACP meddling in their self-governance. If you could further pollute Donald Trump with the blather of Ayn Rand, you’d have someone who looks a lot like the Atticus Finch and Uncle Jack of Go Set a Watchman.
Ponderous and lurching, haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with deadening dead zones, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat. You are confronted by entire pages of her Uncle Jack’s oracular babble, and you must machete through the bracken of listless, throwaway prose in order to get to a memorable turn of phrase. “Jean Louise smiled to herself” and “Jean Louise laughed aloud” and then “Jean Louise shook her head” before “Jean Louise’s eyebrows flickered.” Someone has “green envy,” and someone else “worked night and day,” while someone “dropped dead in his tracks” and someone else was “bored stiff.” Soon, “Henry looked at her” and then “she looked at him” and then “Hank stirred” before “she stirred.” Then “she bit her tongue” right before “she held her tongue.” Characters “raise” their “eyebrows” so often you have to question how their foreheads turned to trampolines. When Jean Louise gets upset, which is always, her “throat tightens,” and you wonder how she breathes through such frequent esophageal constriction. Some good prose survived the voyage from Watchman to Mockingbird—Aunt Alexandra’s corset “drew up her bosom to giddy heights”—and you turn pages praying to find more of it. Those prayers, like most prayers, aren’t answered.
For once, none of those flaws in the novel can be blamed on the author: she was learning how to write when she composed Watchman, and wasn’t able to ready this draft for publication. In the two and a half years it took her to turn this mess into To Kill a Mockingbird, she evolved beautifully as a stylist and storyteller, helped along by an astute editor. It’s impossible to believe that a sound Harper Lee wished for this thing to be published, impossible to believe that her sister-protector, Alice Lee, would have allowed it to happen. This inept book does not come close to meeting the immoderate predictions of its publisher (a “masterpiece” that “will be revered for generations to come”). It should have been permitted to retain its quiet dignity boxed in the author’s archives. The manuscript might have been mildly nourishing for future tweeds in search of tenure, but it should never have been expensively packaged, gaudily hyped, and unscrupulously employed as chum to lure lovers of Mockingbird.
The challenge for a white novelist with a racial subject is to be on the side of truth while skirting the easy exploitation of stereotype, and in both Mockingbird and Watchman, Lee’s response to that tough challenge isn’t always applaudable: her stereotypes can be both white and black. What Harold Bloom says of Mockingbird cannot be said of Watchman: “The book is refreshingly free of ideologies and of the need to revise history to suit some particular politics of the spirit.”
Watchman contains no moment that can match the tremendous affection, the familiarity and inevitability of when, at the end of Mockingbird, Scout is finally able to say to her mysterious neighbor: “Hey Boo.” Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” as Percy Shelley put it in a different context. And futurity, I’m certain, will forgive Go Set a Watchman. I’m not at all certain that it will forgive those who conspired to sell it to us.
—The New Republic, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015