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Although Isaiah 21:6 is the source of the title—“For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth”—had a prophet been set to watch over the publication of “Go Set A Watchman,” the putative prequel to the iconic, circa-1960 “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, he might likely have foreseen the controversy that would follow.
Even before “Watchman” made its official debut on July 14, pre-publication screeds flooded the media, and Amazon experienced a virtual storming of its preordering department rivaled only by the midnight release of the seventh and final “Harry Potter” book. But unlike other found manuscripts attributed to famous literary lights—drafts, as well as unpublished finished fiction—“Watchman” has created a sensation mainly for two distinct reasons, or questions, actually.
First, should the book have been published now, approximately 60 years after it was written, since there is no indisputable evidence that Lee sanctioned it? And, second, what should possessive, loving readers of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Mockingbird,” with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide and still holding a top spot on middle and high school reading lists, make of their beloved hero, Atticus Finch—also known as Gregory Peck—being charged in “Watchman” by his daughter Jean “Scout” Louise with being a white supremacist?
Ironically, HarperCollins, aware of contentious issues surrounding the discovery and publication of the typescript, does not exactly clarify matters in its three-page public relations Q&A. Indeed, some answers seem vague and defensive.
Leading with a statement about the “exact timeline” it was told about the book, HarperCollins states that, last October, HarperCollins President Michael Morrison was shown “a photocopy of the original typewritten manuscript ‘Go Set a Watchman,’” by Lee’s literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg.
After reading it that night, and committing to publishing it, Mr. Morrison “worked out the deal terms” during the next three months. The terms are not specified, nor is it clear what the elderly and frail 89-year-old author, now in an assisted living home, was told and understood—although another Q&A indicates she not only “approved publication” but was “excited to see the book reemerge after so many years.”
This answer does not sit comfortably with the PR statement that Lee had not read the manuscript since its rediscovery, trusting “other readers to look at it,” all of whom were “in favor” of publishing it. She was, however, “directly involved in various stages of the publication process,” the PR materials explain, although that involvement appears to have been limited to “reviewing reports on marketing and promotion,” including helping to revise the book jacket image.
Another PR question addresses “the exact circumstances” of the manuscript’s discovery. “Watchman” was written in the mid-1950s and submitted to J.B. Lippincott in 1957, but HarperCollins, which acquired Lippincott in 1978, provides no evidence that there were “documented references” to a novel with the name “Go Set a Watchman” composed before “Mockingbird.” Lee herself, it’s said, “was not sure what had happened to the manuscript”—although Lee’s friend and lawyer, Tonja Carter, eventually discovered the manuscript in a storage box at a secure location, where it was “attached to a copy of the original manuscript of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’”
HarperCollins stated that Lee wanted “Watchman” to be published “exactly” as it was written, but Lee has been quoted as saying she put the manuscript aside, on advice of her editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, who thought Lee should concentrate instead on Scout in her earlier years.
HarperCollins concedes doing some “light copy-editing” for spelling and dropped words, adding that some “small corrections” were also made with Lee’s “blessing.” “Watchman” makes two general references to Atticus’s “having won acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge,” the incident that takes center stage in “Mockingbird,” and becomes the dramatic focus of the 1962 Oscar-winning screenplay by Horton Foote.
As to the publication of “Watchman,” Robert Reeves, associate provost of the Stony Brook Southampton Graduate Arts Campus, offered a wise rule of thumb: “If a manuscript is discovered and there is money to be made, chances are it will be published. Authors’ intentions are gotten around all the time, but usually after they’ve died. There’s a good reason writers used to burn manuscripts and papers they didn’t want published.”
Mr. Reeves, who grew up in Alabama and has an interest in Southern fiction, has heard people close to Lee suggest that she may, or may not, have given informed consent, but it seems pretty clear to him that “driving this [publication] story is a desire to contribute not to literature but to the bottom line.”
Springs resident Hope Harris, who writes for The Sag Harbor Express, said she believes that “Watchman” should not have been published as is, because it was a “first draft” of “Mockingbird.” “What would a draft of Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ have looked like before [editor] Maxwell Perkins turned it into a masterpiece?” she mused. “‘Watchman’ should be available in a library, under glass, but not mass-marketed—not a book.”
A comparison of the opening pages of “Watchman” and “Mockingbird” show “the accomplished writer found her voice only in Scout,” Ms. Harris explained, while “Watchman” is told in the third person. It is young Scout’s compelling narration in “Mockingbird” that makes the novel a classic, she said.
Although some question how “Watchman” was found, many agree the book merits attention because it reflects conditions in the South in the 1950s. It’s a “gifted writer’s personal depiction of that period in American history,” according to Carol Spencer, the owner of Diaspora Books in Sag Harbor. “The transformation of the beloved Atticus of ‘Mockingbird’ into the flawed racist of ‘Watchman,’ while painful, gives a more accurate picture of the mindset of the majority white population at the time. ‘Mockingbird’ serves as a kinder, gentler introduction to Racism 101.”
No proponent of art for art’s sake, Lee would seem to believe that literature should be a criticism of life. That phrase, ascribed to poetry, belongs to the Victorian cultural critic and poet Matthew Arnold, whom Lee quotes a couple of times, without identifying, in “Watchman.”
Kristine and David Swickard, longtime teachers at East Hampton High School, argue that “Watchman” is worthy of publication because of its characters and theme. In “Mockingbird,” Atticus “remains silent for the most part on his political views on the injustices and hypocrisy built into the social fabric of the South, although he teaches Scout to understand the predicaments of the Blacks entangled in it,” Mr. and Ms. Swickard explained in an email. “Certainly by the conclusion of the book she sees her father’s steadfastness and sense of justice as a foundation for who she is and how she will live her life.”
In “Watchman,” Atticus “pronounces the arguments that prudent men in those days offered to slow down the speed with which changes were being made,” they said. At the end, however, Atticus is “truly proud that his daughter learned to stand up for what she believes in and that she has learned to think for herself through his instruction and by his example, even though her views go further and faster than he can accept.”
Significantly, Scout in “Watchman” has learned something she didn’t in “Mockingbird”: “to tolerate (if not condone or support) the gray area between black and white choices,” they said.
The Swickards see the books as a “two-part Bildungsroman”—Scout “growing up intellectually and emotionally” in “Mockingbird” but learning “more deeply the nature of filial love and how to be a truly human being” in “Watchman.”
“Watchman,” in this regard, is the more complicated—and complex—book. It’s also, not incidentally, well written. It’s clear from the opening paragraph, with its Biblical sentence rhythms and spare selected details, that Lee is a skilled writer: “Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires.”
Of course, it’s the book’s content, not style or narrative structure, at the center of attention. As Mr. Reeves noted, “The complicated issues of race in this country, which are not restricted to the South, should not be confused with the ideal vision of the world the younger lawyer embodies in ‘Mockingbird.’
“Many of the stories our culture takes ownership of, the much beloved novels and movies, aren’t really efforts to reflect our realities,” he continued. “They express our aspirations and wishes, or they protect us from things we’re afraid of.”
He added when it comes to the reality of the South, the truth is the less-idealized version of Atticus Finch, though neither reduction—saint or racist—is exactly right. The unsurprising truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. The book shows a person could be decent and compassionate, yet still reflect the views of the era.
Other voices challenge that view.
On the day “Watchman” was published, The New York Times ran a piece originally published in a little-known trade journal by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard University. It “so enraged admirers of Atticus Finch” that the editors published the piece along with some of the “impassioned responses it provoked,” the article reads.
Mr. Kennedy’s theme constitutes an indictment of the “immature sentimentality ingrained by middle school lessons about the nobility of the white savior and the mesmerizing performance of Gregory Peck.” Mr. Kennedy points out that in 1992, law professor Monroe Freeman, writing in Legal Times, stated that Atticus Finch in Mockingbird “ought not be lauded as a role model for attorneys because he had been assigned the case, and because he abstained from criticizing the exclusion of blacks from juries, the segregation of blacks in the courtroom, and because he took a temperate view of the KKK.”
Nonetheless, for all his criticism, Mr. Kennedy sees “Watchman” as an opportunity to look into the greater complexity of race. The story may not be as thrilling as “Mockingbird,” he said, but it’s more insidious in many ways, such as the fact that Citizens’ Councils—updated versions of the Ku Klux Klan, to which Scout’s father and beau Hank belong—were established in the wake of the despised 1954 ruling of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, which Scout supports, and to counter efforts by the hated NAACP. The law content of “Watchman,” unlike the exciting courtroom scene in “Mockingbird,” turns on interpretations of the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Jean Louise loves her father deeply. She hates what he espouses or does not oppose. The exchange between them toward the end, as she gets ready to flee to New York, is fierce, furious, unrelenting. But before she leaves, her eccentric, learned, cynical but wise Uncle Jack shows up to confront her about her warped idealization of her father and her insufficient understanding of heritage and home. It’s a heady confrontation, full of sophisticated argument and tough-love prodding that occasions a sharp and sudden act of violence, but it leaves the 26-year-old Scout, finally, with a greater appreciation of the South, her father and herself.
As he drives away, her uncle calls out a couple of unidentified lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Ruddigore”: “I was once an exceedingly odd young lady/Suffering much from spleen and vapors.” Scout pauses, then recognizes the lines, and with a bit of restorative humor and insight realizes that she may well be able to finesse the conflict that has caused her such pain. Yes, spleen and vapors, “but we only cut respectable capers” she sings back. She can go home again and she can also leave again. It is in her blood that she is a citizen of Maycomb, but also in her blood that she a citizen of a wider, more humane world.
Perhaps some imaginative schools will include “Watchman” on reading lists alongside “Mockingbird”—at least before the book is picked up by the film industry, but that’s another story. Or is it?
on Sep 15, 2015