Go Set A Watchman

There's been a lot of controversy surrounding the publication of GO SET A WATCHMAN, which has been universally recognized as the first draft of what would eventually become Harper Lee's magnificent TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. WATCHMAN, written several years before MOCKINGBIRD, tells the story of 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch who returns to her childhood home of Maycomb, Alabama to visit her 72-year-old father, Atticus Finch. At first, the visit is bathed in the patina of memories and nostalgia - Jean Louise remembers the smells, the sounds, and the people she grew up with, and she resents the changes that have taken place (Atticus has left the house where Jean Louise was born and built himself a new place that doesn't quite feel the same). The first third of the novel is slow-paced and wistful, with Jean Louise flirting with childhood friend and maybe-fiancé, Hank Clinton, now her father's law partner. She spars with her Aunt Alexandra (who berates her for wearing "slacks" in town) and her Uncle Jack (whose conversation is steeped in metaphor and allusion). It isn't until she learns that Atticus and Hank are both part of the Maycomb County Citizen's Council, an organization bent on preventing racial integration, that the plot really begins. The Atticus we see here - a man determined to preserve the identity of a South torn asunder, first by emancipation and then by Supreme Court decisions - is not the Atticus Jean Louise remembers from her childhood. She thought of him as a God, and we who so loved both the book and movie versions of MOCKINGBIRD did, too. But WATCHMAN has a message that's far more complex than its more famous counterpart. Because Atticus is not a God. He's also not evil, even in his need to protect his world from the kind of change that cannot come easily. WATCHMAN isn't the uplifting, lovely novel that MOCKINGBIRD is. But in many ways, by being Jean Louise's story more than Atticus's, it's bigger and more important. From everything I've read, it's clear that Harper Lee never intended to publish WATCHMAN. She submitted it to publishers who suggested she rework it focusing on Jean Louise's childhood, and the result was MOCKINGBIRD. I can see why they gave Lee this advice - the childhood memories in WATCHMAN (and there are many) are among its most identifiable elements. We get to see Jean Louise again when she was Scout, and we get to see Jem and Dill in all their glory. There is a reference to the trial of Tom Robinson, which makes up the central conflict in MOCKINGBIRD. In WATCHMAN, however, Robinson is not named, he seems much younger (a boy), and his "rape" of a 14-year-old white girl is proven to have been consensual (yes, Atticus gets him off). Most of the rest of the stories and memories in WATCHMAN are new, covering Scout's school years (including high school, first dates, dances, and embarrassments). I loved her and Jem and Dill and young Hank (a character who does not show up in MOCKINGBIRD), and I would have read this for those sections alone. But this isn't a book about children. Instead, it's a book about change, and how difficult it is to get people to let go of their identities and move forward into the future, even if that future is necessary and right. The setting of WATCHMAN is the summer of 1954. The Supreme Court has just ruled (in Brown vs. the Board of Education) that "separate but equal" cannot stand - no longer would states be able to avoid racial integration by setting up separate schools for Negroes. Jean Louise believes in states' rights, so she isn't a fan of the Court's ruling (she believes it violates the 10th Amendment). But she does believe in racial equality and in integration, and she considers herself "color blind," things she believes she learned from her father. But when Atticus finally tells her what he believes - that neither Southern whites nor blacks are ready for forced integration, whether it be in the schools or the voting booth - it shakes her to her core. And the conversations she has with both Atticus and her Uncle Jack reveal a lot about how enlightened Southern white men thought in the 1950's. Parts of it are very hard to read, especially coming from the mouth of beloved Atticus Finch. But it's also a very honest portrayal of issues that are still front-and-center in American life and politics today. It's easy to say that the Atticus we meet in WATCHMAN isn't the same man as the kind, loving, God-like father in MOCKINGBIRD. Since seeing the 1962 movie, I've always heard Gregory Peck's voice when I've read Atticus's words - and that's exactly what I heard when I read WATCHMAN. This is Atticus, but a much older Atticus who is trying to protect the only world he's ever known. He has no hate in his heart for black people, and he truly does believe in equality (this is a man who waits in line behind black people in the grocery store even though the white store owner would happily serve him first). But he does call the Negro people "backward," and he compares them to children who are not ready to cast a vote or play a part in government. Atticus says to Jean Louise, "Do you want your children going to a school that's been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?" She is horrified, and she accuses him of denying that blacks are human. He calmly tells her that change can't be forced upon people until they're ready. It reminded me of a line from Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, "A Raisin in the Sun": Mr. Lindner, a white man trying to prevent a black family from moving into his white neighborhood, says, "You just can't force people to change their hearts." That's pretty much what Atticus is trying to tell Jean Louise. At the same time, Atticus recognizes in his daughter the very spirit and commitment that will ultimately bring the kind of change he knows must happen. She is a product of her upbringing - she was raised by a white man and a black woman (Calpurnia, who was Atticus's housekeeper since the death of his wife when Jean Louise was two). She is Atticus's daughter, in her beliefs, her humanity, and yes, in her color-blindness. And if she represents the changed world yet to come, Atticus represents a past which is so very hard to let go of. I did enjoy reading GO SET A WATCHMAN, and I do think it makes a nice companion piece to MOCKINGBIRD. The issues raised here are the kinds of things people should be thinking about and talking about. I'm very glad this novel was published. I highly recommend it to anyone willing to be challenged.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the controversies surrounding this book—regarding the timing and nature of its release, and the shocking reveals in the book itself, particularly the discovery that Atticus Finch, one of the most idolized characters in American literature, is a racist. Even though I pre-ordered the book, I worried that I’d risk ruining To Kill a Mockingbird for myself. However, when I received my copy on release day, I accepted that Go Set a Watchman was now in the hands of the public, for better or worse, and I decided I would make every effort to put aside all the controversies and read it on its own merits. To try and make of it anything more or less than what it is would be unfair to the author, in my opinion. And to my surprise, I ended up really liking Go Set a Watchman. I just started reading it a second time, in fact, the better to appreciate it. In the hope that I might help another reader decide whether or not to crack open this book, here are some of the things I kept in mind while reading: • In his review for The Guardian, Mark Lawson says, “The first problem in assessing Harper Lee’s first published novel in the five and a half decades since To Kill a Mockingbird is whether to describe it as her first or second book. … Chronologically, Go Set a Watchman is, in Hollywood arithmetic, a sort of Mockingbird 2, depicting the later lives of the Finch family … However, in computing terms, Watchman is Mockingbird 1.0 to the Mockingbird 2.0 of the novel that was previously the 89-year-old Lee’s single published work.” I decided to take the Mockingbird 1.0 view. • I thought of Watchman as a fascinating artifact from a parallel universe: What if Harper Lee’s editors had chosen to work with this draft—polish it up, revise the structure and pacing, but retain the basic storyline—instead of urging Lee to do a complete rewrite, which eventually became To Kill a Mockingbird? • The Bible verse the title is taken from sets the theme of the book. Isaiah 21:6 (KJV) says, “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.” This isn’t very telling, but it came together for me in verse 9: “And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” It did help to find out ahead of time that Atticus is revealed as a racist, because it certainly was a shock. Reading this passage from Isaiah also helped. I understood immediately that Babylon for Jean Louise (Scout) Finch is her beloved Maycomb, and the “graven images,” or idols, are the godly pedestals upon which she put all her loved ones, particularly her father Atticus and her childhood friend Hank. And here are the merits I appreciated in Go Set a Watchman: • This is not just a story about Jean Louise uncovering her beloved Atticus as a flawed human being; more broadly, this is a story about a young woman experiencing the painful but necessary transition of becoming her own person. I really identified with this aspect of Watchman. • The overall tone of Watchman, perhaps heavy-handed at times but no less truthful, is the old adage, “You can never go home again.” Before the big reveal about Atticus’ racist views, Jean Louise realizes upon coming home from New York for a visit that her gilt-edged childhood memories of Maycomb do not match up to what greets her in the present. One of my favorite passages is a conversation about Jean Louise’s discovery that a favorite haunt, Finch’s Landing, no longer belongs to her family but has been sold off to a hunting club. Childhood friend Hank teases Jean Louise about her disappointment: “I believe you are the worst of the lot. Mr. Finch is seventy-two years young and you’re a hundred years old when it comes to something like this.” To which Jean Louise replies: “I just don’t like my world disturbed without some warning.” • Although there is a lot of alienation and pain in this story, there are also many delightful moments in which Lee reveals a fondness for the South in which she grew up. Another favorite passage of mine is when Jean Louise returns to an ice cream shop after recognizing its owner as Mr. Cunningham: “She was sitting at a table behind Mr. Cunningham’s ice cream shop, eating from a wax-paper container. Mr. Cunningham, a man of uncompromising rectitude, had given her a pint free of charge for having guessed his name yesterday, one of the tiny things she adored about Maycomb: people remembered their promises.” I love details like this, and as a Southerner I also enjoyed Lee’s vivid sketches of the Maycomb people, which rang true to me. • Watchman contains some heartwarming flashbacks with Jem, Dill, and Calpurnia, as well as a couple of telling scenes about Jean Louise’s early friendship with Hank. Yes, the flashbacks are a bit jarring to the flow and pacing, but recognizing that Watchman is not a fully polished final draft, I still treasured these scenes as precious insights into beloved characters I never imagined I’d be able to read in my lifetime. • As Michiko Kakutani points out in her review for The New York Times, “One of the emotional through-lines in both ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Watchman’ is a plea for empathy … The difference is that ‘Mockingbird’ suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while ‘Watchman’ asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.” What I got from reading Watchman is that while Atticus is still Atticus in many of the ways readers have adored him for decades, he is very much a flawed, prejudiced human being. Watchman does not in any way excuse Atticus’ racist views toward African-Americans, but it does encourage the reader, along with Jean Louise, to take Mr. Finch down from the godly pedestal and understand him as a mortal. I believe Lee is also urging readers to look inside ourselves and realize we all harbor prejudices of some kind.

Three and a half stars from me, and possibly a little more. It's hard to know what I would have felt about the novel if I had read it with no knowledge of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' But I found it highly readable, with memorable characters. It may not be a first person narrative (as its predecessor was), but it does have a lot of dialogue, and Scout's voice comes through loud and clear. Incidentally, it's a voice of its time: the voice of the sassy young woman you might hear in a screwball comedy of the 1940s -- though this novel is not a comedy as such. Spoiler alert: Some early reviewers complained that their hero Atticus is revealed as a racist. I don't think that that is entirely true, for while Atticus does speak of race, and does worry about the implications of a vote where the majority will come from an ill-educated black background, what he wants is a gradual incorporation of the negroes into the polity as they become more educated. And if he goes to hear a racist speak, it is on the grounds of toleration, and to 'know thy enemy'. Scout at least comes to accept this point of view, and I think Lee puts it forward as an open question, for us to think about. I suspect that Lee was thinking hard about the value of gentility she attributes to Atticus, aware of their virtues and also of the ways in which they did not cohere with northern liberal values. And I don't want to exonerate Atticus entirely, for many of us will think that he and his kind had an obligation to help black culture develop, rather than merely waiting for it to happen. What we should avoid is easy judgement.

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Another thilling adventure, loved it! Finally a Worth Reading continuation of an emotional and mature story! I highly recommend it!

It' s so easy to read. Harper Lee merely tells us a story. Her 2 books are as important as Uncle Tom ' s Cabin in Literature about the Black People. Why didn' t she write more books ?

There’s something particularly inspiring about a book that puts its reader through the same emotional wringer as its main characters. The classic example is Dangerous Liaisons, the great eighteenth-century French classic by Choderlos de Laclos. Its theme is seduction, and we follow the two main characters in their hugely ingenious and utterly callous seductions of innocent victims. They are so ingenious, so self-aware, so insightful on human nature, that we can’t help but admire them – they seduce us. But seduction is only complete when the victim is abandoned: that ultimate betrayal is an essential component of the process. And the end of the book leaves the reader abandoned, as his or her seducers are revealed… – well, I’m not going to include a spoiler to one exceptional novel in a review of another. Go set a watchman pulls off the same trick, at least if you read it after To Kill a Mockingbird. In the earlier book, we come to share the daughter Scout’s unbridled admiration for the fine figure of her father, Atticus Finch, great crusading lawyer in a racist Southern community. In the second novel (the second published even if it was the first written) follows Scout again, though as an adult she’s now mostly referred to as Jean Louise, as she discovers a different side of Atticus and, indeed, of all the most important figures from her childhood. Calpurnia, the black woman who was all but a mother to the motherless girl, can no longer be at ease with a white; her white relatives in the meantime are on the other side of the barricade that isolates Cal from Jean Louise, busily building it up as the Supreme Court starts to tear down some of the structures that have preserved the Southern way of life, specifically through school desegregation. We follow her on an educational journey towards disabuse and disillusion, and if we already know Mockingbird, we share all the associated feelings with her. That alone makes the novel excellent and well worth reading. That being said, the novel shows signs of insufficient editing. If the tale of how it came to press is true, that’s perhaps not surprising: Lee would not have been in a position to work enough on the text before it went for printing. So, for instance, I have no idea what the reference to a telephone is doing in the following paragraph: “Good morning, daughter of Nereus!” said her uncle, as he kissed her on the cheek. One of Dr. Finch’s concessions to the twentieth century was a telephone. He held his niece at arm’s length and regarded her with amused interest. But I enjoyed such minor asperities, which I felt underlined the quality of the writing overall. Look at the concision with which Lee conveys the fear and embarrassment of a motherless girl terrified as she unknowingly enters womanhood: …she was eleven and came home to dinner from school one day and found that her blood had begun to flow. She thought she was dying and she began to scream. Calpurnia and Atticus and Jem came running, and when they saw her plight, Atticus and Jem looked helplessly at Calpurnia, and Calpurnia took her in hand. The poignancy of the moment is all the greater with hindsight, when we discover that this black woman to whom the whole family turned for succour at a moment of crisis, no longer feels she can maintain the old intimacy with them. That truly underlines the long distance the community in Maycomb has travelled down a bad road. And the ending? Has the education of Jean Louise led her to accept the rationalisations by which her community now lives? Or will she stay true to her self-proclaimed colour blindness?