Go Set a Watchman
When To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee emerged onto the literary
scene in 1960, it caused a furor, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It
was also quickly turned into a classic movie starring Gregory Peck as
the idealized hero lawyer, Atticus Finch, who battles to set free a black
man unfairly accused of rape. Educators placed it in high school English
curricula for its magical depiction of the comforts and rude awakenings
of childhood as seen through the eyes of Atticus’s young daughter,
Scout. She and her brother watch her father battle brutal racism in a
1930s Southern courtroom in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama.
Harper Lee, now deaf and almost blind at 89, eschewed publicity and
may not have originally intended to publish Go Set a Watchman,
unearthed from a bank vault by her agent, lawyer, and publishers and
written earlier than To Kill a Mockingbird. Signs point to it being
originally a rough draft with a different plot, taking place when Scout is
a young woman returning to Maycomb to visit her father, Atticus, and
family.
Yet Go Set a Watchman as a progenitor has its own moral labyrinths to
ponder. Beloved literary heroine, Scout, has become a thoughtful yet
still impulsive woman in her twenties: Jean Louise Finch. As Harper
Lee’s first book in fifty-five years, Watchman has a heavy burden of
expectations to bear from the public and the literary world, and it does
not quite meet them. Its concerns are more initially abstract and
complex than those that resulted in Mockingbird’s pitch-perfect and
deeply affecting account of a Southern childhood with its happinesses,
purity, Gothic scares, and angers at the unfairness of life. Yet it is worth
reading just the same, to see Scout’s concerns in a 1950s world. She is
divided between her life in New York City and her visits to Maycomb,
which has always been home. The Supreme Court’s decision to
desegregate schools has helped disillusion her by removing her faith
that Atticus Finch, moral guide par excellence, will automatically
support equality for Negroes.
The novel begins with Jean Louise taking a train trip from New York to
Maycomb for her annual two week holiday, looking forward to the
comforts of home and the golden world in which she grew up, a world
that feels real. She has a hometown beau named Hank Clinton, whom
her father is grooming as a junior partner in lieu of her brother, who
died of a heart attack. He is a new character but one whom she grew up
trusting and loving as a friend of her brother’s. Hank represents her
ambivalence at both the idea of marrying someone and losing herself in
his life, and fitting into Maycomb’s social conformity, which she has
always viewed with a quizzical, sarcastic eye.
While thinking about her options, she stumbles upon Hank and her
father attending a meeting of the Maycomb Citizens Council. The adult
Scout goes up to the balcony once more, and looks down, literally and
figuratively, on the leading citizens of Maycomb at this meeting,
listening to an ardent racist speaker expound on the dangers of
desegregation and the NAACP, who are trying to open up various
institutions all over the South and in Alabama.
The naïve Jean Louise feels struck to the core when she finds out that
Atticus is on the board of directors of this blandly named “Citizens
Council.” She has held Atticus up as a golden idol of truth and
righteousness who always lives publicly as he thinks privately, and is
horrified to believe that he holds views she finds morally repugnant. She
feels as if she has been struck out of her family and that she no longer
even has a foothold in Maycomb, which bred and bore her. Lee makes
the point that Scout, the former child now known as Jean Louise, had
never really seen the realities surrounding her in her world of
intellectual eccentricity and encompassing love. As Lee writes “Had she
insight, could she have pierced the barriers of her highly selective,
insular world, she may have discovered that all her life she had been
with a visual defect which had gone unnoticed and neglected by herself
and by those closest to her: she was born color blind.”
Go Set a Watchman is an intricate work that pits the adult and yet still
fiery and impetuous Jean Louise against the realities of her past and her
father’s current beliefs, which are more nuanced than they may seem.
Those who love To Kill a Mockingbird will find it worth reading because
it fills out the portrait sketched so affectionately and acutely in 1960,
and shows how Scout becomes Jean Louise, engaging with political
arguments and her own disillusionments to make independent
decisions and become an adult.
Luckily, Lee’s sarcastic humor occasionally leavens the novel. The book
is sometimes ponderous, including too much repetitive soul-searching,
dusty academic references, and stories that feel like outtakes from
Mockingbird. In short, it should have been edited before it was released.
Yet while a few plot points strike false notes, the dialogue and story still
take you to Jean Louise’s authentic world, a place where so many
readers have found deep satisfaction and felt her love for humanity in
all colors and variations.