Thursday, August 13, 2015

Go Set a Watchman -- Harper Lee

Like everybody else who talks about Go Set a Watchman, I feel the need to mention something about its publication history, even though you already know the story.  The manuscript was discovered in a safety deposit box, and now it's a book.  Some people are upset by this because they feel it's an inferior book, a rejected manuscript that a sharp editor saw something in that caused him to tell the author to go in another direction.  She followed his sage advice and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a much-loved American novel.  Other people are upset because the novel shows presents Atticus Finch as a racist.  Others are upset because they believe Harper Lee is old and maybe senile and would have prevented the publication if she'd been hale and hearty.  That's a lot of baggage for a book to carry.  

What I wonder is why nobody's upset in the least, and in fact there seems to be great rejoicing, that a newly discovered manuscript by Dr. Seuss will be published.  It was probably written around the same time as Go Set a Watchman, in fact.  He set it aside for some reason and never went back to it.  Did he feel it was an inferior work?  We'll never know.  It's going to be published, anyway.  Dr. Seuss, by the way, seems to have a racist skeleton or two in his closet.  Nobody seems bothered by that, and he's a real person, not a fictional character.

And does anybody really believe that Go Set a Watchman would never have been published?  Virgil on his deathbed asked that The Aeneid be burned.  He really didn't want to be preserved.  Kafka burned some of his work and gave the rest to a friend before he died with the request that it be burned, too.  Nabakov asked that Laura be destroyed.  It wasn't.  Andrew Gulli of The Strand has unearthed an unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald story that he'll soon publish.  J. R. R. Tolkein's estate is going to publish a very early story by Tolkein. George MacDonald Fraser's heirs have uncovered the manuscript of his first novel, which is soon to be published.   Even T. S. Eliot is getting into the act.  And does anybody really think that J. D. Salinger's unpublished works (assuming that there are any) won't find their way into print eventually?  Writers who have actively sought to keep their works away from the public have been thwarted before.  Harper Lee wouldn't have been any different had the manuscript been found after her death, so why not publish it now and let her enjoy the fame and the money?  Not that she needs any more of either of those things.

As for Atticus and his racism, well, he's a fictional character, and this book isn't To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's a different book with a different story.  Atticus still believes in the law in this book, but, sure enough, his attitudes about race aren't good ones by today's standards.  They weren't even good ones when the book was written, but I was alive back then and living in the south.  His attitudes are better than most were.  One of the whole points of the book is Jean Louise's calling him and her friend Hank on their racism.  [BIG-TIME SPOILER ALERT]  Then she gets slapped around by her Uncle Jack and sees that you can still love someone who's wrong and that maybe people aren't as bad as she thinks they are.  I can see why some readers might not like this accommodation or Hank's "you gotta go along to get along" attitude.  But Hank has a point.  He can do some good living in Maycomb, Georgia, and following the law even with his attitudes about race.  So can Atticus.  That doesn't make them right, but it does make them human.  [END OF SPOILER ALERT]   

The way I see it is that Atticus in this book could very well be the same as in Mockingbird.   In Watchman Jean Louise goes on and on about how much she's admired him in the past, but we don't really know why.  The answer's in Mockingbird.  The editor to whom Lee sent the manuscript of Watchman must have said something like, "The scenes from Jean Louise's childhood are great.  Why don't you write a book about why she admires her father so much?  What incident incited that admiration?"  So Lee wrote a different and better novel and put Watchman in a trunk.

What about the book other than that?  As an old retired English teacher, I have to start with the title, Go Set a Watchman, and with commas.  The bible verse that the title comes from is quoted in the book.  It begins like this: "Go, set a watchman; . . ."  So why did the comma disappear in the title?  Or does it even matter?


Aside from that, I think the book needed a good editor.  The first 100 pages are sort of like a '50s romance novel.  Young, free-spirited woman who's worked in New York returns to her hometown and picks up with her childhood sweetheart.  Will they marry or not?  Do we even care?  Things change when Jean Louise slips into a meeting of the Citizens' Council and, the book becomes a treatise on race relations in the South, with lots of long dialogues (or lectures).  There are those fine scenes of growing up in the small town that I mentioned, but those are pretty much tossed in at random, it seemed to me.  They're the best things in the book, but there are a couple of other powerful scenes as well.  There's no doubt that Harper Lee was a good writer right from the start.  She just needed an editor to tell her what her subject was and to guide her a little bit.

In the end, this book is of  interest mainly because of its historical connection to another book.  It's a middling novel that's become a huge bestseller because of interest in that other book.  I don't see a bit of harm in its being published or a bit of harm in reading it.  I'd wait for the remaindered copies to turn up, though, if I were you.

14 comments:

Sam said...

I was in Monroeville, Alabama, for the big midnight celebration there of the book's release. Someone...can't remember who it was...told me that night that the original title as presented by the publisher included the comma you refer to in your review of the book and that it was Harper Lee who insisted that it be removed. I hope that's a true story because it would prove that she understood what was being done with the manuscript. Who knows?

mybillcrider said...

Great story, and I hope it's true, too. Thanks for sharing.

Sam said...

Forgot to mention that she supposedly commented something to the effect that she didn't write the Bible.

Richard Prosch said...

Old DC Comics fan that she is, Gina says it's simply the "Earth-2 version" of Mockingbird.

RK said...

Thanks for your tell-all review, Bill. You've answered all my questions, soothed all my curiosities. Now I can move on with my reading pile.

Cap'n Bob said...

I doubt I'll ever read it, but it sparks a question. How many manuscripts do you have in a trunk that might see posthumous publication?

mybillcrider said...

Only one, and it's at Texas A&M.

Deb said...

Great essay, Bill, but I won't be reading the book--not because of anything you've written here. I've never liked TKAM which I find is a "white savior" novel (perhaps not as egregious as THE HELP, but still...) and is so self-congratulatory about Atticus's basic decency: you have to buy into the status quo of the Jim Crow era south to find Atticus an heroic figure--and I can't do that. So for me, with or without the comma, GSAW is a pass.

Don Coffin said...

Thank you for mentioning Tolkien. Christopher Tolkien's publications of his father's previously unpublished work (most of it, frankly, never intended for publication--it's quite apparent he was writing the back story to Middle Earth for his own use in The Lord of the Rings) is, by my count, up to 16 volumes (including the most recent one). (Oh, and I have them all, except the most recent.) (I've read parts of most of it, and, if he'd only written the posthumously published works, no one would remember his name.)

Max Allan Collins said...

I wrote about WATCHMAN on my own blog a while back, and said I was 100 pages in. I haven't returned to it and doubt I will. At 100 pages it hadn't developed into a story yet. No conflict, and what I knew about the conflict to come didn't appear to be developed into anything more than people arguing.

Also, as you say, Bill, the book needed editing and shaping. I know a little bit about this myself, having dealt with just a few unpublished Spillane manuscripts.

mybillcrider said...

It's as if at about the point you stopped reading, Lee said, "Okay, now I know what the book is supposed to be about." Then the arguing starts.

Bud said...

A lot of hullabaloo over very little. Your comments covered the whole thing just right, particularly the "racist" business. I liked the movie just fine and that will cover it for me 8-)

Dan said...

What impresses me about the story is that an editor read an indifferent book by a talented author and advised her to go back & re-write it. Over the years I've sent out manuscripts to hundreds of agents & editors and the only advice I ever got was to sell my typewriter.

mybillcrider said...

Born too late.