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  It wasn't.  Andrew Gulli of The Strand has unearthed an unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald story that he'll soon publish.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  And does anybody really think that J. D. Salinger's unpublished works (assuming that there are any) won't find their way into print eventually?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.