GO SET A WATCHMAN
Harper Lee
William Heinemann: London
Review: Jennifer Crocker
Seldom does one look at the list of previous works by an author and find it disquieting – they just are what they are.
But opening Go Set a Watchman under the heading “Also by Harper Lee” is part of the drama that the publication of this book has caused, because Harper Lee only wrote one book.
We were told that. We were told she believed that having written To Kill a Mocking Bird there was no way to go but down, and so she stayed silent.
It’s tempting to allow the voices on social media, the stories of how an unprotected elderly woman may have finally given permission to the publishers to allow Go Set a Watchman to appear in print.
It is tempting to speculate that after the death of her apparent protector sister, she was in no position to make a clear choice and may herself have lost her “watchman”, but all of this is a side plot.
To fall prey to the side plot is to miss the point of the novel and the intertextual references one is led into between one of America’s most beloved books, To Kill a Mockingbird, and a very different book.
One can really only, in this case, look with any discernment at the text if one wants to fathom what Lee was doing with Go Set a Watchman.
It begins with Jean Louise Finch returning to Maycomb, her childhood home. She has chosen to take the train from New York, where she now lives with the Yankees, instead of the plane.
The device allows us to enter the South, to Maycomb Junction, where she believes the mythical Atticus Finch, who we all think we know from To Kill a Mockingbird, will be waiting for her.
As she comes closer to home she sheds her stockings and New York clothing and dresses for Maycomb, for the South.
Scout is still part of Jean Louise, but she is a faint figure in the young woman we now must meet.
Atticus is not at the station. Instead, the man Jean Louise expects to marry one day is there – Henry the boy from the wrong side of the track who has been practically raised by Atticus.
Got Set a Watchman is a book that makes the reader work hard. It flows like the river that Henry and Jean Louise will dare each other to leap into later that night, down at the Landing. At times the text is raw and the dialogue a tad strained.
But considering that it was probably written before To Kill a Mockingbird in the 1950s, then that is not strange. The lines used then would not have been clichés at all.
Jean Louise eases back into her hometown, her irritation with her aunt unabated, her attendance at the Maycomb Methodist church obligatory and part of what she expects.
But Lee throws a literary bombshell into the service, the doxology is sung at a rapid rate, it jars, it is not the Southern way. It pre-shadows the fight that Atticus and Jean Louise will reach, at the climax of the book, about racism and change.
You have probably seen the “shock, horror” comments about how Atticus is undone in this book as a racist, but from a contextual point of view, and looking back at a book clearly written a long time ago, and perhaps as a draft, perhaps not, then it is clear that Lee is telling the story of the South in the 1950s as a more complicated narrative than To Kill a Mockingbird ever did.
Far from feeling that this work in any way degrades the one we all love, it seems to me that it tells the true story of the pain of the South.
The question, then, is why was the book never published?
It is a book that tells of two things: that racism and fear are often linked and that the rainbow of a bucolic southern town with a charming, at times outrageous, little girl could never have been the real story.
In a strange backwards sweep it is about the fear that makes us say change must be gradual, the terror of the south and its history with the north of the US, the fact that you can defend the law and still not be a perfect person.
In an eerie nod to the zeitgeist, perhaps it is also true that we have not moved that far from the world of To Set a Watchman, and as I write this my mind drifts to Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace at the end of his Charleston Eulogy. Perhaps, more than ever, we need to set a watchman?