Watchman: not quite Mockingbird

Published Jul 29, 2015

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There’s a lesson in this for writers aspiring to be published: your first effort is probably not THE one. To Kill a Mocking Bird has sold 40 million copies since it was first published in 1960, has been a set book for school pupils across the world, and is beloved of millions of readers.

It held up a mirror to a repugnant way of life, and showed that it was possible to shine a small light of honour in morally dark times. There were many parallels for white South African readers.

Now it has famously emerged that Harper Lee wrote a previous draft of the book, titled Go Set a Watchman, that while it may have many parallels with the bestseller, is not that book. Nor does it contain that book’s truth.

After To Kill a Mockingbird, author Harper Lee, who grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, in the US Deep South, never published another novel, and thanks to the success of Mockingbird, never needed to. She is still alive, apparently suffering from dementia. Famously reclusive, it is not clear how much she had to do with the publication of Go Set a Watchman.

In Mockingbird, Scout, her brother, Jem, and their friend, Dill, live an idyllic childhood under the benign but upright guidance of Scout and Jem’s lawyer father Atticus Finch, apparently based on Lee’s own father.

Maycomb, Alabama, a fictionalised version of Monroeville, is beset with racism, and there is alarm in the town when Atticus opts to defend a young black man accused of raping a white girl.

Later, when a lynch mob come for the man, Atticus sits outside the jail all night to physically defend him.

Go Set a Watchmen is also set in Maycomb, but most of the action takes place around 20 years later when Scout, now known by her proper name of Jean Louise, goes home from New York for a fortnight’s holiday. There she discovers, to her horror, that Atticus, who has always been her moral touchstone, is flawed; he is a racist.

During a major showdown between Jean Louise and Atticus towards the end of the book, he says: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?... Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ‘em?… Zeebo (son of the family’s former housekeeper) would probably be Mayor of Maycomb. Would you want someone of Zeebo’s capability to handle the town’s money? We’re outnumbered, you know.

“Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as people…”

Do you hear the echo? These are familiar arguments. Many white SA readers would support this version of Atticus today. But Jean Louise is having none of it: “You’re a coward as well as a snob and a tyrant, Atticus… You’re the only person I think I’ve ever trusted and now I’m done for.”

But all this is not the point. Watchman is not the “real” Mockingbird.

From a literary perspective, Watchman is not the book To Kill a Mockingbird is. Or as David L Ulin wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Go Set a Watchman is an apprentice effort”.

Watchman, especially the first half, is readable. It has a fair bit of dry humour, has a wonderful sequence involving Scout, Jem and Dill at play in their back yard one summer day which is recognisable as a Mockingbird precursor; and there is a hilarious episode involving a teenage Jean Louise at a school dance losing her falsies; but the second half of Go Set a Watchman is more a political polemic, with Jean Louise and Atticus furiously arguing about racism.

And what about Atticus and the damage Watchman does to his reputation?

There is a statue to him in Monroeville today. It is unlikely the city fathers would have erected a statue to the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman.

According to Charles J Shields, who wrote the biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Lee’s father Amasa Coleman Lee was, like most of his white Alabama peers, a segregationist. But apparently after she had written Go Set a Watchman, while Harper Lee was working on Mockingbird, her father had a change of heart. Shields says this could explain Atticus’s transformation.

Some fans of To Kill a Mockingbird fear that reading Go Set a Watchman will taint their memories of the original book, that they will no longer be able to admire Atticus.

That may be true of some readers, but I don’t think it should be the general reaction. To Kill a Mockingbird is a piece of work in itself, and should be judged on its own merits.

It’s not as if Atticus was a real person whose prejudices we now know, as happened to the reputation of Laurence van der Post. Atticus is made up, a figment of Harper Lee’s imagination, and the fictional character in To Kill a Mockingbird is unaffected by considerations outside that piece of work.

The publication of Watchman will generate huge sales; the US booksellers chain Barnes & Noble reported that on the first day of publication, sales hit record figures. The publication will probably also spark renewed interest in Mockingbird – a new edition was published last month.

It’s hard not feel cynical about the publishers’ motives, but then anything that gets people reading and generates interest in reading is probably a Good Thing. Should Watchman affect your affection for Mockingbird? No.

And I think Harper Lee would have been appalled.

Go Set a Watchman

by Harper Lee (William Heinmann, London/Penguin)

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