We often think of great novels (and films, plays, symphonies and so on) as having burst into existence fully formed, inspired and conceived exactly as the near-perfect works with which we’re familiar. But all great works are the final results of exhaustive revision and rethinking. Did you know Dr. Strangelove was originally intended as a serious drama? Or that the Beatles’ “Yesterday” originally had the working lyrics, “Scrambled eggs / Oh my baby, how I love your legs”? By now, many people know that Lee wrote Go Set a Watchman several years before To Kill a Mockingbird; her editor, Tay Hohoff, encouraged her to rewrite the childhood flashbacks extensively until they evolved into the latter novel. Watchman, which came out yesterday, is the beginning of a process, not the end.
This is a book that’s impossible to evaluate objectively, on its own merits. Mockingbird, both in literary and cinematic form, is so ingrained into the culture that you bring whatever it means to you to Watchman. Many of the familiar characters are here in some form (Scout, Atticus, Calpurnia, Jem, Dill, Aunt Alexandra, even Miss Rachel), but embryonic and incomplete; there’s no sign of Boo Radley, but his presence in Mockingbird was mainly symbolic anyway. Competently written but dialogue-heavy, with less of the descriptive evocation of period and place that makes Mockingbird come alive so vividly, Watchman is less about character development and more about ideological debate.
The main story: 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch, living in New York City in the 1950s, travels back to Maycomb County, Alabama (the setting of Mockingbird) to visit her father, Atticus, now in his early 70s and infirm, and her old friend, Hank Clinton, who now wants to marry her. (She also has an uncle, Dr. John Finch, described as “shot through with curious mannerisms and odd exclamations,” with “conversation… coloured with subtle allusions to Victorian obscurities.”) But as media reports have already sensationalized, Atticus — the noble, anti-racism lawyer from Mockingbird who willingly defends a doomed African American man in court — has changed. He, Hank and Alexandra secretly read racist pamphlets and attend Sunday courthouse meetings promoting segregation.
It’s true that Atticus says a lot of shocking things in Watchman — calling African Americans “backward” and “still in their childhood as a people” in a lengthy (and exhausting) argument with his daughter late in the book. Almost as alarming as this bombshell, though, are Jean Louise’s own unconscious prejudices popping out in her thoughts here and there. “’They were poor, they were diseased and dirty, some were lazy and shiftless,’” she thinks, “’but never in my life was I given the idea… that I could mistreat one and get away with it.’”
Mockingbird may have aspects that seem naive or simplistic today (could a little girl really turn away a lynch mob? And isn’t it a little too obvious that Tom Robinson’s innocent?), but its thematic coherence and sure, confident through line make it seem like a complete work; it also had the advantage of coming along at exactly the right time in the civil-rights movement. While Watchman tries to take a more complex and three-dimensional view of Southern racist attitudes, it’s too incoherent and episodic to affect the reader in the same way. The book has been published with minimal edits to Lee’s original manuscript, and you can tell. With Mockingbird, Lee knew exactly what she wanted to say about prejudice and empathy, and everything in the book contributed to that message. But Watchman feels more like Lee throwing together a bunch of ideas and trying, unsuccessfully, to make them stick.
Hohoff was right to push Lee to develop the childhood scenes. One of the book’s strongest sections is a random but lengthy flashback to Jean Louise’s (i.e. Scout’s) adolescence in which she experiences menstruation for the first time — and mistakenly believes herself pregnant, until Calpurnia sets her straight. It’s funny and moving in a way that predicts both Mockingbird and early Judy Blume. Lee finds her storytelling instincts naturally in these passages, whereas the “present-day” narrative is full of clunky exposition and dialogue that begs for trimming or revision. (One of the book’s more bizarre lines: when the adult Jean Louise blurts to her quarreling aunt, “Why don’t you go pee in your hat?” whatever that means.) Although Watchman is told in the third-person, you constantly sense Lee’s urge to write from Scout’s point of view, with endless details of Jean Louise’s thoughts presented directly without quotation marks or italics.
Go Set a Watchman is messy and frustrating to read, and it must be even more so for Mockingbird fans who have fixed, idealized images in their minds of Atticus Finch and other Maycomb residents. I don’t think this should detract from Mockingbird‘s status as a literary classic, though, because Watchman reads more as a half-baked alternative universe to Mockingbird than as a companion to it. In fact, Watchman might have been better off buried and abandoned; now that it’s public, it will almost certainly warp readers’ memories of Mockingbird in a bad way, and that’s a shame.
