Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee’s Journey through Narration.

Atticus Finch will always…always… sound like Gregory Peck when I read To Kill a Mockingbird or, even now, Go Set a Watchman.  I finished the novel this morning and allowed my mind to wander through the shadows and light of Maycomb, Alabama.  Nothing changed for me after this reading.  I neither was delighted nor disappointed in what Lee wrote here.  After sixty-plus years of the manuscript hiding in an old file cabinet somewhere, I am grateful for the illumination of something that I have long believed.  Writing is a process.

In a review that came out last week, the writer stated that one of the early editors advised Harper Lee about her novel. He said in essence…”Go and re-write this novel about Scout as a girl.” It’s simple advice that recognized the brilliance in Lee’s diction and characterization. This editor realized that the few true moments of story-telling in Watchman happened in the flashbacks of Scout’s childhood, the antics of Scout with her brother Jem and their friend Dill Harris.

Yes.  I am an Advanced Placement Literature teacher.  This kind of thinking is endemic to my line of work. Some might call it a sickness. Yet, after reading and analyzing dozens of books and plays (“the bane of an English major’s existence”)…it helps to stand back from a piece of literature and not get caught up in the “I like it–I hate it” trap of thinking.  That makes it too easy to embrace or reject a novel, play, or poem.  While Go Set a Watchman is the story of a twenty-six-year-old Scout, the kernels of To Kill a Mockingbird are germinating in Scout’s mind and most particularly in Harper Lee’s heart.  This novel is a manifesto of Lee’s beliefs about racism.  Scout claims to be “color-blind” in several passages which seem to come into conflict when Uncle Jack and Atticus both ramble on about the slow evolution of non-racist beliefs and attitudes. They justify their seemingly racist activities as their way to change the systemic problems of racism within the old broken traditions of the South.

Scout is appalled that both Atticus and Hank, his protege and the young man who professes to love Scout, attend a “community meeting” that appears to be pro-segregation. Scout sits in the familiar balcony of the courthouse where in To Kill a Mockingbird, she and Jem watched their father gallantly defend Tom Robinson…a black man accused of raping a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Now…Scout watches her father briefly introduce a racist speaker, and  she can’t believe the tone and invective of the words that followed from that man. She is lost in her pristine memories of her father’s words…equal rights for all; special privileges for none….  Where does she fit? Who are her people? What has come of the place…Maycomb… that she held in her heart and mind?

Go Set a Watchman succeeds and also fails as we explore the mid-1950’s through the character of a contemporary Scout.  This is the time when the South had not yet felt the impact of the coming Civil Rights movement. Maycomb is unsettled, because northerners of the NAACP are perceived to be invading their community and trying to change the role of blacks as voters and eventually fully participating citizens of the town and county.  The resistance of Uncle Jack and Atticus becomes a tedious read as they explain to a defiant Scout the ways of the South and their justification for participating in what seems an anti-negro community organization.  She continues to revere Calpurnia, Zeebo, and others as people who helped her grow and become a person who did not see or consider race as part of her childhood.

Scout is a stronger narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird, because she is able to put the events of her childhood in a clearer context than she can in Go Set a Watchman. Raised by her widowed father, the tomboy Scout draws us into her world, whether Dill is pouring syrup on his food or she’s rolling inside an old tire into the Radley yard.  Growing up in the 1930’s in a very segregated South, Scout more authentically deals with issues that coming of age stories face.  Of course, race is also at the center of that story.  But, interestingly, Tom Robinson is the black heroic counterpoint to the white…almost albino…Boo Radley.  Both men are viewed with deep humanity in each of them.  Tom Robinson had the audacity to help and to feel sorry for a poor white girl who was abused by her white-trash father.  Her loneliness and isolation from the world led to the tragic arrest, trial, and death of an innocent black man.  Boo Radley hides in isolation from the world, yet the games of happy and adventurous children observed from his shadowed lair, cause him to become a protector and hero when the children’s lives are endangered by the angry and vengeful Bob Ewell.  That kind of clear protagonist/antagonist characterization is missing in Go Set a Watchman.  In a rambling narrative between flashbacks about Scout’s childhood and teen years, Lee struggles to find the strength of her narrative voice.  To me, this did not lessen the pages of the novel.  It simply showed me the path a writer must wander to find the essence of “voice.”  Scout’s is controlled and wise in the masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird. She is an authentic narrator…believable…true to her values…because she faced her demons and lack of understanding as the young woman returning home from New York to a changing South.  In To Kill a Mockingbird, this grounded and mature narrator understands that the heroic stance Atticus takes facing the rabid dog is no different than his sitting on the porch in front of the jail waiting for the mob to show up before Robinson’s trial. Finding that authentic voice was worth the meandering journey through Go Set a Watchman.

The reward for me of reading this latest novel is realizing that Harper Lee had the guts to do it again by writing a similar narrative from the worldview of children. She may have demonstrated to any aspiring novelist that the true essence of writing is “to show and not tell” as so many of my writing professors drilled into me.  Uncle Jack and Atticus may have rambled on too long about the history of race and progress.  Plot was sacrificed on their altars of personal philosophies, but they did something we should all be grateful for.  The young adult Scout grew with a light of understanding and reflection, making her into an iconic character for millions of readers in the masterpiece novel that would follow.

Raised glass filled with some divine liquid….”Here’s to long life, love, and health”…and a readable blog….that might make a difference…or not…but makes me feel better for writing it…hoping to record that fountain of thoughts that gushes through my brain at a zillion gallons a minute….and finds me languishing in unexpressed but always quagmire-ish feelings of “when will I get serious about this writing business?”…after all…I spent all those thousands of dollars on a MFA Writing degree…plus have read a barn-full of sophomoric and overwritten research papers for the last thirty years of earnest and hormonal and always funny teenagers…with helicopter parents who swoop down out of their orbit and ….oops…off on a jag here.  Back to the glass…cheers!