books

Grappling with demons in Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set A Watchman’

BY UMAPAGAN AMPIKAIPAKAN
July 14, 2015

And just like that, you’re back in Maycomb.

That tired old town where grass grew on the sidewalks and the courthouse sagged in the square.  Where men’s stiff collars melted by nine and ladies bathed before noon. Where everyone’s business was everyone else’s.

It is a sudden and vivid flashback, an involuntary memory, triggered by a familiar voice, by that same miraculous prose -  a little unpolished, slightly less song-like, but miraculous all the same.

This is still Scout’s story. Only she’s Jean Louise now. All grown up and living in the big city. 26-years-old and precisely what you would expect: independent, opinionated, fiercely passionate, moral, colour-blind, naive, idealistic.

Jem is dead, struck down by the same weak heart that killed their mother. Calpurnia is distant and long ruined by age. And Atticus? Well Atticus is not the man we thought we knew. At least not this version of him.

“Go Set a Watchman” tells an old story. That one about the prodigal daughter, returning home to Alabama after “living in sin” in New York City, only to realise that nothing is as it seems or as she remembered. It is the story of the seemingly world-wise Jean Louise and her struggle to cope with life and love in her beloved South.

The novel turns on a startling realisation. In and among a pile of her father’s books, Jean Louise discovers a pamphlet called “The Black Plague.” On its cover, a drawing of an anthropophagous Negro, its author, “somebody with several academic degrees after his name.” Inside the pamphlet was the kind of disguised racist drivel that was, for generations, used as some kind of academic justification for segregation and apartheid.

“Negroes, bless their hearts, couldn’t help being inferior to the white race because their skulls are thicker and their brain-pans shallower.”

The novel turns when Jean Louise suddenly discovers that both her father, the godlike Atticus Finch, and her long-time boyfriend, Hank Clinton, are unapologetically racist. It is a revelation that leaves Jean Louise disgusted.

“Do you want them in our world?” Atticus asks her. “Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?” It is a conversation that completely breaks the rest of us.

It is a shocking revelation to our young impressionable protagonist, but even more so to all of us who have, for so long, worshipped at the altar of Atticus Finch.

Our view of the South, forever influenced by his humanism, by his unflinching decency, by his fidelity to the truth. Our idea of manhood, rendered unattainable by Gregory Peck.

“Miss Jean Louise. Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing.” We stood up, all of us, when Atticus Finch was passing.

Go Set a Watchman was Harper Lee’s first novel. Previously unpublished, it is essentially an early version of To Kill a Mockingbird, one that her editor asked her to rework and rewrite.

Lee would spend the next two years on the story, expanding on a series of flashbacks utilised in her original manuscript, before finally delivering the classic we so adore.

Watchman, published now as a follow up to Mockingbird, is anything but. This is not a sequel. It is, in every way, a first draft. Reading this, we are allowed to bear witness to Harper Lee’s process.

We are given a front row seat to her evolution as an author. If anything, Watchman provides a kind of contextualisation to Mockingbird. It is a pleasurable insight into just how much of Harper Lee is in her work. It fulfils a deep and abiding curiosity.

In many ways, Go Set a Watchman is a far more considered piece of work. A treatise on the American South that feels authentic. Her characters being rooted in fact rather than fantasy. To Kill a Mockingbird was a fairy tale for the 1960s.

A remarkable piece of work that forced us to look at the world through the eyes of a child, without doubt or disbelief, with a sense of hope and wonder. It was wish fulfilment. That Jim Crow didn’t speak for everyone on that side of the Mason-Dixon Line and that here was a hero, an everyday product of the American South, who was somehow transcendent.

This “new” version of Atticus Finch still possesses many of those same virtues. He still rings true. Because at his core, he is still very much the same man. Fair. Honest. Even minded. Steadfast in his application of the law.

He recognises that he is, for better or for worse, a product of his time but is nevertheless willing to change. He tells Jean Louise: “So far, in my experience, white is white, and black’s black. So far, I’ve not yet heard an argument that has convinced me otherwise. I’m seventy-two years old, but I’m still open to suggestion.”

It is ironic, but Go Set a Watchman feels like a far more timely novel than To Kill a Mockingbird. It feels apt for 2015. In this 21st century, as we still grapple with those same demons, as we struggle to give the lesser angels of our conscience a greater voice, all we can really hope for is a willingness to be open to suggestion. – July 14, 2015.