Harper Lee’s Watchman shouldn’t be compared with Mockingbird

Comparisons with Mockingbird are neither warranted nor appropriate when reading Harper Lee’s ‘new’ book.

Signs outside the old Monroe County Courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama, this week. Picture: AP

If you want to appreciate the moon-sized gravitational pull Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird exerts over the culture, witness the critical resistance to her new novel: it’s like the tidal drag before the tsunami hits. Everyday readers may be lining up around the block for a copy of Go Set a Watchman, but based on early reviews, some of us regard such enthusiasm as unwarranted.

The cynicism many feel about this publishing ‘‘coup’’ was perfectly captured by a mock-news story published earlier this week by satirical website The Onion, which announced ‘‘the surprise release of Harper Lee’s third novel, My Excellent Caretaker Deserves My Entire Fortune’’.

MYSTERY WOMAN: In search of Harper Lee in Alabama

As a tribe, book reviewers are lovers twice, thrice-bitten, more. How many times have we thrilled to claims that this lost work by Hemingway or that lovingly preserved novel by Nabokov was an overlooked masterpiece, only to discover in the cocktail napkin fragments or the bullet-pointed note cards arranged between handsome cloth boards the literary equivalent of a bait-and-switch? So when Lee, the famously reclusive 88-year-old novelist, announced in February via her lawyer that she would — despite having vowed never to publish again, despite being partially deaf and blind after a stroke — release her first novel after all, the broken romantics of the book world braced hard for disappointment: so hard, in fact, that any publication was bound to be tainted by the ambiguous circumstances of its arrival.

Yet the same argument could lead to Max Brod being called a mongrel for posthumously publishing Franz Kafka’s work against the author’s express wishes; it could lash Vera Nabokov for once rescuing the manuscript of Lolita from her despairing husband’s backyard barbecue. The first task for anyone interested in Lee’s book is to balance the ethical questions of testamentary betrayal against aesthetic inquiry: was it worth spurning Lee’s long reticence (even though a recent investigation has found no evidence the author was coerced) to publish the book? Is it any good?

The answer is yes, it was; and yes, it is. Though Go Set a Watchman is a narrative entire unto itself and can be read without recourse to Mockingbird, it is fascinatingly interwoven with the events and lives of its older sibling (older in terms of publication, that is: Watchman was written several years earlier, during the mid-1950s). It is a stylistically polished and self-assured work; uneven perhaps, at times veering toward didacticism, but possessing a political conscience more actively engaged and distinctly rendered than anything in Mockingbird. It is made from the same combination of small-town elegiacs, droll memoir, acerbic insight and liberal temper that made To Kill a Mockingbird a bestseller 30 million times over.

Having granted these affinities, perhaps boundaries between the two novels should not be policed too closely. Lee reports that it was her New York literary agent who, looking over the manuscript of Watchman, suggested she remove and expand those aspects dealing with the childhood of her heroine, a tomboyish southern girl named Jean Louise (if you were her Aunt Alexandra) or Scout (if you were anyone else) Finch. Rather than enter into arguments about whether Watchman properly should be regarded as a prequel or a sequel to Mockingbird, consider the work as one cannibalised in the creative womb by its stronger twin.

What remains is an account of the return of Jean Louise to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, at the age of 26, during the early stirrings of the civil rights movement. For years, we understand, she has made a home in New York — a metropolis where many races live cheek by jowl in conditions that might be described as equality through indifference — but she has returned each year to visit her now elderly father, Atticus, her part-time boyfriend and potential husband, Henry ‘‘Hank’’ Clinton, her poised, bossy and narrow Aunt Alexandra, and her eccentric Uncle Jack — and of course her beloved former family retainer Calpurnia.

The intermittence and the brevity of her visits home over the years have allowed Jean Louise to balance tenderness against contempt for the pinched mores and outmoded attitudes of her birthplace. Indeed, having spent long months in the cold, rude, anonymous north, she sinks gratefully back into the warm social tangle of Maycomb life. At first, at least.

Time has not wearied Jean Louise; she has carried into adulthood all the sass, the drawled wit, the quick temper and the stubborn cowlick that made Scout such a magnetic presence in Mockingbird. There are firm hints that she has carried her independence into the sexual realm, too. In her mid-20s, an old maid by Maycomb standards, she nonetheless carries herself with the confidence of an educated sophisticate dropped into a small southern town. ‘‘I thought women liked to be strange and mysterious’’ observes Henry on their first night out together, to which she rejoins:

“No, they just like to look strange and mysterious. When you get past all the boa feathers, every woman born in this world wants a man who knows her like a book, who’s not only her lover but he who keepeth Israel. Stupid, isn’t it?”

“She wants a father instead of a husband, then.”

“That’s what it amounts to,” she said. “The books are right on that score.”

Henry said, “You’re being very wise this evening. Where’d you pick up all this?”

“Living in sin in New York,” she said.

Yet there are signs and portents from the start that this trip will be different. Her train overshoots its station when she arrives, as though the carriages were advertising a personal speed at odds with the languid world Jean Louise is re-entering. Not only that: she has taken the train in order to spare the 72-year-old Atticus Finch the airport drive. Arthritis has turned his hands into an ugly rictus, an outer deformity that speaks, a little obviously perhaps, of some defect within.

Most ominously, a car filled with black men comes dangerously close to running Hank and Louise off the road.

The old order has been unsettled in various ways. The last pocket of land from the once extensive Finch estate has been sold, and the grand old house where Atticus was born and raised turned into a rowdy private drinking and gambling club. Even the family place in town, ground zero of Scout’s childhood, has been demolished and turned into an ice-cream parlour serving the new class of returned servicemen and risen sharecroppers’ daughters and sons: men and women whose vulgar architectural tastes and government employment are privately decried and publicly ignored by the old families of the town.

Most significant, however, is a recent decision by the US Supreme Court: 1954’s judgment in Brown v the Board of Education demanded an end to segregation on the basis of race in southern schools. Jean Louise has walked into a historical moment in which white southerners are obliged to capitulate to what they view as unwarranted northern interference in states’ rights, or else openly defend the historic privileges accorded to those of their skin colour.

White supremacy, an ideology long buried beneath the gentlemanly manners of the old southern aristocracy, is in the process of being outed as a clear, organised and ongoing system of institutionalised racism.

There is enough of the New Yorker in Jean Louise to instinctively recoil from the naked expression of this system (as Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness, ‘‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much’’). But there is enough Maycomb in her make-up to ensure that certain assumptions about race and class are inviolate, bred in the bone.

Go Set a Watchman takes place at the point where competing personal impulses and collective ideologies have become incommensurable — no longer safe to be contained within the same skull.

For the most part, Lee deftly manages this darkening of tone. In the opening sequences of the novel there is plenty of the old badinage and enough retrospection on Jean Louise’s part that something of the achingly Edenic quality of Mockingbird is retained. There is a masterful chapter where, throughout the course of a single date with Hank, she revisits her childhood with full photographic command. But it is only here, sadly, that fans of the earlier book will see two central characters in the flesh. Dill, short of stature but wild of imagination, has long fled Maycomb for the wider world and Europe, specifically (and indeed Truman Capote, Lee’s fellow writer and childhood neighbour, on whom Dill was based, was working as a screenwriter in Italy during the early to mid-50s).

The other missing figure is Jem, Jean Louise’s handsome, heroic older brother. Only pages in, we learn that Jem has died. It is not until well into the book that we learn he inherited his mother’s weak heart and suffered a heart attack in the street, aged 22.

The perfunctory nature of Jem’s removal has been decried by early readers of the book, and fairly enough. And yet his absence has a significant narrative virtue: it allows old schoolfriend Hank to become Atticus’s adoptive son and legal mentor. By courting her the modestly-born yet ambitious local boy hopes to inveigle her back into her family’s bosom.

At which point, just as Jean Louise is tempted, Lee drops a gear. Word arrives that Frank, Calpurnia’s favourite grandson and a promising young man, got behind the wheel of a car drunk and ran down a white man, killing him. It is a reiteration of the events in Mockingbird when a black man is accused of raping a white woman, this time played in an off-key.

Hank and Atticus agree to take on the case, but only on the basis that their doing so would ensure no agitating lawyer from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People could get involved in the case and meddle with the course of justice.

Perturbed by her father’s attitude, Jean Louise visits Calpurnia. It is a terrible, wounding encounter that pits the old woman’s long relationship with the Finch family against an emerging and aggrieved racial consciousness:

Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them down softly on the arms of the rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind thick lenses.

“What are you all doing to us?” she said.

“Us?”

“Yessum. Us.”

The second tearing of the veil occurs when Jean Louise discovers a white supremacist pamphlet among her father’s papers. After confronting her Aunt Alexandra about the discovery, she learns that Atticus and Hank are attending a Citizens Council meeting at the old courthouse.

She slips in and takes her old seat in the coloured balcony — the one she rose from at the black community’s urging all those years before to honour her father’s successful defence of accused rapist Tom Robinson — and watches as a large group of Maycomb men listen to the vile rantings of a self-described specialist on the inherent inferiority of the negro race.

The novel never quite recovers from this intelligence. Nor does Jean Louise:

The one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted had failed her; the only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with expert knowledge, “He is a gentleman, in his heart he is a gentleman”, had betrayed her, publicly, grossly, and shamelessly.

The final chapters are mainly constructed around two embattled exchanges: one between niece and uncle, the other between daughter and father. These serve to clarify that the two most significant men in her life are as one when it comes to racial paternalism and dislike of northern interference in their affairs. It’s rich, ripe talk all right; but talk is what it is. The horizon of the narrative shrinks to extended, argumentative dialogue that can verge on melodrama when it isn’t circling ugly and defunct arguments about race and civilisation.

The fascinating if flawed nature of this conclusion is not an argument against the book’s worth so much as an illumination of the reasons behind its long withholding.

Jean Louise is unable to square the stainless honour of her father with the racial idolatry he admits; she is unable to mount a successful argument in favour of her colourblind view of the world because she has geographically removed herself from the south’s daily frictions and mounting social woes.

Her decency can find no purchase, and her anger no legitimate outlet. Jean Louise merely rants until such point that her uncle slaps her, causing her to collapse in shock. Like the heroine of an 18th-century gothic novel faced with some horror beyond her capacity to cope, she simply shuts down. To sever herself wholly from Maycomb and the Finches would demand such an extinction, since each of us is no more than the sum of our situation: our race, sex, ancestors, community — and the stories these communities tell about themselves.

But how helpful all this is in understanding the success of To Kill a Mockingbird! By diving further back in time, before the birth of the civil rights movement, before her hero Atticus was forced to show his imperfect hand — before her heroine Scout was obliged to assume her gender and go away, and so enter into sexual and political contingency — Lee was able to portray issues of class and racial injustice without de-legitimising her ambivalent yet ingrained love of people and place in the youth.

Like some chubby putto permitted by his unthreatening scale and ostensible sexlessness to gambol through the most decadent boudoirs of baroque painting, Scout the tomboy could in her radical innocence revisit her own real-world home town of Monroeville, Alabama, and make a myth of it — one immune to later, painful shifts in perspective.

Still, the question of comparison lingers. Just how much better is To Kill a Mockingbird than this new arrival? I’d argue that the answer is unavailable to us. Harper Lee’s first published novel may have sold many millions of copies but it is not to be judged by sales alone. Works of literature exist as part of a gift economy, as argued the American scholar Lewis Hyde:

Your dusty paperback copy may have lost its resale value but the words contained within have gained lustre and significance with every book club reading, every film and theatre adaptation, every high school essay produced since its publication in 1961.

Go Set a Watchman is worth reading solely for the pleasure of hearing Lee’s voice once again, filtered through the rich instrument that is Jean Louise Finch. It is valuable for the light it throws on the formation and the scale of its sister work. But the two cannot be placed on a scale and weighed, since Watchman’s words are new to us and therefore unhallowed. As with Mockingbird, it will be readers and not critics who choose how far and how wide it circulates; only time will tell.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Go Set a Watchman

By Harper Lee

William Heinemann, 288 pages, $45 (HB)