Thoughts on Go Set A Watchman
[Contains spoilers]
First things first: the language of the book is elegant, but it is of very different in type from its famous stablemate. Where To Kill A Mockingbird is made coherent by the binding story of Tom Robinson’s trial, here the internal journey of Jean Louise Finch (Mockingbird’s Scout, yet to be regressed to childhood) is the central thread. This is an almost Woolf-like book of an ordinary mind on an ugly day. This lack of external jeopardy has led some reviewers to complain that the book is, basically, bad. I disagree, and I suspect they wouldn’t take that line if not for the linear clarity of Mockingbird’s fabular style. There’s no literary discredit in its release; it’s just aiming at a quite different target.
Second: it is inescapable that Watchman takes place in a universe that is at most parallel to that of Mockingbird. The detail of the books is not consistent — most obviously in the outcome of the trial which is the central thread of Mockingbird. In that book, Tom Robinson is found guilty, but in Watchman he is (as well as being barely a footnote) acquitted. For all that the names are the same, the world and the people are not. The process of evolution between the stories is authorial and external, and flows from Watchman to Mockingbird rather than the other way around. To say that Atticus in Mockingbird becomes or is revealed to be Atticus in Watchman is to mistake characters for real people existing in real time. The arrow here is fired the other way: Atticus from Watchman is plucked out of his life and remade to suit a different purpose in Mockingbird. Both books have a strong moral point to make — and neither is particularly shy about this mission — and both do this through the creation of a universe that is designed to produce a particular outcome and mood, but the concerns, and therefore of necessity both the universes and the forms, are different.
Mockingbird is a relatively clear moral stream, fitting squarely into the tradition of American narratives which explore the place, function and duty of citizens within a democracy possessing and created by a written constitution: a nation that asserts itself into existence. The system of government in the US does not merely have checks and balances, it is founded on them, on the tensions between chaos and collective action, individual and state, heart and head. The interrogation of these conflicts in American popular culture is constant and ubiquitous, including at the most obvious narratives such as George Stevens’ Talk of the Town and Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes To Washington, or more recently the endlessly fascinating dramatised civics lessons of The West Wing. The same concerns arise in far less likely contexts, as well, such as the perennial battle in cop thrillers between obeying the dictates of due process and the urgent need for right action and the redress of wrongs. In the standard form, a person losing faith in the institutions of America goes to visit the founding documents, becoming glassy-eyed and reinvigorated by the signatures on the Declaration of Independence or the implicit presence of Washington at his monument; a person who has lost touch with the meaning and intent of those words must go to the heartland, to the common soil and real people of what citified coastal folks commonly call flyover country.
Thus, Mockingbird: a pedagogical treat, glowingly written and propped by wonderful character observations, but abstracted from the time of its writing by two decades, stripped of larger and more troublesome discussions of race and civil rights by its tight focus on the right actions of one man in the face of a system behaving badly. The end result of Atticus Finch’s efforts may not be justice, but they point in its direction. The book is — other concerns to one side — an indicator of what the author and the tradition in which she is writing say America should be. Indeed, it is so much that story, capturing in a distilled and even simple form the aspiration to justice through law and right action, that it has since its publication become almost a religious text.
Go Set A Watchman, by contrast, is not simple. A woman in her twenties returns to the town of her birth after five years in New York to find that the place has soured, or perhaps that it was always sour, and she is only now able to see it clearly. The adult Jean Louise Finch has a broader understanding and a broader battlefield than Scout in Mockingbird: as well as race and specifically the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown vs Board of Education, her world’s flashpoints include women’s emancipation in the wake of the Second World War, the changing nature of America’s economy as the nation encounters a modernity of its own making, and McCarthyism. She — and we, and perhaps even Harper Lee — are struggling with the familiar questions of what a person should be, but the forces in play are chaotic and maybe even crudely intersectional, where Mockingbird’s universe is effectively monopolar.
The ultimate conceptual aim of Watchman is just as pedagogical as Mockingbird, but the target is different. If Mockingbird agitates for adherence to the system because the system, properly adhered to, embodies the principles of justice and fairness, then Watchman reaches for a far more delicate aspect of the American political and social self-creation: the contention that parties may hold opposing opinions and yet not be enemies. The ideological resolution of the book comes in Jean Louise Finch’s decision that in demanding that Atticus not hold the opinions he does about race, she is trying to dictate what another person may think, which is an expression not of the urge to freedom but of the desire to control. Even this is not uncomplicated — although the theoretical statement goes unexamined — because it comes in tandem with a kind of Freudian arrival in adulthood. Jean’s uncle Jack tells her that he and Atticus feel she has until now effectively identified her own conscience with her father’s, and have discussed at what point and on what issue she will finally break from a childish state of emotional shadowing and be her own person at last. It’s typical of Watchman’s jagged contrasts that Jack, though he coaches her towards this breakthrough with gnomic utterances and historical promptings that though being resolutely classical or respectably southern in origin nonetheless have the flavour of the analyst’s couch, ultimately slaps her backhanded to bring her to her senses.
Nothing in Watchman is only one thing, and nothing exists in isolation. It is in some ways a much more modern book than Mockingbird, more conflicted about its own place and postures, and more raw, than the one we know and love. Where Mockingbird is a brilliant fairytale lantern, Watchman’s light shines through a basket of troubles. It is harsher about America, bleaker in its perception of the nation’s virtues, more bewildered by its changes, more unclear on where the right of things lies — and yes, the Atticus of Watchman is indeed a racist: he baldly asserts that the local black population is simply immature and incapable of full participation in a democracy. It’s worth noting that this assertion isn’t the part of his bigotry to which his daughter objects; much has been said in the first flush of the book’s publication about the opinions of Watchman’s Atticus, very little about Jean’s. In this arena again her feelings are muddled and imperfect, and therefore probably very much in line with the kind of woman the book makes her out to be.
It’s not hard to see, imagining Watchman published when it was written, why Lee’s editor suggested that the author try to create a different book. The genesis of Mockingbird in Watchman is clear, but the journey from one to the other is very long. Ambiguities are cast off, characters become icons, and childhood learning takes over from adult emergence. Boo Radley exists in part to bring an otherwise missing bookend to the narrative, an almost deus ex ending that is if not wish-fulfilment at least an indicator that fate does not allow guilt to go unpunished, however indirect the judgement. Even if Atticus ultimately cannot save his client, that’s the jury’s imperfection, not a failing in the method. The result is a classic novel and the creation of the archetypal Atticus who inspired generations of civil rights lawyers — and much relief and glory to an editor who would otherwise have been selling an edgy and accusatory psychoanaltical snapshot of a woman in crisis by a writer without reputation, however good a friend of Truman Capote she might have been.
The archetypal Atticus of Mockingbird stands in stark contrast to the compromised Atticus of Watchman, who is a far more plausible son of late nineteenth century Alabama, but a different man for a different universe and a quite different narrative, both in content and aspiration. If Harper Lee had chosen to change the names of her characters between books, we’d see these two clearly in terms of a development and a shift in tone and direction — although Mockingbird itself isn’t entirely uncomplicated in its treatment of race and society, the struggle of that Atticus against a white provincial power structure bent on sacrificing a black man to its prejudice tends to overwhelm critique. With Lee repurposing Maycomb and the Finch family, there’s a natural tendency to assume that Mockingbird’s stalwart already existed fully formed in the drama of Watchman, and that we see him more clearly now in age than we did through the eyes of a child. That’s the power of writing: a good author need only describe the living room in which a scene takes place and readers will debate the contents of the bookshelves for evermore. Novels take advantage of the brain’s relentless synthesis of solidity from fragments to create the appearance of a world out of less information than is required to digitize even quite a small photograph. It is a trick, and a very important one, but one of which we have to be aware in cases like this one, lest we spoil one book with another.
However wrongheaded it might be to allow Watchman to diminish the power of Mockingbird to educate and galvanize, it is equally so to argue that the book should not have been published, either from a literary or a moral viewpoint. For the former, it’s at worst a fascinating insight into the writing of a classic; for the latter, it is horribly timely. 2015 has seen the grim spectacle of Ferguson, and a belatedly dawning awareness that the issues in and of both books are far from resolved sixty years later — either locally in the United States or more globally, as refugees pour into the sea in North Africa hoping to reach the shores of Greece and Italy, and the European Union responds by cutting rescue efforts and planning military action against those who bring them across the water. Black lives are still accounted differently from white ones, and while Mockingbird urges us to take a stand, Watchman requires — in its flaws as well as its successes — that we look to our own culpability.
Go Set A Watchman may not be a Great Book, but it is a fascinating one, and if it’s not as good as To Kill A Mockingbird, well: it’s a hard criticism of any novel that it doesn’t hold its own against one that for many people defines and justifies long form fiction, and speaks to the responsibilities of citizens in a state under the rule of law.
[Afterword: I realise, reading this through, that my analysis draws heavily on a perception of US culture which is approximately contemporary with the actual novels — the work of Robert Warshow, which is collected in The Immediate Experience. If you’re curious, the essays of particular relevance are on The Westerner and The Gangster.]
