Go Set A Watchman
Last week I listened to the audiobook of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman narrated by Reese Witherspoon (HarperAudio, 2015) as I finished a baby quilt. As I stitched and cut and ironed, Witherspoon’s lovely reading brought Jean Louise Finch to life. And some of Lee’s passages were so moving, I paused in quilting to listen to them over and over again, writing them out for use here. The audio version of this book is approximately seven hours long, and though I had finished the quilt before the final lines, it saw me through the end of a quilt that I was beginning to think would never see completion.
I generally wouldn’t begin a book review with a history lesson, but for this book, I find it necessary. When I read a book, especially one that deals with uncomfortable themes (uncomfortable particularly to today’s cultural context), I like to have a firm grasp of when the book was written, so as not to judge the author anachronistically. I don’t wish to critique an author writing in an entirely different time by today’s standards; I also don’t wish to analyze a book published in 2015 as an author’s response to the 21st century if, in fact, the author completed her manuscript in 1957. So, to avoid undue confusion, let us get a few details about Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman straight. Yes, HarperCollins published this, Lee’s second publication, in 2015, and yes, it reads as a sequel to Lee’s famous To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). However, Lee completed Go Set A Watchman in 1957. In fact, this was the first manuscript she attempted to publish, but the publishing house which purchased the rights to Watchman felt it needed considerable work. After several years of tinkering, Lee produced the highly-acclaimed To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960. Half a century later, the public—many generations brought up on To Kill a Mockingbird in grade school—had the rare ability to compare the “original” manuscript (aka Go Set a Watchman) with the previously published version (To Kill a Mockingbird). The characters are the same, even some passages are the same, but as Lee boiled down her narrative and her characters, she ended up writing about Jean Louise “Scout” Finch as a child, rather than as the twenty-six-year-old Scout starts off as in Go Set a Watchman.
I find several things about this particularly interesting. First, Lee took her characters in reverse. Atticus Finch, the hero lawyer, the quintessential good man at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird, takes a darker role in her original manuscript. Jean Louise Finch goes from twenty-six in Go Set A Watchman to elementary-school-aged in To Kill A Mockingbird. And yet, as I listened to Reese Witherspoon perform the audio version of Go Set a Watchman (with her perfectly appropriate southern drawl), I was ultimately struck by the feeling that Scout is still a child through much of the novel. The rambling anecdotal turns of Jean Louise’s inner journey upon returning to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama echo other coming-of-age novels. But this book was written in 1957 with a heroine who is not 16, but 26. Even in 2006, according to the CDC, the average age of a white woman at the time of her first child’s birth was 24 (in the state of Alabama); just a decade ago Jean Louise would have been unique among her peers. One can imagine that during the baby boom years following WWII, Scout was beyond anomalous (as was Nelle Harper Lee, the author, for that matter). Throughout Go Set A Watchman she toys with the idea of marrying her father’s protégé, Hank, who also happens to be her dead brother’s best friend, but seems to approach the concept of marriage and commitment with a foolishness—even a glibness—that, again, places her story firmly within the coming-of-age trope.
The novel’s premise is that at the age of twenty-six, even after years of living independently in New York City, Jean Louise returns to Maycomb, Alabama (a fictional version of Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, AL) for an annual visit. This visit, however, promises to be different even from the first pages; Lee writes that Jean Louise takes the train home for the first time, setting this visit apart from previous ones. This visit, I believe, marks Jean Louise’s coming-of-age: her eyes open to the blindness with which she has previously walked the earth, as she faces the fall-out of unconsciously relying on her father as a moral crutch throughout her entire life. Upon listening to this novel, in 2019, I might think this is savvy critique of millennial culture: a generation that is often found overly-reliant upon their parents for emotional well-being even into what many might consider mature adulthood. Yet, Lee wrote this at the time when millennials’ grandparents were young.
Lee’s original novel, Go Set A Watchman, was much too forward for her time. It is no wonder that a publisher bought the rights (recognizing Lee’s masterful storytelling) and had her rewrite it so much that her heroine took the sideline and the character on whom so much of the original novel’s conflict rests turns into the patriarchal hero of unquestionable moral upstanding. As rewritten, Atticus Finch (in To Kill A Mockingbird) certainly reinforces the patriarchal cultural standards that the years following WWII sought to reinforce (even though he does so with a loving heart and a gentle hand). And Lee was rewarded for her revision. Her debut novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, the year after its publication.
In addition to the uncomfortable (though arguably accurate for the novel’s setting) references to the “n” word, I also noticed the references to “communists” that speckle the manuscript, especially in the passages that witness Jean Louise experiencing the post-war, pre-civil rights era South at its rawest. The twenty-first-century reader should recall the Red Scare of the 1950s and the McCarthyism madness that swept the country; Lee wrote Go Set A Watchman during and in the aftermath of that period. Lee’s novel places the term of “communist” as equivalent in absurdity and bigotry to the “n” word, and has Jean Louise react with physical revilement when she realizes that her father fraternizes with the “trash” who throw such names (and ideologies) around. This disturbing language actually causes Jean Louise to be physically ill, leaving no doubt for the reader what Harper Lee thought of her time and place’s small-mindedness.
And yet, many critics and fans of Harper Lee have been very upset by Go Set A Watchman. They seem to see it as a ruination of Atticus Finch and his heroic position in the history of American literary protagonists. As I listened to Witherspoon read the final lines of this novel, I thought it was an honest portrayal of a young woman’s moral grappling with the nastiness of the world in which she grew up. It seems that it may truly resonate with many young people today as they, perhaps, watched their mentors and moral role-models being taken-in by low-talking, fear-based political movements and ideologies. This novel is about Jean Louise, it really isn’t about Atticus, except as he is a foil to her. In fact, it is Atticus’s eccentric younger brother, Uncle Jack to Jean Louise (Dr. Finch to the rest of Maycomb), who “reluctantly finds himself in the twentieth century” and who guides Scout through her personal conflict. Uncle Jack falls outside the patriarchal norms of the day just as Jean Louise does; he never marries, he seems to live among the Victorian writers and intellectuals whose books are stacked everywhere in his house, and he speaks plainly to Jean Louise as he would to any intellectual equal when she needs it most. Go Set A Watchman is an incredibly feminist text written at a time when publishers may not have wanted to take a risk on a novel about a free-thinking, New-York-City-living, single female protagonist, especially in the years following the McCarthy scare. I am glad for Nelle Harper Lee (the author’s full name, her friends called her Nelle) that she worked with her publisher (and I encourage you to check out this article about that relationship, if it interests you) and ended up publishing To Kill A Mockingbird. I am, however, also glad that near the end of her life, she chose to publish her original novel as well, and allow Jean Louise, at long last, to come out of Atticus’s maybe not-so-perfect shadow.
I think this is a worthwhile read (or a listen, if you opt for an audiobook, as I did in this instance). If you do decide to explore this book, I encourage you to remember that we are the time-travelers when it comes to reading books written in a previous age. We go back to their world, as it is impossible to expect them to come to ours. When I place this novel in the context of the 1950s Deep South, I see a novel that in no way condones the bigotry of the day. I see a novel with a main character trying to articulate her thoughts about the possibilities of a better world as her traditional world changes drastically. She struggles doubly as her father—her moral champion—obviously fears that future as many men of his generation surely did with the coming of the civil rights movement at the end of their lives. I also see an aging father figure seeking to protect the society he loves as life slips away from him and death approaches; this makes the character of Atticus Finch more real to me, not less so. The comparison of Atticus in the 1930s to Atticus twenty years later, is an apt one when we observe the conservativism that tends to build as people approach old age; many wish to leave the world knowing that their version of it, the one they worked for, will go on even once they are gone. This seems fundamentally human to me. But most interestingly, for me, I see Go Set A Watchman as a novel about a young woman’s ability to stand up on her own moral feet and make the decisions that are right for her life on her own. For a novel written in 1950s America, this reading makes Go Set A Watchman a radical book, and one that I am in no ways surprised sat unpublished for nearly 50 years.
A Few Great Passages:
“Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you do or you don’t proposition with them all.”
Of Jean Louise Finch: “She was a person, who when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way”.
“Go set a watchman” is a quote from Isiah 21:6: “For thus the Lord said to me: ‘Go, set a watchman, let him announce what he sees.” Verse 7 continues: “When he sees riders, horsemen in pairs, riders on asses, riders on camels, let him listen diligently, very diligently.”
“[T]hat’s not anything you need to study about. That’s not any of your concern. Don’t you study about other folks’ business ‘til you take care of your own.” (Calpurnia to Jean Louise)
“When, in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, they are communists.”
“If a man says to you, this is the truth, and you believe him and you discover what he says is not the truth, you are disappointed and you make sure you will not be caught out by him again. But a man who has lived by truth, and you have believed in what he has lived, he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you. He leaves you with nothing.”
“Mr. Stone set a watchmen in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour, on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me. This is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that 26 years is too long to play a joke on anybody no matter how funny it is” (close of chapter 13).
“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscience.... now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line you fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with god. You never saw him as a man, with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings. I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes them like all of us. You were an emotional cripple, leaning on him, getting the answers from him, assuming that your answers would always be his answers... when you happened along and saw him doing something that seemed to you to be the very antithesis of his conscience, your conscience, you literally could not stand it. It made you physically ill. Life became hell on earth for you. You had to kill yourself or he had to kill you to get you functioning as a separate entity.”
“Our gods are remote from us, they must never descend to us” (Uncle Jack to Jean Louise)
“Prejudice, a dirty word, and fear, a clean one, gave something in common: they both begin where reason ends.” (Uncle Jack to Jean Louise)
“The time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise, they don’t need you when they’re right.”
Bibliography:
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Shephard, Alex (July 31, 2015). "Why Brilliant Books is offering refunds to customers who purchased Go Set A Watchman". Melville House Publishing. Retrieved February 24, 2019..
Kovaleski, Serge F.; Alter, Alexandra; Crossley Howard, Jennifer (March 11, 2015). "Harper Lee's Condition Debated by Friends, Fans and Now State of Alabama". The New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015.
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The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University, 1977.
