What I thought of Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee…
Controversy swirled around the release of Go Set a Watchman, the second work published by Harper Lee. Lee of course won a Pulitzer Prize for her beloved, best-selling American classic To Kill a Mockingbird. This manuscript was “recently discovered” in a bank vault in 2014 and, assumed to be lost, is the work Lee submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. And after some great advice and rewriting her important novel of race relations in rural America emerged. I pre-ordered my copy and would have been long finished if not for other novels on my bedside when it arrived. Nevertheless, this is what I thought of Go Set a Watchman…
The discovery and publication of this book is considered an historic literary event by some, such as publisher HarperCollins. But it remains a controversial subject for many. Joe Nocera of the New York Times summed so much of the criticism up by saying, “So perhaps it’s not too late after all to point out that the publication of Go Set a Watchman constitutes one of the epic money grabs in the modern history of American publishing.”
Set in Maycomb, Alabama, Go Set a Watchman features many familiar characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, though told twenty years later. Jean Louise Finch, or Scout, returns home from New York to visit her aging father Atticus Finch and becomes disillusioned when she learns of his personal and political views of society, especially pertaining to race. Other beloved characters have little placement in the story: Jem Finch is dead, Dill Harris is part of childhood memories, Calpernia is retired, and there is no Boo Radley whatsoever.
At the outset I decided to read this as an autonomous work rather than a prequel or companion to To Kill a Mockingbird.
So apparently Lee set out to make a statement about race. And I’ve never seen the word nigger written so many times in a literary work—not even in Gone with the Wind. (And in today’s racially charged world I’m not even comfortable writing the word nigger in my blog.) There is not so much action in the story but rather speeches and pronouncements.
From Chapter 8:
Mr. O’Hanlon was born and bred in the South, went to school there, married a Southern lady, lived all his life there, and his main interest today was to uphold the Southern Way of Life and no niggers and no Supreme Court was going to tell him or anybody else what to do . . . a race as hammer-headed as . . . essential inferiority . . .kinky woolly heads . . . still in the trees . . .greasy smelly . . . marry your daughters . . . mongrelize the race . . . mongrelize . . . mongrelize . . . save the South . . . Black Monday . . . lower than cockroaches . . . God made the races . . . nobody knows why but He intended for ‘em to stay apart . . . if He hadn’t He’d’ve made us all one color . . . back to Africa . . .
Did she ever write a book about racial divide!
Interestingly many of the points made in the book about racial tensions are still poignant, especially in today’s racially incendiary culture.
There has been much talk about whether or not is should have been published. Harper Lee is in poor health and lives in a nursing home. And personally I doubt very little that the book would never have come out. So why not put it out there and let her enjoy the feeling of the publication of a work she finished sixty-five years ago?
To be honest, I wasn’t blown away by this book. However, let me soften this pronouncement a bit. I will compare it to an oil painting; a masterpiece such as Madame X would not exist without many studies created by John Singer Sargent in finding his way to the final result. Would the oil painting Madame X with Champagne exist alone as a masterpiece without the final finished work? So too Go Set a Watchman is an important document of Lee’s work in getting to To Kill a Mockingbird. Nonetheless I am glad that I read it and feel smarter for having done so…
I loved seeing the way Lee took a preachy and judgmental manuscript and recrafted it into a sweet and cherished story making points of racial injustice not through words but through actions and symbolism.