I’ve only taught it twice, though, maybe three times, and I don’t know that the experience was all that magical for my students. One class griped constantly about the first half of the novel, my protestations about the importance of establishing mood and setting notwithstanding. In retrospect, they had a point. But by and large, the injustice suffered by Tom Robinson left most of them indignant and, I like to think, a bit more cognizant of the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and a host of other factors that we as a society are still a bit too comfortable downplaying today (though not as comfortable as we used to be, I think).
So when Harper Publishing announced that a follow-up novel, Go Set a Watchman, was coming out, I, like legions of English teachers across the country, squealed in delight, jumped up and down with hands clasped, and wet myself in excitement. More Atticus? More of that pillar of reason and dignity in a racist-tinged South? Um, yes please!
And then, the press started to trickle into my news feed about this Atticus Finch. Much ado was made about the U-turn Atticus takes in this book towards segregation and Ku Klux Klan membership. Legions of English teachers, myself included, curled into our respective corners, in the fetal position, thumbs in our mouths, wetting ourselves yet again, moaning “But who will my students look to for a paternalistic civil rights crusading literary figure?
As it happens, we can all relax. The Atticus in Go Set a Watchman can’t possibly be the same Atticus in Mockingbird. This one is a prototype, a 1.0 model. And he’s interesting enough in his own right, though I doubt he’ll wind up in the canon any time soon.
After all, Atticus in Watchman defended Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape of a white woman, during Scout’s youth, but won an aquittal; the Mockingbird Robinson did not get off so easy. This Atticus, when quietly discoursing on the danger of an overzealous NAACP, is miles away from the Atticus who tells Jem and Scout in Mockingbird that any man who takes advantage of a Negro “is trash.”
Likewise, in this world, Uncle Jack Finch is a pedantic doctor given to quoting Victorian writers in defense of racial discrimination, a far cry from the one in Mockingbird who threatens to brain cousin Cecil for calling Atticus a “nigger lover.” Watchman is no sequel; Maycomb, Alabama is no Westeros with its saga spread out over two novels. In order to be accurately appraised, Watchman has to be read independently of Mockingbird.
If only the novel were as worthy as its predecessor. To my dismay, Watchman just isn't that good—unless we read it as a twenty-something writer's first draft. The plot is narrow, the characters are not convincingly developed, its progression and twists seem arbitrary, and the dialogue sounds scripted in places by George Lucas. Lee assumes we know these people better than we actually do, and that their peccadilloes will be as charming to us as they are to Scout. So for that reason alone, it would probably have been better if this novel had never seen the light of commercial day.
As a piece of textual evidence of the genesis of one of America’s greatest works, however, it’s fascinating. I have absolutely no idea what sort of process Mockingbird went through in the editing phase, but I have to assume, after reading this, more than a little. Maybe we should be thanking Truman Capote. Who knows.
In Watchman, Jean Louise returns to Maycomb for ten days’ vacation. Early on in her stay she sort of ambles from family member to family member, place to place; she spars good-naturedly with Aunt Alexandra and jumps into the river with Hank Clinton, her putative fiancée. Lee paints a picture of Maycomb through her protagonist’s interactions and reminiscing, a portrait that is somewhat charming though bland and insipid for the most part --though, again, that might be because of the decidedly more complex Maycomb shown us in Mockingbird, with its closet drug addicts, agorophobic boogeymen and domestic battery.
But when Scout sneaks into a Maycomb County Citizens’ Council meeting and sees Atticus standing shoulder to shoulder with the most respected and “trashy” folks in town sermonizing about the importance of separating the races and keeping the Negroes in their place, she loses it, and the novel picks up some steam, however clumsily.
Scout has it out with Uncle Jack, who paints a revisionist history of the South during the Civil War and the “hangover of hatred” it is currently experiencing. Then she confronts Hank and gets to call him a coward for not standing up to the community at large over their prejudices. Then her father appears out of nowhere and takes her back to his office, where she gets to tell him off to his face. This, Lee is careful to show, is akin to Man telling off God about the world He made for him, and if it were drafted a few more times, it might make a good one-act play in itself.
Father and daughter both agree on the “backwardness” of the blacks, and they both agree that the NAACP is an affront to states’ rights, but when she tries to castigate the community’s treatment of them, he delivers a line of reasoning that would do conservative icon Russell Kirk proud (see his fourth and ninth principles and The Conservative Mind's discussion of race):
“Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you’ve seen it all our life. They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves and white ways, but they’re far from it.”Eventually, Scout unloads a string of invective, calling him a “ring-tailed son of a bitch” no better than Hitler, and charges home, only to get slapped into docility by her uncle and urged to enter a dialogue with her father and people with similar attitudes, rather than shut them out and be, in his words, “a bigot.” She “comes back to earth,” makes up with Daddy and Hank, and lives to fight another day. I guess.
Deathless prose, it ain’t. But the timing of this novel, coming on the heels of the Confederate flag uproar and continued rhetoric from the right about states’ and individual rights trumping federal overreach, just might serve this country well. We currently have a crop of Republican presidential candidates who would be right at home with the notion that justices is fine, so long as it’s “abstract justice written down item by item on a brief,” as Scout thunders at her father. Virtually all of the major candidates decried the gay rights ruling as judicial overreach, though they were strangely circumspect about such overreach in the wake of the Citizens United ruling. Or the Hobby Lobby ruling. Or Bush vs. Gore. Or anything that advances corporate interests at the expense of the public at large.
Scout may tell her father that the NAACP, “in trying to satisfy one amendment, … rubbed out another one. The Tenth.” This puts her comfortably in today’s Republican party. But she more or less junks this stance in the same scene with one harder to quantify, yet no less valuable.
“Has anybody, in all the wrangling and high words over states’ rights and what kind of government we should have, thought about helping the Negroes?
“We missed the boat, Atticus. We sat back and let the NAACP come in because we were so furious at what we knew the Court was going to do, so furious at what it did, we naturally started shouting nigger. Took it out on them, because we resented the government…
“We’ve agreed that they’re backward, that they’re illiterate, that they’re dirty and comical and shiftless and no good, they’re infants and they’re stupid, some of them, but we haven’t agreed on one thing and we never will. You deny that they’re human.”Scout is much closer to the wrong side of history here than I’d like, but give her some credit. I take comfort in the seed Lee was trying to plant in the nascent civil rights movement.
I also take comfort in Uncle Jack’s imploration to Scout to not simply run from racism but live amidst it and combat it accordingly. If we all took such advice, oh, what a world we would have.
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| You have to admit, the timing of its publication is curious. |
