http://socialistaction.org/harper-lees-discarded-leftovers/
Harper Lee’s discarded leftovers
Published January 28, 2016. | By Socialist Action.
Jan. 2016 Segregation
By JOE AUCIELLO
Harper Lee, “Go Set A Watchman,” (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 288
pp., $27.99.
Why throw away the Christmas turkey after it’s been eaten? It can still
be used. Take the carcass, simmer with water, and the bones make a good
stock for soup. Take the carcass of a popular novel—its discarded rough
draft—place it between hard covers, and these bones can make for a best
seller. The difference is that one is honest and thrifty while the other
is dishonest and shifty.
HarperCollins is a company that knows what to do with leftovers. Given
the popularity of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “To Kill a
Mockingbird,” the publication of “Go Set a Watchman” was inevitable.
“Mockingbird” has sold millions of copies and has never been out of
print since its publication in 1960. The film version released in 1962
won three Academy Awards, brought many more readers to the book, and
helped lift the story of Jean Louise Finch (“Scout”) to a select status
of beloved novels. Every graduate of an American high school knows the
stories of Huck, Holden, and Scout. Their misadventures make up no small
part of the national-curriculum-by-consensus of American education.
But “Go Set a Watchman” is Harper Lee’s failed, first attempt at what
eventually came to be “To Kill a Mockingbird”—her only authentic novel.
Promoted as a sequel or as a companion piece that offers richer insight
into “Mockingbird,” the new volume found an enthusiastic audience.
Immediately upon publication in 2015, “Go Set a Watchman” took top spot
on the The New York Times best-seller category in hard-cover fiction. In
its first week alone, the book sold more than 1.1 million copies. It was
unwrapped under many a Christmas tree. This January, it remains in the
top ten best-seller list.
Publication of “Watchman” was a shrewd commercial decision, but not a
critical one. In fact, there is a real question if Ms. Lee, in her
advanced old age, was capable of consenting to publication of the draft.
However it came to print, “Go Set a Watchman” is not a successful work
of fiction, despite some moments of promise and insightful, ironic
observation. Mostly, the plot plods along, tediously slow. Reading the
book feels like driving behind a car that’s crawling about 15 miles per
hour below the speed limit and brakes at every downhill slope and every
bend in the road.
Without compiling a list, be assured that all the literary errors of the
amateur novelist can be found in “Go Set a Watchman.” The most damaging
offense may be Scout’s utterly implausible discovery—at age 26—that
Atticus is not the decent and open-minded man she had believed him to
be. Instead, her father is and always has been a sophisticated racist,
vilifying the NAACP and the Supreme Court, while asserting that people
of the backward “Negro” race are not yet ready to earn their rights as
citizens.
To Scout, Atticus is a repellant stranger, like a “pod person” from
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” an alien who appears human but who
tellingly lacks a soul. When a Southern novel of manners veers off into
science fiction territory, it is a sure sign that something has gone
terribly wrong.
Within the structure of a clumsy coming-of-age narrative, Harper Lee
intended to write a story that would explore Southern racism. From the
conflicting, insider perspectives of white Southerners, she wanted to
take a stand against intolerance and bigotry. Her literary challenge was
to create a framework and a suitable set of characters to embody those
warring beliefs.
“Go Set a Watchman” was a failed effort, but it contained the seeds of a
better one. The crucial decision was to shift Atticus, a lawyer in a
small, Southern town, into a defender of human rights, a fighter against
racial injustice. This is the man of conscience who tells his children:
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his
point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
With a newly defined Atticus, and with the addition of the mysterious
recluse, Boo Radley (entirely absent from “Watchman”), the plot lines of
“To Kill a Mockingbird” resolved themselves into themes of understanding
and acceptance, rejection of ignorance and prejudice, especially white
racism.
Lee had written a complete first draft, an initial attempt to think out
and approximate her vision. An excellent editor encouraged her to set it
aside and begin anew. No need to dignify the publisher’s scheme by
calling this effort a novel. Nor is there a need to keep it locked away.
The draft should certainly have been made available to biographers or
academic researchers. Perhaps the publication of a scholarly edition by
a university press, like the University of Chicago editions of
Dostoyevsky’s notebooks, would have been a justifiable addition to
American literature. An honest introduction added to the current edition
would have been acceptable. But for HarperCollins to pass off a draft as
a novel is a particularly specious sort of re-gifting.
Photo by Gordon Parks: The separate “colored entrance” of a department
store in the center of Mobile, Ala., in the 1950s.
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Posted in Arts & Culture, Black Liberation, Civil Liberties. | Tagged
books, Harper Lee, racism, Watchman.
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