Gregory Peck in the film ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’
The release of a long-lost ‘second’ book by Harper Lee, famously a fixture on those lists of great one-shot novelists, would have been a sensation whatever its contents. When the news was announced of its existence, apparently hidden for decades in a lawyer’s safe, those who care about such things were stunned. Pre-release orders were huge. But while no one knew quite what to expect, the chatter generated since the actual publication on 14 July of ‘Go Set A Watchman’ has been a mixture of shocked fascination, sadness and even horror.
For it turns out – and this has been so much reported that it can’t be considered a spoiler – that Atticus Finch is a racist. Written first but set later than ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, it portrays the now-grown heroine Scout returning to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama, where she comes to realise that her beloved father is an anti-segregationist given to reading pamphlets entitled ‘The Black Plague’ and scheming against the civil rights lawyers of the NAACP.
There’s more to it than that, naturally. There’s a town resisting change, the introductions of a never-mentioned uncle and a childhood sweetheart, the challenge to Scout’s rather naïve beliefs both about politics and her father and a portrait of a woman trying to defy conventional expectations. While ‘Watchman’ will never rival ‘Mockingbird’ in terms of its genuine popularity and status as an ‘approved’ literary classic for schools across the world, there is much of interest for the kind of reader who likes to pick things apart and see the connections between how this middling first draft became, with inspired editorial help, the assured but very different book we knew.
Critics have had a field day discussing whether it should have been published at all. Readers – and, even more so, those yet to read it or who never will – have responded more viscerally. Atticus Finch, a racist? Lovely noble Atticus, the perfect father – once Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill realise just how brave he has been to defend a black man framed for rape – this man is a fraud?
The New York Times’ venerated literary critic Michiko Kakutani declared: ‘The reader, like Scout, cannot help feeling baffled and distressed’. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, pleaded with readers: ‘Don’t let “Go Set A Watchman” change the way you think about Atticus Finch’. Many have vowed not to read the book at all: they want to remember him the way he ‘was’, either from the novel or – more often – as the handsome hero portrayed by Gregory Peck on film. Even Stephen Peck, the actor’s son, who described the role as his father’s ‘best self’, said that he would have been concerned that the publication could taint the original classic.
On one level, it’s rather wonderful to see so many people caring so deeply about a book, taking words on the page so very seriously that they feel a sense of possession over a fictional character. But wait: there’s the rub. Atticus was never real. In more than one way.
Because it’s not so much that Atticus Finch became a racist: it’s that he always was and we just didn’t see it. While Harper Lee threw out a lot of her first plot and concentrated on the young Scout’s necessarily limited point of view, which saw her father only as a noble hero, she could not have forgotten the man she’d already created. Whatever your thoughts on whether an author’s intentions should always take precedence – literary theorists merrily debate post-structuralism, reader response and contextualism while the rest of us usually can’t resist assuming that a writer’s life inevitably shapes their work – the news that Atticus was conceived as more complicated than we thought must forever change him.
Maybe this explains the remarkable decades of silence in which she gained a recluse’s reputation, not so much for how she actually lived as for her refusal to participate in the modern novelist’s treadmill of public appearances, interviews and questions for book clubs. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about ‘Mockingbird’ because she didn’t want to answer the inevitable questions: what happened to Scout when she grew up? What happened to Atticus? Perhaps she didn’t want to lie but didn’t like to disillusion us.
Well, no doubt Harper Lee had her own reasons; perhaps she would have been perfectly happy to ‘reveal’ her original thoughts. Although there has been controversy over the publication of ‘Watchman’ with claims of exploitation, unless more information emerges we must take at face value the statement attributed to her, in which she declares herself delighted to see the book published at last. In her nursing home she is, of course, safe now from being pushed to explain it but if able to follow the anguished reactions to its publication, she may well feel relieved it wasn’t done sooner.
Nevertheless, although the circumstances of the novel’s conception, revision and eventual release in this form are peculiar, the revelation of Atticus’ feet of clay follows a familiar pattern. In recent years we have become very accustomed to finding out that real-life heroes were not all quite so purely heroic. Does it matter that Martin Luther King might have had affairs or that George Orwell may have given the government a list of Communist sympathisers? Well, it depends. More recently, many Americans have struggled to deal with the claims that Bill Cosby, portrayer of an idealised father on TV, may have actually been a serial rapist. Hardly anyone, it turns out, is quite as simple as they seemed.
Perhaps that is why fictional heroes seem safer. Sealed in his classic book, Atticus Finch could remain upright and clean, forever upholding the rule of law and standing up for poor Tom Robinson, the hapless victim of a legal lynching. How nice for us to have such a role model – no wonder people named their children after him or were inspired to become defence lawyers. As times changed, he was the proof that while racism had been bad, there had still been good (white) men who believed in justice.
Except…I wonder how many African-Americans, particularly in the South, felt quite so grateful. After all, Atticus didn’t manage to save Tom: his gentlemanly defence accepted the terms of a biased system and afterwards he resumed his normal life among the people who’d let it all happen. Not until the civil rights campaigns later in the decade, long after both books, did Southern people of colour get much justice (and some would question if they get it now, given a series of recent deaths in police custody).
He was written as a man of his time, of course, as he is in the ‘new’ book which, in its stiff, uneven way, understands that most people are products of their place and time. As Scout comes to learn, that doesn’t mean that everything’s okay, just that they’re human – even if they’re fictional. Despite its flaws, the publication of ‘Watchman’ has taught us something interesting. But I do hope there isn’t a second missing volume. I can’t face finding out that Boo Radley was grooming those kids.
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By Andrea Mullaney | August 2015