re-righting the story
by Douglas Messerli
Harper
Lee Go Set a Watchman (New York:
HarperCollins, 2015)
Upon
the death of play- and screen-writer Horton Foote in 2009, I revisited three
films for which he had written the screenplays, the first of which was the
noted film, based on Harper Lee’s famed novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. While admitting that I enjoyed the fiction
when I first read it as a 16-year-old in Norway and that the movie is one I
have seen, with joy, numerous times, seeing that film again and rereading Lee’s
novel, I had a negative response this time round, particularly given the fact
that, despite all the good intentions of the obviously high-minded and
well-meaning Atticus Finch, nothing in the world of Scout and Jem really
changes. As I wrote in 2009:
Given the events of both film and
novel…despite any moral
lessons and perceptions gleaned by the Finch
children and the
audiences of the movie and book, the world to which Jem
will
awaken in the morning (the familiar last lines of both
being the adult Scout’s
words about her father: “He turned
out the light and went into
Jem’s room. He would be there all
night, and we would be there when Jem waked
up in the
morning.”) is no better than the one in which he was nearly
killed that night. Atticus Finch may represent a hero, but his
actions in
such an isolate world in which the Finch’s exist, have
little effect. And in
that respect the work embraces the status
quo, and the moral indignation of the
readers of Lee’s classic
and the viewers of the Mulligan/Foote
adaptation can only
represent a kind of righteous pat on the liberal back.
As
I noted a bit earlier in my essay, concerning the sheriff’s argument that they
should keep secret Boo Radley’s involvement in the murder of the evil Bob
Ewell:
Frankly, given the outcome of Tom
Robinson’s trial, we may
find it hard to imagine that the “good”
ladies of Maycomb
would award the murderer of Bob Ewell, who has
convinced
their kind that his daughter has been raped by a black man.
Is it
any wonder then that Tom Robinson, despite Atticus’ advice
to “not lose
faith,” runs “like a rabbit” to escape the police.
The fact that he
is shot and killed, despite the deputy’s
proclamation that he meant just to
wound him, is, perhaps,
given the racists attitudes of the community,
inevitable.
In
short, this time reading through the book and reviewing the film, I discerned
that despite Gregory Peck’s impeccable acting skills, and the lovely nostalgia
and romanticized literary writing of Lee, there was something empty about the
book, as if, for all its good intentions, we were being asked to sentimentally
align ourselves with this obviously beloved but also somewhat sanctimonious
small-town Alabama lawyer. Although I didn’t directly speak it, I truly felt
that the book almost all high school children throughout the country were
required to read, was somehow, if not an not an outright lie, at least a kind
of fantasy that embraced the Southern values of the racial status quo.
I recognized that my new perspective was clearly controversial, and many of my friends, including my spouse Howard, snorted at my stubborn insistence that the nobility of Atticus Finch didn’t ring true.
Having just now finished Lee’s fiction Go Set a Watchman, the work she originally
wrote before being encouraged by her then-editor Tay Hohoff to recast it as the
very different To Kill a Mockingbird,
that I was absolutely right! Hohoff may have been an excellent editor, and
surely she knew how to turn a difficult and more complex work into a more
populist and appealing bestseller, but I would have, as an editor who has
worked with hundreds of brilliant writers, politely asked Miss Lee to change
her title and promptly published her book just as she had written it—with maybe
just a minor tweaking of the debate between Jean Louse (the adult Scott) and
her father near the end of this “new” work. Thus, we might have lost the
beloved classic, but certainly had a more honest piece of writing about race,
sex, and familial relations than the creaky theatrics of Mockingbird.
Several critics have argued that we should read these two books together, in which I am in complete agreement; but I do not all agree that Go Set a Watchman is an inferior work, not even stylistically. If one might miss the dark and somber events such as Atticus’ jail encounters with the lynch mob or the high theatrics of the nuanced courtroom trial (perfect for cinema adaptation), in this work we have a lovely comic childhood tale of Jem and Scout’s dramatic reenactment of a back country baptism in a neighborhood fishpond, with their friend Dill’s (in real life Truman Capote) robed in a sheet, playing the Holy Ghost.
Lee sends up the various local lady groups
in a wonderful satire of their various accents and viewpoints, while the still
tom-boy adult Jean Louise moves back and forth between their conversational
modes serving coffee and sandwiches in a kind of down-South version of
something Wyndham Lewis might have written satirizing the British
establishment.
In an honest depiction of childhood
sexual realities, at times writing almost at a level of other adventurous
writers of the 1950s such as J. D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Purdy,
Lee recounts the painful experiences of young Scout’s first menstruation and
her very touching and frightening presumption that she is pregnant because a
young boy has stuck in tongue into her mouth to demonstrate his gratitude for
her scholarly help. That series of events almost leads to Scout’s suicide as
she ponders leaping from a nearby tower, from which, fortunately, she is
plucked before the ever-wise black servant Calpurnia finally explains all
things sexual to the motherless child. This long passage alone is worth the
price of the book.
And then there’s the wonderful
intellectual ramblings of her uncle Jack that take Jean Louise’s frantic anger
into completely illogical linguistic territory, as if she had suddenly come up
against the a combination of the Wizard of Oz and Lewis Carroll’s Madhatter.
Along with her aunt Alexandra’s endless pronouncements (a character also in the
original book, but stricken from the movie) representing nearly all the
old-fashioned values of the South, these passages help us to recognize Lee as a
wry humorist.
In this work, moreover, the adult Jean
Louise has a boyfriend, Henry, whom, despite her long residence in New York
City, she is expected by everyone in town to marry, and might have married, if
only…. Well that’s where this fiction gets even more interesting. Henry, an
obviously caring and loving being, the protégé of Atticus, is destined to go
far in the Maycomb county political system, and clearly is determined to bring
to the community what Atticus attempted to do in his younger days. But as we
learn by fiction’s end, Henry has a deeper psychological problem in evaluating
himself within the narrow limits of Maycomb’s calcified social distinctions.
The trouble is, as the heroine of Go Set a Watchman quickly discovers,
Atticus Finch was not truly the man she imagined him to be in To Kill a Mockingbird. Threatened by the
Supreme Court decision of 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) and the increasing
N.A.A.C.P “intrusions” into their isolated life, Atticus, like so many in the
South, is a determined libertarian, willing to fight against the governmental
decisions that, remind us today, of the reactions of many Southerners to the
Supreme Court Decisions about gay marriage. In the very same courthouse where
the young Scout and Jem proudly embedded themselves in the all-black gallery to
witness her father’s impassioned defense of a black man, his daughter now
watches her father and Henry plotting with the worst of the segregationists to
speak out against black equality.
Although today it is somewhat
uncomfortable when the 26 year-old character Jean Louise describes herself as
being “color blind”—how can one be blind to the color of someone’s skin, as if
he might have not really seen the other? You can embrace one’s equality and
humanity, but you cannot, I would argue, any more than you can ignore one’s
sex, pretend that people don’t have different complexions and tonalities—she
obviously cannot bear the reality of what she perceives as her father’s radical
shift to ultra-conservative values. Certainly, she can longer pretend that she
might be able to return to Maycomb (and one wonders, accordingly, how Harper
Lee felt when she actually did return to her hometown).
In a final long debate with her father,
still a skilled lawyer bent on convincing her of her illogical thinking,
Atticus Finch, despite his commanding view of history, sounds very much like a
paternalistic white autocrat, arguing that the blacks of his community are not
ready for equality, not ready to attend white schools, not capable of leading
their communities, are ignorant of all the fine things his white society has
denied them.
Jean Louise’s own views hardly might be
described as enlightened; she admits to having been furious with the Supreme
Court decision. But unlike her father, she recognizes that it is a time for
change, and that she can longer embrace her father’s, Henry’s, or anyone else’s
values in Maycomb, suggesting, without quite saying it, that the community
which has betrayed the blacks among them by refusing to allow them a good
education, financial opportunities, and simple friendship and camaraderie, now
condemns them for not having any of these.
As an editor, I might have argued for
Harper Lee to rethink some of the elements of her substantial political
discourse, but I certainly would have insisted that she retain the often
intelligent debate—so advanced from most of the empty racial discussions of
today—with her father, Henry, uncle, and aunt. For hers is the voice of a
young, pre-feminist and--often unsaid when it comes to describing Lee, lesbian--woman who has learned her lessons perhaps all too well to
be able to accept the hypocrisy of the white spokesmen of the 1950s South. If
the novel ends in another kind of stasis, Jean Louise, is now in control,
comfortably placed behind the steering wheel, driving her old father back home.
In many ways, this is a brave work, far
braver that the novel her editor demanded she create in its stead. The only
braver act would been to have cast herself, as many perceived her to be, as a
lesbian.
Go
Set a Watchman is not a great fiction any more than To Kill a Mockingbird was. Lee is no Faulkner, no Flannery O’Connor
or Eudora Welty, or even a Carson McCullers or Truman Capote. But, in this book
at least, she was brilliantly honest, witty, and committed. Perhaps if we read
both of her works, the powerful earlier assessment and the feel good fantasy,
one by one, we can comprehend the dreams and the failures of all lives, black
and white, in so many small American towns.
Los Angeles, August 17, 2015