Adam Gopnik, has a very thoughtful review of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in the New Yorker, July 27, 2015. In it, he raises a question that had sort of vaguely risen in my mind too, but I had not articulated it as he has done. It's worth considering.
Here's the gist of his point. We're all reacting to Watchman in the context of having read To Kill a Mockingbird. We know the characters; we are shocked and dismayed at what seems a radical change in Atticus's attitude about race and desegregation.
But what effect could Harper Lee have expected it to have on readers who had not read To Kill a Mockingbird? After all, she didn't write Watchman in that context. Or did she?
Gopnik points out that uninitiated readers of Watchman would know Atticus only as he is portrayed in that book. Oh, we get Jean Louise's shock and anger, but we don't experience Atticus as the noble hero she tells us he was -- unless we have read Mockingbird. We introduced to him as a somewhat grumpy 72 year old man with bad arthritis -- not the younger principled lawyer and moral giant. References to other characters are even more sketchily drawn, and yet for the full effect one needs to know much more than is revealed in Watchman.
Why have we simply assumed that what was "found" and published is actually the first draft and not some later version, maybe even revised after Mockingbird?
We do know that Lee worked with her editor at Lippincott for months before the decision was made to start over and change the story to 1930 through the eyes of the 8 year old Jean Louise. So it could have been one of the later reworkings of the first draft.
Or, in light of Gopnik's pointing out that the effect of Watchman depends entirely on knowing the characters from Mockingbird, perhaps Lee continued to rewrite it even after Mockingbird was published. Perhaps she did so with the idea of publishing it but was never satisfied with it -- or was persuaded by her editor not to do so.
Gopnik elaborates:
"Indeed, the book as a book barely makes sense if you don’t know “Mockingbird.” If “Watchman” is a first novel, even in draft, it is unlike any first novel this reader is aware of: very short on the kind of autobiographical single-mindedness that first novels usually present, and which “Mockingbird” is filled with, and very long on the kind of discursive matter that novelists will take up when their opinions begin to count.We may never know the answers, unless some as yet undisclosed letters or editor's notes -- or perhaps even some intermediate drafts in Harper Lee's own papers -- come to light. But for the moment it seems that those in charge (Tonja Carter and the current publishers) have chosen commercialization over literary value.
"It is, I suppose, possible that Lee wrote it as we have it, and that her ingenious editor, setting an all-time record for editorial ingenuity, saw in a few paragraphs referring to the trial of a young black man the material for a masterpiece. But it would not be surprising if this novel turns out to be” a revised version of an early draft, returned to later, with an eye to writing the “race novel" that elsewhere Harper Lee has mentioned as an ambition. . . .
"It is sad, though, to think that the preoccupations of this book, however much they may intersect our own preoccupations of the moment, might eclipse her greater poetic talents, evident here, and so beautifully fulfilled in “To Kill a Mockingbird."
In Part IV, I will offer my overall conclusions about this controversy surrounding Nelle Harper Lee and her two books.
Ralph
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