Go Set a Watchman

I've just finished reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman which I'd put off reading it until just recently. Even before all the bad reviews, it seemed to me like the book was a cash/publicity/marketing grab by the publishers. You've always got to wonder why something wasn't published way back when. Why did the author and/or publisher sit on it for decades? The answer is usually simple: it wasn't that good.

But mainly, I didn't want to read Go Set a Watchman because I didn't want to ruin the special place To Kill a Mockingbird has in my heart.

My main takeaway after having read it -- and after reading a few reviews -- is that it's sad that Harper Lee didn't write more/publish more. She obviously had a gift.  If nothing else, Watchman confirmed for me, at least, that Mockingbird wasn't a fluke. Lee had a rich, deep, measured voice in a dark time of American history that would have been a welcome inclusion to the canon of 1960s civil rights literature.

I won't bore you with all the criticisms I've read -- many of which I agree with -- but I can't help but wonder if some of the backlash is the same reaction that Scout has to Atticus in Go Set a Watchman.

Spoiler Alert.

After discovering a disturbing racist tract belonging to Atticus -- and after seeing him in supposed cahoots with a town council meeting laden with bigots of the worst kind -- Jean Louise suffers a late coming of age, identity crisis.

She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral force in her life, was the love of her father. She never questioned it, never thought about it, never even realized that before she made any decision of importance the reflex, “What would Atticus do?” passed through her unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm whenever she did was her father; that whatever was decent and of good report in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she worshipped him.

The thought has struck me that this is perhaps a metaphor for how generations of readers have grown to feel about Atticus and To Kill a Mockingbird.  That is, after having encountered the novel in our youth -- as so many have in school curricula -- perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird has gained some sort of cultural mythic status.  And perhaps Watchman's humanizing of Atticus is a tough pill to swallow just like Scout learns of her father that he is, after all, as Dr. Jack Finch says, "... a man with a man's heart, and a man's failings."

It's not neat and tidy, but, from a literary point of view, I like the grey that is Atticus. He is at the core, as one reviewer put it, a Southern gentleman. He does right by other human beings not because he's a civil rights advocate but because he's a good person. The part of the grey that's not so pretty is that he's still a product of a very Southern upbringing and, as such, a culturally determined racist. That is to say, he's multi-dimensional and complex... kind of like a real person.