But the first half is highly readable with some funny parts, writes Vivien Horler
THERE’S a lesson in this for writers aspiring to be published: your first effort is probably not THE one. ToKillaMocking Bird has sold 40 million copies since it was first published in 1960, has been a set book for school pupils across the world, and is beloved of millions of readers.
It held up a mirror to a repugnant way of life, and showed that it was possible to shine a small light of honour in morally dark times. There were many parallels for white South African readers.
Now it has famously emerged that Harper Lee wrote a previous draft of the book, titled GoSetaWatchman, that while it may have many parallels with the bestseller, is not that book. Nor does it contain that book’s truth.
After ToKillaMockingbird, author Harper Lee, who grew up in Monroeville, Alabama in the US Deep South, never published another novel, and thanks to the success of Mockingbird, never needed to. She is still alive, apparently suffering from dementia. Famously reclusive, it is not clear how much she had to do with the publication of GoSetaWatchman.
In Mockingbird, Scout, her brother Jem and their friend Dill live an idyllic childhood under the benign but upright guidance of Scout and Jem’s lawyer father Atticus Finch, apparently based on Lee’s own father. Maycomb, Alabama, a fictionalised version of Monroeville, is beset with racism, and there is alarm in the town when Atticus opts to defend a young black man accused of raping a white girl. Later, when a lynch mob come for the man, Atticus sits outside the jail all night to physically defend him.
GoSetaWatchmen is also set in Maycomb, but most of the action takes place around 20 years later when Scout , now known by her proper name of Jean Louise, goes home from New York for a fortnight’s holiday. There she discovers, to her horror, that Atticus, who has always been her moral touchstone, is flawed; he is a racist.
During a major showdown between Jean Louise and Atticus towards the end of the book, he says: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?... Would you want your state governments run by people who don’t know how to run ‘em?... Zeebo (son of the family’s former housekeeper) would probably be Mayor of Maycomb. Would you want someone of Zeebo’s capability to handle the town’s money? We’re outnumbered, you know.
“Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as people...”
Do you hear the echo? These are familiar arguments. Many white SA readers would support this version of Atticus today. But Jean Louise is having none of it: “You’re a coward as well as a snob and a tyrant, Atticus... You’re the only person I think I’ve ever trusted and now I’m done for.”
But all this is not the point. Watchman is not the “real” Mockingbird. From a literary perspective, Watchman is not the book ToKillaMockingbirdis. Or as David L Ulin wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “GoSetaWatchman is an apprentice effort.”
Watchman, especially the first half, is readable. It has a fair bit of dry humour, has a wonderful sequence involving Scout, Jem and Dill at play in their back yard one summer day which is recognisable as a Mockingbird precursor; and there is a hilarious episode involving a teenage Jean Louise at a school dance losing her falsies; but the second half of Go SetaWatchman is more a political polemic, with Jean Louise and Atticus furiously arguing about racism.