Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman

The HarperCollins cover of Go Set a Watchman (in a similar design style to the first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird)
Author	Harper Lee
Language	English
Genre	Fiction
Published	14 July 2015 (US & UK)
Publisher	HarperCollins (US) Heinemann (UK)
Publication place	United States
Pages	278 pp
ISBN	978-0-06-240985-0
Preceded by	To Kill a Mockingbird

Go Set a Watchman is a novel by Harper Lee published on July 14, 2015, by HarperCollins in the United States and William Heinemann in the United Kingdom. Although written before her first and only other published novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), it was initially promoted by its publisher as a sequel, but is now more accurately seen as an earlier draft. The title comes from Isaiah 21:6: "For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth." It alludes to Jean Louise Finch's view of her father, Atticus Finch, as the moral compass ("watchman") of Maycomb, and has a theme of disillusionment, as she realizes the extent of the bigotry in her home community.

The book's unexpected and controversial discovery, decades after it was written, together with the exceptional renown of the author's only other book, an American classic, caused its publication to be highly anticipated; Amazon stated that it was their "most pre-ordered book" since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007, and stores arranged all-night openings from midnight to cope with expected demand.

Plot

According to the publisher, Jean Louise "is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father's attitude toward society and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood." Go Set a Watchman shows early versions of many of the characters who later appear in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The novel follows a woman in her twenties, Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who travels from New York to the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, to visit her family. The early sections of the book deal with her return and incidents around town as she reconnects with her aunt Alexandra; her uncle Jack, a retired doctor; and her father Atticus, a lawyer and former state legislator. Aside from this visit, the central reconnection is with a childhood friend and suitor, Henry "Hank" Clinton, who lived across the street and now works with her father. The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are introduced as sources of controversy in the community.

Returning from a trip to her ancestral home, Jean Louise and Henry are passed by a car of black men travelling dangerously at high speed. Henry mentions that the black people in the county now have money for cars but neglect to get licenses and insurance. The next day is spent dealing with the minor scandal a swim the previous evening has caused, and there are flashbacks to Jean Louise's youth, spent with another neighbor friend, Charles Baker "Dill" Harris, and her older brother Jeremy "Jem" Finch, who has since died of a heart condition which also killed her mother.

After finding a pamphlet titled "The Black Plague" among her father's papers, Jean Louise follows him to a Citizens’ Council meeting where Atticus introduces a man who delivers a racist speech. Jean Louise watches in secret from the balcony and is horrified. In a flashback to her youth, her father successfully defends a one-armed black man against a rape allegation (although the man was killed trying to escape the prison he was held in until the trial came to conclusion). She can't forgive that he has now betrayed her and flees the hall.

After having a dream about her old family black maid Calpurnia, whom she sees as a mother figure, Jean Louise has breakfast with her father. They soon learn that Calpurnia's grandson killed a drunk pedestrian the previous night while speeding in his car. Atticus agrees to take the case in order to stop the NAACP from getting involved. Jean Louise visits Calpurnia and is treated politely but coldly, causing her to leave, devastated.

At lunch with her Uncle Jack, Jean Louise questions why Atticus was at the meeting. Jack says that Atticus hasn't suddenly become racist but is trying to slow federal government intervention into state politics. Her uncle lectures her on the complexity of history, race, and politics in the South, trying to get Jean Louise to come to a conclusion, which she struggles to grasp. She has a flashback to when she was a teenager and recalls an incident where Atticus planted the seed for an idea in Henry's brain, then let him come to the right conclusion on his own.

While having coffee with Henry, Jean Louise tells him she doesn't love him and will never marry him. She expresses her disgust at seeing him and her father at the council meeting. Henry explains that sometimes people have to do things they don't want to do. She screams that she could never live with a hypocrite, only to notice that Atticus is standing behind them, smiling.

During a discussion with his daughter, Atticus argues that the blacks of the South are not ready for full civil rights, and the Supreme Court's decision was unconstitutional and irresponsible. Although Jean Louise agrees that the South is not ready to be fully integrated, she says the court was pushed into a corner by the NAACP and had to act. She is confused and devastated by her father's positions as they are contrary to everything he has ever taught her.

She returns to the family home furious and packs her things. As she is about to leave town, her uncle comes home. She angrily complains to him, and her uncle slaps her across the face. He tells her to think of all the things that have happened over the past two days and how she has processed them. When she says she can now stand them, he tells her it is bearable because she is her own person. He says that at one point she had fastened her conscience to her father's, assuming that her answers would always be his answers. Her uncle tells her that Atticus was letting her break her idols so that she could reduce him to the status of a human being.

Jean Louise returns to the office and makes a date with Henry for the evening. She reflects that Maycomb has taught him things she had never known and rendered her useless to him except as his oldest friend. She goes to apologize to Atticus, but he tells her how proud of her he is. He hoped that she would stand for what she thinks is right. She reflects that she didn't want her world disturbed but that she tried to crush the man who is trying to preserve it for her. She tells him that she thinks she loves him very much. As she follows him to the car, she silently welcomes him to the human race, seeing him as just a man for the first time.

Development history

Although promoted by its publisher and initially described in media reports as a sequel to Lee's best-selling novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960; Go Set a Watchman is actually that novel's first draft. The novel was finished in 1957 and purchased by the J.B. Lippincott Company. Lee's editor, Tay Hohoff, although impressed with elements of the story, saying that "the spark of the true writer flashed in every line," thought it was by no means ready for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." As Jonathan Mahler recounts in his Times article on Hohoff, she thought the strongest aspect of Lee's novel was the flashback sequences featuring a young Scout, and thus requested that Lee use those flashbacks as a basis for a new novel. Lee agreed, and "during the next couple of years, Hohoff led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird".

According to Mahler, "Ms. Hohoff also references a more detailed characterization of the development process, found in the Lippincott corporate history: 'After a couple of false starts, the story-line, interplay of characters, and fall of emphasis grew clearer, and with each revision — there were many minor changes as the story grew in strength and in her own vision of it — the true stature of the novel became evident.' (In 1978, Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row, which became HarperCollins, publisher of Watchman.)" Mahler remarks that "there appeared to be a natural give and take between author and editor. 'When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours,' Ms. Hohoff wrote. 'And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country.'"

In terms of the initial characterization of Atticus as a segregationist, an element to his character that was dropped in the later draft, there are various theories already offered. Mahler offers that it could have been Hohoff that inspired the change. Raised "in a multigenerational Quaker home near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Ms. Hohoff attended a Quaker school, Brooklyn Friends. Such an upbringing suggests certain progressive values. But probably the clearest window into her state of mind when she was coaching Ms. Lee through the rewrite of Mockingbird is the book she was writing herself at the time: a biography of John Lovejoy Elliott, a social activist and humanist in early-20th-century New York who had committed his life to helping the city's underclass. The book, A Ministry to Man, was published in 1959, a year before Mockingbird."

Michiko Kakutani made note of the changes between the two versions: "Some plot points that have become touchstones in Mockingbird are evident in the earlier Watchman. Scout's older brother, Jem, vividly alive as a boy in Mockingbird, is dead in Watchman; the trial of a black man accused of raping a young white woman, while a main story line in Mockingbird, is only a passing aside in Watchman. (Interestingly, the trial results in a guilty verdict for the accused man, Tom Robinson, in Mockingbird, but leads to an acquittal in Watchman.)" She continues, "Students of writing will find Watchman fascinating for these reasons: How did a lumpy tale about a young woman's grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father? How did a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech (from the casually patronizing to the disgustingly grotesque — and presumably meant to capture the extreme prejudice that could exist in small towns in the Deep South in the 1950s) mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement, hailed, in the words of the former civil rights activist and congressman Andrew Young, for giving us "a sense of emerging humanism and decency"?

Kakutani also goes on to describe that not only are characterizations and plot points different, the motivation behind the novel shifts as well, stating: "Somewhere along the way, the overarching impulse behind the writing also seems to have changed. Watchman reads as if it were fueled by the alienation a native daughter — who, like Ms. Lee, moved away from small-town Alabama to New York City — might feel upon returning home. It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people’s enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness. At times, it also alarmingly suggests that the civil rights movement roiled things up, making people who “used to trust each other” now “watch each other like hawks.”

According to Kakutani, "Mockingbird, in contrast, represents a determined effort to see both the bad and the good in small-town life, the hatred and the humanity; it presents an idealized father-daughter relationship (which a relative in Watchman suggests has kept Jean Louise from fully becoming her own person) and views the past not as something lost but as a treasured memory. In a 1963 interview, Ms. Lee, who now lives in her old hometown, Monroeville, Ala., said of Mockingbird: 'The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.'"

The papers of Harper Lee’s literary agents in the 1950s, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain, are held by the Columbia U. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Their records show that Go Set a Watchman was an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, and underwent significant changes in story and characters during the revision process. Harper Lee was writing Go Set a Watchman in January, 1957, and sold the manuscript to the publisher J. B. Lippincott in October, 1957. She then continued to work on the manuscript for the next two years, submitting revised manuscript to her literary agents. At some point in that two-year period, Lee renamed her book To Kill a Mockingbird. Some of these records have been copied and posted online.

Circumstances of discovery

Discovery

The manuscript for the novel was originally thought to be lost. According to The New York Times, the typed manuscript of Go Set a Watchman was first found during an appraisal of Lee's assets in 2011 in a safe deposit box in Lee's hometown of Monroeville. Lee's lawyer, Tonja Carter, later revealed that she had first assumed the manuscript to be an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. Later, upon learning in the summer of 2014 of the existence of a second novel at a family gathering, she then re-examined Lee's safe-deposit box and found the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman. After contacting Lee and reading the manuscript, she passed it on to Lee’s agent, Andrew Nurnberg.

Controversy

Some publications have called the timing of the book "suspicious", citing Lee's declining health, statements she had made over several decades that she would not write or release another novel, and the death of her sister (and caregiver) just two months before the announcement. NPR reported on the news of her new book release, with circumstances "raising questions about whether she is being taken advantage of in her old age." Some publications have even called for fans to boycott the work. News sources, including NPR and BBC News, have reported that the conditions surrounding the release of the book are unclear and posit that Lee may not have had full control of the decision. Investigators for the state of Alabama interviewed Lee in response to a suspicion of elder abuse in relation to the publication of the book. However, by April 2015 the investigation had found that the claims were unfounded.

Additionally, historian and Lee's longtime friend Wayne Flynt told Associated Press that the "narrative of senility, exploitation of this helpless little old lady is just hogwash. It's just complete bunk." Flynt said he found Lee capable of giving consent and believes no one will ever know for certain the terms of said consent.

Conversely, Marja Mills, author of The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee, a friend and former neighbor of Lee and her sister Alice paints a very different picture. In her piece for The Washington Post "The Harper Lee I knew," she quotes Lee's sister Alice, whom she describes as "gatekeeper, advisor, protector" for most of Lee's adult life, as saying "Poor Nelle Harper can't see and can't hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence." She makes note that Watchman was announced just two and a half months after Alice's death and that all correspondence to and from Lee goes through her new attorney. She describes Lee as "in a wheelchair in an assisted living center, nearly deaf and blind, with a uniformed guard posted at the door" and her visitors "restricted to those on an approved list."

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera continues this argument. He also takes issue with how the book has been promoted by the 'Murdoch Empire' as a "Newly discovered" novel, attesting that the other people in the Sotheby's meeting insist that Lee's attorney was present in 2011, when Lee's former agent (whom she subsequently fired) and the Sotheby's specialist found the manuscript. They say she knew full well that it was the same one submitted to Tay Hohoff in the 50's that was reworked into Mockingbird, and that Carter had been sitting on the discovery, waiting for the moment when she, and not Alice, would be in charge of Harper Lee's affairs.

He again questions how commentators are treating the character of Atticus as though he were a real person and are deliberately trying to argue that the character devolved with age as opposed to evolved during development. He quotes Lee herself from one of her last interviews in 1964 where she said "I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing — is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this — the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea." He states that "A publisher that cared about Harper Lee's legacy would have taken those words to heart, and declined to publish Go Set a Watchman, the good idea that Lee eventually transformed into a gem. That HarperCollins decided instead to manufacture a phony literary event isn't surprising. It's just sad."

Stephen Peck, son of actor Gregory Peck, has also expressed concern. Responding to the question of how he thinks his father would have reacted to the book, he says that his father "would have appreciated the discussion the book has prompted, but would have been troubled by the decision to publish it." Peck notes that his father considered Lee a dear friend. She gave him the pocket watch that had belonged to her father, on whom she modeled Atticus, and which Gregory wore the night he won an Oscar for the role. The documentary A Conversation with Gregory Peck shows Peck's daughter Cecilia naming her son Harper after the author, who remained a close family friend. Stephen, who is president and chief executive of the United States Veterans Initiative, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides services to homeless veterans, goes on to say, "I think he would have felt very protective of her," and that his father would have counseled Lee not to publish Watchman because it could taint Mockingbird, one of the most beloved novels in American history.

"Not to protect himself, but to protect her," Peck said, also noting that the decision to publish it was made not long after the death of the author’s sister Alice Lee, who had long handled Harper Lee’s affairs. "You just don’t know how that decision was made… If he had to, he would have flown down to talk to her. I have no doubt." Later in the article, which was posted in The Wall Street Journal, he says, "To me, it was an unedited draft. Do you want to put that early version out there or do you want to put it in the University of Alabama archives for scholars to look at?"

Peck said he doesn’t believe the depiction of Atticus in Watchman will affect his father’s legacy. "The Atticus of Watchman is a completely different character from the Atticus of Mockingbird," he said, "even if it's born from the same imagination." He notes that the role was the hallmark of his father's career, and of all the characters he played, the cerebral civil-rights hero was the one closest to who he was in real life. "He so deeply felt the words that he said in Mockingbird that you could barely separate the two," Stephen Peck said. "That was his best self. Those were his deepest, most closely held ideals. He was thankful every day that he got that part." Asked the question whether, if Watchman had been published 20 years after Mockingbird instead of 55 years later, Gregory Peck would have taken up the part again, Stephen answered, "I’m not at all sure my dad would have played this one."

Like Peck, others have also questioned the context of the book's release, not in matters of consent, but that it has been publicized as a sequel as opposed to an unedited first draft. There is no foreword to the book, and the dust jacket, although noting that the book was written in the mid-1950's, gives the impression that the book was written as a sequel or companion to Mockingbird, which was never Lee's intention. Edward Burlingame, who was an executive editor at Lippincott at the time of Mockingbird's release, has stated there was never any intention, then or after, on the part of Lee or Tohoff, to publish Watchman. It was simply regarded as a first draft. "Lippincott’s sales department would have published Harper Lee’s laundry list," Burlingame said. "But Tay really guarded Nelle like a junkyard dog. She was not going to allow any commercial pressures or anything else to put stress on her to publish anything that wouldn’t make Nelle proud or do justice to her. Anxious as we all were to get another book from Harper Lee, it was a decision we all supported." He said that at in all his years at Lippincott, "there was never any discussion of publishing Go Set a Watchman.

Brilliant Books, an independent bookstore in Michigan, made headlines by offering full refunds to customers who felt duped by the marketing of the book, calling it "shameful" and "exploitative". They released a statement shortly after Go Set a Watchman was released, comparing the book to James Joyce's Stephen Hero and condemning its publication.

Reception

Go Set a Watchman has polarized both critics and audiences. An early review by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times described Atticus' characterization as "shocking", as he "has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares [Scout's] horror and confusion". Aside from this reveal, Kakutani does make note that Watchman is the first draft of Mockingbird and discusses how students of writing will find Watchman fascinating for those reasons. A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal described the key theme of the book as disillusionment. Despite Atticus' bigotry in the novel, he wins a case similar to the one he loses in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Entertainment Weekly panned the book as "a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird" and said "Though Watchman has a few stunning passages, it reads, for the most part, like a sluggishly-paced first draft, replete with incongruities, bad dialogue, and underdeveloped characters". “Ponderous and lurching,” wrote William Giraldi in The New Republic, "haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with deadening dead zones, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat." In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik commented that the novel could be seen as "a string of clichés", although he went on to remark that "some of them are clichés only because, in the half century since Lee’s generation introduced them, they’ve become clichés; taken on their own terms, they remain quite touching and beautiful." Maureen Corrigan in NPR Books called the novel "kind of a mess." In The Spectator, Phillip Hensher called Go Set a Watchman "an interesting document and a pretty bad novel," as well as a "piece of confused juvenilia." "Go Set A Watchman is not a horrible book, but it's not a very good one, either," judged the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, citing among other flaws its "overly simplistic" plot.

"It is an inchoate jumble," wrote Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post. "Go Set A Watchman is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good, or even a finished book. For the first 100 pages it lacks anything that could even charitably be described as a plot. ... [T]he writing is laughably bad. ... I flung the book down and groaned audibly and I almost did not pick it back up even though I knew I had fewer than 100 pages to go. ... This should not have been published. It’s 280 pages in desperate need of an editor. ... If you were anywhere in the vicinity of me when I was reading the thing, you heard a horrible bellowing noise, followed by the sound of a book being angrily tossed down. ..."

Sales

Go Set a Watchman set a record for the highest adult novel one-day sales at Barnes & Noble, which included digital sales and pre-orders made before July 14. Barnes & Noble declined to release the exact number.

Translations

Some translations of the novel have already appeared. In the Finnish translation of the novel by Kristiina Drews, the language of the book is toned down. For example, the word "nigger" in the English text is translated in Drews's text as if the word "negro" or "black" had been used. Drews states that she interpreted what was meant each time, and used less offensive words instead.

Bibliography

• Lee, Harper (2015). Go Set a Watchman. UK: William Heineman. ISBN 978-1-785-15028-9.
• Lee, Harper (2015). Go Set a Watchman. US: Harper. ISBN 978-0-062-40985-0.
• Lee, Harper (2015). Go Set a Watchman (Audiobook ed.). US: HarperAudio. ISBN 978-0-062-40990-4.
• Lee, Harper (2015). Go Set a Watchman (Large print ed.). US: HarperLuxe. ISBN 978-0-062-40988-1.

External links

• U.S. publisher book information