Every great story needs a villain and in the story of how Go Set a Watchman came into being, the villain is most probably HarperCollins Publishing Company.
Harper Lee. of course, wrote one of the nation's most beloved novels, To Kill a Mockingbird. It was made into one of the nation's most beloved movies, with that love owing no small debt to the fact that one of the nation's most beloved actors, Gregory Peck, considered his portrayal of small-town lawyer and paragon of decency Atticus Finch his finest role. Mockingbird's telling of how Atticus defended a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama is a frequent school assignment read, with the novel adding layers of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch's awakening to the realities of the world around her that the movie sets aside to focus on the trial. Several generations of middle-schoolers have made Mockingbird one of their first acquaintances with the experience of novels being as much about ideas as they are about plots and characters, and for many of them that first association has been a lasting one.
Mockingbird was published in 1960 and remained Lee's only novel. Whether or not she had ever even finished another full-length manuscript was open to question, until her representatives announced in late 2014 that the manuscript of Watchman had been discovered in a safe-deposit box. According to the story, it was the original novel that the J. B. Lippincott publishing company purchased, and it was over the course of working with editor Tay Hohoff that the idea of building an entire novel from one of the flashback sequences that Lee developed Mockingbird.
But the completed Watchman manuscript, or at least one of its revisions, still existed and it was that which HarperCollins, which now owns Lippincott's copyrights and other assets, began hyping in 2014 and publicizing until publishing it this month. What makes the company villainous instead of heroic is just how much of a disservice to Lee, Mockingbird and their legacy Watchman is. A number of reviewers have pointed out that without Mockingbird, no one would publish Watchman as is. Lee's own advanced age and health left her unable to contribute to preparing the manuscript for publication, and what rests between the enticingly retro covers of Watchman shows that clearly. It's a set of barely-connected episodes as an adult Jean Louise, on her annual visit to Maycomb from where she now lives in New York City, encounters up close and personally the effects of the civil rights movement and the racism that makes it necessary. That racism is in her own family, in her prospective fiance and in her hero, Atticus himself. While not a sheet-wearing cross-burner, Atticus is a member of one of the citizens groups that opposes federal court rulings forcing integration in the South. In one of the many long and overwrought dialogues that make Watchman a chore to read, he explains that he believes the African-Americans of the South have yet not enough exposure to "white civilization" to be entrusted with full citizenship and all its rights. Jean Louise, remembering only his teaching from earlier in her life about loving all equally and his defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman, is devastated by learning what Atticus thinks and breaks with him, vowing to leave Maycomb and never return. She partially reconciles with him by finally removing him from the pedestal where she had placed him and allowing him to be a flawed human being instead of an infallible deity.
As a part of its fairly brilliant publicity campaign, HarperCollins teased first the idea of the book, then the cover, and finally a preview chapter that featured Atticus's backward views on full display. Buzz, of course, was inevitable. I lost count of the clickbait headlines along the lines of "Atticus is now a racist!" The campaign, plus the deeply-felt sentiment for Mockingbird, made Watchman review-proof, which is good thing for it. Although it features several wonderful scenes of the adult Jean Louise recalling her iconoclastic upbringing, written with the combination of youthful worldview filtered through adult language of which Lee is a master, it is in many places curiously lifeless. The temptation is to see the difference sorting out as the dull scenes being those not yet edited when Watchman was abandoned for Mockingbird, but there's probably no way of knowing.
It's not as though Watchman couldn't have been revised to make a proper sequel to Mockingbird. Atticus's seemingly divided character could have been an examination of how someone who has privately awful thoughts may publicly do noble things -- how could the two tendencies be reconciled? How could a man who believed in saying, "Be patient," to a group of people still oppressed almost a hundred years after they were supposed to be have been freed also put his profession and even his personal safety on the line to try to fight an unjust accusation against one of those same people? Jean Louise the adult white woman has an encounter with Calpurnia, the African-American woman who mostly raised her and was almost a surrogate mother to Scout, that is cold and correct and suspicious, an incident that shows how important Martin Luther King's message of ending segregation by preaching love really was, as well as what a tightrope walk it was to try to maintain. The actual arc of the novel -- Jean Louise discovers her sainted father is actually a flawed human being -- is almost trivial, and becomes even more so if you read Watchman without giving it the context and resonance lent it by Mockingbird.
Did Hohoff and Lee spend time trying to work Watchman into such a form, to address and handle those ideas the way that Mockingbird tried to handle its subjects? An executive who worked at Lippincott when Mockingbird was published says they probably didn't, but we don't really know, and even if they did, that version of the manuscript was not the one in the safe deposit box. And it's probable that HarperCollins didn't concern themselves with that paper once they realized what a truckload of negotiable paper it represented. They were at least right about that, as Amazon reported pre-sales as big as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
I've read lots of theories. Some suggest Watchman helps deflate a concept that Mockingbird promotes, that of the "white savior" figure of Atticus aiding the poor helpless people of color. Others say it "exposes the dark side of Atticus Finch." All of these are basically silly ideas. Atticus is a fictional character, and he has whatever thoughts, beliefs, habits and words his creator wishes to give him. If, as the public history of Watchman says, it was written first, then it's far more likely that Lee developed him from a man committed to justice and the law -- even for those he considered backwards and uncivilized -- to a man committed to equality and love. The supposedly more realistic Atticus of Watchman became the compassionate and decent vested and spectacled paladin of Mockingbird, not the other way around.
Watchman, once discovered, should not have stayed hidden. Gregory Peck's son Stephen believes his father, who became good friends with Harper Lee, would have counseled her against publishing it but would definitely approved of its preservation with her papers for use by literature scholars. Stephen also believes that, had this version of Watchman appeared during his father's lifetime and someone suggested filming it, his father would have taken a pass on its version of Atticus.
It would have been nice if HarperCollins had done the same.
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