Harper Lee: Killing Her Darlings

What is it about sequels that simultaneously breaks our hearts and charges our souls? A comeback is always difficult to effect, especially because the audience has grown increasingly jaded, has grown with the tale to expect more or, most tragically, to already believe its expectations will not be met. It is this very cynicism which Harper Lee chooses to tackle in this prescient follow-up to the story which made her famous, back when we too were innocents. She dares us to be disappointed, even as she addresses why we must never be complacent about the moral of our human story. She dares us to question the roots of our vexations with the world, just as her heroine is forced to.

‘Mr Stone set a watchman in church yesterday,’ says Scout, now Jean Louise Finch, now 26, now all grown up but just as feisty, visiting Maycomb from New York City and creating a scandal the very night of her arrival by jumping into the river with long-time admirer Hank. ‘He should have provided me with one… I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference.’

Go Set a Watchman (Penguin Random House, 288 pages) continues Lee’s vigil over truth, moving two decades forward from the memorable trial of To Kill a Mockingbird, her seminal 1960 novel which shaped a generation and earned her the Pulitzer. Bookstores around the world thrilled with anticipation on 14 July, when one of the year’s literary events revived the classic Lee, now approaching 90 years in the world, had set away (more than 100,000 copies sold in the first day of UK sales, announced her publisher). The irony is that this is the book which actually birthed the phenomenon; Lee’s editor is said to have pulled the sensational Mockingbird from between the lines of Watchman. Most sensational of all has been the revelation that in this second novel, one of our most admired literary heroes has fallen—only, so fittingly that the order of publication seems preordained.

And so, back to the future. We may have moved to the 1950s, but the issues of segregation and racism seem to have slipped further backwards into the mire; ‘nigger’ is still in evidence, as are the vagaries of the Hundred Years’ War. Most heartbreaking is the revelation that Atticus, lion-hearted Atticus—in our imagination, the dashing Gregory Peck of the 1962 film made off the novel—has fallen in step with the bigots. Before Jean Louise’s astonished eyes, the unfailingly just lawyer now sits in the company of ordinary evil; permitting the speeches of small-town powermongers like that ‘great dropsical gray slug’ William Willougby, and Grady O’Hanlon, who promotes the cause of segregation full-time, holding forth about the mongrelisation of race and the ‘essential inferiority’ and ‘kinky woolly heads’ of black people. Does her father’s presence ‘make it less filthy?’ Jean Louise wonders, briefly, realising at once that, ‘No. It condoned.’

The revelation is staggering for the unfettered creature that was Scout, that wonderful innocent who persists in Jean Louise. She runs from the courtroom, that previous scene of justice, and stumbles into the ice cream parlour that was her old home, allowing her childhood treat to melt; and this, more than the Trial of her childhood, is her coming of age.

Much later, when at last she confronts Atticus, now septuagenarian and arthritic, she rails at him. He offers scant explanation, and when he speaks it is to our astonishment: “Honey, you do not seem to understand the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people,” says the man who once openly believed in equality for all. Speaking against the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), he calls them backward, ‘unable to share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship’, asks, “can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people?”

The exchange holds some electricity, as Atticus is otherwise largely absent from the book. This is one of its failings. The argument is largely wooden, Scout is throwing herself up against a hollow icon—and he himself knows it. The man who put himself and his family on the line to defend a Black man charged with the rape of a White woman now purports to ensure loyal housekeeper Calpurnia’s grandson pleads guilty, according to the code of the South. Moreover, Hank, who Atticus treats like a son, and who wants to marry confused Jean Louise, stands with him; his defence is that he has to make his way into legislature without the societal privileges of the Finches. And the emotional desertion of Calpurnia, in one of the novel’s most moving scenes, is the other shock. For Scout dies first by her side, when the woman who raised her puts up her guard; ‘in Calpurnia’s eyes was no hint of compassion’.

That old bogeyman, Boo Radley, is a distant prospect; it is Atticus who offers the prospect of terror now. So, what pulls the reader through this oddly paced book, full of vivid (if at times faltering) description and piercing insight but uneven in terms of narrative momentum, is the idea that this is all a trick; that we will be proved wrong in the end. “Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” Atticus warned us half a century ago. What Lee achieves wonderfully, in this more complex tale, is to complicate his legacy. Just who are the mockingbirds, now? Is Atticus not as innocent as Scout, is Calpurnia not as much to blame as Hank, for giving up? What Atticus succeeds in bequeathing is a powerful sense of self-determination; he cannot be sole arbiter, by the very definition of justice. Scout, like us, must find her own watchman.

It may sound dire, but there is plenty to enjoy in Watchman. In rich flashback, we visit the golden years and remember Scout’s brother Jem, who died young of the weak heart he inherited from his mother: handsome teenager, high school heart-throb and dutiful older brother. There is the comedy and magic of Scout’s return, folding herself into her train berth accidentally and making flirtatious banter with Hank; the hilarious occasion of Scout’s first dance, wherein her fake bosom is accidentally flung on a patriotic school sign and her assumption that a wet kiss has gotten her pregnant; the eccentricities of small town Alabama, where people keep their promises and remember their grudges. The texture of the South pulses in the cosy descriptions of this town, with its fussy aunts, and especially through delightfully dotty Dr Finch.

Indeed, the exchange between her uncle and Jean Louise is at the real heart of the book: “The South’s in its last agonising birth pain. It’s bringing forth something new and I’m not sure I like it, but I won’t be here to see it,” he says, telling her later that she is its future and must return to help it assimilate. When he invokes Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (itself a reference to King Lear), he is speaking to the meaninglessness of modern life; Scout is the eponymous Childe Roland, of course, who must sustain her quest.

And she is ready, in the end. She thinks, at a Coffee her aunt has hosted to reintroduce her to local society, ‘New York has all the answers… The city lives by slogans, isms, and fast sure answers. New York is saying to me right now: you, Jean Louise Finch, are not reacting according to our doctrines regarding your kind, therefore you do not exist.’ But it is the South which has raised her as an individual, even if she is unable to conform to its social obligations: ‘everything I learned about human decency I learned here. I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious,’ she tells New York. Of course she defends it in her next breath: ‘In New York you are your own person.’ She wouldn’t be Scout if she didn’t question every tin god.

But how do we explain the importance of Mockingbird to the Twilight generation, who may not bother with Huckleberry Finn or The Lord of the Flies? By reminding them of its literary historical value; it is the duty of the far- reaching reader to look at the moment that produced it.

Atticus FinchbooksEnglish literatureGo Set a WatchmanHarper LeeTo Kill a Mockingbird