Un'finch'ingly racist

Lead review

Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee
Random House
2015, pp 320, Rs 799

We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honourable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s.

As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.

Shockingly, in Lee’s long-awaited novel Go Set a Watchman, Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?”

In Mockingbird, a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In Watchman, set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown vs Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the NAACP” and describes NAACP-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”

In Mockingbird, Atticus was a role model for his children, Scout and Jem — their North Star, their hero, the most potent moral force in their lives. In Watchman, he becomes the source of grievous pain and disillusionment for the 26-year-old Scout (or Jean Louise).

While written in the third person, Watchman reflects a grown-up Scout’s point of view: The novel is the story of how she returned home to Maycomb, Alabama, for a visit — from New York City, where she has been living — and tried to grapple with her dismaying realisation that Atticus and her longtime boyfriend Henry Clinton both have abhorrent views on race and segregation.

Though Watchman is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of Mockingbird. According to news accounts, Watchman was submitted to publishers in summer 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became Mockingbird.

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 mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement?

The depiction of Atticus in Watchman makes for disturbing reading, and for Mockingbird fans, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father — who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion — has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. How could the saintly Atticus — described in early sections of the book in much the same terms as he is in Mockingbird — suddenly emerge as a bigot? Suggestions about changing times and the polarising effects of the civil rights movement seem insufficient when it comes to explaining such a radical change, and the reader, like Scout, cannot help but end feeling baffled and distressed.

Though it lacks the lyricism of Mockingbird, the portions of Watchman dealing with Scout’s childhood and her adult romance with Henry capture the daily rhythms of life in a small town and are peppered with portraits of minor characters whose circumscribed lives can feel like Barbara Pym salted with some down-home American humour.

The advice Lee received from her first editor was shrewd: to move the story back 20 years to Scout’s childhood, expanding what are merely flashbacks in Watchman used to underscore the disillusion Jean Louise feels with present-day Atticus, now 72. (“I’ll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for.”) Scout’s disillusionment in Watchman oddly parallels that of Jem in Mockingbird, after Atticus fails to get Tom Robinson acquitted and Jem realises that justice does not always prevail.

Another pivotal difference between the two books concerns the decision to make Scout (“juvenile desperado, hell-raiser extraordinary”) the narrator of Mockingbird — a decision Lee executed with remarkable skill, managing the stereoscopic feat of capturing both the point of view of a forthright, wicked smart girl and the retrospective wisdom of an adult.

One of the emotional through-lines in both Mockingbird and Watchman is a plea for empathy — as Atticus puts it in Mockingbird to Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” The difference is Mockingbird suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while Watchman asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.