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Harper Lee: Go Set A Watchman (Book Review)
The conference doesn't start until this afternoon, and I got up early, so I had the chance to read it - it's not a long novel. Overall verdict? As a novel - a debut novel, even, which it would have been had it been published when it was written - , it has both strenghts and weaknesses; you can see both why her editor rejected it in this form and why the editor in question also realised this writer had huge potential and there was something there which deserved, nay, demanded further development. The weaknesses, unspoilery: in the last third of the novel the characters spout rethoric of the day, ideas and exposition at each other, they have a tendency to feel more like Shavian mouthpieces, if that makes sense. Which isn't true for the rest of the novel. The solution to the central emotional conflict also feels - not wrong for the characters, but wrongly reached. (I'll get into details why in the spoilery part of the view.) Especially as this involves a character (not Atticus!) doing lots of mansplaining to our heroine. Oh, and I'm not sure whether this counts as a weakness or not, but the narration pov is a bit inconsistent - ist's mostly Jean Louise's/Scout's in third person, but there are two or three passages where we're suddenly in Henry/Hank Clinton's or Atticus' pov.
The strengths, though: Harper Lee was already a wonderful wordsmith at this stage. And the characters - both the ones who'd make it into To Kill a Mockingbird and the ones exclusive to this book - are drawn vividly, at once coming to life in a few sentences and staying that way. The flashbacks to Scout's childhood and adolescence feel organically interwoven with what she experiencs in the present. Btw, interestingly enough, only the first of them feels like it could be in To Kill a Mockingbird (and maybe it is, it's been so many years since I've read the novel - a hilarious Scout-Jem-Dill escapade), whereas the others are in an era Mockingbird stays away from, after Scout starts to menstruate at age 11 and thus is rudely reminded her body is female, and the effect this has on her. The ignorance about sex at school in the stories the girls there tell each other, coming with a matter of fact aside comment (not related to any of the plot, so I mention it here) by one of her schoolmates about two other girls being taken away by social services because the older one got pregnant by her own father. (Mockingbird implies that Mayella Ewell got raped by her father, but it's not spelled out explicitly, and I think the movie skips the implication altogether.). Flashback!!Scout in Go Set A Watchman lives far more acutely aware of being female (and not wanting to be), and what can happen to girls, than the pre-pubescent child in To Kill A Mockingbird. Present day Jean Louise hasn't resolved all her gender issues but is on somewhat better terms with being a woman, especially since she's seeing men (all but one) with a far more jaundiced eye.
Then there's the build up. I now wish I hadn't read the advance reviews, though then probably I wouldn't read the novel for months, because the big twist/revelation isn't something Lee drops her readers into right at the start. It's very skillfully done. The hypothetical 1950s reader not knowing any of these characters would have taken a great liking to most of them as our heroine returns to the town of her childhood. There are a very few hints of what's to come (far more noticable to a current day reader), but no more than that, though they increase, and by the time Jean Louise finds out what shocks her world to the core, even a hypothetical first time reader with no To Kill a Mockinbird knowledge whatsoever would have been as shocked as she was, because this novel has taken great care to build up this version Atticus Finch as a very likeable character, and the father-daughter relationship, full of mutual friendly banter, of which I'll later give quotes, is extremely endearing. For that matter, Jean Louise's boyfriend Henry Clinton is written sympathetically, too. And then there are Scout's memories, in which of course he's the perfect father and defender of the weak. So when the penny drops, so to speak, and she finds out both her father and Henry hang out with "concerned citizens" these days, arguing for segregation, it's incredibly emotionally effective in putting the reader into her shoes. Far more so than if Atticus had been introduced with a racist slogan on his lips to begin with. You're drawn into a story of family reunions with a friendly ease, humorous anecdote abound, and Jean Louise seemingly has no bigger problem than making her mind up about whether or not to marry Henry, whom she's attached to but not passionately in love with, plus she simply doesn't want to be a wife, and then more and more hints sneak in that maybe that comment Henry makes about the young black men who've just overtaken him and Scout in their car wasn't just the reflex of an annoyed driver, maybe Atticus asking his daughter whether she's kept up with the news wasn't just a casual comment, etc., and then, wham. The immediate emotional fallout for our pov character, the disorientation, the desperate attempt to reconcile the past with the present, all this is captivatingly written. (It's only once we move past the fallout-and-trying-to-find-explanations part that we get to the characters turning into Shavian mouthpieces weakness I mentioned earlier.) Aching, but very well.
Also: the novel doesn't let its heroine off the hook, either. There are two very powerful scenes were Jean Louise, as we'd put it today, is called on her privilege. The first is when she visits Calpurnia (too old now to work for the Finch family, but previously introduced in flashback as a firm and loving presence through Scout's childhood and adolescence) in the wake of the big twist and as part of her quest to try and make sense of it all. And that's when she gets, if possibly, an even bigger shock.
Because Jean Louise, for the first time in her life, realises that Calpurnia "is wearing her company manners" towards her when reassuring Jean Louise that everything's fine. And what follows, in a few lines, in the most devastating fictional take on the Mammy trope I've ever read:
"Cal," she cried, "Cal, Cal, Cal, what are you doing to me? What's the matter? I'm your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?"
Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them softly on the arms of the rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind think lenses.
"What are you all doing to us?" she said.
"Us?"
"Yessum. Us."
Jean Louise said slowly, more to herself than to Calpurnia: "As long as I've lived I never remotely dreamed something like this could happen. And here it is. I cannot talk to the one human who raised me from the time I was two years old...it is happening as I sit here now and I cannot believe it. Talk to me, Cal. For God's sake, talk to me right. Don't sit there like that!"
She looked into the old woman's face, and she knew it was hopeless. Calpurnia was watching her, and in Calpurnia's eyes there was no hint of compassion.
Jean Louise rose to go. "Tell me one thing, Cal," she said, "just one thing before I go - please, I've got to know. Did you hate us?"
The old woman sat silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited.
Finally, Calpurnia shook her head.
That's the end of the scene (Jean Louise is talking to Calpurnia's son in the next line, which opens a new one), and wow. There really is nothing more to be said. And if nothing else, I think it justifies the publication of this novel, because what (few) criticisms of To Kill a Mockingbird I've read usually also concerned the black characters being presented as universally in awe of their white savior.
The other scene I was referring to takes place between Jean Louise and Henry, and Henry is another case in point of this novel answering, unintentionally, to one of directed-at-TKaM few criticisms, this time about the classism in the depiction of "white trash" . Because Henry Clinton comes from a "white trash" family, and Atticus' sister Alexandra has a rant about that to Jean Louise early on ("We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash (...)Henry is like he is now only because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came and paid for his education. Fine a boy as he is, the trash won't wash out of him"). I hasten to add that Alexandra is presented as a snob and Henry sympathetically at this point; it's this speech which brings a very pissed off Jean Louise nearly to agree to marry him. When, much later in the novel, Jean Louise and Henry finally have their conversation about the big twist, Henry's reply to the obvious question she asks him goes right at the hart of this difference in their origins, and what it means for his day-to-day existence in Maycomb:
I.e. what she asks him is why, if he doesn't really believe in the natural superiority of the white race etc. (which he just said he doesn't), he goes along with the bigotry, and his defense is that as opposed to her, who lives in New York, he has to live here in Maycomb, make his living here, and besides:
"I mean there are things which I simply can't do that you can."
"And why am I such a privileged character?"
"You're a Finch."
"So I'm a Finch. So what?"
"So you can parade around town in your dungarees with your shirttail out and barefooted if you wanted to. Maycomb says, 'That's the Finch in her, that's just Her Way.' Maycomb grins and goes about its business; old Scout Finch never changes. Maycomb is delighted and perfectly ready to believe you went swimming in the river buck naked. 'Hasn't changed a bit,' it says. 'Same old Jean Louise. Remember when she - '
He put down the salt shaker.
'But let Henry Clinton show any signs of deviating from the norm, and Maycomb says, not 'That's the Clinton in him', but, 'That's the trash in him.'"
Neither Jean Louise nor the novel takes this as an excuse for the larger issue, but neither is Henry's point re: the differences in how people react to them denied.
Btw, before I talk about more serious issues and how they're dealt with, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out another strength of the novel: the humour of it. Not just in some of the childhood scenes. An example of the bantery (and unspoilery) dialogue between Jean Louise and her father Atticus early in the novel, before the twist, which refers to something Henry alludes to in the spoilery passage earlier. Aunt Alexandra is just chiding Jean Louise about the rumour Jean Louise and Henry were swimming in the river naked:
"Your father will die, simply die, when he finds out."
Atticus was standing in the door with his hands in his pockets.
"Good morning," he said. "What will kill me?"
Alexandra said, "Im not going to tell him, Jean Louise. It's up to you.
Jean Louise silently signaled her father. Her message was received and understood. Atticus looked grave. "What's the matter?" he said.
"Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the river in the middle of the night with no clothes on."
"H'r'm," said Atticus. He touched his glasses. "I hope you weren't doing the backstroke."
Conversely, here's Jean Louise teasing her father at breakfast re: coffee:
'Still haven't learned how to drink it?'
'No,' said her father.
'Whiskey either?'
'No.'
'Cigarettes and women?'
'No.'
'You have any fun these days?'
'I manage.'
You can see what I mean about the characterisation build up within this novel. As an example of a characterisation of even minor characters in a few lines, here's Dill, the character inspired by Harper Lee's childhood friendship with Truman Capote, who shows up only in flashback in Go Set a Watchman but is occasionally thought of by Jean Louise in the present, too.
re: Dill the child: He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat. He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.
Dill the adult, during the novel's actions abroad (currently in Italy): He was a born wanderer. He was like a small panther when confined with the same people and surroundings for any length of time. She wondered where he would be when his life ended. Not on the sidewalk of Maycomb, that was for sure.
Aunt Alexandra (whom I don't recall from TKaM): Alexandra was the last of her kind; she had river-boat, boarding school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was a disapprover; she was an incurable gossip. When Alexandra went to finishing school, self-doubt could not be found in any text-book (...).
It's this wit and affection for the characters on the narrator's part which makes the twist and theme extra painful.
The big revelation comes in steps. Jean Louise finds a racist pamphlet on Atticus' desk, reads it, is horrified and asks her aunt (who has taken over the household since Calpurnia is too old) who left it there, which is when her aunt brings up both Atticus and Henry regularly attend court and townhall meetings. At first, Jean Louise refuses to believe it, then thinks there must be an explanation, maybe they're preparing a case, are undercover and what not, and then she goes to the courthouse where she sees her father, at one of the meetings, introduce, in his usual unfailingly courteous manner, the next speaker, who promptly spouts bigotry like you wouldn't believe. And faced with this sight, her father among the bigots, she has her flashback to what would later develop into the core case of To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus in the past saying "Gentlemen, if there's one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none" cross cut with Atticus in the present, sitting among the bigots, and she feels suckerpunched. But she still clings to the hope that maybe, just maybe, this is all a gigantic misunderstanding and there's another explanation somewhere, until the next day we get a scene, which, well. If her encounter later with Calpurnia is a deconstruction of the Mammy trope, this scene is one sharp and devastating deconstruction of Atticus Finch, white saviour. Henry (who is Atticus' protegé, partner and likely successor in the lawfirm) has just told Atticus that there's been an incident of drunk driving. The drunk driver in question (black) hit an old man crossing the road (white).
"What'd you tell the sheriff?" asked Atticus.
"Told him to tell Zeebo's boy you wouldn't touch the case."
Atticus leaned his elbow against the table and pushed himself back.
"You shouldn't have done that, Hank," he said mildly. "Of course we'll take it."
Thank you, God. Jean Louise sighed softly and rubbed her eyes. Zeebo's boy was Calpurnia's grandson. Atticus may forget a lot of things, but he would never forget them. Yesterday was fast dissolving into a bad night.
"But Mr. Finch," said Henry, "I thought none of the -"
Atticus eased his arm on the corner of the chair. When concentrating it was his practice to finger his watch-chain and rummage abstractly in his watch-pocket. Today, his hands were still.
"Hank, I suspect when we know all the facts of the case the best that can be done for the boy is for him to plead guilty. Now, isn't it better for us to stand with him in court than to have him fall into the wrong hands?"
A smile spread slowly across Henry's face. "I see what you mean, Mr. Finch."
"Well, I don't," said Jean Louise. "What wrong hands?"
Atticus turned to her. "Scout, you probably don't know it, but the NAACP-paid lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen - "
"You mean colored lawyers?"
Atticus nodded.
Well. No wonder Jean Louise runs around in the later part of the novel inwardly alternately reeling, wondering whether everyone around her went crazy or whether she did, and generally asking WHY?, feeling horribly betrayed and wondering and how both past and present can be true. Unfortunately, the narrative resolution to all of this brings me to the novel's weaknesses again.
Not re: the Henry subplot; she probably wouldn't have married him anyway, since she really doesn't want to be a wife, and this revelation settles it for her. Their argument/conversation about it feels real. But for the longest time, Jean Louise avoids a confrontation with Atticus himself; psychologically plausible, and obviously that's the narrative climax towards which we're heading. Unfortunately, this avoiding leads not only to good scenes (the Calpurnia one) but also bad scenes, and they all involve a new (I think?) character, Uncle Jack, Atticus' brother Dr. John Finch. (Can't remember whether he's in Mockingbird.) He's the one doing the mansplaining. First, before Jean Louise has her confrontations with Henry, even, she goes to Uncle Jack with her "what the hell happened to my father?" question, and Jack gives her a really long lecture on the history of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. Complete with "the war wasn't really about slavery, most of the white Southerners fighting it weren't even rich enough to own slaves!" defense. And then, after Jean Louise has confronted both Henry and subsequently her father (about which more in a moment), she encounters Uncle Jack again, who does even more mansplaining, this time about Finch family history (he, Jack, was in love with the late Mrs. Finch) and Atticus being proud of Scout for standing up to him for what she believes, even if it's not what he believes, and then he explains Jean Louise's own feelings to her (in case we missed it, she had her father confused with God and now is devastated to discover he's only human, with flaws). In short, he's walking, talking exposition of the worst type.
This would be bad for any novel, but in this one it is even worse because this second Uncle Jack conversation is the transition scene between Jean Louise's cathartic yelling at Atticus in the long-brewing outburst and her later, gentle leave taking of him where she has come to realise she still loves him, even when utterly disagreeing with some of his current beliefs. It's not that I don't find this a plausible ending for the emotional development of Jean Louise through the novel, but getting there via Uncle Jack explaining father and daughter to each other is just, argggh. No wonder the editor told Harper Lee to rewrite.
Now, about the big confrontation scene itself, which the novel has build to. I think for a current day reader what jars almost as much as Atticus Finch's views is that Jean Louise agrees with him on the Supreme Court decision interfering with state rights. (And implicitly on the "backward" state of poc, though she blames the lack of education and equality for this.) Writing-wise, it's a mixed affair, sometimes a father-daughter confrontation and sometimes a newspaper columm argument. When it's good, it cuts deeply.
Honey, you don't seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you've seen it all your life. They've made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they're far from it yet. (...) Then the NAACP stepped in with its fantastic demands and shoddy ideas of government - can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who have no idea of its daily problems? (...) Jean Louise, they're trying to wreck us - where have you been?"
"Right here in Maycomb."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I grew up right here in your house, and I never knew what was in your mind. I only heard what you said. You neglected to tell me that we were naturally better than the Negroes, bless their kinky heads, that they were only able to go so far but so far only. (...) When you talked of justice, you forgot to say justice is something that has nothing to do with people. (...) I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief - nothing to do with a black boy, you just liked a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work out this disorder. It's a compulsion with you, and now it's coming home to you -"
The worst for Jean Louise as she gets more and more into her outburst is that he never yells back but just sits there and takes it: "Her wave of invective had crashed over him and still he sat there. He had declined to be angry. Somewhere within her she felt that she was no lady but no power on earth would prevent him from being a gentleman(...)." Which of course makes it far worse than if he did yell back, and is a far more effective weapon, which is why, after more yelling, she exhaustedly ends with:
"You're a nice, sweet old gentleman and I'll never believe another word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for."
"Well, I love you."
"Don't you dare say that to me!"
Like I said, the transition sequence after this, with Jack, is for me one of the novel's most severe mistakes, but the last scene, the goodbye scene itself, works for me again as a summing up of this father and daughter relationship:
'That you, Jean Louise?"
Her father's voice frightened her.
"Yes, sir."
Atticus walked from his office to the foyer and took down his hat and the stick from the hat rack. "Ready?" he said.
Ready. You can say ready to me. Who are you, that I tried to obliterate and grind into the dust, and you say ready? I can't beat you, I can't join you. Don't you know that?
She went to him. 'Atticus', she said, "I'm -"
"You may be sorry, but I'm proud of you."
She looked up and saw her father beaming at her.
"What?"
"I said I'm proud of you."
"I don't understand you. I don't understand men and all, and I never will."
"Well, I certainly hoped a daughter of mine'd hold her ground and stand up for what she thinks is right - stand up to me first of all."
Dear goodness, the things I've learned. I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who is trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp out all the people like him. I guess it's like an airplane - they're the drag and we'er the thrust, and together we make the thing fly. (...) I can't beat him and I can't join him -
"Atticus?"
"Ma'am?"
"I think I love you very much."
She saw her old enemy's shoulders relax, and she watched him push his hat to the back of his head. (...) As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little. Somebody walked over my grave, she thought, probably Jem on some idiot errand.
I wonder whether, in retrospect, this final passage will work on a meta way on at least some of the readers who are currently devasted at the discovery of a racist Atticus Finch? Seeing him as no longer an idol, but still a character they can are about? In any case, both the sense of feeling betrayed and the eventual admittance that the love is still there is powerful in the novel. I don't think it will ever be loved the way TKaM was, not just because of the narrative flaws but because a novel climax where the noble fight for justice is lost due to a wrong system, but with a moral victory for the participants, is seen as uplifting; whereas finding out someone who gave your all your ideals behaves in a way that betrays said ideals in the way you understand them, and ending not with a separation but with the sad awareness you can neither let go nor change him, isn't. But it resonates for me.
Finally a bit of Mockingbird-related musings: when choosing to shift the story to Scout's childhood and make the trial the big plot, Harper Lee and her editor went for a dramatically more satisfying and far more clear cut tale. However, it also meant a lot of the ambiguity is lost. Go Set a Watchman doesn't have heroes and villains, per se. I mean, there is the boo-hiss racist O'Hanlon making a speech at the courthouse, but he's barely in the book, just in that one scene, not a character as much as a plot device to galvanize Jean Louise's discovery. Everyone else, including Jean Louise, has prejudices in different degrees (though she thinks she has none) but also good intentions. It doesn't make some of their actions less devastating. I think there is more than one good book hidden in this one. The one we actually got in Mockingbird, certainly. But I can't help but wondering what would have happened if the editor, instead of advising Harper Lee to go for the childhood scenes, told her to jettison Uncle Jack the Mansplainer, curb the speechifying in the last third of the book and not to stop redrafting until the final two confrontations were the best they can be? US lit is so obsessed with father/son relationships; daughter/father, when not about the father being emotionally withdrawn (this isn't Atticus' problem at all), is still far rarer.
Or: a Calpurnia pov novel. That scene between Jean Louise and Calpurnia in just a short space gives us an impression of Calpurnia seeing her life with the Finch family so radically different from how Scout saw it, without negating Scout's pov, either, and it would have been fascinating to read an entire book of that.
In conclusion: won't become one of my favourite novels, but I'm glad to have read it.
The strengths, though: Harper Lee was already a wonderful wordsmith at this stage. And the characters - both the ones who'd make it into To Kill a Mockingbird and the ones exclusive to this book - are drawn vividly, at once coming to life in a few sentences and staying that way. The flashbacks to Scout's childhood and adolescence feel organically interwoven with what she experiencs in the present. Btw, interestingly enough, only the first of them feels like it could be in To Kill a Mockingbird (and maybe it is, it's been so many years since I've read the novel - a hilarious Scout-Jem-Dill escapade), whereas the others are in an era Mockingbird stays away from, after Scout starts to menstruate at age 11 and thus is rudely reminded her body is female, and the effect this has on her. The ignorance about sex at school in the stories the girls there tell each other, coming with a matter of fact aside comment (not related to any of the plot, so I mention it here) by one of her schoolmates about two other girls being taken away by social services because the older one got pregnant by her own father. (Mockingbird implies that Mayella Ewell got raped by her father, but it's not spelled out explicitly, and I think the movie skips the implication altogether.). Flashback!!Scout in Go Set A Watchman lives far more acutely aware of being female (and not wanting to be), and what can happen to girls, than the pre-pubescent child in To Kill A Mockingbird. Present day Jean Louise hasn't resolved all her gender issues but is on somewhat better terms with being a woman, especially since she's seeing men (all but one) with a far more jaundiced eye.
Then there's the build up. I now wish I hadn't read the advance reviews, though then probably I wouldn't read the novel for months, because the big twist/revelation isn't something Lee drops her readers into right at the start. It's very skillfully done. The hypothetical 1950s reader not knowing any of these characters would have taken a great liking to most of them as our heroine returns to the town of her childhood. There are a very few hints of what's to come (far more noticable to a current day reader), but no more than that, though they increase, and by the time Jean Louise finds out what shocks her world to the core, even a hypothetical first time reader with no To Kill a Mockinbird knowledge whatsoever would have been as shocked as she was, because this novel has taken great care to build up this version Atticus Finch as a very likeable character, and the father-daughter relationship, full of mutual friendly banter, of which I'll later give quotes, is extremely endearing. For that matter, Jean Louise's boyfriend Henry Clinton is written sympathetically, too. And then there are Scout's memories, in which of course he's the perfect father and defender of the weak. So when the penny drops, so to speak, and she finds out both her father and Henry hang out with "concerned citizens" these days, arguing for segregation, it's incredibly emotionally effective in putting the reader into her shoes. Far more so than if Atticus had been introduced with a racist slogan on his lips to begin with. You're drawn into a story of family reunions with a friendly ease, humorous anecdote abound, and Jean Louise seemingly has no bigger problem than making her mind up about whether or not to marry Henry, whom she's attached to but not passionately in love with, plus she simply doesn't want to be a wife, and then more and more hints sneak in that maybe that comment Henry makes about the young black men who've just overtaken him and Scout in their car wasn't just the reflex of an annoyed driver, maybe Atticus asking his daughter whether she's kept up with the news wasn't just a casual comment, etc., and then, wham. The immediate emotional fallout for our pov character, the disorientation, the desperate attempt to reconcile the past with the present, all this is captivatingly written. (It's only once we move past the fallout-and-trying-to-find-explanations part that we get to the characters turning into Shavian mouthpieces weakness I mentioned earlier.) Aching, but very well.
Also: the novel doesn't let its heroine off the hook, either. There are two very powerful scenes were Jean Louise, as we'd put it today, is called on her privilege. The first is when she visits Calpurnia (too old now to work for the Finch family, but previously introduced in flashback as a firm and loving presence through Scout's childhood and adolescence) in the wake of the big twist and as part of her quest to try and make sense of it all. And that's when she gets, if possibly, an even bigger shock.
Because Jean Louise, for the first time in her life, realises that Calpurnia "is wearing her company manners" towards her when reassuring Jean Louise that everything's fine. And what follows, in a few lines, in the most devastating fictional take on the Mammy trope I've ever read:
"Cal," she cried, "Cal, Cal, Cal, what are you doing to me? What's the matter? I'm your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?"
Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them softly on the arms of the rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind think lenses.
"What are you all doing to us?" she said.
"Us?"
"Yessum. Us."
Jean Louise said slowly, more to herself than to Calpurnia: "As long as I've lived I never remotely dreamed something like this could happen. And here it is. I cannot talk to the one human who raised me from the time I was two years old...it is happening as I sit here now and I cannot believe it. Talk to me, Cal. For God's sake, talk to me right. Don't sit there like that!"
She looked into the old woman's face, and she knew it was hopeless. Calpurnia was watching her, and in Calpurnia's eyes there was no hint of compassion.
Jean Louise rose to go. "Tell me one thing, Cal," she said, "just one thing before I go - please, I've got to know. Did you hate us?"
The old woman sat silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited.
Finally, Calpurnia shook her head.
That's the end of the scene (Jean Louise is talking to Calpurnia's son in the next line, which opens a new one), and wow. There really is nothing more to be said. And if nothing else, I think it justifies the publication of this novel, because what (few) criticisms of To Kill a Mockingbird I've read usually also concerned the black characters being presented as universally in awe of their white savior.
The other scene I was referring to takes place between Jean Louise and Henry, and Henry is another case in point of this novel answering, unintentionally, to one of directed-at-TKaM few criticisms, this time about the classism in the depiction of "white trash" . Because Henry Clinton comes from a "white trash" family, and Atticus' sister Alexandra has a rant about that to Jean Louise early on ("We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash (...)Henry is like he is now only because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came and paid for his education. Fine a boy as he is, the trash won't wash out of him"). I hasten to add that Alexandra is presented as a snob and Henry sympathetically at this point; it's this speech which brings a very pissed off Jean Louise nearly to agree to marry him. When, much later in the novel, Jean Louise and Henry finally have their conversation about the big twist, Henry's reply to the obvious question she asks him goes right at the hart of this difference in their origins, and what it means for his day-to-day existence in Maycomb:
I.e. what she asks him is why, if he doesn't really believe in the natural superiority of the white race etc. (which he just said he doesn't), he goes along with the bigotry, and his defense is that as opposed to her, who lives in New York, he has to live here in Maycomb, make his living here, and besides:
"I mean there are things which I simply can't do that you can."
"And why am I such a privileged character?"
"You're a Finch."
"So I'm a Finch. So what?"
"So you can parade around town in your dungarees with your shirttail out and barefooted if you wanted to. Maycomb says, 'That's the Finch in her, that's just Her Way.' Maycomb grins and goes about its business; old Scout Finch never changes. Maycomb is delighted and perfectly ready to believe you went swimming in the river buck naked. 'Hasn't changed a bit,' it says. 'Same old Jean Louise. Remember when she - '
He put down the salt shaker.
'But let Henry Clinton show any signs of deviating from the norm, and Maycomb says, not 'That's the Clinton in him', but, 'That's the trash in him.'"
Neither Jean Louise nor the novel takes this as an excuse for the larger issue, but neither is Henry's point re: the differences in how people react to them denied.
Btw, before I talk about more serious issues and how they're dealt with, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out another strength of the novel: the humour of it. Not just in some of the childhood scenes. An example of the bantery (and unspoilery) dialogue between Jean Louise and her father Atticus early in the novel, before the twist, which refers to something Henry alludes to in the spoilery passage earlier. Aunt Alexandra is just chiding Jean Louise about the rumour Jean Louise and Henry were swimming in the river naked:
"Your father will die, simply die, when he finds out."
Atticus was standing in the door with his hands in his pockets.
"Good morning," he said. "What will kill me?"
Alexandra said, "Im not going to tell him, Jean Louise. It's up to you.
Jean Louise silently signaled her father. Her message was received and understood. Atticus looked grave. "What's the matter?" he said.
"Mary Webster was on the blower. Her advance agents saw Hank and me swimming in the river in the middle of the night with no clothes on."
"H'r'm," said Atticus. He touched his glasses. "I hope you weren't doing the backstroke."
Conversely, here's Jean Louise teasing her father at breakfast re: coffee:
'Still haven't learned how to drink it?'
'No,' said her father.
'Whiskey either?'
'No.'
'Cigarettes and women?'
'No.'
'You have any fun these days?'
'I manage.'
You can see what I mean about the characterisation build up within this novel. As an example of a characterisation of even minor characters in a few lines, here's Dill, the character inspired by Harper Lee's childhood friendship with Truman Capote, who shows up only in flashback in Go Set a Watchman but is occasionally thought of by Jean Louise in the present, too.
re: Dill the child: He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat. He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.
Dill the adult, during the novel's actions abroad (currently in Italy): He was a born wanderer. He was like a small panther when confined with the same people and surroundings for any length of time. She wondered where he would be when his life ended. Not on the sidewalk of Maycomb, that was for sure.
Aunt Alexandra (whom I don't recall from TKaM): Alexandra was the last of her kind; she had river-boat, boarding school manners; let any moral come along and she would uphold it; she was a disapprover; she was an incurable gossip. When Alexandra went to finishing school, self-doubt could not be found in any text-book (...).
It's this wit and affection for the characters on the narrator's part which makes the twist and theme extra painful.
The big revelation comes in steps. Jean Louise finds a racist pamphlet on Atticus' desk, reads it, is horrified and asks her aunt (who has taken over the household since Calpurnia is too old) who left it there, which is when her aunt brings up both Atticus and Henry regularly attend court and townhall meetings. At first, Jean Louise refuses to believe it, then thinks there must be an explanation, maybe they're preparing a case, are undercover and what not, and then she goes to the courthouse where she sees her father, at one of the meetings, introduce, in his usual unfailingly courteous manner, the next speaker, who promptly spouts bigotry like you wouldn't believe. And faced with this sight, her father among the bigots, she has her flashback to what would later develop into the core case of To Kill A Mockingbird. Atticus in the past saying "Gentlemen, if there's one slogan in this world I believe, it is this: equal rights for all, special privileges for none" cross cut with Atticus in the present, sitting among the bigots, and she feels suckerpunched. But she still clings to the hope that maybe, just maybe, this is all a gigantic misunderstanding and there's another explanation somewhere, until the next day we get a scene, which, well. If her encounter later with Calpurnia is a deconstruction of the Mammy trope, this scene is one sharp and devastating deconstruction of Atticus Finch, white saviour. Henry (who is Atticus' protegé, partner and likely successor in the lawfirm) has just told Atticus that there's been an incident of drunk driving. The drunk driver in question (black) hit an old man crossing the road (white).
"What'd you tell the sheriff?" asked Atticus.
"Told him to tell Zeebo's boy you wouldn't touch the case."
Atticus leaned his elbow against the table and pushed himself back.
"You shouldn't have done that, Hank," he said mildly. "Of course we'll take it."
Thank you, God. Jean Louise sighed softly and rubbed her eyes. Zeebo's boy was Calpurnia's grandson. Atticus may forget a lot of things, but he would never forget them. Yesterday was fast dissolving into a bad night.
"But Mr. Finch," said Henry, "I thought none of the -"
Atticus eased his arm on the corner of the chair. When concentrating it was his practice to finger his watch-chain and rummage abstractly in his watch-pocket. Today, his hands were still.
"Hank, I suspect when we know all the facts of the case the best that can be done for the boy is for him to plead guilty. Now, isn't it better for us to stand with him in court than to have him fall into the wrong hands?"
A smile spread slowly across Henry's face. "I see what you mean, Mr. Finch."
"Well, I don't," said Jean Louise. "What wrong hands?"
Atticus turned to her. "Scout, you probably don't know it, but the NAACP-paid lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen - "
"You mean colored lawyers?"
Atticus nodded.
Well. No wonder Jean Louise runs around in the later part of the novel inwardly alternately reeling, wondering whether everyone around her went crazy or whether she did, and generally asking WHY?, feeling horribly betrayed and wondering and how both past and present can be true. Unfortunately, the narrative resolution to all of this brings me to the novel's weaknesses again.
Not re: the Henry subplot; she probably wouldn't have married him anyway, since she really doesn't want to be a wife, and this revelation settles it for her. Their argument/conversation about it feels real. But for the longest time, Jean Louise avoids a confrontation with Atticus himself; psychologically plausible, and obviously that's the narrative climax towards which we're heading. Unfortunately, this avoiding leads not only to good scenes (the Calpurnia one) but also bad scenes, and they all involve a new (I think?) character, Uncle Jack, Atticus' brother Dr. John Finch. (Can't remember whether he's in Mockingbird.) He's the one doing the mansplaining. First, before Jean Louise has her confrontations with Henry, even, she goes to Uncle Jack with her "what the hell happened to my father?" question, and Jack gives her a really long lecture on the history of the US Civil War and Reconstruction. Complete with "the war wasn't really about slavery, most of the white Southerners fighting it weren't even rich enough to own slaves!" defense. And then, after Jean Louise has confronted both Henry and subsequently her father (about which more in a moment), she encounters Uncle Jack again, who does even more mansplaining, this time about Finch family history (he, Jack, was in love with the late Mrs. Finch) and Atticus being proud of Scout for standing up to him for what she believes, even if it's not what he believes, and then he explains Jean Louise's own feelings to her (in case we missed it, she had her father confused with God and now is devastated to discover he's only human, with flaws). In short, he's walking, talking exposition of the worst type.
This would be bad for any novel, but in this one it is even worse because this second Uncle Jack conversation is the transition scene between Jean Louise's cathartic yelling at Atticus in the long-brewing outburst and her later, gentle leave taking of him where she has come to realise she still loves him, even when utterly disagreeing with some of his current beliefs. It's not that I don't find this a plausible ending for the emotional development of Jean Louise through the novel, but getting there via Uncle Jack explaining father and daughter to each other is just, argggh. No wonder the editor told Harper Lee to rewrite.
Now, about the big confrontation scene itself, which the novel has build to. I think for a current day reader what jars almost as much as Atticus Finch's views is that Jean Louise agrees with him on the Supreme Court decision interfering with state rights. (And implicitly on the "backward" state of poc, though she blames the lack of education and equality for this.) Writing-wise, it's a mixed affair, sometimes a father-daughter confrontation and sometimes a newspaper columm argument. When it's good, it cuts deeply.
Honey, you don't seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you've seen it all your life. They've made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they're far from it yet. (...) Then the NAACP stepped in with its fantastic demands and shoddy ideas of government - can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who have no idea of its daily problems? (...) Jean Louise, they're trying to wreck us - where have you been?"
"Right here in Maycomb."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I grew up right here in your house, and I never knew what was in your mind. I only heard what you said. You neglected to tell me that we were naturally better than the Negroes, bless their kinky heads, that they were only able to go so far but so far only. (...) When you talked of justice, you forgot to say justice is something that has nothing to do with people. (...) I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief - nothing to do with a black boy, you just liked a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work out this disorder. It's a compulsion with you, and now it's coming home to you -"
The worst for Jean Louise as she gets more and more into her outburst is that he never yells back but just sits there and takes it: "Her wave of invective had crashed over him and still he sat there. He had declined to be angry. Somewhere within her she felt that she was no lady but no power on earth would prevent him from being a gentleman(...)." Which of course makes it far worse than if he did yell back, and is a far more effective weapon, which is why, after more yelling, she exhaustedly ends with:
"You're a nice, sweet old gentleman and I'll never believe another word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for."
"Well, I love you."
"Don't you dare say that to me!"
Like I said, the transition sequence after this, with Jack, is for me one of the novel's most severe mistakes, but the last scene, the goodbye scene itself, works for me again as a summing up of this father and daughter relationship:
'That you, Jean Louise?"
Her father's voice frightened her.
"Yes, sir."
Atticus walked from his office to the foyer and took down his hat and the stick from the hat rack. "Ready?" he said.
Ready. You can say ready to me. Who are you, that I tried to obliterate and grind into the dust, and you say ready? I can't beat you, I can't join you. Don't you know that?
She went to him. 'Atticus', she said, "I'm -"
"You may be sorry, but I'm proud of you."
She looked up and saw her father beaming at her.
"What?"
"I said I'm proud of you."
"I don't understand you. I don't understand men and all, and I never will."
"Well, I certainly hoped a daughter of mine'd hold her ground and stand up for what she thinks is right - stand up to me first of all."
Dear goodness, the things I've learned. I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who is trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp out all the people like him. I guess it's like an airplane - they're the drag and we'er the thrust, and together we make the thing fly. (...) I can't beat him and I can't join him -
"Atticus?"
"Ma'am?"
"I think I love you very much."
She saw her old enemy's shoulders relax, and she watched him push his hat to the back of his head. (...) As she welcomed him silently to the human race, the stab of discovery made her tremble a little. Somebody walked over my grave, she thought, probably Jem on some idiot errand.
I wonder whether, in retrospect, this final passage will work on a meta way on at least some of the readers who are currently devasted at the discovery of a racist Atticus Finch? Seeing him as no longer an idol, but still a character they can are about? In any case, both the sense of feeling betrayed and the eventual admittance that the love is still there is powerful in the novel. I don't think it will ever be loved the way TKaM was, not just because of the narrative flaws but because a novel climax where the noble fight for justice is lost due to a wrong system, but with a moral victory for the participants, is seen as uplifting; whereas finding out someone who gave your all your ideals behaves in a way that betrays said ideals in the way you understand them, and ending not with a separation but with the sad awareness you can neither let go nor change him, isn't. But it resonates for me.
Finally a bit of Mockingbird-related musings: when choosing to shift the story to Scout's childhood and make the trial the big plot, Harper Lee and her editor went for a dramatically more satisfying and far more clear cut tale. However, it also meant a lot of the ambiguity is lost. Go Set a Watchman doesn't have heroes and villains, per se. I mean, there is the boo-hiss racist O'Hanlon making a speech at the courthouse, but he's barely in the book, just in that one scene, not a character as much as a plot device to galvanize Jean Louise's discovery. Everyone else, including Jean Louise, has prejudices in different degrees (though she thinks she has none) but also good intentions. It doesn't make some of their actions less devastating. I think there is more than one good book hidden in this one. The one we actually got in Mockingbird, certainly. But I can't help but wondering what would have happened if the editor, instead of advising Harper Lee to go for the childhood scenes, told her to jettison Uncle Jack the Mansplainer, curb the speechifying in the last third of the book and not to stop redrafting until the final two confrontations were the best they can be? US lit is so obsessed with father/son relationships; daughter/father, when not about the father being emotionally withdrawn (this isn't Atticus' problem at all), is still far rarer.
Or: a Calpurnia pov novel. That scene between Jean Louise and Calpurnia in just a short space gives us an impression of Calpurnia seeing her life with the Finch family so radically different from how Scout saw it, without negating Scout's pov, either, and it would have been fascinating to read an entire book of that.
In conclusion: won't become one of my favourite novels, but I'm glad to have read it.
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True. One would have to ask either Lee or the editor, so I'll guess we'll never know.
Though I suppose part of it might have been as Likeaduece said in the last post, about how Lee Sr was reforming his views as the civil rights movement progressed, and Lee herself softened on him.
Yes. It later occured to me that in both books, Atticus owes so much to Lee Sr. - from the mannerisms with the watch to the "equal rights for all, privilegtes for none" quote - that to read Scout's angry outburst in print (complete with "I despise you", "You're a coward and a snob" etc.) would have been painful for both of them. I bet she never said that in real life to him back in the 50s, so letting Scout say it might have been a catharsis when she wrote it, but later the idea of her father reading this may have contributed to her reconsidering, especially since he was simultanously reforming his views.
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I probably will get around to this book eventually, probably after a Mockingbird reread.