Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (review)
Zachary Raasch
The Hopkins Review, Volume 9, Number 1, Winter 2016 (New Series), pp.
141-143 (Review)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/thr.2016.0008
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/609760
Accessed 15 Jun 2017 23:53 GMT
The Hopkins Review 141
“Psalm 150,” rhythmically and structurally a sonnet, replaces traditional
end-rhymes with internal rhymes and slant rhymes. Feel the effects of
Brown’s decision only to end-stop four of the fifteen lines of “Homeland,”
and of the fact that after seven couplets, that poem ends with an emphatic
one-line stanza. The poems here are so much about the writer-as-maker
because they are themselves made by a poet in full command of the
arrangement of words into rhythmic feet, lines, and stanzas.
Brown comes closest to suggesting that it is his words and their sounds
on which we are to focus (even more so even than on what the words
seem to say?) in a wish he attributes to Langston Hughes in the first two
stanzas of “Langston’s Blues.” The phrase “let my words // lie sound
in the mouths of men” is like “love you uncomfortable” in its need to be
read in several ways concurrently. Beyond the usual pun of “lie” having to
do both with being prone and with telling an untruth, Brown plays with
“sound” as a hybrid adverb/adjective, much as he does with “uncomfortable” later in the collection: a posthumous reader of Hughes’s is to
let the poet’s words lie “sound” as if they’re resting soundly, to let them
be “sound” as if they are intact, and to let them “lie sound” as if they are
in fact laying down sound into the mouths of others. This last meaning
might put a reader in mind of Lucille Clifton—certainly one of Brown’s
models in the business of mingling the supposedly sacred and profane
in a particularly American stew, and one of Hughes’s heirs in this same
business—and her own rewriting of Genesis. In the poem “Tree of Life,”
Clifton imagines Eve deciding to whisper into Adam’s mouth her name
and his, while the unwitting Adam sleeps soon to awake in the false belief
that his is the power of naming.
Throughout The New Testament, Jericho Brown’s power to name is anything but false. He has taken to heart Baldwin’s imprecation that the artist
is to look at the unseen things around him by first looking at his unseen
self; as he does so, Brown raises again and again the questions of just what
words can do and how words work. Any triangulation of race, sex, and
religion will seem to some to be explosive; little surprise, then, that Brown
has at times been given to referring to his new collection by the acronym
TNT. He is a writer who embraces, rather than downplays, the fact that
his words and his understanding of The Word will be read for better or
for worse as volatile. In fact, Brown insists that we consider his words as
carefully as we can. He maintains an unshakeable faith that words are the
best resource we have, not necessarily to defuse that which might explode,
but to have some say over the nature of the heat and light so produced.
The poems in his second collection are the latest evidence that he is right.
—Lucas Jacob
Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman (Harper, 2015), 278 pp.
Shortly after Harper Lee’s sister/executor passed away, Lee’s new executor discovered the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman and sought to publish
it with Harper Lee’s blessing. This, at least, is the publisher’s official
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stance. Several decades prior, however, Lee had insisted that she did not
intend to publish Go Set a Watchman. So the fact that the book’s publication comes when Harper Lee’s physical and mental health is quickly
declining—so much so that her sister, before passing away, had stated that
Harper would sign any document put in front of her—casts doubt over the
legitimacy of the publication. And for many readers this would be enough
to justify never picking up the book. Yet for those still interested in reading
it, there is a second hurdle to get past: Go Set a Watchman is a bad novel.
The book’s central premise is simple: Jean Louise must come to terms
with the realization that her father, Atticus, whom she describes as “the
only man she had ever known to whom she could point and say with
expert knowledge, ‘he is a gentleman,’” is a segregationist. However,
despite its apparent simplicity, the book spends its first third meandering
through Maycomb County’s present and past before the plot even surfaces. And when it does at last arrive, both Jean Louise and Harper Lee seem
wholly disinterested in acknowledging it outside of a slew of one-sided
dialogues—dialogues that are only read as such because they happen to
take place between the thin veil of quotation marks. They read more as
Lee’s own philosophical diatribes, her role as demagogue broken up only
by a secondary character’s occasional “go on” or “how so.” These disparate, poorly constructed scenes are just one of the many reasons that Tay
Hohoff, Lee’s editor at J. B. Lippincott, initially rejected Go Set a Watchman,
suggesting instead that Lee focus on the book’s flashbacks to when Jean
Louise was known as Scout (one of the few areas where Lee’s beautiful
prose shined through). Over the next few years—with the guiding hand of
Hohoff—Harper Lee worked through several drafts until the final version,
To Kill a Mockingbird, was released for publication in 1960.
Now in 2015, we are faced with that original draft. Thankfully—despite
what the publisher wants you to believe—Go Set a Watchman is neither a
sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, nor a completed novel. And the book itself
makes no attempt to hide this. In fact, many of Watchman’s best-written
moments highlight its role as a draft of Mockingbird. Take the following
description of Finch’s Landing:
A two-rut road ran from the far end of the clearing and vanished
among dark trees. At the end of the road was a two-storied white
house with porches extending around its four sides, upstairs and
downstairs.
This passage from Chapter 5 of Go Set a Watchman can also be found,
word for word, in Chapter 9 of To Kill a Mockingbird—one of many identical passages throughout the two books. And when Go Set a Watchman
is not repeating passages from Mockingbird, it is altering central facts of
the book. The trial of Tom Robinson in Go Set a Watchman is stripped of
its power as well. Instead of the powerful courtroom scenes—in which
Atticus solidifies himself as literature’s moral compass, and Jem’s devel-
The Hopkins Review 143
opment truly begins to take place—the trial is only briefly mentioned as a
way to highlight the gap between Jean Louise’s memory of a moral father
and the fact of his overt racism facing her upon her return to Maycomb
County. Watchman’s version of the trial simply states that Atticus “accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County:
he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge. The chief witness
for the prosecution was a white girl.”
If we slip into viewing Watchman as a progression from Mockingbird,
the change of turning Atticus’s defeat into a victory not only undoes one
of the defining plot points of To Kill a Mockingbird, but erases Atticus’s
moral resolve, the very touchstone of his personality—a fact noticed by
many readers and one of the primary reasons behind the emotional outcry
against Go Set a Watchman. Droves of readers have denounced the book,
many even seeking refunds, claiming that the book has not only tarnished
Atticus’ legacy, but Lee’s as well. They cannot imagine a world in which
one of literature’s pillars of tolerance has his morality stripped from him.
On the other hand, there is a second, opposing segment of readers who say
that it is not a leap for a socially progressive man in the ’30s (when Mockingbird takes place) to be a segregationist come the ’50s, and so the new,
racist Atticus is just a natural development of the character. Even farther
along that train of thought, some have argued that Mockingbird was an
untrue, whitewashed version of the South and that Atticus’s racist nature
highlights the true culpability of even the best white man of the time.
However, by understanding Watchman as a draft, the change Atticus
undergoes should not be read as one from Mockingbird to Watchman, but
the reverse. Atticus’s character is transformed from the overtly racist old
man into the Atticus that stands as a beacon of equality. And this is in line
with Lee’s own personal experience. Lee’s father, a Southern lawyer upon
whom Atticus was based, was for much of his life a staunch segregationist. However during the late ’50s, as Lee was revising Go Set a Watchman
into To Kill a Mockingbird, her father softened his own views and became
an integrationist. Taking this into consideration, Go Set a Watchman does
not represent Atticus’s fall from his status as a hero of literature. Rather,
the changes in Atticus are a reflection of Lee’s renewed faith in her father
and, by extension, her hope for positive changes in race relations towards
the end of the ’50s.
Even turning the courtroom victory into a defeat reflects Lee’s renewed
belief. It allowed her to showcase that it is possible to stand up for what
one’s conscience says is right—to set one’s watchman, as Atticus would
say—regardless of the bleakness of the situation and the strength of one’s
opposition. This is what Lee accomplished through the change in Atticus.
And through Jem and Scout she was able to portray her view of continued
racial progress through the next generation. Yet, it is only through seeing
the Atticus Finch of Go Set a Watchman that we can truly recognize the
extent and newness of Lee’s message of hope. And ultimately, as uncomfortable and perhaps unfortunate as the book’s publication is, as much as
Lee wished it not to be published, as poorly written as it is, Go Set a Watchman is now, and will remain, an important part of Lee’s legacy.
—Zachary Raasch