Forgetting Atticus Finch

Rereading Harper Lee's 'Go Set a Watchman'

To Kill a Mockingbird, 1961, Photograph, Getty Images

July will mark the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s long-lost first novel that also functions as a sequel To Kill a Mockingbird — the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller that was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Gregory Peck and, well, you know. Readers have been ambivalent about Watchman. In terms of style, the novel has been deemed a far lesser achievement than its predecessor. Many have struggled with the fact that Atticus, the moral locus of Mockingbird who vigorously though unsuccessfully defends an innocent Black man against charges of rape, is revealed to harbor racist views in his old age. The release of Watchman roughly coincided with the mass shooting by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina. The killing of Michael Brown had happened the year before, and Trayvon Martin and others in the years prior. Disillusionment and outrage were widespread. Few were in the mood to learn that a fictional icon was on the wrong side of history. This, coupled with controversy surrounding Harper Lee’s mental acuity at the time of the book deal, created a soft consensus that the novel should never have seen the light of day. Yet I am grateful that it has. Go Set a Watchman adds clarity and depth to the world that Lee introduced with Mockingbird; and it resonates, unsuspectingly perhaps, with our time in a way that warrants its revisiting.

No book had a greater impact on me growing up than To Kill a Mockingbird. I may have been in fourth grade when I first read it. I was attracted to the cover without knowing much about its reputation. I thought I had happened upon something of which few others knew. Little did I know it is the book that everyone reads (and rolls their eyes at) in high school. I had no idea what I was in for. I didn’t know that there would be a trial. I didn’t know that Tom Robinson would be found guilty. I didn’t know that Boo Radley would be standing there behind the door at the end. I don’t agree with Flannery O’Connor’s famous dismissal of Mockingbird as a “child’s book,” but I do think it is ideally read as a child. There is something about the structure that works according to the experience of childhood. The first chapters are preoccupied with baiting Boo Radley to come outside. I might have been under the impression that the entire book would be about this, and I was perfectly content to stick with the kids in this endeavor. Gradually, though, the book opens up onto a wider vista. There is an elderly woman fighting morphine addiction. There is a man being tried for a crime he couldn’t have committed. There is disappointment and betrayal. There is murder. There is a heroic rescue and an ensuing cover-up. There is hate and there is love. After finishing, I believe I understood what literature was. That a story could exceed the sum of its elements — plot, character, etc. — and that its final and most lasting effect was to have spent time with people whose lives correspond, mysteriously and meaningfully, to your own. Even at a young age, I had a feeling that people had the book wrong. I didn’t get why everyone was talking about Atticus. I was confused about why he was on the cover of the cassette case at the video store (remember those?). To me, it was obvious that the book was Scout’s story, not Atticus’. Go Set a Watchman confirms this.

Set two decades after the events of Mockingbird, Jean Louise (formerly “Scout”) returns to her childhood home in Maycomb, Alabama on one of her annual trips to visit her father. She is in her twenties and lives in New York City. When she steps off the train, Atticus is “not waiting for her.” Already in his seventies, he cannot collect his daughter due to a flare up of rheumatoid arthritis, sending his protégé and Jean Louise’s sometimes lover, Henry Clinton, to pick her up instead. Jean Louise’s descending from the train without seeing her father activates Watchman the way that Jem slapping the side of the Radley house activates Mockingbird. Jean Louise’s reality is already altered at the outset by her father’s infirmity and looming death. Her disorientation worsens when she later witnesses Atticus, as well as Henry, attending a Citizens’ Council meeting at the local courthouse (the same place she had watched her father defend Tom Robinson decades earlier) where a David Duke-like figure named Grady O’Hanlon spouts anti-Black vitriol to a receptive audience. Her father is no longer the man she thought he was. Jean Louise spends the rest of the novel coming to grips with this reality. The scope of the novel is more restricted than Mockingbird’s, its focus much tighter. Less is at stake, yet the pitch of Jean Louise’s personal anguish compels us throughout.

Before we go any further, let’s get a few things out of the way. Go Set a Watchman has significant flaws. Enough has been written about this, so I don’t feel much need to dwell on this point, but here’s the upshot. There are clichés and glib anecdotes galore. In the early chapters, especially, the reader winces their way from one jokey takedown to the next. The author has to get an awful lot of nervous laughter out of her system before she begins telling the truth. She does arrive, however. Indeed, one of the novel’s pleasures is getting to experience its creator learning to harness her storytelling prowess from one cover to the next.

The novel’s greatest sin is the outsized role played by Uncle Jack, Atticus’ brother. A blessedly minor character in Mockingbird, Uncle Jack performs as a tiresome voice of reason in Watchman. Lee cheats in the penultimate chapter by having him quite literally knock sense into his niece rather than allowing Jean Louise’s change of heart to come from within. This directly follows the novel’s most affecting scene in which Jean Louise confronts her father and holds nothing back. It is a gut punch of a chapter that ranks as some of the rawest, most daring writing Lee has yet given us. The author tells the truth right up until she doesn’t. She takes her protagonist right to the edge, then reels her back. Hence the deus ex machina of Uncle Jack’s backhand, which brings the novel to a screeching halt. Go Set a Watchman is neither the undiscovered masterpiece its publisher, HarperCollins, had hoped it would be, nor is it the outright dud some of its detractors have labeled it as. It is one or two drafts away from being very good, perhaps excellent. What it lacks in polish, it compensates for with passion. Jean Louise’s struggle to restore the world she once knew becomes our own. And if she is honest with herself, as we must be, that world never fully existed in the first place.

Even with respect to Mockingbird, the novel we know is not the novel we love. It ends with a warm stroke, affirming the essential goodness of people, but the book wastes few opportunities to undermine this conclusion. Its subject matter is darker than we tend to acknowledge and its eventualities more disturbing than we care to admit. The author has us thinking about incest. She has us thinking about the Holocaust as well as the social cleansing of the “feeble-minded” in Hitler’s Germany. By every indication, Arthur “Boo” Radley has been tortured by his family, psychologically if not physically, for most of his adult life. Most significantly, Lee assigns the worst possible fate to Tom Robinson. She does so for the sake of pure realism. Despite convincing evidence, laid out by Atticus, that Tom was incapable of raping Mayella Ewell, he is found guilty on all counts by the all-white jury. Lee doesn’t stop there. He is then shot seventeen times, ostensibly for an attempted jailbreak. Lee, however, doesn’t want the reader to have any illusions about what happened: the lynching that Atticus had thwarted earlier in the novel has finally claimed Tom’s life. As it happens, one of Lee’s books strongly disagrees with the other on this point. In Watchman, the trial in question ends with an acquittal. Lee revises her own world for the sake of indicting its harsh realities. The challenging contours of Maycomb society are obscured in Mockingbird by the sheen of Scout’s innocent gaze. In Watchman, Jean Louise has nowhere left to turn except the deplorable truth of her hometown, of which her father has become the most treasonous avatar. The seriousness and artistry of Lee’s vision come into sharper focus as well.

With Watchman, Harper Lee’s Maycomb County comes a shade closer to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Atticus comes to bear at least some resemblance to Ike McCaslin, the lead in Faulkner’s seven-story opus, Go Down, Moses. McCaslin, as with Atticus, demonstrates a certain kind of idealism at a younger age, going so far as to disown his family’s estate due to the horrors of its slaveholding past, then defaulting to bigotry with respect to race relations in his advanced years. Both characters had maintained a relative liberalism that crash-lands at or near the dawn of the civil rights era. In Atticus’s mind, the NAACP looms large as the latest proxy in the federal government’s tyrannical encroachment on southern life. But Lee subverts the states’ rights defense in the confrontation between Jean Louise and her father, during which Atticus’s paranoia and resentment of social integration are thrown into stark relief. For what it’s worth, Atticus is also funnier and more vulnerable than he ever was in Mockingbird. He makes dry, sarcastic remarks (upon learning that his daughter had gone skinny dipping, “I hope you weren’t doing the backstroke”) and he weeps at the memory of his deceased wife. Lee offers us a human being rather than an icon. Jean Louise has to learn this the hard way. She is unable to abide by Atticus’s example any longer.

The protagonist’s exodus from her father’s shadow is inevitable. Jean Louise will outlive Atticus in every sense. According to Harold Bloom, among the few eminent twentieth-century critics who paid Mockingbird any attention, Scout Finch is “better than her book” and she alone “has the individuality, of consciousness and of speech, that allows the representation of a person to be much more than a name on a page.” This is somewhat fair. Scout is the novel’s greatest, most timeless achievement. Yet she is held back. She approaches but cannot enter the motley pantheon of rogues and dreamers who exceed the stories which contain them — a company that includes Huckleberry Finn and Hester Prynne, Ahab and Gatsby, Rabbit Angstrom and Sethe. Scout is as willful and defiant — and spirited and generous — as Huck Finn, but she is too young and too dependent to affect any major outcomes. She does not set forth on her own, a prerequisite for the American canon. As William Giraldi writes in The New Republic, “Scout can’t be the moral agent of her own story.”

She is deprived of a pivotal moment like that in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck has to weigh whether or not to send a letter that will abet the recapture of his friend, Jim. Understanding full well that he is violating his society’s laws, not to mention God’s perceived judgment, Huck decides, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” before tearing up the letter. Scout Finch crosses no such threshold in Mockingbird. She does eventually, though Ms. Lee may have hoped for our patience. Such a moment arrives in the eighth chapter of Watchman, when Jean Louise, upon discovering a racist pamphlet advertising the event that her father will attend, “stepped on the garbage can trigger and threw the pamphlet in.” Even before all the implications have been absorbed, Jean Louise has taken a dramatic step away from her past and begins the process of fulfilling her agency. Between the two novels, thus, we are given a character that transcends the confines of her world and the shortcomings of her narrative.

Jean Louise Finch is a worthy escort. She leads us through a hyper-polarized time that anticipates our own. In one of the most poignant scenes, Jean Louise visits an elderly Calpurnia, the Black woman who helped raise her, but finds Cal distant and forlorn, worn down by injustice after injustice. At one point she looks to the child of her previous employer and says, “What are you all doing to us?” Jean Louise is devastated. She is now “you all” and Cal “us.” Rampant distrust has depersonalized everyone. Repeated traumas have eroded earlier bonds. She must then listen to old friends and relatives promote the vilest, most reactionary views. Change is underway in the country, and Maycomb is revolting. Tribalism has taken over. People see archetypes rather than individuals. The world is, figuratively and literally, black and white. We understand Jean Louise’s crisis. We may well have experienced it, at different times and in different ways. People post things online that we can’t understand; they vote in a way we can’t accept. Everywhere we step across one battle line or another. Jean Louise’s efforts to navigate this zero-sum world lend us a roadmap.

Among the novel’s redeeming qualities, Harper Lee captures the surreal aspect of returning to the place you recognize the most but understand the least as well as, or better than, any writer I can think of. The term she settles on for this alienation, “a sharp apartness,” is wonderfully apt. She expands on this idea in one of my favorite paragraphs in recent memory:

Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present? I am their blood and bones, I have dug this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party.

Here we glimpse Jean Louise’s “apartness” not only from her hometown but the country and culture at large. She doesn’t quite belong to one world or the other, the one she hearkens from or that she gravitated toward. She is too liberal for the small town, too conservative for the big city. She is a “stranger” at every party. She struggles to come back or depart. But depart she must, and at the very end of the novel she is seated behind the steering wheel of her family’s car, with little sense of what lies ahead, but prepared at least and at last to take charge.

Jean Louise departs the novel as her “own person,” her own “watchman.” The territory before her is uncharted, the trials untested. She moves forward on her own terms, according to her own conscience. She will take from her past what still works and leave the rest behind. Her father could guide her up to a certain point but no further. She tries to re-erect his stature in her mind, but this will come to naught, and it does seem tragic. Her audience can relate. We were heartbroken by Atticus’s frailty and humanity. We wanted to resurrect his icon, but the era in which that icon was forged is long gone. In the early 1960s, America depended on its cultural leaders to break through the ice and penetrate the fog. We elevated the speeches of Dr. King, the songs of early Dylan, and the performance of Gregory Peck in order to do so. But those echoes have grown faint. The heroes of last century are too distant, those of this one too disappointing. In this interregnum, a new premium on the individual emerges.

We live, as Don DeLillo measured, in an age of crowds. The individual is an interruption, a counter-position. Go Set a Watchman argues in its favor. It challenges us to probe not only the complexities and contradictions inherent in the ones we love, but also the real consistencies — the values and principles that might impel some to political commitments that appear to be at odds with who they are. The author insists that we cherish one another anyway.

Nelle Harper Lee died at the age of eighty-nine in Monroeville, Alabama, her forever home. Her output was slim but staggering. She gave us a coming-of-age masterwork, and a classic in its own right, as well as an imperfect but powerful novel which helps propel Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, heroine now of her own life, into the living heart of American letters.

Michael Goodwin Hilton is a playwright and fiction writer currently living in Germany. He is the author of the story collection What The Statue Thinks. Many of his plays are available on NPX, and he publishes literary work on Substack at “Little Things.”