Why I won’t be reading ‘Go Set a Watchman’
Image: CC0 Public Domain
A little while back I was chatting to another dad at a children’s birthday party. He was telling me how he’d just bought a copy of Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman. Angelo talked of his anticipation of re-entering the fictional world of Maycomb County, having greatly enjoyed Harper Lee’s first and, until very recently, only published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, as a teenager.
When I met up with Angelo again a few weeks later at yet another children’s birthday party (these seem to be the only social gatherings I attend nowadays) it was clear the book had been a big disappointment. Having read a number of scathing reviews, I wasn’t surprised. I had also read a number of articles (including ‘Mystery in Monroeville’ in The New Yorker) examining how the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman came to be ‘discovered’, and the circumstances of its publication.
In short, Lee wrote Go Set a Watchman as a young, unpublished writer. It was the editor at her publishing company who persuaded her to rework the story—originally set in the 1950s against the background of the civil rights movement—taking it back 20 years to the depression era of the 1930s, when her autobiographical protagonist, Jean Louise, was a child. The result was To Kill a Mockingbird, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and sell more than 40 million copies.More than 50 years later, with Lee confined to an assisted-living facility after a stroke, her lawyer Tonja Carter claimed to have found the original manuscript for Go Set a Watchman and, having convinced Lee of its quality, negotiated with HarperCollins to have it published in its original, unedited form.
Given its dubious provenance and dubious quality, I won’t be reading Go Set a Watchman any time soon. After all, for more than half a century its author felt that it wasn’t worthy of being in the public domain. However, professional editor and blogger Richard Adin is one person who thinks I should. In his post ‘Two books every author (& editor and publisher) should read’, Adin argues that a comparison of the two works provides an excellent example of the value of editing—apparently Lee and her editor worked for two years to develop the final draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. He suggests that:
Editors should use these books as teaching experiences for clients. They illustrate the benefit of not creating an artificial schedule and of taking the time needed to properly develop the story and to do the editing the story requires.
The exercise of publishing Go Set a Watchman in its original form only highlights the author’s original wisdom in shelving the manuscript for all these years. As Adin notes, now that it has finally seen the light of day, ‘its primary value is to demonstrate what should not be done if one values one’s writing and reputation as an author’.
But perhaps it’s not as dire as he suggests. I suspect that in another 50 years, Go Set a Watchman will be long forgotten, and people will still be reading To Kill a Mockingbird. And it is for writing the latter that Harper Lee will be remembered.
