Warning: If you haven’t read Go Set a Watchman and want that experience to be pure, stop now.
Then after you’ve read it come back and tell me what you think.
I waited
for the release of Harper Lee’s old-new-sequel-prequel novel, Go Set a Watchman, the way you’d wait
for the birth of a much-wanted child. I counted the months, the weeks, the
days. Before I went to bed on the night before its release, I considered waking
at midnight just so I could watch the download appear on my Kindle’s home page.
Like damn near everybody else in the country, it seemed, I had pulled up my old
and tender feelings for To Kill a
Mockingbird, and worried about how badly they were going to get hurt by
what was about to transpire. I’d even reread the book for the first time in
years so that I could have the taste of Scout, Jem, Dill, Boo and Atticus fresh
in my mouth as I was being inundated with tidbits of escaped information and
opinion. And boy, was I inundated. “Atticus a Racist!” “Harper Lee the Victim
of Elder Abuse?” “A Mess of a Novel!” When I woke up on July 15th
and turned my Kindle on, I had many voices in my head alongside Miss Nelle’s
and my own.
I read that
book in a single day, with feelings that ranged from deep pleasure and delight
to puzzlement and, ultimately, compassion and empathy, for its characters, for
its author, for the whole upset world, and for myself. Go Set a Watchman is as important as it’s been imagined to be, but
for reasons far more broad than can be conveyed in a tweet or a post or a
minute and a half on the national news. Reading it in the context of today’s
delicate dealings with race, and with the instantaneous and reactionary nature
of opinion sharing, is quite an experience. More personally, reading with the
eye and experience of a writer and a small town Southern girl who left its
culture for a far different one, Miss Nelle’s newly published work was, for me,
far more than simply the breathtaking story that Mockingbird was. This wasn’t just a book. It was literature as a
social and psychological construct. It was old wounds and the attempt to heal
them. It, and we, the people reading and reacting, have become partners in a
piece of art that far exceeds the tale of a young woman’s disillusionment with
her upbringing.
I’ll admit
that I’m the perfect audience for this book. Like a million other kids, I
wanted Atticus to be my father. I wanted his tolerant wisdom, his secret and
mysterious abilities, his vulnerability wrapped in a strength that it seemed
could never fail. He was the exception to all the false things I heard about my
people as I grew up in the South of the 1960s, and to the parts I knew to be
true. I wanted to be the girl who could sit in the secure, loving lap of a
hero, the one who was different from everyone else. I wanted the one who not
only wouldn’t spew hatred and wish harm to anyone, but who would defend those
hurt from those who did the hurting. I wanted the good humor that Miss Nelle
mentioned again and again to be in the eyes of the man to whom I could go with my hurts and indignities. I, along with
a generation, poured all my wishes for unalloyed goodness and tolerant love
into the ideal of Atticus Finch, even as I dealt with the realities of my own
father and the people all around me, people with whom my relationships were, as
most are, far more complicated.
Southern
people, like all people, are never pure and never simple. The idea that we can
be is wonderful, seductive, and immature. At their best my own father and the folks
I grew up with were intelligent, interesting, hard working, loyal, brilliant
storytellers and funny as hell. They saved me, as they did the fictional Scout,
when my mother was dead and I never doubted for an instant that I would be
taken care of and loved. At their worst they were separatists, conservative to
the point of paranoia and every bit as haughty about people—including black
people—having a natural place in the world and needing to keep to it, as Aunt
Alexandra is in the new work. And as much as I sometimes wanted to tell some of
them to, as Jean Louise tells her aunt, “Go pee in your hat,” I know I was
shaped by those attitudes in ways that pop up as nervousness and anger around
people whose ways are different from my own. I can be as reactionary toward others
as I hate seeing in others. I can carry the haughtiness of the liberal the way
my people carry it as conservatives. I
aspire to do better and I both succeed and fail every day. One of the reasons I
write is to try to make it, and myself, better. And this, ultimately, is the
lesson Jean Louise has to learn as well. I could be wrong, but I expect Miss
Nelle was having a long conversation with herself as she wrote.
The title of Go Set a Watchman was taken from a Bible verse, Isaiah 21:6 For thus hath the Lord said
unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. The idea of being that
watchful eye, the conscience of rather than a participant in a small Alabama
town during those tumultuous times, must have been seductive beyond belief. It
must also have been dangerous, because Harper Lee, whom I have come to think of
as a combination of Miss Nelle and the editor who saw her rough struggle with
her feelings and essentially advised her to regress to the unconflicted
feelings of a child for an ideal father, gave us a most beautiful fantasy
instead of the hard reality with which we all struggle. It is beautiful beyond
measure. And it isn’t false. It’s just fiction, a story that we want to be the story. Now, with Go Set a Watchman, that story has a
sibling, one who sees things differently, who isn’t the innocent, idealizing
one. She’s the smart one who can’t live forever in her perfect father’s lap,
and points us toward the realities and foibles of our own. And now that we’ve
got the two of them, we all have to figure out if we can love them both.
No comments:
Post a Comment