Editorial

The new Atticus, and old

First drafts always works in progress

Gregory Peck is shown in a scene from the film "To Kill a Mockingbird" in this 1962 photo.
Gregory Peck is shown in a scene from the film "To Kill a Mockingbird" in this 1962 photo.

We can argue about whether we ever should have seen Go Set a Watchman, the literary sensation that all the best book clubs are now desperately discussing. Does the 89-year-old Nelle Harper Lee really want us to see it? Who knows? There have been suggestions that maybe the author was manipulated into allowing the book to be printed, shipped and marketed, but an Alabama Department of Human Resources investigation declared all those allegations "unfounded."

Under the circumstances, we understand why some would not want to read it. For 50 years, Miss Nelle has resisted courting celebrity, and the book mightn't be anything other than the sort of writing an author must do to get down to the real writing. (Writing, when done right, is hard. Maybe not as hard as running a tree saw all day in the Arkansas summer, but still difficult. And it may be that the better writer you are, the harder it is for you. For Miss Nelle it might have become impossible. That would explain some things.)

Yet we're not in favor of people not reading anything. People should read bad books as well as good, if for no other reason than to learn the difference. After all those years of reading her short stories, over and over, the other day somebody finally put a copy of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away in our hot little hands. Our considered editorial opinion: We prefer her short stories.

So if you are curious about Go Set a Watchman and you have no qualms about giving HarperCollins a chunk of your disposable income, by all means, have at it. Support your local bookstore. Or library.

But just keep in mind that the universe depicted in Go Set a Watchman doesn't have to impinge on the characters and locales described in To Kill a Mockingbird. If you love the principled Atticus Finch of Mockingbird, you don't necessarily have to agree that the character morphed into the pragmatic, anti-integration Klan apologist who appears in Watchman.

No book is complete without a reader, and every reader completes every work in his own way. We cast the characters, we supply the particulars of the imaginary world the author suggests with a few specific details. The printed word allows us the opportunity to collaborate with Shakespeare or Ralph Ellison, with long-dead poets and those emerging voices from the other side of the globe we're always hearing about. It really is a kind of telepathy, and that's why it's still more special than movies and long-form cable series.

So you needn't just accept Miss Nelle's revision of Atticus--if in fact that's what it is--as the inevitable souring of an idealist into curmudgeon-hood. This is just one possible Atticus, and from all the evidence, it's an inchoate one. A beta version, if you will. Just because the events in To Kill a Mockingbird pre-date the events in Go Set a Watchman doesn't mean that the 1950s Atticus (who was written before the Atticus who defends Tom Robinson during the Depression) is a more authentic superseding version of the character.

In other words, maybe we should lighten up a bit. If you want to read Go Set a Watchman, maybe you should keep in mind that it's as much as anything a working-through of certain themes that preoccupied the author. It's not her final draft, just an arrested moment in her progress. She worked her way through to another kind of character--a man who wasn't without complications or incapable of compromise, but a decent, even heroic figure, nevertheless.

And we don't know all the reasons the new (old) Atticus has surfaced in this new (old) book, but we can suppose that some of them were financial.

And that none of them occlude the lesson he taught Scout (and us): "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

Editorial on 07/27/2015

Upcoming Events