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| Chicago Tribune photo by Terrence Antonio James |
The
news this week is about a “new” novel by Harper Lee. Last summer on the
occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of To Kill a
Mockingbird, I did a blog post in honor of the acclaimed Alabama author. When I
heard the news of another novel by Ms. Lee, Go
Set a Watchman, I was at once excited by it but also skeptical about the
author’s wishes to have it published.
Here
is a quote from the publisher's announcement:
Go Set a Watchman is set during the mid-1950s and features many of the characters from To
Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later. Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has
returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She is forced
to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand
her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where
she was born and spent her childhood.
Many
news outlets, of course, have had a field day with the news. NPR noted on their
website:
As second novels go,
this one should prove a doozy. More than five decades after Harper Lee
published her first
— and, so far, only — novel, To Kill a
Mockingbird, Lee's publisher has announced that she plans to release a new one.
The book, currently titled Go Set a Watchman, will be published July 14.
The Associated Press,
which broke the news, reports that Lee actually finished the 304-page novel in
the mid-1950s — before Mockingbird was published in 1960 — but Lee had decided
to shelve the work at the time. Lee says she was surprised to stumble upon
Watchman again last fall, after her friend and attorney Tonja Carter unearthed
an old manuscript that had been attached to an original typescript of
Mockingbird.
Some Were Skeptical
The
problem I had, in the midst of my excitement, is that I know there have been
questions in recent years about whether Ms. Lee has been manipulated into
signing things by those in charge of her legal affairs. It turns out I am not
the only one who has some concerns.
Birmingham
journalist, Kyle Whitmire, grew up in Southwest Alabama near Harper Lee’s
hometown of Monroeville. In his article for The
Birmingham News he tells of his early class room experience where “Our
teachers also taught us the rule. If by some chance you meet her, you may
introduce yourself, and you may ask her about almost whatever you wanted -
politics, the weather - but never the book.” Whitmire is skeptical about the
release of a new novel by the author. “I want there to be another book,” he
writes, “But the bucket brigade of publishers, agents and lawyers between her
and the public need to give a complete account first of how this other book
came to be found and published, or I won't read it. They have a lot of
explaining to do. I'll respect Nelle Harper Lee's silence, as I was taught as a
child. But not theirs.”
In
another article from Real Time News from AL.com, Connor Sheets is
equally skeptical:
The historical record
seems to demonstrate that Lee did not want her other book published, as it
remained a closely held secret for decades. Her sister, Alice Lee, died at the
age of 103 in November after defending Lee's legacy and estate against circling
vultures in the publishing industry who might have caught wind of her
unpublished novel.
According
to Ed Pilkington writing from Monroeville, the whole town has questions about
the publication of the new book. In “Harper Lee book news leaves home town surprised, bemused and skeptical” Pilkington writes:
But with such meager access, many in the town are left wondering whether Lee has been manipulated.
Many also wonder why so many strange things began to happen once Alice, her
greatest friend and protector – her “Atticus in a skirt”, as she was said to
have once called her – retired and then passed away.
A Measured View
If
I may be allowed to have conflicted views, here is my thinking at the moment. It may be that the publishers are the vultures
who finally got through to make a little more money. On the other hand, since
the novel was written prior to To Kill A Mockingbird, I can see literary value
in it just to see what the author was thinking, what her writing was like and
what she was focused on in the period leading up to TKAM. For those defending
Harper Lee’s privacy and personal wishes, I can see that it is quite possible
that the author may simply not have wanted her earlier writing made public,
given that she was so reticent in all things regarding TKAM in spite of so much
public interest throughout the years.
I
want to read it. I’m not sure I want to buy it. I want to take a long look, I
want to drink it in, but I don’t want to invade a respected author’s privacy. I
want to walk through her wonderful house, as it were, but I don’t want to barge
in uninvited. I want Harper Lee to tell
us everything, but I respect her right to tell us nothing more than what she
has already said in her acclaimed novel. I want this information to be out
there in public, just like the keepers of J.R.R. Tolkein’s estate released so
many unpublished tales from Middle Earth to shed light on The Lord of the Rings. I do not want to think about how the keepers
of Harper Lee’s estate may be pulling a fast one.
But it is Harper Lee’s
writing – it must be good. It is about Scout all grown up, and Atticus is there
to. Surely there is great benefit in that. In the end, our life’s choices are like
what I imagine Atticus Finch would advise, we walk with our eyes open to all
the nuances of justice and injustice, then we do the thing that we can best
live with as we carry on with our lives.
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