Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

While I am now based in Sydney the members have agreed the book club will go on! Muriel Baker is pleased to continue to hold the gatherings at her place in Coorparoo each month and I will Skype in. For ease of operation I am circulating the names and details of those regulars who turn up at meetings (in the next email) so you can communicate with each other. Those people who I haven’t had the chance to speak to yet but who are based in Brisbane and would like to join in, “in the flesh” so to speak, please let me know.

Members who met last Wednesday night were somewhat dismissive of February’s book: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee.

One member refused to read it because they didn’t want to spoil their experience of To Kill a Mockingbird which is Harper Lee’s most famous book. Written in 1960 it won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. To Set a Watchman was written about five years earlier.

Another member described the book as “not riveting”, saying it took her the whole month to read: “Nothing stayed with me. It was a trial.”

Another said she enjoyed the flashback episodes of the kids growing up but found the narrator’s voice changed in the later sections and became too didactic and dull. The writing had merit in places but needed a good edit. Another member said that at the end of the book she felt satisfied that Jean Louise, an idealistic student, had grown up somewhat and recognised that the world was changing, nothing could bring back the past, and we have to learn that the people we idolise as we are growing up are more complex and flawed than we think as children.

This is certainly a book heavily mirroring the attitudes and debates of the convulsive time in which it was written. The plot is that Jean Louise Finch returns home to a southern American town from New York City to visit her ageing father Atticus in the 1950s. She learns some painful truths about the beliefs of her most beloved relatives and friends.

Harper Lee wrote the manuscript in the mid '50s after the US Supreme Court decision on Brown vs the Board of Education which ended segregation of schools in the southern states. Publishers rejected Lee's manuscript at the time but it was controversially published in 2015, apparently against Lee’s wishes, after it was found by her attorney.

The book contains material which many modern readers would find shocking. Apart from the attitudes towards the negroes expressed in the book, towards the end Jean Louise’s uncle strikes her to 'make her see sense' and she rather quickly apologises to her male relatives instead of simply fleeing the scene. She also seems to accept too quickly the concept that there is more than one kind of bigot and she might just be a New York one, at the other end of the political spectrum to her father, Atticus. At the end of the book she is contemplating staying in the town she grew up in because her relatives have her believe her views are needed to stand up against the more openly racist around her.

One member described a key scene in the book when the endearing old black lady, Calpurnia, who was full time nanny to Jean Louise, and her brother, Jim, after their mother died, turns on Jean Louise, remaining aloof and formal, rather than speaking to her warmly and directly, when she visits.

Calpurnia's grandson has killed a white man and now race issues stand between Calpurnia and Jean Louise, even though Atticus has agreed to take the case (if only to prevent the involvement of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).

Calpurnia’s attitude shocks Jean Louise who is described as growing up “colour blind” and who has been taught to treat all people well (if not equally).

The title of the book, Go Set a Watchman, comes from a passage in the King James Bible in the Book of Isaiah (21:6):

For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

According to a Baptist Minister and friend of Harper Lee, Wayne Flynt, this means that somebody needs to be a moral compass in a community. “Isaiah was a prophet. God had set him as a watchman over Israel. It’s really God speaking to the Hebrews, saying what you need to do is set a watchman to set you straight, to keep you on the right path."

That’s not to say that Jean Louise is perfect for the job. While she proclaims she upholds the equal rights of negroes she says she’d never marry one and Calpurnia is still treated as a servant at the end of the day.

She is also on the side of her father in being outraged that the Supreme Court’s decision on ending segregation is overturning the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. This basically says that the federal government possesses only the powers delegated by the Constitution. All remaining powers are reserved for the states which should be able to govern their own affairs and their own people. Sound familiar?

By a coincidence, I was reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America at the same time as this book (Charley is Steinbeck’s poodle). Written in 1960, Steinbeck writes about travelling the states of America to rediscover them. He describes witnessing the horror of ‘The Cheerleaders’ in New Orleans. These were white women who stood at the school gate and hurled abuse at negro and white children and their parents as they entered a desegregated school accompanied by US Marshals. Those were the days.

Happy reading!