The serious part came in his “Letter to the North” published in Life magazine in March 1956, one week before southern senators released the Southern Manifesto. It was perhaps the most concise statement of the political concern at the heart of Watchman: the defense of the white southerner caught “in the middle of a revolution,” as Uncle Jack would call it, or, as Faulkner put it, the man “present yet detached, committed and attainted neither by Citizens’ Council nor NAACP.” This position, Faulkner’s position, was being made untenable by an overbearing Supreme Court, he argued; the decision in Brown was “the first implication, and—to the Southerner—even promise, of force and violence.” The mayhem in Alabama, as well as the Emmett Till lynching and the failure of state officials to convict his murderers, Faulkner laid at the feet of the court. The North would have to learn again a lesson it should have learned in the Civil War, Faulkner wrote. The South, which he imagined as “a white embattled minority who are our blood and kin,” would “go to any length, even that fatal and already doomed one, before it will accept alteration of its racial condition by mere force of law or economic threat.”
The absurdity came a few weeks later with the publication of an interview Faulkner gave to a British reporter. Faulkner pledged that “if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” He was drunk at the time of the interview, a fact he implied the following month in a public letter disputing the comments attributed to him.
Harper Lee would have recognized Faulkner’s bombast for what it was, yet certainly she sympathized with his notion that “the rest of the United States knows next to nothing about the South.” In a sense, Watchman was her own letter to the North. That’s how Maurice Crain tried to pitch the novel to potential publishers, as a book with important lessons for readers above the Mason-Dixon line. “Well, to hear the Post tell it, we lynch ’em for breakfast,” Jean Louise informs Atticus when he asks how the newspapers up North covered southern racial matters.
The ambition to correct pat northern assumptions is why Lee gives so much of the argument in the novel to Atticus and Uncle Jack. In an internal dialogue Jean Louise has with an imagined northern audience, she thinks to herself that “New York has all the answers.” New York knows who Jean Louise is, knows what kind of people she comes from. “Please believe me,” Jean Louise imagines herself saying, “what has happened in my family is not what you think. I can only say this—that everything I learned about human decency I learned here.” Atticus she defends as a “man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel,” a man who waited in line behind Negroes, a man who had raised her not to despise, fear, or mistreat Negroes. “Look sister,” the voice of New York says to her, “we know the facts: you spent the first twenty-one years of your life in lynching country.… So drop the act.” But it wasn’t an act, not for Atticus and not for Jean Louise. Or at least she had always believed it wasn’t—that is until the day she spotted Atticus at the Council meeting.
HARPER LEE MAKES clear by the end of Watchman that Jean Louise wasn’t, in fact, mistaken, that Atticus really was a decent man. Yet for all of Jean Louise’s confusion, she has her moments with her father and her uncle both. She may struggle to follow Uncle Jack’s explanation of southern politics and history, yet she’s smart enough to suspect that he’s dissembling, and her conversation with him ends with Uncle Jack placing a worried phone call, presumably to his brother, to warn him that Jean Louise had seen him at the Council meeting and was incensed. With Atticus, though Jean Louise can’t rebut him point by point, she responds with an emotional appeal that manages to unsettle her father. “Atticus, the time has come when we’ve got to do right,” she says. The imputation of immorality stings Atticus. “Have you ever considered that you can’t have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?” he asks her. He and Jean Louise descend into a shouting match in which Atticus is “[d]esperately trying” to make her understand his position. The argument lays bare the ugliest aspects of his views.
This is the passage that received the greatest attention in 2015, when Watchman was published for the first time. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” Atticus asks Jean Louise. He talks of schools being “dragged down to accommodate Negro children,” of government run by incompetents, as was allegedly the case during the first Reconstruction. “[T]he Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people,” Atticus explains. “They’ve made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they’re far from it yet.”
Yet what stands out to modern readers—Atticus’s racism—would not have seemed so scandalous either to Harper Lee or to many readers in the 1950s. Such racist views were a common part of American political discourse at the time. They showed up without comment or apology in major newspapers, opinion journals (and not just the National Review), and the Congressional Record. Men of achievement who enjoyed great esteem in American life—Georgia senator Richard Russell for example—expressed them openly. Non-southerners who may not have shared such views exactly conveyed their sympathy with them privately. This was the case reportedly with President Dwight Eisenhower, who, not long before the court issued its decision in Brown, buttonholed Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren at the end of a White House dinner. Southerners were not “bad people,” Eisenhower suggested to Warren. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” For years southern politicians had sought and found political friends from other regions who could appreciate what they would have described, and what would have been understood by sympathetic northern whites, as their region’s peculiar difficulties.
That Harper Lee did not intend Atticus’s racist remarks as any kind of final judgment on his character is indicated by what comes next. Atticus, not his daughter, is the one who maintains his dignity and sense of propriety in the midst of the heated exchange. Jean Louise shouts Atticus down, furious that he would raise her to believe in justice knowing full well he didn’t practice it himself. She calls him a coward, a snob, a tyrant, a son of a bitch. She compares him to Hitler. As her fury devolves into hysteria, Jean Louise cedes the moral high ground. Atticus, meanwhile, has come back to himself. He assures his daughter of his love. She is merely a young woman beyond reason. She has idolized him for too long, and now she has to grow up and realize that he is mere flesh and blood.
The chapter resolves this way because Harper Lee is intent on balancing the scale: Atticus’s racial conservatism on one side, Jean Louise’s moral condemnation of Jim Crow on the other. The critical scene in Watchman involves a similar sort of accounting, one that pulls Atticus back from the brink of moral condemnation. Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia, her beloved African American maid, her only true mother, to assure her that Atticus would represent her grandson in court. It is one of the few times that Harper Lee manages to dramatize, rather than merely ventriloquize, the novel’s political ideas. A veil has come down between the two women. Jean Louise knows when Calpurnia is putting on company manners for white folks. She recognizes it as Calpurnia mouths pieties about what a good man Mr. Finch is, how he always does the right thing, all the while her eyes show “no hint of compassion.” “Tell me one thing, Cal,” Jean Louise asks as she stands to leave, “just one thing before I go—please, I’ve got to know. Did you hate us?” Calpurnia sits silent, Jean Louise suffering the agonizing moments, until finally Cal shakes her head. Here, as it so often was in the stories that white southerners told about themselves, it is the loyal black servant who provides the essential testimony as to the decency of the good white southerner.
In the end, the most erratic character in Watchman, Uncle Jack, conveys the novel’s real message. There are “meaningful things” that will be lost when men like Atticus are tossed on the dust
heap of history, he says, things that “the North” doesn’t understand and that the editorial page of the New York Post refuses to see. It is Uncle Jack who will resolve the novel’s central conflict with a violent deus ex machina, a “savage” backhand slap of Jean Louise as she is packing the car to leave. It literally knocks her to her senses. A stiff bourbon soothes the pain, and, as Uncle Jack imparts final words of wisdom—including a bizarre non sequitur that he was secretly in love with Jean Louise’s mother—Harper Lee does some last-minute scorekeeping: Jean Louise has been bigoted against the South; she’s convinced finally that Atticus really would stop the Klan if it came to that; it takes maturity and humility to live in a region in the midst of political revolution. Jean Louise goes to see Atticus, they reconcile, and she drives him home, remembering to duck her head getting into the car, a sign that she is learning not to be so hardheaded.
The limitations of Watchman as a work of fiction were clear to those who read it at the time. The editors at G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Harper & Brothers, where Maurice Crain sent the manuscript in March and April of 1957, both turned it down, citing the lack of story and suspense. For readers today, the limits of the novel as a work of political critique are clear as well. The white South’s principled conservatives would not be the ones who guided the region through its social and political crisis. Writing nearly four decades later, Eugene Genovese, one of the most distinguished historians of the antebellum South and one of the fiercest theorists and defenders of the southern conservative tradition, frankly criticized that tradition in the civil rights era. “The responsible, humane, decent conservatives of the South did almost nothing to lead their people toward a well-ordered, locally guided integration,” Genovese wrote. “They could not do so. For they have always stood for the rights of the community, and their particular communities, which embraced all social classes among whites, were implacably hostile to black demands.”
Completing a draft of “Watchman” in late February 1957, however, Harper Lee didn’t have the benefit of hindsight, and she wasn’t looking backward anyway. She was already on to a new novel, one that drew on the childhood short stories that she had first shown Crain a few months earlier. Meanwhile down South, the honorable white southerners—the Sartorises of Faulkner’s world whom she valorized in Watchman—were either being swept up in the madness of segregationist militancy or slinking into a cowering silence. Maybe a letter to the North wasn’t what she needed to write after all.
Chapter 4
The Boiling Frog
The pages flew out of Nelle’s typewriter in ribbons. In late May 1957, she gave Maurice Crain 111 pages of her second novel, which she had titled “The Long Goodbye.” A little over two weeks later she had a finished version of it. Crain immediately sent the novel to Lynn Carrick at J. B. Lippincott. A month earlier he had given Carrick “Go Set a Watchman,” hoping that the third submission would be the charm. But Carrick set aside “Watchman” to focus on this second novel, which Harper Lee continued to work on during the summer. She sent Lippincott a revised version of the manuscript in July, and then another in August. By October, the Lippincott editors had seen enough to know that they wanted Harper Lee under contract, even though there remained work to be done, as suggested by the fact that Lippincott dropped the title “The Long Goodbye.” On the contract that Lee signed on October 17, 1957, the work was untitled.
The project was assigned to Tay Hohoff, the formidable, silver-haired publishing veteran then in her late fifties. With a throaty voice made deeper by near-constant cigarette smoking, Hohoff, fiercely independent, was known to scoff at recently married women in the office who had taken their husband’s name. She would edit an impressive array of writers over her long career, including Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Pynchon, and Nicholas Delbanco. In Nelle, Hohoff found an eager young writer, lacking in experience but with genuine storytelling talent. Yet, upon signing Nelle, “[t]he editorial call to duty was plain,” Hohoff wrote years later. “She needed, at last, professional help in organizing her material and developing a sound plot structure.” An editorial assistant had reported to Hohoff that the manuscript was “diffuse,” “autobiographical,” and far too long. It’s not surprising that a novel that grew out of several short stories might read like “a series of anecdotes,” as Hohoff put it, or that a manuscript that Harper Lee had told Maurice Crain could go “on and on” might in fact do so. Revisions were expected to take six months. As it turned out, they took over two years.
Set in the Depression-era South, the novel follows the adventures of three precocious children as they try to unravel the mystery of the town recluse. The story unfolds through the perspective of the smallest of the children, the puckish, irresistible Scout Finch. Lee switched between the childhood voice of Scout and the adult Jean Louise in ways that some critics hailed as brilliant and others dismissed as amateurish and utterly implausible. But most readers hardly noticed or cared, so charmed were they by Scout, Jem, and Dill and the colorful characters that populated Maycomb. When her classmate Cecil Jacobs announces at school one day that Scout Finch’s daddy “defends niggers,” she fights him. Only when she gets home does she learn what he meant, that her father, Atticus Finch, would take the case of a black man, Tom Robinson, who had been accused of raping a white woman. Thus begins the children’s initiation into the world of adults, a story that plays out in parallel with their growing realization that things with Boo Radley, their mysterious, reclusive neighbor, are not as they seem.
In Mockingbird, the character of Atticus is conceived from a very different point of view than the character in Watchman. He offers no ruminations on the nature of racial difference, no warmed-over defenses of Lost Cause dogma, no diatribes against the dictates of the Supreme Court. Gone is almost any detail that would identify Atticus with the more distasteful or impolitic orthodoxies of his region. The few that remain are studiedly indirect, such as his uncharacteristically peevish aside to the jury about the “distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington” hurling Jefferson’s words on equality in the face of southerners, or his response to Scout who, when prodded by an annoying question from Cecil Jacobs, asks Atticus if he is a radical. “You tell Cecil I’m about as radical as Cotton Tom Heflin,” he chuckles.
These were shorthand ways for Lee to make the case that, yes, Atticus was of his time and place, despite holding some views not commonly associated with white southerners. Most readers, if they had heard of Tom Heflin at all, would have known him from his rabid justifications of lynching as a means of defending white southern womanhood. What could Atticus have meant by that? Harper Lee is content to leave the reader as confused as Scout. They wouldn’t have known Cotton Tom as Lee herself knew him, refracted through her father’s evolving politics in the 1930s, as a Klansman-turned-handpicked candidate of the Black Belt–Big Mule coalition, the avatar of white racial populism that economic conservatives backed against the liberal Lister Hill. Heflin was a flawed vessel by A. C. Lee’s lights, no doubt, but still the best chance by the late 1930s of beating back the radical New Dealers ascendant in Washington.
Yet Harper Lee was moving away from any overt engagement with politics. With Hohoff’s guidance, she was learning how every element of the novel must be in service to the story. In Mockingbird the particulars of Atticus’s politics would muddy his essential nobility, which is critical to the novel. His politics could only be implied, and only sparingly at that. This not only streamlined the narrative, it also gave Harper Lee a slyer, more implicit way to make one of her central arguments. Watchman hits the reader over the head with the idea that a segregationist like Atticus could be a principled man. Mockingbird presents readers with a principled man who—oh, by the way—sees things pretty much eye-to-eye with Tom Heflin.
The most straightforward explanation for the altered view of Atticus is that it was dictated by Lee’s change in narrative voice and temporal setting. In Mockingbird, readers see Atticus through the eyes of Scout, and so through the limited ex
perience, knowledge, and perspective of a child. Yet it’s not only through Scout that we see and hear the story. The novel opens in the adult voice of Jean Louise, and conceivably it could have ended that way, with Lee inserting some reflective qualifying comment about the limits of Atticus’s example, some more detached version of the criticisms that Jean Louise gives in Watchman.
That, however, could have unraveled Mockingbird entirely. What would Harper Lee have had the adult Jean Louise say exactly? There was nothing detached about Jean Louise’s criticisms of Atticus in Watchman. She rages at her father and his politics, and her reaction to him is of a piece with her disillusionment with and alienation from Maycomb. In Mockingbird it is only through Atticus’s goodness that the reader is assured that Scout and Jem will be all right in the end, and that Maycomb will be all right, too.
Perhaps Tay Hohoff was instrumental in helping Harper Lee craft the idealized view of Atticus. At the same time she was editing Lee, Hohoff, who had grown up in Brooklyn in a multigenerational Quaker home steeped in tradition, was finishing up a book of her own about an idealistic man. In 1959 she published an admiring biography of John Lovejoy Elliott, a familial descendant, though not blood relative, of the famous abolitionist martyr Elijah Lovejoy, and an important figure in the settlement house and ethical culture movements in turn-of-the-century New York. In the book’s epilogue, Hohoff imagined Elliott himself viewing the motley group of rich and poor, uptown and downtown, who had gathered at his funeral. “[H]e would have been pleased that his death had broken down all the barriers, even for so short a time,” she wrote; “to have no barriers ever any more between different sorts of people had been the dream and the work of his whole life.” This would not have been an unreasonable description of the Atticus of Mockingbird. The Quaker influence could be seen in at least one of the early reviews of Mockingbird, which described Atticus Finch as “simply the man of conscience who must obey his inner light.”
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