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Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; boney mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were soft like teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.
~ To Kill a Mockingbird
In Go Set the Watchman, the attentive reader witnessed Jean Louise Finch — Scout — go through the shattering of a borrowed conscience and come out the other side carrying something real, hard-won, and entirely her own. As a good hero must, she woke up and was on her way to becoming a Finch in the truest sense, ready to pick up the mantel Atticus would leave behind.
Too bad very few readers will arrive at this truly heroic accomplishment for Scout and that’s the sorrow of a book that isn’t well done top to bottom. What a lament that it was released in the current form, and bravo for anyone who gets to the end because the slog is worth it. Especially if you are someone who wants to understand the way the world works and those big maturity high points that happen in a life. This is literature at its best. It teaches us. Challenges us. Pushes us to ask the hardest questions which honestly, we need to ask. Do I have a well formed conscience? If you do, you are grounded and NOTHING throws you off center. If you don’t, EVERYTHING throws you off center and you are ranting at the wind.
How sad then that this heroine, Jean Louise isn’t seen as she deserved. How sad the delivery device of the book itself isn’t solid enough and well written enough, to get the reader to “the end.” But that’s how it goes. And many truly great books have died like this. As a teacher, I can say that most drop dead at exactly the point that Go Set the Watchman stopped. This then, is a teaching AND a cautionary tale: Don’t let your book be one of those that dies on the vine. Do the work. Go the distance. And it’s why we work so hard with and for you here at the Studio. Your hero matters. Their journey can change lives.
And now this teaching circles back almost two decades to the same town, the same streets, the same heat. But a different hero and honestly, a different story.
To Kill a Mockingbird is not a separate story though. It is the origin story and many would argue it is an extraordinary work that stands as an iconic master of several generations but especially of the 60’s and 70’s.
The Editorial Miracle:
As I wrote in the overview, To Kill a Mockingbird was born from an editor’s instinct.
Tay Hohoff was a Quaker with a similar formation as Atticus and Uncle Jack. Old school religious. Bible learning. And living. And when she read the first draft Go Set a Watchman, she saw that whenever Lee’s writing moved into memory the prose came alive in a way the adult Jean Louise narrative did not. I am very familiar with that seeing. That’s what any good teacher, or editor, watches for and calls out, and it’s what you’ve all had called forth in your own writing. When Lee’s language loosened and the images sharpened, the core feeling arrived. The child’s perspective then was where Harper Lee’s genius lived.
Hohoff’s gift to literature was recognizing that and sending Lee back to the desk. What emerged from two and a half years of revision was a novel that begins in summer and ends in autumn and covers three years in the life of a child. We see, in that life, everything Lee had to say about conscience, about justice, about fathers and children and the monstrous ordinary evil of a world that tells itself it is decent.
What changed between the first draft and the masterpiece was not the town. Not the characters. Not the moral architecture. What changed was the seeing. Adult Jean Louise saw Maycomb and was outraged by it. Child Scout saw Maycomb and loved it and saw it with the clear eyes of a child.
The finch in the setting with it’s four dimensions:
I wrote about the finch in the previous teaching, that small resilient songbird that survives in every climate, not mimicking, not borrowing, but producing something native to itself. The bird of medieval iconography that touches the thorns and lives. Now we get that finch at six years old with that narrative intelligence of the adult Jean Louise tucked behind the curtain and only peeking out with the great overviews provided in the setting, the history and the people.
Dimension One: Period
Early 1930s.
The 1930s South is a world under multiple simultaneous pressures. The Great Depression has hollowed out the economy. Maycomb County has no industry to speak of. Lawyers go unpaid in goods and produce. The social fabric, always dependent on economic stability, is stretched so thin its fraying.
Jim Crow is fully operational. Not as a set of recent laws but as the air. As the assumed shape of reality. Black citizens of Maycomb exist in a parallel social world. They have their own church, their own neighborhood, their own economy that intersects with the white world constantly but never on equal terms. This is not a system anyone in the white community feels they choose. It is simply the water they swim in.
And here is the crucial difference from the world of Go Set a Watchman. There is no Civil Rights movement yet. No Brown v. Board of Education. No federal intervention. All this means the architecture of injustice is still largely invisible to the people living inside it.
Scout’s journey then is one of blind to sight. Not the blindness of malice but the blindness of childhood, which is a different thing entirely. And what she sees as her eyes open is both beautiful and devastating.
Dimension Two: Length of Time
Three Years
Where Go Set a Watchman compressed everything in one week, a mirror of the compression the South felt when Brown v. Board landed, To Kill a Mockingbird breathes across three years which is enough time for a child to grow. For Jem to move from boyhood toward adolescence and begin to see things Scout cannot yet see. For the Boo Radley mythology to evolve from terror to mystery to something else entirely. For the Tom Robinson case to move through its stages of rumor, accusation, trial, verdict, aftermath.
And three years to see a father fathering without a wife, and with a strong faith, resolve and conscience. When a man, or woman, possesses these qualities, they do the truly heroic things that others cannot. They can wipe spit out of their eyes calmly, can follow their gut, can lament the sorrows of the innocent and the injustices of the undervalued, and offer comfort all at the same time and they can fail, as Atticus will, with dignity.
That Lee takes her time is both a mirror of the South even now. People t a k e t h e i r t i m e, but you also get time to love this town as Scout loved it. You get to sit with Miss Maudie on her porch in that heat, and smell the flowers in air, and have a piece of cake.
Dimension Three: Location
Maycomb, Alabama
The epicenter of this location is home. The neighbors. And then the school, which gives us time to also get a fix on the other sections of town where the Cunninghams and the Ewells live. Then it moves out to the town center and it’s various gathering places. The courthouse where Atticus has his office. Back at home, with the neighbors, we’ve got mystery and comfort and irritation all around. We’ve got the Radley house which is dark, forbidden, endlessly fascinating. And, Miss Maudie’s garden which is warm, spectacular, welcoming. And Ms. Stephanie Crawford who is the busy body, and Ms. Rachel who is Dill’s aunt, and the old morphine addict who cusses Jean Louise and Jem. Last, we’ve got a family history in the set up of Finch’s Landing that will bring us Aunt Alexandra.
Equally real. Equally present.
Dimension Four: Level of Conflict
Formation Under Pressure
While Atticus is the man to watch, the hero with the arc who faces the issue of the day, justice in an unjust system, the genius of To Kill a Mockingbird’s “conflict “architecture is that it operates on every level simultaneously and connects through the innocent eyes of a single child. Scout. At the outermost level, there is the racial injustice as systemic evil. Tom Robinson is innocent. Atticus will prove it. And it will not matter. Because the system is not designed to produce justice for a Black man accused by a white woman in Alabama in the 1930s. (And this the value line as well only ending not a tyranny but collective racism). Everyone in that courtroom, and the town, knows the truth, and as a reader you do too while Scout slowly figures it out as only children can do.
There is also a class conflict woven through the whole story. The Cunninghams are poor but proud. The Ewells are poor and vicious. The difference between those two families is character. Bob Ewell is not evil because he is poor. He is evil because he has chosen to direct his resentment outward toward people more vulnerable than himself rather than inward toward the harder work of dignity. And, because people understand this, they keep their distance from him, in a way cultivating him by looking away. It’s not a matter of “if” he’d going to create mayhem in his own family’s life and that of anyone else, it’s just a matter of when.
There is family and generational conflict. Jem growing up faster than Scout. Aunt Alexandra importing her social certainties. Atticus parenting against the grain of every expectation raising his children to see rather than to look past.
And at the innermost level Scout becomes the conscience of the reader itself. She feels what we feel. She sees what we are meant to see.
The Mockingbird and The Finch
Atticus says it. Miss Maudie explains it. It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. Because mockingbirds don’t do anything except make music for the world to enjoy. They harm nothing. They only sing. Lee has populated this novel with mockingbirds. Figures of pure innocence who have done nothing to deserve what the world does to them.
Who are they in the story:
1) Tom Robinson. Accused of a crime he did not commit. Convicted because the system requires a conviction. Dead before the story ends.
2) Boo Radley. Locked away by a family that could not manage his difference. Reduced in the town’s mythology to a monster. Living in the dark house at the end of the street, watching, leaving small gifts, waiting.
3) Walter Cunningham. The boy who comes to lunch and pours syrup all over everything. Scout’s instinct is to humiliate him for being different, for not knowing the social codes, and Calpurnia’s correction is an echo of Atticus.
The Finches are not the mockingbirds. And despite the challenges this story presents, even for Atticus within his own family that judges and condemns him for what doing what he must, he will not be beaten down. He will carry on…until he’s forced to see that he’s taken his own standards too far.
Repurposed and reused:
If you look hard at Go Get a Watchman, and get out your page tabs, you will have no trouble marking exactly what was saved and reused, and almost word for word.
The trial, the emotional and moral center of TKAM, was a memory in Go Set. A flashback. The editor saw it and Lee built the whole book (and Atticus’ arc) around it.
The courthouse balcony where Scout, Jem and Dill watch the trial with Reverend Sykes is the same balcony where adult Jean Louise stands in Go Set and sees her world collapse. Same physical location. Completely different emotional meaning. That is not accident. That is a writer who understands that place carries memory.
Calpurnia. The Cunninghams. The class tensions. The particular moral temperature of people trying to be decent inside a system that makes decency very difficult. All of it carried from first draft to masterpiece.
The town itself, too. The heat. The pace. The social architecture all lifted and plopped down as is and this can happen in your own work. Remember how I say NOTHING is wasted? This is what I mean. Nothing, I mean nothing, is wasted.
🤔 Questions to Ponder:
What was your favorite “lift out” and reuse in Go Set a Watchman that ended up in To Kill a Mockingbird? Have you spotted one I did not? And then, think about your own story that you are working on right now. Can you imagine, as Lee had to, making the book about someone else? Go Set a Watchman was Jean Louises journey. To Kill a Mockingbird is Atticus’. Can you see that in your early drafts that this can happen and needs to happen in order you get to know your world as fully as possible? What does this realization do to your resolve as a writer? And your patience with yourself?
