Date: 27 September 2015
Location: John & Marion
The discussion first centered on the validity of the manuscript. Harper Lee herself obviously didn’t want to publish it—but on the other hand a professor at Auburn who has been seeing her regularly reports that nobody influenced her concerning the publication, so she probably approved. Another possibility: The whole thing is a fabrication. In the first place very few were involved in the discovery of the MS; we may well doubt that there even was a MS saved away. The book may in fact have been written by the editors and marketed with a lot of hype in hopes of taking advantage of the big money involved in anything connected with To Kill a Mockingbird. Or maybe it was indeed Harper Lee’s MS, and it was published to cause controversy, and so to make money. The conclusion: We will never know the answers to these questions.
As for the quality of the book, opinions varied:
- It reads like a rough draft.
- Some parts are good, but overall it lacks maturity—reads like a high-school essay. We have lived through all that history of the civil rights struggle, and Go Set a Watchman has nothing to teach us.
- On a more positive note: The final part (the discussion between Jean Louise, Atticus, and Uncle Jack) stops being a novel and becomes a socio-political essay. This is a fault in novel-writing, but the essay is a good one. The issues are clarified, and the justification for the old people’s view, though wrong-headed, is made understandable.
- Some simply enjoyed the book, especially the comic flashbacks—the baptism in the pond, the falsies at the dance, and Jean Louise’s “pregnancy,” which was not only comic but painfully realistic.
There was little comment on Atticus. We have been familiar with his type. Aunt Alexandra was another matter. We also have seen her type. But could Jean Louise realistically have felt so unable to stand up to her? Peggy had an aunt like that, but Peg told her off and the old lady became less strident. Most said that Jean Louise’s reaction was realistic. A grown person can come back among elders and feel like a child.
The question came up: Why didn’t Harper Lee come out with another book after Mockingbird? It was agreed that after a great success one may not want to try again.
There were some personal recollections of racial situations in the fifties and since—the ugliness of “white only” observances, the failure of some of us to understand the feelings of blacks, and experiences of being a white minority among many blacks.
— John