Now it is impossible to know what might have been the reaction to Nelle Harper Lee’s death, at the age of 89, had last year not seen the publication of Go Set a Watchman, 55 years after that of her only other novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The latter’s immense and enduring popularity, its long life as a school set text and its celebrated film version would doubtless have ensured widespread coverage. But the extraordinary and frequently unedifying furore that preceded and engulfed Watchman’s arrival in the world has had a dual effect: a woman who was not, as often described, a recluse so much as someone who simply did not want a public profile has had her last years repeatedly and distastefully picked over; and, more productively, the ambiguities and tensions of her work have made themselves more evident.
When a novel becomes a phenomenon, subtlety is often the first casualty. Rapidly it becomes an emblem, an icon, a cultural artefact supposed to relate plainly to its times and social context; its meaning is made to crystallise in a way that truly great fiction never really allows.
To Kill a Mockingbird, set in 1930s Alabama, became a story about the vital importance of standing up for truth and justice, which it was; but it was also a nuanced portrait of a society on the brink of radical change.
Despite its specifics – Lee’s Maycomb was heavily based on her small home town of Monroeville, in which she grew up alongside close friend Truman Capote – its universal appeal came from the way it dramatised the personal, moral and philosophical conflicts that always result when the status quo is disrupted. Through the years, many have argued over Lee’s presentation of Atticus Finch’s liberal position – but the popular perception of the book’s didactic intentions have remained relatively simplistic.
Go Set a Watchman, an early draft of Mockingbird set 20 years after it, shattered all that. One must, really, leave aside all the speculation over whether Lee – elderly, having suffered a serious stroke, and living with impaired hearing and vision – did consent to publication; certainly, authorities who investigated charges of elder abuse found no reason to proceed.
It is true that things changed after her sister, Alice, like their father a lawyer, died in 2014 at the age of 103. But her new lawyer, Tonja Carter, has maintained that, after the manuscript was discovered in Lee’s safety deposit box in Monroeville, the author gave her permission to send it to her literary agents. Lee also described it to Carter as “the parent of Mockingbird”.
More details may emerge now – or we may never know anything more about it. Either way, my feelings about Go Set a Watchman’s eventual unveiling are fairly clear: it was both a horrible reminder of the realities of the global publishing industry and an exceptional opportunity to see a writer at different stages of development. Its crass marketing – here was something of genuine literary interest, but not, in any way other than the most literal, a “new book” – fuelled the apparent horror of readers who discovered that in old age Atticus Finch held racist and pro-segregation views.
It was as though the possibility that fictional characters might change – and not always for the better – in the way that people do was a sudden revelation; and that our affection for them somehow made them our property.
And yet no novel worth reading is static; its relationship with both the time of its creation and the numerous subsequent contexts in which it is read is – and should be – dynamic.
Go Set a Watchman’s release in a year of especially horrifying injustices perpetrated on America’s black communities should surely mean that we demand more complexity from art, not less. If we focus on the fact that Atticus is not as we would wish him to be, then we ignore the fact that Lee was attempting to explore the clash between the aged Atticus and his now adult daughter, Scout, who has returned from the wide world to Alabama.
The point is not whether Lee succeeded – the fact that her editor back then, Tay Hohoff, directed her to set the bulk of Watchman aside and instead develop Scout’s flashbacks to her childhood tells us she didn’t – but that she was attempting to create a fictional world that would seriously interrogate the issues.
As last year’s Man Booker Prize winner, Marlon James, said very recently in an interview with a Canadian radio station, art should make us uncomfortable.
“Relatability has nothing to do with empathy,” he argued. “With relatability you’re asking the piece of art to do the work. With empathy you do the work.” James’s Booker victory – he was the first Jamaican to win the prize – and the way he has since talked about the experience of black writers also prompt us to think about issues of writing and power. When I interviewed him for the Observer at the end of 2015, he remarked that “the idea that a writer of colour can actually use his imagination just never occurs to anybody” – instead, he or she is always expected to write directly of their own experience. To counter that, James is planning a novel about Vikings.
Lee both wrote about her experience – the milieu and the people that surrounded her, and the prospect of its alteration – and also about that which she might have observed, but could not have experienced. She could not relate to the racism that so seismically affected Mockingbird’s Tom Robinson, and those others wrongfully accused on which she loosely based the novel, but she empathised with him. The power with which she did so is borne out by Mockingbird’s continuing lives – a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that Aaron Sorkin would adapt the novel for Broadway. That sort of longevity does not generally happen with one-dimensional art, however much its contours get smoothed out.
Empathy is the novelist’s job. It is also the reader’s. And empathy often requires openness to the strange, the provisional and the shifting. Those expecting straight lines were not, after all, in much luck when it came to Umberto Eco, the Italian writer, academic and translator who died on Friday. At the age of 21, I remember reading Foucault’s Pendulum and having my tiny mind blown: conspiracy theories! Knights Templar! Secret societies and mysterious manuscripts!
Eco – who, like Lee, found enormous success with his debut novel, The Name of the Rose – wrote about the generation and meaning of meaning itself, and of the endlessness and futility of its pursuit. His novels were like vast, expansive puzzles that you knew you would probably never solve, but which somehow welcomed you into a great celebration of the imagination. He also loved Starsky and Hutch, but not as much as Columbo (this detail courtesy of a wonderful Paris Review interview).
But perhaps his greatest achievement was the belief that underpinned all his writing: that stories are connected to one another across the ages, in constant conversation with one another and with us. The best way to engage with all these stories is with a sense of wonder and play, and with a sense of great fortune. Your most important companion, whether you are reading To Kill a Mockingbird or The Name of the Rose, is curiosity.
