Mockingbird (15 page)

“From Monday to Saturday,” said the Rev. J. O. Malone of the African-American Bethany Baptist Church in Burnt Corn, “you weren't welcome in Monroeville, unless you were working with somebody. Even just a pleasure stroll uptown was taboo, and oftentimes the law enforcement would find a way to bother you about doing that.” During the week, when blacks encountered white people in town, the protocol was “step aside, no eye contact, they didn't speak to you in public even if they knew you.”
33
A young white girl recently arrived in Monroeville from Texas was surprised by the amount of deference expected. “My Mom, my sister and I were walking home from a movie in town, and there was a black man approaching on the sidewalk. He took off his hat, and stepped off the sidewalk as we passed. I asked my mother why he did that, and she said ‘That's just the way they do down here.'” Likewise, when the Finches' housekeeper and nanny, Calpurnia in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, brings Jem and Scout to her church on a Sunday, “the men stepped back and took off their hats; the women crossed their arms at their waists, weekday gestures of respectful attention. They parted and made a small pathway to the church door for us.”

The South was a segregated society in law and custom; but in the eyes of whites, it worked—it was practical, so long as the cardinal belief was observed in every respect that black Americans were inferior.
34
Patiently, Atticus Finch in
Go Set a Watchman
explains to Jean Louise the paternalistic “white man's burden” notion—still accepted in the late 1950s—used to justify withholding black Americans' rights: “Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people. You should know it, you've seen it all your life. They've made terrific progress in adapting themselves to white ways, but they're far from it yet.” He's incredulous that his daughter would disagree. “Then let's put this on a practical basis right now,” he says. “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”
35
To him, integration invites anarchy, and he is far from alone in thinking so. During a debate in Congress in 1957 over a civil rights bill, a conservative New York–based magazine, the
National Review
, asked whether white Southerners would continue to be able to maintain political control over black communities if the bill passed. “The sobering answer is Yes—the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
36
Unquestionably, whites had the upper hand, and they would pull any levers, offer any argument that seemed feasible to maintain the status quo.

Harper Lee knew this, but the for the sake of exposing it in
Go Set a Watchman,
she has Jean Louise discover a racist tract among her father's papers, titled “The Black Plague.” A few pages later, from her perch in the “blacks only” balcony of the county courthouse, she observes a meeting of the local, pro-segregation White Citizens' Council. A demagogue is railing about “mongrelization,” and the audience includes not only her father, but also several other men—“men of substance and character, responsible men, good men”—from the town's professional class. This is a new kind of Klan, she thinks to herself, but essentially they are “the same people who were the Invisible Empire, who hated Catholics; ignorant, fear-ridden, red-faced, boorish, law-abiding, one hundred per cent red-blooded Anglo-Saxons, her fellow Americans—trash.” The revelation disgusts her and she feels physically sick. “What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved?”

Is her shock at what she discovers persuasive? Not very. It's hard to accept that Jean Louise, having been raised in the South, would be unaware of upright citizens condoning racism; but it sets the stage for her accusing Atticus of being a hypocrite. “You double-dealing, ring-tailed old son of a bitch! You just sit there and say ‘As you please' when you've knocked me down and stomped on me and spat on me, you just sit there and say ‘As you please' when everything I ever loved in this world's—you just sit there and say ‘As you please'—you love me! You son of a bitch!”

But then,
Go Set a Watchman
is Lee's first sustained effort at writing a novel. She struggles with point of view, vacillating between first and third person; the distance in scenes zooms in and out, from close up to far back; and sometimes it's hard to tell who is speaking. But as a cultural document about a time and place in America not so long ago, it's a valuable reading experience—especially because readers recoil from Atticus, just as Jean Louise does, now that they understand him through the eyes of an adult, and not from the perspective of nine-year-old Scout. Its best single scene demonstrates in breathtaking economy how racism makes strangers of people, even of those whom we love. Jean Louise realizes that she has never really known Calpurnia, the woman who raised her. “‘Tell me one thing, Cal,' she says, ‘just one thing before I go—please, I've got to know. Did you hate us?' The old woman sat silent, bearing the burden of her years. Jean Louise waited. Finally, Calpurnia shook her head.”
37

*   *   *

In spring 1957, Crain judged that the novel was ready to go out to publishers, and an unsolicited manuscript bearing the title
Go Set a Watchman
arrived at the offices of J. B. Lippincott in New York.
38
In the meantime, Harper Lee—not wanting to waste a day of her writing sabbatical—surprised Crain at the end of May with one hundred and eleven pages of a second novel,
The Long Goodbye.
39
Days later, he phoned her with good news: Lippincott had requested to meet with her about her novel. Her pen froze.

 

seven

Tay Hohoff Edits
Go Set a Watchman

Now for the story of a first novel where the genius of the author was unmistakable from the outset.

—J. B. Lippincott corporate history,
privately published (1967)

The Lippincott editors who assembled to meet Nelle were all men except one: the vice president, a woman in her early sixties dressed in a business suit, with her steel-gray hair pulled tightly back. Her name was Theresa von Hohoff—but she preferred the less Teutonic-sounding “Tay Hohoff.”
1
Her voice was raspy from too many cigarettes and her eyesight was failing, but her associates knew her as “a powerful gray-haired lady who knew her own mind” and spoke frankly.
2

Hohoff had been raised a Quaker in a multigenerational home in Brooklyn where “thee” and “thou” were used.
3
She attended the Brooklyn Friends School, and the Quakers' social consciousness had never left her. Outside the office she was completing a book of her own,
A Ministry to Man
(1959), a brief biography praising John Elliot Lovejoy—her ideal of a social reformer.

Elliot was a descendent of Elijah Lovejoy, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, because of his editorials condemning slavery. “Once in open court,” Hohoff wrote, “Lovejoy daringly cut a Negro's bonds before the Fugitive Slave Law could be invoked, while his small daughter looked on shivering with pride and terror.” John Lovejoy's goal was to work for the betterment of society by promoting the best life of others. In 1897, after receiving a doctorate in Germany, he founded the Hudson Guild, which became like Hull House in Chicago, one of New York's most successful settlements. Hohoff was deep into describing the zeal of this reformer when Harper Lee arrived for her appointment to discuss
Go Set a Watchman
.

Hohoff enjoyed working with young writers: some of the many she guided during her career included Zora Neale Hurston, Thomas Pynchon, and Nicholas Delbanco. As she studied the “dark-haired, dark-eyed young woman [who] walked shyly into our office on Fifth Avenue,” Hohoff instinctively felt she would like her.
4

To Lee, the meeting was excruciating. The Lippincott editors talked to her at length about
Go Set a Watchman,
explaining that, on the one hand, her “characters stood on their own two feet, they were three-dimensional.” On the other, the manuscript had structural problems: it was “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.” (A first reader reported to Hohoff that the manuscript was “diffuse,” “autobiographical,” and much too long.)
5
Hohoff made suggestions about how Nelle could address their concerns. Turning her head back and forth to acknowledge the remarks from this round-table dissection, Nelle obediently nodded and replied politely in Alabama-accented monosyllables, “Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am.” She assured them that she would try. Finally, they wished her luck on a revision and hoped to see her again. She left, taking her manuscript with her.

Hohoff hoped they hadn't discouraged her. (Someone in the office heard a rumor that she had arrived from Alabama with a trunkful of writing and “lived in a garret on macaroni.”)
6
Even though Lee had never published anything, not even an essay or short story, her draft of a novel “was clearly not the work of an amateur or a tyro,” Hohoff decided. In fact, it was hard to believe that Nelle was in her early thirties and had waited until now to approach a publisher. “But as I grew to know her better,” Hohoff said later, “I came to believe the cause lay in an innate humility and a deep respect for the art of writing. To put it another way, what she wanted with all her being was to
write
—not merely to ‘be a writer.'”
7

*   *   *

By the end of the summer, Lee had resubmitted her manuscript. Hohoff found “it was better. It wasn't
right
. Obviously, a keen and witty and even wise mind had been at work; but was the mind that of a professional novelist? There were dangling threads of plot, there was a lack of unity—a beginning, a middle, an end that was inherent in the beginning.”
8
But Lee's willingness to accept criticism, and how quickly she delivered a revision, convinced Hohoff to offer her a contract with an advance of a thousand dollars for an “untitled novel.”
9

As editor and writer got down to the business of working together, Hohoff discovered “a vivid and original personality hiding behind her intense reserve.” The younger woman's speaking and writing voices were very similar—wry, subtle, and engaging, perfectly suited for the regional southern novel she wanted to write. Hohoff encouraged her to pursue that vein, digging into Monroeville and its people. Another of Hohoff's authors, who knew Lee, said the challenge was making “the pieces fit together nicely, because they weren't in novelistic order. Tay started her thinking about the arrangement of events. It's like a piece of iron sculpture. It starts out as pieces of metal, and then through arranging and rearranging becomes a melded work of art.”
10

What story could Lee tell, Hohoff wanted to know, that could pull everything else together?

*   *   *

In
Go Set a Watchman
, Lee hasn't yet developed the ability to let drama carry ideas. She's heavy on summary and exposition, to the detriment of the story unfolding. “Her father's office had always been a source of refuge for her. It was friendly. It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable. She wondered if those were the same abstracts, files, and professional impedimenta on his desk that were there when she would run in, out of breath, desperate for an ice cream cone, and request a nickel. She could see him swing around in his swivel chair and stretch his legs. He would reach down deep into his pocket, pull out a handful of change, and from it select a very special nickel for her. His door was never closed to his children.”
11

But when she recreates scenes from childhood from the eye-level perspective of a child, another sensibility takes over. The reader is
there
, watching, belonging to the moment, as when Dill, Scout, and Jem are trying to decide how to spend the day:

Lemonade in the middle of the morning was a daily occurrence in the summertime. They downed three glasses apiece and found the remainder of the morning lying emptily before them. “Want to go out in Dobbs Pasture?” asked Dill. No. “How about let's make a kite?” she said. “We can get some flour from Calpurnia…” “Can't fly a kite in the summertime,” said Jem. “There's not a breath of air blowing.” The thermometer on the back porch stood at ninety-two, the carhouse shimmered faintly in the distance, and the giant twin chinaberry trees were deadly still. “I know what,” said Dill. “Let's have a revival.”

Lee is at her best when she's not trying to craft a treatise and hammer it out as dialogue. In the passage just quoted, there's atmosphere, a mood, and an authenticity about the nature of childhood that becomes one of the best-loved aspects of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Hohoff must have recognized these gems scattered throughout
Watchman
, the evidence being that the change in perspective from a twenty-eight-year-old Jean Louise to a nine-year-old Scout is what drives the second novel and creates its charm. The change also allows Atticus to become the moral agent, instead of Jean Louise, decrying like a modern Elijah all those who have sinned in Maycomb.

*   *   *

Second, a trial is mentioned in passing in
Go Set a Watchman
. “Atticus took his career in his hands, made good use of a careless indictment, took his stand before a jury, and accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County: he won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl.… [T]he defendant had only one arm. The other was chopped off in a sawmill accident.” In miniature, it sounds like the Tom Robinson trial in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. And indeed a trial with similar elements had occurred when Lee was a child, and her father was editor and publisher of the
Monroe Journal
.