Watchman is the chronicle of a love of place curdling to disdain - even hate. Mockingbird, for all its dark jibes and Gothic twists, is a fairy tale, and Maycomb is its cozy fortress. It’s the product of an intensely loyal person who nonetheless never belonged - not as a tomboy in a debutante culture, not as an arriviste in haughty New York, and not as a prodigal-daughter spinster returning to a home she no longer knows.
In its rawness and fragmentation, the draft feels to anyone who’s read up on Lee (especially Charles Shields’s biography, Mockingbird) like notes from a journal toward something like proper fiction. Watchman tells a different story, one in which home, not fame, is the greatest source of angst. She came to New York, bright-eyed and dream-filled, published a book celebrating small-town life and justice, won enormous fame and then, paralyzed, retreated into the twin anonymities of Manhattan’s upper reaches and Monroeville’s fishing holes. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Nelle Harper Lee’s life story has set in the public imagination along the familiar lines of a recluse narrative. For every question it raises about its profoundly famous and private 89-year-old author, it also answers a mystery or two about Lee’s life and motivations. Watchman may leave Mockingbird fans equally horrified, and critics disappointed, but it’s a crucial biographical document. In Watchman, that heralded courthouse is where a 26-year-old Jean Louise (no longer Scout) watches her hero lawyer father attend a racist meeting the site of her former home, now an ice-cream parlor, is where she subsequently vomits in revulsion. For reasons as muddled and fraught as the draft itself, 2 million copies of Mockingbird’s inelegant precursor were published this week. On the other hand, the Maycomb of Go Set a Watchman, Mockingbird’s first draft, was contemporaneous, the sketch of a writer suspended between her racially stratified hometown and her adopted liberal refuge. Mockingbird’s Maycomb was a throwback, a ‘30s backwater rendered by a New York transplant in the late ‘50s.
Invariably, they come to the well-preserved county courthouse, which looks a lot like the place where Atticus Finch defends a black man falsely accused of rape, and they visit a stone wall, next to a shake-and-burger shack, that used to separate the houses where Lee and her childhood friend Truman Capote ( Mockingbird’s “Scout” Finch and Dill Harris) played and plotted. Tourists come to Monroeville, Alabama, for one reason: to visit the real-life model of To Kill a Mockingbird’s Maycomb and the birthplace and current residence of its author, Harper Lee.
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