The biggest literary event in decades is coming to stores this upcoming Tuesday, but is Harper Lee's long desired and completely unexpected follow-up to her 1955 masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, what it claims to be? The controversy surrounding the release of Go Set a Watchman is certainly interesting fodder.
What we have been told is that Tonja Carter, Lee's longtime friend and lawyer reportedly discovered the novel when she was checking on the condition of the original manuscript for Mockingbird at Lee's secure archive near her Alabama home. Tonja Carter worked with Alice Lee, Harper's lawyer sister and former caretaker up until Alice's death in November of last year. The manuscript for the upcoming novel was allegedly right there the whole time which brings some speculation by itself since it is hard to believe that a publishable manuscript from Lee was just resting in her archive for over sixty years. The miraculous discover sounds somewhat farfetched already, but given that Lee, who has seen her health decline in recent years, was ecstatic that the novel was found because she thought it was lost many years ago.
Lee once described that she wanted to be the "Southern Jane Austen," and even tried but failed to finish a novel following Mockingbird called The Long Goodbye. It also appears that Lee was inspired by her time spent with her childhood friend Truman Capote as they researched his hugely successful true-crime book, In Cold Blood, since Lee herself was working on a true-crime narrative of her own until at least the mid-80's titled The Reverend, but it was never completed. A writer with such grandiose expectations of herself and her work was unable to finish another novel, but yet she had a finished manuscript in her archive the whole time?
The story goes that Lee wrote Go Set a Watchman before Mockingbird, which chronicles Scout as an adult, and after her editor gave her notes on it and told her it did not quite work, she followed the suggestion of backing the story up to Scout's childhood and a classic American novel was born. All of this begs the question of if there were people outside of Lee and her family that knew about this first attempt at a novel, how is it that it has been kept a secret for more than half a century? Of course, Lee could have thought that the novel was not up to the standards she held herself to, but after trying to complete subsequent books, would she not be curious about the quality of the manuscript that never made it to publication? We should give Lee more credit than to believe that the manuscript was lost since we are talking about a writer who wrote one of the most beautiful and thought provoking novels of all time. Harper Lee is a creative genius, not a fool who simply loses her own words.
If the forgotten manuscript story is disregarded then the story of its discovery proves to be extremely unlikely. The truth behind the novel may never be known but there are a few more plausible explantations than what we have been fed by her representatives.
At the age of 89, Lee is virtually legally blind and deaf from the aftermath of a stroke several years ago that has caused her to be in the care of others, wheelchair-bound in an assisted-living home. In her declined health, Lee was almost duped out of the rights to To Kill a Mockingbird in 2013 when the son-in-law of her former literary agent maliciously used Lee's stroke as a way to try and steal the copyright of her novel. The case was settled out of court, but it definitely raises some uncertainty over the capability of people who are supposed to be looking out for her to even let this happen originally. It is not inconceivable that the people close to her are not necessarily looking out for her best interests, and the timing of her sister's death and the reveal of the new novel provides a spark to this notion. The possibility that the novel was stolen from Lee, either through devious legal movements or actually physically stolen, cannot be discounted.
Lee had trouble making To Kill a Mockingbird resemble a novel as it more closely fell in line with a collection of interconnected short stories. With regards to that, there is a claim to be made that what was discovered was in fact just a collection of stories from previous drafts that Lee never intended to rework, and now they are being released. If that has any merit, then her novel is not completely genuine, because with her deteriorated health, it would be impossible for her to piece together the content or even edit it at all. Considering that it was considered to not be up to publishing standards when she reportedly wrote it, the over sixty year old manuscript would likely need some major revisions. Harper Lee could not make any revisions, bringing a third party into the fold, and if that is true, then the literary world is getting a half-hearted gift.
The genius of Harper Lee was her ability to make every word count as To Kill a Mockingbird proved. If parts of Go Set a Watchman are not from the mind of the writer whose name is etched on the cover then this monumental literary event is not at all what it seems, and the disheartening part about that is that we will likely never know the truth behind Go Set a Watchman. The most anticipated second novel of arguably all time will be released regardless of the questions surrounding it next week, and millions will read it and love it, but the speculation of its origin and fruition will likely always be an unsettling conundrum.