Devoted readers of an author tend towards completism. We want to read all of it. The posthumous Hemingway books—there were several—beginning with “A Moveable Feast,” then “Islands in the Stream,” “The Garden of Eden” and so on, have become an integral part of the corpus. I think this will not be the case for either “Go Set a Watchman” or “The Land of Sweet Forever.”
“Watchman,” published in 2015, an early version of “Mockingbird,” is rarely mentioned today and I suspect that this collection will soon be forgotten also. “Sweet Forever” is eight short stories, all written in the 1950s, all rejected, never published, and eight pieces of nonfiction, written in the 1960s after “Mockingbird” had made Lee wildly famous and readers were eager to hear whatever she had to say.
The stories might be called juvenilia, the writings of youth, but Lee was between 23 and33 years old, not a child. Her college writings, many of them wickedly clever, might constitute juvenilia. As Casey Cep tells us in her introduction, the short stories and the essays do tell us what Harper Lee had on her mind in those days, as she adjusted to life in NYC: automobile traffic, dogs in apartments, movie theatres, at the same time musing on the life she had led in Monroeville, a million cultural years away.
These are scenes, anecdotes, not, strictly speaking, short stories, in which conventionally, a life is changed, an epiphany achieved. Casey Cep observes that Lee is just learning to move “beyond incident and towards plot.” As Gertrude Stein famously said of early Hemingway: “remarks are not literature.”
A couple of these stories do get developed later. “The Binoculars,” in which the protagonist runs into trouble in the first grade because she already knows how to read, becomes a good scene in Chapter 2 of “Mockingbird.”
“The Cat’s Meow “will attract interest because while “Watchman” revealed how conservative Lee’s father, Amasa Lee, probably was, showing Atticus at a Citizens Council meeting, this story contains a conversation with a character, called here Doe, clearly based on Alice Lee, who is described by the narrator as a “deep-water segregationist.”
A Black character, Arthur, Doe’s gardener, we learn, is a “Yankee Negro,” and Doe tells the narrator: “He’s the only Negro I’ve ever talked to who understands what I’m saying when I say it.” The narrator, having lived comfortably in “democratic” NYC, chooses to keep the family peace and not to argue with her sister. She “bites her tongue.” The story could not be published today by anyone with weaker virtue credentials than Harper Lee.
Of the nonfiction, one piece stands out as emotionally strong: the story of the Christmas where Lee’s friends, the Browns, give her the guarantee of enough money to write for one year. That was the gift that helped make “Mockingbird” possible and for which we should all be grateful.
