Two by Harper Lee

December is Finally Here!

So it’s time to start the preparations in earnest, and to enjoy all of the lights and the festivities of the holiday season. I’m trying my best to take a breath and mindfully enjoy the oncoming days and the chill of early winter. This past year has been a bit rough and a lot busy and I’m looking forward to a bit of slowdown. Not that the holidays are particularly slow, but we have a new rule in this house: We are striving to only be out two evenings a week. No densely packed concerts this year! As much as I wanted to experience every special event, I feel like I wasn’t present enough at each of them and that’s just a waste.

A calico tabby lies in the sunshine and flicks her tail. Beside her are two books by Harper Lee.

On the blog this month I’m going to feature new re-issues of classic literature and books that could make good gifts for avid readers. To start off, I’m featuring two publications of Harper Lee’s formerly unpublished work. Go Set a Watchman was written in the 1950s and was published by Harper in 2015 to much fanfare and literary debate. The Land of Sweet Forever was just published this year and had an epically huge million-copy print run.

Harper Lee passed away in 2016, just a year after the first of these books was released, and while she did sign off on Go Set a Watchman, it’s been dogged by controversy. The Land of Sweet Forever has similarly raised questions about what to do with a literary estate and how to handle unpublished work by classic authors that have recently died.

A calico tabby lounges on a sunny bed with two hardcover books by Harper Lee.

Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman is a previously unpublished novel, that I think is quite solidly and obviously a first draft of Lee’s contribution to literary canon, To Kill a Mockingbird. Many of the same characters are here: Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, Atticus Finch, Calpurnia, etc. However, Jean Louise is an adult who has come home to Maycomb, Alabama for visit and is now faced with the racism of the family and friends that raised her and the disillusionment in her father’s subtle form of bigotry. No trial of Robinson, no Boo Radley, just that awkward moment in your twenties when you see your relatives for who they really are.

Beside a calico tabby lay two hardcover books by Harper Lee.

There is some good writing here, but I agree with most other reviewers: If this was the book that was published instead of To Kill a Mockingbird, I don’t think Lee would have been as remembered as she is today. It has the same message as To Kill a Mockingbird, but it is not delivered effectively and the novel has a meandering structure that makes it difficult to read despite its length. It was a novel that was written in one of the lowest points of Lee’s life and she refused to publish it for decades and I can see why. The piece has the feeling of therapy writing and of a writer trying to get to the issue that they really want to write about but can’t quite touch.

Beside a calico tabby is a copy of Go Set a Watchman. The cover is a blue landscape of a train coming towards the viewer and a tree beside the tracks.

The Land of Sweet Forever

I found The Land of Sweet Forever a good deal easier to read as well as being a better representation of Lee’s body of work. It features unpublished fragments and stories as well as some that were published in various venues. Readers of Go Set a Watchman will see a repetition of some scenes and chapters here including one entire chapter that here appears as most of the titular story, and this happens again in the story entitled ‘The Water Tank’ which is used again in the chapter in Go Set A Watchman where Scout recounts an incident she had when she was child and had no idea what pregnancy was.

Particularly, I loved ‘The Roomful of Kibble’ in the short stories section and the essay she wrote on Truman Capote and his time in Kansas writing In Cold Blood (one of my favourite books). In general, I thought that The Land of Sweet Forever was enlightening, but only if you approach it as an artifact and not as a book for entertainment. I find I’m pretty divided on whether or not unpublished work by deceased writers should be published without their input, but I think the bad taste that lingers when it comes to Harper Lee’s work comes from how insistent she was while she was alive that these things not be seen by the public. Also, her death is still relatively fresh — this is not a writer who has been gone for centuries.

A calico tabby lies beside a copy of The Land of Sweet Forever. The cover is white with an image of black tree branches with pale green leaves.

Letting Go of Expectations

I’m trying to let go of all the expectations I usually have for the holiday season. I will be happy if they are peaceful and I am going to let them roll out in front of me without any attempts to exert a death grip of control over every aspect. Time to let go and let the holiday spirit just take me where it will. It’s a hectic time of year, and I don’t need to stress myself out further by holding it up to some yardstick of golden years gone by.