Think of the last book that you read,
whether fiction or non-fiction: the compelling characters, the story arcs, the
way it did or didn’t quite work out in the end, the conversations. You probably
didn’t notice the typesetting or the spelling or any of the technical aspects
unless you work in the publishing field. You probably couldn’t read between the
lines to figure out what had been added in later, or what had been shaped from
an original version. And if you didn’t, that’s good: it means the editor did his
or her job.
I’m an editor. Yes, I’m obviously also a
writer, but first and foremost, I’m an editor. The reason the episode guides
that I write tend to go through each episode and piece together a puzzle is
because this type of detective work is what I do every day. That book that you
just read: unless it was self-published, it didn’t come off the author’s
computer, or typewriter, or handwritten notepad fully formed. There was an
editor’s hand at work. An editor who, to name a few of the things I’ve done in
the past, perhaps told the author that the ending didn’t work at all and it
needed to be rethought or readers would be unsatisfied. Or that a particular
character was unnecessary, and then went through the book and carefully
stripped out all traces of that character so no one would ever know it had
existed. Or corrected a sentence where a character is driving westward on
Gerrard and hangs a right to drive to the CN Tower. Or where the editor simply
talked a writer through a particularly horrible writer’s block. Or got to the
end of editing a mystery book only to realize the killer couldn’t have actually
done it, because way back on page 52 we had his alibi, so we’ll need to wipe
that out and give it to another character. Perhaps when reading a non-fiction
book you marvelled at how interesting the information was throughout. It’s
possible an editor had gone through and stripped out all of that uninteresting
side information that wasn’t necessary, thus saving you having to slog through
it later.
The author is king. The editor is the
author’s advisor, the first reader who looks at these works of staggering
genius (as an editor, I will sign up nothing less) and does everything he or
she can to make it even better. But we stay in the background, because the resulting
book is not ours — it belongs to an author who worked tirelessly and
brilliantly, with us coaching, encouraging, and giving advice along the way.
Why did I become an editor? On the one
hand, I wanted to work with books. But the moment I realized I wanted to be an
editor occurred one day in my 20th Century British Literature course in my
undergrad at university. We were studying T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, one of my favourite poems, and the professor
brought in a facsimile of Ezra Pound’s edit of the poem. For the first time, I
saw the hand of an editor at work. Pound had the mind of a genius, and he was
working with a friend who was a genius. So here were two men working to achieve
a work of stunning timelessness — one was the writer; the other was the editor
who gave him new ideas in the margins, or corrected his use of Greek mythology,
or suggested a different word that might be more evocative, or threw out entire
passages and suggested a different direction. I’d had no idea that an editor
had that much input into a book. I imagined the thrill of working with someone
who could create such beauty, but working alongside them to make it even
better, of making a suggestion and having an author excitedly take it and
incorporate it into their work.
That’s what I wanted to do.
In the late 1950s, a young writer named
Harper Lee was sending around her manuscript, which was called Go Set a Watchman. It fell into the
hands of a brilliant editor named Tay Hohoff, who thought the book was fine,
but it could be much better. In 1960, Harper Lee published what turned out to
be one of the great literary classics
of all time: To Kill A Mockingbird.
This book about a young girl in the South who is affected by racism, civil
unrest, and a town divided resonated with readers across America. Now, 55 years
later, its themes of what it means to be an outsider, of acceptance or
rejection, of race and how the actions of the few can affect the lives of the
many, is still being taught in schools, and it was voted the most important
book of the 20th century by American librarians.
If you’ve read the book or seen the
excellent film with Gregory Peck, you know why it’s important. Atticus Finch is
a character who leaps off the pages, even though you won’t find a quieter or more
restrained character in the book. Told from the point of view of Scout Finch,
we older readers chuckle and giggle at her shenanigans as we look up to her
older brother Jem. We love their cook/nanny/housekeeper Calpurnia, but most of
all it’s the very famous courtroom scene that resonates. When an
African-American man, Tom, is charged with having raped and beaten a white girl,
Mayella, who lives down near the town dump, all of Macomb County is in an
uproar. There are those who simply assume he did it, while others aren’t so
sure. Mayella’s father is an alcoholic who’s made more enemies than friends in
this town, but on the other hand, the accused is Black. For some, that’s all it takes to assume he did it.
(Warning: Spoilers for Mockingbird ahead.) Atticus Finch is handed the case by the judge,
and asked to defend the accused. He takes the case because he has to. But
because he’s an excellent lawyer who believes that everyone deserves the right
to a fair trial, he gives the man one. Scout and Jem sneak into the upper
balcony where the African-American people sit, and listen to the entire case,
unbeknownst to Atticus. Through very careful cross-examination of Mayella and
her father, and in a reasonable discussion with Tom, Atticus presents a case
that no one could deny: Mayella lured Tom into the house and kissed him, and
her father came home, saw it, and beat her senseless and forced her to accuse
Tom or he’d kill her. The evidence is undeniable.
Unless, of course, this is the South in the
1930s. In which case Tom is convicted. When the verdict is handed down, Scout
and Jem are beside themselves. They can’t believe what they just heard, and
they’re enraged at the obvious injustice. Atticus, on the other hand, quietly
packs up his bag and walks out of the courtroom. As he does so, the children
are tapped on the shoulder and turn to see every African-American person in the
balcony standing out of respect for their father.
A lot more happens in the book, but this
court case stands at the centre, and is the reason we still read and study this
book today. Atticus Finch has been hailed as one of the great heroes of
literature, a man who stood up for his beliefs and went against the status quo
to try to ensure that a man would be treated as an equal, regardless of the
colour of his skin.
Harper Lee never published another book. As
the years went on, there were stories of an editor who’d worked heavily on the
book with her, and tales that her friend Truman Capote had written large
portions of it. She and Capote were very close, and it was said that she
equally contributed to his development of his own classic, In Cold Blood.
Then, last year, to the shock of the
literary community, HarperCollins announced they had the sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, a long-lost book
that was now coming to light. No sooner did every bibliophile add this new took
to their to-read list on Goodreads than the news came out that Harper Lee
perhaps wasn’t on board. Reportedly senile and in a nursing home, she was being
taken advantage of, reports said, and didn’t want this book to see the light of
day. It would be akin to reading someone’s teenage angsty poetry, and no author
of the calibre of Harper Lee should be remembered for that. Reportedly her
sister had fought tooth and nail to keep the manuscript suppressed, but when
she died at the age of 102, there was no one left to fight on behalf of Lee.
Enter an unscrupulous lawyer and a money-hungry publisher, said the reports,
and you have Go Set a Watchman.
Now I was torn. I really wanted to read
more of Harper Lee’s writing, but was the book sanctioned by her? The publisher
said yes; the public said no. It was unclear what was true. HarperCollins was
touting this as the sequel to Mockingbird,
a book set 20 years after the events of the first one, and that we’d see what
would happen to the characters. In my excitement on the first day, I’d
pre-purchased the book, and then promptly forgot that I’d done so.
Fast-forward to July, when the book came
out, and appeared on my doorstep. I didn’t realize I’d ordered the book, and
had half a mind to simply return it. Especially now that, in the week before
its release, it had come to light through reviewers that the Atticus Finch in
this book was actually a racist in his later years, that Scout was flaky, the
writing was weak, and this was not the sort of book that fans of Mockingbird would want to read. Not only
are the characters disappointing as hell, but there are ENTIRE PASSAGES that
are exactly the same as in Mockingbird,
said the reports. Who would want to read that?!
But I also discovered something else — this
was NOT the sequel to Mockingbird,
despite HarperCollins promoting it as such. This was the original manuscript.
Suddenly, this was an entirely different
matter. There was no way I was sending the book back now.
And so I read it. And as a book, it’s fine;
at times it’s great, and at times it’s lousy, but overall, it’s fine. If this
had been Harper Lee’s first foray into fiction, it probably would have done
well, and she would have been promptly forgotten. No one would have been
studying this book 55 years later.
BUT... as a historical document that sheds
new light into one of the greatest books ever written, Go Set a Watchman is perhaps the most important book of the 21st
century thus far. Because this is not a sequel — it’s the very book that was
handed to Tay Hohoff all those years ago. And when you read it, you can see
exactly where To Kill a Mockingbird
came from.
Scout returns to Macomb County years after
her father had defended a Black man against wrongful rape allegations, and he
won the case. But when she goes to town and sees him in a town meeting, where
he allows a man to speak shockingly racist things, and seems to back him up,
she’s appalled. She can’t believe the very man who’d given her so many values
as a child could have turned into this person. And then we get flashbacks to
some of those moments of her childhood, with her brother Jem and their friend
Dill. After she has it out with her aunt about what she overheard her father
saying, she confronts Atticus, and there’s a long section of the book that
consists solely of the argument between the two of them, with her offering up
every attack against his racism, and him calmly taking those attacks and
throwing back something else. Scout comes off as rational, intelligent,
sympathetic, and outraged, and Atticus is infuriatingly calm, and in a couple
of moments, a little unnerved. I won’t say what ultimately happens, but I will
say that when I read the dialogue between the two of them, it seemed like very
daring material for a book written by a white women from the South in the
1950s.
And, perhaps, it’s why it wasn’t published.
Maybe the world wasn’t quite ready for a book that was that sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement.
I will warn you now: reading Go Set a Watchman won't always be a pleasant experience. There are moments of abject racism in this book where you'll want to hurl it across the room. And there are moments of outdated sexism that will just make you shake your head. But the thing is, we can't turn away from those moments. Because while the sexism is, as I said, largely outdated, the racism, devastatingly, isn't. There were times in Go Set a Watchman where I couldn't believe how progressive some of Scout's arguments were against her father. And then I had the depressing realization that the only reason they seem progressive is because we're still saying them.
Reading this book before Mockingbird — and should you take up
both of them, I strongly urge you to read Watchman
first, and Mockingbird second,
because it’s a much richer experience to see the genesis of Mockingbird than to read it as a sequel,
which it is not — I could imagine the editor working with Lee. I imagined her
reading it and saying look, I really like what you’ve done here, but I think
the argument at the end simply isn’t something the publishers will go for. Why
don’t we be a little subtler with how we jar their sympathies? See these little
moments where we flash back to Scout’s childhood? I have to admit; that’s where
your book really comes to life. Why don’t we simply come up with a way to
actually go back to that time and recreate the very summer that she spends so
much of this book talking about? She keeps referring to an Atticus that’s
clearly not the one in these pages: what if you showed us that Atticus, but
let’s not make it easy. We’ll paint him as a hero, but let’s have the judge
force him to take the case; he’s not just taking it out of the goodness of his
heart. And right here, where you say he won the case? What if he presents an
irrefutable case and actually loses?
Wouldn’t that garner the sympathies of audiences even more? And since this is
the story of outsiders, why not have one closer to home? Like maybe a next-door
neighbour who never comes out of his house? I want to evoke that voice of
childhood: Scout and Jem are children who don’t see black and white, they
simply see people. It’s only in the jadedness of adulthood that racism festers
and grows. I want the story told from the point of view of a child. Perhaps
that might force the audience — without them even realizing that it’s happening
— to realize that Scout is right.
And Harper Lee went back to the drawing
board and reimagined the entire book. There are stories I’ve heard of Lee going
through serious anxiety while working on the book, of throwing the pages out of
the window at one point and then calling her editor to tell her what she’d just
done, and of her editor ordering her outside to go and pick up all of those
pages. She was encouraged, coaxed, and sometimes perhaps forced to get a better
story out of what she’d already written. But reading Watchman, you can see the same wit, style, and sense of humour on
every page. I don’t believe Capote wrote this book, because the voice of In Cold Blood is very different than the
one we get here, and with the exception of whatever editing actually happened
at HarperCollins within the past year to get this book to publication, we can
assume that most of this book is Lee’s raw manuscript. And there are moments of
brilliance in there.
Right before I started reading this book, I
saw a review in Entertainment Weekly
that gave the book a D+, if I remember correctly, and it said quite simply:
don’t read this. If you do it will ruin your experience of To Kill a Mockingbird forever. After having read Go Set a Watchman, I can honestly say
that that review is one of the single most irresponsible pieces of journalism
I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Read Go
Set a Watchman for a perfect example of a work of fiction that was
rejected. Read it to see how much work an author really has to go through to
get from Draft A to the finished product. Read it to see just how much input an
editor can have in a book. Read it to realize that not everyone can be an
author, and the few who do are the ones who have gone through editorial
processes like this one. Read it to see how the germ of a great idea may be
hidden in a not-so-great one. Read it to see the flashes of brilliance that Lee
exhibited even in her unedited first draft. Read it to see what a remarkable
writer she really is. Read it to convince yourself that there’s no way Capote
wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and that
instead, this book is the result of the sweat and tears of one author, working
alongside a very encouraging editor.
And then go read To Kill a Mockingbird. And see what the result of all that work can
be. Read it to see that it’s not the cut and dried book people seem to think it
is. Read it to see that Atticus isn’t exactly a civil rights hero — he was
forced to fight the case, and when he lost he simply walked out of the
courthouse and shrugged his shoulders because he’d done the best he could and
that was that. Read it to see where the good passages in Go Set a Watchman became exquisite ones in Mockingbird. Read it and marvel at what an extraordinary book it
still is, and always will be.
