Closely watched trains

Go Set a Watchman is flying off the bookshelves as many persons are dying to find out what happened to Scout. However, some credits are a skeptical of this "sequel," which was apparently written a year before To Kill a Mockingbird.

It wouldn't be the first time an author wrote a prequel to a previous book, but for whatever reason Go Set a Watchman wasn't published in its day and we were given the young Scout instead. I doubt Harper Lee or her publisher could have imagined the power this book would have, bolstered by a movie two years later that featured Gregory Peck as the much revered Atticus Finch. The book is one of the most recognized American novels, selling more than 40 million copies worldwide.

Mockingbird was set in the 1930s. Scout was a precocious young girl who idolized her father, narrating the trial in which Atticus defended a young black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. Scout sneaks into the "coloured gallery" to witness the event, with Atticus finding himself at odds not just with the prosecuting attorney but the community as a whole, which had made up its mind that Tom was guilty.

Scout was telling this story in retropsect, and it could very well have emerged from the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman, which the publisher rejected at the time. Atticus didn't so much take the case as a civil rights advocate, but rather out of respect for the law. In this earlier novel, Atticus has many of the same petty biases as other respected white Southern men of his era and didn't feel that Blacks were ready to vote yet. Atticus quotes Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the right to vote is earned not given. Sadly, we learn the Atticus supported the status quo in the South, and this was really nothing more than a Pro Bono case out of deference for Capurnia, who had raised Atticus' two children after the death of his wife.

No longer Scout in Go Tell a Watchman, Jean Louise comes back to Maycomb, Alabama, as a self-possessed young woman who finds herself butting heads with her father and others over civil rights issues. It is the kind of didactic first novel you would expect from an idealistic young writer trying to reconcile herself with her Southern roots. It isn't too hard to doubt this novel came first, but Adam Gopnick thinks that at the very least the novel went through some editorial revisions that take To Kill a Mockingbird into account.

Go Tell a Watchman has come under attack mostly by critics who feel it dilutes the power of the former novel, and that we will never be able to look at To Kill a Mockingbird the same way again. That might be so, but then maybe we interpreted Mockingbird in ways we shouldn't have, and this newly released previous novel "corrects" some of those impressions. I guess some novels shouldn't be revisited, as we would prefer to hold onto our illusions.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...

TripplerAugust 21, 2015 at 12:19 AM
I am half way through the novel which is a terribly slow read but picks up after page 100. Had been on the VERY long waiting list for the book but St Paul's library system must have ordered a few extra volumes and they lent me a copy - thought I'd have to wait until December but got it last week.

Here is a review that interested me because of its reference to William Faulkner:

http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2015/02/go_set_a_watchman_whats_the_bi.html

That particular writer see Faulkner as an influence upon Lee and comments about the use of biblical allusions in their books. It will be recalled that when we discussed "Absalom, Absalom" I asserted that Faulkner's book was sermon like because of its repeated allusions to the Bible. My friend Gintaras did not see it that way as he felt miscegenation was the key issue whereas biblically based moral teaching was more of a marginal matter:

http://am-perspectives.blogspot.com/2011/12/history-and-sense-of-tragic.html#comment-form

The link I provided suggests that my analysis had solid foundation. But again, I leave it up to the reader to determine for him/herself as to the proper interpretation and intent of the author.
James FergusonAugust 24, 2015 at 4:02 PM
I'm sure it does, Trip. I think for Faulkner the religious references were more a way of reinforcing the themes of his novels and the way religion is so pervasive in Southern society, used to defend everything from slavery to the Jim Crow era. It was part of the world he created in Yoknapatwpha County.

In Absalom, Absalom, Sutpen was hardly what one could call a religious man. Faulkner set him up as the perfect foil for Antebellum Southern society, essentially a gatecrasher in a society that provided itself on its petty aristocratic lineage. It's perhaps my favorite book, as he places the antagonistic characters so much at odds with each other, especially when his Sutpen's first family comes back to haunt him.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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