Bittersweet Infamy - #37 - Go Set a Watchman

Episode Date: February 6, 2022

Taylor tells Josie about the controversial "sequel" to Harper Lee's classic novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Plus: a trip to the Gates of Hell, Turkmenistan's ever-burning fire pit.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Taylor, I know that you have heard of the Well to Hell, because I- Yeah, I remember hearing about that somewhere. I told you about it in episode 12, Well to Hell. But to get us warmed up, literally, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Gates to Hell. Okay. I mean, I've seen Little Nicky. I don't know what else you can tell me. I'm just going to relay the whole plot of Little Nicky.

This podcast episode is not performing well. No, the Gates to Hell have come across my radar because in the near future, they will be closing. So we have a- That's good. It depends who you are, right? It's all relative. I don't know. Empathy for the Devil, man. It's a deep- It's a hot take. It's deep. Truly, truly. So I'm taking you to the wide, open, windy, hot desert in Turkmenistan. Okay. And we're going to the small town called Darvazga. No, that's not how you say it. You say it Darvazza. It's just Darvazga. That's it. It's not that fucking hard.

Oh, you're so hard on yourself, man. So outside of this tiny town is what can be called the Door to Hell, what has also been called Shining of the Karakum. Karakum is the name of the larger desert where it is. Or it's more common name, the Gates of Hell. It is an open pit. The Gates of Hell are open currently. Yes. A crater, one and one-third acres large. It's always holes. On fire. Holes on fire. Okay, Taylor? I like it. No, I like it. You're always giving me the latest and disconcerting whole news. It's a service that I value. I want to keep you updated. Keep you safe. Absolutely. Please continue.

To get a sense of this, the diameter is 69 meters wide and a depth of about 30 meters. So if you need to think in feet, that's 226 feet in diameter and across and 98 feet deep. So like 100 feet. It's in the middle of the desert and it's a very windy, it's a desert. So there's wind and apparently when you get close to it, it is physically hot to be around. Even in the pitch of night when it's the desert is so cold and there's so much wind in the desert there's all this hot wind that blows around the Gates to Hell and it attracts all this different wildlife. Like apparently desert spiders are attracted to the light and the heat and they throw themselves into this crater. Whoa, that's so metal. It's very metal. Very

metal. And it's a really, it's a really big tourist destination. It's about three and a half hours from Ashbegat. No. You have to get in like a four wheel drive vehicle and just like head out across the sand. It's not like take the interstate and then like take a ride at exit 395. It's like, no, just like. By the furniture store. Yeah. Exactly. I got so hung up on the idea of desert spiders and then you just kept mowing. Like straight ahead. Well, I was like, wait, wait, no. Desert spiders. No. Yeah. And then you're like, yeah, people come and I'm like, no. But the desert spiders. Why are you going to see a fiery hole? A fiery hole full of desert spiders. But you know what's also kind of cool? There's a lot of wild camping that happens around there too.

So many tourists go and it's not as cold and it's such a sight that people like not camp on the like lip of the crater or whatever of the Gates of Hell, but like close by. There's a lot of desert camping. Does the fire ever go out or is it just fire, fire, fire? Boom. It has never gone out since the creation of the Gates to Hell. So I'm going to tell you about this. In 1971, when the Soviets were in Turkmenistan, they were. So it's Soviet holes always with you. I love a Soviet hole. Is that so wrong? Can a girl just love a Soviet hole? I'm not here to king shame you. Thank you. Thank you. 1971, the Soviets were in Turkmenistan and they were drilling for natural gas specifically for methane. They hit this specific spot, which is pretty common geologically

actually. It's just like a bubble where the natural gas has kind of like popped up closer to the, you know, the surface of the earth. But when they, when they drilled into it with a rig, it ignited the methane that was in there and the entire rig blew up. Just no casualties. No casualties. Nobody died. But the rig completely, you know, exploded, melted. However, it, it do in all that heat and what's left or what was left was this crater. Now, initially, the crater was not on fire. It was just this pocket, right? But it was leaking large amounts of methane. Right, which is very flammable. Very flammable and also could be very, very poisonous for the environment. So typically what they do with drill, I don't know. I mean, I see it a lot in Texas,

but like at the top of a structure where they're bleeding out natural gas, they'll light the very top to burn off the natural gas. So it's not entering. I see. Yeah. And supposedly it's safe. So they thought, okay, we'll just burn off the methane that's in here. And I mean, kind of a bummer not to be able to mine it and harness it and sell it, but you know what, it'll be safer this way. So reports kind of differ. They don't know if it happened in 71 or if it was like even a decade later, they lit the bad boy on fire and it's been on fire ever since. They haven't been able to tap that pocket because it's leaking in from somewhere else or they don't even fucking know. All they know is that this shit has been on fire for about 50 fucking years.

But yeah, it's hard to get information on those, I don't know, like Soviet resource extraction operations. No, no. Yeah. And then because there's reports from the Soviet Union about what happened and who's fault it was, and then there's like the Turkmen reports and who's at fault and they all kind of, you know, don't correlate. But 2022, things are changing. The world is a different place. And there's a lot of reasons why there's a push to stop the burning. One of them is that it's becoming more and more of a popular tourist site. And there's some concern that the most popular tourist site in Turkmenistan is this gate to hell. I'm burning to it. Well, we have a really big fire. And I actually like that on the cover of the brochure. Like that's a hard stop. It's kind of

like a Springfield tourist attraction. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. There's of course environmental concerns that when you're burning all of this off that that burnt particle matter is not super great for the surrounding inhabitants. So there's that. There is also the fact that the president of Turkmenistan, a man who has been president since about, I think, 2015 or so. So for a while. Also, that's code for being a very authoritarian leader in Turkmenistan. Garband Gully, Birdie Mohamed. You did that? Wow. Thank you. Good job. Okay, but here's the thing about Garband Gully. We're on a first name basis. Garbs. G-bang. Exactly. So he is variant gold, variant marble. Yeah. Ashbegat has the Guinness World Record now since he's been in power of the

most white marble clad buildings in the world. Congratulations. Donald Trump is pissed that he doesn't have that one. I know. There's, yeah, there's some roughness there for sure. But I say all of this to just put in context that extinguishing the gates to hell falls in line with this kind of juging up of a location and a country and an identity. Right. The white marble cladding. Yes. Just the cladding, right? Yes. Our guy, Garband Gully, has set up a research committee to see how they can go about extinguishing the fires in the gates to hell. So nothing has concretely been done, but there is concerted and authoritarian interest in letting that crater singe itself out. The desert night sky going completely dark.

I was really working up to the time limit on this one. This is what I do every time, Taylor. This like stress and adrenaline and like endorphin situation you're having right now. That's my life. I live on that. I like to think of myself as being a little bit better than you. Well, I mean, it's true, but not this time. It's not true. No, I, I, there's a lot of moving stuff around. And I, and I mentioned that because I am decently diligent about having stuff prepared. Oh, very much so. Put it to you this way. I've tinkered with stuff right before we went to recording, but this was like, whoa, this was, I did like 33% of this in the two hours before the show. The reason that I mention it is because it sort of made me feel like I was back

in high school or, you know, you know, when you would like, you'd have that essay, you'd have the book report due tomorrow and you would just be like, why, like, why have I put myself in this position? Or you'd be doing it like right before you'd be sitting on the floor at lunch hour, like outside class being like, fuck. Yeah. Yeah. I so want a corn dog, but I can't, I gotta finish this. That all is apt because today we will be doing a little book report. Yeah. Okay, cool. I want you to, all that aside, close your eyes, reestablish the scene. Okay. You've just entered a church rec room. There's some shitty chairs. There's kind of some people milling around. Yeah. You see that Judy made some snacks and then Viv cuts in and is like,

no, Judy bought those snacks. Okay. I mean, I'm still gonna eat them, but whatever. Classic Judy. Everybody kind of sits down in the like unfolding brown, creaky plastic chairs with their, you know, their little, their little cup of like, whatever coffee was left over from the AA meeting, you know, like this is the vibe. Okay. Yes. Today we are gathered for the bittersweet infamy book club. Josie, did you do the reading? No. That's kind of in line though. Well, today we will be talking about a controversial book. Go figure. A million little things. A million little pieces. Whatever. I didn't read it. No. Okay. We will be talking about a book called Go Set a Watchman. Oh, shit, dog. That's okay. I'm ready. I'm ready. Harper

Lee, baby. Harper Lee. This is the controversial sequel to Harper Lee's beloved 1960 Pulitzer prize winning novel to kill a mockingbird. A book once described by Oprah Winfrey as our national novel. Well, yeah. Can I tell you what I know about to go? Absolutely. Go Set a Watchman. Go Set a Watchman. Harper Lee, from what I remember, did not publish very much, if at all, after she wrote to kill a mockingbird. And her dying goddamn wish was that the book to go set a watchman would not be published. And it was not until her death that her estate, the people in charge of her estate, released it for public reading, because she was in like in the last few years of her life, she was not in like full, full mental capacity. And she signed

away the rights without knowing. Okay, so that is the goss that I have heard and never read it. Because I didn't do the reading, it's book club. But I've heard that, as Oprah Winfrey says, to kill a mockingbird is our national novel. It is a beautiful, rich understanding of race in America at that time. And to go set a watchman is like, Oh, Atticus. It's just, it's just go set a watchman. What do I keep saying? Go set a watchman. To go set a watchman. Oh, to go. Okay. Yeah. There's no two. There's no two. Just go set a watchman. But go set a watchman. Atticus is like, Well, look, isn't so bad. Like, there's a little bit of that going on. And it's like a total racial understanding of the US. So that's what I come with.

Okay, see, I'm interested because some of what you said was right. Some of what you said was wrong. Okay, some of what you said was somewhere in the middle. And all of what I said was intelligent and eloquent, I know. But I kind of came into this story and ended up finding out, and when I say finding out, I mean finding out like two and a half hours ago, that certain parts of the story that I thought I knew were sort of similar to what you just said, half right, half wrong, whatever. I was very interested in this as a piece of like 2015 ephemera that there was when Mitchell hosted the Twilight Zone episode, he described that movie as having a bit of a stink around it. And I find the same about this book. There's like a bad vibe around this book. And so that's

kind of what drew me to it. And I was like, do we maybe need to reappraise this book? How does it play different now than it did when it was released? Spoiler, yeah, it kind of does. So let's just get to the bottom. I appreciate your signposting all of this stuff about the book because it's going to take a while in my telling this story until we get back to this book, Go Set a Watchman. So here's how it's going to go. First of all, if you're listening. You're going to go set us straight. Yes, you nailed it. I'm going to go set a watch, man, and it's going to send us back in time. I get it. I get it. Not my best work, but you know what? It's work though. It's work. You're doing the work. It's honest work.

Okay. Here's how this is going to go. First of all, if you are listening to this podcast to complete your 10th grade English homework. Hello. Welcome. Glad to have you. Oh my god. Welcome. Is it 3am before the assignment? Yes. Legit. That's why. And this is about like to kill a mockingbird. So I am straight up taking us back to 10th grade today. Yes. I'm ready. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the book's author Harper Lee, Very Abridged. And then I'll tell you a little bit about the original book, To Kill a Mockingbird, Also Very Abridged. This is a very, I mean, I couldn't vote for it outside of North America, but in a North American context, this is a very famous and widely read book.

I expect many of the listeners will have read it, but I will go over it in case you haven't. Maybe you just read the spark notes. So maybe you just read the spark notes. And then after that, we will talk about the publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2015, 55 years after the original book, and why it bent people out of shape. Oh, it's so stoked. I love book clubs. I know. Fun, right? We should have a bittersweet infamy book club. This is it. We're doing it right now. Oh yeah, I forgot. That's why I never finished my assignments all the time. I forget that I am doing them. I'm in the midst of them as they are happening.

Now Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926. I always leave the full data in case it's a listener's birthday. In the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, as the youngest of four, her mother was a homemaker and her father was, at various points, a newspaper editor, a businessman, a lawyer, and a state-level politician. Atticus much? It's very obviously the basis for Atticus. And I think Harper Lee has said as much. In his time as an attorney, Amasa Coleman Lee defended two black men in the murder of a white shopkeeper. Both were found guilty and hanged. They were a father and a son. I milled around for some info on this, but I couldn't really find much, unfortunately. I'm sure it's swept under rug. Nell was also related through her

father to the famous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. Yeah, okay. Unlikely branches on the same family tree, right? Yeah. Nell grew up in Monroeville, counting among her childhood friends, fellow author Truman Capote, with whom she would be a collaborator and a long-term friend, because Harper Lee is such a documented person, and To Kill a Mockingbird is such a documented book. The wiki articles for these things are jacked. They are beefy. Oh, I'm sure that's like half of school assignments across North America, or like, update the Wikipedia on Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. So I limited my scope to things that were more or less directly concerned in telling the story

of ghosts at a watchman. And so if you're a big Truman Capote fan, I'm sorry I don't have much for you. But they had a friendship. In the end, her love of privacy and his love of the spotlight set them down different paths, though. He wanted to be like a socialite, and she kind of wanted to be a wallflower. And so that's what it was. Like many perceptive, sensitive people, she became interested in English literature in high school. So she thrived under the mentorship of cool teacher Gladys Watson, who's an English teacher. The English, you gotta give it up for the English teachers. A good breed. Then she went to an all-women's college, Huntington in Montgomery, and finally she studied law at the University of Alabama, but left one semester away from

finishing her degree. What a badass. That's a metal move. That's a spider throwing itself into the gates of hell, for sure. When Walking Dead Season 7 was about to come on, everyone was watching Walking Dead, so I thought, why don't I watch the first six seasons of this show, and then it'll be all caught up for Season 7, and I can watch live. Okay. I got five and a half seasons in, and I was like, you know, I actually don't like this. And so I fucking dropped it. Point being, me and Harper Lee, Kindred. That's like, yeah, Sympatico. Same, same. Big time. Same, same, different. Yeah. So then she did a semester abroad at Oxford, and that was like, her dad funded it in hopes that it would reignite her interest in the law, but no dice. Ah, okay. She never got the law degree.

In 1949, when she was about 23, Nell moved to New York City, and took a job taking reservations for an airline in order to write in her spare time. In 1956, she landed an agent, so for Christmas, her friends got her a year's wages, so she could take a full year to write. I'm sorry. Good friends. Her friends got her a year's wages? Yeah. Taylor, what did you get me for Christmas? Next year, I am anticipating a year's worth of wages. A year's wages. Absolutely. Listen. She pulled together a book which her agent, Maurice Crane, sold to publisher J.B. Lippincott, which is a great name for a publisher. Lippincott. Yeah. A very, like, New York publisher. What is the big apple? I'm your publisher, Lippincott.

Hampton's stock. Live next to the Kennedys, you know. Have a pietitère in the city. At Lippincott, the book was assigned to an editor named Tay Hohoff about whose editing skills everybody speaks very highly. Tay and Nell worked very closely together on the manuscript, and eventually, in 1960, Tequila Mockingbird was released. Okay, so I'm going to try to give you Tequila Mockingbird in a nutshell. Okay, wait, before you do that, how old is Harper Lee at this point? Nell at this point? Okay, so early 30s, early 30s. Okay, okay. Early 30s. Yeah. Okay, making me feel bad, but not too bad. So it's good. None of this story needs to make anybody feel bad. I think that Harper Lee, like, who do you ever hear about who publishes one thing, gets universal adulation

in a fucking Pulitzer Prize, and then never, ever, ever publishes anything again? Asterisk. Fair, fair. And that asterisk is this podcast. Welcome to the asterisk. Okay, tell me about Tequila Mockingbird. Right. In a nutshell, Tequila Mockingbird is the coming of age story of a young girl named Scout Finch growing up in a fictional Alabama county called Maycomb in the 1930s, the details of which mirror much of Lee's own childhood experiences. On the one hand, the book tells these very charming, anecdotal, slice of life stories about Scout and her brother, Jim, and their friend, Dill, who is based on Truman Capote, playing in this environment and interacting with all of these eccentric characters and

learning lessons and, you know, all of this. And then on the other hand, the book stares headlong into the issues of racism, of inequity, of the ignorance that lack of access to education and opportunity brings. Specifically, the big narrative thread that carries the end of the story is the fabricated accusation that a black man, Tom Robinson, has raped a white woman. The story somewhat echoes the case that Lee's own father tried and many other famous cases. Emmett Till, Dick Rowland, whose arrest was an inciting incident in the Tulsa race massacre, but the case Lee principally drew from, it seems, is the 1933 case in Monroeville, which is where she was from, in which a white woman, Naomi Lowery, accused a black man,

Walter Lett, of rape. Lett was found guilty, but the verdict met with enough sympathy and scrutiny from the public that his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, by which point he had apparently already suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. So just a really miserable, miserable, sad story. Back to Tequila Mockingbird. Atticus Finch, Scout's father, an attorney, and the story's moral compass, takes on Robinson's defense amidst increasing hostility amongst the residents of Maycomb. In the end, although it is revealed Tom's accuser is lying, he is nonetheless found guilty, and is then shot to death while attempting to escape from prison.

Afterwards, a townsperson with a grudge against Atticus attacks Scout, but she's saved by Boo Radley. Good job, A-plus. Boo Radley, the Finch's reclusive neighbour, whom Scout has been fascinated with since the beginning of the book, and who serves as another of Maycomb's innocent, persecuted outsiders. These are the major beats of Tequila Mockingbird. It's many things. It's a coming of age story. It's a satire. It's a moral parable. It's a romantic clap. It's a very deft piece of writing. Big time. From a story standpoint, it's tight as a drum. No, totally. And there's still plot-wise, structurally, tight as a drum, but then like turns of phrase and images that she uses. There is a real warmth to the voice in which

Harper Lee writes that draws the reader in and can be used to soothe in a way that allows her to deliver some very harsh moral truths as well. And that's, I think, Atticus is a very interesting character to me within Tequila Mockingbird because he's, he's the white guy. He gets to be the savior, right? He gets to be the voice for the voiceless and all this bullshit, right? But he's also the white dude, you know? It's like, why is he getting all of this accolade and praise and love and adoration? I mean, he's also, but he's also her father. So then there's, you know, and there's, I don't know, it's very complex. Thank you. You've given me a beautiful say because like Atticus, to me, I think that if we look at this book as something, and obviously

it's many things, but if we look at one function of this book, is that it's like a moral parable that delivers truths about racism to a largely white audience in a fairly digestible way. Yes. Audiences that may not necessarily have considered their own culpability in, in these things, right? Right, yeah. In that context, to me, Atticus is a star player because he's both scouts and the reader's stabilizing force as the story pushes forward. And we'll wander a bit here about humor me. No, I'm, I'm there. I'm humor. As you say, well, this book is clear eyed in its examination of racism. It's a book about race whose narrator is a little white girl. I don't say that as a criticism. I think scouts are compelling and fleshed out narrator

who I like spending time with, but it provides readers the escape hatch of riding along with someone who can experience these events and react with horror at the injustice of it all, but whose life is not materially altered by that which has transpired. Exactly, yes. If the book were written from Tom Robinson's perspective, it would be a very different and considerably more intense novel. And so to bring it back to Atticus, if you're a reader who feels confronted by the magnitude of the things you're reading here, Atticus provides, if you're getting the point, he provides an example of what morally and ethically sound allyship or just plain good humanity looks like. Or if you're missing the point, he's someone you can flatter yourself that

you already are. Yes. Ooh, yeah. You can be the person who's like, the fucked up reality is that there weren't that many Atticuses, right? Like it, but if you're in a little bit of denial, you can flatter yourself to think that, oh yes, I would be the one good white man in the situation or whatever it is. And I think that, I don't know, but that's a very cynical read of the character. I like to think that it's more just that he's somebody that people look to and see in this really aspirational way, because he's a fictional character, he has no flaws, which makes it all the more fucked up and traumatic for some people. When Ghost at a Watchman comes out, and Atticus is a very flawed character in it, but we'll get to that. Yeah, yeah. No, totally. He is

so, I don't know how many people I know who have named their child Atticus because of that book, because he's so aspirational, because he is this, you know, shining beacon of decency. Yeah, it's hard, but you put it so well, he's fictional, he's fictional. Readers really responded positively to this character of Atticus, and due to this day, Book Magazine. They must be official. No, but they must be official. They must be official, because they got book. You know what I mean? Nobody else had book. Book had to be the first book magazine, the Book Magazine. Book Magazine, if you're out there, keep going. If you're still

going. Yeah, be careful. It's rough out there for print. Book Magazine named him the seventh best fictional character in 20th century literature. The American Film Institute voted Atticus as portrayed in an Academy Award winning performance by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation as the greatest hero in all of American cinema. Whoa dude. Whoa dude. President Barack Obama referenced Atticus Finch in his farewell address. Organizations were named after him. Children were named after him. People went into law because of him. People really like this guy. People love this fictional character, which you know what? On one hand, it's like he's fictional people, clue him, but on the other hand,

it's like fiction has power. Don't deny it. There's so much power in imagination. I think that there are worse fictional characters. If you were really like, yeah, I'm really like the guy from Death Note. That's fucking, you know what I mean? That's a waste of time. Any Chuck Palinick story character. Yeah, exactly. Tyler Durden. Fuck you. No, you're not, Greg. Okay. Greg, get rid of the beanbag and fucking grow up, okay? Yeah. So To Kill a Mockingbird gets released, published, whatever. It's out. It's in the world. It's on the shelves. Fly Little Mockingbird. Fly. It's on the wing. And it's an instant smash success. It gets a wide audience quickly when it's anthologized by Reader's Digest condensed books,

which I, which I spotlight because I was, I am really taken by this idea of a condensed book. You know what I mean? I guess I can really, I can understand like a condensed Moby Dick because it's a long ass book with a lot of details that you're not like how do you condense to kill? I mean, I guess To Kill a Mockingbird does have a lot of like idle anecdote and stuff like that. But it's like you say it's not, it's not an imposition to kill a Mockingbird. But I guess this was just to get it into the hands of like 65 year old grandmas. So apparently the this, this there was a little sentence on the Wikipedia article about this that said that these, these Reader's Digest condensed book series, they released them forever. They released them until

like the 90s. And apparently they were like, they're ubiquitous, and you like cannot sell them. Like nobody will pay any amount of money to take these things off your hands. Enough that it was mentioned in the Wikipedia article with a citation. So two of that, what you want. You follow the citation is just pictures and pictures and pictures of garage sales where everything's kind of picked through. But this one box is just just a bunch of stickers on it with progressively lower prices. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nobody wants them. Free, free, free. I'll shovel your driveway. Just take them, please. The book receives the Pulitzer Prize. The acclaimed film starring Gregory Peck is released in 1962, which is

that is not long out because it was published 60, right? Oh, they snapped that write up and it was immediately made into a mega smash success movie wins three Oscars nominated for five more. It's pretty much what every writer naively hopes will happen after they write their first novel. Oh, yeah, she's she's getting like the VIP experience of writing. Yeah, your friends, her fucking friends gave her a year's wages for her to fuck around and write whatever she wants. She fucking gets the best agent and editor in the world who help her boil it down. It comes out. She gets the Pulitzer, receives all the plots and never has to write another fucking thing again if she wants it. She doesn't. So there you go. This was my this was my like writing career plan when I was like 19.

Yeah, yeah, I got it. Don't worry. Don't worry about me. Don't worry. Oh, well, I feel like the way that we're doing it is good for humility, though. Oh, very good. I got to actually. Oh, sorry, this. Yeah, no, it's good. Harper Lee. Yes, she receives a lot of attention for the book. And at first she loves it. And then she really, really doesn't. She's just like, it was too much pressure to respond to everyone. And people were always asking like, Oh, what are you going to write? You got to write? You got to write? What are you going to write? What's next? What are you writing? Also, like, she's at the it's 1960. So things are the civil rights movement is is coming up and moving. And people are understanding a whole different

reading on race in America. And I'm sure they're like, Oh, you got something more. Give us more. We don't know what the fuck is going on. I mean, I should preface that white people are like, Oh, my God, you're a white writer. I don't know what's going on. Tell me more. So she found the public pressure to write really overwhelming. So she and people were like writing her letters and stuff. So she gets an unlisted number, which why I don't know why she didn't have one of those to start. She seems like she likes her privacy. And she assigns her sister and lawyer, Alice Lee, to be her gatekeeper. And Alice, along with this editor, Tae Ho-Hoff and her agent, who she was also quite good friends with, this kind of is the the wall that protects Harper from the vultures.

And she seems like somebody that we've all decided that we need to protect from the vultures in a way that might become appropriate later in the story. So she publishes sporadic essays, she makes speeches and public appearances over the years. She worked on a second novel called The Long Goodbye, which she ultimately elected not to publish. She started a true crime book in the late 1970s, which she also shelved. She returned to Monroeville in 1962 to care for her ailing father and seems to have stayed there after his death. Just wear it all again. That's pretty fast though, because she published 1960, the movie was 62. 62? Okay, yeah, yeah. And so this was her life for most of her middle age and later years. Living quietly in Alabama, writing here and there,

but nothing substantial. Collecting various medals and presidential awards and otherwise keeping to herself. And people would ask her write another book, write another book, and she never did. Never did in a way that made it to market, let's say. She tooled around with a couple other things, but. Right, yeah. Yeah, it sounds like she was probably writing pretty consistently, but. As the years went by, it said that Harper suffered some health issues resulting in her cognitive decline and access to her became more and more exclusive. Her sister, Alice, who had been her legal counsel and guardian gave up the position when she turned 100. Okay, maybe it's time to let this one go. She had a nice three year retirement and then she died at 103. Damn, you know. These

southern women, they're good stock. In her obituary, it was noted that Alice Lee, quote, helped guard the privacy of her sister, Nell Harper Lee, who in 1961 won the Pulitzer Prize for her only published novel. Request to interview Harper Lee often landed on the desk of Alice Lee and the answer was always a polite but firm no. Also in that this is just a really sweet sentiment sweetly expressed in the obituary. Quote, whenever there was a question in the community that no one could answer, the saying was, go ask Miss Alice. Her death is like the closing of a great library. That's that's that's such a touching sentiment and very beautifully expressed. Oh my gosh. I mean, it's really sad. It captures that sweet sad sentiment so well. The person who's

quote that was, I don't have his full name right off the dome, but it'll come up later in the story because he comes back. His name is Reverend Butts. Oh, cutie. So after Alice moved out of the picture, a lawyer, Tonya Carter took over as Harper's gatekeeper. And by 2013, we're suddenly seeing a lot more lawsuits coming from Harper Lee. Okay. Coming from her. So she's engaging the legal system. Harper Lee is all of a sudden suing a lot of people. Okay. Okay. Like you've re you've reproduced the book in this form and you never got my permission. I'm suing you this. I'll tell you. Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Quoting Wikipedia on May 3 2013, Lee filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court to regain the copyright to tequila mockingbirds seeking unspecified damages

from a son-in-law of her former literary agent and related entities. Son. Sorry. Somebody's son-in-law engaged in a scheme to dupe her into assigning him the copyright of the book in 2007 when her hearing and eyesight were in decline. And she was residing in an assisted living facility after having suffered a stroke. In September 2013, attorneys for both sides announced a settlement of the lawsuit. Okay. Okay. So it gets settled. But this is something that supposedly happened in 2007. And now six years later, Harper Lee has filed a lawsuit on it. Right. After Alice, her sister has died and a new lawyer has come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. In 2014, she sued the Monroe County Heritage Museum for using the Mockingbird IP without her permission

in their gift shop. What do you, sorry. What do you mean IP? Like, like they were selling chotchkies that were in some way branded with tequila, something like, I don't know if they said tequila mockingbird or if they had like imagery from the cover of tequila mockingbird. Okay. Yeah. But it was in some way infringing. Right. Yeah. Which does not sound like she would give one or even two shits about. So. Well, not to get ahead of myself. The allegation is that she's like just in a room somewhere and people will allege in the course of this story that she is maybe not in the shape to make consenting decisions. Yeah. People, other people to be clear will say no, absolutely not. She's, she's, you know, has a little bit of eyesight and hearing loss,

but mentally, she's sharp as a tack. People, other people say that. So. Also in 2014, Lee issued a statement about a book by journalist and longtime friend, Maria Mills. The book was called The Mockingbird Next Door, Life with Harper Lee. This is a woman who had lived next to Harper and Alice. Yeah. And had written some sort of book. Lee, by that point, 88, okay, issued a statement saying she did not willingly participate in or authorize the book. As she said in 2011, when the publisher bought the book. So when the publisher bought the book in 2011, she was like, yeah, I participated in this. I'm fine with this. But now all of a sudden, years later, she's issuing a statement denouncing this book saying I did not authorize this book,

I did not participate in this book. That sounds very fair to Mills. According to NPR, Mills says the book was reported with the full knowledge and agreement of both sisters, and says she was surprised by the resistance, quote, things have been happening around them, I would say. I just know that the book is true to the spirit of the time that I spent with them. These are smart women who were clear with me. The same author, Maria Mills wrote a piece for the Washington Post, the Harper Lee I knew, where she quotes Lee's sister Alice, whom she describes as gatekeeper advisor protector for most of Lee's adult life, as saying, quote, this is her now quoting the sister. Yeah, porno Harper can't see and can't hear and will sign

anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence. In 2011, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Lane Butts Jr, former pastor of the Monroeville Church and the man who gave that quote from Alice Lee's obituary about the Great Library. Also named Butts. Also named Butts, Reverend Dr. Thomas Lane Butts Jr. Boom, man, dream name, dream name. I read up a little bit on him, seems like a great man, great man. One of those, you know, one of those like Christians who is like just actually like embodies the shit that Veggie Tales Jesus was about. He seems like one of those he indicated to an Australian newspaper that Harper Lee now lived in an assisted living facility was using a wheelchair partially blind and deaf and suffering from memory loss. Butts also

shared that Lee told him why she never wrote again. Oh, shit. To and I find this man credible. Yeah, quote. Two reasons. One, I wouldn't go through the pressure and publicity I went through with to kill a mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again. Damn girl. Pretty absolute. That is very absolute. And it fits with the way that she reacted to the publicity in the early 60s. She was like, this isn't my vibe. I don't want to be famous. What? Yeah, I fuck this. Not get this. Thank you. And I've said it. Anything, any question that you have for me? I've said it. It's in the book. Why are you asking me? It's in the book. Start the book over. Start the book over. That is wild. So imagine

everybody's shock on February 3rd, 2015, when a press release announced out of the clear blue sky that Harper, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, was thrilled to have acquired North American rights to a newly discovered novel by Harper Lee. The press release went on to say, listen, the press. Thanks for listening. The press release went on to say the deal had been negotiated via Harper Lee's lawyer, Tonya Carter, and included this quote from the author who contrary to your beliefs was very much still alive while all this was happening. In the mid-1950s, I completed a novel called Ghost at a Watchman. It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman, and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken

by the flashbacks to Scout's childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told. I hadn't realized that it had survived, so was surprised and delighted when my dear friend and lawyer, Tonya Carter, discovered it. After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust, and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication. I am humbled and amazed that this will now be published after all these years. So the story, according to that statement, whether or not it's true or false, is up in the air. But according to that statement, she first wrote this, and then she went back, or from that timeline, she then wrote To Kill a

Mockingbird. Is that it? Okay, okay. So let me explain exactly what we're looking at here. So the release gives a brief summary of the plot, indicating it's about Scout facing disillusionment upon her return to Maycomb as an adult. It also says, quote, the original manuscript of the novel was considered to have been lost until fall 2014, when Tonya Carter discovered it in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original type script of To Kill a Mockingbird. So what we're looking at here is the first thing that she wrote, and this is apparently a matter of record, the first thing that Harper Lee wrote and gave to this editor, Tay Ho-Hoff, was called Ghost at a Watchman, and it was this book. Okay, okay. And then Tay Ho-Hoff was like,

great stuff. I love what you're doing here, but I want you to take those flashbacks, and I want you to expand those, get rid of everything else, change the point of view, maybe the tense a little bit, let's focus more here, focus more there, tiny changes in a month, let me know. We also get a quote in the release from Harper's senior vice president and publisher, Jonathan Burnham, that I think ultimately might have done more harm than good. Oh, okay, love it. Quote, this is a remarkable literary event. The existence of Ghost at a Watchman was unknown until recently, and its discovery is an extraordinary gift to the many readers and fans of To Kill a Mockingbird. Reading in many ways like a sequel to Harper Lee's classic

novel, it is a compelling and ultimately moving narrative about a father and a daughter's relationship and the life of a small Alabama town living through the racial tensions of the 1950s. The word that I think presents a hiccup here is sequel, because I think that ended up making it a little muddy as to what this book actually was, to the point where until I read that press release two hours ago, I had been under, it's legit, I had been under the impression that Harper had deliberately greedily marketed it as a sequel. Yeah, yeah. And done so to obfuscate the true origins of this book. And I don't think I was alone in that misapprehension. Many sources reported it. I saw like a PBS news hour thing that said like Mockingbird's sequel in the head,

like it was a thing. No, totally. Well, I mean, when you use the same characters, you enter the same location, you're just saying million, you like there's no, there's, there's no way around your readers understanding it in the context of the first. And if you're looking at the chronology where, oh, Scout is older, then it becomes the sequel. This, this book jacket says nothing of the origins of this book. And I think they got some criticism for that. Yeah, yeah. No, because that is super interesting that because chronologically it's a sequel, but it's, but in, in creation, in, in, in thought process, in maturation of Harper Lee as a writer, it is a prequel. It's not even a prequel. It's a fucking first draft. Yeah. Okay. There we go. But I think that to me, to me,

that in and of itself is, and they, it's, I don't think that they were deliberately lying. I think that they were just kind of vague in a way that came back on them when in short order, they would need credibility, but people already thought they were kind of being a little dishonest or whatever. I don't know, though, from a marketing standpoint, you want to tie that thing as fucking close as you can to kill a mockingbird. Do you know what I mean? From a marketing perspective, but that's the thing is, I mean, the only answer I can think of is greed, right? Like you think that it being a straight up sequel sells better, but they didn't market it as a sequel, but they were mushy is the point. Right. Yeah. They, when people said

sequel, they did not correct them. And this question of intention and credibility became material when shortly after the book's release, questions were raised about whether Lee was capable of consenting to its publication, and whether it had actually been discovered in the way the press release claimed. All kinds of people from actress Mia Farrow to writer Tracy Chevalier to Jezebel writer Madeline Davies publicly raised the specter of Shenandigas at best, and elder abuse at worst, and a particularly scathing New York Times opinion piece by Joe Nocera claimed the following. I'm ready. The year fact about Harper Lee is that after publishing her beloved novel to kill a mockingbird in 1960, she not only never published another book, for most

that time she insisted she never would. Until now that is when she's 89, a frail, hearing and sight impaired stroke victim living in a nursing home, perhaps just as important, her sister Alice Lee's longtime protector passed away last November. Her new protector Tanya Carter, who had worked in Alice Lee's law office, is the one who brought the new novel to Harper Collins' attention, claiming conveniently to have found it shortly before Alice died. If, Josie, if you have been following the Times clear eyed coverage and I know that you have, you know that Carter participated in a meeting in 2011 with a Sotheby's specialist and Lee's former agent in which they came across the manuscript that turned out to be Go Set a Watchman. In the Wall Street Journal, where else,

Carter put forth the preposterous claim that she walked out of that meeting early on and never returned, thus sticking with her story that she only discovered the manuscript in 2014, but others in the meeting insisted to the Times. The Times is a fucking rag, huh? Boy, yes! Insisted to the Times that she was there the whole time and saw what they saw, the original manuscript that Lee turned into Teho off her editor. Thus, the Times' account suggests an alternate scenario that Carter had been sitting on the discovery of the manuscript since 2011, waiting for the moment when she, not Alice, would be in charge of Harper Lee's affairs.

Speaking to NPR, Harper Lee's friend Wayne Flint said he'd spoken to her on the day before the news of the book's publication broke and she never mentioned it. But he did stress that, quote, Lee can still quote long passages of Shakespeare for memory and discuss the complete works of C.S. Lewis. She can still write and she reads voraciously using a giant magnifying machine. He says Lee is hard of hearing and sound of mind. Quote, does she understand what's going on? If you make her hear, she can understand what's going on, he says. Can she give informed consent, absolutely she can give informed consent. She knows what she likes, who she likes, what she doesn't like. Mainly, she doesn't like people to disturb her and interrupt her privacy

and probe in her personal business. He also said he was willing to give Lee's lawyer the benefit of the doubt. Quote, that interplay is an interplay totally beyond my knowledge and totally beyond anybody else's knowledge, he says. That is, no one was in the room with the lawyer and Lee at the time any of these negotiations or signings went on. And so until someone shows me some evidence and not some rumor, I have no reason to doubt the lawyer's concern about what is best for Harper Lee. According to Wikipedia investigators for the state of Alabama interviewed Lee in response to a suspicion of elder abuse in relation to the publication of the book, like somebody called the state about the whole thing. Which could be literally any of the

fucking millions of Harper Lee fans. So who knows. And they did an investigation and by April 2015 they found that the claims were unfounded. So do with that what you want, there was an investigation, they said the claims were unfounded. There you go. So it's one of those stories yet again, we're like, we don't know, we don't know. It certainly, everybody seems to get the sense that something smells fishy. But sometimes it's just fish, you know what I mean? It's true. Sometimes you're at the fish market. It's true. Yeah, and you're just like, oh yeah, that's why. Yeah. So another controversy emerged when about four days before the book's release, one of the first big reviews comes out by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.

Okay. It's a real open wound of a review. And it starts like this. We remember Atticus Finch and Harper Lee's 1960 classic to kill a mockingbird is that novel's moral conscience, kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man, the ideal father and a principled idealist and enlightened and almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after

Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus. Shockingly, in Ms. Lee's long-awaited novel, Go Set a Watchman, due out Tuesday, Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting. The review goes on at length to mourn the symbolic death of America's patriarch as it outlines every way, side by side, every way he was a stand-up guy in the original story, and then every way that he's a racist piece of shit now. Fair enough, okay. And she goes on to give further critique, but it's this part. Atticus is racist now. This is the hook, right? This is the meme reaction. This is the thing, right? Yeah, or worse, Atticus was racist the whole time, right? That's the other thing. And that's the other thing is people...

Because people didn't necessarily quite understand that this is a rough draft of Tequila Mockingbird, so it's not that Atticus necessarily... First of all, Atticus isn't real. Second of all, it's not that Atticus became racist as he's got older. He was just racist in an early draft until she made it like the kind of squeaky clean fairytale version, right? Yeah, yeah. This is the part that really sticks in people's claws. Atticus is racist now. And when I say people, I mean Twitter. Okay. Good distinction. Thank you. Those are different intents. They are. Dude, they are. Whenever anyone tells you people are pissed about something, ask them if they mean people or if they mean like Twitter, because they usually mean Twitter.

Like they're usually like six guys on Twitter said shit and then somebody made an article of those six guys saying shit. Here's an article from Tech Times that I like because it really captures the hysteria. Okay, good. All those who have ever found inspiration and hope in the character of Atticus Finch in the novel Tequila Mockingbird had their hearts and souls crushed. Yes, everyone had their hearts and souls crushed as the first U.S. reviews of Harper Lee's long-awaited second novel, which was thought to be lost, began to trickle out and it goes on to site specifically this Kakutani review. Atticus Finch, the perfection of manhood, has turned into a bigot and racist in Go Set a Watchman, a man who even scouted his daughter and narrator of the Mockingbird book,

despises. The Twitterverse reflects the disgust, horror, and heartbreak of hundreds of thousands of readers throughout the decades who fell in love with the man in Tequila Mockingbird. Can we stop sucking this guy's dick? He had this... Holy cow! Holy cow! Sometimes. Sometimes. You don't think about it until you've had to paste the same fucking quote about how Atticus Finch is a good guy. But I also want to say that sometimes you don't realize how high the pedestal is until someone falls off of it. Do you know what I mean? There's a little book about that. I will get to the damn book, by the way. We will talk about the story from the damn book, but we're just, we're talking about the context of the book first. Context is important, always. The perfection of

manhood, Jesus Christ. So this article then documents tweets from six disappointed Twitter users, not hundreds of thousands but six. Okay. Including, so here are some of the tweets. Spoiler, Atticus Finch is super racist. Your childhood is ruined. Twitter is the dirt worst, man. Holy cow. Okay. First Woody Allen, then Bill Cosby, now Atticus Finch. You can't trust anyone anymore. Oh my god. So yeah, I'm disinclined to think it was hundreds of thousands of people, but those, those who felt the dysphoria of racist Atticus felt it really hard. One particular instance, a Colorado couple gave an interview with People Magazine declaring that they were changing their 14 month old son's name from Atticus to Lucas.

Oh my god. I don't know who the fuck these people are that they're getting an exclusive with People Magazine. So this couple named the son Atticus because says mom, Kristen, we wanted to see the ideals of Atticus Finch instilled in our son. But after reading, Go Set a Watchman, in which the beloved character is exposed as a racist who once attended a clan meeting, they had a change of heart and a change of name. When the new book came out, we just felt like this does not at all encompass the values that we want for our son to have and know, Kristen explains. And we felt like our son was young enough that we could change his name. Okay, yeah, fair. So they changed the name to Lucas and they explained to their other child, three-year-old

Ayala, who doesn't really understand. She doesn't get the, I guess, complicated history of race relations in the American South. I don't know. Huh, strange, yeah. The reaction has been mixed, Kristen says. Some people are so understanding and are like, I totally get why you would do that and we totally support you. Other people think it's kind of odd and weird and they're like, I don't think it's necessary that you're doing this or I don't know how to respond to what you're telling me. That's my favorite one. I don't know what you want me to say. Man, this is a Wendy's. Why are you telling me this? In spite of all this like hubbub around this book, go set a watchman or maybe fuel by it, who can say. Right, yeah. The book is a huge massive,

massive, massive commercial success. Storys scheduled midnight openings. Amazon said it was their most preordered book since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Whoa. Anticipation was high for this once-in-a-lifetime literary event and so the book comes out and here it is. Whoa. And here we go. Let me tell you what happens in this book. The title, Go Set a Watchman, comes from the Bible verse Isaiah 21-6. For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeeth. If you want to know what that means in this context, the back of the book jacket has very, this is a book that is kind of marketed toward people who have like maybe literally only ever read To Kill a Mockingbird. Fair enough. That's a very large population. Yeah. The condensed

version and it says in large things in the back, large, large font, every man's island, Gene Louise, every man's watchman is his conscience. So this is a story about a crisis of confidence in the conscience of her community and specifically in her father, Atticus, who as Michiko Kakutani alluded, has been palling around with Ray-Rays. Okay, okay, okay. Which is this, I mean to me this sounds still like a compelling story, but it is. It is in many ways to me a more compelling story. It's a messier, it's a more complicated than being an idle witness to a horrible injustice. But you still have to wrestle with the horrible injustice, that doesn't go away. But in this case, it's very specifically embedded in this relationship

with her father, right, who she's held up to be this kind of the like of the world, like all of us apparently put Atticus on this pedestal. And it turns out that no, he's just like a condescending old racist. Anyway, right. So this book uses a third person narrator as opposed to Mockingbird, which is told from Scott's perspective. And it opens with 26 year old Gene Louise Finch, formerly known as Scout, returning to make home on the train. She's been living in New York City, does that remind you of anybody we know. And she returns home once a year for two weeks. We're also introduced to Henry Hank Clinton, her childhood friend in romantic interest, who is presented as an inevitable someday husband for Gene Louise, albeit not somebody

she's particularly swooned by. Okay. Kind of old reliable. Yeah. You know what I mean? When we're not married by the time we're 30. He has aspirations to local politics. So in some ways, he represents the idea of Gene Louise settling back down and entrenching herself in make home. If she was, if she was to marry him, she would be like a make home politician's wife, right? Yeah, yeah. In general, the first 100 pages of this book are a whole lot of nothing. A lot of the growing up around here anecdotes that proliferate in Mockingbird told well told with Harper Lee's customary wit and warmth, but fluff, right? Yeah. Notably, we do not encounter Gem, her older brother, who has died since the events of Mockingbird, nor Dill, who is living in

Europe. But we are reintroduced to Atticus. This is part of like, I think part of why people don't start, I'm now, I'm now going off my notes here. But I think part of the reason people were felt so confronted by this book is that there's such a warm sentimentality to, to kill a Mockingbird that this book, if you are reading it kind of linearly, just absolutely strips all of it away. Because Gem is dead, Dill's not here, Atticus is a racist, I'll get to Calpurnia, but she fucking hates Scott now. Okay, okay. It is, it really, it really strips you of any character or situation that you might have found sentimental comfort in from the first book. It's very unmooring, as opposed to the

first book, which has Atticus, who's this like incredibly grounding, everything will be okay as long as you're with Atticus, you know, whatever. Yeah. So I think that's part of that weird energy, that idea, I think is what drew me to this book. So it's like, of course, of course, everybody hates this book, because they've been socialized for, for fucking 50 years by Oprah, but this is some national novel. And this like really like pisses on the ashes of pretty much everything from it. It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In a way that is really fantastic. Yeah. I know, I find it exciting, right? But I'm also like, I'm not, I don't believe in idols, like I try not to. Just Kelly Clarkson. The one true idol. The one true idol, the first,

the first and the only one. We are reintroduced to Atticus Scott's revered scholarly father, and we're allowed the sense that there's a growing divide between makehomes white and black residents, even since the events of to kill a mockingbird. Right, okay. With a lot of bad blood expressing itself in a panic around black drivers without licenses and insurance. Okay, okay. The white population is also perhaps more relevantly feeding into this, struggling to accept the recent Supreme Court decision around integrating schools, Brown versus Board of Education. Yeah. The story's conflict starts in earnest when Gene Louise finds a pamphlet among Atticus's things, decrying the black plague. Oh, pamphlets. Nothing good ever came out of a

pamphlet. Some good Chinese food or whatever, maybe, but good information on HPV. I don't know. That's true. You know what? That's true. I fuck with pamphlets. I take it back. The source, a citizens council, which is a white supremacist organization of the type popular in the mid-century American South. So in real life, citizens councils were pro-segregation groups that were often populated by the most public-facing and, quote, respectable members of a white community, described by Charles M. Payne as, quote, pursuing the agenda of the Klan with the demeanor of the Rotary Club. Right, right, right. This is for our public interest and then you put a hood on it. Exactly, exactly. And obviously, there was often considerable

overlap between the memberships of citizens councils and clans, right? I am sure. Outraged, Gene Louise goes down to the courthouse, and this is very rich symbolically because the courthouse is the big climactic set piece of To Kill a Mockingbird is this courthouse, and Gene Louise goes up to the same balcony that she's sitting in. It's where the kind of black citizens of the town are allowed to sit because it's like segregated seating. Yeah. And they sit up there and watch it and she's in that same balcony and she watches the men of the town, including her father Atticus and her sweetheart Hank, listening to another man as he delivers a racist sermon drawing upon white supremacist rhetoric

and fears of race mixing and so on. Not only is Atticus sitting in the audience, he had introduced this man before he spoke. So Atticus is like part of it. Yeah, yeah. Gene Louise feels like she's gonna puke. I think the most emotionally vivid and captivating the story was for me was the moments in the immediate aftermath of her finding out this horrible thing, and then she wakes up the next morning, and I always think that's the most awful. That's one of my least favorite awful emotions is when something really, really horrible has happened. Somebody's died, something really bad has happened, and then you go to sleep, and then the next morning you wake up and you remember, I fucking hate that. And it really, it captures that moment so, because like she wakes

up and remembers this, and she just like goes out to like hack a dart and like kind of like wanders around with a coffee and like tries to start the lawn mower, but she's like, what the fuck? Yeah, yeah. She and like every, every so often it will like become clearer in her head again, and then she fucking goes through it again. It's really good. Her beloved father, America's beloved father, has just gone mask off racist out of fucking nowhere, Hank too, but she doesn't really care about him so much. Well, no one, and no one does, right? Nobody cares. He wasn't even in the first book, I don't think, I don't even remember. Yeah. This is compounded when news arrives that a young black man behind the wheel of a car has accidentally killed one of Macomb's white residents

who wandered into the way of the car while drunk. So the white guy was drunk, a black driver accidentally manslaughtered him, isn't at fault, but the man is dead. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. The driver, the young black driver of this car is revealed to be the son of Calpurnia, who is a supporting character in To Kill a Mockingbird, the black housekeeper who helped raise the Finch children. Yeah, because they have no mother. Yeah, the, the mom dies. I don't remember how I should know, but she's, she's dead. She dead. Right there. She dead. RIP. Atticus and Henry agree to defend the driver and for a minute there, like America's redeemed. Jean-Louise is like, I had a badge. Oh, it was opposite day.

You were scaring me over here. It was, it was opposite day when you were in that courtroom. I see what happened. I see what happened. But unfortunately it was not opposite day and they, they indicate that this was only to keep the NAACP from finding out about the case, taking on this, this young man's defense and bringing their message of integration to Maycomb County. Oh, so it's just a cock, it's a cock block. Not just integration, but like equality and yeah, yeah, civil rights and all these human decency. Yeah, yeah. And the rest of the book is basically Jean-Louise stewing and stewing and feeling worse and worse and she avoids Atticus and Hank by having just a series of increasingly disastrous conversations.

That's the only thing that happens in this book, by the way, conversations, which I've like, had that affliction in my writing before where it's literally, it's first draft syndrome. Yeah. Nothing happens, it's just a bunch of conversations. Yeah, yeah. No, totally. She talks to a woman her age at a party and the woman just parrots her husband's vague, half formed views equating the NAACP to communism, which wow, shit has not changed one bit. I actually had to like close the book when I read that and it was like, oh, she knew. Yes. She visits Calpurnia to kind of go check on her and Calpurnia kind of ices her out because Calpurnia is just seeing her as like another potentially deceptive white

person when previously they'd been, you know, the thickest thieves, these two. And Jean-Louise has this meltdown where she's like, talk to me Calpurnia. God damn it. Look at me. Like really kind of making it about her and you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah, totally. The fact that Calpurnia's son is in serious danger. Yeah. And it's like, it's like the good son. It's like the one she actually loves. So it's like, yeah. She talks to Jean-Louise talks to her uncle Jack, who I hate. Oh my god, I hate this fucking character, this uncle Jack. He's just this like kind of old paternalistic eccentric kooky professor type. And he gives her this long rambling lecture about like states rights and small government and like libertarianism in the Civil War. The south and just a little

yeah, very much dodges the racism though, dodges, dodges the like, but what does like any of that have to do with how you're treating these black people? You know, it's so anyway, it's mercury retrograde, none of the scouts communications popping off like every, every convo she has, someone gives her some like new variety of racism. And she's she's like really, she's climbing up the wall, she's really can't handle it. And so finally she meets up with Hank at this diner. And she basically is like you fucking coward, you spineless, you racist, you this, you like, etc, right? Yeah, it calls him out on a ship. Yeah. And his excuse is that in order to be a man of prominence in the community, he needs to be involved in all

aspects of that community. He needs to be a racist. It's a mealy mouth bullshit answer. And Jean-Louise tells him so. And as she's storming off, she runs right into Atticus, who somebody has probably his brother, I think, has given him wind that all of this is happening. Yeah. And that that scouts on the warpath. Yeah, Jean-Louise is out there. Yeah, to crying. Yeah, yeah, very different ideals and values. Okay. So they have this big confrontation that calls him a ringtailed son of a bitch at one point, like this is very big confrontation that this book has been building towards. It's okay. It loses a bit by being the umpteenth in a string of many conversations, many similar kind of conversations. Yeah. Atticus is basically unrepentant. There's no sense that

the whole thing has been a misunderstanding. Atticus plainly states that he's not feel the black population of Macomb County is ready for civil rights. Scout is horrified. She runs off again, but encounters her uncle, who slaps her across the face, and explains to her that this is simply the moment where she realizes that Atticus isn't a God merely a man. And he falls from the pedestal in her eyes. And Jean-Louise is finally able to see Atticus for the first time, merely as a man. And they walk off together. That's the end of the book. I'm afraid so it's a real limp dick of an ending to reduce this to its constituent parts. Why doesn't this work for me? Yeah, it feels a little too tidy and simplistic for the tangled moral mess. The rest of the book

gives us. Okay. And it reduces the issues of racism that are central to the story to a mere issue of ethical divergence between a white woman and her father. And I definitely think that there's space in literature to explore the question of what we do when someone we deeply, deeply love and admire is racist. Yeah. When Atticus is racist, yeah. I like that as a point of tension for a story. And like I say, I think it's very relevant now. Yeah. The ending of the book falters in its answer for me. It's too, it's too easy. And I said earlier to kill a mockingbird as tight as a drum. Part of that is that it cleans up all of its loose ends, buraddley wards off the attacker, saves the day, meets the children. Yeah. Go set a watchman is not clean and tidy. And part of that

is that the reader is left with lingering questions and uneasy emotions. What do we do when people in our lives, even people we previously held to be good, intelligent, moral humans role models, become radicalized by misinformation peddled by bad actors. You know what I mean? So in the end, I found a watchman resident. Yeah. In a 2021 context, because you hear stories like this of people who have been like, indoctrinated by hate groups. Yeah. Or even if it doesn't go to the to the degree of hate group, it becomes this kind of casual hate that is very, I mean, endemic of something to come, most likely. Right, right. But but still, those turns of phrase, those quote unquote jokes that

get told in this guys, it's all very disconcerting. Yeah. That was basically my take. I thought it was a first draft, not a novel. Yeah. And that's basically how other critics received it. It sounds like it'd make a really interesting short story. Yeah, it does. You're right. This is a short story. Yeah. It's just a novel length short story. Yeah. Yeah. You and you could cut there's a whole bunch of it like you could condense this one. Readers digest if you're looking to reboot the franchise. You could condense this one with this one. What really stood out was critics registering their consternation at the circumstances under which the book came to exist. Right. Writing for Entertainment Weekly,

Tina Jordan said, The Watchman has a few stunning passages, it reads for the most part like a sluggishly paced first draft, replete with incongruities, bad dialogue and underdeveloped characters. Maureen Corrigan wrote, Go set a Watchman is a troubling confusion of a novel politically and artistically beginning with its fishy origin story. Allegedly, it's a recently discovered first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, but I'm suspicious it reads much more like a failed sequel. Corrigan adds, All I know for certain is that Go set a Watchman is kind of a mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece. This is similar to how Jordan signed off. Look, I'm very aware of the fact that no reviewer is going to be able to stop The Watchman Juggernaut.

I just want people to understand two things. First, this is all about the money and second, reading Watchman will forever tarnish your memories of one of the most beloved books in American literature. So that, yeah, there you go. A mediocre first draft that people dramatically violently rejected as a matter of principle. That is the critical legacy of Go set a Watchman. You know what's so frustrating about that? I will also say this is that like, if you were to publish Harper Lee's papers, like if you were to understand her work within this context, within a framework of first draft, second draft, young, maturing writer, if you were to publish Go set a Watchman within that context, granted, it's not in a big airport paperback

context. It's in a most likely small publishing, academic publishing framework. If you were really interested in the story and the craft of the book and the way that Harper Lee could approach American society, then you publish it in a nice digest like those like those folks who did the night trap anthology thing, right? And they packaged in all the nice shit about it. And I was like, wow, I feel very edified by this experience. Yes, but not in this in this kind of wishy-washy sequel 2013, you know, because the expectations are so different and so much higher. And there's just so much more to lose. My hunch is that this book would probably do better on a reappraisal. But for what a commercial success it was, it's also pretty forgotten. Far from being a permanent

blot on Mockingbird's record, I never hear anybody talk about this book to you. No, not unless they're talking about the context of this controversy. Yes. Yes. So it didn't have, it wasn't like a cultural artifact that had a tremendous amount of staying power that I observed. I will say I liked this take by sci-fi legend Ursula K. Le Guin that ran against the grain, and I think I'll close with it. Okay, Ursula for the win. Ursula for the win. And this is one of those quotes that like reminds me of the the way that I would like to see art. And so I think it's cool. It appears that the New York editor who handled the book was uninterested in the human, this is, she's now talking about the ghost set of Watchmen, and its process of being turned into

to kill a Mockingbird. Oh, okay, okay, okay. It appears that the New York editor who handled the book was uninterested in the human and moral situation the author was attempting to describe, or in helping her work through the oversimplifications and ineptitudes of that part of the book. Instead, she apparently persuaded Lee to enlarge on the very charming nostalgic early parts of the book when Jean-Louise was scout. Lee was encouraged to go back to childhood and so to evade the problems of the book she wanted to write by writing instead a lovable fairy tale. I like to think of the book it might have been had the editor had the vision to see what this incredibly daring first novelist was trying to do, and encouraged and aided her to do it more convincingly. But no doubt the editor

was, commercially speaking, altogether right. That book would have found some admirers, but never would it have become a bestseller and a classic. It wouldn't have pandered to self-reassuring images of white generosity risking all to save a grateful black man. Before Watchmen was published, I was skeptical and unhappy. All the publicity made it sound like nothing but a clever lawyer and a greedy publisher in cahoots to exploit an old woman. Now having read the book, I glimpse a different tragedy. Lee was a young writer on a roll with several novels in mind to write after this one. She wrote none of them. Silence, lifelong. I wonder if the reason she never wrote again was because she knew her terrifyingly successful novel was untrue. Harper Lee was a

good writer. She wrote a lovable, greatly beloved book. But this earlier one, for all its faults and omissions, asks some of the hard questions to kill a mockingbird evades. Damn! No, she's so right because she's asking us not to critique Ghost Setter Watchmen, but to critique the way that we love to kill a mockingbird and the process that it took to write that. Because it challenges us less. Yeah, totally. And I've got to say, but she's right from the perspective of that novel. This novel, Ghost Setter Watchmen, doesn't win the Pulitzer Prize. It doesn't win the da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's probably not on very many reading lists, unless it's companioned with to kill a mockingbird. And the fact that, yeah, that Harper Lee could have gone on to write so much

more and to say so much more. One sad final note, Harper Lee died in her sleep on the morning of February 19, 2016, aged 89, about a year after the publication of Ghost Setter Watchmen. Mmm. My hope, out of all of this, is that next time you read the book, and so I won't have to spend book club just explaining to you everything about it. Sorry, I'm sorry. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release a new episode every other Sunday, and you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. And if you liked the show,

consider subscribing, leaving a review, or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. My sources for this week's episode include, obviously, to kill a mockingbird and Ghost Setter Watchmen, both by Harper Lee, the Wikipedia articles for Ghost Setter Watchmen and Harper Lee, the press release issued by Harper Collins to announce the acquisition of Ghost Setter Watchmen, and reviews by Tina Jordan in Entertainment Weekly during Corrigan for NPR and Michiko Kakutani for the New York Times. I also got information from Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway, Stories of the Inspiration, Behind Great Works of Fiction, by Celia Blue-Johnson. To meet a mockingbird, memoir, recalls talks with Harper Lee in NPR July 19, 2014. Harper Lee's friend says author

is Heart of Hearing, Sound of Mind, by Lynn Neary in NPR February 4, 2015. Alice Lee, sister of mockingbird author, dies at 103 in NPR November 19, 2014. Parents change son Atticus's name at the Ghost Setter Watchmen controversy on People.com by Tierney McAfee July 24, 2015. The Harper Lee Ghost Setter Watchmen fraud by Jono Saran in the New York Times July 25, 2015. Atticus Finch is a racist in Harper Lee's second novel, The Internet is Heartbroken, by Jan Dizon in The Tech Times July 11, 2015. Lastly, I quoted from Charles M. Paines, I've Got the Light of Freedom, The Organizing Tradition, and The Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins. The song you're currently listening to

is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Thanks for listening.