These were the ideas of the Southern Agrarians—that extraordinarily accomplished and influential set of writers and critics who embraced the modernism of Yeats and Pound and Eliot, exactly because it seemed to them a protest against modernization of all types, while they dreamed of a reformed “organic” society in the South, with that “identity,” that cult of “private honor,” still accessible. (It is good to be reminded of a time when “identity politics” belonged to the right.) Writers like Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren—though deluded about the concentration-camp society of the prewar South as it really was—had a worked-out and potent ideology, and one readily assented to by people who should have known better. Had they foundered, as their white-supremacist successors do today, in cheap nostalgia, they would not have had much influence, but they made a brilliant marriage with modernism, and that gave them immense academic authority at a time when little magazines moved big boulders, or seemed to. Theirs was among the most powerful intellectual movements of the thirties and forties, along with, predictably, the companion Jewish one in New York.

And so beneath Atticus’s style of enlightenment is a kind of bigotry that could not recognize itself as such at the time. The historical and human fallacies of the Agrarian ideology hardly need to be rehearsed now, but it should be said that these views were not regarded as ridiculous by intellectuals at the time. Indeed, Jean Louise/Lee herself, though passionately opposed to what her uncle and her father are saying, nevertheless accepts the general terms of the debate as the right ones. Asked her response to “the Supreme Court decision”—one assumes that Brown v. Board is meant—she says that she thought, and still thinks, “Well sir, there they were, tellin’ us what to do again.”

And it should also be said, out of human sympathy, that to demand that people reject their traditions and their understanding, however misconceived, of their own history—to insist that the Atticuses of this world go to reëducation camp—is foolish. The problem is not people who think wrong thoughts, since we all think what will, retrospectively, turn out to be wrong thoughts about something or other. The problem is people who give their implicit endorsement to violence or intolerance in the pursuit of wrong thoughts. And, as far as one can tell, Harper Lee never intends Atticus to be taken for that sort. Atticus’s central commitment is to the law, and that commitment is never questioned. We are meant to see Atticus as someone with skewed convictions about Jefferson, but not as someone who would participate in a cross burning or in fire-hosing protesters.

The Southern Agrarians—it was part of their complexity—didn’t see themselves as racists; quite the opposite. (Robert Penn Warren certainly more than made his peace with the civil-rights movement.) They saw themselves merely as cautious and watchfully conservative about the pace of change. That the pace of change had to be accelerated because it had been held back by terror for so long was not a truth that they wished to be told, or to see. Atticus’s attitude seems entirely authentic, his heroism and his prejudices, as so often with actual human beings, part of the same package. Credibility is the ethic of fiction, and he is a credible character.

In any case, as with most social upheavals that are allowed to work their way through a society, the things that Atticus and the Agrarians feared may have happened, but they didn’t happen because of the Supreme Court. Atticus and his friends vastly overestimated the power of liberal ideology and badly underestimated the power of their other enemy, capitalist commerce. The Monroeville Walmart Supercenter has doubtless altered Monroeville more than all the fiendish Yankee conspiracies to undermine the Tenth Amendment. Certainly the supremacists’ hysterical fears of anarchy, as much as the fondest hopes of civil-rights utopians, have been left unrealized. Hysteria about change is rarely earned by the change when it comes.

Yet here is where the questions of the book’s provenance begin to arise, and they, too, get a little sticky. The emotional force of “Watchman” depends entirely on the reader’s sharing Scout’s shock at the revelation of Atticus’s new friends and new affiliation, and, since Atticus is scarcely dramatized at all before his fall from grace, the reader already suspicious about the pedigree and the background of the book becomes doubly so. If you don’t know Atticus as a hero—and in this book you really don’t, except by assertion—why would you care that he seems to defect to villainy, however well he defends it? Taken as a composite from both books, Atticus may be a credible hero, but you have to read both books to know that. The charm of the flashbacks that ornament “Watchman” is real for those who know Jem and Dill and Cal from “Mockingbird”—but what effect could Lee have expected them to have on readers who don’t? Indeed, the book as a book barely makes sense if you don’t know “Mockingbird.” If “Watchman” is a first novel, even in draft, it is unlike any first novel this reader is aware of: very short on the kind of autobiographical single-mindedness that first novels usually present, and which “Mockingbird” is filled with, and very long on the kind of discursive matter that novelists will take up when their opinions begin to count.

It is, I suppose, possible that Lee wrote it as we have it, and that her ingenious editor, setting an all-time record for editorial ingenuity, saw in a few paragraphs referring to the trial of a young black man the material for a masterpiece. But it would not be surprising if this novel turns out to be a revised version of an early draft, returned to later, with an eye to writing the “race novel” that elsewhere Harper Lee has mentioned as an ambition. (The manuscript might then have been put aside by the author as undramatic and too abstract.) It is sad, though, to think that the preoccupations of this book, however much they may intersect our own preoccupations of the moment, might eclipse her greater poetic talents, evident here, and so beautifully fulfilled in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” There is a genuine dramatic climax, worthy of the writer’s gifts, offered and then evaded in “Watchman.” In the book’s toughest scene, Scout goes to visit Calpurnia, the black woman who brought her and Jem up, with infinite-seeming love, after Atticus agreed to defend Cal’s grandson from a charge of manslaughter. Scout is heartbroken to find that her beloved mother figure is cautiously distanced from her:

“Cal,” she cried, “Cal, Cal, Cal, what are you doing to me? What’s the matter? I’m your baby, have you forgotten me? Why are you shutting me out? What are you doing to me?” Calpurnia lifted her hands and brought them down softly on the arms of the rocker. Her face was a million tiny wrinkles, and her eyes were dim behind thick lenses. “What are you all doing to us?” she said.

Then Scout asks, “Did you hate us?,” and Calpurnia shakes her head no. This is credible. But the scene, and the book, would have been stronger if she hadn’t. ♦