The Pulse: Lee stories don't add up

I'm reading the "new" Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman, under protest. I'm far enough along to realize this is not the same Atticus Finch I recall from reading To Kill a Mockingbird as a student, much less the adaptation on the big screen featuring Gregory Peck. The Atticus I remember would never have said to his daughter Scout: "You do realize our Negro population is backward, don't you? You will concede that?"

Too bad the new book was offered as a manuscript independent of Mockingbird instead of being marketed as what it seems to be: an early draft of the iconic novel. And without a contemporary interview revealing Lee to be of sound mind and supportive of the release in its current form, questions will forever remain as to whether she's been taken advantage of with the new publication.

There was immediate reason for cynicism in February, when HarperCollins first announced that after 50 years of rebuffing demands for more of her work, Lee had consented to the release of a second, newly discovered novel. (Lee, 89, has been living in a nursing home since suffering a stroke in 2007, uses a wheelchair, and reportedly has limited sight and hearing.) Equally troubling was an Associated Press report that the publisher "had no direct conversations with Harper Lee, but communicated through [attorney Tonja] Carter and literary agent Andrew Nurnburg."

Watchman follows Mockingbird in its timeline, the same order in which the books were published, but now we know that Watchman was written first. Lee's editor rejected that book and suggested that she instead write from the young Scout's perspective. After a few more years of work, Watchman, set in the 1950s, became Mockingbird, set in the 1930s.

If Mockingbird had never been published and Watchman were printed as a stand-alone, its story would make more sense. But in the context of the fictitious events 20 years prior, there is a disconnect between the two books that strains credulity and only furthers questions about whether it was Lee's intention to publish both before she became physically debilitated. Where many become more tolerant with age, Atticus Finch becomes more racist in the span of the two books. The noble lawyer willing to defend a "Negro" wrongly accused of rape in Mockingbird is now - incongruently - a bigot.

"If she were more involved with this, I have to believe that she would have been very cognizant of and would have wanted to deal with" Atticus' moral regression, Julia Keller, an accomplished author and Pulitzer Prize-winning former cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, told me. "It doesn't make sense in the timeline. I do think we morally evolve, and for heaven's sake, Atticus Finch would have morally evolved. So how did he go from this great figure of rectitude, this Lincolnesque figure of towering moral integrity, to a moral pigmy that we see in Go Set a Watchman?"

A commentary written by Carter last week for the Wall Street Journal ("How I Found the Harper Lee Manuscript") did little to assuage concerns. Carter, the trustee of Lee's estate, explained that in 2011, Lee's then-agent, Sam Pinkus, traveled to Monroeville, Ala., to examine and inventory Lee's assets. An appraiser from Sotheby's accompanied the agent. Not explained is why the literary agent would introduce an auctioneer to Lee's safety-deposit box.

Included in the inventory was a Lord & Taylor box containing "several hundred pages of typed original manuscript." Carter said she left the inspection before it concluded, without a hint that the contents contained a "new" manuscript, and that neither the agent nor the Sotheby's representative told her anything about a second book.

Only after later hearing at a gathering of Lee's family that the reclusive author might have written another book did Carter return to the safety-deposit box, she wrote. There she discovered a title page for Go Set a Watchman. ("I read enough to know this was not To Kill a Mockingbird.") She then shared her find with Lee, who described the book as "the parent of Mockingbird." Carter wrote that she took solace from the fact that when she shared her "discovery" with Lee, the author corrected her as to the book's title.

But nowhere does Carter suggest that upon hearing of the "discovery," Lee asked to read the book or have it read to her. By now, Pinkus was no longer her agent. No wonder the new London-based agent immediately jetted to the United States to discuss its publication with Lee.

And that might not be where this story ends. Carter wrote that she found "other pages" that might be a "third book bridging the two."

Atticus Finch was unsuccessful in his defense of Tom Robinson in Mockingbird. Still, I'd like to watch him cross-examine everyone involved in the recent discovery.

on CNN.