Given the conflicting, contradictory stories swirling around the release of “Go Set a Watchman” by HarperCollins Publishers two weeks ago, it’s impossible to know what to believe.

So I’ve distilled the situation down to the two possibilities that feel most crucial to me:

1. It’s possible that author Harper Lee – known primarily for her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” and now physically frail at 89 – was mentally sharp when she approved HarperCollins’ proposal to publish “Watchman” as a new novel.

In truth, however, “Watchman” is not a freestanding piece of work. It is a manuscript Lee wrote 58 years ago that was rejected for publication, then re-envisioned, rewritten and revised through many drafts until it emerged in completely different form as “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

If Lee knew what she was doing when she approved the proposal, she was guilty of atrocious judgment that has put at risk the stature of “Mockingbird” as one of literature’s most beloved and timeless creations.

2. Alternatively, it’s possible that Lee’s frailty extends to her mental condition, in which case she may have approved HarperCollins’ proposal while lacking the ability to give informed consent.

If Lee’s mental frailty was known, then she may have been exploited for financial gain, a morally despicable and possibly illegal act. And, as with possibility No. 1  above, publication of “Go Set a Watchman” increases the likelihood that “To Kill a Mockingbird” will suffer as a result.

(In April, the Alabama Department of Human Resources closed an investigation into a complaint that Lee was the victim of elder abuse. The investigation found no evidence of it.)

At this early stage, HarperCollins’ plan to release “Watchman” after a crafty prepublication publicity campaign is hard to fault on business terms. It debuted last week at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller lists for combined print and e-book sales as well as in hardcover and e-book formats separately.

But calling “Go Set a Watchman” a new novel doesn’t change what it really is: an early manuscript draft that was written by a young would-be novelist and rejected by a New York publisher, J.B. Lippincott Co., in 1957. Her work spurned, Lee did not defend it. Instead, she accepted the judgment of the late Therese von Hohoff Torrey, a Lippincott editor, and accepted Torrey’s offer of help. Though the manuscript was unpublishable, Torrey bought it anyway because she believed Lee had great promise.

The two worked together, focusing the young woman’s considerable literary gifts on countless additional drafts and revisions that, not surprisingly, left only superficial resemblances to the rejected “Watchman” manuscript. The changes included radical restructuring of the novel’s time frame and dramatic emphasis. New plot points appeared as old ones fell away during rewriting. Character names and family connections generally survived, but their personality traits and their ways of interacting with each other sometimes did not. 

“To Kill a Mockingbird” was published by Lippincott to instant acclaim in the summer of 1960. Lee’s novel explores the people and events in a small Alabama town over the course of three years during the Great Depression. 

At the center are the members of the Finch family: widowed father Atticus, a lawyer; his daughter Jean Louise (Scout), who serves as the book’s narrator; Scout’s brother  Jem, the youngest child; and Calpurnia, an African-American woman who is the family’s housekeeper and the children’s substitute mother. 

In one of the book’s principal plots, Atticus defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

In 1961, “To Kill a Mockingbird” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The following year brought a film adaptation starring Gregory Peck as Atticus. The movie won three Academy Awards, including one for Peck, and was nominated for five more, including best picture.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” had thus triumphed as two very different kinds of art, cementing its identity as a work that transcends form and format through fundamentally decent characters who strive to act honorably within a racist society built on injustice, hatred, fear and violence.

Today, the book and the movie alike continue to affect readers and viewers at emotional levels undiminished in intensity by the story’s time period or small-town setting. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies in 40 languages worldwide and typically sells an additional three-quarters of a million copies each year. In 2003, a jury assembled by the American Film Institute chose the movie version of Atticus Finch as “the greatest hero in 100 years of film history.”

Contrary to some recently published reviews and articles, “Go Set a Watchman” is not a “sequel” to “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “Watchman” is simply a poorly conceived draft manuscript that Lee wrote years before “Mockingbird” existed. And while Lee and her editor, Torrey, ostensibly built “Mockingbird” on the bones of “Watchman,” the work went through so many modifications and changes as to make most comparisons ridiculous.

Equally absurd are reviews that point to the racist attitudes of the older Atticus character of “Watchman” and proclaim that the honest, idealistic, younger Atticus of “Mockingbird” changed as he aged. Nonsense. Lee wrote the older Atticus first, not second. It was the older Atticus who changed – for the better – as he got younger.

Through some impossible-to-predict artistic alchemy, “To Kill a Mockingbird” became more than a novel, more than a movie, more than a work of art. It became a touchstone of our culture that has stayed vibrant and powerful across years and generations of diverse readers and viewers.

We love Scout and Atticus and Calpurnia and Boo Radley. We take comfort and inspiration from the “existence” of these decent human beings doing their best under severely compromised conditions. We hope that we might be as good as they are if we were put to the test.

People hunger for such feelings and for connections to characters who arouse those feelings in us. Yet in “Watchman,” characters with the same names as characters in “Mockingbird” act differently and behave less honorably. In doing so, there is a danger that our emotional bonds with “Mockingbird” may weaken and falter. That would be a crime against culture itself.

When a work of art forms the kinds of exceedingly rare transcendent connections with people that “To Kill a Mockingbird” has forged, no one — not even the artist — has the right to betray those connections.

Eric Mink is a freelance writer and editor and teaches film studies at Webster University. He is a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Daily News in New York. Contact him at [email protected].