Greetings, literature-loving Kossacks! Last week we wrassled with everyone's favorite Russian malcontent, Fyodor Dostoevsky; this week we jump ahead a few generations to take a long, lazy lounge in the sweltering heat of the American South.
Do you remember what you were doing at 23? Finishing college? Landing your first major job? Well, if your name was Carson McCullers, you'd have published your first major work and been well on your way to becoming what people like Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal have called the greatest of all Southern prose writers. (I think at 23 I was lucky to write the greatest essay that my three-person section of class had produced that semester.)
So that's our topic for today: how did a frail young woman from small-town Georgia become one of the titans of American fiction? Follow me below to find out.
'But what I'm getting at is this. When a person knows and can't make the others understand, what does he do?' (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, p. 69)
Carson McCullers (née Lula Carson Smith) is the poet of hot summer days spent playing cards, listening to the radio, and dreaming about a better life: but these superficial pleasures mask the soul-killing tedium and banality of the everyday. Her characters feel oppressed both by the humidity and by the weight of history, and they ache to be transported to somewhere cooler, kinder, or at least more interesting.
A prolific novelist, playwright, and poet, McCullers is best known for three works: the novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and the novellas The Ballad of the Sad Café and The Member of the Wedding (some of you may know the latter from its manifestation as a Broadway play and an Oscar-nominated film. Here's a great photo of McCullers with the two lead actresses from the film). Critical and popular success from all three allowed her a certain amount of financial independence during her somewhat short and difficult life. As a 15 year old she had suffered from rheumatic fever, followed by bouts of pneumonia, influenza, nervous attacks, and partial paralysis all through her 20s. By 30 she was paralyzed on one side due to strokes. Her twice-husband committed suicide (and tried unsuccessfully to get her to join him).
Through much of her life, which was spent in places like New York and Paris, she nonetheless channeled her memories of the South into her fiction. In the forward to the collected short stories, Virginia Spencer Carr notes that McCullers was happy to leave the South, despite setting her greatest works there. According to Carr, in 1949 McCullers made a rare trip back to Georgia, saying, "I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror." (Carr, p. viii)
That "sense of horror" is why McCullers' work is sometimes labeled "Southern Gothic", although her style tends towards hyperrealism rather than gloomy Gothic romanticism. Her characters occasionally brush on the symbolic, and her plots occasionally flirt with allegory, but joys of her fiction are the joys of everyday life rendered in deliberately languid prose.
Common to her best works are a few issues of style and content that deserve extra attention:
Elements of Style:
A big part of McCullers' genius lies in her ability to focus, with torpedo-like precision, on the most pregnant details of everyday life. Let's take an example from Ballad. Years before the plot of the story begins, Miss Amelia had married a local lout named Marvin Macy, whose love for her had transformed him into a shy, self-abnegating puddle of jelly. After a disastrous wedding night (see below), she refuses to allow him entry into the house. He sits outside, pining away, giving her everything he owns, and finally disappears altogether. McCullers writes,
Miss Amelia was left with everything that Marvin Macy had owned - his timberwood, his gild watch, every one of his possessions. But she seemed to attach little value to them and that spring she cut up his Klansman's robe to cover her tobacco plants. (Ballad, p. 222)
Until this moment, there had been no mention that Marvin Macy was involved with the Klan, but that sudden and nonchalantly tossed detail (notice how it's further deemphasized by its grammatical function as the direct object) suddenly complicates any sympathy we might have been feeling for Marvin Macy.
The other major weapon in her formidable arsenal is irony. McCullers is a master of the third-person limited omniscient viewpoint, which allows her to record the unreliable thoughts of her characters with seemingly "objective" detachment. When her focal character is young, she creates an almost unbearable irony between that character's understanding of the world around her, and what a more sophisticated reader would understand about that world. For example, Wedding's Frankie believes she's no longer a victim of the illusions of childhood:
She heard the calling voices of the neighborhood children who were trying to dig a swimming pool. They were all sizes and ages, members of nothing, and in the summers before, the old Frankie had been like leader or president of the swimming-pool diggers in that part of town - but now that she was twelve years old, she knew in advance that, though they would work and dig in various yards, not doubting to the very last the cold clear swimming pool of water, it would all end in a big wide ditch of shallow mud. (Wedding, p. 300)
At the time, Frankie is building her own metaphorical swimming-pool, something the reader recognizes from the very beginning but Frankie is slow to understand. Frankie uses that beautiful phrase "members of nothing" to remind herself that, unlike these ragged and scattered children, she belongs to something - a wedding (not her own). The reader of course knows better.
This style of writing occasionally causes problems: using the subjective viewpoint of various characters in the South, she inevitably runs into the issue of ethnic labeling and slurs. Because the prose is deceptively "neutral", it's easy to conflate the author's opinions with the characters', but a closer reading shows that McCullers is both careful and studied in her use of language, and especially in who uses that language. At one point in Heart, characters even argue over what the most "appropriate" term for blacks should be. Still, it's understandable if some contemporary readers wince at words that have long since fallen out of acceptable usage.
Sexuality:
Discussions of McCullers' works inevitably come back to issues of gender and sexuality for two reasons: the author herself flirted with bisexuality and blurred gender roles, and her most famous heroines all challenge the expected gender roles of their environments. Some, like Mick from Heart and Frankie from Wedding, prefer the androgynous forms of their first names to the more conventionally feminine forms; they run around with short haircuts, threaten to beat up boys, and only take to wearing dresses awkwardly.
In some respects both these girls are trying to come to terms with their budding sexual nature - their stories take place during the messiest moments of adolescence. But other characters, like the much older Miss Amelia of Ballad, still resist those roles, wearing overalls and boots, refusing to marry and raise children, and occasionally getting into fistfights with men.
Sex was apparently a touchy topic with McCullers. When it appears in her novels, it's almost always with a feeling of dread, if not horror. The young Mick has no ambiguous feelings about her first adolescent experimentation:
One Saturday afternoon in May she committed a secret and unknown sin. In the MacKeans' garage, with Barney MacKean, they committed a queer sin, and how bad it was she did not know. The sin made a shriveling sickness in her stomach, and she dreaded the eyes of everyone. She hated Barney and wanted to kill him. Sometimes alone in the bed at night she planned to shoot him with the pistol or throw a knife between his eyes. (Wedding, p. 277)
This horror isn't reserved for adolescents, either: the falling out between Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy in Ballad is explicitly tied to what happens in the bedroom, a scene that McCullers does not describe except through its detrimental effect on their marriage.
Her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, would tackle sexuality more directly. The dark, somewhat grotesque tale put off a lot of readers, but has since developed a strong following. In 1967, John Huston directed the film version, which starred Marlon Brando as an army officer coming to terms with his repressed homosexuality.
The Café:
As a literary device, the café is a convenient way to bring different characters together into the same space, but in McCullers' hands, it acquires its own personality. It dominates the space of Ballad and Heart - even the trio at the center of Wedding, too young for the café life, spend all their time lounging around the kitchen. McCullers understood that this kind of public area, one that could ease both the mind and the stomach, had a particular magic about it: in Ballad, for example, the café transforms both the owner and the town around her by virtue of its democratic space:
The spirit of a café is altogether different. Even the richest, greediest old rascal will behave himself, insulting no one in a proper café. And poor people look about them gratefully and pinch up the salt in a dainty and modest manner. For the atmosphere of a proper café implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfactions of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behavior. (Ballad, p. 213)
Likewise, Biff Brannon of Heart keeps his New York Café open all hours of the night, even if no one shows up:
His place was the only store on all the street with an open door and lights inside.
And why? What was the reason for keeping the place open all through the night when every other café in the town was closed? He was often asked that question and could never speak the answer out in words. Not money...
He would never close up for the night - not as long as he stayed in business. Night was the time. (Heart, p. 356)
Night in the café is a time when outsiders can feel safe participating in public life, and McCullers' disjointed heroes and heroines gravitate towards this safety. (As someone who frequents the late-night café myself, I can attest that there's a definite magic around 2am, when the lurkers come out to drink coffee and congregate around the counter.) So let's take a closer look at the people who frequent the New York Café:
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Though written in her early twenties, Heart still holds up as McCullers' best work. Less a single narrative than a constellation of characters who pass through each others' lives, the novel begins in poverty and isolation and ends in despair and loneliness. Sounds like good times, eh?
What keeps her vision from being irredeemably dark is her characters, who are decent, kind, yet somehow disconnected. The novel is less about events than about the interactions of these characters, who bake beneath the hot Georgia sun, drink Coca-Cola and cold beer at the local café, and dream about a better world than their dust-covered town, suffocated by economic decline, casual racism, and hopelessness.
Since the novel is about people rather than events, it makes more sense to discuss the characters one-by-one:
- Mick Kelly is the author's stand-in, a young girl on the cusp of puberty who finds both her external and internal worlds shifting beneath her. Like McCullers' other heroines, she finds herself drawn to the world of boys rather than girls, and much of her transition into adulthood is spent as an outsider. One night she discovers the joy of classical music, which transports her from the banalities of everyday life:
Maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved the best - glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. (pp. 118-9)
- Jake Blount is a well-read itinerant who's desperately trying to convince the town's workers to organize. Likely thrown out of every other town he's visited, Blount finds soul-crushing work at the local carnival, but feels his true calling is to spread the word of socialism around town. Blount is loud, abrasive, drunk, but means well for everyone involved:
Take Jesus. He was one of us. he knew. When He said that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God - He damn well meant just what He said. But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word he spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if He was living today. (p. 158)
- Dr. Benedict Copeland is an aging black man whose life had been dedicated to improving the situation for the black population of the town, but his cold practicality has made most of the town afraid of him. He rejects the speech patterns of his family and community to adopt a 'white' clarity and wishes the black community would adopt more stringent procreation standards. His failure as a teacher is echoed in the meaningless names of his children:
When he went into the house William would be playing music on a comb wrapped in toilet paper, Hamilton and Karl Marx would be shooting craps for their lunch money, Portia would be laughing with her mother.
He would start all over with them, but in a different way. He would bring out their lessons and talk with them. They would sit close together and look at their mother. He would talk and talk, but none of them wanted to understand. (p. 81)
- Biff Brannon is really the novel's emotional anchor. As the proprietor of the New York Café (see above), he provides a second home for the novel's lost characters, who gather late at night to drink beer, talk past each other, and feel part of something. Brannon's world is the most internalized of all the characters: he rarely uses the power of speech, but behind the quiet exterior he's constantly wrestling with his doubts and fears.
At last he put away his mandolin and rocked slowly in the darkness. Death. Sometimes he could almost feel it in the room with him. He rocked to and fro in the chair. What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.
Broken pictures lay like a scattered jigsaw puzzle in his head. (p. 237)
Each of these characters interacts in the same space, but can't seem to find a way to communicate with the others on a level where mutual understanding is reached. But they all share one thing in common:
- John Singer is the town's biggest enigma, a deaf man who lives simply and contentedly as a tenant in the Kelly home. No one is sure where he comes from, what his ethnicity is, or why he makes occasional week-long trips out of town. But his infinite patience turns him into the novel's (false) moral center:
One by one they would come to Singer's room to spend the evening with him. The mute was always thoughtful and composed. His many-tinted gentle eyes were grave as a sorcerer's. Mick Kelly and Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland would come and talk in the silent room - for they felt that the mute would always understand whatever they wanted to say to him. And maybe even more than that. (p. 94)
Why false? Due to his impairment, Singer has one quality that everyone is drawn to: he makes a great listener. It also helps that he is so patient and kind, so everyone feels comfortable in his presence. But does Singer actually deliver the goods?
Not really. Singer is a sweet man who does what he can, but the others turn him into an almost superhuman idol, a role he can't possibly fill. Meanwhile, McCullers displaces Singer's authority by giving him his own idol of sorts: a fellow deaf man named Spiros Antonapoulos. But Antonapoulos is mentally impaired, so Singer's attempts to find communion with him are doomed from the beginning. While Singer searches for meaning in Antonapoulos, everyone else searches for meaning from Singer. Moral authority in the novel disintegrates, leaving an empty core of hopelessness.
In a sense, Heart is a novel about loneliness even though none of the characters are physically lonely: they share space and time, but they cannot connect on deeper levels. The double frustration here - and this will ring true for anyone who's spent time in the liberal blogosphere - is that they all want to make the world better for one another. The differences between them aren't so much ideological as personal, but the novel hints that this flaw isn't unique to them: it's part of the human condition to fail each other, constantly and tragically, even when working towards the same general goals.
One of the best reviews of the book came from novelist Richard Wright, whose classic Native Son appeared in the same year. His review (highly recommended, but contains major spoilers, so be warned) praises her for being the first white Southerner to handle black characters with an even hand, though not everyone agrees. Wright ends his review with this insightful observation:
In the conventional sense, this is not so much a novel as a projected mood, a state of mind poetically objectified in words, an attitude externalized in naturalistic detail. Whether you will want to read the book depends upon the extent to which you value the experience of discovering the stale and familiar terms of everyday life bathed in a rich and strange meaning, devoid of pettiness and sentimentality.
That sounds about right to me.
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Note: all photographs copyright wikimedia commons. I've used the Mariner Books editions of McCullers work for all quotations.