The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (24 page)

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
is an urban story, unmistakably set in the South, but this is a South where the sense of community and familial affinities are broken, where even exploitation has taken on a new tone and texture. McCullers’s characters are solitary misfits who cannot create a bond. They might speak in a more “civilized” manner than Huck and Jim, but they do not know how to interact, how to connect, how to communicate—they are spiritually inarticulate, having discovered a new kind of urban loneliness that will cast a long shadow over American fiction.

“The South has always been a section apart from the rest of the United States,” McCullers wrote in an essay published in 1941, “having interests and a personality distinctly its own. . . . Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to the rest of the nation.” In the year that America entered the Second World War, McCullers proclaimed that modern southern writing was “the progeny of the Russian realists,” an affinity she attributed to the strikingly similar circumstances under which the two societies functioned: “In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life,” she wrote. “Life is plentiful; children are born and they die, or if they do not die they live and struggle. And in the fight to maintain existence the whole life and suffering of a human being can be bound up in ten acres of washed out land, in a mule, in a bale of cotton.”

I found the essay almost by accident and was only a few paragraphs in when I felt myself transported back to those muggy spring days in Oklahoma when Joanna and I argued about the southernness of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Joanna was not terribly interested in this central theme of Carson McCullers’s most famous novel, the special kind of loneliness that she described as peculiarly American. What she wanted was to retrieve its texture. At times, frustrated by my abstractions, she would almost shout out, “Yes, but how would you
paint
that?”

In her outline for “The Mute,” the working title for
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
McCullers writes that the town that forms the backdrop to her story could exist anywhere in America, at any time, but “there are many aspects of the content which are peculiar to the America of this decade—and more specifically to the southern part of the United States.” This town, never mentioned by name, “is located in the very western part of Georgia, bordering the Chattahoochee River and just across the boundary line from Alabama”—much like Carson’s own hometown of Columbus. Its population is around forty thousand, about one-third of whom are “Negroes.” It is a “typical factory community and nearly all of the business set-up centers around the textile mills and small retail stores. Industrial organization has made no headway at all among the workers in the town,” who are “conditioned to a very apathetic, listless state.” Rather than blame himself for his own misfortune, the worker turns on the “only social group beneath him—the Negro.”

From this skeletal description grew that haunting town somewhere in “the middle of the deep South,” whose stagnant air carries something of the dangerous and dusty heat of the Phelps farm in
Huckleberry Finn
. The same motionless air chases all the characters, penetrating their pores and setting them in frantic motion, as if in flight from some invisible burden: “The summers were long and the months of winter cold were very few. Nearly always the sky was a glassy, brilliant azure and the sun burned down riotously bright. Then the light, chill rains of November would come, and perhaps later there would be frost and some short months of cold. The winters were changeable, but the summers always were burning hot. The town was a fairly large one. On the main street there were several blocks of two- and three-story shops and business offices. But the largest buildings in the town were the factories, which employed a large percentage of the population. These cotton mills were big and flourishing and most of the workers in the town were poor. Often in the faces along the streets there was the desperate look of hunger and of loneliness.”

This same aura of desperation will resurface in McCullers’s later fiction. In
The Ballad of the Sad Café
she writes, “Yes, the town is dreary. On August afternoons the road is empty, white with dust, and the sky above is bright as glass. Nothing moves—there are no children’s voices, only the hum of the mill. . . . There is absolutely nothing to do in the town. Walk around the millpond, stand kicking at a rotten stump, figure out what you can do with the old wagon wheel by the side of the road near the church. The soul rots with boredom.” We have come a long way from Dorothy’s Kansas and the celebrated myth of the hardworking pioneer.

I once tried to convince Joanna that the small towns in American fiction all have something in common, thinking of Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio,
Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street,
and the unnamed towns in Georgia of
Lonely Hunter
and
Ballad of the Sad Café
. This was a pet theory of mine, one I still find myself returning to. She shot back that I didn’t understand a thing about America. They are not the same, she cried, Winesburg and that town in Georgia! Her tone implied that such a thing should be very obvious, like the color of snow. “Can’t you see?” she would ask earnestly, leaning slightly toward me, her hands outstretched as if in supplication.

For a long time, I did not see. I could not bring myself to share her view that all southern characters are lonely outcasts—this was certainly not true of the characters populating Eudora Welty’s novels, or Robert Penn Warren’s
All the King’s Men
. And yet I was forced to concede that Faulkner’s major characters are outcasts in the sense that they have been cast away from a past that is not just irretrievably lost but also somehow poisoned by a lie. “There was something definitely rootless about him,” the narrator says of Joe Christmas in
Light in August,
“as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home.”

At the time I staked out my position, but over the years I have come to appreciate that there are certain elements that make southern fiction distinct. Faulkner, O’Connor, Richard Wright, Erskine Caldwell—they were born in the only part of America that had lost a war and been occupied, a loss that remained central to their self-definition. Their unique history was a burden but also a source of inspiration. Many other southern writers, like Peter Taylor and Walker Percy, tackle this admittedly southern theme of a lost past to different degrees, but the past is not a major concern for McCullers. Her characters suffer from loneliness and isolation, but their conditions are rooted firmly in their present states of mind.

Joanna wasn’t a friend in the usual sense of the word. Most of my close friends, like Joan and Steve, were sympathetic to “the cause,” if not part of a specific political group or ideology. Joanna would have none of it. Whenever I would mention a protest meeting or the war in Vietnam she would shake her head and lean forward, as if ready to physically cut me off, and then she would change the subject to what she really wanted to talk about.

Mike was on the other side of the spectrum. He was a committed activist. At the time there were so many different organizations and groups mobilized to change the world. Although I officially belonged only to the Confederation of Iranian Students, I participated in some of the other radical activities around campus. Mike, of course, sympathized with each and every cause. He would tease me about my literary “tendencies,” which he saw as a distraction from what really mattered. For a while I was on the English department’s speakers committee, and he’d appraise the speakers we brought to campus, dragging out his curt evaluation in slow motion: “Allen Ginsberg, good. Norman Mailer, not so good. Amiri Baraka, good. Fredric Jameson, gives Marxism a bad name. Adrienne Rich, good, I guess. And who is this John Barth you are so crazy about?” I would try to cajole him into appreciating literature by quoting from his favorite thinkers: Hegel on form and content, Marx in praise of Greek tragedy, Brecht on the fact that Paul Claudel was a reactionary but nonetheless a great poet.

“Facts, Mike,” I would tease him. “Your facts are mere skeletons, without the flesh and blood of imagination.”

“Fancy talk,” Mike would say, “fancy talk.”

He would tell me that stories do not put bread on the table, and I would say they’re not meant to do that, and your “facts” are in the eye of the beholder. And besides, man does not live by bread alone.

Mike was, as others later described him, a Norman “fixture.” I have the same mental image of him throughout my years at the University of Oklahoma: slim and straight, with a long face, frizzy hair, a beard that covered most of his face, and granny glasses. He and Joanna represented two poles of my existence in Norman, one having to do with art and literature, Fellini, Bergman and playing the guitar, and the other with protests, taking over the administration building, long meetings and singing old labor songs.

In her outline for “The Mute,” McCullers describes the main theme of the novel as that of “man’s revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as is possible.” The characters could belong to any place at any time, as their isolation and inability to communicate takes on a larger, more universal meaning. Or could they? This was what Joanna and I never could agree on. She held the view that what gave these characters blood, flesh and bones and shaped their souls—in short, what made them “real”—was rooted in a particularly American psychosis and, more specifically, in the character of the American South.

“Inner isolation,” “man’s revolt,” “the urge to express”—these are charged words, both intense and abstract, almost intimidating, but what endures is a compelling human drama and not an existential thesis concocted by a precocious twenty-year-old who, aside from a short trip to New York, had only ever been to Charlotte, North Carolina. Yet she did touch on all of those abstractions, with the ruthless eye of a writer, accomplishing what one of her characters, Biff Brannon, strives for, which is “to store up a whole lot of details and then come upon something real.”

There is something about each one of her four principal characters that is slightly off, slightly self-tortured, as they struggle to understand the meaning of life and to give their own lives meaning. Rereading the book, I found many aspects at once comical and tragic and began to feel that the whole novel was, in many ways, encapsulated by what the narrator says at one point about Jack Blount: “There was something very funny about the man, yet at the same time another feeling would not let you laugh.”

This is McCullers’s secret strength: creating something “very funny” that cannot be laughed at. McCullers invented her own style, what the German writer Klaus Mann called “a strange mixture of refinement and wildness, ‘morbidezza’ and ‘naïveté.’” She would later describe southern realism as a “bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.” While farce and tragedy have always been foils for each other, it is rare, she maintains, other than in works of Russian and southern literature, that “they are superimposed one upon the other so that their effects are experienced simultaneously.”

McCullers describes her book as “the story of five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves. One of these five persons is a deaf-mute, John Singer—and it is around him that the whole book pivots.” The other four are a restaurant proprietor, Biff Brannon; a self-proclaimed activist and labor agitator, Jake Blount; an African American doctor, Benedict Mady Copeland; and a twelve-year-old girl, Mick Kelly, whose large family barely makes ends meet by turning part of their home into a boardinghouse. “Because of their loneliness,” McCullers writes in her outline, these four “see in the mute a certain mystic superiority and he becomes in a sense their ideal.” Singer himself has a parallel relationship with another deaf-mute, Antonapoulos, who is his roommate and only friend until he begins to behave strangely and is taken to a mental hospital in another city.

I did not at first imagine, when I went searching for Huck’s progenies, that I would find myself revisiting Carson McCullers. But when I did, I was struck by their affinity, with one crucial difference. Huck’s solitary journey was enriched by Jim’s presence. Here there is no Jim, no soul mate and moral compass. What each character is left with is a secret passion and the need to communicate it. This makes them feel both alone and hopeful. It also accounts for their jittery restlessness. McCullers’s characters do not ponder the past; they spend their time dreaming of the future, or rather of a future other than the one they have been dealt.

When Oprah picked
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
for her book club, she devoted a segment to interviewing two “deaf divas,” the actress Marlee Matlin and former Miss America Heather Whitestone McCallum. Both expressed their excitement about the novel, and the former Miss America said she admired McCullers for offering “the hearing world a glimpse of what it may have been like to be deaf in the 1930s.” Both said how impressed they were with McCullers’s ability to “capture deafness,” not in today’s terms, but “accurately for her time and place.” Whitestone McCallum mentioned the isolation she had suffered while growing up and said, “Today, people have a better attitude towards deaf people. Technology is much better, and that’s what makes such a difference.” I would have liked to hear more about her feelings of isolation as a child, that experience being so central to the book.

Singer is deaf, and he can read lips, but is that really the point of the book? Is it a book about deafness? Maybe, but not as literally as that would suggest. McCullers did not model Singer on research about deafness. When, a few months after their marriage, her husband suggested that he could take her to a convention on deafness in Macon, Georgia, so she could authenticate her conception of John Singer, she refused to go. She said she wanted to keep “her own imagined image.”