The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (30 page)

Mick’s despair is echoed by Singer’s other disciples: the time has come for each of them to grow up and face the world. After Singer’s death, Dr. Copeland’s disease weakens his body and soul to the point that he can no longer practice or keep up the fight. His children want him to live with his father-in-law, but he does not want to leave his dark and empty home. “This could not truly be the end. Other voices called wordless in his heart. The voice of Jesus and of John Brown. The voice of the great Spinoza and of Karl Marx. The calling voices of all those who had fought and to whom it had been vouchsafed to complete their missions. The grief-bound voices of his people. And also the voice of the dead. Of the mute Singer, who was a righteous white man of understanding.” The “mystery” of Singer’s suicide “left him baffled and without support. There was neither beginning nor end to this sorrow. Nor understanding.”

Where Jake works, meanwhile, there is a murder: a young black boy is killed, and Jake takes off running through the streets. It starts when he gets into the middle of a fight between the black boy and a white boy, which escalates into a full-scale brawl, the crowd joining in with razors and knives. He is knocked out, only to open his eyes and find out that he “lay half on and half beside the body of a young Negro boy.” The boy is dead, the police are coming and Jake starts to run. He runs toward the Kellys’ boardinghouse, seeking Mr. Singer, only to find out that Singer is dead and cannot comfort him. The news made him not sad but angry. It seems to Jake that with Singer’s death, all of the innermost thoughts he had confided in him have also died.

“What good was it?” Not just for Mick but for Jake, for Dr. Copeland and for Biff Brannon? Singer’s death marks the end of childhood for Mick—the only real adolescent in the story—but it signals a period of transformation for the three adults as well. It takes immense pain and disillusionment, and a death, to awaken them into consciousness and to rescue them from the acts of violence that loneliness and despair can induce. For the first time they cannot just talk and talk in the hope that this one man will understand them. They have to slow down, to reflect, to take account. Singer’s death has in a sense liberated them, forcing them to face reality both on the surface and in their inner lives. They have to do something, to make a move, now that they can no longer go around the circle of their fantasies, repeating them eagerly and longingly to the uncomprehending Singer.

Growth for McCullers has two stages: consciousness of the self, and the will to belong. “The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us,” she writes. With “the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self.” We leave adolescence behind when we allow ourselves to change by connecting with others. For McCullers this “primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself.”

All the characters in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
are oppressed by their inability to connect, to express the inner urges that consume them. This crippling inability can lead to violence. After Singer’s death, every one of the principal characters is shocked and grief-stricken. For each, this shock invites a period of transition, or what McCullers calls “maturation.” Of all the characters in the novel, it is Singer—whom everyone in town identifies with, believing that he knows and understands them—who has no real goal or passion beyond connecting with his friend Antonopoulos, who in turn has no understanding of Singer and, unlike Singer, has no real kindness in him.

Singer’s death is liberating to each of the characters who have grown to depend on him, because it forces them to confront their true selves, to see their yearnings unfiltered and raw. It is a myth that such liberation can come without pain, that we can read Dale Carnegie or one of those bestselling self-help books and learn how to overcome grief, or take solace in one of those life stories whose descriptions of pain and brutality are like a lollipop you suck on to ease your toothache. The characters themselves might not know it, but we as readers realize that in fact the most childish of them all was Singer. He did not have the passion, the one thing that connects them to the world. Singer’s world, his obsession, begins and ends with his friend Antonapoulos, and it is not enough to live through another person. It is only with Singer’s death that we discover that the others all have something to live for.

That is why they survive and why they may in the end succeed in obtaining what they are after. To connect, you need something in you that is worth connecting to, some desire to leave the self and become part of something bigger than you. Passion works in mysterious ways—its rewards cannot be counted or saved in the bank—and yet no democracy, no genuine human community, can live without it.

Until Singer’s death, Biff, Mick, Jake and Dr. Copeland are not only childlike; they are childish. Their inability not just to know what they want but to articulate it leaves them with a gaping void. If it is not filled, this void or inner anguish can lead to violence—a violence that we find manifested in the novel when Jake beats his head against the wall or Dr. Copeland beats the wife he loves. But perhaps the greatest violence is committed by the gentle Singer when he takes his own life.

Violence is an integral part of so many great works of American fiction. We see it almost unbearably brilliantly portrayed in the works of Flannery O’Connor and Shirley Jackson, who capture the kind of horrendous cruelty that is rooted in life’s everyday tedium and repetitiousness. Or in Nathanael West’s
The Day of the Locust,
in which people flock to California to escape the boredom of their lives, to be entertained, only to find that the vacancy of their hearts and minds leads them to a scene of mass violence. In
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
there is more hope and less brutality, but it is no less disturbing. To me the most tragic act of violence in the novel is Singer’s suicide, an act of profound desperation; on the other side of the spectrum is the accidental shooting of Baby, Biff ’s little niece, when the gun in the hands of Mick’s sensitive brother accidentally goes off, turning the lives of both families upside down. Then there is the violence that flares up as a result of repressed anger and frustration, both personal and political, that we see in Jake and Dr. Copeland, whose rage disables him from articulating his emotions and alienates him from his wife and children. The story begins with the personal lives of these isolated small-town characters, but it ultimately links them to the destiny of the whole of humanity as the feeling of menace that only Harry Minowitz, Mick’s Jewish friend, felt threatened by closes in. We are left at the end with Biff, who, while offering us a glimmer of hope, also leaves us with a sense of creeping danger as the transatlantic voices he hears on the radio are as yet distant drums, warning us of what is to come. It is the same urge that compelled the gentle “other Mike” to put his beloved dog in a sack and beat him, and it may also be the urge that has persuaded unhappy and isolated students to turn violently on their teachers and classmates in terrible tragedies like Columbine and Sandy Hook, in which angry and disturbed young men have walked into schools and killed dozens of children. My own son was in a locked-down building adjacent to the one in which the Virginia Tech killer was massacring his classmates. He lost a professor, and for all those hours I spent calling his cell phone, trying vainly to contact him, I kept thinking that our children had survived a revolution and a war—but would my son survive the violence unleashed by this lonely and disturbed outcast in a small, peaceful American town?

I have often asked myself whether this particular form of violence that McCullers describes—a pent-up anguish that erupts in unexpected and unpredictable ways—is something that is in its own way particularly American. Violence—like love, hate, compassion, or greed—does not belong to a particular nation, but one of the contributions of American fiction is its articulation of a modern phenomenon, the isolation of individuals, leading to a sort of emotional and social autism. Is this the unforeseeable flip side of the American dream? Is it what happens if you are allowed to imagine a future so remote from your existence when, as will so often happen, your dream cannot be realized? McCullers’s art is not just her ability to reveal this violence in its different forms but to illuminate its frequent coexistence with something that is equally American: resilience, the urge to stand up and not give in, an innate form of rebellion against submission to any force, be it that of man or destiny, which in this book is best presented through the young girl Mick. Despite their burning need to communicate, not one of Singer’s disciples has learned to listen and take notice of the others around him or her. It is only after his death that they become conscious of themselves and their surroundings. No more “I want—I want—I want,” but a certain taking into account.

Taking into account is the price that must be paid if we are to transcend our narcissistic preoccupations. In all great works of fiction, including fairy tales, a price must be paid—there will be no glass slipper before scrubbing the floors. No tweeting and texting your pain to the world and getting millions of sympathizers who feel your pain or are amused by it, no downloading of self-help books on your Kindle or iPad, no antianxiety pills, no Dr. Phil or Honey Boo Boo or
Real Housewives
(descendants of the little glamour girl Baby in the novel). Mick and her family will not become stars of a reality show, Jake will not move the masses to demand social justice on YouTube. What will rescue them is good old-fashioned passion, a belief that one can give meaning to an otherwise meaningless life, the desire to create—to face the world, with its pain and grief, and not evade it. That passion enables them to connect; it is something at once evanescent and enduring, a bit like snow. In that passion there is pain and anguish and redemption, even if that redemption is just a firefly glimmer on the dark horizon.

There are no promises of a great and fabulous ending: there will be no concert pianist falling in love with Mick and no gathering of all the workers of the world around Jake, no lessening of the pain for Mady Copeland. But there is that glimmer of hope in the fact that, now Singer is dead, they will have to do more than merely talk—they can no longer lash out in episodic violence as they take refuge in reflection, in building a rudimentary plan. Though their friend is dead, their urges are not, and they will have to find a new and more meaningful way to communicate them.

So this new era without Singer is opaque; there are glimmers of hope in the decisions each character makes. The last we see of Copeland, he is seated in a wagon beside his father-in-law, heading out to the country. “He felt the fire in him and he could not be still. He wanted to sit up and speak in a loud voice—yet when he tried to raise himself he could not find the strength. The words in his heart grew big and they would not be silent. But the old man had ceased to listen and there was no one to hear him.”

When Jake discovers that Singer is dead, an urge overcomes him to leave town. Where will he go this time? “The names of cities called to him—Memphis, Wilmington, Gastonia, New Orleans. He would go somewhere. But not out of the South. The old restlessness and hunger were in him again. It was different this time. He did not long for open space and freedom—just the reverse.” Only then does Jake think of Dr. Copeland and of a visit he made to Copeland’s house when the doctor was very sick and could not leave his bed. Jake had barged in, without paying attention to the people who had come to visit Willie. He had made his way to the sick man’s room, where he found Dr. Copeland lying in bed with a high fever, and right away he started in on a long and arduous argument. The two men had fought until they passed out, one from delirium and the other from too much alcohol.

Now Jake remembers the doctor’s advice that night: “Do not attempt to stand alone.” Jake thinks, “Copeland
knew
. And those who knew were like a handful of naked soldiers before an armed battalion. And what had they done? They had turned to quarrel with each other.” He has a sudden urge to go and see Copeland. But Copeland is gone, too, so instead he goes to the New York Café to have a bite to eat. “The emptiness in him hurt. He wanted to look neither backward nor forward.” He thinks of Singer and how “now it was up to him to get out of it by himself and make a new start again.” He is tired and unmoored, but in the end he does leave town:

The late afternoon sun was out again. Heat made the steam rise from the wet pavement. Jake walked steadily. As soon as the town was behind a new surge of energy came to him. But was this flight or was it onslaught? Anyway, he was going. All was to begin another time. The road ahead lay to the north and slightly to the west. But he would not go too far away. He would not leave the South. That was one clear thing. There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.

One by one the characters take charge of their lives and grapple more honestly with themselves. But this does not stop them from holding on to their dreams. Mick, sitting in the New York Café, concludes that “maybe it would be true about the piano and turn out O.K. Maybe she would get a chance soon. Else what the hell good had it all been—the way she felt about music and the plans she had made in the inside room? It had to be some good if anything made sense. And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good.”

Biff Brannon is left to puzzle over the enduring mystery of what makes human beings who they are. Biff is alone in the night, thinking that his is the only all-night place, which is what he likes. He thinks of the others, of how things have changed. The menace, the violence, does not exist only in his own backyard, but thousands of miles across the Atlantic, traveling like a deadly virus around the world. The radio is on, and a foreign voice is speaking in German, French or Spanish—he cannot tell, but the voice from across the Atlantic comes to him like a sinister whisper in the dark. To him, “it sounded like doom. It gave him the jitters to listen to it. When he turned it off the silence was deep and unbroken. He felt the night outside. Loneliness gripped him so that his breath quickened.”