. Spinning .

Awesome book.  Most impressive was the writing, the character interaction, the narrative structure and the insight of Carson McCullers into her people.  Theme:  Hopelessness of dreams coming true and the feeling of isolation in seeking a soulmate. 

While I’ve since scanned some reviews, the main objections to the novel seem to be the lack of dramatic action and the unhappy ending for all the main characters.  For me, the internal longings and turmoil of each character’s personal strife and their connections with each were plenty dramatic enough.  Nor am I a fan of happy endings.  In books anyway.

There were a lot of intertwining themes that lay beneath the surface: the racial issue in a 1940’s south; the growing gap between wealthy and very poor that came with the industrial revolution; the impending war in Europe; a young girl’s growing from tomboy to her first sexual experience to the rut of salesclerk that destroys her desires for a life of music; a loving homosexual relationship; the loneliness within a crowd, and many more.  One of the biggest tragedies on display is the false belief fostered on hope that someone else cares about what one can be so passionate about.

I loved this novel and will seek out at least one of McCullers’ other works despite reading that this was the best of all.

Amazing.  McCullers is truly amazing in some of her skills of storytelling.

We know the truth about what happened between Dr. Copeland and Jake Blount, but when next we come upon Jake after some time has passed, he is running blindly through the alleys:

Fighting blind with the dust and sun.  The sharp cut of teeth against his knuckles.  And laughing.  Christ!  And the feeling that he had let loose a wild, hard rhythm in him that wouldn’t stop.  And then looking close into the dead black face and not knowing.  Not even knowing if he had killed or not.  (p. 288)

While it is obvious to the reader–and to Jake–that the face is not that of Dr. Copeland that he sees but a young man caught in a fight at the carnival grounds, it holds relevance to his last meeting with Dr. Copeland and the condition the sickly doctor was in when Jake left him.  It picks up an underlying thread of the hopelessness of both of these two men’s focused desires.

McCullers must have been born with a pen in her chubby little hand.  I can’t believe how well the story has been plotted out.

In the first couple of chapters, we meet the five main characters and three or four minor ones, basically they know each other or meet during this time, and all live within this small neighborhood.  As the story unfolds, McCullers takes us along through the heads of each of them individually, therefore giving us some insight into their own thinking as well as their insight into the other characters as they come across them.

Then she brings them all together. 

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First off, let me say that McCullers is at least a thousand times the writer I could ever be.  Then, because I cannot help but read as a writer, let me say that there  are some elements of writing in the novel that have bothered me a teeny bit, and they are so teeny in themselves–especially for a first novel–that I shouldn’t even mention them, but I will.

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While it is debatable as to exactly what the event or situation need be, most of the best novels go beyond just the lives of their characters to include some more important question of interest to society.  McCullers has the obvious involvement of the racial issue underlying the more universal yet personal issue of loneliness and ambitious dreams.

It is amazing to me that she handles the inner lives of the black man and woman so well, especially in the year the novel was published, 1940, and McCullers being only twenty-three and white.  Her character of Dr. Copeland as a Negro physician upset with his own race of people for being so subservient and accepting of their lot is a volatile issue.  Dr. Copeland brings up the same points that the whites of the time felt, and is vehemently trying to stir up the people to overcome these unfair labels.  While he is passionate about the cause–to go so far as to focus his speech on Karl Marx at his annual Christmas party–he is pitifully lacking in the sensitivity of understanding his own children.  He himself carries his own prejudices, against whites, as he asserts what he calls an "insolence" that he sees in all of them with the only exception being the mute Mr. Singer.  His prejudice against his own people may be masked under his self-proclaimed raging love for them.

I wonder if there is some deeper meaning in McCullers’ use of Dr. Copeland as he does not inspire reader empathy as strongly as one would want to cheer on a hero of human rights.

Carson McCullers has a way with words. 

I still tend to believe that the above is where the natural talent displays itself, and the skill is learned through study and reading.  In this novel, her first, there is an obvious extraordinary ability to provide setting in a minimalist manner, and yet it appears complete.  There is no overuse of adjectives, and little use of metaphor and simile so that the language is straightforward and yet gives us the image without extraneous detail.  This sentence stopped me cold:

The sky was a wonderful blue.  (p. 136)

Beautiful, wonderful, nice–these are not adjectives a writer is supposed to use because they are abstract, vague.  Had McCullers’ written The sky was a beautiful blue, it would have been a fairly useless sentence.  But the word wonderful in this context is unusual.  It employs more of a feeling of joy and brightness that gives the sentence more meaning.  This feeling is vital to this section of the plot because it does not foreshadow the near-tragedy that happens in this setting.

Nice twist, eh?  This is skill.

I am well on my way to being awed and intimidated by McCullers’ writing.  This is one author I do want to know more about; natural talent? study of writing?  a reader? an observer?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorite styles of storytelling in that the characters provide the drama through their reactions to the situation (I remember something from Aristotle’s Poetics that stresses the difference between actions of characters and events as the point of story).  While each character is allowed to be turned inside out by the narrative omniscient third person pov, McCullers slowly reveals them then places a very simple event in front of them and we get to see how they react, learning even more about them in the process.  These characters–mainly, Mick, Jake, Dr. Copeland, and Biff–each seek out something beyond their world and their disillusionment with it.  They each feel apart from the rest of humanity and each seek a different path.  But they all seem to find some measure of belonging with the enigmatic deaf-mute, Mr. Singer. 

Is it the fact that he doesn’t talk, doesn’t argue, doesn’t try to change them or their views?  Their hopeless and helpless feelings and desire to belong and yet change the way things happen is met with such disappointment in the world.  Does Singer provide for them an ally of sorts?

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The tension that arose in the reader’s mind for the party to go well for Mick, given the knowledge of her character and her tendency to not quite fit in with her peers, does come about when the boys and girls are reluctant to mingle and the party is crashed by neighborhood kids.  But there is no real conflict that sets it off, no turning point that changes the mood except for Mick’s noticing the difference in where the partygoers group together, and a louder commotion caused by the crashers, but the conflict is rather anticlimactic in my mind, and in fact, Mick does the wildest thing by running down the street and jumping into a ditch thus ruining her fancy borrowed clothes.

There is another, deeper tension going on between the hired help at Mick’s house, Portia, and her father, Dr. Copeland though Portia does her best to keep peace. 

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During the first week she walked up and down the halls by herself and thought about this.  She planned about being with some bunch almost as much as the music.  Those two ideas were in her head all the time.  And finally she got the idea of the party.  (p. 88)

We have followed Mick, the young girl through a few of her days, known her thoughts and her dreams through third person omniscient POV.  She’s tough, she’s capable and dependable, yet she has desires and goals for herself that reach for the stars.  She’s no girly-girl, and she knows herself well.  Now, in her desire to be part of the new class of friends at the high school, she is planning a party and invites forty boys and girls.  We wouldn’t have thought this would matter to this loner, and with the knowledge we have of her, fear for disaster ahead.  Perhaps with King’s Carrie in mind.  Perhaps with the exerience of McCarthy’s Suttree and Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, we hope yet we fear for these vulnerable characters against a world in which they barely belong.

I love Carson McCullers’ voice in this novel, her easy way of telling what is in the setting, and yet I would cringe a bit at what I see as amateurish, in this case, repetition of a vital word used once beautifully, the second time, unnecessarily I think:

The moonlight was bright and the shadows of Portia and William and Highboy lay black and solid on the dusty street.  The houses in the neighborhood had a miserable look.  Doctor Copeland’s house was different from any other building near-by.  It was built solidly of brick and stucco.  Around the small front yard there was a picket fence.  (p. 61)

I love the shadows laying black and solid.  I lover the neighborhood having a miserable look.  These are simple, clear and yet give so much more information in the simplicity of statement.  You could read something about the three characters in the solidness of their shadows, the definitiveness of black as being an absolute and in contrast to the dusty street.  But in saying that Doctor Copeland’s house was built solidly of brick and stucco, the word solid is not only unnecessary, given the materials and the "miserable" of the neighborhood, it dilutes its value in the descripton of the shadows.

Most certainly these are such minor nitpickings in a novel of this depth.  It will be interesting to follow up with further of McCullers’ works to see the writer progression; although masterful already in langugage, I would expect great things of her. 

Even when you think you have the point of view thing all worked out–it sounds very simple–it, like tense, doesn’t always come out clean with the rules.  Carson McCullers uses omniscient third person narrator in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and switches often between all characters to allow their thoughts to progress the story and show a more in-depth side of the characters with whom they interact.  For the main part, at least so far, it appears that the chapters are controlled by different characters and remain fairly in sync without switching within. 

However, some points may be taken even with the omniscient pov:

Many memories were confused in Jake’s brain.  He lay motionless with his eyes open and his hands turned palm upward.  His hands were huge and very brown against the white sheet.  When he held them up to his face he saw that they were scratched and bruised–and the veins were swollen as though he had been grasping at something for a long time.  His face looked tired and unkempt.  His brown hair fell down over his forehead and his moustache was awry.  (p. 45)

Here we have the narrator allowed into the head of one of the characters, and yet we also see what Jake cannot see–how he looked.  He can see his hand, but certainly not his face.  But the omniscient narrator can.  It is an all-powerful tool.  We can both see the character from the third person narrator pov, as well as know what he is thinking and feeling. 

The danger in this, especially as in this novel where all characters are opened up so to speak, is that we as readers cannot be fooled; nothing should be held back if such information is known to be readily available, i.e., what a character knows to be true.  The skill therefore is to pace the story so that we know just when the character does what is going on.

I have noticed some questionable areas in McCullers’ writing as  far as grammatical adherence is concerned, and will remember to excerpt them here as otherwise I forget.  The story is good, the writing is good, and I just hate to stop reading to write about it.

Fate (or whatever) led me to pick up this book, and fate made me read today:

Mick leaned on the bannisters of the stairs.  The sudden crying had started her with the hiccups.  It seemed to her as she thought back over the last month that she had never really believed in her mind that the violin would work.  But in her heart she had kept making herself believe.  And even now it was hard not to believe a little.  She was tired out.  Bill wasn’t ever a help with anything now.  She used to think Bill was the grandest person in the world.  She used to follow after him every place he went–out fishing in the woods, to the clubhouses he built with the other boys, to the slot machine in the back of Mr. Brannon’s restaurant–everywhere.  Maybe he hadn’t meant to let her down like this.  But anyway they could never be good buddies again.  (p. 39)

Mick, a young girl probably close to thirteen in age, is the tomboy, the daredevil, the practical dreamer.  From parts found here and there she’s been making a violin out of a ukelele.  Her older brother Bill is the only one she’d taken into her confidence, and in the scene above, he’d just told her that he figured it best she find out for herself that it would never work.

There’s a pulling away as Bill needs to grow into his own as a man.  There’s Mick, who just realized it and must learn to stand on her own.  But she’s also just been faced with her own failings: "She was tired out."  Through no fault of his own, Bill has just left Mick to her own devices at a time when Mick is just learning to acknowledge and temper her dreams with reality.  Mick is tough.  She takes care of the babies and she wears boys’ clothes and smokes, and she swears not to be like her two older sisters.  But she’s not so tough nor not smart enough to know that her brother had been the rock she’d depended upon; the ground that would be there whenever she took off to fly.

Carson McCullers tells a great story.   Mr. Singer, the mute, has lost his longtime friend and is faring well enough on his own, but we are getting a strong sense of loneliness, and McCullers, with the backdrop of a tavern complete with understanding barkeeper and obnoxious drunk, leads us subtly into a new group of characters and a new direction for Singer.

One of the tools she uses to give us a closer look beyond the action and interaction of the players is narrator omniscience, getting into one head to give us an opinion of another’s.  This, from the barkeeper (Biff), after Blount, the drunk, has been dumped back in their care and Singer is going to take him home with him for the rest of the night, but first they make him eat something:

The steam from the soup kept floating up into Blount’s face, and after a little while he reached shakily for his spoon.  He drank the soup and ate part of his dessert.  His thick, heavy lips still trembled and he bowed his head far down over his plate.

Biff noted this.  He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded.  With the mute his hands.  The kid Mick picked at the front of her blouse to keep the cloth from rubbing the new, tender nipples beginning to come out on her breast.  With Alice it was her hair; she used never to let him sleep with her when he rubbed oil in his scalp.  And with himself?  (p. 23)

McCullers wrote this novel at a very young age and yet she must have spent all of those years watching people.  It shows in her writing.

Perhaps like alcohol, reading can immerse the mind in worlds that don’t exist.  Finding comfort in the drinking in of pages till the bottom of bottle glistens with the last drop of story. 

I’ve picked out Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter just for pleasure, a smooth fine wine against the necessarily acquired taste of Joyce’s scotch.  I read ten pages before I’d walked across the room and settled on the couch–the characters, the place, the world all laid before me so easily that I was no longer in my own living room huddled with a novel, but in the flowing, swirling noisy world around two deaf-mutes and couldn’t hear a sound.

But the two mutes were not lonely at all.  At home they were content to eat and drink, and Singer would talk with his hands eagerly to his friend about all that was in his mind.  So the years passed in this quiet way until Singer reached the age of thirty-two and had been in the town with Antonapoulos for ten years.  (p. 4)

The picture McCullers draws is so softly intrigueing we are part of it before we understand that.  There are no longer two friends here, there are three.  We do not know what’s coming yet, but have stood by Singer’s side and felt his love, know his depth of caring, somehow want some for ourselves as well as wanting to care that much for someone else.