[In the following excerpt, Graver asserts that not only is The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter “an admirably complete introduction” to McCullers's themes and subject matter, “but it raises in a complex and provocative way the major critical issues posed by all her important work.”]

Since Carson McCullers' gifts as a novelist are essentially celebratory and elegiac, it is appropriate that the simple facts of her life should evoke both wonder and melancholy. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, of French Huguenot and Irish ancestry. Lamar Smith, her father, had come a few years earlier from Society Hill, Alabama; her mother, Marguerite Waters, had been born in Dublin, Georgia.

From an early age, Carson was recognized as an odd, lonely girl of uncommon talents and her parents tried to be especially sensitive to her needs. When, at five, she revealed a passion for music, her father bought a piano; when, at fifteen, she first began to shape plays and stories, he came home one day with a typewriter. To both the piano and the typewriter she devoted an unusual amount of energy. As she was later to recall: “[In childhood] my main interest had been music and my ambition was to be a concert pianist. My first effort at writing was a play. At that phase my idol was Eugene O'Neill and this first masterpiece was thick with incest, lunacy, and murder. The first scene was laid in a graveyard and the last was a catafalque. I tried to put it on in the family sitting room, but only my mother and my eleven-year-old sister would cooperate. … After that I dashed off a few more plays, a novel, and some rather queer poetry that nobody could make out, including the author.” Among those vanished adolescent works were “A Reed of Pan,” a novel about a musician seduced by jazz; and “Fire of Life,” a two-character verse play in which Christ debates with Nietzsche.

Supported by funds from the sale of a valued family ring, Carson at eighteen traveled to New York to attend the Juilliard School of Music. Almost immediately her dream dissolved. A girl from Columbus, with whom she had agreed to room in Manhattan, claimed to have lost all the tuition money on the subway, and Carson was forced to work instead of study. She did, however, register for creative writing courses at Columbia and New York University, and during the next year she worked feverishly at fiction and dutifully at a half-dozen part-time jobs. Just before her twentieth birthday, “Wunderkind,” the tale of a prodigy's failure, appeared under her maiden name in the December 1936 issue of Story magazine. The following autumn, she married a young Georgian named Reeves McCullers.

During her stay in New York, Mrs. McCullers suffered a recurrence of a childhood ailment that was to exercise so powerful and poignant an influence on her life. She had always been a frail girl, but after having experienced a severe attack of rheumatic fever in the winter of 1936-37, she began her third decade in a vulnerable state of health. For the next thirty years, pneumonia, heart disease, and a savage series of paralytic strokes were to become the frightful facts of daily life, tests for her spirit to survive.

In the two years following their marriage, the McCullerses lived happily in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Reeves worked as a credit manager and Carson blocked out a novel originally called The Mute. At the suggestion of Sylvia Chatfield Bates, her New York writing teacher, Mrs. McCullers used an outline of the work in progress to apply for a Houghton Mifflin Fiction Fellowship. She won praise, ＄1500, and a contract. After the editors changed the title to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the book appeared in June 1940 to generally enthusiastic reviews. Most critics praised the work as a formidable achievement in its own right, but the age of the author was too startling a fact to minimize. For a twenty-two-year-old girl to probe at such length the passionate idealism of a half-dozen adult characters was an astonishing act of imaginative sympathy.

At the time of her sudden fame, Mrs. McCullers was already at work on Reflections in a Golden Eye, a story of infidelity, murder, and perversion at an army base in the South. When it appeared in February 1941, the critical response was chilly. Most reviewers found it an unpalatable and self-consciously bizarre performance, deficient in just those qualities of psychological intuition that made the first novel so memorable. In his severity, Hubert Creekmore is typical: “the characters are all somewhat hermetically sealed in the pigeonholes of their neuroses. None of them reacts on the others. … You watch them go through their paces like a series of parallel dots and the experience is barren.”

The disappointment at the reception of the new novel was matched by a private misfortune. In 1940 the McCullerses quarreled and agreed to divorce; and for the next five years Mrs. McCullers lived for short periods of time in Columbus and Saratoga Springs, but mostly amidst a legendary gathering of artists and writers called February House at Seven Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights, New York. At the time of her marital troubles, her friend George Davis, the editor of Mademoiselle, had suggested renting an old brownstone house as the site for an experiment in cooperative living. Before long they were joined by the poets W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Chester Kallman; the novelists Paul and Jane Bowles, Christopher Isherwood, and Richard Wright; the designer Oliver Smith, the composer Benjamin Britten, and the tenor Peter Pears. During the war years, a visitor to the house might find any one of the transient charter members, or such guests as Aaron Copeland playing the piano, Denis de Rougemont talking to Salvador Dali, or Paval Tchelitchew decorating the walls with a mural. Domestic details were managed by Auden, Mrs. McCullers, or Gypsy Rose Lee.

For a twenty-three-year-old girl from Georgia, Seven Middagh Street provided unusually spirited company and singular material for novels and stories. A strutting hunchback who came each evening to a bar near the Brooklyn Navy Yard now lives in The Ballad of the Sad Café, and a New York fire engine played a role in the birth of Frankie Addams. After meditating for weeks on the disjointed elements in a story of an adolescent girl, Mrs. McCullers heard a siren just outside the house. Following Gypsy Rose Lee out the door, she was oddly inspired to shout: “Frankie is in love with her brother and his bride and wants to become a member of the wedding.”

The early 1940's proved to be Mrs. McCullers' most productive period. “A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud” was chosen for the O'Henry Prize Stories in 1942, and The Ballad of the Sad Café for Martha Foley's Best American Short Stories two years later. Meanwhile, encouraged by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she had been working steadily on The Member of the Wedding. Even her personal life seemed momentarily to stabilize: her recently widowed mother bought a house in Nyack, New York, into which Carson was later to move; and she began once again to correspond with Reeves when he was wounded fighting in Europe. Shortly after his return to the United States in February 1945, they were married for a second time.

For the next three years, Mrs. McCullers fought against failing health and tried to find a producer for the dramatic version of The Member of the Wedding, which had been published as a novel in 1946. In Paris, the summer of 1947, a stroke impaired the vision of her right eye; and that autumn still another stroke left her partially paralyzed on one side of her body. Although recuperation at the American Hospital in Paris and the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York was dishearteningly slow, the decade was to end on a triumphant note. On the night of June 5, 1950, The Member of the Wedding opened at the Empire Theatre in New York to the extravagant praise of the audience and newspaper critics. In the World-Telegram, William Hawkins spoke for the majority: “I have never before heard what happened last night at the curtain calls for Member of the Wedding when hundreds cried out as if with one voice for Ethel Waters and Julie Harris.” The next year, the play won both the Donaldson Award and the prize of the Drama Critics Circle, and after running for 501 performances it was filmed by Stanley Kramer.

On the crest of this popular and critical success, Houghton Mifflin published Mrs. McCullers' three novels and seven stories in an omnibus volume. Reviewing the British edition the next year, V. S. Pritchett called its author “a genius … and the most remarkable novelist to come out of America for a generation.” At thirty-four, Mrs. McCullers was, in Gore Vidal's recollection, “the young writer” of the period, “an American legend from the beginning.” Even critics like Edmund Wilson and Diana Trilling, while expressing serious reservations about her talent, were likely to talk of her youth and the undeniably rich promise of her future. If, Joseph Frank wrote, Mrs. McCullers could, like Dostoevski, place her characters in a situation where their grotesqueness takes on symbolic value, “American literature may find itself with a really important writer on its hands.”

From this point on, however, the life story of Carson McCullers becomes the history of declining health and talent. The promise, which in the 1940's was on everybody's lips, was never fulfilled. In 1951, she and her husband bought a house at Bachvillers, near Paris, where they lived on and off for two years; but domestic calamity made much of the interlude a nightmare. Reeves drank heavily, took drugs, and fell into fits of wild, almost maniacal abusiveness. Mrs. McCullers, desperate, returned alone to Nyack and soon learned that Reeves had committed suicide in Paris. Other personal disasters weakened her resistance: the death in 1954 of a favorite aunt was followed a few months later by the loss of her mother. Given the severity of the stresses under which she labored, the play and the novel Mrs. McCullers published in 1958 and 1961 were triumphs of stoicism but, unhappily, failures of art. The Square Root of Wonderful, a maladroit comedy of manners, closed after forty-five performances in New York; and Clock without Hands, an ambitious, long-studied novel about race, is devoid of both energy and plausible social observation. But despite these disappointments, her earlier work continued to be widely read and appreciated; each of the first four volumes sold more than a half-million copies in hard- and soft-covered editions and adaptors were eager to translate her books into other media. Edward Albee dramatized The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1963; John Huston cast Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor in a film of Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967); and Robert Ellis Miller directed Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968).

Against the physical afflictions of her last decade, Mrs. McCullers responded with admirable gallantry and spirit. A heart attack, breast cancer, paralysis, pneumonia, and a bone-crushing fall occurred in terrible succession from 1958 to 1964, and yet she traveled, received guests, and worked fitfully on unfinished manuscripts. In August 1967 she was felled by still another stroke and lapsed into a coma from which she never regained full consciousness. She died on September 29, 1967.

Any reader who wishes to determine the characteristic strengths and limitations of Carson McCullers as a writer could do no better than to begin with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Not only is this first novel an admirably complete introduction to her themes and subject matter, but it raises in a complex and provocative way the major critical issues posed by all her important work. The scene is the deep South; the characters are estranged and disadvantaged; and the theme is loneliness and the inevitable frustrations of love.

When the book opens, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, two deaf-mutes, have been joined for ten years in a close but enigmatic friendship. The active and quick-witted Singer has been entirely infatuated with his impassive and feebleminded friend. Although most of the other people in this depressed factory town are isolated, the two mutes never seem lonely at all. Singer gives; his friend receives; and each seems absorbed in his role as lover and beloved. But suddenly Antonapoulos becomes mysteriously ill and a social menace, stealing silverware, jostling strangers, urinating in public places. Despite his distress and passionate concern, Singer can do nothing; the deranged Greek is packed off to an asylum two hundred miles away. At this point, still very early in the story, Singer involuntarily enters the life of the community by renting a room in the Kelly house and taking his meals at the New York Café.

During the course of the next few months, Singer unwittingly becomes the focal point of the lives of four other people, who, visiting his room, see in him a mysterious figure to complete their own obsessive but fragmentary dreams. For Mick Kelly, a twelve-year-old tomboy with a blossoming gift for music, Singer's imagined harmony of spirit brings Mozart to mind. To the crusading Negro doctor Benedict Copeland, the mute symbolizes an all-too-rare instance of white compassion. For Jake Blount, a haggard radical agitator with a greater gift for talk than action, Singer is divine because he listens. For Biff Brannon, the café owner who self-consciously observes the human pageant, Singer is a fit subject for contemplation because of the attention paid to him by others. None of these dreamers know of Singer's love for Antonapoulos; nor are they aware of the bewilderment with which he observes their interest in him. When Antonapoulos dies, Singer commits suicide, and the disciples are left to ponder and to grieve.

From the opening pages of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter one is aware that this strange and absorbing story is designed to be read both as a realistic tale of a half-dozen displaced southerners and as a generalized parable on the nature of human illusion and love. And, at the start at least, each level operates satisfactorily with the other. All the carefully observed details needed to authenticate the mutes are present. Antonapoulos, fat and slovenly, works in a fruit store; Singer, tall and immaculately dressed, engraves silver for a local jeweler. Their routine is carefully set, odd perhaps in its regularity, but entirely credible: they play at chess, and go once a week to the library, to the movies, and to a local photography store. As we move on, characters read Popular Mechanics and write letters to Jeanette MacDonald; they sing “Love's Old Sweet Song” and “K-K-K-Katie,” smoke Target tobacco and speak of Joe Louis and Man Mountain Dean. Behind the exotic Georgian passion play stand Chamberlain, Munich, and the Danzig Corridor, and when Mrs. McCullers stops to describe a character from the viewpoint of Biff Brannon, she writes with the specificity familiar in traditional realistic fiction.

Yet along with the virtues of specification go the vaguer promptings of allegory. The symmetrical obsessions of Singer's four admirers quickly make him a special case, more interesting as a catalyst than as a complex human being; and soon afterwards the admirers themselves take on generalized significance: the adolescent, the idealistic Negro, the failed reformer, the philosophical student of human affairs. Through the passion with which each constructs the god he needs, he bears ironical witness to the many and wayward forms of human mythmaking.

For the first one hundred pages of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Mrs. McCullers is able to persuade us that contemporary reality and legendary story are one; but soon afterwards her technique falters and the novel becomes increasingly unsatisfactory both as document and as myth. On the literal level the difficulties center on implausible psychology and faulty observation of character. Biff Brannon is introduced as a man with a rare gift for disinterested observation and described in such a way as to suggest that he should function as Mrs. McCullers' raisonneur, the one person to make objective sense of the action. As a café owner, he can see more of the drama than anyone else and he is sympathetic to a wide range of emotional grotesques; as a male with a strong feminine strain, he is able to temper the chill of analysis with the warmth of an intuitive compassion. Following the presentation of Singer, Biff is the first of the main characters to be introduced, and his reflections form the coda that brings the novel to an end.

Throughout the early pages, Biff is described as thoughtful, inquisitive, and alert; whenever something happens, he is often the first, perhaps the only, person to notice. As the pattern of the action evolves, however, Biff is of little use beyond his ability to tell us things we have already established on our own. Sometimes, his vaunted insight is merely banal: “By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men's voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk.” But most often his discoveries are posed in terms of coils, puzzles, unanswered questions; after rubbing his nose, narrowing his eyes, fixing his stare, he is most likely to come up with this: “How Singer had been before was not important. The thing that mattered was the way Blount and Mick made of him a sort of home-made God. Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have. Yes. But how could such a strange thing come about? And why?”

It is just “how it came about” and “why” that Biff is never able to tell us, and—on many of the more important matters—neither can Mrs. McCullers. In this respect, the fundamental weakness of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is that past midpoint, the central theme (men make strange gods in their own image) is not so much developed as embroidered by still another fancy but no more enlightening illustration.

Related to this inadequacy is Mrs. McCullers' failure to establish a satisfactory relationship between the various idealizations of Singer and what actually happens to each dreamer in the novel. A number of commentators have insisted that the forlorn fate of each character at the end of the book is prompted by Singer's suicide. When the Kelly family is pressed by poverty, Mick quits school to work in the dime store, her musical promise thwarted. Copeland, devastated by the bestial white torture of his prisoner son, goes in broken health to live with relatives who ignore his message. But these events are not causally related to Singer's death. The Kelly family is impoverished because of damages they must pay to the mother of a child their son injured, and Mick took the dime store job while Singer was still alive; in fact, he approved the choice. Copeland is shattered not by anything related to Singer, but by impotence, frozen incomprehension, and the obvious failure of his dream.

There is a growing sense, toward the close of the novel, that the death of God is anticlimactic, or perhaps even beside the point. The dreamers would have been doomed to frustration had the mute never lived, and the kind of fierce inevitability that so beautifully links a Kurtz to a Marlow, a Clarissa to a Lovelace, or Ahab to his own white whale does not bind the characters to Singer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

On a realistic level there are other small problems as well. Several of the episodes in the middle section of the novel are either irrelevant or gratuitous to the main lines of the action (I am thinking of the shooting of Baby Wilson, Blount's encounter with the crazed evangelist, the riot at the amusement park; but others could be mentioned). Occasionally, characters are given dialogue so preposterous that it would bring high color to the face of a Victorian melodramatist: Copeland, who reads Spinoza and Shakespeare, says “Pshaw and double pshaw” when goaded into anger. Several times in the novel people express frustration and rage by hitting their heads against walls, fists against tables, thighs against stones. And, finally, climactic scenes collapse because the writer is too busy establishing lofty poetic meaning to notice the absurdity of a literal image. Here, for instance, is Biff's final recognition on the last page of the book: “Between the two worlds he was suspended. He saw that he was looking at his own face in the counter glass before him. Sweat glistened on his temples and his face was contorted. One eye was opened wider than the other. The left eye delved narrowly into the past while the right gazed wide and affrighted into a future of blackness, error, and ruin. And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.” Like the legendary student who wrote of Petrarch standing with one foot in the Renaissance while with the other he spanned the Middle Ages, Mrs. McCullers has forgotten the classic rule: specify first; signify later.

When one remembers, however, that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the work of a twenty-two-year-old girl, the realistic lapses are understandable; they could easily be corrected by more careful observation and growth. But the failures on the level of fable are more troublesome because they point to an ambivalence that was a permanent feature of Mrs. McCullers' sensibility. There existed in her nature a continuing conflict between her nearer and her further vision, between her desire to document the world and a desire to give it evocative poetic significance. Like Edward Albee (who—in Philip Roth's fine phrase—was “born Maupassant but wished to be Plato”) she seemed to waiver in her own evaluation of her gifts, and sometimes would express contradictory allegiances almost in the same breath. The most remarkable and revealing example of this occurs in a set of notes on writing, “The Flowering Dream,” published in Esquire in 1959. First, she tells an anecdote that confirms her existence on a plane beyond mundane reality: “What to know and what not to know? John Brown, from the American Embassy, was here to visit, and he pointed his long forefinger and said, ‘I admire you, Carson, for your ignorance.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He asked, ‘When was the Battle of Hastings, and what was it about? … I said, ‘John, I don't think I care much.’ He said, ‘That's what I mean. You don't clutter your mind with the facts of life.’” But then, two paragraphs later, comes this expression of the ultimate supremacy of living facts in fiction: “Every day, I read the New York Daily News, and very soberly. It is interesting to know the name of the lover's lane where the stabbing took place, and the circumstances which the New York Times never reports. In that unsolved murder in Staten Island, it is interesting to know that the doctor and his wife, when they were stabbed, were wearing Mormon nightgowns, three-quarter length. Lizzie Borden's breakfast, on the sweltering summer day she killed her father, was mutton soup. Always details provoke more ideas than any generality could furnish. When Christ was pierced in His left side, it is more moving and evocative than if He were just pierced.”

The trouble with the symbolism of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter begins with Mrs. McCullers' inability to decide whether Singer is pierced on his left side, just pierced, or never pierced at all. The characters themselves are rarely in doubt. For Mick Kelly, the thought of God conjures up an image of Mr. Singer with a long white sheet around him, and she whispers: “Lord forgiveth me, for I knoweth not what I do.” Preparing her lesson for the Sunday school, Alice Brannon chooses the text “All men seek for Thee”; and a moment later, reflecting on the gathering of the disciples, her husband thinks of the mute. Gradually, however, the correspondences become rather murky. Copeland's daughter, Portia, claims that Singer's shirts are as white as if John the Baptist wore them; and as the plot thickens, the mute becomes poignantly and comically all things to all men: a Jew to the Hebrews, a Turk to the Turks, a wizard to the ignorant. Obviously, Mrs. McCullers wants us to see Singer as an ironic God figure, a product of mass wish-fulfillment; but even an ironic symbol runs the danger of becoming too indiscriminately resonant. Part of the problem stems from Mrs. McCullers' flawed control over the implications of the symbol itself. Usually, the insistence on Singer's religious nature is made by one of his blinded admirers, but sometimes the objective narrator seems to confirm their romantic obsessions. Singer, Mrs. McCullers writes, has “the look of peace that is seen most often in those who are very wise or very sorrowful.” And finally, the mute is thirty-three when he dies, a detail chosen not by Blount or Mick Kelly, but by the author.

Some of the same uneasiness must greet the frequent assertion that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is an allegory about fascism. Although Mrs. McCullers has given this reading her guarded blessing, its origin is difficult to pinpoint. I suspect, however, that it may have grown from the casual remark of Clifton Fadiman, who—in his early notice—confessed to seeing signs of a myth of fascist and anti-fascist forces in the human soul. Yet, even if we recall Mrs. McCullers' cautious disclaimer (“the word is used here in its very broadest terms … the spiritual rather than the political side of that phenomenon”) the analogy has no roots in the narrative. In what sense does Singer actively tyrannize anyone; who is being regimented, and to what degree? Can Christ and Hitler live comfortably within the confines of the same myth?

What we have here, I think, is early evidence of Mrs. McCullers' susceptibility to portent, her tendency to glide irresistibly toward any beckoning abstraction so long as it is somber, suggestive, and poetic. She never wrote a book that was not to some degree weakened by this inclination, and only once (in The Ballad of the Sad Café) was she able to put dark fancy to the service of a compelling and powerful literal truth. In The Member of the Wedding, her finest achievement, there is less aberrant symbolizing than in any of her other works.

Yet even after all the damaging charges have been made, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter remains what it was in 1940: “a queer sad book that sticks in the mind.” The original design is brilliant enough not to be wholly dimmed by the failure of the performance. If the inflated myth finally collapses, the sense of small-town meanness holds up. Few books of the 1930's communicate as well the stagnancy of life in a depressed textile community and the inevitable frustration for those who try to stir free from it. “Find an octopus and put socks on it,” says Blount in a phrase that sums up a generation. If the solemnity of the novel palls, the flashes of shrewd country humor remain bright: the antics of Grandpa Copeland and his ancient mule Lee Jackson; the fancies of Bubber Kelly, who prefers fairy tales that have something to eat in them. If Brannon and Copeland seem flat, Mick Kelly is about as round as a twelve-year-old can be. Laughter has always been the finest defense against pretentiousness, and in her treatment of several minor characters and of Mick herself, Mrs. McCullers reveals an affectionate gaiety that provides wholesome leavening for the pessimism so pervasive in this first novel.

The portrait of Mick Kelly is a charming evocation of the sensitivity and thickness, the exuberance and boredom, the ease of flight and quickness of descent that mark a familiar period in early adolescence. Like so many characters in Mrs. McCullers' books, Mick is defined by the extremity of her isolation and the fever of her fantasy life. Although she wants desperately to connect with other people, she cultivates those qualities of talent and personality that might bring her increased separateness as well as applause. Excitement keeps her imagination at boiling point. To escape the squalor of her slum environment, she climbs a ladder to the roof of a house being built nearby and sits reflecting on the possibilities of celebrity and fortune. In her inventor's phase, she hopes to market radios the size of green peas that people could stick in their ears and to provide flying machines to fit comfortably on a voyager's back. During her heroic period, she expresses her desires in murals of natural and human catastrophe, “Town Burning,” or “Sea Gull with Back Broken in Storm.” In her interlude as a composer, she hopes to rival Mozart in symphony and song, but since her family cannot afford an instrument, she tries to make a violin out of a broken ukulele. Her tunes, dissonant and intense, carry titles like “Africa,” “The Snowstorm,” “A Big Fight.” The magniloquent but unfinished “This Thing I Want, I Know Not What” is her masterpiece.

As the conflict worsens between the world and her imagination, Mick constructs her most elaborate and personal defense: “She sat down on the steps and laid her head on her knees. She went into the inside room. With her it was like there was two places—the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and the things that happened every day were in the outside room. Mister Singer was in both rooms. Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there. And the symphony.” A moment later, Mrs. McCullers conveys the transparent frailty of her defense with the sentence: “Spareribs stuck his dirty hand up to her eyes because she had been staring off at space. She slapped him.”

Although Mick is irrepressibly creative, she is by no means free from an egotism strident enough to injure others. When her brother accidently shoots Baby Wilson, she torments him with visions of Sing Sing and hellfire; and we are told earlier that she had continually hit him whenever she noticed his hands in his pants, so that now he never “peed normal like other kids” but with his hands behind him. Although Mick is a virtuoso of escape, her artistry is rarely effective, and at the end of the novel she feels the disquiet of being barred from the inside room. She does, however, manage to express a qualified affirmation, which—in its vernacular familiarity—is one of the most convincing moments of celebration in the novel:

But 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. …

All right!

O.K.!

Some good.

Part of Mick's appeal rests in her indomitability and it is this sense of a human being refusing to accept meanness that Mrs. McCullers is able to celebrate so skillfully. Singer talking blissfully with his hands to an incomprehending Antonapoulos; the feuding Kelly family joined for a short while in loyalty and love; the weary Copeland hearing “rich, dark sounds” from the pages of Spinoza—these are moments of beauty as well as pathos. Rage, anger, and indignation are often in this story the other side of love, for Mrs. McCullers—like Keats—believed that a street fight is ugly, but the energies displayed can be beautiful.