[In the following essay, Evans discusses The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as an allegorical novel.]

1

The novel on which Mrs. McCullers had started to work during the year she was ‘resting’ in Columbus did not begin to take definite shape until after her marriage, and even then it did so very gradually. She knew that it was to be a book whose central theme was loneliness and love, and she had roughly decided on its pattern: the protagonist was to be a Jew about whom the other characters knew very little but to whom, for some reason, they all turned in their distress and confided their innermost hopes and fears. Somewhere in an art gallery she had seen a portrait of a Jew whose expression—wise, kindly, and compassionate—supplied her with the physical image of her character, whom she named Harry Minowitz. It is also possible that, unconsciously, she was endowing Harry Minowitz with some of the characteristics of her own father, and that this character represents to that extent a projection of the father image: Minowitz, like Mr. Smith, is a jeweller, and his relationship with the other characters is of a distinctly paternal type. It had not yet occurred to her to make her protagonist a deaf-mute, and Mick, at this stage, was not a girl at all but a boy named Jester.¹

It was during the first year of her marriage, when she and Reeves were living in Charlotte, that she had what she sometimes refers to as an ‘illumination’:

For a whole year I worked on this book and I didn't understand it at all. All the characters were there and they were all talking to this man—but I didn't know why they were talking to him. Then one day, after working very hard on this novel I did not understand, I was walking up and down the floor when suddenly it came to me that Harry Minowitz (his name) is a deaf-mute and immediately the name was changed to John Singer.² The whole focus of the novel was fixed and I was, for the first time, committed morally, ethically, and with my whole soul to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

This statement suggests that Mrs. McCullers is, like many romantics, a writer of the compulsive type, and it is her conviction that the writer discovers his purpose in the act of composition by a kind of ‘dawning’ process. It may be remarked that this is not, perhaps, the way in which allegories are commonly thought of as being written—and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, like most of Mrs. McCullers's work, is largely allegorical. But all allegorical writers do not work in precisely the same way, and in any case no real inconsistency is involved, for allegory, if it is to be other than merely mechanical, presupposes an intuitive faculty that invents incidents and relationships as well as a rational faculty that orders and arranges them according to a conscious plan. In allegory, which by its nature involves the use of symbols, the selection and integration of them is naturally more rigorous than in non-allegorical writing, but the source and growth of any work of art remain, as Mrs. McCullers has said, ‘as mysterious as the formation of life in the womb.’

At any rate the idea of making her protagonist a deaf-mute was a happy one, not merely for the obvious reason that he constitutes an excellent symbol of isolation but also because the nature of his handicap contributes greatly to the irony that is at the centre of the novel. For the reason Singer is so highly esteemed by the other characters is that, being mute, he cannot make himself fully known to them. Not that there is anything dubious about his character—he is simply lacking in the godlike qualities that they imagine they see in him, as is made clear from the letters he writes—and never mails—to his friend Antonapoulos. He himself wonders why it is that the others are always seeking him out. He writes to Antonapoulos: ‘They come up to my room and talk to me until I do not understand how a person can open and shut his or her mouth so much without being weary.’ Of Jake Blount he says: ‘The one with the mustache I think is crazy … He thinks he and I have a secret together but I do not know what it is.’ And of Mick: ‘She knows I am deaf but she thinks I know about music.’ About the whole situation he confesses: ‘I do not understand, so I write to you because I think you will understand.’

It is tempting to speculate that the reason Singer is able to get along so well with these so different characters (who often quarrel among themselves) is that his understanding of them does not greatly exceed theirs of him. Certainly it is because they know so little about him that they are free to imagine him as they wish him to be, so that the image of him which they fashion is really a projection of their own desires. The rumours that exist about him are therefore many and varied:

The Jews said that he was a Jew. The merchants along the main street claimed he had received a large legacy and was a very rich man. It was whispered in one browbeaten textile union that the mute was an organizer for the C. I. O. A lone Turk who had roamed into the town years ago and who languished with his family behind the little store where they sold linens claimed passionately to his wife that the mute was Turkish. He said that when he spoke his language the mute understood. And as he claimed this his voice grew warm and he forgot to squabble with his children and he was full of plans and activity. One old man from the country said that the mute had come from some place near his home and that the mute's father had the finest tobacco crop in all the county. All these things were said about him.

There is surface irony in the choice of the name Singer as applied to a deaf-mute, but there is also a sense in which the name, as I shall presently show, is peculiarly appropriate.

‘I never knew a deaf-mute,’ Mrs. McCullers once admitted in an interview. To write about one so knowingly, and at such length, posed a problem that was not to be solved overnight, but her imagination proved equal to the task and in none of her other novels, with the possible exception of Clock Without Hands, has she been quite so successful in the handling of realistic detail. When the book was nearly finished, her husband told her about a convention of deaf-mutes which was being held in a nearby town and suggested they go to observe it, but Carson refused: ‘I already had made my conception of deaf-mutes and didn't want it to be disturbed.’

The two years during which she worked on The Mute (whose title was later changed by the publisher to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter³) were amongst the happiest of Mrs. McCullers's life. She and Reeves were poor but they were in love, and as yet no cloud had appeared which threatened to trouble their peace of mind. During the day she would write, play the piano, and go for long walks in the country; in the evening, when Reeves came home, she would read aloud what she had written during the day and discuss with him the plan of the book. Occasionally he would make a suggestion, but what he mainly had to offer was not criticism so much as encouragement and enthusiasm. He had not altogether forgotten his own literary ambitions, and Carson made a point of reminding him of them from time to time. Between them they made a pact: she would write for a year while he worked to support them, and the following year the parts would be reversed—he would work at his writing while she acted as breadwinner. By this means they hoped in time to arrive at the point where it would be possible for both of them to devote all their time to fiction.

When Carson was in New York she had met, through Miss Bates, the novelist William March, author of Company K, which was perhaps the best American novel to come out of the First World War. Miss Bates, with whom she continued to keep in touch and who knew that she was working on a novel, now suggested that she apply for a Houghton Mifflin Fiction Fellowship and advised Carson to send several chapters of The Mute to March for his opinion and criticism. He was enthusiastic: not only, he declared, was the book worth subsidizing, but it contained some of the most sensitive writing that he had ever read; it was hard for him to believe it was a first novel. Encouraged by his and Miss Bates's support, Carson submitted the outline which appears in the Appendix of this book to the Houghton Mifflin Company, which awarded her a Fiction Fellowship of ＄1500.

2

The essential loneliness of individuals in a world full of other individuals as lonely as themselves is the paradox about which The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is constructed. It would, I think, be an impertinence to suggest specific biographical reasons why Mrs. McCullers chose this particular theme—or rather (since, as I have said, she is a compulsive writer) why it chose her. Beyond noting that she had always been conscious of the sense of difference that separates creative from ordinary people (and conscious also that ordinary people were conscious of it) and that during her first months in New York she came to know what it was to be lonely in the midst of crowds, there seems to be no particular point in speculation of this type: what is important is that the theme is a valid—indeed, a traditional—one, and that she recognized in it an opportunity to communicate her experience of life.

The structure of the book is strictly symmetrical. At its apparent centre is Singer, about whom the other main characters are grouped in satellite fashion, or to whom they stand in the same relation as the spokes to the hub of a wheel: Mick Kelly, the adolescent tomboy who struggles fiercely but hopelessly against the fate that denies her the money for piano lessons and that forces her finally to exchange her dream of becoming a concert pianist for a job at Woolworth's; Doctor Copeland, the agnostic Negro physician whose mission in life is the advancement of his race and who is willing to sacrifice everything, including his own health, toward this end—yet who is feared and mistrusted by even the members of his own family; Jake Blount, the Marxist proselytizer whose excess of zeal and refusal to compromise render him so ineffectual that he takes refuge in alcohol; and Biff Brannon, the proprietor of the New York Café, who watches everything from behind his counter with an attitude that is half ironic, half compassionate, and who, when his wife (for whom he feels no special fondness) dies, expresses the feminine side of his nature, hitherto held in abeyance, by using perfume and bleaching his hair.

Though Singer is the protagonist and the apparent centre of the book, its real centre is Spiros Antonapoulos, a grotesque character who is not merely a deaf-mute but a half-wit as well. For, while all the above-mentioned characters are attracted to Singer, Singer himself—unknown to the others—is attracted to Antonapoulos, so that Singer stands in the same relation to Antonapoulos as the other characters do to Singer. Singer's suicide removes the apparent centre of the structure, which thereupon collapses, but Singer commits suicide because Antonapoulos, the real centre, has died in a mental hospital. Alternatively, the structure of the novel, as Frank Durham has observed in an interesting essay (‘God and No God in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall, 1957), may be considered to be pyramidal, with Antonapoulos at the apex, Singer just below him, and the other four major characters forming the base.⁴

When Singer, to whom everyone looks up, commits suicide (the situation reminds one irresistibly of that in Edwin Arlington Robinson's well-known poem, ‘Richard Cory’), the shock is indeed great for the four characters who, as we have seen, have imputed to him an omniscience that he really lacks, but the shock is no less severe for Singer when he learns of the death of his friend, to whom he has ascribed a similar power: indeed, judging from his reaction, it is far more severe, since it leads him to end his life while the other characters, though temporarily stunned and confused, continue their frustrated search for love.

Granted that the novel is an allegory, what is the symbolic function of Antonapoulos, and what is the moral truth that the author wishes to dramatize by causing the least attractive character in the book to be the object of Singer's love? These are difficult questions, but they must be answered if we are to understand The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. We have seen that Mrs. McCullers did not, as many reviewers thought, make Singer a deaf-mute because she has a fondness for the unusual as such but because of his symbolic value. Antonapoulos' defect, which is mental as well as physical, is likewise essential to the moral of the story. The fact that Singer's four friends do not see him as he really is but as they imagine him, and that Singer does not see Antonapoulos as he really is but as he imagines him, suggests that what men see in other men whom they admire or love is not what is ‘really’ there but what they wish to find: this is one of the truths with which Mrs. McCullers is concerned in her novel, and it ought to be obvious that the more grotesque and repulsive a character is who is yet capable of inspiring love in another, the more forcefully he illustrates this thesis.

That there is religious symbolism in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter cannot, I think, be denied, but it is religious only in the general sense that Singer may be said to be ‘deified’ by the others, and Antonapoulos by him. I think it is safe to infer, especially in view of the evidence in her outline, that Mrs. McCullers means that men invent the kind of gods that best serve their own purposes, but I do not think it is possible to find specific religious meanings in the novel in spite of a number of false clues which the author—I think unfortunately—scatters throughout. Of these the most obvious are the attempts (noted by Durham and others) to make of Singer a Christ figure.⁵ For if Singer represents Christ, whom then does Antonapoulos represent? Mr. Durham's speculation (that he symbolizes the gods of classical antiquity, and that the outcome of the novel illustrates ‘how, with the destruction of the pagan past, the Christian myth derived from it collapses’) is certainly ingenious, but it is inconsistent with some of the circumstances in the story, such as Antonapoulos' prayers to the Virgin Mary.

Of Antonapoulos (who, incidentally, was modelled—with a few radical alterations—after a Greek produce dealer in Columbus) Mrs. McCullers has deliberately made an enigmatic figure. Singer has the following dream about him, which has a Dostoevskyan quality:

Out of the blackness of sleep a dream formed. There were dull yellow lanterns lighting up a dark flight of stone steps. Antonapoulos kneeled at the top of these steps. He was naked and he fumbled with something that he held above his head and gazed at as though in prayer. He himself knelt halfway down the steps. He was naked and cold and he could not take his eyes from Antonapoulos and the thing he held above him. Behind him on the ground he felt the one with the mustache and the girl and the black man and the last one. They knelt naked and he felt their eyes on him. And behind them were uncounted crowds of kneeling people in the darkness. His own hands were huge windmills and he stared fascinated at the unknown thing that Antonapoulos held.

It is tempting, but not very rewarding, to speculate concerning the unknown thing which Antonapoulos is holding above his head ‘as though in prayer’, for it may supply the key to the meaning, or one of the meanings, of the novel. The context establishes that it is an object of worship, which would make of Antonapoulos not so much a god as a high priest or religious champion (In hoc signo vinces). The possibility that it is a cross,⁶ however, is less likely—since it is Singer rather than Antonapoulos who has been endowed with Christlike qualities—than that it is a pagan idol of some kind, perhaps a phallus (the author has previously suggested that Antonapoulos has both onanistic and exhibitionistic tendencies), so that the ironic source of Singer's ‘selfless’ love may be sexual after all, and the meaning of the dream may be that the spirit must ultimately kneel before the altar of the flesh—a meaning which does not fit easily into the ideological pattern of the novel. I rather wish that Mrs. McCullers had made the import of this dream more apparent or omitted it altogether, for I cannot resist the feeling that she has invested Antonapoulos with a mystery and an importance that are incommensurate with what we actually know of him.

There is in Singer more than a slight resemblance to Prince Myshkin in The Idiot of Dostoevsky: about both characters there is an aura of holiness which is associated with their simplicity, and both inspire confidences from the most unlikely persons. In neither novel is the attempt to make a Christ figure of the protagonist entirely successful, and both books suffer from a certain fuzziness in their symbolism. And when we read of Singer that he has in his face ‘something gentle and Jewish, the knowledge of one who belongs to a race that is oppressed … a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise,’ we are reminded of the Dostoevskyan doctrine that it is suffering which ennobles and redeems mankind.

Mrs. McCullers once described The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter as ‘an ironic parable of fascism … presenting the spiritual rather than the political side of the phenomenon,’ a statement which has puzzled many critics and which, as Ihab Hassan has commented, ‘seems to have encrusted itself like a barnacle in the standard reference works on contemporary authors.’⁷ But while this description of the novel is indeed misleading in the sense that it limits the real subject too narrowly, it is possible if we think of Singer and Antonapoulos as leaders, blindly invested by others with attributes in which they are only too conspicuously (for those whom they fail to hypnotize) lacking, for us to see the terrifying meaning of the parable: in this absurdly grim game of follow-the-leader, the ultimate leader, the power beyond the power, is a lunatic. Chester E. Eisinger is therefore mistaken when he says concerning Mrs. McCullers's description of the book as an ‘ironic parable of fascism’: ‘The comment makes sense only if we assume that the economics of capitalism and the racial practices of the South suggest to her the barbarism of fascism.’⁸

At its broadest level of meaning, however, the allegory of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is neither religious nor political but concerns the struggle of individuals to free themselves from the cells of their beings—to achieve communication with other individuals similarly imprisoned and to identify themselves in some way with something bigger than themselves and outside themselves. Now of all the practical means of communication the most obvious is speech, and it is another irony of this intricate narrative that its two most articulate characters (Doctor Copeland and Jake Blount) are also the most miserable, while the only one who achieves a sort of happiness, however provisional and short-lived, is Singer, the deaf-mute. Speech, indeed, only leads in this novel to further confusion, frustration, and loneliness, as witness the bitter quarrel between Jake and the Doctor—two men with very similar interests—in the latter's bedroom. And it is because the Doctor must always say what he thinks, with a monumental tactlessness that is really a form of egotism, that he alienates his own children; and the one lesson that this would-be teacher has not learned himself is that the language of the mind is less eloquent than that of the heart, as his daughter, Portia, reminds him.

None of us ever cares to talk like you. Us talk like our own Mama and her peoples and their peoples before them. You think out everything in your brain. While us rather talk from something in our own hearts that has been there for a long time.

Portia, uneducated though she is—perhaps even because of her lack of education—is more adept than her father at the language of the heart, the language of ideal communication. Another would-be teacher, scarcely less effective than Copeland and Jake, is Alfred Simms, the mad evangelist who tries to substitute for the language of the heart the language of Scripture, to which he gives his own private meanings: he lives in a world of utter fantasy.

Any practical attempt at communication between individuals must end in failure, Mrs. McCullers is saying. The only way in which man can escape from his cell is through ideal communication, or love, and it is interesting in this connection to contrast Jake and the Doctor with Singer, for what the former are filled with is ideological enthusiasm rather than love. Of all the lovers and would-be lovers in the book the most passionate—and the most successful—is Singer. It is in this sense that, although a mute, he is the most eloquent of all the characters: the language of the heart does not require a tongue and may even be the more eloquent for lacking one—just as, in the case where one of the physical senses is impaired, another will occasionally compensate for it. The deaf-mute is indeed a singer, and his song—like that of the shepherd on the Grecian urn—is all the sweeter for its silence.

It is one of the characteristics of ideal romantic love, derived from Platonism, that it need not be reciprocal; the beloved, indeed, may even be unaware of the lover's existence, and while this is not precisely the case with Singer and Antonapoulos, it is, in view of the latter's limitations, an approximation of it. Singer's love does not require reciprocation but it does require an object, and when Antonapoulos dies his own reason for living is removed: suicide is a not uncommon outcome of romantic love. Grotesque though it may seem, Singer is in fact the archetype of the romantic lover, and the fact that the object of his love is unworthy of it makes him not the less typical but the more so, since idealization is the essence of romantic love.

What we have in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a group of characters seeking release in love from the bondage of self, but, since it is ‘natural’ for most men to think and act selfishly, their capacity for love is limited. The book presents us with a hierarchy of lovers, and of these Singer is the most eminent because he is the most selfless. The other characters seek out Singer chiefly because of what they think he has to offer them, not because they wish to offer him anything of their own. This point has been elaborated by John B. Vickery (in ‘Carson McCullers: a Map of Love’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. I, No. 1, 1960) and by Horace Taylor (in ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: a Southern Waste Land’, Studies in American Literature, Louisiana State University Studies, Humanities Series No. 8, 1960). Mr. Taylor points out that the selfishness of the other lovers is demonstrated in the scene when all of them meet by chance in Singer's room—an extremely awkward occasion, for while each of them was able to talk freely when he was alone with the mute, none of them is able to do so with the others present:

They cannot say anything. Each of them regards the others as intruders and considers his own need of Singer as paramount. When they are finally able to talk it is about the most superficial subject of all, the weather … What is revealed in the incident is the unconscious but utter selfishness of these people. Each of them is solely concerned with the pouring out of his own inner compulsions to Singer.⁹

But the gift of love which Singer makes to Antonapoulos is very nearly unqualified: it is true that his sessions with the Greek are consoling to him, but he is prepared to offer sympathy and understanding whether he receives any or not. (Actually, of course, he is the gainer, since the gift that Antonapoulos makes to him—of an object to love—is greater than that which he makes to Antonapoulos, who is incapable of the selflessness demanded of a true lover: Singer, however, never consciously entertains this motive.) It is this selflessness which is the source of the spiritual superiority that the other characters recognize in him, so that their feeling about him is, at least to that extent, justified.

The Platonic and Neo-Platonic aspects of Mrs. McCullers's theory of the nature of love have been tentatively explored by Frank Baldanza (‘Plato in Dixie’, The Georgia Review, Summer, 1958). Their presence in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is undeniable, but I am not at all sure that they are consistent with the central irony of the parable. One is forced, I think, to choose between the popular view of love that it is blind—on which depends the irony of Mrs. McCullers's story—and the view that it is clairvoyant, endowing the lover with special vision which enables him to see qualities in the beloved to which others, because they do not love, are blind. It is repeatedly suggested throughout the novel that this clairvoyance is but a projection of what the lover wishes to find, and this is a psychological rather than a metaphysical theory of love.

But whatever its source, love, the author is saying, offers man his only hope of escape from the fate of spiritual isolation. The hope, however, is a slight one, and most attempts to love end in frustration: even Singer cannot endure the thought of life without Antonapoulos. The next most selfless seeker after love and happiness is Mick, who longs to express herself and to communicate with others through music, and her failure is pathetic because it is not the result of a flaw in herself but of economic necessity. One of the most moving passages in the book is that in which she still persists in clinging to her impossible ambition with a desperation which is the measure of her suspicion that it is all in vain:

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 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.

All right!

O.K.!

Some good.

More than a piano, of course, is involved here: Mick is trying to persuade herself, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that life has some meaning, that it ‘makes sense’. Young as she is, she realizes that life without love is scarcely worth the living and that life therefore contains for most people more pain than happiness. Hitherto she has been able to escape this realization by retreating into an ‘inner room’, a private world where she can be alone with her dreams:

With her it was like there was two places—the inside room and the outside room. School and the family and things that happened every day were in the outside room … Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. The songs she thought about were there … The inside room was a very private place. She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel she was locked up by herself.

The conflict between the world of dreams and the world of reality is very strong in Mick. In an early scene, when her effort to convert a ukelele into a violin ends in failure, she bursts into tears:

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 kept making herself believe. And even now it was hard not to believe a little.

That illusions are necessary for human happiness is also the theme of another early story, ‘Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland’—as it is of Henry James's ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, Ibsen's The Wild Duck, and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, to name only three works by twentieth-century authors in which this theme is found. When Mick takes the job at Woolworth's, the inner room becomes increasingly difficult of access, and the dream dissolves into a sordid reality.

Doctor Copeland and Jake Blount are, as we have seen, doomed to isolation because of defects in their own character. Biff Brannon's situation is less desperate than that of the other main characters because he has achieved a sort of adjustment: the mechanical relationship which, in his role of restaurant proprietor, he enjoys with them alleviates somewhat his sense of loneliness. Even though the place loses money, he continues to maintain it: ‘The business was losing money. There were many slack hours. Still at meal-time the place was full and he saw many hundreds of acquaintances as he stood guard behind the café counter.’

Biff is the least ardent of all the lovers. He is conscious of Singer's charm, but he does not depend upon him as do the others, and because he has less need of him he is the only one who does not fashion the mute according to his own wishes and who can see him with anything approaching objectivity: it occurs to him to wonder how much Singer really understands of all that is said to him. He is attracted to Mick in a wistful way that is half paternal, half maternal, but as she grows older she loses interest for him and he is able to play with greater efficiency his role of detached observer. He is important to the symmetry of the book: he is one of the first characters we meet, and the final chapter, a kind of coda, is written from his point of view.¹⁰

No fewer than six cases of frustration occur in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Five of them involve the love of one individual for another which is either unreturned (Singer-Antonapoulos), unrecognized (Harry-Jake, Mick-Singer), spurned (Lucile-Leroy), or mistaken for its opposite (Biff-Mick). Three of them involve the love of an individual for an ideal: Copeland longs for racial equality, Jake for social justice, and Mick for her music. (The case of Simms must, I think, be overlooked: it is hard to think of him as a lover in any sense.)

But the fact that love, whether it be for a person or an ideal, is seldom completely or permanently successful does not mean that it is not valuable while it lasts. Its value, however, is chiefly to the lover (something that must be constantly kept in mind as one reads Mrs. McCullers) in that it affords him release, however partial and temporary, from his cell, so that for the time that he loves he is happy, as was Singer. The wish to love, also, is so universal that it tends to join men together, often without their realizing it: in the very attempt to love—however awkward that attempt and however unworthy its object by standards inadmissible to the lover—man finds a measure of relief from his loneliness. Finally, love invests its possessor with a certain dignity: without her dream, which she clings to so stubbornly (as if realizing that without it she is nothing), Mick would lack the interest that she has for us, and certainly the same is true of Doctor Copeland.

The emphasis on social reform, without which almost no writer in the Thirties would have dared to offer a first novel—especially one with a Southern setting—to a reputable publisher, occurs most overtly in the speeches which Copeland and Jake are forever making. At his annual Christmas party, the Doctor tells the assembled guests:

One hundred and twenty years ago another man was born in the country that is known as Germany—a country far across the Atlantic Ocean. This man understood as did Jesus. But his thoughts were not concerned with Heaven or the future of the dead. His mission was for the living. For the great masses of human beings who work and suffer and work until they die. For people who take in washing and work as cooks, who pick cotton and work at the hot dye vats of factories. His mission was for us, and the name of this man is Karl Marx.

In one of his curious sessions with Singer, Jake lashes out against organized religion as follows:

The things they have done to us! The ideals they have fouled and made vile. 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. Jesus would be one who really knows. Me and Jesus would sit across the table and I would look at him and he would look at me and we would both know that the other knew. Me and Jesus and Karl Marx could all sit at a table and—

The humanitarianism in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter reveals itself in two ways: in a sympathetic concern for the wage slaves in the town's textile mills, and in a passionate protest against the situation of the Southern Negro. On neither subject is Mrs. McCullers sentimental, and—unlike a good many of her contemporaries—she never idealizes the social victim. When Jake tries to tell the workers how they are being taken advantage of, he is met with indifference and even derision:

‘What I'm trying to tell you is plain and simple. The bastards who own these mills are millionaires. While the doffers and carders and all the people behind the machines who spin and weave the cloth can't hardly make enough to keep their guts quiet …

‘Don't it make you mad? Don't it?’

Jake's eyes were flushed and dark and his lips trembled.

The three men looked at him warily. Then the man in the straw hat began to laugh.

‘Go on and snigger. Sit there and bust your sides open.’ The men laughed in the slow and easy way that three men laugh at one. Jake brushed the dirt from the soles of his feet and put on his shoes. His fists were closed tight and his mouth was contorted with an angry sneer.

‘Laugh—that's all you're good for. I hope you sit there and snicker 'til you rot.’ As he walked stiffly down the street the sound of their laughter and catcalls still followed him.

These workers, to whom Mrs. McCullers has given a collective identity (‘The men laughed in the slow and easy way that three men laugh at one’), remind us of that other group, equally unattractive, in The Ballad of the Sad Café, who comes to Miss Amelia's house to investigate Cousin Lymon's ‘murder’: there they serve as a symbol of suspicion; here, of the kind of caution that proceeds from ignorance and self-interest.¹¹

Doctor Copeland has the same problem with his own people. ‘The Negro race,’ he tells Portia bitterly, ‘of its own accord climbs up on the cross on every Friday.’ A little later, in the same scene, it occurs to him that ‘the whole Negro race was sick’. A firm believer in birth control, he distributes contraceptives that he pays for himself:

All his life he had told and explained and exhorted. You cannot do this, he would say. There are all reasons why this sixth or ninth child cannot be, he would tell them. It is not more children that we need but more chances for the ones already on earth. He would tell them in simple words, always the same way, and with the years it came to be a sort of angry poem which he had always known by heart. He studied and knew the development of any new theory. And from his own pocket he would distribute the devices to his patients himself. He was by far the first doctor in the town to even think of such. And he would give and explain and give and tell them. And then deliver maybe two score times a week.

So the frustration pattern in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter involves not merely individuals but large masses of people; it persists on a social level as well. How private fear stands in the way of public reform is illustrated most dramatically in the incident involving Willie, the Doctor's son, who, because he ‘sassed back’ one of the white guards at the penitentiary where he was sent for wounding another Negro with a knife, was punished—together with two other convicts—by having his feet tied for three days to a rope suspended from the ceiling of a ‘cold room’: gangrene developed, and his feet had to be amputated. When Willie returns, Jake has the idea of publicizing his mistreatment by exhibiting him in a wheelbarrow, and urges Willie to give him the names of the other two convicts. But Willie refuses to co-operate: he has been warned at the penitentiary that he must keep quiet about what has happened or suffer further imprisonment. Besides, he has quarrelled with the two convicts (‘Us all has had a big falling out’) and has no desire to help them. As Portia explains: ‘You see, during them two days when they hurt so bad they commenced to quarrel. Willie don't ever want to see any of them again.’ Mrs. McCullers's moral here is very plain: individuals are prevented from uniting for a useful purpose by fear and by petty differences which divide them and weaken their force, driving them deeper than ever into the isolation which is the result of their failure to achieve harmonious social union. Long-range ideals are thus defeated by purely personal fears and obstinacies, and I can agree only partially with Mr. Eisinger when he says, ‘The failure of love is the failure of communion, not of labor unions or Negro-white relations.’¹²

Of the various symbols for loneliness and incompletion in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, physical deformity and freakishness are the most obvious, and this explains not only the presence of many freakish characters in the book but also the constant references to freakishness. There is something a little odd about most of the main characters: Mick is overgrown and a tomboy, and here is Jake as seen by Biff:

There were many things about the fellow that seemed contrary. His head was very large and well-shaped, but his neck was soft and slender as a boy's. The mustache looked false, as if it had been stuck on for a costume party and would fall off if he talked too fast. It made him seem almost middle aged, although his face with its high, smooth forehead and wide-open eyes was young.

Biff (like Miss Amelia in The Ballad of the Sad Café) has an affinity for freaks that is, of course, symbolic:

What he had said to Alice was true—he did like freaks. He had a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples. Whenever somebody with a harelip or T.B. came into the place he would set him up to beer. Or if one of the customers were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him.

Mick's divergence from the norm is the source of the attraction that she has for him:

Mick had grown so much in the past year that soon she would be taller than he was … She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl, and on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? 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. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches. And he even proved it to himself—the part of him that sometimes wished he was a mother and that Mick and Bubber were his kids.

There is one passage concerning Mick—as a student in Vocational High School—that is particularly interesting because it suggests a theme that Mrs. McCullers was later to explore much more thoroughly:

Here was the thing that soon began to bother her. In the halls the people would walk up and down together and everybody seemed to belong to some special bunch. Within a week or two she knew people in the halls and in classes to speak to them—but that was all. She wasn't a member of any bunch.

In the desire to belong to some ‘bunch’, to be a ‘member’ of something outside herself and greater than herself, Mick anticipates Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding.

3

A study of Mrs. McCullers' preliminary outline reveals that the departures which she made from it in the final version are, for the most part, of a minor and mechanical kind. She altered a few of the circumstances in the lives of certain minor characters, dropping one of them altogether—‘Lily Mae’ Jenkins, the homosexual Negro, who turns up several years later in The Member of the Wedding, where he never actually appears but is merely mentioned by Berenice—and made several changes in the sequence of events. The most radical differences between the novel-as-projected and the novel-as-written are in the character of Alfred Simms and in the scene involving Jake and the Doctor in the latter's bedroom. Simms, as originally planned, was ‘a pitiable, fragile old fellow whose senses are muddled’ and who appears on the street ‘in clean, ragged clothes and holding an old woman's pocket-book’. His function was to dramatize the contrast between Biff's kindness and the indifference of his wife, Alice—a contrast which reverses the conventional role of the sexes, in which the husband is generally (as in Robert Frost's poem, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’) thought of as being more unfeeling than his wife. This contrast is necessary, for it underscores Biff's sexual ambivalence, and Mrs McCullers wisely did not omit it: she merely makes Jake rather than Simms the target of Alice's unkindness. Another function Simms originally served was to cause Biff to experience pangs of conscience after he ejected him from the café at Alice's insistence. In the final version, Biff is spared this necessity, for Singer offers to take Jake home with him. The Alfred Simms whom Mrs. McCullers originally had in mind has almost nothing in common with the religious fanatic whom we meet in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and for whom it is not easy to see a raison d'être unless it be that he contributes a certain local colour (almost every Southern town of any size contains such a madman) and lends a bizarre, Dostoevskyan quality to the scenes in which he appears.

The other departure from the original plot, that involving the scene between Jake and Doctor Copeland, is far more important. Mrs. McCullers first planned for this meeting between the two men (who have been prevented by a misunderstanding from knowing each other more fully but whose purpose in life is very similar and in whom the zeal for social reform is equally passionate) to end in a harmonious reconciliation: ‘In the course of a few hours these two men, after a lifetime of isolation, come as close to each other as it is possible for two human beings to be.’ But in the final version exactly the opposite occurs: after an all-night argument in which Jake calls the Doctor a ‘short-sighted bigot’ and the Doctor retaliates with the epithet ‘white fiends’, Jake rushes violently from the house and Copeland (who is tubercular)¹³ quite literally foams at the mouth and is ill for a long time thereafter.

The advantages of the revised over the original version of the incident are that it fits more easily into the general pattern of frustration and that it adds to the irony which, as we have noted, is all-pervading. This scene occurs immediately after Jake's unsuccessful attempt to extract from Willie the names of the two ex-convicts and to persuade him to allow himself to be exhibited, and the two failures of communication are played off against each other. It may be worth noting that the relationship between Jake and the Doctor is based on a mis-understanding from the very beginning. When they first meet, Jake is drunk and the Doctor (who has more than his share of the persecution complex that is apt to characterize minority groups, especially minority groups that are persecuted) gives him ‘a look of quivering hatred’. The second time they meet they collide physically on the stairs leading to Singer's room and Jake tells Singer, ‘I never had anybody look at me so dirty.’ Copeland thinks Jake despises him, while actually Jake is curious to know more about the Doctor: the situation here is very similar to that in Sherwood Anderson's story, ‘Queer’, where Elmer, a paranoid character, convinces himself that George, the small-town news editor, hates him while in truth George has been hoping for a chance to make a friend of him. The isolation that results from mutual miscomprehension is also the theme of that story.

In the case of Portia, Mrs. McCullers also made an interesting alteration. Originally she had planned for this character's husband, Highboy, to be unfaithful to her, and in the outline Portia experiences strong feelings of jealousy where her rival, a ‘light-colored, good-looking girl’, is concerned. But in the novel Highboy continues to be faithful, so that of all the relationships depicted theirs is the only one that remains untroubled. At first thought this may seem inappropriate to the general pattern, but if one reflects on Portia's value as a foil to such characters as Jake and her father, and on her mastery of the language of the heart, one may see a certain rightness in the exception which the author has made in her favour. The speech in which Portia originally referred to this rival now refers, with a few changes, to the girl over whom Willie has the fight that sends him to the penitentiary:

What I can't understand is how come he would be messing around with that Love. She at least ten shades blacker than I is and she the ugliest nigger I ever seen. She walk like she had a egg between her legs and don't want to break it. She ain't even clean. And here Willie done cut the buck like this over her.

Were Portia one of the major characters she would be doomed by the logic of the allegory to an unsuccessful love life, like the others. Because she is not, she is permitted to remain as the single exception to the pattern.

There is some reason for believing that Mrs. McCullers originally intended the novel to end on a more ‘positive’ note than it actually does. ‘A few of the people in this book,’ she writes in her outline, ‘come very near to being heroes and they are not the only human beings of their kind. Because of the essence of these people there is the feeling that, no matter how many times their efforts are wasted and their personal ideals are shown to be false, they will someday be united and they will come into their own.’ In view of the actual outcome, however, it is easy to escape this feeling: Singer dies by his own hand; Mick's dream becomes a conscious illusion; Jake leaves town only, presumably, to repeat his blunders elsewhere; Doctor Copeland is forced to accept the charity of relatives to whom he has always felt himself superior. Only Biff remains undefeated—but this is because he has been too cautious to make investments in the ideal. And at the end even he is frightened. The last chapter, seen from his point of view, contains a passage which is a coda to the entire work:

… in a single radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. 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.

Sharply he turned away.

‘Louis!’ he called. ‘Louis! Louis!’

And again there was no answer.

His moment of vision over, he finds it is his own face that confronts him in the mirror: was the vision valid, or was it but a projection of his own desires? Suddenly, as the latter possibility dawns on him, he becomes terrified, and, feeling himself alone, calls for help. But there is no answer.

4

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in the spring of 1940. On Sunday, June 16th, the day it was reviewed by The New York Times, its publisher ran a large advertisement describing it as ‘a book that brought down the house before it appeared on the stage’, and quoting opinions by T. S. Stribling (‘the literary find of the year’) and Katherine Gauss (‘a perfectly magnificent piece of work, one of the best first novels I think I have ever read … one thinks about it for days’). Rose Feld's review, in the same issue, was scarcely less enthusiastic. ‘Mrs. McCullers's imagination is rich and fearless; she has an astonishing perception of humanity,’ she wrote, and added:

No matter what the age of its author, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would be a remarkable book. When one reads that Carson McCullers is a girl of twenty-two it becomes more than that. Maturity does not cover the quality of her work. It is something beyond that, something more akin to the vocation of pain to which a great poet is born.

The two other most influential popular reviews were also favourable; they were written by Lorine Pruette in The New York Herald-Tribune (‘One wonders how any young person could know so much about the lonely hearts of men, women and children too’¹⁴) and by Ben Ray Redman in The Saturday Review of Literature (‘An extraordinary novel in its own right, considerations of authorship apart’).¹⁵ One of the most enthusiastic and perceptive reviews was that of Richard Wright, the Negro novelist whose popular autobiographical novel, Native Son, was published the same year. He wrote in The New Republic:

Her quality of despair is unique and individual; it seems to me more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner … To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.¹⁶

Negative opinions were expressed by L. B. Solomon in The Nation and (when the novel appeared three years later in England) by the anonymous reviewer of The Times Literary Supplement, who wrote:

It is not a novel of any real imaginative power or distinction … At present Mrs. McCullers, besides being too obviously derivative in manner, relies almost entirely upon what is strange and passes comprehension to produce an effect of profundity. This lends itself merely to impenetrable mystification. Make your characters, after all, sufficiently singular, enigmatical and even freakish, and you can easily claim vast and unexplored significance for what they say.¹⁷

Clifton Fadiman, then doyen of The New Yorker's reviewing staff, complained: ‘She writes without humor, and reveals no special gift for story telling. She might be a flop at handling ordinary human beings.’¹⁸ (He added, however, that he was willing to place ‘a small bet’ on Mrs. McCullers's future.) The popular book reviewer of The Boston Transcript, Lewis Gannett, called it ‘a strange and uneven book, at times almost breathtaking in its concise intensity, at times baffling.’¹⁹ While praising the quality of the writing, The Catholic World deplored its author's ‘free use of very coarse language’ and ‘defeatist philosophy.’²⁰ And Robert Littell, in The Yale Review, called it ‘a queer sad book that sticks in the mind’ and suggested that Mrs. McCullers study Huckleberry Finn and Chekhov.²¹

Reviewing these opinions, one is impressed by how few of the critics—even the most enthusiastic of them—seem to have understood that Mrs. McCullers was writing allegorically: most of the praise was for the skill with which she handled the devices of realism, while most of the censure was for her choice of improbable characters and far-fetched situations. Richard Wright, who frankly confessed ‘I don't know what the book is about,’ nevertheless came closer to the truth than all the others:

The naturalistic incidents of which the book is compounded seem to be of no importance; one has the feeling that any string of typical actions would have served the author's purpose as well, for the value of such writing lies not so much in what is said as in the angle of vision from which life is seen. There are times when Mrs. McCullers deliberately suppresses the naturally dramatic in order to linger over and accentuate the more obscure, oblique and elusive emotions.²²

Today, more than two decades later, and with the remainder of her work to assist us, it is easier to make a more accurate appraisal of Mrs. McCullers's first novel. For Granville Hicks, who (like F. R. Leavis) likes novels that criticize existing social values and institutions, it is the best of McCullers. And some of the most recent critics have defended it against the charge of formlessness. Thus, taking issue with Ihab Hassan's comment (‘Its failure of form can be clarified, I think, with reference to a statement that Mark Schorer has made in Society and Self in the Novel: “The novel must find a form that will hold together in some firm nexus of structure the individual human being and the social being.”’), Irving Malin declares: ‘I think the novel does have form … The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has what Robert M. Adams has called “open form”, or, better yet, “suspended form”.’²³ Nevertheless, the book is uneven stylistically: some scenes are rendered with a realism that Flaubert himself might have envied, while others have a shadowy, abstract, Kafka-like quality, and it is no wonder that the critics were confused. The extended incident in Part Two involving Bubber's shooting of Biff's niece, Baby, has no real connection with the main narrative on either a realistic or an allegorical level; it is a story—and a very entertaining one—in its own right. The insistence on local colour and on social justice tend to date the work somewhat from the point of view of realism, while allegorically the attempt to make of Singer a Christ figure and of Antonapoulos a mystery is not entirely successful. Nevertheless, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter remains an impressive achievement. Singer, the mute symbol of spiritual eloquence, is one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction, and the book of which he is the protagonist is probably the most elaborate treatment in American literature of the theme of spiritual isolation. The fact that it is a first novel makes it, of course, all the more extraordinary.

Notes

1. Readers familiar with Clock Without Hands will recall that this is also the name of a character in that novel: there is no other resemblance, however, between the two characters.

2. The name Harry Minowitz in the final version designates another character—the playmate with whom Mick has her first experience of sex.

3. Probably after a poem, ‘The Lonely Hunter’, by William Sharp (‘Fiona MacLeod’) in which occurs the line, ‘My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.’ See Poems and Dramas, by ‘Fiona MacLeod’ (William Sharp), New York, Duffield & Company, 1914. p. 27.

4. Other structural patterns in the novel have been pointed out by Klaus Lubbers, ‘The Necessary Order: A Study of Theme and Structure in Carson McCullers' Fiction’, Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, No. 8 (1963), p. 188 ff.

5. Chester E. Eisinger (Fiction of the Forties, University of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 247) argues, not very plausibly, that Singer, because he is bisexual, combines the double function of the Virgin Mary and her Son—that, however, because he lacks omniscience, he is ‘the false Virgin and the false son’.

6. Lubbers errs when he claims (op. cit., pp. 189-90): ‘The “thing” that the Greek holds in his hands is later identified as his little brass cross’. The passage to which he refers is ambiguous.

7. In Modern Fiction Studies, Winter, 1959-60, p. 317.

8. Op. cit., p. 251.

9. p. 157.

10. René Micha (‘Carson McCullers ou la Cabane de l'Enfance’, in Critique, Paris, Août-Septembre, 1962) says that when he told Mrs. McCullers that Biff reminded him of Charles Bovary, she was greatly pleased. But the resemblance is very weak: Charles is stupid; Biff is not. Charles worships his wife; Biff does not. When Emma dies, Charles no longer wishes to live; when Alice dies, Biff for the first time begins to live according to his own nature. It is difficult, indeed, to see what they have in common, except perhaps a certain sluggishness of temperament.

11. Lubbers (op. cit., p. 193) sees a parallel between this scene and that in Matthew (X, 11-14) in which Jesus sends forth his apostles.

12. Op. cit., p. 251.

13. Copeland's disease and Jake's alcoholism are the external signs of the sickness which is destroying the souls of both men.

14. 9th June 1940, Book Review Section, p. 11.

15. 8th June 1940, p. 6.

16. 5th August 1940, p. 195.

17. 27th March 1943, p. 153.

18. 8th June 1940, p. 69.

19. 5th June 1940, p. 13.

20. November 1940, p. 252.

21. Autumn 1940, p. viii.

22. Op. cit., loc. cit.

23. New American Gothic (Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), p. 113. See also Lubbers' elaborate analysis (op. cit.) of the structure of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.