[In the following essay, Cook offers a thematic and stylistic examination of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.]

I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.

—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in the spring of 1940, when she was just twenty-three years old. With its publication McCullers first gave full expression to a concern that was to be the basis of almost everything she would write—a concern for man's “spiritual isolation,” his revolt against that isolation and his need to achieve a perfect communion with others.¹ She also introduced in this first novel that particular type of character the “grotesque,” who, because of his peculiar incapacity or deformity, most movingly dramatizes the plight of the human being in isolation. Looking back at her work almost twenty years after The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers wrote: in her essay “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing”:

Spiritual isolation is the basis of most of my themes. My first book was concerned with this, almost entirely, and all of my books since, in one way or another. Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figures to write about—people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love or receive love—their spiritual isolation.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a story of five lonely people, each of them isolated, desperate for understanding from those around them, and tragically incapable of rendering the kind of love and understanding each of the others need. Yet because of their painful struggles with an indifferent, hostile environment, these people often inspire the sympathy and respect that we might not expect to feel for grotesques and freaks.

McCullers has been remarkably successful in fusing the separate histories of each individual into one story. In her outline of the novel, she explained how she managed to join the five stories into one:

This book is planned according to a definite and balanced design. The form is contrapuntal throughout. Like a voice in a fugue each one of the main characters is an entirety in himself—but his personality takes on a new richness when contrasted and woven in with the other characters in the book.

Through the use of this contrapuntal form, switching from character to character as each goes through similar alienating experiences, Mrs. McCullers preserves the separateness of each person even as she holds them all together in a lonely community of suspicion and misunderstanding.

The book is divided into three parts, each of which deals with the events that occurred in a mill town in the deep South during the late 1930s. The actual time covered in the novel extends from the middle of May 1938 until August 21, 1939. The first part of the book introduces John Singer, a deaf mute, and four other characters, who, for reasons of their own, sense in Singer a kindred spirit. Almost all the novel's action occurs in the second and largest part of the book, which begins after each of the four characters has started seeking out Singer alone in his room, and ends when Singer puts a bullet through his chest. The last part balances the first by providing a parting glance at the remaining characters as they try to reorganize their lives after the death of Singer.

McCullers has written in her outline that “the interrelations between the people of this book can be described as being like the spokes of a wheel—with Singer representing the center point. This situation, with all its attendant irony, expresses the most important theme of the book.” She clearly establishes this theme in the first part of the novel, introducing the characters individually, highlighting their peculiar problems and suggesting their different reasons for being interested in Singer. About the only major event that occurs in this section is the meeting of all the characters one night in Biff Brannon's New York Cafe.

Singer is the first to be introduced. Thin and neat in appearance, restrained and polite in manner, Singer seems to express his whole personality perfectly in his quiet eyes—eyes that Biff Brannon describes as being “cold and gentle as a cat's.” Singer, who has lived happily for ten years in the town, has suddenly found himself alone in the world when his only friend, a fat retarded Greek, named Antonapoulos, who is also a mute, is sent away to an asylum for being a public nuisance. Deprived of his companionship with Antonapoulos, Singer turns into a lonely, brooding human being who haunts the streets of the town after dark, a poignant figure of human solitude: “In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”

Singer's remoteness, McCullers wrote in her outline, his seeming sense of self-sufficiency, give him such “an air of wisdom and superiority” that the citizens in the town come gradually to believe that he is a seer with deep, private intuitions into their own personalities. His physical handicap alone speaks so eloquently of human isolation that other solitary individuals find themselves drawn to him as to a reflection of their secret inner selves. The souls of men, as McCullers has written, have “shape and color” just like bodies; Singer's handicap but mirrors in physical fact the spiritual conditions of those around him.

Biff Brannon, the owner of the New York Cafe, is introduced next. In appearance, Biff, a hard-jawed man always wearing a day's growth of beard, seems normal enough, but he too lives with a handicap. Biff is impotent. He likes to work the night shift in his cafe. That way he avoids having to sleep next to his wife and can watch the lonely people as they move quietly in and out of his cafe during the early-morning hours. At that time “there was no noise or conversation for each person seemed to be alone.” Fully aware of the peculiarities that set him apart from other men (he is inclined to such behavior as wearing his mother's wedding ring and using his wife's perfume), Biff likes 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 a beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house.” Naturally, he is generous to Singer: “… if Singer were a drinking kind of man he could get liquor at half price any time he wanted it.”

Biff is also a collector. He has filled a back room with twenty years of newspapers, all carefully filed according to the date. And he has a passion for detail. All facts interest him, no matter how arcane or irrelevant. At one point, later in the novel, while attending to the burial arrangements of his wife he asks the funeral director: “And what is the percentage of cremations in your business?” But the freaks, the room full of newspapers, and the avidity for details, serve mainly to fill the void in Biff's lonely life. Like Singer, whom he considers “uncanny”—one “possessed with extraordinary powers. … His eyes made a person think; that he heard things nobody else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before”—Biff faces the world alone. “And he was nobody but—Bartholomew—Old Biff with two fists and a quick tongue—Mister Brannon—by himself.”

One freak that fascinates Biff is the drunken radical, Jake Blount. Newly arrived in town, Jake has spent most of his first twelve days in the cafe drinking and talking—“talk, talk, talk”—until everybody but Biff, who likes freaks, and Singer, who cannot hear, has lost either interest or patience. Jake, as Biff notes, is not exactly a freak, but “it was like something was deformed in him—but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be.” Biff concludes that if Jake's problem “was not in his body, it was probably in his mind.” He seems a product of two personalities unnaturally fused: “sometimes he talked like a linthead and sometimes like a professor.”

Mixing crude, personal abuse with bits of surprisingly sophisticated political analysis, Jake argues that there is a conspiracy among the ruling classes to keep people, primarily poor people, from knowing the truth. He alone sees through it all: “His voice was loud and cracked. ‘I'm one who knows. I'm a stranger in a strange land.’” Jake refuses to talk with Biff, whom he calls a “flat footed, blue-jawed, nosy bastard” and directs all his remarks to Singer, who he thinks understands: “You're the only one in town who catches what I mean. … For two days now I been talking to you in my mind because I know you understand the things I want to mean.” Whether or not Singer—who can read lips—understands, Jake talks to him late into the night and continues to talk throughout the coming year. Like Biff, Jake senses extraordinary powers in Singer, and, like Biff, he finds himself making frequent visits to Singer's room, convinced he understands “things no one had ever guessed before.”

At one point Jake leaves the restaurant only to return a few minutes later, dragging in with him a Negro doctor, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, whom he grabbed off the street outside for no apparent reason. Dr. Copeland, who is outraged at all white men's “insolence,” turns on Jake a look of “quivering hatred” and leaves the cafe, where only whites are permitted. But the doctor is to meet Jake Blount again—at Singer's room. For the doctor, another lonely human being, also senses in Singer an inner compatibility and a sympathy he never before found in a white man. Like Jake, Dr. Copeland suffers from a deep contradiction in his nature that alienates him from all those around who might sympathize with him. Recognizing that the Negro's plight in the United States stems at least in part from the Negro's own despairing indifference and escapist superstitions, Dr. Copeland has educated himself in medicine, Marxism, and the possibilities for racial reform. By so doing he had hoped to heal his people and at last lead them out of their bondage.

Pursuing his “strong, true purpose” however, he has lost touch with his own cultural heritage and with the hearts of his people. He thinks in the white man's terms and reasons with a cold logic that offends those he loves. His daughter Portia tells him: “Us talks like our own mamma 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.” Doctor Copeland can no longer speak to his children, Karl Marx, Hamilton, and Portia, in a language they understand. His wife has left him, and now he lives alone in a cold and immaculate house, reading Marx and Spinoza, murmuring “a kind of singing moan” until late into the night. Threatened by whites, rejected by those whom he cares the most about, he turns to Singer for comfort: “He remembered the white man's face … and peace was in him.”

One other character who comes into the New York Cafe that first day feels a special attraction to Singer—Mick Kelley, “a gangling, tow headed youngster, a girl of about twelve” who looked “like a very young boy.” Mick, whom McCullers in her outline calls “the most outstanding character in the book,” is certainly its most fully realized and probably its most normal personality. Drawing on her own memories of what it was like to be a precocious girl growing up in a dull mill town in the South, McCullers has invested Mick with all the vague but terrible yearnings of a frustrated adolescent as well as with the charm and obnoxiousness of the neighborhood brat. Mick is bright and ambitious; like Carson McCullers, herself, she loves music and dreams of writing symphonies and conducting her own orchestra. But living in a boarding house “cramfull of people,” with a sick father out of work and hardly enough food to live on, Mick comes slowly to realize that the grim realities around her, her parents' poverty in particular, threaten to dash all hopes for the future. Yet the more she feels the grinding pressures of the outside world, the more Mick longs to fulfill her deep inner aspirations: “The feeling was a whole lot worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.”

Unable to find any real solution to her dilemma, Mick seeks consolation by symbolically destroying the outside world. On the wall of her bedroom she tacks pictures of great disasters she has painted. One is of a “transatlantic liner going down and all the people trying to push and crowd into one little lifeboat.” Another depicts a conflagration on the main street of town with “people … lying dead in the streets and others … running for their lives.” But Mick's primary defense against the constricting pressures of the outside world is to retreat into an “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. … Foreign countries and plans and music were in the inside room. … The inside room was a very private place.” Like Biff's room full of newspapers and Jake's messianic vision of himself as “a stranger in a strange land” and Doctor Copeland's “strong, true purpose,” Mick's inside room brings temporary feelings of peace and direction, but it represents yet another retreat into a spiritual isolation that can cripple as well as console. Significantly, Singer is the only other real person Mick allows in the inside room: “Mr. Singer was in both rooms.” His deferential, enigmatic silence poses no threat from the outside. His isolation mirrors her own.

Having sketched in, as she says in her outline, “the salient points of each person” and “the general direction each character will take,” McCullers proceeds in the second part of the novel to show each of her characters struggling in his own way to break out of isolation and to establish some meaningful relations with the world outside. All efforts, however, seem doomed from the start. Wishing to express himself fully, but impatient with the opinions of others, each character finds himself yelling at those who will not understand or cursing to himself in solitude. The only other option is to visit Singer, who nods and “listens” politely to all the talk, most of which “he did not understand in the least.” The impression given by this central section of the novel is that human loneliness is a universal, not an exceptional condition, that the cause of isolation lies not so much in any one person's eccentricity as in a basic perversion in the relationship between all human beings and the world they live in. The two are simply not compatible. Human nature is at fault, but so is society and the world at large. One can almost hear in this section of the novel an involuntary cry of pain—there is so much sickness and so little chance for cure.

Mick's struggle to discover and fulfill her “wants,” as she grows into adulthood, form the central episode of this part of the book. Her story is in a sense the most representative. Her initiatory confrontations with the adult world, her failures to adjust, her limited successes, shed light on how the other characters came to be the way they are. At the same time the pathetic fate of the others stands as a terrible warning of what may happen to her in the end—gifted and determined as she is.

Mick's maturing experiences bring moments of satisfaction, at least at first. She gives a party for the kids at the new school she is attending, and though it can hardly be called a crashing success, it does help her feel she is as good as any of her classmates: “She would feel different in the halls now, knowing that they were not something special but like any other kids.” By saving her lunch money she is able to pay for music lessons from a girl at school, who teaches her on the piano in the school gymnasium. But more important than the minor successes at school are those at home where she begins to show a more mature and disinterested sympathy for the people around her whom she had always taken for granted:

This summer she realized something about her Dad she had never known before. Up until then she never thought about him as being a real separate person. … He was lonesome and he was an old man. Because none of the kids went to him for anything and because he didn't earn much money he felt like he was cut off from his family. And in his lonesomeness he wanted to be close to one of his kids—and they were all so busy that they didn't know it. He felt like he wasn't much real use to anybody.

The entire scene between Mick, who is in an “awful hurry” to get somewhere, and her father, pretending he has important work to finish, demonstrates as well as anything else she wrote, Mrs. McCullers's capacity to handle critical emotional moments without lapsing into sentimentality.

But Mick's experiences during that year of change contain at least as many failures and disappointments as triumphs. Nor does she often demonstrate the kind of sympathetic insight into the people around her that she does in the brief scene with her father. First she loses her friendship with her younger brother George, the only real friend she has. After George accidentally shoots and wounds the girl across the street with a twenty-two rifle, Mick in an extraordinary display of childish terrorism, horrifies the already scared kid by telling him that they will send him to Sing Sing: “They got little electric chairs there—just your size. And when they turn on the juice you just fry up like a piece of burnt bacon. Then you go to Hell.” George is never the same to Mick or to anyone afterward, and Mick loses the one friend who had always been open with her: “… he was a different kid—George—going around by himself always like a person much older and with nobody, not even her, knowing what was really in his mind.”

Then there is the brief affair with the boy next door, Harry Minowitz. Mick had played with Harry since they were little, but this summer the play turns serious. On a bicycle trip to a swimming hole, Mick dares Harry to take his clothes off. She does the same. Then only half realizing what they are doing, they make love for the first time. The idyllic afternoon turns hot and ominous, and suddenly Mick feels old and vaguely disappointed: “‘I wasn't any kid’,” she tells Harry, “‘But now I wish I was, though.’ … She felt very old, and it was like something was heavy inside her. She was a grown person now, whether she wanted to be or not.”

As her experiences in the outside room become increasingly disappointing (she even has to give up the music lessons in the school gym), Mick retreats more and more to the inside room. There with Singer and her dreams she creates a world that works—a world that keeps faith with her ideals. However, things get so bad in the outside room (her father loses the house; her sister becomes dangerously ill; “and sometimes she and George were downright hungry for days”) that she finds it difficult even to get into the inside room. Nothing seems safe from the onslaught of poverty and bad luck, and Mick fears she will even lose the consolation of dreaming: “In bed she lay awake. A queer afraidness came to her. It was like the ceiling was slowly pressing down towards her face. How would it be if the house fell apart?” The final blow to Mick's hopes comes when out of fear for her family's future she takes a job at Woolworth's. Now her time will not be her own. She will never get a chance to practice the piano at the school gym or have time to write music at home. She will not finish school:

The excitement of the hour before [when she told her family she would take the job] had died down and she was sick to the stomach. She was going to work in the ten-cent store and she did not want to work there. It was like she had been trapped into something. The job wouldn't be just for the summer—but for a long time, as long a time as she could see ahead.

The night she takes the job Mick waits on the porch for Singer. She must get his approval: “In a desperate way she wanted to see him.” Without at all understanding what is at stake in his decision, Singer nods a polite yes, and Mick begins her adult life in the outside room, without music, without plans, and, as it soon turns out, without Singer. The hopes she has will fester and turn sour, making her perpetually angry, “only there was nothing to be mad at.” A. C. Bradley, in Shakespearean Tragedy, has written that the “central feeling [in tragedy] is the impression of waste,” an impression that “makes us realize so vividly the worth of that which is wasted. …” In sacrificing her talent, her plans, her vitality, to the dehumanizing monotony of clerking in Woolworth's for as far as she can see, Mick creates that impression of tragic waste—not the less tragic for its being contemporary and familiar. One feels that Mick, once a fascinating, bright youngster, will grow up an unhappy, neurotic woman, and that the loss involved in such a growing up is tragic.

The chaotic emotional states of Jake Blount and Doctor Copeland throughout the central section of the novel demonstrate just how crippling a failure to fulfill one's highest aspirations can be. Like Mick, both men developed passionate hopes for the future at an early age. Jake saw himself fomenting an economic revolution that would liberate the workers of the South. Doctor Copeland saw himself leading his people out of racial bondage, teaching them the social and economic truths they would need in their struggle for justice. But the overwhelming difficulty of their tasks turned their hope finally into despair—a despair that is both violent and self-destructive.

Jake tells Singer: “You see, we just can't settle down after knowing, but we got to act. And some of us go nuts. There's too much to do and you don't know where to start. It makes you crazy. Even me—I've done things when I look back at them they don't seem rational.” Jake's screaming at night through the streets of the town, his raving mania at the Fair where he gets involved in a fight in which a man is killed, and his “talk—talk—talk” in Singer's room, prove his point.

Doctor Copeland shares in his frustration and his violence: “The hopeless suffering of his people made him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction. At times he drank strong liquor and beat his head against the floor. In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife.”

The intensity of their passion to reform and save invests Copeland and Jake with a certain dignity. Doctor Copeland, who understands so well the suffering and degradation of the Negroes in the South and has sacrificed his health and happiness to help them, reveals a selfless dedication that is as heroic as it is desperate. It is not for nothing that “more than a dozen” of the Negro children in the town are named after him. And yet it is also the sheer intensity of his and Jake's idealism, turned rude and hysterical by repeated disappointment, that alienates each of them from those who might sympathize with their sense of injustice and even work alongside them to ameliorate the suffering they see around them.

Confronted by indifference and ridicule from workers he would like to organize in a strike, Jake forgoes persuasion for an angry sneer: “Laugh—that's all you're good for. I hope you sit there and snicker till you rot.” Copeland, who has failed so far to educate his sons according to his “strong, true” purpose, continues to spoil his chances with them by further alienating them with bitter denunciation: “I mean that to you and Hamilton and Karl Marx I gave all that was in me. And I put all my trust and hope in you. And all I get is blank misunderstanding and idleness and indifference.”

But the greatest failure of Jake and Doctor Copeland to break out of their self-imposed states of isolation and join with others in a common cause is their mutual failure to recognize in each other the sort of person they could trust and with whom they could work. After Copeland's son William has returned from prison with both legs amputated, Jake, outraged, goes to Copeland, hoping to plan a strategy of revenge and revolution. After hours of furious discussion about America's exploitation of the poor, both black and white, the two men reach a tenuous understanding that they must stand together if they are to achieve anything. In a matter of minutes, however, the discussion lapses back into angry disagreement over the methods of achieving change. Jake wants to “start at the bottom. The old traditions smashed and the new ones created.” Thus he blasts Copeland for his gradualist approach. Copeland, frustrated by any disagreement with his cherished plans, accuses Jake of racism. Jake departs in a fury:

“Oh, the Hell with it!” Jake said, “Balls!”

“Blasphemer!” screamed Doctor Copeland. “Foul Blasphemer. … White fiend.”

Such rudeness, as John Vickery has written, “is by no means deliberate. It is the result of a compelling drive to be fully understood without undertaking the infinitely more difficult task of attempting to understand.”² To Jake and Copeland, only Singer, who in his silence does not try to make himself understood, is the one who understands.

Some critics have referred to Jake and Copeland as monomaniacal egotists. Their complaints against society have been dismissed as “sublimations”³ or “pretexts—psychological ‘whipping boys,’ convenient evils to let off steam against.”⁴ I think, however, that McCullers took them and their complaints more seriously. As Ihab Hassan pointed out, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is addressed to some wide social issues” as it is also “deeply concerned with the secret issues of the soul. …”⁵ Indeed one of the achievements of the book is Mrs. McCullers's success in grounding the problems of the soul in the actualities of time and place. Mick betrays her aspirations and takes the job at the ten-cent store for reasons that are largely financial: “It was money, money, money all the time.” Jake is genuinely angered by the poverty he sees around him and by a system that permits absentee owners to exact lifelong labor from mill workers for slave wages. His outrage may solve nothing, but its impetus is real. We catch our last glimpse of Jake as he walks out of town surrounded by the misery he hates:

On either side there were rows of dilapidated two-room houses. In the cramped back yards were rotted privies and lines of torn, smoky rags hung out to dry. For two miles there was not one sight of comfort or space or cleanliness. Even the earth seemed filthy and abandoned. … Little younguns swarmed in this filth, the smaller of them stark naked. The sight of this poverty was so cruel and hopeless that Jake snarled and clenched his fists.

Finally, it is simply not fair to call Copeland's anguishing over the poverty and the disease of the Negroes a “pretext” or a “sublimation.” The Doctor, who has had a son tortured and maimed in prison and who has been beaten and jailed for simply trying to see a judge, knows racism to be a real, not a “convenient,” evil. Mrs. McCullers sees a great deal that is mysterious and strange in the heart of man, but she also sees and records the very real pressures—economic, racial, sexual—that make the extraordinary behavior of her characters in part at least understandable.

In a novel of exceptional people, Biff Brannon is the exception among the exceptions. Instead of finding his desires in increasing conflict with the world's demands, Biff finds himself, as he grows older, relieved from the pressures of the world—relieved to the point where he can retire to his newspaper shed, rock in his rocking chair, strum his mandolin, and dream of the past—and of death. The event that frees Biff is the death of his wife. His problems had always centered on sex. He hated it, and hated his wife: “Being around that woman always made him different from his real self. It made him tough and common and small as she was.” Biff believed that “by nature all people are of both sexes,” that “marriage and the bed were not all by any means.” With the death of Alice, Biff can assume his “natural” role of being both man and woman. He wears a little perfume, puts a rinse in his hair—“Certain whims that he had ridiculed in Alice were now his,”—and does over their room. Blue silk cushions for the couch, deep red curtains for the windows: “He loved the room. … In this room nothing reminded him of her.” Unlike Mick, who is forced out of her inside room into the ten-cent store, Biff is able to transform his apartment into an inside room, and live in it almost all of the time.

But Biff's success is part of a larger defeat. Freed from the demands of living with Alice, Biff drifts slowly out of active life and moves into an almost idyllic state of passive self-sufficiency. He recognizes it for what it is, “the boundary of death.” After Alice's death Biff begins to feel very old. One Sunday afternoon, with the cafe full of customers, he abruptly leaves the cash register and the general hubbub and goes to his newspaper room:

The room was almost dark. The damp chill penetrated to his bones so that his legs ached with rheumatism.

At last he put away his mandolin and rocked slowly in the darkness. Death. Sometimes he could almost feel it in the room with him. He rocked to and fro in the chair. What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A Riddle.

Biff retains his interest in the people around him, and he is always prepared for “the enjoyment of a spectacle,” but his interest is the detached curiosity of someone removed far enough from the struggle to puzzle idly about what it all means. When Biff goes to Singer's room, it is not to talk but to observe: “He watches,” Singer writes his friend Antonapoulos. “The others all have something they hate.” At forty-four years of age, Biff is already living in a world of nostalgia, looking back on moments of heroism (the time he knocked out his sister-in-law's no-good husband) and moments of embarrassment (the time he farted when blindfolded at a surprise birthday party). He participates in the events around him largely vicariously; and he is tired much of the time.

By including the story of Biff's gradual detachment from life with the other stories of suffering and violent confrontation, Mrs. McCullers brings emotional balance to what seems at times a scenario of hate and despair. More importantly, Biff's successful withdrawal into his inside room throws into sharp relief the other characters' painful involvement in life's harsh realities. For Mick, Jake, and Copeland, living means suffering. It is the price they pay for their hopes and for life. Biff can escape their pain only by retreating to “the boundary of death.” Singer escapes only in suicide.

John Singer's suicide, the final event in the central part of the novel, brings the action to a climax by destroying in an instant all the cherished illusions the others have had about him. Each of his visitors feels betrayed by it. Biff speaks for them all by calling it “an ugly joke.” But Singer's suicide is just the final act of an ironic tragedy that has been playing itself out beneath the surface of his polite manners and his silence since his friend Antonapoulos was sent away. Just as Singer's visitors had made him into the perfect confidant, Singer had made Antonapoulos into the perfect friend. He sends him gifts and writes him long letters describing his private thoughts and his visitors:

You remember the four people I told you about when I was there. … There are some things I should like to tell you about them but how to put them in words I am not sure.

They are all very busy people. In fact they are so busy that it will be hard for you to picture them. I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest. 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. …

The one with the moustache [Jake] I think is crazy. Sometimes he speaks his words very clear like my teacher long ago at the school. Other times he speaks such a language that I cannot follow. Sometimes he is dressed in a plain suit, and the next time he will be black with dirt and smelling bad and in the overalls he wears to work. He will shake his fist and say ugly drunken words that I would not wish you to know about. He thinks he and I have a secret together but I do not know what it is. …

Singer may “listen” to his visitors, but he does not understand them. Rather he thinks them half-crazy, only tolerating their “busy” talk as a diversion. Singer cares only for Antonapoulos, whom he addresses as “my only friend.” His absence is a perpetual torment to Singer: “The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.” But the dropsical, feeble-minded Greek understands Singer even less. He does not read his letters (Singer eventually stops sending them) and nods vaguely and goes to sleep when Singer visits him on vacations. McCullers, in her outline of the novel, has written that “there is a deep need in man to express himself by creating some unifying principle or God. A personal God created by a man is a reflection of himself—and … in a disorganized society these individual Gods or principles are likely to be chimerical and fantastic.” In their frantic desire to break out of their isolation and express themselves fully, Singer and those around him have created such chimeras. When Antonapoulos dies, Singer's god dies. When Singer commits suicide because of it, his visitors are also left abandoned—more hopelessly confined than ever in their spiritual isolation.

John Singer has attracted a good deal of critical attention as a possible religious symbol in the novel, and McCullers has dropped a few clues supporting such speculation.⁶ But I would agree with her biographer, Oliver Evans, that they are largely “false clues” and that there is very little to be gained in trying “to find specific religious meanings in the novel.”⁷ Singer is not so much a modern Christ as he is the embodiment of the community's need to find acceptance and confirmation of their individual visions and hopes. Nor is he chosen as a spiritual confidant because, as Ihab Hassan has written, “he alone in the novel is a lover, he alone loves,”⁸ but because, as McCullers herself writes in her outline, “his remoteness [resulting from his handicap] gives him an air of wisdom and superiority” and because the “vague and unlimited” quality of his “outward character” makes it possible for his followers to define him as they wish. Like Herman Melville's Bartleby and William Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, Singer is largely important in the novel for what he means to others rather than for what he means by himself. McCullers says it most clearly:

Singer is the first character in the book only in the sense that he is the symbol of isolation and thwarted expression and because the story pivots around him. In reality each one of his satellites is of far more importance than himself. The book will take all of its body and strength in the development of the four people who revolve around the mute.

The last section of the novel, consisting of four short chapters, provides a final glimpse of the four major characters as they try to reorganize and carry on their lives after the death of Singer. David Madden, undoubtedly influenced by the chaos and despair revealed in this final section, has written that “Hunter [The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter] is the most pessimistic book ever written.”⁹ Certainly, conditions following Singer's suicide are grim. Doctor Copeland bedridden with tuberculosis, his “strong, true purpose” unfulfilled, is carted off by his relatives to the country, mumbling regrets and self-recriminations: “‘I have done those things which I ought not to have done and left undone those things which I ought to have done.’” Jake Blount, bloody and emotionally distraught after his fight in a race riot at the fairgrounds, packs his bags and skips town—walking off between “rows of dilapidated two-room houses” where live the workers he never organized or even got to know. Mick, who for so long had wanted to leave, to go North to snow and foreign countries, stays behind, working overtime in Woolworth's, having all but despaired of ever finishing school. Only Biff in his self-sufficient, curious detachment comes through unscathed. For Biff, who has come to expect little from people and from life in general, “All was serene.”

Yet the pessimism, that feeling of wasted potential and dashed hope, which readers have found so overwhelming in this last section, is at least qualified if not balanced by a new sense of human resilience—a resilience that may be nothing more than a crazy, blind stubbornness. Even as he is being carted off to die, Copeland refuses to accept the illusory consolation in heaven his father-in-law describes as a “reward in the Beyond.” “‘Pshaw!’ Doctor Copeland said bitterly, ‘I believe in justice now.’” Similarly Jake, turning his back on the disasters he is leaving behind, refuses to see in them any clear lessons against trying again: “Jake walked steadily. As soon as the town was behind a new surge of energy came to him. But was this flight or was it onslaught? Anyway he was going. All was to begin another time.”

But it is McCullers's description of Mick, trying to make some sense of what has happened to her—“It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her”—that best reveals that curious, almost pathetic resilience found somewhere between mere stubbornness and hope:

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. 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.

In an essay entitled “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature,” which McCullers wrote a year after the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, she commented on what many critics have called the “cruelty” of recent Southern literature and its alleged “confusion of values.” She admitted that Southern literature frequently portrays life as violent, harsh, and depressing and that it refuses to resolve the moral and philosophical questions it raises. But she also wrote that the Southern writers, in describing repeated scenes of violence and suffering, are only reporting what they see, and what they see escapes neat moral formulations: “They [Southern writers] have transposed the painful substance of life around them as accurately as possible, without taking the part of emotional panderer between the truth as it is and the feelings of the reader.” It is, in other words, the fault of the time and place, not of the writer, that the “dominant characteristic” of so much recent Southern fiction is what she calls “the cheapness of human life”—a fact not easily converted into easy, much less happy, moralizing on the nature and destiny of man.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter tells the story of lives lived where human life is cheap and human aspiration a kind of “ugly joke.” The events of the book are cruel indeed, supporting no ideologies, no moral directives. And yet the very cheapness of life, the outright violence that Copeland suffers and the brutalizing attrition of poverty that is everyone's lot, inspires a respect for life if only because the forces against it seem so ominous and final. In a society racked by intolerance, poverty, and misunderstanding, sensitive, idealistic human beings, however “grotesque” they may be, strike us with the pathos of an endangered species. In their resistance to surrounding evils they suggest that peculiarity may be inseparable from nobility. Biff Brannon standing alone in his cafe late one night after Singer has killed himself seems to sense just this. Thinking back over the events of the year, he sees that the drama he has witnessed, for all its strange characters, its “confusion of values,” its bitter ironies, has been a terrifyingly heroic one:

The silence in the room was deep as the night itself. Biff stood transfixed, lost in his meditations. Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift 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 … And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.

Biff has a vision of human suffering and human valor, but it is a vision too ironic and confusing to teach and finally too painful to bear. Biff goes outside and raises the awning.

David Madden has written that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is not only Carson McCullers's best work, but that it is “among the ten greatest American novels; her other work stands in relation to it as Fitzgerald's other work stands to The Great Gatsby.”¹⁰ It may be that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is her best work. She does capture in this book better than in any of the others what, for lack of a better phrase, might be called a fully realized and integrated sense of time and place. The Southern mill town makes a complete impression on the imagination. One feels by the end of the novel that he knows the town as if he had lived there; the factories, the hot glaring streets, the people hanging around on street corners. And one feels he knows the time as well, whether measured by the progressing seasons—the white, hot Sunday afternoons in the summer, the drizzling, gray, winter days—or by the political climate, the race riots, the talk of fascism, the threat of war.

This sense of current, extant reality has admittedly been achieved at the expense of a neatly controlled plot—a sacrifice some critics, Tennessee Williams among them,¹¹ have considered a serious flaw in the novel. I think, however, more has been gained than lost by McCullers's attention to all the “distracting” details that help so much in setting a novel, in giving it what F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition has called that “plane-mirror reflection of the surface of ‘real’ life.” For she has thereby invoked a more convincing and therefore more moving vision of her subject—the human being, trapped and suffering in isolation. Her treatment of Doctor Copeland and the Negro problem, for instance, goes far beyond the strict demands of the novel's plot by describing in detail the Southern Negro's superstitions, his experiences at the hands of white justice, and his physical illnesses. Yet it is through such evidence reported in the daily occurrences of the town that we come to understand Copeland's desperate love for his people as well as his alienation from their culture. Richard Wright, in his review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, testified to the accuracy and the sympathy of McCullers's portrait of the Southern Negro and to her success in handling the details of their daily lives.

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. … In the conventional sense, this is not so much a novel as a projected mood … an attitude externalized in naturalistic detail.¹²

Partly because she has chosen details that are often as brutal as they are accurate; Willy's torture, the beating of Copeland, Jake's descriptive analysis of the living conditions of the mill workers; and partly because McCullers once described her book as “an ironic parable of facism …,”¹³The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter has occasionally been discussed as a novel of social protest. One can hardly deny the novel's social consciousness. As Ihab Hassan has written:

Despite its disconsolate title, the novel finds a way of acknowledging the social realities of its time. Its events hark back to the economic distress of the Thirties and reverberate with the distant echoes of Nazi tyranny, and its spirit shudders with the “strangled South.”¹⁴

Yet McCullers has consistently subordinated moral outrage and social and political commentary to her overriding concern with the mysteries of individual human nature. She describes the social environment with a fullness of detail not found in any of her later novels, but we are asked to look inward to the heart rather than outward to political and economic structures in society for any final answers to human problems. This is not to say that society must be accepted as a god-given or devil-given status quo, and that it cannot or should not be reformed, but that all attempts to reform it will stand or fall on the quirks of human nature, as Copeland's and Jake's abortive discussion so depressingly proves.

In the works that follow The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers continues to explore the problem of man's “spiritual isolation” from new and interesting points of view, some of them more penetrating and well defined, some of them more bizarre. In none of her later works, however, does she put man's loneliness at the center of a vision that comprehends so many types of people and so many diverse aspects of human behavior. Nor does she ever succeed as well in embodying the secrets of the heart in a fictional world that is as familiar as it is strange.

Notes

1. Carson McCullers, “Author's Outline of The Mute,” in The Mortgaged Heart, edited by Margarita G. Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 124. This working outline for The Mute, later The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, contains McCullers's own excellent criticism on the novel.

2. John B. Vickery, “Carson McCullers: A Map of Love,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 1 (Winter, 1960): 17.

3. David Madden, “The Paradox of the Need for Privacy and the Need for Understanding in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” Literature and Psychology 18, no. 2-3 (1968): 138.

4. Horace Taylor, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: A Southern Wasteland,” Louisiana State University Studies, Humanities Series, edited by Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy (Baton Rouge) no. 8, p. 160.

5. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 215.

6. See, for instance, Chester E. Eisinger's ingenious comparison of Singer to the Virgin Mary and to Christ in Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 247.

7. Oliver Evans, The Ballad of Carson McCullers: A Biography (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1966), p. 41.

8. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 213.

9. David Madden, “Transfixed among the Self-Inflicted Ruins: Carson McCullers's The Mortgaged Heart,” Southern Literary Journal 5 (Fall, 1972): p. 134.

10. David Madden, “Transfixed among the Self-Inflicted Ruins,” p. 161.

11. Tennessee Williams, Introduction to Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye (New York: Bantam Books, 1950), p. xv.

12. Richard Wright, Review of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, New Republic, August 5, 1940, p. 125.

13. Oliver Evans, The Ballad of Carson McCullers: A Biography, p. 43.

14. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 211.