SOURCE: Knowles, Jr., A. S. “Six Bronze Petals and Two Red: Carson McCullers in the Forties.” In The Forties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by Warren French, pp. 87-98. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1969.

[In the following essay, Knowles places The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter within the context of American literature around the time of World War II.]

We are dogged by coincidence. As this essay is written, Carson McCullers has succumbed to a long illness, bringing to earth all the rumors of her decline. At the same time, in theatres across the country a controversial motion picture version of Reflections in a Golden Eye has stirred new interest in this curious imagination that first captured our attention nearly thirty years ago. The writer perishes, the reputation is nourished: not the exchange we would have wanted, but more acceptable than complete oblivion. Nineteen sixty-seven has, ironically, managed to be another “McCullers year,” although more than a decade has passed since her last novel, and in retrospect her active career as a writer seems a very small one. Conscious of these ironies, we now look back upon her work and ask, How did it seem then, and How does it seem now?

Perhaps these questions are best approached by beginning at the beginning: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Her first full-length novel, it still seems to capture Carson McCullers' total sensibility more completely than her other works. It might even be said that whatever else she wrote was a more particularized investigation of some theme, or some mood, that first appeared here. But, granting the novel's pre-eminence, if we go on to ask how the novel struck us in the decade with which this book is concerned, we must also say a word about the mood of the early Forties and about some other writers who may have shaped our first reaction to Carson McCullers.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was issued in 1940. The war had started in Europe. Here “preparedness” was ending the long economic depression of the thirties. But certain feelings that had been kindled by the depression remained; the war would take them over, transforming some of them slightly, amplifying others. One of these was a feeling for the “little” people, for the once-buried lives of the lower middle class and the poor, unearthed in the national self-consciousness produced by our economic collapse. To speak of this as “a feeling” oversimplifies the matter considerably, for our involvement ranged from simple pity to fervent assertions that new instruments of social justice, perhaps revolution, must be created to permit these meek to inherit their due portion of the earth. However mild or violent such expressions may have been, however, behind them lay a sense that it was here, among the little people, that one would find whatever was left of honesty, courage, decency, true gentleness and love. Powerless they might be, and incapable of either the grand tragedy or high comedy of the prosperous, but they were real, in touch with the fundamental rhythms of life, and their survival seemed important far out of proportion to their influence over those events of which they were, in fact, often the victims.

Such sentiments as these—rooted so deeply in the depression, the approaching war, and our instinct that only the simplest, most fundamental forms of life might possess the virtues that would enable them to survive complex events—were given sentimental encouragement in the literature of the period. John Steinbeck and William Saroyan, to mention only two, had achieved enormous popularity on the strength of their ability to distill the comedy and the pathos out of little lives. Standing not far behind The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men; Saroyan's My Name is Aram was published in the same year as the McCullers' novel, and The Human Comedy was shortly to follow. Whatever their dissimilarities, all of these works focused their attention upon the American lower classes, finding among them virtues of humor, courage, and sympathy that elevated them, as human beings, far above the politicians and statemen who had led the world to the edge of chaos.

It would have been easy enough, certainly, in the early 40s to have placed The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in this same broad tradition. All the characters are little people, their lives rescued from oblivion only by the author's concern. There are no great events in the novel, only events that mark, almost silently, a few obscure lives. The locale is a Southern mill town, by its very nature isolated not only from the rest of the world but from the rest of America. News of the growing European crisis (the last section of the novel occurs on August 21, 1939) filters in through the radio, but is scarcely understood. It is a silent, stagnant town. In such an environment, Mrs. McCullers locates her people, moving the focus of our attention from one to the other while carefully weaving the threads of their lives together: Singer, a deaf mute; Mick, a girl growing into adolescence; Biff, a cafe owner; Jake, a transient revolutionary; Dr. Copeland, a Negro physician, and others whose lives are tied to theirs.

While things happen to these people, there is no sharply delineated narrative structure. Mick grows up, encountering along the way her first sexual experience; the saintly Singer loses his deaf mute companion, Antonopoulos, to an insane asylum, becomes for a while a kind of confessor to the others, then commits suicide upon being told of Antonopoulos' death; Biff's wife dies, and he undergoes strange alterations of personality; Jake leaves town, frustrated in his attempts to organize the downtrodden against injustice; Dr. Copeland retires to a country farm after his attempts to arouse his people into effective action have failed. At the end of the novel, nothing is different and everything is different: all plans have failed, but no one of the characters is the same. Each has been marked by some event on the quest for love, companionship, justice, or brotherhood, but the marks, while deep, hardly show.

When the novel appeared, Richard Wright in the New Republic praised Carson McCullers' ability to “embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.” This is, in truth, what the novel does: not tell a story but make a testament to its author's impartial understanding and concern. The Negro characters are drawn superbly, with little of the sentimentality that undermined the good intentions of other authors of the period. But Carson McCullers also felt distress at injustice, and so a major factor in her examination of the little people is a depiction of the economic and social oppression of the white worker and, especially, of the Negro. What sets her apart is her realization of the degree to which the white worker was a victim of his own apathy, and the “Negro problem” a function of the Negro's inability to develop a consistent idea of himself and his goals. Her Dr. Copeland sees the future of the race in terms of dignified amelioration through education, but his own sons and daughter fail him by slipping back into stereotyped, “ignorant Southern Negro” behaviour. It is to Mrs. McCullers' credit that she sees both sides of this situation; her portrait of Copeland's daughter, Portia, is full of sympathy and an understanding of the essential goodness that lies behind Portia's unmilitant nature; Portia is, in fact, a heroine of the novel.

In her portrait of the Negro community Carson McCullers, only twenty-two when The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published, brings off a remarkable bit of prophecy. She saw, in 1940, the precise nature of the present Negro movement, what would cause it to arise, where it would try to go, and the agony it would produce. Exasperated because dignity and silent suffering have gotten him nowhere, and enraged by the brutalizing of his son Willie at a prison camp, Dr. Copeland revolts against his vision of salvation through patient striving and demands immediate action. His new vision is expressed in a quarrel with the equally adamant Jake:

I have a program. It is a very simple, concentrated plan. I mean to focus on only one objective. In August of this year I mean to lead more than one thousand Negroes in this county on a march. A march to Washington. All of us together in one solid body.

But Jake rejects the program, asserting that the answer lies not in an attempt to redress immediate grievances, but in an attack upon the whole capitalist system:

Who cares whether you and your thousand Negroes struggle up to that stinking cesspool of a place called Washington? What difference does it make? What do a few people matter—a few thousand people, black, white, good or bad? When the whole of our society is built on a foundation of black lies.

“‘Short-sighted bigot!’” shouts Jake. “‘White … Fiend,’” answers Copeland. That this prefiguring of our present anguish should take the form of a quarrel between a black man and his white friend, over methods of approach to a problem each needs desperately to solve, demonstrates remarkable insight on Carson McCullers' part. It would, in fact, come to this.

.....

It is something, then, the perception of this young Georgia girl. And yet for all her understanding of black and white, and her concern for the little people, she expressed something else in her first novel that is as much a part of contemporary sensibility as it is of the sentimental, reforming spirit of the early forties. Looking back once more at the reactions of early reviewers, one finds such adjectives as “strange” and “queer.” It is a strange book, to be sure, especially in the sexual orientations of its characters. Singer, the saintly deaf-mute, devotes himself to the care of another mute, the gross and self-indulgent Antonopoulos, whose death drives Singer to suicide. Biff, the cafe owner, develops distinctly feminine characteristics after the death of his wife, with whom he had long had no sexual relationship. Mick, the tomboy, is seduced by Harry Minowitz, but discovers that this clearly heterosexual experience produces only fear. The implication of these situations appears to be that the loneliness, the alienation experienced by her characters can be mitigated only in some basically homosexual orientation toward human relationships.

The rest of Mrs. McCullers' work bears out this implication, especially Reflection in a Golden Eye, but it is not really necessary to go beyond The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter to see that she means what she seems to be saying. The transformation of Biff is carefully anticipated in a passage in which he muses upon Mick's adolescent awkwardness:

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 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 himself—the part of him that sometimes almost wished he was a mother and that Mick and Baby were his kids.

Sexual transformation, then, is latent in all of us. Biff's lurking femininity becomes overt when, after his wife's death, he evokes her presence by daubing perfume on his wrists and ears:

Along with the Agua Florida he found in the closet a bottle of lemon rinse Alice had always used for her hair. One day he tried it on himself. The lemon made his dark, white-streaked hair seem fluffy and thick. He liked it. He discarded the oil he had used to guard against baldness and rinsed with the lemon preparation regularly. Certain whims that he had ridiculed in Alice were now his own. Why?

The obvious answer is that Biff, in his loneliness, has to some extent become his wife, taking on especially her more sensuous and feminine characteristics. We also learn later, in Biff's reminiscences, that a moment of physical coarseness embarrassed and shocked him into impotence once in the past. And near the end of the novel we find him making a delicate flower arrangement in the window of his restaurant, carefully saving out “a freak plant, a zinnia with six bronze petals and two red,” presumably for his private pleasure. For all the suggestion of hairy-chested masculinity in his name, Biff is curiously feminine; nor will he be the only character in Carson McCullers' fiction in which a certain artistic sensitivity—indeed, sensitivity of almost any kind—will be linked with either sexual neutrality or transformation.

Nor will the girl, Mick, be the last of the tomboys, with their suggestions of sexual ambiguity. And there is also the corollary matter of “sensitivity” in Mick's love of music and in her recognition of the existence of an inner life:

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

Mick's initiation into adult sexuality comes at the end of a picnic with Harry Minowitz, who has borrowed boy's bikes for them—the kind with “a bar between the legs.” After the event, Harry leaves town, and Mick, assailed by “a terrible afraidness,” withdraws into herself. Her greatest desire during this period is to confess her sin to the gentle Singer, but she cannot. Only when Mick receives an opportunity to take a job at Woolworth's—to strike out on her own—does she snap out of the near-paralysis brought on by the episode with Harry.

We also note that Mick's compulsion to confess to Singer is an example of the way in which Singer is placed in the role of Christ by various suggestions and devices. Earlier in the novel Mick realizes that “When she thought of what she used to imagine was God she could only see Mister Singer with a long, white sheet around him,” and she imagines herself saying to the deaf-mute, “‘Lord forgiveth me, for I knoweth not what I do.’” Equally Christ-like is Singer's position as the center of a group of followers—disciples—made up of Jake, Mick, Dr. Copeland, and Biff. But Biff, lying in bed, also has his chance to be the son of God:

Biff stretched both of his arms outward and crossed his naked feet. His face was older in the morning light with the closed, shrunken eyelids and the heavy, iron-like beard on his cheeks and jaw.

And so, for whatever it is worth, spirituality is added to sensitivity as a possible concomitant of sexual abnormality.

Is the novel really as naive as all that? In a sense, it is. Certainly the sort of overly explicit allegorizing suggested by the description of Biff quoted above is the work of an immature writer. The diffuseness of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, both in theme and structure, also suggests inexperience. The real naïvete of the novel lies, however, in certain assumptions already alluded to—assumptions that are primarily a feature of adolescence, although they may not wear away entirely until later in life. The basic assumption is that in order to be sensitive one also has to be “different,” a little freakish, perhaps, a little fey. The corollary, of course, is that if one isn't “different,” he also isn't sensitive, and all sorts of related propositions cluster around these: that talent and eccentricity are inextricably related; that the sensitive must always by martyred; and that, in general, the world can be divided into the sensitive few and the insensitive many. There is reason enough to suspect that there is some truth in all these attitudes, but when they are used as a basic rationale one is entitled to suspect that a measure of adolescent self-pity or, at least, preciousness is really behind it all.

And yet, to look at another side of the question, Carson McCullers' assumptions about the life of the sensitive have enabled her to explore the theme of loneliness on various levels, and despite the weakness of her premises, to project a certain mood through her material that is quite affecting. Indeed, looking back on the novel now, it may be this quality that strikes us most: that her ambiguous people moving through their inarticulate, dream-like world come remarkably close to the adolescent sensibility of our own time.

.....

Reflections in a Golden Eye is set on a peace-time Army base in the South, and there the dream becomes a nightmare. The basic assumptions are present, but by now there is something a little sinister in them. In the twisted relationships of Carson McCullers' second novel, the only remotely sympathetic characters are the asexual Mrs. Langdon and her effeminate houseboy Anacleto. Both of them have the requisite “sensitivity,” both are afflicted by the coarseness of others, but in neither is there anything approaching the charm of a Mick. Indeed, Alison Langdon's response to her situation is self-mutilation, madness, and death in a sanitarium. For the rest of the characters, Mrs. McCullers shows little pity. Major Langdon, a boor, is the lover of Leonora Pendleton, a bitch. Captain Pendleton is fascinated by Private Williams, who goes horseback riding in the nude. As someone is reported to have said, “not even the horse is normal.” It is all written in a precise, clinical style that somehow makes the novel at once distasteful and suspiciously synthetic. What seems clear in Reflections is the author's implication that normal heterosexuality is associated with the coarse and vulgar, and that, once again, any marked degree of sensitivity is likely to have as its corollary a departure, in some direction, from normal sexuality. For Leonora and Major Langdon, the stud and his mate, there is no sympathy. For the Captain, with his fixation on the faun-like Private Williams, there is some. It is a sterile and morbid book, and one wonders why Carson McCullers wrote a novel in which she so obviously felt superiority to and distaste for her characters.

Her humane and comfortable vein returns, however, in The Member of the Wedding (1946). The old materials, the old assumptions, are still present: the central figure is a tomboy making an uncertain approach toward the adult world; the same uneasiness about adult, “normal” sexuality lurks around the edges of the story. But there is a good deal less insistence here on the fragile virtues of special people. Compared to the gallery of grotesques who populate the first two novels, Frankie Addams and the magnificent Berenice are comfortingly human, special only in the ways we all are at some point or another.

As in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, nothing much happens in this later novel. Frances Addams, in the summer of her twelfth year, prepares to attend her older brother's wedding. She talks to the Negro servant, Berenice, pals around a little with her six-year old cousin, John Henry, has a frightening encounter with a soldier who misinterprets her interest in him, attends the wedding and behaves disastrously. John Henry dies, Frances prepares to move to a new house and to take the next, uncertain steps toward adulthood. On this light framework, however, Carson McCullers has constructed an amusing, often touching study of late adolescent psychology. At the heart of the study is a simple, basic symbol: the wedding. For Frances (also called Frankie—her child-name—and F. Jasmine—the pretentious designation she adopts as she begins to struggle free of childhood) the wedding is to be the moment when she joins hands with the world; when, putting childhood aside once and for all, she will be wedded to life and, in life, find herself. Of the bride and groom she says, “They are the we of me.” For this reason Frances is convinced that her brother and his bride will take her with them on the honeymoon and that she will continue to be their companion after. They are the adult world, the world “out there,” and Frances is sure she is ready. In reality, she is far from ready. Her encounter with the soldier shows that she is, above all, utterly ignorant of adult sexuality. She is moving toward maturity, but she is not there yet. Frances is, in a sense, unfinished, as is suggested by a brilliantly used symbol that appears in two forms in the novel. In its first appearance, it is a blues song:

The tune was low and dark and sad. Then all at once, as Frankie listened, the horn danced into a wild jazz spangle that zigzagged upward with sassy nigger trickiness. At the end of the jazz spangle the music rattled thin and far away. Then the tune returned to the first blues song, and it was like the telling of that long season of trouble. She stood there on the dark sidewalk and the drawn tightness of her heart made her knees lock and her throat feel stiffened. Then, without warning, the thing happened that at first Frankie could not believe. Just at the time when the tune should be laid, the music finished, the horn broke off. All of a sudden the horn stopped playing. For a moment Frankie could not take it in, she felt so lost.

Its other appearance is the unfinished scale played by Mr. Schwarzenbaum as he tunes the piano next door: “‘Do ray me fa sol la tee. Tee. Tee. Tee. It could drive you wild.’” It is not, of course, simply Frankie who is unfinished; it is her life as well that seems always on the verge of some sort of fulfillment. Equally, the unfinished music suggests the frustrating enigma of life in general, the way in which it keeps edging up on an answer, seems about to “lay a tune,” but always stops short.

This sense of the awful mystery of life is particularly acute in the otherwise disarming conversations between Frances and Berenice. Berenice's theme is, simply, the prevalence of a random determinism: “‘Things will happen,’” as she puts it, and we are inextricably woven into the patterns that bring those things to us. Our names are part of the pattern, for instance: “‘You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning.’” Frances has three names, each symbolic of a stage in the pattern of her life. In one sense, her behaviour in each stage gives meaning to the name; we may impart a certain shape or color to a portion of the pattern. In a larger sense, however, it is the pattern that produces behavior and, through that, controls us. As Berenice says,

We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself.

“‘Yet at the same time you almost might use the word loose instead of caught,’” Frances insists, “loose,” she seems to mean, in the sense of the existential “absurd.” No one knows where the people one sees on the street have come from or where they are going. No one knows why they have arrived in the same place at the same time. They are trapped in the pattern, but the pattern is inscrutable; “‘somehow,’” says Frances, “‘I can't seem to name it.’” Faced with the manifold frustrations of existence, the three—Frances, Berenice, and John Henry—burst into tears. Each blames his outburst on some immediate problem, but the reader knows better: on this “final kitchen afternoon,” with Frances's attempt to marry life just a moment in time away, none of them can say what life is all about.

Nor is there to be any real lessening of their bewilderment. Before the novel is done, John Henry dies an agonizing, uncalled-for death on “a golden morning of the most butterflies, the clearest sky.” The Addams prepare to move, severing their relationship with Berenice. In the final scene, Frances sits with Berenice waiting for the arrival of a new friend, Mary, who rings the doorbell just in time to prevent Frances from finishing the last sentence she utters in the novel. The symbols of incompleteness, of inscrutability, are carried through to the end.

For all its insistence on the cruel mysteries of existence, however, The Member of the Wedding is a gentle, bittersweet book. Among many excellences, its triumph is the portrait of Berenice, a study full of the affection that only a writer from the South—a region that has given the Negro more of pain and more of love than any other—could truly show.

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At the beginning of this essay it was suggested that Carson McCullers' first novel might have been seen in the somewhat deceptive context of such sentimental novelists of “the little people” as Steinbeck and Saroyan. Deceptive but not altogether misleading, for in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and in her last novel, Clock Without Hands she focuses deliberately and often sharply on those social problems that have been a particular concern of the genre. But it is obvious that in Reflections in a Golden Eye and later in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe she is as closely associated with the “Southern Gothic” school of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, and that the attitudes implied in that phrase are not entirely missing in any of her work.

Carson McCullers makes legitimate claims upon our admiration: the precociousness of her talent, the depth of her sympathy, the courage with which she endured great suffering. These qualities all testify to her strength of character. As a writer, however, she now seems less important than she once did, and we may hope to be forgiven for observing, without malice, how greatly her reputation was enhanced by the time in which she wrote and by her regional associations. Carson McCullers was primarily a writer of the Forties, a period dominated by Southern writers and Southern critics: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and so on. There was an enormous amount of talent, of genius, embodied in this movement, but there was cultishness too, with a good deal of back-scratching and log-rolling in the literary quarterlies that were the official voice of the movement. In this atmosphere, Carson McCullers was cherished as a kind of wunderkind, her talent taking precisely the form that the symbol-oriented proponents of the New Criticism—concentrated in the South—were most adept at explaining. In dealing with Carson McCullers we are dealing with a writer who was favored by a self-supporting coterie that held sway over American letters for a decade. If we should now decide that she was essentially a minor writer, however, this is only to suggest that her vision was often limited and special. Like Biff's zinnia, her art was a kind of hybrid, mixing the familiar and universal with the strange and personal. Within the scope of that vision, she handled her themes of love, loneliness, alienation, and identity with precision and, at her least morbid and most natural, great tenderness.