The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

n  “People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.”

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house crammed full of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.” n

I first discovered this novel around 1990-91. I was 19 or 20 and I had been reading lots of feminist literature. I’d read Herland and The Handmaid’s Tale and A Room of One’s Own among others for a feminist literature college course the year or so previously and had recently completed Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe for my own reading pleasure. I barely knew who I was, finding men falling far short of my emotional needs, but mostly feeling like a freak, a feeling that had been with me all my life and that I’ve since learned is by no means a feeling exclusive to me, and certainly prevalent among young people questioning their sexual identity. I was a decade away from learning I was bipolar, though it was called manic-depressive illness at the time. I just knew I'd always been incredibly moody & melancholy (“mercurial” is most often used to describe my type of personality) and was pretty much a loner and rarely felt a part of anything, howevermuch I tried to be.

You could say I was relatively well-read at that age, since reading had always been my primary activity, but I don't believe I'd read Southern Gothic writers yet, and certainly nothing by such a young female writer before either (McCullers was 23 at the time this novel was published. TWENTY THREE!!! which was just a few years older than I was then.) I'm giving lots of context, because this book is all about context for me... the impact it had on me is ALL ABOUT CONTEXT. This book simply bowled me over. I remember being completely fascinated with Carson McCullers’s writing, with how she observed and described her characters, with how strange they were, like circus freaks, and yet how TOUCHING her story was. So strange and yet so relatable. I was devastated by this book, and at the same time it gave me hope. I finally knew for sure that I wasn't alone in my loneliness and my freakiness. It confirmed I was a freak for sure. It confirmed there were many of us out there. It confirmed to me maybe I could achieve something before I got too old (i.e. past 30). (I was wrong on that score).

In truth, all I could remember of the story itself years later were mostly vague impressions, but what stayed with me vividly were the awe and reverence I felt. Firstly, for what I recognized as a brilliant and original masterpiece, and secondly, for what I knew instinctively was an author who understood what it was to be a freak too, and who somehow made it all just... a part of life. And because of that, it had stayed with me for over 25 years as a shining memory and I've often listed it among my all-time favourites.

I can't describe the disappointment I felt when, listening to the audiobook version for my second reading in 2014—which was perfectly well narrated by Cherry Jones, I hasten to add—I found it slow going and rather dull, even too didactic in parts, and worse still, I failed to find all the beauty and poetry I'd seen in this novel the first time around. But I need to describe the story a little bit for those who aren't familiar with this book. It takes place in a "large" town—all things being relative—in the Deep South (pop. 30,000). The opening pages focus on the intense relationship between two deaf-mute male friends who live together, John Singer and Spiros Antonopoulous. When Spiros starts to behave more and more strangely and erratically, repeatedly getting in trouble with the law, he is eventually committed to an insane asylum, forcing John Singer to move from their shared home into a local rooming house.

John Singer somehow becomes a magnet to some of the locals, who, largely aided by his muteness, can see in him whatever they wish to see, and consider him their best friend, jealously guarding their relationship with him from anyone else. From there, the novel describes the events in the lives of four of John Singer's acquaintances. There is Mick Kelly, a fourteen year-old tomboy, the daughter of the impoverished owners of the rooming house who has a passion for music, discovers Mozart and Beethoven almost by accident, and dreams of composing music and having a piano of her own one day. There is Jake Blount, a hard drinker, drifter, and labour agitator regarded by most as a Communist. Biff Brannon is the owner of the New York Café where most of the characters in the story go to have drinks and meals, and he seems to have a soft-spot for people who find nothing but trouble. Finally there is Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, a black physician who despises all whites, and who worked hard to have a proper education, and raised his children to have high values and ideals, only to be bitterly disappointed in their obstinacy to remain "like their own people" in their mannerism, speech and deeds.

As I was writing this, I couldn't help but wonder why I wasn't more moved by this novel on second reading, because it has so very much going for it, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as a great piece of literature. But somehow the magic wasn't there. I sought to find out why. There is the fact that I've read quite a bit since I was 19, I've read other Southern Gothic authors, but also about Communism and Communist agitators specifically, so that, that aspect of the book took on much more significance. I found the parts spoken by Jake Blount bolder and much more pronounced in the audio format. I'd read John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle in the last couple of years and, shortly before this reread, Richard Wright's Native Son which is basically a Communist Manifesto. The social-political aspects of the novel which now to took much more importance than they had when I was still a young woman took away from my enjoyment of the purely poetic and affective human contact elements of the story that had originally struck me most, because I recognized those as being more relevant somehow. But then maybe I'd have been better off finding my paperback copy and reading it at my own pace, savouring the sentences and emphasizing those of my own choosing instead of the narrator's, so I could enjoy those aspects of the novel that spoke most to my humanity. Then again it could just have been a question of bad timing, so maybe reading it at some other more propitious time will prove more satisfying. Only one way to find out... From 2014—Revised February 2019

A credible friend here in GR told me that this novel is the saddest he had ever read. That’s the main reason why I read this. Well, it is the saddest and most depressing among the fiction ones that I’ve read too. Saddest among the ones I found earlier to be downright depressing: Good Morning, Midnight (1939) by Jean Rhys and The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy. Well, I am still to read The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Also, the holocaust-based semi-autobiographical but classified as fiction novels are, by nature, all sad so I am excluding those. This list is very long but the saddest ones are Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald and Night by Elie Weisel.

So what makes this novel sad and depressing? In my opinion, there are three main reasons:

(1) This was set during the 1930’s Great Depression in the Southern State of Georgia. The characters belonged to middle- to low-class families. Also, during that time, the racial discrimination in the US was still a big problem;
(2) the tone and mood that McCullers’ prose created. In the novel, all the characters are unhappy people. They all wanted something which were not realistic given the time, place and circumstances that they were in; and
(3) McCullers seemed to me a real unhappy person judging from the Wiki entries about her life – failed marriage, attempted suicide due to depression, alcoholism and frequent ailments that lead or contributed to her untimely death at the early age of 50. So, at 23 (the age she wrote this novel), this seemed to have foretold the sadness that she would later experience in her life. It could be a case of creating in her mind, the image of her future self. Think about the power of mind: what can it attract without us knowing.

Given the many examples of brilliant yet sad novels about The Great Depression like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, I have nothing against the first reason.

The second reason is something that is not very realistic for me unless the author’s main purpose is to make her author sad like the characters in the book. At the age of 46, I have experienced awfully sad events in my life but those were all temporary or during those events that were almost always somethings that were going right, i.e., happy. I remember that when my father died in 1997, my family life was going great what with my cute little girl making us, including my father happy. I also told my father before he died that I wished I could have another (better) job. Few years after his death, my wish was answered. In McCullers’ story, all the characters were unhappy and they seemed to have gotten nothing but problems, one after the other, in their lives: death, sickness, imprisonment, loss of sanity, loss of feet, loss of dreams, loss of virginity, loss of innocence, etc. Even the birds in that scene when Mick and Harry made love for the first and last time sang sad songs. Even the almost poetic lines were sad with this as my favorite: ”"How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?"

The third reason is something that I am scared of as a reader. I hope that the sadness in this book will not rub on me.

On the positive side, I appreciate the main theme that this book wants to impart: our need for somebody or our fear of being isolated. The struggles of four of John Singer's acquaintances make up the majority of the narratives. They are: Mick Kelly, a tomboyish young girl who loves music and dreams of buying a piano; Jake Blount, an alcoholic labor agitator; Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a diner; and Dr. Benedict Copeland, an idealistic African-American doctor. They seemed to have nobody to talk with and they all found Singer (who name is in itself an irony: a mute who sing or even speak) as their confidante. Maybe they thought that their secret was safe with him. They just did not know that he could write and he thought that at least one of them was crazy and he could not understand what they were saying. Well, even that one is sad.

Being my saddest book so far, this is definitely one of the most memorable reads. Thanks to my GR friend for telling me about this book’s existence.

Lonely... ostracized... marginalized... oppressed... Carson McCullers provides insight to all of these conditions. It must have been remarkable when it was published in the still-very-racially-tense south right before World War II, and it still hits hard now. She was 23, and white, which makes it even more amazing.

Several of the characters are Marxists and attempting to incite revolution, and that was the most severe time traveling that this book does for the reader, in my opinion. Racism, oppression - we still deal with these issues. But Communism is EVIL now, not inspiring. (Not really, but I think you see my point).

The idea of using deaf-mute characters as the sun the rest of the stories rotate around was brave but powerful. I loved Mick, the girl who seems to move throughout the same lives that Singer does.

"It was like she was so empty there wasn't even a feeling or thought in her."

"He cleared his bench and began to write. He loved to shape words with a pen on paper and he formed the letters with as much care as if the paper had been a plate of silver."

"I do not understand, so I write it to you because I think you will understand."

"I am not meant to be alone and without you who understand."

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is about the dreams that drive us. It is about the tension between the differences that keep us apart, and the loneliness that brings us together.

Each of McCullers' characters is in some way closed off from other people. The dreams that define their purposes so clearly to themselves are essentially dismissed and misunderstood by others. Through Singer they find a sympathetic "ear", someone who understands and lends legitimacy to their aspirations. But what they see is only a false reflection. The tragedy is compounded by Singer's own obliviousness, and his mislaid devotion to his friend who is himself oblivious in turn. In this regression there is a message of inescapable human disconnection - the inability of people to truly understand each other, consumed as they are by their own private desires, unable to see others except through the prism of their own perspective. Even Blount and Copeland, who share similar values and aspirations, are driven apart by their petty differences. This is all the more tragic because what motivates them both is love, and a desire to liberate those they see being exploited.

The story reveals both the supreme power of our innate desires (they can define, drive, and ultimately destroy) but surprisingly, also a certain impotence. The desires that are so powerful within us can be simply cast aside, as when Mick takes a job knowing that she doesn't need to, and knowing that doing so means giving up her musical ambitions. Despite her absolute obsession with music, she performs this act almost causally. She understands on some level that growing up requires acceptance of this inevitable abandonment of self - it is at this moment she realises she has become an adult.

For someone with the empathy and sensitivity of McCullers, the era in which the book was written must have felt explosive. Issues of race and gender oppression, the extreme poverty of the depression, imminent war and the horrors of fascism - all were visibly simmering and set to erupt over the coming years. In many ways, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a political novel - a reaction to the problems of the age. But McCullers writes with a compassion and desire for social justice that was well ahead of her time. She treats race and sexuality with a deep honesty and empathy, and accepts her characters' human shortcomings (some of which may be uncomfortable even for readers today) with nothing but compassion; and entirely without moral condemnation. It is an incredible achievement, especially for someone so young.

When I was reading this book I remember hating it. These people's lives left me feeling hollow inside, and now that I am away from the book, I realize why this book was so popular and was made into a movie: It leaves an impression on people. I can never forget the feeling that I had while reading it; one of hopelessness, of indifference to life, of going nowhere. And how many people's lives are like this? I know I have met a few, the man at the house I lived in when going to college, who said that life was boring, and so he sat around watching TV all day. The man who works all day hating his job, comes home to a life of nothingness, and the next day gets up and does the same.

This is the book that Russia allowed its people to read, and for good reason. They didn't want their people to glamorize American life.

Novela absolutamente moderna y transgresora. Una de mis muchas manías lectoras es siempre buscar la fecha de publicación del original (me gusta poner el libro en el contexto histórico de la época en que se escribió). Esta obra se estaba escribiendo en el entorno del 1938-39. Los temas que toca una chiquilla de 20 años como es la autora en ese momento, es una auténtica locura: habla de cómo se machaca a las minorías principalmente negros y judíos, América está triturando a los negros y en Europa a los judíos, se está iniciando el nazismo. Pero no sólo eso, también de las lamentables condiciones del empleo en América, más lamentables todavía para la mujer, tratándose del país más rico del mundo, que es a la vez el más injusto. Siempre sale en sus obras de forma absolutamente respetuosa algún guiño a relaciones homosexuales de sus protagonistas, aquí desde luego que también se aprecia. Lo dicho, una locura genial.
 
Ello por no hablar de lo moderno de esos personajes tan sorprendentes que nos pinta.
 
McCullers, al igual que ocurre en el circo, siempre buscaba el “más difícil todavía”. Sus personajes son rebuscados, sus historias no son convencionales, sus diálogos no son simples muchas veces… Creo que hace todo aquello que no se recomienda al que comienza a escribir. Con magnífico resultado, por cierto. Dos sordomudos, una mujer gigante, un enano, una mestiza china…esos son los personajes de su mundo. Y sin embargo sus historias logran atraparte, te subyugan. Es un caso parecido al recientemente fallecido y genial Paul Auster: los nombres que usaba para los personajes, algunas historias estrambóticas, etc… y ocurría lo mismo, por más raro que fuera todo no podías dejar de leerlo.
 
Con McCullers hice lo contrario de lo que suelo hacer con otros escritores, leer obras menores suyas, antes de su obra consagrada. Ya le conocía sus mecanismos y su imán.
 
Entrando en el fondo, bien avanzada ya la segunda parte del libro es cuando empiezo a captar el mensaje. La búsqueda del conocimiento verdadero:
 
“(…) ¿qué ocurre con un hombre que sabe? Ve el mundo tal como es y mira miles de años atrás para ver cómo se produce todo. Observa la lenta aglutinación de capital y poder, y como ha llegado hoy a su cúspide. Ve América como una casa de locos. Ve como los hombres tienen que robar a sus hermanos para poder vivir. Ve como los niños se mueren de hambre y las mujeres trabajan sesenta horas por semana para ganarse la comida. Ve a todo ese maldito ejército de parados y los miles de millones de dólares y miles de kilómetros de tierra desperdiciada. Contempla como se acerca la guerra. Contempla como cuando la gente sufre tanto, se vuelve mala y fea, y algo muere en ella. Pero lo más importante que ve es que todo el sistema del mundo está construido sobre una mentira. Y aunque todo esto es tan evidente como el mismo sol…, los ignorantes han vivido tanto tiempo con esta mentira, que ya no son capaces de verla”
 
La huida del aborregamiento mayoritario del capitalismo salvaje norteamericano. Hay 4 personajes centrales protagonistas muy peculiares y muy ricos, que giran en torno a un personaje principal Singer, una especie de deidad enigmática, del que no se acaba desvelar por la autora el misterio que lo envuelve: ni la relación inicial con el griego, ni las sucesivas relaciones que se van entretejiendo. 
 
Solo apuntar que cada uno de los protagonistas parece defender, de forma más o menos heterodoxa y estrafalaria una causa, a saber: el trabajo digno y justo, la igualdad racial, la defensa de la mujer y del arte, la defensa de lo bello y la libertad en las relaciones. Casi nada.

I knew nothing about this book at all. Well, except for the title, I’d definitely heard the title before – but I would have bet money the book was written by a man and that it was bad romance novel, at least, that would have been my best guess. Instead, this is now perhaps one of my all-time favourite American novels. It can be compared without the least blush of embarrassment with Steinbeck at his best and Harper Lee out killing mocking birds – and there are many, many points of comparison between all three writers. This one has completely captivated me – and in ways I had not expected to be captivated.

My very dear friend Nell and I were chatting one day about Calvino’s idea of the books one might write and how these ought to fit into an imaginary bookcase – the short version of his idea being, what books would you like your own book to be beside on an imaginary bookshelf? Anyway, in the very next email from Nell there appeared a list of books – one of which was this one. I went to the library to see if I could find it, and then to some second hand bookshops around and about – but with no luck. Well, six months or so later and now I’ve read it. And god I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am.

The title is actually the perfect title for this book, but that is only true after you have read it – it is actually a remarkably bad title for the book before you have read it. I would not be surprised if 999 readers in a thousand would think that this would be a story about unrequited love. That this might just be a melancholy story about a protagonist, let’s call him Mr Sadsack, who has spent his life looking for the perfect partner, but she is terribly allusive and although he sometimes despairs that he will ever find her no one reading this imaginary novel called ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’ doubts that in the end our nice wee man will finally end up with his perfect partner. But no. Although the title might make you think the book is about this sort of thing, it is about nothing like this at all.

I guess I could say that the book has grand themes about ‘what is wrong with The South’ – and that might make you form images in your mind of the inhuman treatment of black Americans in the southern states of America and the struggle to end segregation and a terrible legal system based on discrimination. And although you would be closer to the truth, it would still not be quite the book you might expect it to be.

And if I said that it has themes concerning the subjugation of labour and how the economic system is sustained by creating the conditions by which the working classes are convinced of their fundamental inferiority so they do nothing to remove their fetters – and that the heart that seeks freedom is also a lonely hunter – all this would be true too, to a point, and not true beyond that point. There are parts of this book that made me think about Chomsky’s political writings and how dreadfully long the truth has been known about oppression and exploitation and how dreadfully long it has been clear what needs to be done. And that this too is the part of the American tradition that is spoken of, if at all, only in whispers; for don’t you know they’re talking about a revolution in whispers?

And if I said this book is about coming of age and the loss of innocence and how becoming an adult is actually a kind of death which we might long for, but where more is lost than it seems we could possibly dare to lose. If I said that the young woman in this who throughout the novel moves from being a child to becoming an adult (even without some of the possible horrible things that could have happened to her not actually eventuating) and yet she still basically loses everything by growing up – that would be mostly true too.

And if I said that the book is about selfishness and how a moment’s decision or thoughtlessness can have horrible and irrevocable consequences – well, you might think you’ve read this book many times before – but again, I think you would be wrong.

Or I could say that this is a book about how we fundamentally misunderstand others – for doesn’t everyone misunderstand (project onto) John Singer, the deaf-mute who is more or less central to the story, whatever it is they need him to be? And isn’t Singer guilty of exactly the same human frailty with his own friend Antonapoulos? I thought it was terribly clever of her to have Singer bring Antonapoulos a projector – I thought she was nearly god-like as a writer at that point.

What this book is really is a warning – not a warning that I might have written if I was to write a book like this – but a dark and terrible warning all the same. Much darker and much more terrible than I think I would be capable of writing. No, I couldn’t write a book like this, and knowing that fills me with the deepest of regrets. Because this is also a much more optimistic book than I think I would be capable of writing too.

McCullers was 23 when she wrote this book – god, the thought of it fills me with awe. There are times when I would almost be prepared to believe that some people really do have older souls than the rest of us. It is as incomprehensible that a 23 year old could write this book as it is to believe that a woman of only 22 years could have written Pride and Prejudice.

And the warning? Well, that you can be absolutely right in what you believe, you can be standing on the side of righteousness and hold the truth shining in the palm of your hand and be doing everything in your power to improve the lot of your people – and you can still be only half human. You can walk in the ways of the great project of your time, you can know and you can spend your life seeking to show the ‘don’t knows’ so they too become part of the enlightened – and still you can be a damaged half a man. We are barely human without our dreams, but even when our dreams are not selfish and are directed at the greatest, the most noble of aspirations, we are still human, all too human.

The scene with the two old men, the one black and the other white, arguing through the night until dawn about the best way to liberate those who are oppressed and unaware is achingly sad. And why? Because it is blindingly obvious to anyone with eyes that neither of these men could ever ‘mobilise the masses’. Their dreams are as just and pure and true as they are barren and impotent and without substance. They shimmer and flap and torment them both – and thus is the human condition.

Of all the characters I think perhaps Doctor Copeland is the most poignant. He effectively loses his own children because they do not live up to his dreams for them, his need for them to fight for his ideals. This really is a key theme of the book, that dreams not only have the power to make us human, but can then over-power us and make us something other than human too. With the book being written at a time when Hitler was screaming at crowds of men standing with arms raised in salute this 23 year old woman had a much clearer vision of what was wrong with the world than I have ever been able to achieve. And she tells of this vision in the only way it can be told - in whispers.

This really is a remarkable book – like nothing I imagined it to be and so much more than I could ever have hoped..

ROCK AND ROLL

It turns out that Miss McCullers did most of her great writing - most of her entire writing - before she was 30. Rock and roll! After 30 she was too busy having ghastly illnesses and marrying the same guy three or four times, and dodging invitations to a suicide pact from the guy she married all those times. So when she was 22 - I ask you! - she wrote this first novel which is a stone American classic. I had heretofore thought that absorbing a ton of influences and developing a unique voice all by the age of 22 had only been done by Lennon/McCartney, Bob Dylan and Aubrey Beardsley, but Miss McCullers performs this remarkable feat too. Her surefootedness and precision are fantastic. I'm so much in awe that I feel sick to my stomach.

METAPHORS FOR GOD WHICH IS A METAPHOR ALREADY

Onto the book itself. The inexorable gravitational pull of the metaphor in all our verbal dealings is something I have mentioned before, so that even someone like Raymond Carver's ironed-flat tell-it-like-it-is bargain-basement prose still spins in stories like So Much Water So Close to Home or A Small Good Thing brilliant metaphorical explorations of the various uncomfortable truths he shoves our way (the ignored corpse, the tasteless birthday cake). Perhaps we no longer love overly obvious metaphors (Little Red Riding Hood) - then again, perhaps we do (The Titanic). But they're very useful when you try to talk about God - in fact it's impossible to talk about God non-metaphorically insofar as God is Himself a metaphor. Fictionmakers love God metaphors - last year we had Ron Currie's disappointing "God is Dead", a few years back we had the smart Jim Carey movie "The Truman Show", further back we have other movies like "Whistle Down the Wind" and "Theorem". In "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" John Singer, the deaf mute, the blank slate, the man who everyone talks to but who talks to nobody, stands for God. People pour out their dreams, fears & hopes onto him and he scribbles the odd bland sentence in reply and they think he understands all and knows all. In fact - and here's Miss McCullers' audacious vicious twist - John Singer is himself completely obsessed with another deaf mute who he thinks of as almost Godlike but who in fact is a fat greedy imbecile confined to a mental asylum. If we follow the metaphor along, not too fancifully I think, we find that Antonapoulos the idiot therefore represents the human race, with which God/Singer is fatally, poignantly, uselessly obsessed - Antonapoulos will never get well and was a sad mistake to begin with - so what does that say about the rest of us chickens? Not much.

BRIEF ACTS OF APPALLING VIOLENCE

Miss McCullers doesn't belabour this central conceit too much and she also throws in a ton of local knowledge but without smacking you upside the head every time like Annie Proulx does. And although this is a slow old read at times, a lot of doing nothing punctuated by brief acts of appalling violence (is this what the American South is like?), her sad sweet song of humanity is as beautiful a tune as I've heard all year.