Each year I attempt to participate in classics bingo in the group catching up on classics. This year, so far, so good. I gave a lot of thought as to which classic book I wanted to use for my classic of North America square. There are a few authors that come to mind as classic American authors, where each piece of literature written by them reads like a story being told on one's front porch. The names Hemingway and Steinbeck first come to my mind, along with that of Carson McCullers. Distinctly southern and writing about the human condition during the era in which she lived, Carson McCullers is a literary treasure. My mother owns the complete set of her writing in one volume and I have previously read Member of a Wedding, which was a gem. It comes as little surprise then that I selected McCullers' definitive work The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for my classic of North America square this year as her work comes straight from the heart and is a joy to read.

I can not say much about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter that has not been written before. Taking place in a Georgia mill town during the Great Depression, McCullers writes of the trials and travails that occurred during that time. The town could have been her own and the female protagonist Mick Kelly could been McCullers when she was younger. She speaks out about racism, fascism, the rights of the disabled, as well as the depression, through the alternating chapters told through the eyes of her archetypal protagonists Singer, Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Doctor Benedict Copeland, and Mick Kelly. Readers find a woman ahead of her time in that she views blacks, Jews, whites, men, and women as equals, and this was during the 1930s. Perhaps the fact that McCullers was all of twenty three years of age when she wrote this timeless novel speaks to her views of society in that her generation did not emerge as leaders until the later 1940s, when people did start to speak out against racism and lack of rights for women. Published in 1940, McCullers work was slightly ahead of its time and most likely eye opening for many.

With blacks and whites, Jews and gentiles, unmarried men and women sharing dialogue in the south, McCullers work is refreshing for this era as well as the country has become as polarized as it was during the times of separate but equal. Each of her protagonists had much to say about society, and each had a plan as to how to better themselves and the world that they lived in. The world needs more people like Doctor Copeland, Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Singer, and Mick Kelly. Yet, they are a thing of the past and many of their inclusive views with them. The literary world also needs more writers like Carson McCullers who spoke her mind from a young age. Her work remains as timeless as ever and her Georgia mill town an archetype for forward thinking people. Carson McCullers work should be viewed as North American classic writing, and I look forward to reading more of it in the coming year.

5 timeless stars

A novel of misfits and dreamers: the drunk with his impressive rage; a doctor with a strangled voice & failing lungs; a gangly girl chasing a fragment of a song to hunt the full Symphony and the proprietor of The New York Cafe, his compassion for the crippled and his deep desire to understand the heart of his patrons.

At the centre of the tale is the deaf mute John Singer. The four misfits visit Singer and communicate their dreams, desires & woes. They are certain that Singer, in his silence, understands everything.

Singer has his own revered sounding post, the dreamy & troublesome greek Antonapoulos. When his friend is admitted to an out of town asylum, Singer's life is forever changed. The hands he used so frenetically to communicate his heart to the Greek were rendered useless in his absence. He took long walks at night and all he met mistook his heartache for wisdom. Carson could be pointing out the foolishness of idolatry. Ironically, the people that visit Singer for solace & understanding only confuse him with their need. To Antonapoulos he writes:

"You remember the four people I told you about when I was there... 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...the New York Café owner is different. He watches. The others all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy."

This is a beautiful and tragic tale. The prose is eloquent and deceptively simple.

I read somewhere that the character (& my favourite) Mick Kelly is semi-autobiographical. My own deep love of music is what draws me to this character, and these lines in particular:

'Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her fist went up to her throat. How did it come? Like a walk or a march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. It didn't have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the day-time and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her - the real plain her. She could not listen hard enough to hear it all'.

'But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved best - glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen'. Pg 107.

The difference between my first reading, and this one: a deeper understanding of the characters. There is more pain here then I first registered. It is my favourite of McCullers few novels, not as perfect as the short story The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, but pretty close.

I've been reading Carson McCullers for the last month. I started with this book and then picked up each of her five other books one after the other, leaving myself no time in between to think about what I've read or consider writing a review. Today, I'm glad that I didn't attempt a review of this one because I just came across a piece in the sixth book, The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings, entitled Author's Outline of 'The Mute' (later published as 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter').

Her own words describe her intentions for this book so clearly that I'm going to use them in lieu of a review:
....The general outline of this work can be expressed very simply. It is the story of five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves. One of these five is a deaf man, John Singer - and it is around him that the whole book pivots. Because of their loneliness these other four people see in the mute a certain mystic superiority and he becomes in a sense their ideal. Because of Singer's infirmity his outward character is vague and unlimited. His friends are able to impute to him all the qualities which they would wish for him to have. Each of the these four people creates his understanding of the mute from his own desires...In his eternal silence there is something compelling. Each one of these persons makes the mute the repository for his most personal feelings and ideas...
This situation between the four people and the mute has an exact parallel in the relation between Singer and his deaf-mute friend, Antonopoulos. Singer is the only person who could attribute to Antonopoulos dignity and a certain wisdom...
About this central idea there is much of the quality of a legend. All the parts dealing directly with Singer are written in the simple style of a parable.
Before the reasons why this situation came about can be fully understood it is necessary to know each of the principal characters in some detail. But the characters cannot be described adequately without the events which happen to them being involved. Nearly all the happenings in the book spring directly from the characters. During the space of this book each person is shown in his strongest and most typical actions.
Of course it must be understood that none of these personal characteristics are told in the didactic manner in which they are set down here. They are implied in one successive scene after another - and it is only at the end, when the sum of of these implications is considered, that the real characters are understood in all of their deeper aspects....

Carson McCullers then goes on to describe her plot and characters in great detail before finishing with some notes about time, place and structure. I was very interested to see that she had a musical structure in mind because I'd experienced the book in musical terms even as I was reading it. This is how she describes the structure: 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.

One of the other interesting things that emerged for me is the amount of material she eventually left out of this novel. Because I've read all of her novels and most of her stories at this point, I realise that she recycled some of those deleted scenes. Characters' names and circumstances have also been recycled which makes reading all of her work together extra rewarding. The reader begins to see the entire cast of characters as part of one big family and all of her themes as being connected. She is always writing, in one way or another, about inner isolation and the battle to overcome it.

“Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,
Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.
Go as a great wave of cool water,
Bear my contempt of oppressors.”

“Go”, commands Ezra Pound in his poem n  “Comission”n.
And so I obey, and I go.
I go and listen to the mute choir of the lonesome and the restless, of the disinherited and the excluded, of the alienated and the embittered.
Isolated voices withering in despair, wrestling in incomprehension, anguished voices that interweave with each other creating a desolate fugue where only the tuneless can sing.

A nameless mill town in the middle of the deep South during the thirties serves, not only as a background orchestra for these discordant voices, but also as the universal representative of the spiritual solitude that underlines the human condition. Four main characters struggle against different kinds of afflictions depending on race, class, age and sexuality.
Thirteen-year-old Mick Kelly nurtures her passion for music locked in her secret “inside-room”. Mr.Coperland, a colored doctor, tries to control his anger against the submissiveness of his race. Jake Blount, an alcoholic communist wanders from town to town spreading his inner contradictions. Biff Brannon, the owner of the Café, sits behind the booth and observes it all, especially boyish Mick, who seems frozen into eternal youth.
These disconnected individuals, eager to appease their escalating sense of alienation, pivot around John Singer, a deaf mute, whose grey eyes offer mute solace.

“Speak against unconscious oppression,
Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,
Speak against bonds.”

“Speak”, continues Pound’s song.
And speak is what these four rotating “satellites” do while hovering around their beaming sun, their self-created icon, like blind moths being drawn recklessly towards the scorching lightbulb. They all turn to Singer like starving souls, pouring all their turmoil into his opaque face, which looks back with a peaceful glance, a glance that swallows it all. Despair, anger, shame, pain, emptiness. All of them gone, diluted in the indefinite wells of easiness emanating from John Singer’s being, who becomes the so much coveted savior, the embodiment of goodness and empathy, the guardian angel who listens and understands.

“Mick Kelly and Jake Blount and Doctor Coperland would come and talk in the silent room – for they felt that the mute would always understand whatever they wanted to say to him. And maybe even more than that.” (87)

But does Mr. Singer really hear the uneasy songs of his faithful “disciples”? Can he fully grasp the implications of their vivid speech? Oh, the talking. Isn’t all the talking less about communicating rather than unburdening oneself? Isn’t the soul after all, as Virginia Woolf said, a n  “wedge-shaped core of darkness”n? Something invisible to others?
For what these lost souls don’t know is that Mr. Singer wanders the night as the most lonely of them all, imagining the face of his friend, his lover, the face of his only reason to keep on moving, his only reason to be.
Love, even when seemingly directed at another, is often a form of egoism.
What is then, the adored one?
Only a blank canvas on to which anything can be painted, only a shallow mirror reflecting whatever is wished. As in a chimerical fantasy, these off-balance voices, enraged by events, at once bruised and musing, fixate on the make-believe scene they create in their locked minds and think they live, cheating themselves.

“Oh how hideous it is
To see three generations of one house gathered together!
It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotten and falling.”

As the trees in Ezra Pound’s poem, the condemned, the voiceless and the rejected stand staring at the abyss of their own incomprehension, in a world hovering on the edge of a Great War. Some will fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some – like Mick – with a quiet but fierce resolution to keep the beauty of Beethoven’s (also a deaf) “Eroica” engraved in the most recondite part of her soul.
But mostly, they will be suspended in uncertainty, swaying between radiance and darkness, between bitter irony and faith, between music and silence; eternally bend in a double-edged posture where empathy can be corrosive as well as liberating, where one can imagine the other as a melody of life, or as McCullers appears to be saying, as a melody of death.

“Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.” (107)

*****
Note: I have had the pleasure to read this novel at the same time that my friend Tej and his criss- crossed comments and kind encouragement have made of this novel an even more intense reading experience. Thanks for sharing and building expectations along with me, Tej.

Publicada en 1940, la novela es un retrato de la vida miserable en un pueblo industrial de Georgia en los años 30. El sordomudo John Singer es el centro de una serie de personajes, todos ellos marcados por la incomunicación y el ansia de algo que no pueden alcanzar.

Erraba por aquellos poblados barrios situados junto al río que tenían un aspecto más sórdido que nunca desde que las hilanderías habían reducido su actividad aquel invierno. En muchos ojos podía leerse una expresión de sombría soledad. Ahora que la gente se veía forzada a permanecer ociosa, se podía percibir una cierta inquietud. Se producía un ferviente estallido de nuevas creencias.

Es notable la manera en que Carson McCullers, una joven blanca de 24 años, nos transmite a la perfección el ambiente en que se mueven estas personas, y en especial los sufrimientos y las limitaciones de los negros. El fascismo, el socialismo y los movimientos de liberación de la comunidad afroamericana están presentes en toda la narración y llegan a constituir una obsesión mística en algunos personajes, como el doctor Copeland que le pone a su hijo el nombre de Karl Marx.

Pero es sobre todo el problema de la incomunicación y la manera en que lo viven los distintos individuos lo que da unidad al texto:

Jake hablaba, con palabras creadas en las oscuras mañanas pasadas en las calles o en la soledad de su habitación. Las palabras se formaban y eran dichas con alivio.

Ha habido aspectos que me han gustado, pero no he llegado a sintonizar con los personajes y, en algunos casos las relaciones entre ellos me han resultado algo absurdas. Supongo que es una metáfora, pero el empeño de todos los personajes en contarle su vida a Singer - un sordomudo - resulta algo extraño. De la misma manera, la pasión de Singer por su amigo Spiros es incomprensible, ya que la autora lo pinta como alguien bastante desagradable. Aunque hay momentos intensos, la trama parece estancarse y no acaba de arrancar, dejando una especie de sensación de que falta algo. Comprendo el mérito que tiene, considerando en momento en que fue escrita, pero creo que no ha envejecido bien.
3,5*

What a terribly sad book, and yet, so insightful about loneliness, despair and alienation that it’s impossible not to love it, somehow.

In a small town in Georgia during WWII, four very different people find solace in talking to Mr. Singer, a deaf and mute man who eats at the New York Café every day. The café’s owner, a young tomboyish girl, an alcoholic communist and a black doctor desperate to affect change, are, each in their own way, all alone in the world. They operate at a slightly different level of vibration than the people around them, they feel hopelessly out of step and can’t seem to adjust and fall in line with the rest of the world. But talking to Mr. Singer, who reads their words on their lips, shares food or plays chess with them soothes them in ways nothing else can.

“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” follows the characters over the course of about a year, where their lives will take strange and unexpected turns and send them far from where they started. It doesn’t sound like much, and in some ways it isn’t, but the tiny, quiet and intimate events are often the ones with the biggest impacts on our lives, and McCullers does an amazing job of opening up her characters, making them achingly real, flawed yet sympathetic and as mentioned above, terribly sad. I’m just repeating what many people have said before, but it boggles the mind that she could have written with such poignancy at 23.

I sighed and wished for a better life for these characters, even if I had a feeling where they would end up. A good writer makes you want to hug the characters they create, and I wanted to bake all of them cookies. Well done, Carson McCullers; I’ll be getting more books by this brilliant lady.

The ending of Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of the saddest I've ever read. In fact, I'd not hestitate to say it is one of the worst things that could ever happen to me, and I hope like hell it never does. I related too much to situations of concentrating on some small special thing to get through the day. Hearing music and stories in my head. The luxury of energy (and the heart left) to expend on such thoughts should not be taken for granted (even if it is just about something good to eat later on in the day. Woody Allen is wrong though, there IS such a thing as bad pizza).
That McCuller's wrote 'Hunter' at the age of twenty-three is a much talked about point. Is it a point? The book jackets (such as the Josh Nichols heroine's book club edition, no doubt) tout this a lot. It's not some Orson Wellesian making their masterpeice and peaking before age twenty-four behind the story to me. As if that could ever be the point. (Well, yeah, maybe. Their lives were frustrating as all heck, and fascinating too. I got too depressed investigating either one, actually... They were both Orson Wellesian on that score.)
Isaac Bashevis singer didn't write a novel until he was forty (in my opinion, he's was as awe-inspiring as any youngster). There are assuredly buttloads of such examples for either direction on the age time line. I don't think it is age, only that some experiences are more shattering than others. Truman Capote wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms before twenty-four. It was autobiographical (Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird shows some of those shared experiences. Must've been some time they had.) Some people stop listening to music when they get out of high school. Is it like that? I don't know. The capacity to be shaped still by experiences (and not every shaping experience is profound).
Do you stop growing at some point?
(Is 'Hunter' autobiographical in a sense? I feel it is. The Member of the Wedding too. The "Take me with you" feelings of that book has to be.)
Did they give up and have nothing else left to bleed? I know that I don't want to think of McCullers ending up without the stories in her head. Not ever. So she's still twenty-three.
I just don't want to think of anyone ending up like Mick.
If it all ends for naught, it is still too painful to live without the love for something better.
For me, one of the most haunting parts of 'Hunter' was the story of Willie Copeland. Fuck, that was hard. It is hard to think beyond that...

When a bunch of society’s outcasts become inexplicably drawn to and befriend a deaf mute. He becomes their sympathetic ear and confidante when each of them gain their own voice and this gives them all a glimmer of hope and a safe space for them to dream. The twist of irony makes this book tinged with so much sadness, the breakdown of society and the harmfulness of segregation, bigotry and the outcasting of the lost, lonely and displaced. 4 sad and lonely stars.

I have never seen my parents reading a book but for some reason we always had books at home. Not only novels but also encyclopaedic ones about the human body, wildlife and the wonders of nature around the world. My brother and I literally devoured them all (the big encyclopaedic chunks) and some of them now look like they’ve been read since the beginning of times. They’re happy books I guess as they served their purpose in life.

The novels just stayed there, not untouched but unread. They looked too serious and scary. We couldn’t guess what could possibly be written in them.
Among all those novels there was a tiny little hardback edition of Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café translated to Portuguese in 1986. I lost count of how many times I held it in my heads. Probably because it was the shortest and the one with the most appealing cover. And I remember thinking (it’s funny the things we can remember) “Carson McCullers?! Who’s this guy (aha) and why did he decide to write a story about a sad café?!” The word sad being enough to catch my total attention.

But then, as it happens a lot in life, I ended up not doing what I wanted to do and that sad book by what I thought could only have been written by a sad guy has never been read (Probably not such a happy book as the one about the human body one I’m afraid).

It’s funny isn’t it?! That an author born on the other side of the world and long dead had influenced my life and my memories in such a strong way?!

Obviously I knew from long ago before picking The Heart is a Lonely Hunter up that Carson McCullers was not a guy and her debut novel was written when she was twenty three years old.

And I tell you something, what a debut!
Oh my, my... How did such a young person write such a marvellous, insightful and wise story at such a young age? What had she been through in life to have the maturity, the knowledge and the courage to tell a story like this?

So much loneliness in just one story. I loved it. All of it. The writing! The imagery! The characters! Loneliness and more loneliness. And all so thought provoking.

Obsessive parenthood, racism, neglected children, alienation, isolation, frustration, desperation, grief, sadness and despair.

Sounds too familiar, doesn’t it?

We’re only humans.
And we’re all lonely.

I have to admit that, initially, I was a bit underwhelmed by this highly acclaimed novel. That has to do with personal experiences: 2 of our 4 children are deaf, so I know that world a bit. McCullers' image of John Singer, the central character she systematically describes as "deaf-mute", doesn't quite match the image of truly deaf people, at least not of today's (it would lead me too far to explain why). Hence, in the beginning I regularly was annoyed by that incorrect image.

But I soon realized that I had to distance myself from that: clearly McCullers was not interested in giving an accurate picture of the deaf community. In this novel, John Singer functions as a compositional hub to explore four other characters: the good-hearted bartender Biff Brannon, the fanatic activist Jack Bounty, the black doctor Benedict Copeland, and the boyish girl Mick Kelly. To their own surprise, they each see in the (obviously) taciturn Singer a point of contact to pour out their hearts to, someone who seems to understand everything. In this way, McCullers knows how to deepen the tragic side of each of these figures, ingeniously touching on a lot of themes: the race issue, the gender issue (quite remarkable for a 1940 novel!), the classic coming-of- age and midlife themes, the role of ideology in tackling injustice, and so on. That is impressive for a debut by a 23-year-old writer.

But of course, it is above all the central theme that sticks: the fundamental loneliness of every individual. In that regard, the title of this novel leaves nothing to the imagination: each of the 5 main characters (I include Singer) almost continuously bumps into the tragedy of the human condition, not being understood, being powerless against the facts of life, not really being able to communicate, etc. And in that respect, I understand McCullers' choice of the deaf John Singer as the pivotal character a little bit better. Towards the end of the story, it even turns out that behind this protagonist lies an even greater human tragedy than with the others.

This is a slow, thoughtfully written novel, which no longer matches the pace and dynamism typical of today's literature. For example, the story only really picks up a little past halfway. But the ending that McCullers is working towards is absolutely confrontational and haunting. My major point of criticism is that a few of the characters she presents are just a little too much of a caricature. And I'm not only referring to the too angelic John Singer. The fanatic Jack Bounty, for example, is drawn as the restless communist ideologue whose activism inevitably ends in frustration, drowned in a large amount of alcohol. And to my taste, the heroic dr. Copeland is a bit too melodramatic, although the way he describes the dire condition of the black community is absolutely impressive. In that view, the more layered characters of Biff Brannon and especially the endearing Mick Kelly are far more appealing. There's an all-pervading sadness in this book, that kept on haunting me for days after I had read it. (3.5 stars, perhaps in time I'll upgrade it)

“I am not meant to be alone and without you who understands.”

The great burden of humanity lies in our need to be understood. Each human is a vessel of thoughts and emotions simply waiting to be poured forth to other vessels willing to reciprocate, each relationship a barter, an exchange of ideas and feelings, and so there remains in us a shred of influence from every person, idea, experience we encounter. Our lives a shared reality in ways we may not comprehend, a concoction of all impressions accepted mingled with the fear of those our formed identity rejects.

Yet for a lot of people life is still a lonesome experience. Countless souls have spent years in search of someone to lend them time and understanding but have found none. Even those inside conjugal relations and tribal camaraderie still experience this feeling of solitude. Individuals forge relationships in order to find listeners but do not spare the effort to listen when it is their turn. And so convenient projections are created of each other resulting in fragile bonds that shatter at the earliest stages of conflict. Do we really have a thorough understanding of those we come in contact with on a day-to-day basis?

The heart is a lonely hunter draws from the bitter isolation of individuals on their search for an outlet. Rejects of their own accord malcontent in the different paradigms they exist in. Four distinctive people filled with substance vastly out of place in their simple rural town and at the center of it, an ill-fated deaf-mute who accepts all and gives nothing. A political subversive, a racial activist, a flowering bud of classical music, and a detached voyeur all unload their lonesome bulks on a solitary and often confused deaf-mute. The projection of their ideal companion carelessly placed upon this unsuspecting sacrifice. All pour but none take the time to hear from their perceived equal, until this cracked vessel is broken due to its inability to unburden itself.

Carson McCullers wrote this novel during her 23rd year. A lot of people seem surprised that this work, widely considered an American classic, was written by someone of her age. But this is hardly surprising, that timeframe of early to late twenties is a pivotal period in the human existence when loneliness is most pronounced. It is the time when we are forced to make harsh decisions that more often than not diverge from the idealistic dreams of our youth. This reality compels us to find solace in the shared misery of those around us who have also experienced the crushing bitterness of the world.

McCullers perfectly captures the intensity of loneliness inside us when our failures float into the surface of our attention. This nurtured loneliness that plagues and torments never really goes away. It lingers and it hurts. Perhaps all we can do is share some of the pain to people who have chosen to suffer with us.

“The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear.”

This one took me by surprise. Quite simply I grabbed it from the library based on positive reviews among GR friends AND the hole in my reading resume. Must read a Carson McCullers book, the wind whistling through that hole said. And so I did.

From the get-go, I thought I was reading Sherwood Anderson. The voice and the diction reminded me mightily of Sherwood's Winesburg, Ohio.

But it went one better than that. The characters were mostly down-and-outers, reminding me of Anderson's "grotesques" in Winesburg. Quite simply, a "grotesque" is defined as just another person living a life of quiet desperation. No one likes that Thoreau quote better than me. It could be on many of our gravestones and work nicely.

Anyway, I was stunned that this book was written by a 23-year-old. Holy Toledo Ohio, could she write. Gifted. And what a collection she put together -- Biff "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" Brannon, the cafe owner; Jake the Radical Drunk; Copeland, the black doctor whose anger anticipates today's news (in fact, Carson McCullers herself anticipates it in general -- that's how sensitive her prose is to the oppressed black community); Mick Kelly, the teenaged girl who must've been based on CM herself; and finally the seer of them all, the deaf mute John Singer.

Singer gives heart to all of these lonely hunters, but he was an enigma to me. I could not for the life of me understand his attachment to fellow mute Spiros Antonapoulos, who isn't a very sympathetic human being. For Singer the attachment is a driving force, so much so that the reader wonders why. It's a question that never gets answered, perhaps by design.

Anyway, so-called Southern Literature generally causes me to break out in hives (see Faulkner, William), but this novel with its deep characterization, sensitive political and philosophical themes, and just-enough-plot, was an exception to the itch. As the old song goes: I did not need an ocean of Calamine lotion (thank God).

Hole mended, then. And heart happy.