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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN September 26, 2004 Issue 
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (c1940) 
The Heart's Eternal Quest From the reading of Southern literature, one could easily assume the South to be an entirely different country. Southern writing rivals Russian literature in angst and psychological drama. In spite of its glum and torturous presentation of life, or perhaps because of it, Southern literature was quite in vogue through the 1970s. But the ethos of society changed in the 1980s and with that, the literary tastes of readers. Although Southern authors are still a reading requirement for college American literature courses, most people today do not get past "Gone with the Wind." In a surprising turn of events, the High Noon Literary Salon that meets at Feldheym Central Library on the third Tuesday of each month, chose as its September reading "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers. It is doubtful that the group could have chosen a more depressing and gloomy book. "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" is the story of people tormented by loneliness and isolation, in search of that human connection that would give them a modicum amount of warmth and love. There is Mick, a teenage tomboy who yearns for a piano and music lessons. There are her parents and her numerous siblings who barely subsist on the rent they collect from their huge run-down house turned into a boarding house. There is the angry failed agitator, the black doctor who wants to restore dignity and justice to his people, the doctor's estranged children who do not understand their father's passions, the gentle owner of the local café. And there is the deaf-mute with the musical name of Singer who boards at Mick's parents' boarding house and listens to everyone else's anguished ravings. The book is set in a nameless Southern town during the latter part of the 1930s and was published in 1940 when Carson McCullers was only twenty-two years old. She was born Lula Carson Smith in 1917 in Columbia, Georgia to a well-to-do family. At the age of seventeen she moved to New York, presumably to study piano at Juilliard, but instead studied creative writing at Columbia and NYU and started to write. In 1937 she married a failed writer, Reeves McCullers whom she divorced after both of them had indulged in homosexual affairs. For a time, she lived with George Davis, the editor of "Harper's Bazaar" and was a member of the Brooklyn art commune February House. In 1945 Carson and Reeves remarried. In 1948 she attempted suicide but it was Reeves who died by his own hand in 1953 by taking an overdose of sleeping pills while staying in a Paris hotel. As a result of a childhood rheumatic fever and a series of strokes, McCullers was a frail invalid and suffered from depression. Perhaps her work would be better understood by an examination of her life. "Writing for me," she confided in the critic and writer Terence De Vere White, "is a search for God." The characters in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" are in search of that elusive something, which could give them the love and happiness that are missing from their lives. For a reason that neither I nor anyone else in the High Noon Literary Salon could see, when this novel was first published, it was interpreted as a parable against Fascism. Much more obvious is the author's condemnation of the deplorable social conditions in which the book's characters are trapped. They know that life ought to be better and more just. They flirt with religion and communism while groping for a better life, for love, for understanding and happiness. Living with injustice has driven the black doctor to communism. His knowledge of it is at best vague, yet he must cling to it as to a lifeboat. "Karl Marx was a wise man," the black doctor tells his black guests at his annual Christmas party. "He did not divide the world into Negroes or white people or Chinese - to Karl Marx it seemed that being one of the millions of poor people or one of the few rich was more important to a man than the color of his skin. The life mission of Karl Marx was to make all human beings equal." "Were he the Mark in the Bible?" asks a befuddled old black man. "But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years...How they have turned every word he spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today," the angry would-be-evangelist and agitator tells the deaf-mute Singer. "Me and Jesus and Karl Marx could all sit at a table and..." This mixing up of Jesus and communist philosophy reminded me of the theories about Jesus that circulated in the communist world where I grew up. Communism, of course, denies the existence of God. But Jesus was something entirely different. Many communists suggested that the historical personage Jesus was the first communist revolutionary because he led communal life, had no possessions and his followers were the poor and the disadvantaged. The majority of the readers in the Literary Salon did not care for "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." The majority found it boring and depressing and out of touch with life today. But some of us saw in it the story of Everyman. For some of us this book put things in a more realistic perspective. How fortunate that not all of us are trapped in debilitating social conditions. How fortunate that some of us could and should help those that are trapped release the traps. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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