The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a powerful, moving, socially committed
and poetic novel, written by Carson McCullers and published in
1940. Set in 1938 and 1939 in a medium-sized town in Georgia
in the South of the United States of America, the book revolves
around the lives of five main characters from different parts of
society, and shows the relationships that come to form or already exist
between them.
The main characters are:
A deaf-mute, who comes to the town after his friend Antonopoulos is
institutionalized. Antonopoulos is another deaf-mute, but unlike the
quiet and gentle Singer is prone to sudden and unprovoked outbursts of violence,
leading to him being locked up in an asylum far away. Singer is the
centre around which all the other characters revolve. Because he
cannot talk, everyone thinks he is wise. Because he cannot listen,
everyone tells him their problems. But while he tries to do right by
the people who visit him, all he yearns for is his friend Antonopoulos,
and no one listens to his own sadness. As he walks through the varying
neighbourhoods of the town, everyone sees themselves in him, makes him
after their own image, but denies him any expression. This cruel irony
is the heart of the story: a deaf mute is the only one who will listen,
and the only one to whom people will open up and tell their deepest
hopes, desires and fears. But they do not care about him.
A twelve year old girl, in love with music, who dreams of being a
composer like her idol Mozart. She is one of a
large family; her father owns the boarding house where Singer rents a
room. Already taxed with looking after her younger brothers, and
dealing with her older sisters, she finds herself thrown into adulthood
through her relationship with neighboring boy Harry, and by her
family's financial worries. Her dreams of escape through music must
mirror those of McCullers, who began writing at an early age. She is
portayed sympathetically as someone who is both a playful girl turning
into a woman, and as a dreamer, who keeps a box full of music she has
written under her bed and sneaks around her neighbourhood at night
listening to people's radios outside their windows.
A black doctor of intense political conviction and dedication to
helping the poor of his race. Dr Copeland has raised four children
according to his convictions: to have pride in their race and reject
superstition and religion. However, they have all turned their backs
on him. In the book the most important of his children are Portia and
William. His daughter Portia works as a maid for
the Kelly family at their rooming house. When she's not working, she
spends her time with her husband Highboy (who is tall) and brother
Willy socialising and going out on Saturday night; they are normal
people who have outgrown their father's vision, attending church and
not being concerned with politics.
In contrast, Dr Copeland is a driven man. He risks his own health
trying to minister to his patients, many of whom are suffering more
from poverty than from treatable disease. He knows this, and that
their only hope lies in escaping the racism that keeps them down.
However, he has (by his own standards) failed with his children, and
his wife, who left him after he beat her in a violent rage. He
befriends Singer when he visits him trying to find help for a deaf-mute
little boy.
A drunken would-be labor organizer, who is rescued at one point from
a drunken rage by Singer and sleeps on his floor for a while, before
finding work as a fairgroung mechanic. Blount has travelled from
town to town, speaking of the evils of capitalism. His attempts to
engage people are either comic or tragic in their ineptitude. Although
he is an atheist, he makes friends with the preacher Simms, and they
have much in common, standing in the street haranguing people about the
evils of the world. Blount dreams of a Marxist revolution and
earthly paradise; Simms dreams of heaven and building a church on a
vacant lot. Although McCullers is sympathetic to his message, and
describes the terrible poverty of the townspeople, Blount himself is
pathetic.
Blount's methods are criticized by Dr Copeland for his refusal to join
with other people and organize. But like Dr Copeland, he is fighting,
or at least wants to fight, to better people's lives; however the two
of the squabble over tactics when they should be working together He
is a ranter and a loser, a man with no roots, only dreams he will never
fulfil.
He is the most passive character, and the most ordinary, the one with
the littlest to do. He owns a
cafe where Singer comes every day for
his meals, and he is sympathetic to Blount's plight even though his own
politics are
conservative rather than
radical.
His passion is all
spent, his marriage a failure. Having no children of his own, he
dotes on his sister's. He stands at his cash register watching
everyone eat and drink.
The novel has two sides to it. Carson McCullers presents a small
town full of sad little people. Like the figures in Sherwood
Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio they are unable to communicate with each
other. Each is laden down with their own personal sadness, the feeling
that they have failed in life: the failed political radicals Blount and
Copeland, and the failed family man Brannon. Even young Mick finds her
dreams threatened by her family's financial problems.
But it is also a significant work in recounting the political
situation of its time. McCullers was praised by Richard Wright,
author of Native Son and Black Boy, for her portrayal of black
characters, and she gives a complex range of these, from the everyday
people just struggling to make a living like Portia, to Dr Copeland, a
man of greatness and subtle and complex flaws. She also refers
repeatedly to the poverty of the black people of the time. But with
the portrayal of Jake Blount, she leaves open the question of whether
the greater problem is racist or economic. And wider resonances are
brought out with references to the rising problems in Europe, the
crimes of Hitler and Mussolini as
they move towards war; McCullers was one of the first writers to link
the Nazis' treatment of the Jews in Europe to the treatment of
blacks in the USA.
Despite its many qualities, it is not always a pleasant read, and shows
the limits of its young author. Its first flaw is that McCullers
seems to have little sympathy for her characters. Certainly, she
empathises with their imagined sufferings, but there is a coldness, a
contempt about these fools. She allows them no happiness, and
occasionally mocks the pathetic, deluded figures cruelly. Perhaps this
is because she hates the South. She fled her hometown as soon as
possible, off to the North, to New York and university.
The other main criticism is related to this: its pessimism. The book
offers no opportunity for improvement. The twin issues of racism and
poverty are attacked by Dr Copeland and Jake Blount, but both of them
are failures. The book indicates that the weakness of everyone is due
to their isolation and loneliness, their despair and inability to
communicate their true feelings; but this is far from a political
manifesto.
Although there are passages of poetry delving deep into the
characters hearts, and brief escapes from the mundane, the novel is a
sometimes overwhelming slog through heartache and other people's
misery. Moments of humor are few and far between - unless you count a
precocious Shirley Temple wannabee being shot in the head by a BB gun
- and this is arguably detrimental to the book. There is no sense of
what life should be like; it at times seems to be wallowing in despair.
But this is apparently the author's intent; her hatred and dismay for
the life she has left behind and the world in which she still lives is
manifest on every page.
In a century where every American writer seemed to be trying to write a
great American novel expressing the full web of social connections in
their society, it is perhaps surprising that a novel of this quality
should be written by a 21 year old who spent much of her childhood and
adult life stricken by illness. But although it is evidently an
account based on sympathetic imaginings and second-hand reports rather
than on direct experience, McCullers gives an amazing picture of a
deeply flawed world. And if it is pessimistic, can we really say she
is wrong?