The Member of the Wedding: “an unjoined person who hung around in doorways”

1/ Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) has written at length about the characters in The Member of the Wedding and the themes of loneliness, identity, belonging, and so on—what can I possibly say?—so I’m gonna have to write about something else. 

Maybe Carson McCullers’s style? 

“She complained aloud, and her voice was fringed and sharp like the edge of a saw.” 

Later on: 

“So she sharpened her voice and chiselled the words.” 

Remember Nabokov’s idea that before the 19th century, writers didn’t “see” colours? “The sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on”? 

“She opened her eyes, and it was night. The lavender sky had at last grown dark and there was slanted starlight and twisted shade. Her heart had divided like two wings and she had never seen a night so beautiful.” 

Lavender sky. 

“The air was chilled, and day after day the sky was a clear green-blue, but filled with light, the colour of a shallow wave.” 

Carson McCullers is not Flannery O’Connor, who fills her pages with strange and striking metaphors, but once in a while one comes across an interesting sentence in McCullers. 

“The noon air was thick and sticky as hot syrup, and there was the stifling smell of the dye-rooms from the cotton mill.” 

I like this: 

“In the silence of the kitchen they heard the tone shaft quietly across the room, then again the same note was repeated. A piano scale slanted across the August afternoon. A chord was struck. Then in a dreaming way a chain of chords climbed slowly upward like a flight of castle stairs…” 

This is an unusual sentence: 

“… But nevertheless there were times when Frances felt his presence there, solemn and hovering and ghost-grey.” 

These phrases are repeated later: “solemn”, “hovering”, “ghost-grey”. 

2/ As I read The Member of the Wedding, I couldn’t help thinking of the contrast between Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor—both female writers from the American South, about a decade apart. 

Carson McCullers is warm. Flannery O’Connor is cold. 

Tolstoy is warm. Flaubert, cold. Chekhov, warm. Ibsen, cold. Fielding, warm. Thackeray, warm. Choderlos de Laclos, cold. Dickens, warm. Jane Austen, I’d say cold. Vasily Grossman, warm. Nabokov, cold.

With Flannery O’Connor, you can feel her cold, pitiless stare as she cuts open her characters and studies them. Carson McCullers, in contrast, depicts her characters with compassion and warmth, even affection. 

3/ Much has been said about the central character of the book, Frankie, the 12-year-old tomboy who belongs to no club and who so desperately wants to belong, to be part of something that she fantasises about her brother’s wedding, wanting to join him and his wife and get out of her ugly little town. Himadri for example has written a very good blog post about Frankie, who calls herself F. Jasmine in the second section of the book (a name she adopts to group herself with her brother Jarvis and his bride Janice), and who becomes Frances in the final section. 

It is very good, but I don’t particularly remember 12-year-old me. Perhaps I blocked it out of my memory. 

So I’m more interested in Frankie’s black cook, Berenice. This is a black woman in the segregated South. This is a woman who first got married at the age of 13, just one year older than Frankie now, and who has gone through many bad marriages, each time worse than the last. This is a woman who has a blue glass eye because her last husband gouged out her eye. 

But she was happy once (I should say, she was adored once too). 

“‘I loved Ludie and he was the first man I loved.  Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward. What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them. It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces…’” 

It is heartbreaking. I suspect that when I have forgotten everything else about The Member of the Wedding, I will still remember Berenice. 

Reading women (2)

See my earlier blog post about reading women. 

1/ With the plan of reading more books by women this year, so far I have read: 
- Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence. 
- Daphne du Maurier: My Cousin Rachel. 
- Kate Chopin: “At the ‘Cadian Ball”, “The Storm”, “Désirée’s Baby”. 
- Willa Cather: “Neighbour Rosicky”, “The Sculptor’s Funeral”. 
- Carson McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. 
- Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji. 
- Sei Shonagon: The Pillow Book. 
I also reread Mansfield Park and Persuasion. 
I like them all, and now Murasaki Shikibu and Edith Wharton are among my favourite writers. 

2/ The Tale of Genji is the greatest book I’ve read this year, and among the best I’ve read. Here’s what I wrote at The Common Breath: 

“From afar, The Tale of Genji may not look very appealing because it’s from the 11th century, and the culture is indeed alien, but in terms of technique, it is surprisingly modern. It forced me to rethink everything about world literature and the history of literature, because most of my favourite writers come from the 19th century (Tolstoy, Austen, Melville, Flaubert, etc.), then I realised that in 11th century Japan, a female writer had already figured out everything about the psychological novel.
I think it would be hard to read The Tale of Genji without getting a sense of awe, as it is a novel of great scope, longer than War and Peace, with about 400 characters. The characters are all unnamed, because it is rude to use personal names at Heian court, so we know of the characters by their titles or nicknames related to a flower, a poem, or a residence. The challenge is that the characters get promoted and change titles, or move house, and their inter-connections are also complex, so it is more difficult than War and Peace, but Murasaki Shikibu keeps track of all of them and the characters are all distinct and memorable.
As Tolstoy does with Russia in War and Peace and Anna Karenina, The Tale of Genji captures the intellectual and moral climate of Japan in the Heian period — we learn about the court system, beliefs and lifestyles, rituals, festivals, letter-writing, calligraphy, poetry, music, dance, incense-making, painting, gardening, Buddhist philosophy, and so on. At the same time, because it’s written by a woman, and about the women surrounding Genji as much as about Genji, The Tale of Genji also shows us what it’s like to be a woman in Heian Japan. It is also a beautiful novel, pervaded by mono no aware. A central theme is the fragility and impermanence of life, but it is not only sadness—in the idea of mono no aware, there is also a celebration of fleeting beauty, while it lasts.
It is an extraordinary novel, one that should be read more.” 

Everyone who knows me and knows my obsession with Jane Austen would be surprised to hear that I think Murasaki Shikibu is a greater writer. It’s partly because The Tale of Genji is an immense, impressive novel, in which she has to keep track of a large number of characters and still makes them vivid and distinctive (see my blog post about 2 kinds of big novels). She’s similar to Tolstoy in that she works on a large canvas, but you’re even more in awe when you come closer and see all the subtlety, all the fine details. Another reason is the way she writes about death and its impact, mortality, and the fragility of life. I love Jane Austen, but cannot help noticing, since Nabokov pointed it out in his lecture on Mansfield Park, that in her novels, deaths always happen off-stage and tend to drive the plot forward—no character dies in the author’s arms. 
There’s something else that I love in The Tale of Genji: the spirit of the Rokujo Haven is one of the finest creations I’ve encountered in literature—it is not a ghost, because the person is still alive, it’s an incarnation of her jealousy, hatred, and bitterness. The spirit may have its roots in Japanese folk tales, I don’t know, but it works so well in the novel because the Rokujo Haven, as herself, is unhappy but unaware of her jealousy of Aoi, but the bitterness takes the form of a spirit to attack Aoi savagely and kill her—Murasaki Shikibu is aware of the gap between conscious and unconscious feelings. 
She doesn’t just show the material aspects of life—she shows something more, something beyond them. 
In some ways, Murasaki Shikibu is comparable (though not similar) to Tolstoy, but with her, I don’t have to struggle the way I sometimes do with Tolstoy’s ideas and the preacher in him. 
Between her and Jane Austen, I naturally feel closer to Jane Austen because I’ve known her works for several years and am familiar with British culture, but I already feel that Murasaki Shikibu’s also close to my heart, in spite of time, in spite of the cultural barriers. 

3/ My reading took a new direction because of the pandemic, as I started reading East Asian classics—The Tale of Genji fits both (East Asian and female author). Little did I know, it would change me forever. 

4/ Edith Wharton and Carson McCullers are also wonderful. Both of them can create vivid and complex characters, and both fit my ideal of not moralising and not spoon-feeding readers, but in a way they are opposite. Edith Wharton is the cold, harsh one, who dissects society, sees through everything, and exposes the hypocrisies and pretensions of the upper-class, often in a misanthropic, mocking tone, whereas Carson McCullers, at least in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, writes about a range of misfits and depicts them with lots of love and compassion. 
McCullers is even more remarkable because she was only 23 when the novel was published—is it not stunning that a 23-year-old white woman in the South in 1940 could write so well and with so much sympathy about a bitter middle-aged black doctor? Is it not even more incredible that a 23-year-old could see through and expose the type like Jake Blount—a Marxist who goes on and on about grand ideas, but who is deep down very racist, heartless, hypocritical, and willing to sacrifice people for his cause? 

5/ I want to read more books by Carson McCullers and Willa Cather. 
Edith Wharton too, but at least I’ve read her 3 major works. 

6/ I also like Daphne du Maurier, and so far have read Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel. Both are enjoyable and well-plotted. She’s a great storyteller. 

7/ So far my plan to read more books by women has been going well, and I’ve discovered some fantastic authors.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: Dr Copeland and Jake Blount [updated]

In the previous blog post, I was whining about the political and religious speeches in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Now I’m going to disagree with myself (which you might have noticed I frequently do, if you follow this blog): the political speeches of Dr Copeland and Jake Blount (to John Singer and to the reader) build up to the argument, the confrontation between the 2 of them, which is an excellent scene.  
As I have written before, Dr Copeland, the black doctor, cannot stop talking about “the purpose” or “the mission”, and Jake Blount, the drunkard, cannot stop talking about “knowing” and “the truth”. Both of them are Marxists—Dr Copeland speaks of Karl Marx and apparently compares him to Jesus in his Christmas speech, and names one of his children after him; Jake Blount calls himself a Red, a radical, and always rants about capitalism. Both of them, in their anger and bitterness, feel lost because they cannot talk to anyone else about their ideas, so they come to John Singer. 
I reckon there must be many readers like me, who wonder what would happen if they had a conversation. Carson McCullers lets them cross paths many times, but they never have a real talk till near the end of the novel, and she handles it masterfully. It is astonishing that at the age of 22-23 and in the year 1940, she could have written so well the character of Dr Copeland and inhabited his mind—his rage, his disappointment, his sense of injustice and oppression, his hatred of “the oppressors” and deep distrust of “the white race”, his humiliation, his desperation and helplessness. Carson McCullers seems to depict him with ease. 
It is even more remarkable that she could have written a character like Jake Blount—a bitter, self-pitying drunkard obsessed with Marx’s ideas, and deeply racist. Throughout the novel, his actions already show that he’s a rude, unpleasant, obnoxious man, but the scene at the Copelands exposes him for what he is—he fills his head with theories and cannot see any individual, doesn’t care about anybody, and just wants to use people (specifically William, Dr Copeland’s son) as his pawns. He’s also deeply racist, without quite realising it—at least twice in the chapters where we’re in his mind, there’s mention of a “Negro smell” (the scene at the Copelands’ house, and the fight scene). He seems to follow eugenics. 
The depiction of the 2 characters, and their confrontation, shows Carson McCullers’s deep understanding of racial relations and ability to get into the minds of such different characters. But to me, it’s more fascinating that she’s capable of seeing through, and portraying, the type like Jake Blount, who talks about equality and such wonderful ideals but has no feelings for the individual and is willing to sacrifice a few people for “a higher cause”. Blount becomes worse in the novel—he doesn’t particularly seem to care about John Singer, only himself, and then it turns out that he’s been eating at Biff Brannon’s restaurant without paying and doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  
Dr Copeland isn’t much better. He’s more sympathetic and likable, but he is also obsessed with ideas (better conditions for black people) but takes out his rage on his wife, alienates his own children, fails as both a husband and a father, and has little patience or kindness with his daughter Portia. Portia is the one who holds everything together. 
In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, except for John Singer, who is blank on purpose for people to interpret in any way they like, Biff Brannon is the weakest character of the 5, mostly because he doesn’t have the same complexity and depth. Mick Kelly is another good character, clever, and likeable—the one who gets a glimpse of something beyond her daily life. The 3 finest scenes in the novel, I think, are the scene of Mick discovering Beethoven, the scene of the traumatising incident (which I won’t spoil), and the scene of the argument between Dr Copeland and Jake Blount. 
This is an excellent novel. I’m going to read more of Carson McCullers’s works.



Addendum: I’ve just read a few articles about Marxism in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and would like to expand on my points. There are spoilers.
I think it’s a mistake to read the political passages straight—see the characters’ politics as Carson McCullers’s politics. She’s depicting poverty, racial disparity, and despair in a Southern town in the 30s, and there is no doubt that her sympathies lie with the people she created. She portrays them as they are, depicts them with compassion, and helps the reader understand why they are who they are and why they do what they do—we understand, for example, why Dr Copeland has a deep distrust of “the white race” and convinces himself that John Singer must be Jewish, or why Jake Blount turns into a Marxist.  
However, Carson McCullers isn’t propagating any political message—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a more subtle and complex book. Jake Blount, as I wrote above, is a complex man. Throughout the book, he has many rants about the system, about capitalism, about inequality, and the story seems to support his ideas, but there are 2 important scenes near the end of book that must force us to re-examine his ideas and see his approach in a different light—the confrontation with Dr Copeland, and the scene where he and Biff Brannon talk about the fight. I think a reader misreads the book if they read through the book and read those 2 scenes, but afterwards still read the political passages straight and don’t question the Marxist’s thinking. It is clear that Jake Blount has some fancy ideals, but he’s ready to sacrifice people for a cause and incapable of seeing them as individuals. It is not only racism—he is indifferent to human lives, and seems to have no regret when a tragedy happens because of the messages he has been spreading. 
Note too that he is full of self-pity, rude to everyone, and always speaks against the system but doesn’t have John Singer’s dignity and self-respect. Blount has been eating at Biff’s café without paying and has been rude to him, then says that if he had money, he still wouldn’t pay, but is shameless enough to take Biff’s money before he leaves town. He thinks that he gave Singer everything, but only thinks about himself when Singer’s dead, and leaves all of Singer’s affairs to others (Biff) to take care of. Blount, to me, is a despicable man. 
To clarify, I’m not saying that Carson McCullers, in her portrayal of Blount, is mocking Marxists or taking an anti-socialist stance—she isn’t propagating any political message, she’s depicting the characters. It is more subtle and nuanced.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: John Singer and the reader

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a very good, enjoyable novel. At the same time, I can’t help feeling tired of the political speeches—you know, the Marxist speeches and anti-Nazi speeches and religious speeches and race speeches (I’m using the polite term “speech”, some of them are actually rants). 
These speeches serve the book—they’re not pointless digressions from the author, and if they’re intended by Carson McCullers to be some messages to readers (which I doubt), it’s not overt. My reaction says something about me, more than the book itself.   
As written in the previous blog post, the novel is about the lonely lives of 4 people in a Southern town who are drawn to a deaf-mute named John Singer. They come to him to talk, to pour their hearts out, to treat him as a confidante and a priest and a therapist—they turn him into a personal god in their minds and tell him all the things they want to say but can’t say to anyone else. 2 out of these 4 are desperate, bitter, and angry at the world—Jake Blount, the mad alcoholic, ceaselessly raging against injustice and wealth disparity, can’t stop talking about “the truth”, and Dr Copeland, the black doctor and Marxist, can’t stop talking about Marxism and race and “the purpose”. 
In addition, there are a few religious speeches here and there throughout the book, and Mick’s neighbour/ friend is a Jewish teenage boy called Harry Minowitz, who reads newspapers and goes on and on about Hitler and Nazis.    
Part of me just wants to tell them to calm their tits and stop saying the same things over and over again. I even think, Jane Austen was wise not to put political ideas in her books—over time, political ideas in literary works easily become old-fashioned, irrelevant, or just tiresome (Tolstoy is a great writer, but I doubt that there are many people today who would take his ideas seriously). 
These speeches capture well the political climate in a Southern town in the 30s, and help characterise the people in the book. Carson McCullers’s depiction of Dr Copeland, I must say, is remarkable—how could a white woman at the age of 22-23 get into the mind of a middle-aged black doctor, filled with rage and disappointment? So when I say The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is marred by its politics, I suppose it says more about me than about the book itself. 
Anyway, I’ve decided to modify my approach: I’m going to read the novel like I’m John Singer—I’m going to read it like these people attach themselves to me and go on and on about ideas I don’t care about and I don’t understand why they keep talking and keep saying the same things. Carson McCullers, somehow, in writing these characters’ thoughts and rants, puts the reader in the position of Singer. Biff aside, who comes to watch rather than unburden himself on Singer, the other 3 characters are each occupied with a single subject, and they come to Singer not to have a conversation, but to have a monologue. 
I picked up The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, thinking it’s about loneliness and communication difficulties, but now I think it’s about something else, something harder to describe. Mick Kelly, Jake Blount, and Dr Copeland come to John Singer because they feel lonely, and they feel lonely because they cannot share their thoughts with anyone, but they don’t really look for friendship, and don’t see Singer as a friend. They come to him to talk, to have someone listening, and imagine that he understands—but does he? The question hardly seems to bother them. 
If we look at each of these characters, Jake Blount is rude and hostile, pushing everyone away (see his conversation with Biff, when Biff attempts to know more about him), Dr Copeland alienates the people closest to him because he takes out on his own family his rage at the world and at himself, and Mick keeps to herself for a large part of the story and doesn’t try to get closer to her older siblings or anyone at school (until later, she becomes closer to Harry). With Singer, they just use him, and talk and talk, without any interest in him as a person. 
In a way, their loneliness seems to come from something within them—their egotism, their inability to see beyond themselves, perhaps. 
The irony is that the person that they see as a personal god, the only one who is wise and understands, is a blank. The only person Singer sees as a friend is his deaf-mute friend, the Greek, Antonapoulos. 
Does Antonapoulos see Singer as a friend, and love him in the same way? Now that is another question.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers’s insights

Lately I’ve been reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. The novel is about people in a small town in Georgia in the 30s. Each chapter focuses on the perspective of one character: Mick Kelly, a 13-year-old girl in boy’s shorts who loves classical music and dreams of writing music or making inventions; Biff Brannon, a restaurant owner who has an unhappy marriage and takes an interest in Mick; Jack Blount, an angry, bitter alcoholic who’s always raging against injustice and income inequality; Dr Copeland, a frustrated black doctor who takes out his anger at the world on his own family and loses them as a consequence; and John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute that everyone gravitates towards and sees as a wise, understanding confidante. 
There are also many other characters, and they’re all interconnected. John Singer eats every day at Biff’s restaurant and rents a room from the Kellys, where Portia work as a housekeeper; Portia is Dr Copeland’s daughter; Singer first sees Jack Blount at Biff’s restaurant and takes him in before Biff’s wife, Alice, kicks him out; Mick takes care of her younger siblings Bubber and Ralph, and Bubber likes Baby Wilson, who is Biff’s niece (Alice’s sister Lucile’s daughter), and so on. 
The point I’d like to make is that the novel has a range of characters, each chapter focuses on a character’s perspective, and Carson McCullers shows an astonishing understanding of human nature and ability to inhabit very different characters—even more astonishing when she was only 23 when the book was published.   
Her prose is also brilliant, so I’m going to share some quotes to let her speak for herself: 
On loneliness: 

“It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.” (P.1, ch.3) 

“She could be in the middle of a house full of people and still feel like she was locked up by herself.” (P.2, ch.5) 

This is something everyone can relate to. 
On longing: 

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.” (P.1, ch.3) 

On grief: 

“When he tried to remember her face there was a queer blankness in him. The only thing about her that was clear in his mind was her feet—stumpy, very soft and white and with puffy little toes. The bottoms were pink and near the left heel there was a tiny brown mole. The night they were married he had taken off her shoes and stockings and kissed her feat. And, come to think of it, that was worth considering, because the Japanese believe that the choicest part of a woman.” (P.2, ch.2)  

I like this a lot, because anyone who has known grief knows that it’s a strange thing—sometimes you think of things that you wouldn’t have expected to think about, or sometimes, when you seem to be doing fine, grief takes over you, unexpected. 

“The light was very bright in Doctor Copeland’s eyes and her voice was loud and hard. He coughed and his whole face trembled. He tried to pick up the cup of cold coffee, but his hand would not hold it steadily. The tears came up to his eyes and he reached for his glasses to try to hide them.” (P.1, ch.5) 

Some readers might argue that’s not grief, but in a way it is—Portia reminds him of his failure as a father, and makes him grieve for the children he has lost, even though they’re all alive. 
On the shock of a child you know doing bad things: 

“It was true that in Bubber there was a tough, mean streak. He was acting different today than he had ever acted before. Up until now he was always a quiet little kid who never really done anything mean. When anybody’s feelings were hurt it always made him ashamed and nervous. Then how come he could do all the things he had done today?” (P.2, ch.5) 

That passage follows some wonderful scenes, though I won’t spoil them for those who haven’t read the book. 
The best moments are probably when the characters see something beyond themselves, such as when Mick wonders about John Singer: 

“She wondered what kind of music he heard in his mind that his ears couldn’t hear. Nobody knew. And what kind of things he would say if he could talk. Nobody knew that either.” (P.1, ch.3) 

Or when Mick realises her father’s loneliness: 

“That was when she realized about her Dad. It wasn’t like she was learning a new fact - she had understood it all along in every way except with her brain. Now she just suddenly knew that she knew about her Dad. He was lonesome and he was an old man. Because none of the kids went to him for anything and because he didn’t earn much money he felt like he was cut off from the family. And in his lonesomeness he wanted to be close to one of his kids - and they were all so busy that they didn’t know it. He felt like he wasn’t much real use to anybody.” (P.1, ch.2) 

Most of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is about the characters’ loneliness, yearning, despair, and their attempts to communicate, to reach out for companionship and understanding. A lot of the times they misunderstand or get misunderstood, or all they get is a one-sided relationship. But above is one of those moments when a character understands another, and they have a conversation.  
There is also a magnificent moment in the novel, when Mick listens to Beethoven for the first time, and gets a glimpse of something beyond herself, beyond her daily life. I won’t put it here though, you need to read it in the book.  
The book is full of insights, and Carson McCullers writes so well. 
The other day, I saw someone on Twitter write that, except for Tolstoy’s best novels, he never read any book that showed so much love for the characters as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. That’s probably true.