Ruth's book club recently did The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, in part because she told them that it was the only one that everyone in my book club (the NV one) had liked, and after that meeting said that everyone in that club had been curious about why we liked it so much, and requested an email distillation. It's taken me a while to get round to it, but I eventually expanded my previous thoughts, as follows:
* * *
[...] the short version would go something like this: I like "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" because it's haunted, poetic and human, and because it makes me feel all sad and stirred-up inside...
To begin with, an idea: in literature as in all art, only the particular and specific can be truly universal. To create something which somehow expresses or otherwise touches upon the universal (which is not to say that this is or should be the goal of all literature, natch), it's necessary to focus on a specific setting and milieu rather than dealing in windy abstractions and generalities; the most well-known of Shakespeare's plays, for example - "Romeo and Juliet", say, or "Hamlet" or "Lear" or "The Tempest" - derive their universality and archetypal flavour precisely from the playwright's close, nuanced scrutiny and 'pushing' of the particular characters and events which inhabit and constitute those works.
Whether or not you agree with all of that (I happen to, by the way), I think it's just such a dialectic (not quite the word I'm after but you know what I mean) that's at work in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - McCullers' is an intense scrutiny of a small group of characters in a particular place and time (namely 1930s small-town southern America), and in particular of the loneliness, incipient anomie and sense of yearning for something they're unable to clearly identify that afflicts all of them, but it also comes to serve as microcosm, illustration and exemplar of what might be called, were it not so pretentious, the 'human condition' as perceived and experienced by McCullers herself.
Of course, the trick is in how McCullers achieves this. The inside front page of my secondhand Penguin edition quotes Graham Greene as saying that "Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility" and I reckon that phrase - 'an original poetic sensibility' - gets it just right...there's just something about it. The novel has a clarity of vision that's at once troubling and affecting -
The poignancy of its characters' plight (a plight which is referable to the sort of existential malaise which lies over all of them rather than to any particular events or happenings in their lives) is highlighted by the tenuous, unarticulated ways in which they relate to Singer. In many ways, the deaf-mute stands at the centre of the book, but it's the characters over whom he exerts his strange fascination - Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Dr Copeland, and most of all Mick Kelly - who most touch and linger, which may be precisely the point. After all, Singer himself is a strangely absent central figure, not only in the literal sense of his muteness, but also in that his motives are almost completely opaque to the characters, including, perhaps, himself (Biff seems to get closest, but even he doesn't understand the half of it); it's telling that Greene, in that line above, speaks of McCullers in the same breath as William Faulkner, for both are inextricably tied up with the idea of the southern gothic, which itself is characterised by the use of (among other devices) grotesque elements to highlight and throw into relief the setting and milieu being explored. Singer is not who everyone thinks he is; he is a blank canvas on which they can project their longings for human connection and understanding.
It seems clear that, for McCullers, if we can't live alone, then we also haven't yet fathomed how to live with each other. One thing that the novel is about is the gaps between people, and how impossibly difficult those gaps may be to bridge - the loneliness that is experienced by everyone in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is a deeply social loneliness...people are all around us, if we could only connect.
...which leads naturally to the political elements of the novel, such as they are. For mine, these aspects of the book are its weakest - McCullers is better on the personal, human dimensions of her canvas, whether in isolation (Mick's inchoate development, Biff's half-articulated feelings for the girl) or shading into the political (Dr Copeland's difficult relationship with his people and his family, Jake's alcoholism and fiery idealism), than with the overtly political stuff (which is not so surprising given that she was only 23 when the book was published and presumably younger while writing it). Still, they have their place - set pieces like the conversations between Blount and Copeland, playing out the classic lefty strategy of (as I once saw it memorably put in a different context) drawing their wagons into a circle and firing inwards, add to the sense of sorrow that is imbued in every line of the book...and of course she can't be faulted for giving fascism a good kicking, nor for wrapping the progressive political movements of the time (and their failures) up with the wider malaise which then afflicted (and continues to afflict) society at large, and those aspects of the novel left me not merely sad, but actually angry, too, in a way that few others have (Toni Morrison's "Beloved" leaps to mind as one other with such an impact).
But for all of that, for all of the sense of sadness and shadowy, heavy melancholy, of failures of connection and understanding, of loss and absence in it, there's something miraculous about "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" - it remains humane and somehow pure of vision...it has a kind of crystalline quality. Whatever it is that makes literature great, this novel has it.
Phew! I could go on, but I'm kind of running out of steam and this is already pretty long, and messy too. [...]
