A Fighting Writer
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. By Carson McCullers. (Cresset Press. 15s.)
CARSON MCCULLERS'S " poet's eye " has already been remarked upon. It is indeed a fine creative eye, sweeping in this novel upon the breadth and depth of deep-South American town life. The effect of ease is deceptive. This beautiful writing is most careful and the persons and scenes are picked with the highest skill and played upon for shifting emphasis and for the thing as a whole.
This novel, now reprinted after ten years, reminds those who know best the short novels and stories of The Ballad of the Sad Café, that Miss McCullers can stretch herself at length and lose nothing in strength and control. She has been likened to D. H. Lawrence and, though this is putting it high, there is something Lawrentian in the fierce way she falls upon the natural images of rocks, trees, stones and weather, and upon the human images of squalor, smell, flop-houses and cafes ; images that are always in retreat from the hunting writer. Lawrence brings such captives home alive and so does Miss McCullers. But sometimes, in the way she falls upon the human heart, she is a little too parti pris for an artist. Especially with the young girl Mick Kelly we get this feeling of a loving relationship that is embarrassing.
. " But now no music was in her mind. That was a funny thing. It was like she was shut out from the inside room. . . . And she wanted to stay in the inside room but she didn't know how. It Was like the inside room was locked somewhere away from her." And also when this fourteen-year-old poetical and musically gifted child is putting on her party dress . . . " silk teddies she put on, and silk stockings. She even wore one of Etta's brassieres just for the heck of it.. .. Six different ways she tried out her hair . . . the cow- licks were a little trouble, so she wet her bangs and made three spit- curls. . . . It was beautiful she looked—just beautiful. . . . She didn't feel like herself at all."
It is a terrible story Miss McCullers has to tell and she is a fighting writer (which does not seem to have been so much noticed as that she is a beautiful writer). She fights for the poor and the coloured people ; this book is as much a fight as Uncle Tom's Cabin. And ;because it is such a fight in so good a cause one does not at first notice a missionary simplification—that all the poor and coloured people are good, or if bad only bad through hardship, so that the exciting and mysterious complications of human beings—how account for the vices and even more for the virtues that are disdainful of the mere mechanics of circumstance ?—do not always have enough room, and so in this way the picture Jacks the profounder depths. But how spendidly she uses her power to rouse anger ; anger that the Kelly family are so poor that Mick cannot learn to write her music ; anger that they must become so much poorer because Mick's little brother shot their cousin Baby's hair off—Baby the horrible three- , year-old decked-out film aspirant—and they must pay the surgeon's fee ; anger that the intellectual Marxist coloured Doctor Copeland must suffer so abominably in his heart because the coloured people ' are not allowed to serve but only to be servants (" The nsgro race of its own accord climbs up on the cross every Friday ") ; anger that this tragic man's son, sentenced to the chain gang, is so roped in the " ice-room " that his feet, slung above the freezing floor, become gangrened and must be amputated. In the hired room of a most beautifully and fully drawn character, the deaf-mute John Singer, the people gather for comfort and quietness, Mick to think of
• her music, Biff from the eating-house (he is a man who is turning rather feminine ; he sews curtains and wishes he could have a baby— how he would dress her, in a little red muff and coat and white boots). Jake comes too ; he is a violent man, a Christian Red—" Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty. Yeah."—and always also the sad doctor. The saintly Singer's true love is for his fellow deaf- mute friend who now in his lunatic asylum further south is sitting up in bed knitting. Singer makes the long journeys to see him and when he dies shoots himself. Everything is now passing ; the friends go away, Mick, growing up, is in Woolworth's, Jake will obviously be in prison soon because of his Red sympathies (" God, I'm thirsty, I feel like the whole Russian army marched through my mouth in its stocking feet.") Dr. Copeland too, if t.b. does not take him off first, will soon be in the hands of the police ; he has already been smacked down for " talking bigitty."
That such things can happen as happen in this book is true and is abominable and Miss McCullers is plainly of the sound opinion that damning the Reds is no cure for them. A point about this writer . which has not been sufficiently stressed is that what she says is as important as the fresh and beautiful way she says it. A poet does not mind having an ear lent sometimes to what he is saying as well
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