Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  His attitude toward his fellow man vacillates continually between hate and the most unselfish love. His attitude toward the principles of communism are much the same as his attitude toward man. Deep inside him he is an earnest communist, but he feels that in concrete application all communistic societies up until the present have degenerated into bureaucracies. He is unwilling to compromise and his is the attitude of all or nothing. His inner and outward motives are so contradictory at times that it is hardly an exaggeration to speak of the man as being deranged. The burden which he has taken on himself is too much for him.

  Jake is the product of his peculiar environment. During the time of this book he is twenty-nine years old. He was born in a textile town in South Carolina, a town very similar to the one in which the action of this book takes place. His childhood was passed among conditions of absolute poverty and degradation. At the age of nine years (this was the time of the last World War) he was working fourteen hours a day in a cotton mill. He had to snatch for himself whatever education he could get. At twelve he left home on his own initiative and his self-teachings and wanderings began. At one time or another he has lived and worked in almost every section of this country.

  Jake’s inner instability reflects markedly on his outer personality. In physique he suggests a stunted giant. He is nervous and irritable. All of his life he has had difficulty in keeping his lips from betraying his emotions—in order to overcome this he has grown a flourishing mustache which only accentuates this weakness and gives him a comic, jerky look. Because of his nervous whims it is hard for him to get along with his neighbors and people hold aloof from him. This causes him either to drop into self-conscious buffoonery or else to take on an exaggerated misplaced dignity.

  If Jake cannot act he has to talk. The mute is an excellent repository for conversation. Singer attracts Jake because of his seeming stability and calm. He is a stranger in the town and the circumstance of his loneliness makes him seek out the mute. Talking to Singer and spending the evening with him becomes a sedative habit with him. At the end, when the mute is dead, he feels as though he had lost a certain inner ballast. He has the vague feeling that he has been tricked, too, and that all of the conclusions and visions that he has told the mute are forever lost.

  Jake depends heavily on alcohol—and he can drink in tremendous quantities with no seeming ill effect. Occasionally he will try to break himself of this habit, but he is as unable to discipline himself in this as he is in more important matters.

  Jake’s stay in the town ends in a fiasco. As usual, he has been trying during these months to do what he can to right social injustice. At the end of the book the growing resentment between the Negroes and the white factory workers who patronize the show is nourished by several trifling quarrels between individuals. Day by day one thing leads to another and then late on Saturday night there is a wild brawl. (This scene occurs during the week after Singer’s death.) All the white workers fight bitterly against the Negroes. Jake tries to keep order for a while and then he, too, loses control of himself and goes berserk. The fight grows into an affair in which there is no organization at all and each man is simply fighting for himself. This brawl is finally broken up by the police and several persons are arrested. Jake escapes but the fight seems to him to be a symbol of his own life. Singer is dead and he leaves the town just as he came to it—a stranger.

  DR. BENEDICT MADY COPELAND

  Dr. Copeland presents the bitter spectacle of the educated Negro in the South. Dr. Copeland, like Jake Blount, is warped by his long years of effort to do his part to change certain existing conditions. At the opening of the book he is fifty-one years old, but already he is an old man.

  He has practiced among the Negroes of the town for twenty-five years. He has always felt, though, that his work as a doctor was only secondary to his efforts at teaching his people. His ideas are laboriously thought out and inflexible. For a long while he was interested mainly in birth control, as he felt that indiscriminate sexual relations and haphazard and prolific propagation were responsible in a large part for the weakness of the Negro. He is greatly opposed to miscegenation—but this opposition comes mainly from personal pride and resentment. The great flaw in all of his theories is that he will not admit the racial culture of the Negro. Theoretically he is against the grafting of the Negroid way of living to the Caucasian. His ideal would be a race of Negro ascetics.

  Parallel with Dr. Copeland’s ambition for his race is his love for his family. But because of his inflexibility his relations with his four children are a complete failure. His own temperament is partly responsible for this, too. All of his life Dr. Copeland has gone against the grain of his own racial nature. His passionate asceticism and the strain of his work have their effect on him. At home, when he felt the children escaping from his influence, he was subject to wild and sudden outbreaks of rage. This lack of control was finally the cause of his separation from his wife and children.

  While still a young man Dr. Copeland suffered at one time from pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease to which the Negro is particularly susceptible. His illness was arrested—but now when he is fifty-one years old his left lung is involved again. If there were an adequate sanatorium he would enter it for treatment—but of course there is no decent hospital for Negroes in the state. He ignores the disease and keeps up his practice—although now his work is not as extensive as it was in the past.

  To Dr. Copeland the mute seems to be the embodiment of the control and asceticism of a certain type of white man. All of his life Dr. Copeland has suffered because of slights and humiliations from the white race. Singer’s politeness and consideration make Dr. Copeland pitiably grateful. He is always careful to keep up his “dignity” with the mute—but Singer’s friendship is of great importance to him.

  The mute’s face has a slightly Semitic cast and Dr. Copeland thinks that he is a Jew. The Jewish people, because they are a racially persecuted minority, have always interested Dr. Copeland. Two of his heroes are Jews—Benedict Spinoza and Karl Marx.

  Dr. Copeland realizes very fully and bitterly that his life work has been a failure. Although he is respected to the point of awe by most of the Negroes of the town his teachings have been too foreign to the nature of the race to have any palpable effect.

  In the beginning of the book Dr. Copeland’s economic situation is very uncertain. His house and most of his medical equipment are mortgaged. For fifteen years he had received a small but steady income from his work as a member of the staff of the city hospital—but his personal ideas about social situations have led to his discharge. As a pretext for dismissal he was accused, and rightly, of performing abortions in certain cases where a child was an economic impossibility. Since the loss of this post, Dr. Copeland has had no dependable income. His patients are for the most part totally unable to pay fees for treatment. His illness is a hindrance and he steadily loses ground. At the end the house is taken away from him and after a lifetime of service he is left a pauper. His wife’s relations take him out to spend the short remaining part of his life on their farm in the country.

  BIFF BRANNON

  Of the four people who revolve around the mute Biff is the most disinterested. It is typical of him that he is always the observer. About Biff there is much that is austere and classical. In contrast with the driving enthusiasms of Mick and Jake and Dr. Copeland, Biff is nearly always coldly reflective. The second chapter of the book opens with him and in the closing pages his meditations bring the work to a thoughtful and objective finish.

  Biff’s humorous aspects are to be brought out in all the parts dealing with him. Technically he is a thoroughly rounded character in that he will be seen completely from all sides. At the time the book opens he is forty-four years old and has spent the best part of his life standing behind the cash register in the restaurant and making his own particular observations. He has a passion for detail. It is typical of him that he has a small room in the back of his place devoted to a complete
and neatly catalogued file of the daily evening newspaper dating back without a break for eighteen years. His problem is to get the main outlines of a situation from all the cluttering details in his mind, and he goes about this with his own painstaking patience.

  Biff is strongly influenced by his own specific sexual experiences. At forty-four years he is prematurely impotent—and the cause of this lies in psychic as well as physical reasons. He has been married to Alice for twenty-three years. From the beginning their marriage was a mistake, and it has endured mainly because of economic necessity and habit.

  Perhaps as a compensation for his own dilemma Biff comes to his own curious conclusion that marital relations are not the primary functions of the sexual impulse. He believes that human beings are fundamentally ambi-sexual—and for confirmation he turns to the periods of childhood and senility.

  Two persons have a great emotional hold on Biff. These are Mick Kelly and a certain old man named Mr. Alfred Simms. Mick has been coming in the restaurant all through her childhood to get candy with her brother and to play the slot machine. She is always friendly with Biff, but of course she has no idea of his feelings for her. As a matter of fact, Biff is not exactly clear himself on that point, either. Mr. Simms is a pitiable, fragile old fellow whose senses are muddled. During middle life he had been a wealthy man but now he is penniless and alone. The old man keeps up a great pretense of being a busy person of affairs. Every day he comes out on the street in clean ragged clothes and holding an old woman’s pocket-book. He goes from one bank to another in an effort to “settle his accounts.” Mr. Simms used to like to come into Biff’s restaurant and sit for a little while. He always sat at a table quietly and never disturbed anyone. With his queer clothes and the big pocket-book clutched against his chest he looked like an old woman. At that time Biff did not have any particular interest in Mr. Simms. He would kindly pour him out a beer now and then, but he did not think much about him.

  One night (this was a few weeks before the opening of the book) the restaurant was crowded and the table where Mr. Simms was sitting was needed. Alice insisted that Biff put the old man out. Biff was used to ejecting all sorts of people from the place and he went up to the old man without thinking much about it and asked him if he thought the table was a park bench. Mr. Simms did not understand at first and smiled up happily at Biff. Then Biff was disconcerted and he repeated the words in a much rougher way than he had intended. Tears came to the old man’s eyes. He tried to keep up his dignity before the people around him, fumbled uselessly in his pocket-book and went out crushed.

  This little episode is described here in some detail because of its effect on Biff. The happening is made clear in a chapter in the second part of the book. All through the story Biff’s thoughts are continually going back to the old man. His treatment of Mr. Simms comes to be for him the embodiment of all the evil he has ever done. At the same time the old man is the symbol of the declining period of life which Biff is now approaching.

  Mick brings up in Biff nostalgic feelings of youth and heroism. She is at the age where she possesses both the qualities of a girl and of a boy. Also, Biff has always wanted to have a little daughter and of course she reminds him of this, too. At the end of the book, when Mick begins to mature, Biff’s feelings for her slowly diminish.

  Toward his wife Biff is entirely cold. When Alice dies in the second part of the book Biff feels not the slightest pity or regret for her at all. His only remorse is that he did not ever fully understand Alice as a person. It piques him that he could have lived so long with a woman and still understand her so confusedly. After her death Biff takes off the crepe paper streamers from under the electric fans and sews mourning tokens on his sleeves. These gestures are not so much for Alice as they are a reflection of his own feeling for his approaching decline and death. After his wife dies certain female elements become more pronounced in Biff. He begins to rinse his hair in lemon juice and to take exaggerated care of his skin. Alice had always been a much better business manager than Biff and after her death the restaurant begins to stagnate.

  In spite of certain quirks in Biff’s nature he is perhaps the most balanced person in the book. He has that faculty for seeing the things which happen around him with cold objectivity—without instinctively connecting them with himself. He sees and hears and remembers everything. He is curious to a comic degree. And nearly always, despite the vast amount of details in his mind, he can work his way patiently to the very skeleton of a situation and see affairs in their entirety.

  Biff is far too wary to be drawn into any mystic admiration of Singer. He likes the mute and is of course very curious about him. Singer occupies a good deal of his thoughts and he values his reserve and common sense. He is the only one of the four main characters who sees the situation as it really is. In the last few pages he threads through the details of the story and arrives at the most salient points. In his reflections at the end Biff himself thinks of the word “parable” in connection with what has happened—and of course this is the only time that this designation is used. His reflections bring the book to a close with a final, objective roundness.

  SUBORDINATE CHARACTERS

  There are several minor characters who play very important parts in the story. None of these persons are treated in a subjective manner—and from the point of view of the novel the things that happen to them are of more importance in the effects on the main characters than because of the change that they bring about among these characters.

  Spiros Antonapoulos

  Antonapoulos has been described with complete detail in the first chapter. His mental, sexual and spiritual development is that of a child of about seven years old.

  Portia Copeland Jones, Highboy Jones, and Willie Copeland

  A great deal of interest is centered around these three characters. Portia is the most dominant member of this trio. In actual space she occupies almost as much of the book as any one of the main characters, except Mick—but she is always placed in a subordinate position. Portia is the embodiment of the maternal instincts. Highboy, her husband, and Willie, her brother, are inseparable from herself. These three characters are just the opposite of Dr. Copeland and the other central characters in that they make no effort to go against circumstance.

  The tragedy that comes to this group plays an important part on all the phases of the book. At the beginning of the second section Willie is arrested on a charge of burglary. He was walking down a side alley after midnight and two young white boys told him they were looking for someone, gave him a dollar, and instructed him to whistle when the person they were looking for came down the alley. Only when Willie saw two policemen coming toward him did he realize what had happened. In the meantime the boys had broken in a drug store. Later in the fall Willie is sentenced along with them for a year of hard labor. All of this is revealed through Portia as she tells this great trouble to the Kelly children. “Willie he so busy looking at that dollar bill he don’t have no time to think. And then they asks him how come he run when he seen them police. They might just as soon ask how come a person jerk their hand off a hot stove when they lays it there by mistake.”

  This is the first of their trouble. Now that the household arrangements are disturbed, Highboy begins keeping company with another girl. This too is told by Portia to the Kelly children and Dr. Copeland: “I could realize this better if she were a light-colored, good-looking girl. But she at least ten shades blacker than I is. She the ugliest girl I ever seen. She walk like she haves a egg between her legs and don’t want to break it. She not even clean.”

  The most brutal tragedy in the book comes to these three people. Willie and four other Negroes were guilty of some little misbehavior on the chain-gang where they were working. It was February and the camp was stationed a couple of hundred miles north of the town. As punishment they were put together in a solitary room. Their shoes were taken off and their feet suspended. They were left like this for three full days. It was cold and as their bl
ood did not circulate the boys’ feet froze and they developed gangrene. One boy died of pneumonia and the other four had to have one or both of their feet amputated. They were all manual laborers and of course this completely took away their means for future livelihood. This part is of course revealed by Portia, too. It is told in only a few blunt broken paragraphs and left at that.

  This happening has a great effect on the main characters. Dr. Copeland is shattered by the news and is in delirium for several weeks. Mick feels all the impact of the horror. Biff had formerly employed Willie in his restaurant and he broods over all the aspects of the affair.

  Jake wants to bring it all to light and make of it a national example. But this is impossible for several reasons. Willie is terribly afraid—for it has been impressed upon him at the camp to keep quiet about what has been done to him. The state has been careful to separate the boys immediately after the happening and they have lost track of each other. Also, Willie and the other boys are really children in a certain way—they do not understand what their cooperation would mean. Suffering had strained their nerves so much that during the three days and nights in the room they had quarreled angrily among themselves and when it was over they had no wish to see each other again. From the long view their childish bitterness toward each other and lack of cooperation is the worst part of the whole tragedy.

  Highboy comes back to Portia after Willie returns and, handicapped by Willie’s infirmity, the three of them start their way of living all over again.

  The thread of this story runs through the whole book. Most of it is told through Portia’s own vivid, rhythmic language at intervals as it happens.

  Harry West

  Harry has already been briefly described in the section given to Mick. During the first part of the year, when he and Mick started their friendship, he was infatuated with a certain little flirting girl at High School. His eyes had always given him much trouble and he wore thick-lensed glasses. The girl thought the glasses made him look sissy and he tried to stumble around without them for several months. This aggravated his eye trouble. His friendship with Mick is very different from his infatuation with the other little girl at High School.