The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  I felt slightly depressed after seeing Mike, and although I had promised I would keep in touch, I did not give him my contact information, or ask for his. I wanted to forget him, to not be disturbed by something so very sad that I sensed in him but could not touch.

  11

  What connects a restaurant owner, a drunken agitator from out of town, an African American doctor and a young teenage girl living on the edge of poverty? The answer appears to be a deaf man, John Singer, and their insatiable need to be close to him, to talk to him. They believe he is the only person in that town who genuinely understands them.

  They don’t know that Singer is simply puzzled by them. In a letter to his friend Antonapoulos, Singer writes that the four are “very busy people,” so busy that “it will be hard for you to picture them.” He adds, “I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest.” It is words that torment them: “Those words in their heart do not let them rest, so they are always very busy.” He cannot understand why they are so eager to talk to him, when most of the time he does not understand them, although he nods in response and is distantly sympathetic.

  Of these four people, Biff Brannon, the restaurant owner, is different from the other three. His focus in life is on one word: Why? “The question flowed through Biff, always, unnoticed, like the blood in his veins. He thought of people and of objects and of ideas and the question was in him.” The word is echoed throughout the story, gradually gaining volume as it takes on a more universal meaning. Biff is different from the others. While the others take refuge from their inner turmoil in constant, agitated physical movement, Biff’s restiveness has little outward manifestation. Jake is a drifter, moving from one shabby, smelly room to another. Mick finds no free and private space in her home and takes to spending a great deal of her time wandering the streets. And then there is Dr. Copeland, whose cold, lonely home cannot appease his terrible feeling of uprootedness. Even Singer is a roamer. He has a room in the Kelly family’s boardinghouse but spends most of his time when he is not working roving the different parts of the town. None of these characters feel at home in their own home. Biff is the only one who pays any attention to where he lives, who takes care of his home and makes it presentable. He is the only one who remains, at the end of the novel, in the same place we first found him.

  We meet Biff Brannon at his restaurant, the New York Café, named for the elsewhere that so many inhabitants of small towns all across America dream of, the fantasyland to which the eighteen-year-old Carson fled the first chance she got. The summer night is “black” and “sultry,” it is midnight and all the streetlights have been turned off, so “the light from the café made a sharp, yellow rectangle on the sidewalk.” The streets are deserted, and inside, the café is busy with the half dozen customers drinking while Biff waits “stolidly, his elbow resting on the counter and his thumb mashing the tip of his long nose.” As is his habit, he is watching. Singer differentiates him from the other characters, writing to his friend that those others “all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.” But as for Biff, what he does is “watch.”

  Biff’s eyes are “cold and staring, half-concealed by the cynical droop of his eyelids. On the fifth finger of his calloused hand there was a woman’s wedding ring.” Early in the novel, there is a scene in Biff’s bedroom in which he and his wife, Alice, quarrel about one of their customers, Jake Blount, who his wife complains has been eating and drinking and talking wild for a week without paying a cent. She wants him kicked out, for “he’s nothing but a bum and a freak.” Biff responds that he likes freaks. “I reckon you do!” Alice shouts back, “I just reckon you certainly ought to, Mister Brannon—being as you’re one yourself.” In response, Biff accuses his wife of not having “any real kindness. . . . Or maybe it’s curiosity I mean,” he elaborates, adding, “You don’t ever see or notice anything important that goes on. You never watch and think and try to figure anything out.” His list keeps growing: “The enjoyment of a spectacle is something you have never known. . . . You don’t know what it is to store up a whole lot of details and then come upon something real.”

  Watchfulness, thinking, curiosity, “enjoyment of a spectacle,” “real kindness”—might these be qualities similar to those of a writer of fiction? One who does not participate in the spectacle but is almost always watching, asking, curious to know, who has to place himself in the minds and hearts of others, all the time piling up a whole lot of details? Biff has the urges of a writer; what he lacks is the ability to express and articulate them, to “store up a whole lot of details” and, through his imagination, come up with “something real.” His artistic ability is limited to decorating his room or the café window.

  Through the café doors they come and go under Biff’s watchful gaze, in search of something, as if hoping to find a way to fulfill the dreams gnawing at their hearts, evasive and yet so real. There is John Singer and the agitator Jake Blount, and the thirteen-year-old Mick Kelly, and for a brief moment Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland. Soon we, the readers, find ourselves asking: Why? Why are they so restless, so uncomfortable in their own skin? Why?

  12

  Joanna wanted to study painting in order to find her own style. Capturing “southern heat” was her main obsession. We spent hours tracing the way the heat chased the characters around the city. I had discovered the metaphorical use of the word “dazzle”—both Jake Blount and Mick Kelly are dazzled by the glare of the sun, which seems to follow them almost like a fury in Greek mythology, in sync with their inner urges or, in Jake’s case, his indecipherable rage.

  Joanna and I went over several passages again and again, like the one in which Jake walks down the “quiet and hot, almost deserted” main street on a Sunday morning, when “the awnings over the closed stores were raised and the buildings had a bare look in the bright sun.” He doesn’t have any socks on, and “the hot pavement burned through the thin soles of his shoes. The sun felt like a hot piece of iron pressing down on his head. The town seemed more lonesome than any place he had ever known. The stillness of the street gave him a strange feeling. When he had been drunk the place had seemed violent and riotous. And now it was as though everything had come to a sudden, static halt.”

  Jake is an anticapitalist; he is full of facts and figures about the oppression of labor, the need for workers to unite, but the people he wants to liberate do not understand his agitated words, and they pay attention only to tease him. Biff, observing Jake carefully through half-closed eyes, comes to the conclusion that although Jake gives the impression of being a “freak,” he is not one. “It was like something was deformed about him—but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.”

  That same night, Jake comes in with a “tall Negro man carrying a black bag.” Jake tries to bring him to the counter for a drink, but the black man refuses and leaves. When someone objects to his bringing this man to a place where white men drink, Jake responds, “I’m part nigger myself,” and goes on to say, “I’m part nigger and hop and bohunk and chink. All of those.” They laugh at him while he continues: “And I’m Dutch and Turkish and Japanese and American,” ending with “I’m one who knows. I’m a stranger in a strange land.”

  “Why?” Biff asks, and this time he has an answer. “Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons—throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to. In some men it is
in them—the text is ‘All men seek for Thee.’ Maybe that was why—maybe—He was a Chinaman, the fellow had said. And a nigger and a wop and a Jew. And if he believed it hard enough maybe it was so.”

  Faulkner, who wrote to a friend that he did not “care much for facts,” believed there was no room in a writer’s profession to “be afraid,” no room, as he proclaimed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Central to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are those “old verities and truths of the heart”—in fact, we wouldn’t be far off the mark if we were to claim that the main themes in the novel are “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Is this not the real reason we read Carson McCullers or William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor—or any novelist, for that matter, whether from the South or from Tahiti?

  13

  I was reminded of Mick Kelly the other night by a young girl on a segment of 60 Minutes whose parents had lost their jobs and their home as a result of the economic crisis. They had lived with dignity and relative comfort, and suddenly they were homeless, living in their car. They were not complaining—not because they had nothing to complain about, but out of a certain sense of personal integrity. Their protest was implied in their description of how they were forced to live, struggling to keep clean and find a safe place to sleep, how they avoided being discovered by the authorities and worried about the consequences—one problem, you see, is that to go to school you have to have a permanent address, and of course they had none. They were not ‘ “moochers,” nor did they feel “entitled”—terms some of our elites have been throwing around indiscriminately about Americans without jobs or homes, when really they would more appropriately describe Kim Kardashian and her fellow reality stars.

  That young girl and her family were no Kim Kardashians; they were just plain Americans, more like descendants of Dorothy and her sober relatives in Kansas, or of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. What caught my attention was the expressions on the faces of the children, in particular that girl with short blond hair, who seemed to beam forth a desperate resilience and personal integrity that made her say, not because of the camera but in all sincerity, that they would survive, and that for her the American dream was still valid—and I believed her. That expression has stayed with me and made me think of Mick Kelly. The two girls, one fictional and one real, certainly have something in common. It has something to do with passion and integrity—something that makes you hopeful and breaks your heart.

  There is another passage Joanna and I pored over a great deal. Mick has taken her two younger brothers out for a walk. There’s no one in the street on this “very hot” late Sunday morning, and her brother Bubber “was barefooted and the sidewalk was so hot it burned his feet. The green oak trees made cool-looking black shadows on the ground, but that was not shade enough. . . . The long summer-time always gave Bubber the colic. He didn’t have on a shirt and his ribs were sharp and white. The sun made him pale instead of brown, and his little titties were like blue raisins on his chest.”

  Joanna would cry out in frustration, “How do you capture heat? How can you paint it like Carson McCullers does in her stories? That sort of loneliness,” she would add. “It’s not a Hopper kind of loneliness.” She said this knowing that Hopper was my favorite painter, at a time when Andy Warhol reigned supreme. So it just may be that I owe to Joanna an idea I later became obsessed with: the different forms of loneliness in American art and fiction and their relation to a certain idea of America.

  That morning, Mick had been woken up early by the sun. Too hot to even drink coffee, she had ice water with syrup and cold biscuits before leaving home. She set off with her brothers for a building site. When she got there, she left the boys and started climbing a ladder to the top, where she stood up “very straight. She spread out her arms like wings. This was the place where everybody wanted to stand. The very top. But not many kids could do it. . . . The sky was bright blue and hot as fire. The sun made everything on the ground either dizzy white or black.” Mick has an urge to sing, and “all the songs she knew pushed up toward her throat, but there was no sound.” This urge, the search for song, is what makes Mick so restless. She belongs to a large family, all of them hard workers who barely make ends meet. Mick is too poor to afford a radio, a gramophone or a musical instrument. She roams the streets listening in on houses with a radio or a gramophone and occasionally indulges herself by listening to their lodger Singer’s radio. Like her creator, she can read and play notes without training, and she spends her lunch money learning to read music from another girl, practicing long hours after school on the piano in the gym, amid the noise of her schoolmates playing sports. She even takes a cracked ukulele that’s been strung with two violin strings, a guitar string and a banjo string and tries to refashion it as a violin. “But all the time—no matter what she was doing—there was music. Sometimes she hummed to herself as she walked, and other times she listened quietly to the songs inside her. There were all kinds of music in her thoughts. Some she heard over radios, and some was in her mind already without her ever having heard it anywhere.”

  Like all young girls of her age, Mick has her daydreams. On that day, alone in the unfinished building, Mick dreams about how, when she is seventeen and very famous, she will write her initials, M.K., on everything, how she will drive a red and white Packard with her initials on the doors, how she will have them on her handkerchief and underwear. She daydreams about inventing a radio the size of a green pea that people will carry around and stick in their ears, and flying machines, but her real dream is music, and the thing she wants most in the world is to have a piano.

  She has recently discovered one fellow whose music “made her heart shrink up every time she heard it.” The fellow is called something like “Motsart.” Standing in the empty room, she takes two stubs of chalk out of her pocket, one green and the other red, and writes on the wall, in big block letters, “EDISON, and under that she drew the names of DICK TRACY and MUSSOLINI. Then in each corner with the largest letters of all,” she writes her initials. Finally, on the opposite wall, she “wrote a very bad word—PUSSY.” She hums one of the tunes she remembers, “and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn’t sing any more. Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at the very top of the list—MOTSART.”

  In her outline, McCullers states that Mick is “perhaps the most outstanding character in the book. Because of her age and her temperament her relation with the mute is more accentuated than any other person’s.” Mick “commands more space and interest than anyone else.” This is partly because her “essential traits” are “great creative energy and courage. She is defeated by society on all the main issues before she can even begin, but still there is something in her and in those like her that cannot and will not ever be destroyed.”

  McCullers bestows her with her own most distinct attributes: her appearance, her love of music, her desire to be loved and tended to, her complex relationship to sex, her need for tenderness and capacity for life, her resilience and courage. In her secret inner room, Mick keeps her paintings and drawings, her notes and the notes to the music she is either hearing or composing. Nothing is clear to her yet; she is at a transitional time in her life, something both frightening and exhilarating, on the verge of discovering herself and the world.

  Mick’s prominent role also comes from the fact that she is a metaphor for the main theme of the story: growing pains. She is the only real teenager in the book, but the other characters in one way or another suffer from stunted growth: they are grown-up adolescents with urges and emotions they are unable to express. Like Mick, they are haunted by an inner voice whose language they have not learned to speak: “The feeling was a whole lot
worse than being hungry for any dinner, yet it was like that. I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.”

  14

  After the publication of Reflections in a Golden Eye, one of whose characters was gay, McCullers was visited on her return to Columbus, Georgia, by a Ku Klux Klan member who told her that she should leave town immediately or else he and his friends would come and “get her” before morning: “We know from your first book that you’re a nigger-lover,” he said, and “we know from this one that you’re queer. We don’t want queers and nigger-lovers in this town.” Her father stayed up all night on their front porch with a loaded shotgun, but the Klansmen never showed up.

  Twenty-five years later, McCullers wrote that in her first book she had tackled several moral problems, most notably “the problems of prejudice and poverty in the South.” Jake represents the search for social and economic justice, but it is in the figure of Benedict Mady Copeland, the most critically acclaimed character in the novel, that we find a man grappling with the most enduring of all urges: the desire for dignity, both for his race and for himself. McCullers should be praised as much for her minor characters—the Copeland family, Antonapolous, Mick’s brother Bubber, and her friend Harry Minowitz—as for the major ones, each in their own way attempting to preserve their dignity, and each being defeated in the end.