The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  20

  I have often asked myself whether this particular form of violence that McCullers describes—a pent-up anguish that erupts in unexpected and unpredictable ways—is something that is in its own way particularly American. Violence—like love, hate, compassion, or greed—does not belong to a particular nation, but one of the contributions of American fiction is its articulation of a modern phenomenon, the isolation of individuals, leading to a sort of emotional and social autism. Is this the unforeseeable flip side of the American dream? Is it what happens if you are allowed to imagine a future so remote from your existence when, as will so often happen, your dream cannot be realized? McCullers’s art is not just her ability to reveal this violence in its different forms but to illuminate its frequent coexistence with something that is equally American: resilience, the urge to stand up and not give in, an innate form of rebellion against submission to any force, be it that of man or destiny, which in this book is best presented through the young girl Mick. Despite their burning need to communicate, not one of Singer’s disciples has learned to listen and take notice of the others around him or her. It is only after his death that they become conscious of themselves and their surroundings. No more “I want—I want—I want,” but a certain taking into account.

  Taking into account is the price that must be paid if we are to transcend our narcissistic preoccupations. In all great works of fiction, including fairy tales, a price must be paid—there will be no glass slipper before scrubbing the floors. No tweeting and texting your pain to the world and getting millions of sympathizers who feel your pain or are amused by it, no downloading of self-help books on your Kindle or iPad, no antianxiety pills, no Dr. Phil or Honey Boo Boo or Real Housewives (descendants of the little glamour girl Baby in the novel). Mick and her family will not become stars of a reality show, Jake will not move the masses to demand social justice on YouTube. What will rescue them is good old-fashioned passion, a belief that one can give meaning to an otherwise meaningless life, the desire to create—to face the world, with its pain and grief, and not evade it. That passion enables them to connect; it is something at once evanescent and enduring, a bit like snow. In that passion there is pain and anguish and redemption, even if that redemption is just a firefly glimmer on the dark horizon.

  There are no promises of a great and fabulous ending: there will be no concert pianist falling in love with Mick and no gathering of all the workers of the world around Jake, no lessening of the pain for Mady Copeland. But there is that glimmer of hope in the fact that, now Singer is dead, they will have to do more than merely talk—they can no longer lash out in episodic violence as they take refuge in reflection, in building a rudimentary plan. Though their friend is dead, their urges are not, and they will have to find a new and more meaningful way to communicate them.

  So this new era without Singer is opaque; there are glimmers of hope in the decisions each character makes. The last we see of Copeland, he is seated in a wagon beside his father-in-law, heading out to the country. “He felt the fire in him and he could not be still. He wanted to sit up and speak in a loud voice—yet when he tried to raise himself he could not find the strength. The words in his heart grew big and they would not be silent. But the old man had ceased to listen and there was no one to hear him.”

  When Jake discovers that Singer is dead, an urge overcomes him to leave town. Where will he go this time? “The names of cities called to him—Memphis, Wilmington, Gastonia, New Orleans. He would go somewhere. But not out of the South. The old restlessness and hunger were in him again. It was different this time. He did not long for open space and freedom—just the reverse.” Only then does Jake think of Dr. Copeland and of a visit he made to Copeland’s house when the doctor was very sick and could not leave his bed. Jake had barged in, without paying attention to the people who had come to visit Willie. He had made his way to the sick man’s room, where he found Dr. Copeland lying in bed with a high fever, and right away he started in on a long and arduous argument. The two men had fought until they passed out, one from delirium and the other from too much alcohol.

  Now Jake remembers the doctor’s advice that night: “Do not attempt to stand alone.” Jake thinks, “Copeland knew. And those who knew were like a handful of naked soldiers before an armed battalion. And what had they done? They had turned to quarrel with each other.” He has a sudden urge to go and see Copeland. But Copeland is gone, too, so instead he goes to the New York Café to have a bite to eat. “The emptiness in him hurt. He wanted to look neither backward nor forward.” He thinks of Singer and how “now it was up to him to get out of it by himself and make a new start again.” He is tired and unmoored, but in the end he does leave town:

  The late afternoon sun was out again. Heat made the steam rise from the wet pavement. Jake walked steadily. As soon as the town was behind a new surge of energy came to him. But was this flight or was it onslaught? Anyway, he was going. All was to begin another time. The road ahead lay to the north and slightly to the west. But he would not go too far away. He would not leave the South. That was one clear thing. There was hope in him, and soon perhaps the outline of his journey would take form.

  One by one the characters take charge of their lives and grapple more honestly with themselves. But this does not stop them from holding on to their dreams. Mick, sitting in the New York Café, concludes that “maybe it would be true about the piano and turn out O.K. Maybe she would get a chance soon. Else what the hell good had it all been—the way she felt about music and the plans she had made in the inside room? It had to be some good if anything made sense. And it was too and it was too and it was too and it was too. It was some good.”

  Biff Brannon is left to puzzle over the enduring mystery of what makes human beings who they are. Biff is alone in the night, thinking that his is the only all-night place, which is what he likes. He thinks of the others, of how things have changed. The menace, the violence, does not exist only in his own backyard, but thousands of miles across the Atlantic, traveling like a deadly virus around the world. The radio is on, and a foreign voice is speaking in German, French or Spanish—he cannot tell, but the voice from across the Atlantic comes to him like a sinister whisper in the dark. To him, “it sounded like doom. It gave him the jitters to listen to it. When he turned it off the silence was deep and unbroken. He felt the night outside. Loneliness gripped him so that his breath quickened.”

  There is a moment, a brief flash of universal comprehension, in which he is awed by seeing himself as part of the whole of humanity. “The silence in the room was deep as the night itself. Biff stood transfixed, lost in his meditations. Then suddenly he felt a quickening in him. His heart turned and he leaned his back against the counter for support. For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who—one word—love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended. . . . And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith. Sharply he turned away.”

  Biff calls for his assistant, but there is no answer. He then tries to calm down and reason away the terror he feels. “Somehow he remembered that the awning had not yet been raised. As he went to the door his walk gained steadiness. And when at last he was inside again he composed himself soberly to await the morning sun.”

  21

  The story ends, and no matter how many years go by, it will remain the same: we continue to wait with Biff for the rising sun as a new generation of readers discovers these characters and gives them a new life. What good is it for us, seventy-four years later, in the second decade of the twenty-first century? The realities of our lives have changed a great deal since the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1940, on the eve of America’s involvement in a war not of its own making—its last “good” war, fol
lowed by Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The inarticulate feeling of rage that stalked Dr. Copeland has been articulated, leading to a real march on Washington and many more confrontations before an African American could be elected president of the United States. And yet the poverty and inequality that Jake railed against, the savage daily threats to individual integrity and liberty, still exist and are justified in far more sophisticated ways. The labor movement has moved beyond Jake’s dreams, and yet many of the same questions he had then could be asked today. The miniature radios Mick dreamed of that were small enough to fit into your ear have been invented, along with so many other unimaginable gadgets and innovations. And the creative urges that made Mick roam the streets are as potent and neglected today as they were then. My conversations with Mike and Joanna have remained with me all these years, as well as the questions, carrying the seeds of their own answers, and the resolution inviting and implying new questions.

  I wonder what I would have done differently had I known how easy it is to lose people, how someone who has been an intense part of your life can suddenly vanish, leaving their traces only in a few selective memories. That is what happened to Joanna. I went away for the summer, and on my return she was not there. A few times, people from my past life have called, e-mailed or appeared out of the blue at a talk or a book signing, saying, “Do you remember me?” This happened most recently during a talk at Trinity University, in San Antonio, Texas, when I ran into my friend Joan Frederick, with whom I had fled into the National Gallery when we were teargassed during a demonstration in Washington. Maybe Joanna will appear similarly unannounced, and we will continue our discussion and she will tell me how wrong I still am. I am not sure I will concede, but I will always be grateful to her for the gift of the southern sun.

  Some of the facts have changed, but the South has the same climate, with the same sun shining over its small towns. It has become more prosperous in parts, with its own skyscrapers now home to Fortune 500 companies in cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, Dallas and Birmingham, and yet the hankering of isolated human souls, the urge to articulate, to connect, to belong, still remains. The creative urge has not changed any of the old verities and truths Faulkner wrote about—nor will they fundamentally change for as long as the beating of the human heart remains the same. Some attention must be paid to things that endure.

  In “Loneliness . . . An American Malady,” McCullers argued that America has been caught in a protracted adolescence, searching for an identity and wanting desperately to belong. In the twenties and thirties, right until it entered the Second World War, America was undergoing a process of questioning and self-questioning, wondering how to define itself and relate to the rest of the world. And like all younger siblings, it seems it will never completely lose the sense of being the youngest, with all its privileges and burdens. Perhaps this is the main reason why McCullers’s novel still reads as if it were written yesterday.

  But each new generation must discover its own response to its own specific form of loneliness. What we do know is that loneliness, in and of itself, is not a positive attribute. Even the lone cowboy who rides into town needs a few good guys to defend and bad guys to defeat before he can move on to the next town.

  What if today we have finally reached the point of technological progress at which we can eliminate solitariness? What if the efficiency that we so worship, rather than paving the way for the actualization of passions, has become a tool for easy escapes, inviting less thinking, less confrontation with real pain and actual impediment? What if in our search for elsewhere, we have managed to destroy this place, this home we live in, pillaging our natural resources and turning all reality into virtual reality? What if, gradually losing our ability to be childlike, we have remained childish and infantile? What if that prized individualism, the one that was worth risking life and property to secure, that found its apotheosis in a kind of universal empathy, is being transformed into a narcissistic self-indulgence or greedy selfishness? The world of McCullers’s characters is inherently in opposition to that of Babbitt and his mates, but in the history of America and American fiction, there has been a constant battle between the two mind-sets. Can we afford to let Babbitt win?

  Epilogue: Baldwin

  Last September I gave a talk at the Baltimore Book Festival. I should have stayed at home—I had work to do—but I can seldom avoid the temptation of a book festival, with its transient sense of festivity and community: all those strangers sharing the same interest, if not exactly the same passions. Add to this the fact that I was hosted by one of my favorite independent bookstores, the Ivy, and my university, Johns Hopkins, and the lure was inescapable.

  I love the chaos of book festivals, the way different characters, cultures, stories and times all jumble together to the accompaniment of music, food and art, all the good things in life shared with gusto, but not too seriously. It is as if the abundant variety of human existence contained in the thousands of books under consideration spills over onto the sidewalks and streets of the host city. This particular festival was sunny and celebratory. I couldn’t help but smile as I made my way through various book pavilions, from mystery tales and romance to “literary” fiction, poetry, science fiction and comic books. From time to time I felt I’d spotted a comic book character walking around or waiting in line at the food vendors, but mostly it was couples holding hands and browsing while their children squealed and fought or found distractions of their own.

  Each city lends something of its character to these events. With Baltimore, home of Omar Little and at one point Edgar Allan Poe, its grittiness gives it an edge, different from the more formal arrangements of the National Book Festival, in Washington, which was held on the National Mall and attended by well over a hundred thousand people until 2014, when it was exiled to the ungainly convention center—a move that was more a reflection of the city’s “guardians” than of its citizens. Baltimore’s festival had a feel of the mass gatherings of the sixties and seventies, where people doing their own thing were tuned in to one another and appeared to be conspicuously enjoying themselves, a conspiracy of smiles that seemed to be a sort of protest against the harsh reality of the city. But of course the resemblance was, on some level, skin-deep: here the dominant attitude was one of giving in and having fun, rather than protesting and having fun.

  I had about an hour and a half to spare before my talk. I like to walk or roam around a place as I fashion my thoughts. Browsing in the sun, I tried to focus on my topic that day. I carried two quotes with me, one by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the other by James Baldwin, and wondered if I should insert one or both into my speech. It wasn’t that they were necessary, but I liked them, having come across them the day before while thinking of what I had taken to calling “my Baldwin chapter,” though my editor would only say, “Let’s see.”

  I strolled in a state of mind I would define as “alert absentmindedness,” taking in the sights and sounds while busily weaving ideas into words. These times of aimless wandering are some of my most lucid moments, before the painful process of combining and shaping the exuberant jumble of thought into a coherent form and structure begins. Thoughts flowed freely as I earnestly poured out words to my imaginary interlocutors; I was seemingly as oblivious of the world around me as it was of me. That’s the thing about books, I thought. They’re like children: enthralling, exasperating and not quite so predictable as you might have imagined. You believe you are in control, but a serious give-and-take is really in operation, and in some mysterious way they are equally in charge of you, dragging you to new places, bringing strangers into your house and questioning your ways and habits. So there I was, having initially wanted to write about twenty-four books but now focusing on three, wanting to concentrate on the text but constantly being pulled away by the facts of life and the world around me. Unlikely places, events and people kept tempting me with new revelations, flashing like fireflies and demanding m
y attention. In the Metro, in the middle of a conversation, even while watching a film, I would take out my pen and paper and jot down notes, some of which I could not decipher when I turned to them later at home.