Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  As the eldest child in our family I was the custodian, the counter of the cakes, the boss of all our shows. The repertory was eclectic, running from hashed-over movies to Shakespeare and shows I made up and sometimes wrote down in my nickel Big Chief notebooks. The cast was everlastingly the same—my younger brother, Baby Sister and myself. The cast was the most serious handicap. Baby Sister was in those days a stomachy ten-year old who was terrible in death scenes, fainting spells and such-like necessary parts. When Baby Sister swooned to a sudden death she would prudently look around beforehand and fall very carefully on sofa or chair. (Once, I remember, such a death fall broke both legs of one of Mama’s favorite chairs.)

  As director of the shows I could put up with terrible acting, but there was one thing I simply could not stand. Sometimes, after coaching and drilling half the afternoon, the actors would decide to abandon the whole project just before curtain time and wander out into the yard to play. “I struggle and work on a show all afternoon, and now you run out on me,” I would yell, past endurance at these times. “You’re nothing but children! Children! I’ve got a good mind to shoot you dead.” But they only gulped the drinks and ran out with the cakes.

  The props were impromptu, limited only by Mama’s modest interdictions. The top drawer of the linen closet was out of bounds and we had to make do with second-best towels and tablecloths and sheets in the plays that called for nurses, nuns and ghosts.

  The sitting-room shows ended when first I discovered Eugene O’Neill. It was the summer when I found his books down in the library and put his picture on the mantelpiece in the back sitting-room. By autumn I was writing a three-acter about revenge and incest—the curtain rose on a graveyard and, after scenes of assorted misery, fell on a catafalque. The cast consisted of a blind man, several idiots and a mean old woman of one hundred years. The play was impractical for performance under the old conditions in the sitting rooms. I gave what I called a “reading” to my patient parents and a visiting aunt.

  Next, I believe, it was Nietzsche and a play called The Fire of Life. The play had two characters—Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche—and the point I prized about the play was that it was written in verses that rhymed. I gave a reading of this play, too, and afterward the children came in from the yard, and we drank cocoa and ate the fallen, lovely raisin cakes in the back sitting-room by the fire. “Jesus?” my aunt asked when she was told. “Well, religion is a nice subject anyway.”

  By that winter the family rooms, the whole town, seemed to pinch and cramp my adolescent heart. I longed for wanderings. I longed especially for New York. The firelight on the walnut folding doors would sadden me, and the tedious sound of the old swan clock. I dreamed of the distant city of skyscrapers and snow, and New York was the happy mise en scène of that first novel I wrote when I was fifteen years old. The details of the book were queer: ticket collectors on the subway, New York front yards—but by that time it did not matter, for already I had begun another journey. That was the year of Dostoevski, Chekhov and Tolstoy—and there were the intimations of an unsuspected region equidistant from New York. Old Russia and our Georgia rooms, the marvelous solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind.

  Author’s Outline of “The Mute”

  GENERAL REMARKS

  THE BROAD PRINCIPAL THEME of this book is indicated in the first dozen pages. This is the theme of man’s revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as is possible. Surrounding this general idea there are several counter themes and some of these may be stated briefly as follows: (1) There is a deep need in man to express himself by creating some unifying principle or God. A personal God created by a man is a reflection of himself and in substance this God is most often inferior to his creator. (2) In a disorganized society these individual Gods or principles are likely to be chimerical and fantastic. (3) Each man must express himself in his own way—but this is often denied to him by a wasteful, short-sighted society. (4) Human beings are innately cooperative, but an unnatural social tradition makes them behave in ways that are not in accord with their deepest nature. (5) Some men are heroes by nature in that they will give all that is in them without regard to the effort or to the personal returns.

  Of course these themes are never stated nakedly in the book. Their overtones are felt through the characters and situations. Much will depend upon the insight of the reader and the care with which the book is read. In some parts the underlying ideas will be concealed far down below the surface of a scene and at other times these ideas will be shown with a certain emphasis. In the last few pages the various motifs which have been recurring from time to time throughout the book are drawn sharply together and the work ends with a sense of cohesive finality.

  The general outline of this work can be expressed very simply. It is the story of five isolated, lonely people in their search for expression and spiritual integration with something greater than themselves. One of these five persons is a deaf mute, John Singer—and it is around him that the whole book pivots. Because of their loneliness these other four people see in the mute a certain mystic superiority and he becomes in a sense their ideal. Because of Singer’s infirmity his outward character is vague and unlimited. His friends are able to impute to him all the qualities which they would wish for him to have. Each one of these four people creates his understanding of the mute from his own desires. Singer can read lips and understand what is said to him. In his eternal silence there is something compelling. Each one of these persons makes the mute the repository for his most personal feelings and ideas.

  This situation between the four people and the mute has an almost exact parallel in the relation between Singer and his deaf-mute friend, Antonapoulos. Singer is the only person who could attribute to Antonapoulos dignity and a certain wisdom. Singer’s love for Antonapoulos threads through the whole book from the first page until the very end. No part of Singer is left untouched by this love and when they are separated his life is meaningless and he is only marking time until he can be with his friend again. Yet the four people who count themselves as Singer’s friends know nothing about Antonapoulos at all until the book is nearly ended. The irony of this situation grows slowly and steadily more apparent as the story progresses.

  When Antonapoulos dies finally of Bright’s disease Singer, overwhelmed by loneliness and despondency, turns on the gas and kills himself. Only then do these other four characters begin to understand the real Singer at all.

  About this central idea there is much of the quality and tone of a legend. All the parts dealing directly with Singer are written in the simple style of a parable.

  Before the reasons why this situation came about can be fully understood it is necessary to know each of the principal characters in some detail. But the characters cannot be described adequately without the events which happen to them being involved. Nearly all of the happenings in the book spring directly from the characters. During the space of this book each person is shown in his strongest and most typical actions.

  Of course it must be understood that none of these personal characteristics are told in the didactic manner in which they are set down here. They are implied in one successive scene after another—and it is only at the end, when the sum of these implications is considered, that the real characters are understood in all of their deeper aspects.

  CHARACTERS AND EVENTS

  JOHN SINGER

  Of all the main characters in the book Singer is the simplest. Because of his deaf-mutism he is isolated from the ordinary human emotions of other people to a psychopathic degree. He is very observant and intuitive. On the surface he is a model of kindness and cooperativeness—but nothing which goes on around him disturbs his inner self. All of his deeper emotions are involved in the only friend to whom he can express himself, Antonapoulos. In the second chapter Biff Brannon thinks of Singer’s eyes as being “cold and gentle as a cat’s.” It is this same remoteness that gives him an air of wisdom and superiori
ty.

  Singer is the first character in the book only in the sense that he is the symbol of isolation and thwarted expression and because the story pivots about him. In reality each one of his satellites is of far more importance than himself. The book will take all of its body and strength in the development of the four people who revolve about the mute.

  The parts concerning Singer are never treated in a subjective manner. The style is oblique. This is partly because the mute, although he is educated, does not think in words but in visual impressions. That, of course, is a natural outcome of his deafness. Except when he is understood through the eyes of other people the style is for the main part simple and declarative. No attempt will be made to enter intimately into his subconscious. He is a flat character in the sense that from the second chapter on through the rest of the book his essential self does not change.

  At his death there is a strange little note from the cousin of Antonapoulos found in his pocket:

  DEAR MR. SINGER,

  No address on corner of letters. They all sent back to me. Spiros Antonapoulos died and was buried with his kidneys last month. Sorry to tell same but no use writing letters to the dead.

                            Yours truly,

                            CHARLES PARKER

  When the man is considered in his deepest nature (because of his inner character and peculiar situation) his suicide at the death of Antonapoulos is a necessity.

  MICK KELLY

  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. At the beginning of the second part of the work she steps out boldly—and from then on, up until the last section, she commands more space and interest than anyone else. Her story is that of the violent struggle of a gifted child to get what she needs from an unyielding environment. When Mick first appears she is at the age of thirteen, and when the book ends she is fourteen months older. Many things of great importance happen to her during this time. At the beginning she is a crude child on the threshold of a period of quick awakening and development. Her energy and the possibilities before her are without limits. She begins to go forward boldly in the face of all obstacles before her and during the next few months there is great development. In the end, after the finances of her family have completely given way, she has to get a job working ten hours a day in a ten-cent store. Her tragedy does not come in any way from herself—she is robbed of her freedom and energy by an unprincipled and wasteful society.

  To Mick music is the symbol of beauty and freedom. She has had no musical background at all and her chances for educating herself are very small. Her family does not have a radio and in the summer she roams around the streets of the town pulling her two baby brothers in a wagon and listening to any music she can hear from other people’s houses. She begins reading at the public library and from books she learns some of the things she needs to know. In the fall when she enters the Vocational High School she arranges to have rudimentary lessons on the piano with a girl in her class. In exchange for the lessons she does all the girl’s homework in algebra and arithmetic and gives her also fifteen cents a week from her lunch money. During the afternoon Mick can sometimes practice on the piano in the gymnasium—but the place is always noisy and overcrowded and she never knows when she will be interrupted suddenly by a blow on the head from a basketball.

  Her love for music is instinctive, and her taste is naturally never pure at this stage. At first there is Mozart. After that she learns about Beethoven. From then on she goes hungrily from one composer to another whenever she gets a chance to hear them on other people’s radios—Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Sibelius, etc. Her information is often very garbled but always the feeling is there. Mick’s love for music is intensely creative. She is always making up little tunes for herself—and she plans to compose great symphonies and operas. Her plans are always definite in a certain way. She will conduct all of her music herself and her initials will always be written in big red letters on the curtains of the stage. She will conduct her music either in a red satin evening dress or else she will wear a real man’s evening suit. Mick is thoroughly egoistic—and the crudely childish side of her nature comes in side by side with the mature.

  Mick must always have some person to love and admire. Her childhood was a series of passionate, reasonless admirations for a motley cavalcade of persons, one after another. And now she centers this undirected love on Singer. He gives her a book about Beethoven on her birthday and his room is always quiet and comfortable. In her imagination she makes the mute just the sort of teacher and friend that she needs. He is the only person who seems to show any interest in her at all. She confides in the mute—and when an important crisis occurs at the end of the book it is to him that she wants to turn for help.

  This crisis, although on the surface the most striking thing that happens to Mick, is really subordinate to her feeling for Singer and to her struggle against the social forces working against her. In the fall when she enters Vocational High she prefers to take “mechanical shop” with the boys rather than attend the stenographic classes. In this class she meets a fifteen-year-old boy, Harry West, and gradually they become good comrades. They are attracted to each other by a similar intensity of character and by their mutual interest in mechanics. Harry, like Mick, is made restless by an abundance of undirected energy. In the spring they try to construct a glider together in the Kellys’ backyard and, although because of inadequate materials they can never get the contraption to fly, they work at it very hard together. All of this time their friendship is blunt and childish.

  In the late spring Mick and Harry begin going out together on Saturday for little trips in the country. Harry has a bicycle and they go out about ten miles from town to a certain creek in the woods. Feelings that neither of them fully understands begin to come about between them. The outcome is very abrupt. They start to the country one Saturday afternoon in great excitement and full of childish animal energy—and before they return they have, without any premeditation at all, experienced each other sexually. It is absolutely necessary that this facet of the book be treated with extreme reticence. What has happened is made plain through a short, halting dialogue between Mick and Harry in which a great deal is implied but very little is actually said.

  Although it is plain that this premature experience will affect both of them deeply, there is the feeling that the eventual results will be more serious for Harry than for Mick. Their actions are rather more mature than would be expected. However, they both decide that they will never want to marry or have the same experience again. They are both stunned by a sense of evil. They decide that they will never see each other again—and that night Harry takes a can of soup from his kitchen shelf, breaks his nickel bank, and hitchhikes from the town to Atlanta where he hopes to find some sort of job.

  The restraint with which this scene between Mick and Harry must be told cannot be stressed too strongly.

  For a while Mick is greatly oppressed by this that has happened to her. She turns to her music more vehemently than ever. She has always looked on sex with a cold, infantile remoteness—and now the experience she has had seems to be uniquely personal and strange. She tries ruthlessly to forget about it, but the secret weighs on her mind. She feels that if she can just tell some person about it she would be easier. But she is not close enough to her sisters and her mother to confide in them, and she has no especial friends of her own age. She wants to tell Mr. Singer and she tries to imagine how to go about this. She is still taking consolation in the possibility that she might be able to confide in Mr. Singer about this when the mute kills himself.

  After the death of Singer, Mick feels very alone and defenseless. She works even harder than ever with her music. But the pressing economic condition of her family which has been growing steadily worse all
through the past months is now just about as bad as it can be. The two elder children in the family are barely able to support themselves and can be of no help to their parents. It is essential that Mick get work of some kind. She fights this bitterly, for she wants to go back at least one more year to High School and to have some sort of chance with her music. But nothing can be done and at the beginning of the summer she gets a job working from eight-thirty to six-thirty as a clerk in a ten-cent store. The work is very wearing, but when the manager wants any of the girls to stay overtime he always picks Mick—for she can stand longer and endure more fatigue than any other person in the store.

  The essential traits of Mick Kelly 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.

  JAKE BLOUNT

  Jake’s struggle with social conditions is direct and conscious. The spirit of revolution is very strong in him. His deepest motive is to do all that he can to change the predatory, unnatural social conditions existing today. It is his tragedy that his energies can find no channel in which to flow. He is fettered by abstractions and conflicting ideas—and in practical application he can do no more than throw himself against windmills. He feels that the present social tradition is soon to collapse completely, but his dreams of the civilization of the future are alternately full of hope and of distrust.