The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

Frankie Adams is an “unjoined person.” Part of her craves connection, part of her is attracted by disconnection. She is contrary: sometimes sweet, sometimes bad-tempered; sometimes practical sometimes ethereal. She is an innocent, a twelve-year-old still baffled by the adult world and simultaneously drawn to and repelled by it. She is deeply in love with her brother and his soon-to-be bride and the focus of the book is her implacable but doomed resolve that, after the wedding, the three of them will drive off together into the wilderness. 

Read on a simple level, The Member of the Wedding is a gentle, beautiful, witty and sad story of adolescent confusion. Even read on this level it is a great work. But it goes deeper than this, of course. Otherwise we would be left with a novel presenting only the cliched oxymorons of teenage angst, that life can be bitter and sweet, funny and sad. That isn’t to decry such works – they have a power of their own – but Carson McCullers’s perception of human nature goes far beyond such truisms. Her disconnection is a cry for love, and her love is fractured by disconnection.

In The Member of the Wedding, she presents us with three fragile human beings: the gangly outsider Frankie; her black, four-times-married maid, Berenice and her first cousin, six-year-old John Henry. The interplay between them is remarkable. These ordinary people, none of them eloquent in the ways of human love, nonetheless manage to reveal extraordinary truths. Each has been born into a fixed identity, into a role that society expects of them – Berenice already to service; Frankie, in time, to marriage and children; and John Henry, even later, to a lifetime in the workplace of men. But each of these characters, in their own way, eschews convention.

The pre-war certainties of gender and race give way here to an understanding, simply, of people as people. John Henry reckons people should be “half boy and half girl”; Frankie wants them to change back and forward between sexes; Berenice imagines a world where everyone is light brown with blue eyes and black hair. Theirs are worlds of fairness and goodness. They even begin to criticise the Creator and each, in turn, assumes the role of “Holy Lord God” and decrees a better world. John Henry’s is “a mixture of delicious and freak”; Berenice’s contains no war, “[n]o stiff corpses hanging from the Europe trees and no Jews murdered anywhere”; Frankie’s is “the best of the three worlds”, in which she builds on Berenice’s basic concept, but adding “an aeroplane and a motor-cycle to each person, a world club with certificates and badges, and a better law of gravity”.

Their conversations around the kitchen table are perfectly judged. They are slightly stylised, so that some of the subject matter, when considered rationally, would be beyond at least the two children but, even so, the fictive dream holds: their visions of a better world are lucid and appealing and we remain in thrall to these three uncommon sages.

This is no, Eden, however. McCullers is no Pangloss and the imagined worlds of her characters are ultimately revealed not to be El Dorado. Although wildly humorous and broadly uplifting, The Member of the Wedding is explicit in its depiction of the disconnection of modern life. The experiences of its characters make this clear.

The central character is Frankie, our free-spirited, lonely, happy/unhappy, bored/engaged young tomboy. Her mother died giving birth to her and her father is remote and uncomprehending of his daughter. Frankie feels herself an outsider and dreams of escape. The novel begins:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.

She has dreams, and as the novel begins those dreams coalesce around her fantasy of accompanying her brother and his fiancee on their imminent honeymoon and beyond. She will, literally, become a “member of the wedding” and the three of them will head afterwards into the wilderness of Alaska and eventually they will make “thousands of friends, thousands and thousands and thousands of friends.” They will be, she concludes, “members of the whole world”. Thus, we have escape and flight, those essentials of freedom; but we also have family connection, the assertion of familial bonds more loving than those attaching Frankie to her father; and, more than that, we have a strong sense of human connection, a promise of companionship among the entire human family. The confusion wrought by her childhood alienation is thus, in Frankie’s eyes, brought to a perfect resolution: freedom, with control; escape, with ties; family, with community; private, with public. In Frankie’s adolescent mind, such contradictions offer entirely practicable solutions to the intractable problems of loneliness and hope and fear.

But Frankie’s entrance into adulthood is not, as we readers quickly intuit, going to be so easy. The day of the wedding is, naturally, a disaster. The bride manqué is spurned. But even before this, Frankie’s lessons are harsh. Styling herself F. Jasmine to separate her grown-up self from the childish Frankie she has come to hate, she goes into town and enters a bar. Here, she is mistaken by a soldier for a much older girl and, unable to refuse, goes with him to his room, where he attempts to seduce her. F. Jasmine is so innocent she doesn’t even realise what is happening, only later making a connection between this and an earlier experience, when she witnessed the lodger and his wife in their room, as the lodger appeared to be having some form of fit. Growing up, then, is not an idyllic rite of passage, and those who dismiss The Member of the Wedding in such terms are not doing it justice.

Accompanying Frankie through much of the narrative are Berenice and John Henry. Berenice, old (“I bet you are forty years old,” says Frankie) and wise, represents the adulthood to which Frankie aspires, and John Henry, her young cousin, the childhood from which she is retreating. The truth, of course, is more complicated than that: at various times the woman retains the sense of a child, and the boy reveals the insight of a man. But, in this way, the three form a unique bond. At one point, one of the most beautiful in the novel, they each burst into tears at precisely the same moment: “suddenly it started, though why and how they did not know; the three of them began to cry... and though their reasons were three different reasons, yet they started at the same instant as though they had agreed together.” It is one of the most arresting scenes I’ve read in a long time, a middle-aged black woman, a tomboy half-girl, half-woman and an infant boy, sitting round a table, crying. It is inexplicably moving.

Berenice is lost in the past. She has married four times, but the latter three occasions are to men whom she married only because, in different ways, they reminded her of her true love, her first husband Ludie, who died of pneumonia the same year that Frankie was born. She married him when she was thirteen – that is when she was only a year older than Frankie is now. Thus, while Frankie is straining to embrace the future and move into adulthood, Berenice’s emotional development has stalled completely: an adult, dismissive of Frankie’s childish whims, she is nonetheless stuck in the past, holding to memories of younger, happier times, and is as confounded by visions of the future as the confused child.

The final member of the triumvirate is John Henry West. How difficult is it to write convincingly of a six-year-old main character? Cormac McCarthy tried and failed in The Crossing: in the early drafts Boyd Parham is only seven, but by the time of the published draft he has aged to fourteen. But John Henry West is a living, breathing boy. In a way, in some emotional or spiritual sense, he is the eldest of the three, wise beyond his years, calm and sensible, except when he is covering the walls of the kitchen with “queer, child drawings” or picturing the freaks from the Chattahoochee Exposition who so excite his interest. His heartbreaking fate represents the end of childhood and, no matter how much we always want to break that bond at the time, age and experience and weariness usually return us, at one time or another, to a sense of nostalgia for those lost days. John Henry reminds us that we cannot.

So what is The Member of the Wedding about? For McCullers, it is about belonging. She writes:

I to think the idea of wanting to belong haunts every child. And not only children. I think it is the primary question: ‘Who am I? What am I? Or, where do I belong? and where can I belong?’ But childhood or adolescence is a time of crisis, and such questions are more haunting, more immediate, then.

It is that, and it’s more than that. Belonging is a basic human desire but it brings with it, too, a sense of need. And it requires love, and faith, and trust. The necessity of love and the difficulty of love – whether that is romantic love or familial love or societal love – that is what this novel addresses. That something so necessary and so beautiful can be, at the same time, so painful is what makes love such a difficult emotion to manage. And that is why our human connections are always so fragile.

The saddest, most beautiful reflection of this sad and beautiful book is that, throughout, Frankie is connected. All along, she is indeed part of a marriage of three – a marriage between her and Berenice and John Henry. But, as it transpires, this marriage is as illusory as the one in Frankie’s imagination, and it fractures into tragedy. The triumph of The Member of the Wedding is that, through this tragedy, a sense of hope remains.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

I suspect if I’d read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter twenty-five years ago I’d have become the bore in the corner telling everyone how they just have to read this book. Perhaps I’ll make up for lost time now. There are very few books I’ve finished and immediately wanted to start reading all over again. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the first. The Tin Drum was second. One Hundred Years of Solitude next. That may be about it. And now The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers was twenty-three when she wrote this book. I don’t know how she did it. At twenty-three I had come nowhere close to understanding myself, let alone the rest of humanity. At twenty-three McCullers created a living world of living people, lonely and sad human beings, disconnected, wanting, longing, failing, falling prey to a world for which they were ill-equipped. Human beings who failed and were failed.

The novel focuses on five central characters, essentially

archetypes who represent humanity and its problems. In Dr Copeland we have the embodiment of the civil rights movement and the struggle against racism; in Mick, a thirteen-year-old girl, we see the travails of young  (especially poor) women growing up in a male-dominated world; in Jake we have the communist conscience, the struggle of the worker against the system; Singer, the deaf-mute, is the eternal outsider, searching for companionship; and Biff, keeping his cafe open throughout the night even though it is uneconomic to do so, because he can think of nothing else to do and because nobody else is doing it, is slowly ageing, watching his life disappear into sameness and disappointment. If this sounds contrived, writing by numbers, a character for every ‘issue’, then don’t be fooled. This may be the basic structure of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but it is far from rigid, and the episodic plot, in which each of the characters interact in turn, falling in and out of the action, feels beautifully organic. It is a masterclass in marshalling your resources.

In particular, a significant strength of the novel is the way that McCullers uses voice to develop character. The narrative is presented in third person but takes the perspective of each of the major characters in turn. Thus, we see the development of the five principals from each other’s perspective. For example, when we begin to discern the otherworldliness of Singer, it is Biff who tells us that Jake and Mick have both turned him into a ‘sort of home-made God’ because his muteness allows them to project their idealised visions of goodness onto him. Or, of Doctor Copeland, we learn from his daughter, Portia, that he ‘done lost God and turned his back to religion’ and all his troubles stem from that loss. Explaining her approach, McCullers wrote:

There are five different styles of writing - one for each of the main characters who is treated subjectively and an objective, legendary style for the mute. The object of each of these methods of writing is to come as close as possible to the inner psychic rhythms of the character from whose point of view it is written.

This explanation also reveals another of the great strengths of the novel, the way it melds realism and mythicism. Ihab Hassan sees this as a problem with the text, suggesting that McCullers fails to successfully integrate ‘social man’ and ‘individual man’, that is, outer reality (history) and inner reality (psychology). I cannot agree. The structure of the novel is controlled perfectly and there is a clear progression from the characters and their internal preoccupations to the dangers of the wider world (the novel is set in 1939, in the lead-up to the Second World War, and culminates in a race riot). The key to this structural cohesion is the character of Singer, the mute. He is both real and unreal, occupying an important place in the lives of the other characters but existing, himself, in a kind of alternative reality where he and his mute friend, Antonapoulos, consigned early in the novel to an asylum, can continue to live in harmony. The ‘home-made God’, as Biff describes him, is much treasured by the other characters, though he himself is completely unaware of this. And in the novel’s final part, after Singer’s death, their reactions to that death help to solidify their beliefs. Each of them acts, makes a statement in the real world, sees their interaction with that real world develop. Thus, a strong element of realism in the novel is manifested through the subtle use of McCullers’ ‘legendary style’.

Oliver Evans, writing in 1962, notes that ‘[i]t is impossible to understand Mrs. McCullers' work unless one realizes that she conceives of fiction chiefly as parable. The reader who concerns himself exclusively with the realistic level of her stories will never fully appreciate them.’ Evans goes on to suggest that narrative is always secondary to allegory in McCullers’ work, describing her as a ‘didactic writer’ whose goal is to teach truths about human nature rather than to entertain. Again, I disagree. There are moments when the novel does slip into didacticism, such as when the Jewish boy, Harry Minowitz lectures Mick on Nazi Germany or some of Jake’s more laboured political pronouncements, but to describe the overall allegorical tone as didactic does McCullers a disservice. Evans is correct, however, to stress that a literal reading of McCullers in realist vein is unlikely to be rewarding.

Such an approach – and this is where I think Hassan’s analysis falls down, underestimates the depth of the central theme. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a novel about human love. It is about our aspirations and our needs, the concomitants of fruitful, fulfilled lives, the potential for happiness, the danger of despair. It is, therefore, intensely personal: the novel explores these individuals’ lives, what it is that makes them who they are. Yet it does so against a realist backdrop in which Dr Copeland suffers vicious racism; in which, surrounded by friends, Singer fails to find friendship; in which Jake rails helplessly at the downtrodden workers who cannot or will not help themselves; where Mick finds her dreams tempered by harsh economic reality; and where Biff, that lonely seeker of companionship, continues his fruitless quest. People close to these characters die; others are abused horribly. The world turns and history proceeds in violence. And these people, these poor symbols of humanity, are inextricably bound to it. Alienation and isolation afflict them. Through it all, their preoccupation is to find love.

All of this may sound as though the novel presents a hopeless world, but far from it. There is much despair for the characters here, but their plight shows a path for us. Connection, communication, this is the key. Thus, the tragedy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is demonstrated by each of the characters’ desperate search for communication, human empathy. They all want somebody to know. But ultimately each is incapable of knowing anyone else. Each is sloughed in their own travails and, when opportunities arise, they fail to take them. Thus, Dr Copeland and Jake come close to agreement on the need for action against the increasing racist tendency, but end up repelling one another and parting acrimoniously. Earlier, Copeland even manages to alienate his own family, from whom he is already largely estranged but who, through his daughter, Portia, attempt a reconciliation with him; it fails because Copeland proves quite incapable of hiding his disappointment at his children’s meek acceptance of racism. Meanwhile, Singer remains oblivious of the wellspring of goodwill that surrounds him. Mick’s attempts to help her young brother backfire. On the only occasion when all five main characters are present together, in Singer’s room, there is only an awkward silence. They all want to communicate, to express themselves, to share the human experience with others, but they lack the wherewithal to achieve it. How may they - we - attain fulfillment?

McCullers’ remedy, one suspects, is religious, and there are strong religious resonances throughout The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. However, whether one takes a religious or secular view, the predicament remains as she describes it – the disconnection of the individual from society, the difficulty of achieving community.

In this vein, many critics have argued that Singer is a Christ-figure. Jan Whitt, for example, suggest that the remaining characters ‘seek to work out their own salvation’ through communicating with the mute Singer who becomes, as a result, a ‘paralyzed Christ figure, so restricted by the expectations of others that he is fictionalized by them.’ There is certainly a strong argument for Singer-as-Christ. People are drawn to him, they see in him whatever it is that they aspire to in the name of goodness. They see him as a conduit to fulfillment. And this is the great irony of the novel. It is the mute man who can show the others how to communicate, how to achieve their aspirations. But, of course, they fail. They sit in silence, mistrusting one another, resentful that they cannot be alone with Singer. And this, it seems to me, is a powerful message: communication with one’s saviour, whoever or whatever that may be, should not come at the expense of your fellow humanity. For a so-called religious novel that seems to me a radical call to humanist faith.

Therefore, it seems too simplistic to consider this to be a religious novel. It is certainly spiritual, in as much as it presents a quest for understanding, but too much remains unresolved for it to seriously be claimed by those of a religious persuasion to be a religious novel. In this, it appears to mirror McCullers’ own relationship with religion. Much like Herman Melville, she was drawn to religion and aspired to belief, but found such belief troublesome. Writing about The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers described its themes as a ‘unifying principle or God.’ Note that this is a principle or God, not of God. A search for godness is not the same thing as a search for God. And godness, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, will ultimately be found in humanity.

Christ – goodness – is in each of us and all of us, humanity as a collective, and it is our failing that we cannot see it. We fail to reach out to one another and, in so doing, we fail ourselves and we fail each other. This is what The Heart is a Lonely Hunter reminds us.

Now, you just have to read this book...

The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

It’s hard to believe that The Man with the Golden Arm was written in 1949. It seems so fresh, and so contemporary, and its approach to drugs and criminality so open, that one wouldn’t believe it could be the product of buttoned-up, frightened post-war America. The collection of deadbeats and low level criminals depicted in its pages is remarkable.

The Chicago of the novel seems to sit somewhere between Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and the apocalyptic Africa of William Burroughs’ Wild Boys. The depiction of the daily lives of these characters is more realistic than either of those novels: Steinbeck’s Mack and the Boys, however impressively they are depicted, have the whiff of idealism about them, while Burroughs, even when he is chronicling the more savage side of drug-taking, always runs the risk of romanticising the life. Algren does none of this. Like the characters of Carson McCullers, Algren’s are real, flesh and blood, as prone to terrible mistakes as honourable acts. Reading The Man with the Golden Arm, we believe we are in Chicago’s Polish Downtown, and we believe in the moral and social disintegration of Frankie Machine, and we believe that, despite this, the community of which he is a part will be sustained. It is an outstanding example of naturalistic writing that can lay bare the deprivations and assorted ills of a society and still leave one feeling optimistic about human nature.

The eponymous Man is Frank Majcinek, known to all as Frankie Machine, a stud-poker dealer regarded as the best in the business, hence the golden arm of the title. Addicted to morphine after being treated with it for an injury sustained in World War 2, however, his life subsequently begins to unravel. His fabled golden arm fails him. He falls into crime. His wife is in a wheelchair as a result of his drunk-driving. He ends up in jail. His mistress leaves him. Worse ensues. This sounds like a catalogue of calamity, and it is, so how can one argue that The Man with the Golden Arm is an uplifting piece of fiction?

Well, the first thing to note is that the novel was, as one might expect, controversial in its day. Norman Podhoretz, for one, thought it glorified the underclass at the expense of decent society. Such an assertion from Podhoretz, of course, is proof positive that the novel most certainly does not do that: being attacked by Podhoretz is a clear indicator that you’re doing something right and the more he criticises the more you should feel satisfied with your efforts. And Algren, while clearly depicting the underclass of his novel in a more positive way than neocons like Podhoretz would deem healthy, nonetheless cannot be accused of naive liberalism. This can be seen most clearly in the character of Captain Bednar.

Bednar is one of the most human characters in the story. His humanism is not some starry-eyed idealism: he knows the criminals he deals with are no good and will amount to nothing. And yet he craves some form of connection with them. We are told, from his point of view, that “[i]t was patently wrong that men locked up by the law should laugh while the man who locked them there no longer felt able even to cry.” He is trapped inside his own unhappiness. “I know you,” he says to them. “You think you’re all members of one another, somethin’ like that.” And yes, their community is “something like that”, but again not in a romanticised way. Those critics of the novel, like Podhoretz, who suggest it is burdened by liberal romanticising of poverty and the poorer classes haven’t read the novel, just the cliched version of it their political views force upon it. Again from Bednar’s point of view, we are told:

For every man was secretly against the law in his heart, the captain knew; and it was the heart that mattered. There were no men innocent of intent to transgress. If they were human – look out. What was needed, he had learned long ago, was higher walls and stronger bars – there was no limit to what they were capable of.

Somewhere along the line he had learned, too, that not one was worth the saving. So he’d been right in saving none but himself. And if that had left them all to be members of one another, then it had left him to be a member of no one at all. Had, indeed, left him feeling tonight like the most fallen of anybody.

This is extraordinary stuff. The captain simultaneously condemns and pardons, disapproves and understands, wants and rejects, seeks harmony and craves isolation. His conflict is total and despairing. There are no easy answers, either for him or for us. But there are questions, so many questions. And this is why the novel is ultimately uplifting: it forces us to question preconceptions, to wonder, to empathise, to criticise. It forces us out of the comfort of our own prejudices to think about things and people and society in radically different ways.

What is truly astounding about the novel is its language. It is (before it was even invented) hiphop, rap. Above all, it is jazz, a hymn to the motion and poetry of the rhythms of life. Take this passage, told from the viewpoint of Sophie, trapped upstairs in her wheelchair, listening to the activity down below:

The smell of despair, the odor of whisky and the scent of the night’s ten thousand dancers, the perfume and the powder sprinked across the deep purple roar of barrelhouse laughter, the armpit sweat cutting the blue cigar smoke and the hoarse cries of those soon to grow hoarser with love, scents and sounds of all things soon to be spread up through a thousand rooms into her own room. Till the drinkers and the dancers, the gamblers and the hustlers and the yearning lovers came dancing and loving, came gambling and hustling in a wavering neon-colored cloud down her walls.

That writing is so good it makes you shiver.

Hello

Hello to the blog world - again.

I used to run a blog some time ago, using my writing name. I've given that up now and I'm writing under my own name, so I'm starting afresh.

I'm a writer who loves reading, and this blog will cover both aspects. I have an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in American Literature, both from the University of Hull. Before returning to academia, I did a lot of writing, mostly short stories, and was successful in a number of competitions and was published in various journals and ezines.

After taking a break from my own writing to study for my PhD I returned refreshed and moved onto novels. I have written one novel, Cloudland, for which I'm currently seeking representation, and I'm currently on a second draft of my second novel, based on a true crime in Scotland in the 1930s.

So, hello and welcome