The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
1940 (reprinted 1993) • The Modern Library
430 pages / 0679424741 (hardcover)

The Village of Nyack sits on the Hudson River in southern New York State with a population of 6,700. A shipbuilding and manufacturing center in past eras, it is nowadays a middle class residential area dotted by the recent presence of figures like actress Helen Hayes and painter Edward Hopper. This was also the chosen home of Carson McCullers, who worked closely with Hayes on the stage, and would become the endpoint of her turbulent journey that began in Georgia fifty years earlier.

It’s obvious that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter stands as a magnificent achievement by a young author, with McCullers’s debut novel ranked 17th on the Modern Library list of 100 best novels in English. Yet the fact that McCullers published the novel at 23 (Dickens, by comparison, began publishing sections of The Pickwick Papers when he’d just turned 24) tends to cloud Heart’s place in the literary canon as a great work regardless of age. When compared to any American author at any point in his or her career – Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, Cather, Tarkington, Updike – McCullers’s work in Heart easily holds sway with that of her colleagues.

The first test for a novel to be considered ‘great’ is its ability to rise above era and location, becoming a thing of universal significance. Heart could’ve easily restricted itself in meaning to the American South but, like Faulkner and O’Connor’s novels, it became far more. While it addresses the social predicaments of the South during the late 1930s, Heart encompasses all people with a theme that afflicts millions: the desire to fit in. Even in these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, huge shares of the human race do not enjoy inclusion and the social divides, caused through history and its continued prejudices, seem unable to be bridged.

What makes Heart special is the lingering emptiness and prevalent sense (for Whites) of shame that we feel after reading. All of the novel’s characters are vividly drawn and cannot be easily forgotten. McCullers, even in her characters' most debased hours, avoids cheap pity and instead uses a simple, non-emotive narrative that forces readers to look at themselves and produce their own judgments. McCullers is so restrained in her telling of the story that we have to find the sympathy in our own bodies, something that only the most coldhearted person could fail to do.

There is very little to say about McCullers’s prose style, which in Heart is only blemished on rare occasions by repetition: constant reference to the sky’s color becomes grating and ‘that were never said before,’ in speaking of the mute John Singer and his friends, really does not add to the dramatic effect – it just looks a bit overwrought. Her syntax flows easily; there is not a poorly-placed word to really be found and McCullers is excellent in conveying Southern life by using habits and speech in select places rather than bogging the story down with it. At 23, her writing already has distinction and is almost completely free of doubt and experimentation.

First-time readers of McCullers might ask questions in the opening 114 pages (part I of III) about where this novel is going, since it’s written in the older mode of introducing characters before moving forward the plot. All doubt should be dispelled, however, when the extensive middle section kicks in and we begin to experience the day-to-day trials that make Southern Whites and Blacks alike unable to reach a higher sphere of existence. There is something of us in each character that McCullers enlivens; Mick Kelly’s pains as a burgeoning teenager will hold particular resonance for women, just as Benedict Copeland, an overworked and idealistic doctor, should carry impact in the Black community. Above all, Heart is a novel that appeals to many people for many things, a fact that will assure its survival.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is available from several publishers, including the Modern Library in an attractive hardcover edition from 1993. The ML edition is in familiarly clean and easy-to-read type and has a short bio on McCullers. Other labels include Mariner, Bantam Press, and the first edition run by Houghton Mifflin.

Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poems

Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poems
1957 • University of California Press (translated by C.F. MacIntyre)
192 pages / 0520008014 (paperback)

There are quite a few similes that can be used to describe Stéphane Mallarmé's verse: a sheet of gauze, a cloud, a pane of frosted glass. All of the comparisons point to distortion, one of the prevailing trends in fin de siècle art that connected romanticism to 20th century modernism.

Useful background reading is the essay 'Concepts of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century French Literature' by James M. Smith, which appeared in a 1953 issue of Studies in Philology. Smith, a literature professor at Emory University, supports the belief that late-19th century French writers such as Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Valéry confused true inventiveness with erudition and overt analysis. And in reading Mallarmé, this is too often what comes to mind. The Parisian, who died on the cusp of major artistic and social change in 1898, left behind a modest collection of work that has all of the jadedness, overloaded imagery, and desperation that is standard for his time.

C.F. (Carlyle Ferren) MacIntyre's little volume of Mallarmé translations was a standard-bearer in its day. It was originally published in 1957, after MacIntyre had agonized for 18 years over conveying the poet's work in a language often incompatible with French expression and cadence. The Selected Poems offers 43 works that draw from Mallarmé's more traditional writings. Included are his famous 'L'Après-midi d'un Faune,' the pastoral that influenced Claude Debussy's Prélude; the triptych 'Hérodiade'; and tributes to artists such as Baudelaire and Poe.

MacIntyre does what he can to transpose the ideas, rhythms, and rhymes that are frequently lost in English. While he manages to carry over some of the meter and rhyming elements cleanly, he struggles in other areas such as line groupings and Mallarmé's complex vocabulary. Mallarmé worked in a free-form language that places musicality over grammatical accuracy, which makes a one-for-one translation neigh impossible. It is to some credit that MacIntyre did not go the route of other translators in loosening the structure or resorting to prose, though his mission was in many ways futile.

MacIntyre elucidates much in 50 pages of notes, though there are plenty of times along the way when he gives into pretention and looks to show off his vast knowledge. A professor at UCLA and Berkeley, MacIntyre knew his subject thoroughly and is quite willing to remind us. Instead of keeping to watered-down explanations, he freely refers to locations, writings, and people that are not commonly known in the English-speaking world and quotes French and German texts without offering translations into English (could you imagine having to look all of this up before the Internet existed?). He also doesn't bother to translate the poem titles or inscriptions which, needless to say, would help a bit.

In the meantime, Mallarmé's poetry itself offers difficulties. Reading this volume felt like a trying exercise, with one poem soon becoming indistinguishable from the others. He was one of the many to come down with that -itis that struck art at the turn of the century, when Europe was lurching from the last scraps of Romanticism into the Postromantic and Modernist worlds. Symbolism, a champion of indirect reference and 'fogginess' to examine life, has the feel of a struggle to overcome its forebearers' achievements and create anew.

The predominant feeling I got from these poems was of being suffocated by ideas and images - simply too much furniture in the room. Mallarmé's best poems of the volume are, not surprisingly, those with a clearer sense of organization and story arch. These include the well-known 'Faun' and 'Hérodiade,' a triptych profiling Salomé's mother that Mallarmé intended as a larger work but never completed. Such poems feel more deliberate in their settings and trains of thought compared to the vague blobs of 'Sainte' and 'A la nue,' which are crammed with allusion but have very little end product. There is also plenty of repetition in the lesser works that brings out Mallarmé's fetishes like women's hair, tombs, fire-torches, and the sonnet form.

Mallarmé was not alone in this poetic swamp that gave off bright colors and sweet fragrances - the 'synesthesia' that psychiatrists talk about. His work became a standard of the symbolist and decadence movements and influenced a long line of writers, composers, painters, and sculptors who bridged the 19th century into the 20th. His experiments with how poetry appears on the printed page (hypertext) were also important to later trends in graphic arts. Mallarmé's poetry needs to be revisited on these grounds alone.

MacIntyre's volume from the University of California Press is fairly easy to obtain, as it's been circulating for nearly 60 years. If you are looking for a less 'bookish' translation, you may want to consider UC's newer volume by Henry Michael Weinfield, published in 2011. The Weinfield compilation is more 'layman friendly,' with a helpful introductory essay and notes that offer more basic background and translations of titles and inscriptions. It also includes late period poems by Mallarmé that built on the concept of hypertext, which MacIntyre chose not to touch.