Carson McCullers is buried in the same cemetery in Nyack, New York, as the painter Edward Hopper – surely fitting, as they have been well-described as “two of America’s most penetrating mediums of loneliness”. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter must rank as one of the most impressive of debut novels, all the more remarkable when one considers that it was published when McCullers was only 23.
The novel is set in a town in the US south, probably similar to the one in which the author herself grew up. It centres on the enigmatic John Singer, a 32-year-old deaf mute who finds himself alone after sharing 10 years of a routine with his only friend and fellow mute, Spiros, who has been confined in a mental hospital after increasingly unstable behaviour. When Singer moves into the Kelly family boarding house, he becomes the focus of four lonely people who create in him the image of their own desires.
The four are cafe-owner Biff Brannon; political radical Jake Blount, a heavy drinker; Benedict Copeland, a black doctor; and Mick Kelly, a 12-year-old tomboyish and inquiring girl with unattainable dreams of a musical career. They are all estranged from family and community and alienated by their thwarted desires and ambitions.
Singer experiences the agony of isolation because the one person he cares for has been taken away, but his infinite gentleness somehow consoles the other four as he becomes their confidant.
When McCullers sent her manuscript to the publishers, she described the story as the journey of five lonely and isolated people to find something greater than themselves. Tennessee Williams, her contemporary and friend, said that she “owned the heart and the deep understanding of it, but in addition she had that ‘tongue of angels’ that gave her power to sing of it, to make of it an anthem”.
The deceptively simple prose lends great dignity to the wants and disappointments of the unhappy characters. Although they are misfits, they are somehow made memorable because of a deep, underlying kindness informing the writer’s vision.
