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: (i) 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 Singet'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 superiority.
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.
His attitude toward his fellow man vacillates continually between hate and the most unselfish love. His attitude toward the principles of communism are much the same as his attitude toward man. Deep inside him he is an earnest communist, but he feels that in concrete application all communistic societies up until the present have degenerated into bureaucracies. He is unwilling to compromise and his is the attitude of all or nothing. His inner and outward motives ate so contradictory at times that it is hardly an exaggeration to speak of the man as being deranged. The burden which he has taken on himself is too much for him.
Jake is the product of his peculiar environment. During the time of this book he is twenty-nine years old. He was born in a textile town in South Carolina, a town very similar to the one in which the action of this book takes place. His childhood was passed among conditions of absolute poverty and degradation. At the age of nine years (this was the time of the last World War) he was working fourteen hours a day in a cotton mill. He had to snatch for himself whatever education he could get. At twelve he left home on his own initiative and his self-teachings and wanderings began. At one time or another he has lived and worked in almost every section of this country.
Jake's inner instability reflects markedly on his outer personality. In physique he suggests a stunted giant. He is nervous and irritable. All of his life he has had difficulty in keeping his lips from betraying his emotions—in order to overcome this he has grown a flourishing mustache which only accentuates this weakness and gives him a comic, jetky look. Because of his nervous whims it is hard for him to get along with his neighbors and people hold aloof from him. This causes him either to drop into self-conscious buffoonery or else to take on an exaggerated misplaced dignity.
If Jake cannot act he has to talk. The mute is an excellent repository for conversation. Singer attracts Jake because of his seeming stability and calm. He is a stranger in the town and the circumstance of his loneliness makes him seek out the mute. Talking to Singer and spending the evening with him becomes a sedative habit with him. At the end, when the mute is dead, he feels as though he had lost a certain inner ballast. He has the vague feeling that he has been tricked, too, and that all of the conclusions and visions that he has told the mute are forever lost.
Jake depends heavily on alcohol—and he can drink in tremendous quantities with no seeming ill effect. Occasionally he will try to break himself of this habit, but he is as unable to discipline himself in this as he is in more important matters.
Jake's stay in the town ends in a fiasco. As usual, he has been trying during these months to do what he can to right social injustice. At the end of the book the growing resentment between the Negroes and the white factory workers who patronize the show is nourished by several trifling quarrels between individuals. Day by day one thing leads to another and then late on Saturday night there is a wild brawl. (This scene occurs during the week after Singer's death.) All the white workers fight bitterly against the Negroes. Jake tries to keep order for a while and then he, too, loses control of himself and goes berserk. The fight grows into an affair in which there is no organization at all and each man is simply fighting for himself. This brawl is finally broken up by the police and several persons are arrested. Jake escapes but the fight seems to him to be a symbol of his own life. Singer is dead and he leaves the town just as he came to it—a stranger.
DR. BENEDICT MADY COPELAND
Dr. Copeland presents the bitter spectacle of the educated Negro in the South. Dr. Copeland, like Jake Blount, is warped by his long years of effort to do his part to change certain existing conditions. At the opening of the book he is fifty-one years old, but already he is an old man.
He has practiced among the Negroes of the town for twenty-five years. He has always felt, though, that his work as a doctor was only secondary to his efforts at teaching his people. His ideas are laboriously thought out and inflexible. For a long while he was interested mainly in birth control, as he felt that indiscriminate sexual relations and haphazard and prolific propagation were responsible in a large part for the weakness of the Negro. He is greatly opposed to miscegenation—but this opposition comes mainly from personal pride and resentment. The great flaw in all of his theories is that he will not admit the racial culture of the Negro. Theoretically he is against the grafting of the Negroid way of living to the Caucasian. His ideal would be a race of Negro ascetics.
Parallel with Dr. Copeland's ambition for his race is his love for his family. But because of his inflexibility his relations with his four children are a complete failure. His own temperament is partly responsible for this, too. All of his life Dr. Copeland has gone against the grain of his own racial nature. His passionate asceticism and the strain of his work have their effect on him. At home, when he felt the children escaping from his influence, he was subject to wild and sudden outbreaks of rage. This lack of control was finally the cause of his separation from his wife and children.
While still a young man Dr. Copeland suffered at one time from pulmonary tuberculosis, a disease to which the Negro is particularly susceptible. His illness was arrested—but now when he is fifty-one years old his left lung is involved again. If there were an adequate sanatorium he would enter it for treatment—but of course there is no decent hospital for Negroes in the state. He ignores the disease and keeps up his practice—although now his work is not as extensive as it was in the past.
To Dr. Copeland the mute seems to be the embodiment of the control and asceticism of a certain type of white man. All of his life Dr. Copeland has suffered because of slights and humiliations from the white race. Singer's politeness and consideration make Dr. Copeland pitiably grateful. He is always careful to keep up his "dignity" with the mute—but Singer's friendship is of great importance to him.
The mute's face has a slightly Semitic cast and Dr. Copeland thinks that he is a Jew. The Jewish people, because they are a racially persecuted minority, have always interested Dr. Copeland. Two of his heroes are Jews—Benedict Spinoza and Karl Marx.
Dr. Copeland realizes very fully and bitterly that his life work has been a failure. Although he is respected to the point of awe by most of the Negroes of the town his teachings have been too foreign to the nature of the race to have any palpable effect.
In the beginning of the book Dr. Copeland's economic situation is very uncertain. His house and most of his medical equipment are mortgaged. For fifteen years he had received a small but steady income from his work as a member of the staff of the city hospital—but his personal ideas about social situations have led to his discharge. As a pretext for dismissal he was accused, and rightly, of performing abortions in certain cases where a child was an economic impossibility. Since the loss of this post, Dr. Copeland has had no dependable income. His patients are for the most part totally unable to pay fees for treatment. His illness is a hindrance and he steadily loses ground. At the end the house is taken away from him and after a lifetime of service he is left a pauper. His wife's relations take him out to spend the short remaining part of his life on their farm in the country.
BIFF BRANNON
Of the four people who revolve around the mute Biff is the most disinterested. It is typical of him that he is always the observer. About Biff there is much that is austere and classical. In contrast with the driving enthusiasms of Mick and Jake and Dr. Copeland, Biff is nearly always coldly reflective. The second chapter of the book opens with him and in the closing pages his meditations bring the work to a thoughtful and objective finish.
Biff's humorous aspects are to be brought out in all the parts dealing with him. Technically he is a thoroughly rounded character in that he will be seen completely from all sides. At the time the book opens he is forty-four years old and has spent the best part of his life standing behind the cash register in the restaurant and making his own particular observations. He has a passion for detail. It is typical of him that he has a small room in the back of his place devoted to a complete and neatly catalogued file of the daily evening newspaper dating back without a break for eighteen years. His problem is to get the main outlines of a situation from all the cluttering details in his mind, and he goes about this with his own painstaking patience.
Biff is strongly influenced by his own specific sexual experiences. At forty-four years he is prematurely impotent—and the cause of this lies in psychic as well as physical reasons. He has been married to Alice for twenty-three years. From the beginning their marriage was a mistake, and it has endured mainly because of economic necessity and habit.
Perhaps as a compensation for his own dilemma Biff comes to his own curious conclusion that marital relations are not the primary functions of the sexual impulse. He believes that human beings are fundamentally ambi-sexual—and for confirmation he turns to the periods of childhood and senility.
Two persons have a great emotional hold on Biff. These are Mick Kelly and a certain old man named Mr. Alfred Simms. Mick has been coming in the restaurant all through her childhood to get candy with her brother and to play the slot machine. She is always friendly with Biff, but of course she has no idea of his feelings for her. As a matter of fact, Biff is not exactly clear himself on that point, either. Mr. Simms is a pitiable, fragile old fellow whose senses are muddled. During middle life he had been a wealthy man but now he is penniless and alone. The old man keeps up a great pretense of being a busy person of affairs. Every day he comes out on the street in clean ragged clothes and holding an old woman's pocket-book. He goes from one bank to another in an effort to "settle his accounts." Mr. Simms used to like to come into Biff's restaurant and sit for a little while. He always sat at a table quietly and never disturbed anyone. With his queer clothes and the big pocket-book clutched against his chest he looked like an old woman. At that time Biff did not have any particular interest in Mr. Simms. He would kindly pour him out a beer now and then, but he did not think much about him.
One night (this was a few weeks before the opening of the book) the restaurant was crowded and the table where Mr. Simms was sitting was needed. Alice insisted that Biff put the old man out. Biff was used to ejecting all sorts of people from the place and he went up to the old man without thinking much about it and asked him if he thought the table was a park bench. Mr. Simms did not understand at first and smiled up happily at Biff. Then Biff was disconcerted and he repeated the words in a much rougher way than he had intended. Tears came to the old man's eyes. He tried to keep up his dignity before the people around him, fumbled uselessly in his pocket-book and went out crushed.
This little episode is described here in some detail because of its effect on Biff. The happening is made clear in a chapter in the second part of the book. All through the story Biff's thoughts are continually going back to the old man. His treatment of Mr. Simms comes to be for him the embodiment of all the evil he has ever done. At the same time the old man is the symbol of the declining period of life which Biff is now approaching.
Mick brings up in Biff nostalgic feelings of youth and heroism. She is at the age where she possesses both the qualities of a girl and of a boy. Also, Biff has always wanted to have a little daughter and of course she reminds him of this, too. At the end of the book, when Mick begins to mature, Biff's feelings for her slowly diminish.
Toward his wife Biff is entirely cold. When Alice dies in the second part of the book Biff feels not the slightest pity or regret for her at all. His only remorse is that he did not ever fully understand Alice as a person. It piques him that he could have lived so long with a woman and still understand her so confusedly. After her death Biff takes off the crepe paper streamers from under the electric fans and sews mourning tokens on his sleeves. These gestures are not so much for Alice as they are a reflection of his own feeling for his approaching decline and death. After his wife dies certain female elements become more pronounced in Biff. He begins to rinse his hair in lemon juice and to take exaggerated care of his skin. Alice had always been a much better business manager than Biff and after her death the restaurant begins to stagnate.
In spite of certain quirks in Biff's nature he is perhaps the most balanced person in the book. He has that faculty for seeing the things which happen around him with cold objectivity—without instinctively connecting them with himself. He sees and hears and remembers everything. He is curious to a comic degree. And nearly always, despite the vast amount of details in his mind, he can work his way patiently to the very skeleton of a situation and see affairs in their entirety.
Biff is far too wary to be drawn into any mystic admiration of Singer. He likes the mute and is of course very curious about him. Singer occupies a good deal of his thoughts and he values his reserve and common sense. He is the only one of the four main characters who sees the situation as it really is. In the last few pages he threads through the details of the story and arrives at the most salient points. In his reflections at the end Biff himself thinks of the word "parable" in connection with what has happened—and of course this is the only time that this designation is used. His reflections bring the book to a close with a final, objective roundness.
SUBORDINATE CHARACTERS
There are several minor characters who play very important parts in the story. None of these persons are treated in a subjective manner—and from the point of view of the novel the things that happen to them are of more importance in the effects on the main characters than because of the change that they bring about among these characters.
Spiros Antonapoulos
Antonapoulos has been described with complete detail in the first chapter. His mental, sexual and spiritual development is that of a child of about seven years old.
Portia Copeland Jones, Highboy Jones, and Willie Copeland
A great deal of interest is centered around these three characters. Portia is the most dominant member of this trio. In actual space she occupies almost as much of the book as any one of the main characters, except Mick—but she is always placed in a subordinate position. Portia is the embodiment of the maternal instincts. Highboy, her husband, and Willie, her brother, are inseparable from herself. These three characters are just the opposite of Dr. Copeland and the other central characters in that they make no effort to go against circumstance.
The tragedy that comes to this group plays an important part on all the phases of the book. At the beginning of the second section Willie is arrested on a charge of burglary. He was walking down a side alley after midnight and two young white boys told him they were looking for someone, gave him a dollar, and instructed him to whistle when the person they were looking for came down the alley. Only when Willie saw two policemen coming toward him did he realize what had happened. In the meantime the boys had broken in a drug store. Later in the fall Willie is sentenced along with them for a year of hard labor. All of this is revealed through Portia as she tells this great trouble to the Kelly children. "Willie he so busy looking at that dollar bill he don't have no time to think. And then they asks him how come he run when he seen them police. They might just as soon ask how come a person jerk their hand off a hot stove when they lays it there by mistake."
This is the first of their trouble. Now that the household arrangements are disturbed, Highboy begins keeping company with another girl. This too is told by Portia to the Kelly children and Dr. Copeland: "I could realize this better if she were a light-colored, good-looking girl. But she at least ten shades blacker than I is. She the ugliest girl I ever seen. She walk like she haves a egg between her legs and don't want to break it. She not even clean."
The most brutal tragedy in the book comes to these three people. Willie and four other Negroes were guilty of some little misbehavior on the chain-gang where they were working. It was February and the camp was stationed a couple of hundred miles north of the town. As punishment they were put together in a solitary room. Their shoes were taken off and their feet suspended. They were left like this for three full days. It was cold and as their blood did not circulate the boys' feet froze and they developed gangrene. One boy died of pneumonia and the other four had to have one or both of their feet amputated. They were all manual laborers and of course this completely took away their means for future livelihood. This part is of course revealed by Portia, too. It is told in only a few blunt broken paragraphs and left at that.
This happening has a great effect on the main characters. Dr. Copeland is shattered by the news and is in delirium for several weeks. Mick feels all the impact of the horror. Biff had formerly employed Willie in his restaurant and he broods over all the aspects of the affair.
Jake wants to bring it all to light and make of it a national example. But this is impossible for several reasons. Willie is terribly afraid—for it has been impressed upon him at the camp to keep quiet about what has been done to him. The state has been careful to separate the boys immediately after the happening and they have lost track of each other. Also, Willie and the other boys are really children in a certain way—they do not understand what their cooperation would mean. Suffering had strained their nerves so much that during the three days and nights in the room they had quarreled angrily among themselves and when it was over they had no wish to see each other again. From the long view their childish bitterness toward each other and lack of cooperation is the worst part of the whole tragedy.
Highboy comes back to Portia after Willie returns and, handicapped by Willie's infirmity, the three of them start their way of living all over again.
The thread of this story runs through the whole book. Most of it is told through Portia's own vivid, rhythmic language at intervals as it happens.
Harry West
Harry has already been briefly described in the section given to Mick. During the first part of the year, when he and Mick started their friendship, he was infatuated with a certain little flirting girl at High School. His eyes had always given him much trouble and he wore thicklensed glasses. The girl thought the glasses made him look sissy and he tried to stumble around without them for several months. This aggravated his eye trouble. His friendship with Mick is very different from his infatuation with the other little girls 1 at High School.
Harry has the exaggeratedly developed sense of right and wrong that sometimes is a characteristic of adolescence. He is also of a brooding nature. There is the implication that his abrupt experience with Mick will leave its mark on him for a long time.
Lily Mae Jenkins
Lily Mae is an abandoned, waifish Negro homosexual who haunts the Sunny Dixie Show where Jake works. He is always dancing. His mind and feelings are childish and he is totally unfit to earn his living. Because of his skill in music and dancing he is a friend of Willie's. He is always half starved and he hangs around Portia's kitchen constantly in the hopes of getting a meal. When Highboy and Willie are gone Portia takes some comfort in Lily Mae.
Lily Mae is presented in the book in exactly the same naive way that his friends understand him. Portia describes Lily Mae to Dr. Copeland in this manner: "Lily Mae is right pitiful now. I don't know if you ever noticed any boys like this but he cares for mens instead of girls. When he were younger he used to be real cute. He were all the time dressing up in girls' clothes and laughing. Everybody thought he were real cute then. But now he getting old and he seem different. He all the time hungry and he real pitiful. He loves to come set and talk with me in the kitchen. He dances for me and I gives him a little dinner."
The Kelly Children—Bill, Hazel, Etta, Bubber and Ralph
No great interest is focussed on any of these children individually. They are all seen through the eyes of Mick. All three of the older children are confused, in varying degrees, by the problem of trying to find their places in a society that is not prepared to absorb them. Each one of these youngsters is seen sharply—but not with complex fullness.
It is Mick's permanent duty to nurse Bubber and the baby during all the time when she is not actually at school. This chore is something of a burden for an adventurous roamer like Mick—but she has a warm and deep affection for these youngest children. At one time she makes these rambling remarks concerning her sisters and brothers as a whole: "A person's got to fight for every single little thing they ever get. And I've noticed a lot of times that the farther down a kid comes in a family the better the kid really is. Youngest kids are always the toughest. I'm pretty hard because I have a lot of them on top of me. Bubber—he looks sick but he's got guts underneath that. If all this is true Ralph sure ought to be a real strong one when he's big enough to get around. Even though he's just thirteen months old I can read something hard and tough in that Ralph's face already."
INTERRELATIONS OF CHARACTERS
It can easily be seen that in spirit Dr. Copeland, Mick Kelly and Jake Blount are very similar. Each one of these three people has struggled to progress to his own mental proportions in spite of fettering circumstances. They are like plants that have had to grow under a rock from the beginning. The great effort of each of them has been to give and there has been no thought of personal returns.
The likeness between Dr. Copeland and Jake Blount is so marked that they might be called spiritual brothers. The greatest real difference between them is one of race and of years. Dr. Copeland's earlier life was spent in more favorable circumstances and from the start his duty was clear to him. The injustices inflicted on the Negro race are much more plainly marked than the ancient vastly scattered mismanagements of capitalism as a whole. Dr. Copeland was able to set to work immediately in a certain narrow sphere, while the conditions which Jake hates are too fluid for him to get his shoulder to them. Dr. Copeland has the simplicity and dignity of a person who has lived all of his life in one place and given the best of himself to one work. Jake has the jerky nervousness of a man whose inner and outer life has been no more stable than a whirlwind.
The conscientiousness of both of these men is heightened by artificial stimulation—Dr. Copeland is running a diurnal temperature and Jake is drinking steadily every day. In certain persons the effects of these stimulants can be very much the same.
Dr. Copeland and Jake come into direct contact with each other only once during the book. Casual encounters are not considered here. They meet and misunderstand each other in the second chapter when Jake tries to make the doctor come into Biff's restaurant and drink with him. After that they see each other once on the stairs at the Kelly boarding house and then on two occasions they meet briefly in Singer's room. But the only time they directly confront each other takes place in Dr. Copeland's own house under dramatic circumstances.
This is the night in which Willie has come home from the prison hospital. Dr. Copeland is in bed with an inflammation of the pleura, delirious and thought to be dying. The crippled Willie is on the cot in the kitchen and a swarm of friends and neighbors are trying to crowd in through the back door to see and hear of Willie's situation. Jake has heard of the whole affair from Portia and when Singer goes to sit with Dr. Copeland during the night Jake asks to accompany him.
Jake comes to the house with the intention of questioning Willie as closely as possible. But before the evening is over he is drawn to Dr. Copeland and it is he, instead of Singer, who sits through the night with the sick man. In the kitchen Willie is meeting his friends for the first time in almost a year. At first in the back of the house there is a sullen atmosphere of grief and hopelessness. Willie's story is repeated over and over in sullen monotones. Then this atmosphere begins to change. Willie sits up on the cot and begins to play his harp. Lily Mae starts dancing. As the evening progresses the atmosphere changes to a wild artificial release of merriment.
This is the background for Jake's meeting with Dr. Copeland. The two men are together in the bedroom and the sounds from the kitchen come in during the night through the closed door. Jake is drunk and Dr. Copeland is almost out of his head with fever. Yet their dialogue comes from the marrow of their inner selves. They both lapse into the rhythmic, illiterate vernacularisms of their early childhood. The inner purpose of each man is seen fully by the other. In the course of a few hours these two men, after a lifetime of isolation, come as close to each other as it is possible for two human beings to be. Very early in the morning Singer drops by the house before going to work and he finds them both asleep together, Jake sprawled loosely on the foot of the bed and Dr. Copeland sleeping with healthy naturalness.
The interrelations between the other characters will not have to be described in such detail. Mick, Jake and Biff see each other frequently. Each one of these people occupies a certain key position in the town; Mick is nearly always on the streets. At the restaurant Biff comes in frequent contact with all the main characters except Dr. Copeland. Jake is constantly watching a whole cross-section of the town at the show where he works—later when he drives a taxi he becomes acquainted with nearly all of the characters, major and minor, in the book. Mick's relations toward each of these people are childish and matter of fact. Biff, except for his affinity for Mick, is coldly appraising. Certain small scenes and developments take place between all of these people in a variety of combinations.
On the whole the interrelations between the people of this book can be described as being like the spokes of a wheel—with Singer representing the center point. This situation, with all of its attendant irony, expresses the most important theme of the book.
General Structure and Outline
TIME
The first chapter serves as a prelude to the book and the reckoning of time starts with Chapter Two. The story covers a period of fourteen months—from May until the July of the following year.
The whole work is divided into three parts. The body of the book is contained in the middle section. In the actual number of pages this is the longest of the three parts and nearly all of the months in the time scheme take place in this division.
Part I
The first writing of Part I is already completed and so there is no need to take up this section in detail. The time extends from the middle of May to the middle of July. Each of the main characters is introduced in detail. The salient points of each person are clearly implied and the general direction each character will take is indicated. The tale of Singer and Antonapoulos is told. The meetings of each one of the main characters with Singer are presented—and the general web of the book is begun.
Part II
There is a quickening of movement at the beginning of this middle section. There will be more than a dozen chapters in this part, but the handling of these chapters is much more flexible than in Part I. Many of the chapters are very short and they are more dependent upon each other than the first six chapters. Almost half of the actual space is devoted to Mick, her growth and progress, and the increasing intensity of her admiration for Singer. Her story, and the separate parts developed from her point of view, weave in and out of the chapters about the other characters.
This part opens with Mick on one of her nocturnal wanderings. During the summer she has been hearing concerts under unusual circumstances. She has found out that in certain wealthier districts in the town a few families get fairly good programs on their radios. There is one house in particular that tunes in every Friday evening for a certain symphony concert. Of course the windows are all open at this time of the year and the music can be heard very plainly from the outside. Mick saunters into the yard at night just before the program is to begin and sits down in the dark behind the shrubbery under the living room window. Sometimes after the concert she will stand looking in at the family in the house for some time before going on. Because she gets so much from their radio she is half in love with all of the people in the house.
It would take many dozens of pages to go into a synopsis of this second part in complete detail. A complete and explanatory account would take actually longer than the whole part as it will be when it is completed—for a good book implies a great deal more than the words actually say. For convenience it is best to set down a few skeleton notations with the purpose of getting the sequence of events into a pattern. These rough notes mean very little in themselves and can only be understood after a thorough reading of the part of these remarks which goes under the heading of Characters and Events. This rough outline is still in a tentative stage and is only meant to be indicative of the general formation of this central part.
LATE SUMMER
Mick's night wandering and the concert. Resume of the growth that is taking place in Mick this summer. On the morning after the concert Portia tells Mick and the other Kelly children of Willie's arrest. Mick's morning wanderings.
Jake Blount's experience at the Sunny Dixie Show.
AUTUMN
Mick's first day at Vocational High.
Dr. Copeland on his medical rounds. Another visit from Portia in which she tells her father that Highboy has left her.
Mick becomes acquainted with Harry West.
Biff's wife, Alice, dies—his meditations.
Mick and her music again. Mick's sister, Etta, takes French leave of her family and tries to run away to Hollywood, but returns in a few days. Mick goes with the little girl who teaches her music to a "real" piano lesson. She experiences a great embarrassment when she boldly tells the teacher she is a musician and sits down to try to play on a "real" piano. (This takes place at the house where Mick was listening to the concert at the opening of this section—and Mick already knows this teacher and her family quite well after watching them through the window during the summer.)
WINTER
Christmas. Dr. Copeland gives his two annual Christmas parties—one in the morning for children and another in the late afternoon for adults. These parties have been given by him every year for two decades and he serves refreshments to his patients and then makes a short talk. The relation between Dr. Copeland and the human material with which he works is brought out clearly.
Singer visits Antonapoulos.
Jake Blount's experience in the town as a ten-cent taxi driver.
Mick and Singer. Mick begins plans for the glider with Harry West.
The tragedy of Willie and the other four boys is told by Portia in the Kelly kitchen to Mick, Jake Blount and Singer.
SPRING
Further meditations of Biff Brannon—and scene between Mick and Biff at the restaurant.
Mick and her music again—Mick and Harry work on the glider.
Willie returns. The meeting of Dr. Copeland and Jake.
The experience between Harry and Mick comes to its abrupt fulfillment and finish. Harry's departure. Mick's oppressive secret. The Kellys' financial condition. Mick's energetic plans and her music.
Singer's death.
***
This outline does not indicate the main web of the story—that of the relations of each main character with the mute. These relations are so gradual and so much a part of the persons themselves that it is impossible to put them down in such blunt notations. However, from these notes a general idea of the time scheme and of sequence can be gathered.
Part III
Singer's death overshadows all of the final section of the book. In actual length this part requires about the same number of pages as does the first part. In technical treatment the similarity between these sections is pronounced. This part takes place during the months of June and July. There are four chapters and each of the main characters is given his last presentation. A rough outline of this conclusive part may be suggested as follows:
Dr. Copeland. The finish of his work and teachings—his departure to the country. Portia, Willie and Highboy start again.
Jake Blount. Jake writes curious social manifestoes and distributes them through the town. The brawl at the Sunny Dixie Show; Jake prepares to leave the town.
Mick Kelly. Mick begins her new work at the ten-cent store.
Biff Brannon. Final scene between Biff, Mick and Jake at the restaurant. Meditations of Biff concluded.
PLACE—THE TOWN
This story, in its essence, could have occurred at any place and in any time. But as the book is written, however, there are many aspects of the content which are peculiar to the America of this decade—and more specifically to the southern part of the United States. The town is never mentioned in the book by its name. The town is located in the very western part of Georgia, bordering the Chattahoochee River and just across the boundary line from Alabama. The population of the town is around 40,000—and about one third of the people in the town are Negroes. This is a typical factory community and nearly all of the business set-up centers around the textile mills and small retail stores.
Industrial organization has made no headway at all among the workers in the town. Conditions of great poverty prevail. The average cotton mill worker is very unlike the miner or a worker in the automobile industry—south of Gastonia, S.C., the average cotton mill worker has been conditioned to a very apathetic, listless state. For the most part he makes no effort to determine the causes of poverty and unemployment. His immediate resentment is directed toward the only social group beneath him—the Negro. When the mills are slack this town is veritably a place of lost and hungry people.
TECHNIQUE AND SUMMARY
This book is planned according to a definite and balanced design. The form is contrapuntal throughout. Like a voice in a fugue each one of the main characters is an entirety in himself—but his personality takes on a new richness when contrasted and woven in with the other characters in the book.
It is in the actual style in which the book will be written that the work's affinity to contrapuntal music is seen most clearly. There are five distinct styles of writing—one for each of the main characters who is treated subjectively and an objective, legendary style for the mute. The object in 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 likeness between style and character is fairly plain in the first part—but this closeness progresses gradually in each instance until at the end the style expresses the inner man just as deeply as is possible without lapsing into the unintelligible unconscious.
This book will be complete in all of its phases. No loose ends will be left dangling and at the close there will be a feeling of balanced completion. The fundamental idea of the book is ironic—but the reader is not left with a sense of futility. The book reflects the past and also indicates the future. A few of the people in this book come very near to being heroes and they are not the only human beings of their kind. Because of the essence of these people there is the feeling that, no matter how many times their efforts are wasted and their personal ideals are shown to be false, they will someday be united and they will come into their own.
[The Ballad of Carson McCullers by Oliver Evans, published by Coward-McCann in 1966]