The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

At the centre of Carson McCullers’ 1940 debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is the deaf-mute, John Singer and his friendship with Spiros Antonapoulos:

“…the two mutes were not lonely at all. At home they were content to eat and drink and Singer would talk with his hands eagerly to his friend about all that was in his mind.”

Ironically, this will be one of the few examples of camaraderie and communication in McCullers’ novel. Singer and Antonapoulos will be parted when the latter is sent by his cousin to an insane asylum two hundred miles away and Singer’s isolated figure will become the focus of the novel’s lonely characters, who revolve around him without ever being able to use his silent acceptance to communicate with each other. The first of these is Biff Brennan, the owner of the New York Café. When the novel opens, Biff is married (his wife later dies), but, as with the other characters, he finds himself unable to speak openly even to those close to him:

“He was sorry he had talked to Alice. With her, silence was better.”

The black doctor, Copeland, similarly found his wife and children did not understand him and now he is estranged from all but his daughter Portia:

“Sometimes he thought that he had talked so much in the years before to his children and they had understood so little that now there was nothing to say.”

Copeland is a serious man, who longs for the emancipation if his race, but is cynical about their ability to achieve it. He finds his children’s lives trivial and struggles to keep his opinions to himself. When Portia convinces him to come a family gathering, he finds it unbearable, neither able to speak – knowing he will not be listened to – or be silent:

“His pulse beat too fast and his throat was tight. Sitting in the corner of the room he felt isolated and angry and alone.”

In his seriousness he is similar to Jack Blount, whom we first meet drunk in Biff’s café. Blount is a socialist, but, like Copeland, he finds his reasoning leaves the average person unconvinced. Where Copeland retreats to his books, Blount drowns his misery in drink. We first meet Copeland with Blount when Jack enters the café with “a tall Negro man carrying a black bag” intending to buy him a drink. When Copeland realises Blount’s intention he leaves – he is not welcome where white men drink. Blount immediately declares, “I’m part nigger myself,” but it will be his lack of understanding of race that prevents him and Copeland ever becoming friends despite their left-wing sympathies. Both think they have found a willing audience in Singer, Blount declaring:

“For two days now I been talking to you in my mind because I know you understand the kind of things I want to mean.”

In Copeland’s view, Singer “”is not like other white men”:

“He was a wise man, and he understood the strong, true purpose in a way that other white men could not.”

The final character is a child, Mick. If Blount and Copeland represent politics and race, Mick represents art. Despite living in poverty, her head is full of music, humming tunes she has heard on the radio – “they all made her somehow sad and excited at the same time”:

“Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at the very top of the list – MOTSART.”

She, too, forms an attachment to Singer, comparing him to other crushes – “The other people had been ordinary but Mr Singer was not.” In Biff’s eyes, Blount and Mick turn Singer into a “sort of home-made God”:

“Owing to the fact he was a mute, they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.”

All these characters have goodness in them, and this prevents the novel descending into bitterness. However, despite this, they cannot find each other, and neither can they replace Antonapoulos for Singer:

“At night when he closed his eyes the Greek’s face was there in the darkness – round and oily with a wise and gentle smile. In his dreams they were always together.”

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter portrays a world where difference is isolation, where intelligence and talent, if you are poor, will only result in loneliness, but where, in the words of Hugh MacDiarmid, “some elements of worth / With difficulty persist here and there on earth.”

Tags: 1940 club, Carson McCullers, the heart is a lonely hunter