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Rating: “Everyone is alone, but with a varied heart
always looks at the same usual stars”
(Sandro Penna)...
So much loneliness in this book. So many rooms traversed by obstinate thoughts. So many nightly walks.
But today, where are the stars? Between us and the sky, only an unbearable babble. And by now, even solitude is unfamiliar with itself.
...
But let's get to the point and consider this fantastic pair: Mr. Antonapoulos and Mr. Singer, both deaf-mutes.
Well, one is fat and the other is thin, one cooks and the other washes the dishes, one is dull and the other intelligent, one licks his fingers and the other plays chess.
They are always together and at night Singer, with fingers feverishly wandering in sign language, opens his heart to his friend. Antonapoulos might not understand, but it doesn’t matter. "Whatever works," Woody would say.
Then Antonapoulos, due to increasingly eccentric behavior, is admitted to a mental hospital. Singer then finds himself alone in a world he does not know.
Well, imagine a feminine writing style of rare sensitivity and an atmosphere both melancholic and sweet where the Kafkaesque absurd marries a tenderness reminiscent of Laurel/Hardy. Everything is tragic, but you almost don’t notice.
Singer then begins to wander the city...
And his eyes are filled with a strange mysterious light which, together with his innate gentleness, will attract other bizarre solitary hunters to him.
…
Consider now a modest little room and the four people who, albeit reluctantly, find themselves there together.
They are all solitary beings marked by an irreducible otherness, and they know that little room well, for it is there that Singer, who has become their confidant, resides.
Jack, Mick, Biff, Copeland, these are their names—they all came to see the mute each for their own reasons, but chance had it that all four had the same idea.
So there they are: Jack, a wandering spirit with a perennial nervous tension; Mick, a magical girl in love with music; Biff, a melancholy bar philosopher; Copeland, a black doctor with dark nightly thoughts.
One thing is certain, their four souls have the same weight and the same color. Yet in that room, they seem to belong to four different worlds. Moreover, they all remain silent, and it’s strange because these are people with a world boiling inside them, generally talking, talking, talking—a real flood.
But, to at least three of them, only Singer matters. It is only to the mute that they open their hearts, reveal their dreams, confide their torments. More or less the same thing he did with Anastapoulos. But, while the mute did not really care whether his friend understood or not, well they do, they absolutely want to be understood.
Even though the mute just listens, nods, and smiles, he becomes, in their whimsical imagination, the only one who truly understands them. The fact that he does not reply, or does so only within the limits of his handicap, allows them to see him according to their needs.
Singer thus becomes the great sage, the one who knows and understands everything. In his eyes, Mick feels the music of Mozart, and if God existed, He would have his face. And God does not speak, right?
Only then our God doesn’t stop thinking about his Anastapoulos, after all, could you ever imagine Laurel without Hardy? Yet no one notices his despair.
Moreover, the figure of the absent friend gradually takes on for Singer the same unrealistic nuances with which he himself appears in the eyes of the quartet. Thus, if the mute is a God for the others, he too kneels at a very personal altar.
Illusion upon illusion, this is how human communication proceeds. Impossible to open one's heart, impossible to understand and be understood.
….
Beyond the discourse on loneliness, there is a second great theme, and it is that of social justice.
That “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” is, among other things, also a great proletarian novel and recounts with touching sweetness the humiliated and offended of 1930s America. Not only that, which is quite unusual, there is a lot of Marx in it.
Jack and Copeland are indeed Marxists, but their opposite demands, one passionate to the point of hysteria, the other cold and overly severe, inevitably collide.
It is the individual differences, McCullers seems to tell us, that always matter more than anything else. Not only is any form of communication an illusion, even the noblest ideas of justice are doomed to fail. The latter idea is brought to perfect completion in the subsequent “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” where a small island of social harmony disintegrates because of whim and ego.
…
Having mentioned the strange Kafka/Laurel Hardy atmosphere of the Singer/Anastapoulos relationship, the rest of the book keeps its feet firmly in a realism that blends narrative grace with a great capacity for introspection. Add perhaps a hint of folk ballad and the strong hues of a harsh and fiery South.
Those that come to life before our eyes are figures irreducible to the mere existent and wonderful fragments of mystery that McCullers contemplates with a tenderness akin to an act of love.
A love similar to that of Biff for the rare night customers of his small bar. He certainly doesn’t profit from staying open at that hour, but then again, the night suits the atmosphere of cafes and where else could he encounter such individuals? Solitary hunters destined for defeat, sure, but how can one not recognize themselves in that unresolved and inevitable wandering?
“I know you, go - says someone to the girl Mick - this afternoon you will wander around always dissatisfied, you’ll drift as if you’ve lost something, you’ll get carried away with silly notions and end up poisoning your heart.” Perhaps, but that poison is maybe our only hope.
Mick!!!
We will never forget Mick... there she is, sitting on the roof of the house under construction, happy and undecided only about which song to sing, because how can you not sing when you're up there?
Trallallà...
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