The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (26 page)

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this very American form of solitude is essential to our democracy, springing forth as it does from a native self-reliance. I am reminded of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s short and searing pamphlet “The Solitude of the Self,” in which she proclaims that the need for equal rights comes innately from the seclusion of every woman in America who is born alone, is solely responsible for her own life and will die alone. Therefore, she needs to be able to sustain herself. Cady Stanton begins her essay by championing “the individuality of each human soul” and goes on to elaborate why every woman must live “in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island.”

In words that are more poetic and anguished than ideological and polemical, she writes, “The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings.” Then she relates how she once asked Prince Kropotkin, a Russian political prisoner, “how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper.” He responded, “In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I had ever learned.” He had a “world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailer or Czar could invade.”

McCullers was deeply musical, and in her outline she writes that the novel’s form is “contrapuntal throughout.” She goes on to explain: “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.” The main characters all suffer from an inner isolation. Their suffering is unique, but they are all too preoccupied with their own obsessions to listen to one another or to anyone else, so they share this listless isolation.

As Joanna used to say, there are many different forms of loneliness. In some respects, the loneliness of solitude is far less chilling than the loneliness we feel when we are alone together. Joanna and I would pore over paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Edward Hopper showing people sitting or standing, within touching distance, and yet appearing to be lonelier than if they were by themselves. In all of these paintings, that feeling of loneliness is accentuated by silence—no one makes eye contact or speaks—by the evident inability to communicate and by the simultaneous awareness of the other person’s physical proximity.

Lately I have discovered a new kind of loneliness, peculiar to our time, for which I have yet to find proper artistic expression. I have seen it in photographs on the Internet of groups of young people who sit very close together, each one busy texting. What disturbs me most about these photographs is that the youth seem to have no consciousness of where they are or whom they are with. They are not lonely; they are wholly somewhere else. Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Hopper all attempted to convey a consciousness of this terrible isolation, and a certain anguish stays with you long after you have stopped looking at the painting, but we seem in our own time to have become numb to our surroundings.

In
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
the principal characters are equally unaware of their environment; they are too wrapped up in their own obsessions to see or hear one another, but their distractions give them no entertainment or comfort. They are disturbed by their inability to express themselves or communicate with others. It makes them restless. It also keeps them from knowing themselves, because for McCullers, the search for the self is inseparable from the need to connect with others. “For a baby,” McCullers writes, “the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes pristine wonder.” This consciousness of the self is indispensable not just philosophically but also pragmatically.

If, in the work of Hopper and Raymond Carver, loneliness is expressed through silence, in McCullers this solitary pain is communicated in words. Jake Blount, the agitator, best demonstrates the manic urge to pour out words, words that seem to have no hinges, no past or present to them—they do not reveal or clarify but confuse and frustrate. Biff stands behind the counter, observing, as Jake eagerly talks to Singer, the words coming “out of his throat like a cataract.” Biff notices that “the accent he used was always changing the kinds of words he used.” Jake is all over the place; he jumps from subject to subject and seems to belong everywhere and nowhere, and that, of course, is the problem.

I did not really properly say goodbye to Mike when I left the United States for Iran in 1979. I had told him what I had said to my other friends: “See you next year, or the year after.” I promised to come back for summer vacations. But once I was in Tehran, there was no coming back for summer vacations. I did not see him again until I returned to Oklahoma for two days in 1991 to give a talk on Iranian culture and film before heading on to Washington and then back to Tehran. To call that trip an emotional event is an understatement. I was elated and saddened and curious and absolutely dislocated. All I remember is faces: Dr. Gross, Dr. Yoch, Dr. Velie and Dr. Elconin, my beloved English teacher, who was very sick and died before my next visit to Norman, in 2001. There were some unfamiliar faces, too, telling me they had heard about me, had started to wonder what had happened to me. I saw Mike briefly on that visit—he was not there and then he was, standing a little aloof from the crowd after the discussion of an Iranian film I had just screened.

We had coffee together later and, like David Gross, my professor, fellow protester and dissertation chair, Mike told me that for a long time he’d thought I had died or been killed. After the revolution I had changed addresses in Tehran and he didn’t know how to find me. We talked a bit about old times, and at one point he said, “Don’t you remember, you wanted to seduce me into loving literature?” “Seduce” was a strange word for him to use, because Mike was so un-seducible in so many senses of the word—or so I believed. He was the type of person who was always on the periphery of one’s attention, not outstanding for being handsome or intelligent or particularly passionate; he was, if anything, outstanding despite or because of his lack of these qualities. There was an oddness about him; even when he was young he appeared older than his years; his shadow would fall somewhere between your line of vision and those good-looking, boyish young men who attracted your attention. He was there, and one got the impression that he would always be.

I reminded Mike of how he had taught me about Woody Guthrie and told me about his participation in the civil rights movement. I said I had thought of him and our conversation about African American writers and the civil rights movement when my first published work, a translation of two poems by Langston Hughes, came out and later when I wrote an introduction to Richard Wright’s
American Hunger,
a book I had taken with me to Iran. He remembered that Melville had been one of my favorite authors and reminded me of how I had once called him “Mr. I Prefer Not To” in reference to the character in
Bartleby, the Scrivener
—I’d told him he was as stubborn as old Bartleby. I had also called him Mr. Gradgrind, after Dickens’s character, because he would repeat so many times in our discussions “facts, Azar, it’s all about the facts. . . .” He remembered my love of Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and then there was Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” “And the British,” he said. “You loved them, too, and some of the French, like Flaubert and Balzac. For a while you talked like a real proletarian, when you were reading Mike Gold and Henry Roth.”

He told me that the times had changed; there were the Reagan years, and now? “What now?” I asked. “We’ve come a long way from the civil rights movement,” he said. “That was an exciting time.” He started filling me in on the years since I had left. “It all started with Reagan,” he said, casting his eyes about him now, “followed by Bush and the Gulf War.”

Mike had always talked a lot, but as time went by, most of those who had listened or pretended to listen dispersed and left, and he was left talking to fewer people and then mainly to himself. His “enemy” did not kill him or put him in jail; it simply ignored him. Indifference, as McCullers reminds us, is among life’s worst punishments.

Norman had remained progressive, or at least there were progressive pockets. “You think New York and Chicago are hubs of protest,” Mike said, “but we have our own tradition right here. It goes back—yes, it goes back.” Then he told me how the other night at a bar, some rednecks had beaten two Pakistanis, thinking they were Iranian. I mentioned this anecdote in my speech that night, asking the audience to please not do that sort of a thing to me. It gave me an opening to remind them of how little they knew about these other countries, that they could not tell the difference between a Pakistani and an Iranian.

When it came to politics, Mike talked for so long, and I was so tired, that everything was becoming more jumbled and confused in my mind. A long time had passed since I had been away from America, from Norman, from Mike and from drinking coffee dressed that way with a man who was not my husband. It had been eleven years since I had left all of that behind. Perhaps since I was coming from Tehran for the first time in so many years and knew that I would return in a few days’ time, I felt Mike had little to complain about. He seemed dissatisfied with the U.S. government, but I pointed out that there were no morality squads and public executions. I felt that I had changed a great deal since we had last met but that he had not changed so much. He had remained the same Mike, without roots or attachments, ready to talk to you at the drop of a hat and always looking for that invisible something in the distance that tempted and eluded him.

I felt slightly depressed after seeing Mike, and although I had promised I would keep in touch, I did not give him my contact information, or ask for his. I wanted to forget him, to not be disturbed by something so very sad that I sensed in him but could not touch.

What connects a restaurant owner, a drunken agitator from out of town, an African American doctor and a young teenage girl living on the edge of poverty? The answer appears to be a deaf man, John Singer, and their insatiable need to be close to him, to talk to him. They believe he is the only person in that town who genuinely understands them.

They don’t know that Singer is simply puzzled by them. In a letter to his friend Antonapoulos, Singer writes that the four are “very busy people,” so busy that “it will be hard for you to picture them.” He adds, “I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest.” It is words that torment them: “Those words in their heart do not let them rest, so they are always very busy.” He cannot understand why they are so eager to talk to him, when most of the time he does not understand them, although he nods in response and is distantly sympathetic.

Of these four people, Biff Brannon, the restaurant owner, is different from the other three. His focus in life is on one word: Why? “The question flowed through Biff, always, unnoticed, like the blood in his veins. He thought of people and of objects and of ideas and the question was in him.” The word is echoed throughout the story, gradually gaining volume as it takes on a more universal meaning. Biff is different from the others. While the others take refuge from their inner turmoil in constant, agitated physical movement, Biff’s restiveness has little outward manifestation. Jake is a drifter, moving from one shabby, smelly room to another. Mick finds no free and private space in her home and takes to spending a great deal of her time wandering the streets. And then there is Dr. Copeland, whose cold, lonely home cannot appease his terrible feeling of uprootedness. Even Singer is a roamer. He has a room in the Kelly family’s boardinghouse but spends most of his time when he is not working roving the different parts of the town. None of these characters feel at home in their own home. Biff is the only one who pays any attention to where he lives, who takes care of his home and makes it presentable. He is the only one who remains, at the end of the novel, in the same place we first found him.

We meet Biff Brannon at his restaurant, the New York Café, named for the elsewhere that so many inhabitants of small towns all across America dream of, the fantasyland to which the eighteen-year-old Carson fled the first chance she got. The summer night is “black” and “sultry,” it is midnight and all the streetlights have been turned off, so “the light from the café made a sharp, yellow rectangle on the sidewalk.” The streets are deserted, and inside, the café is busy with the half dozen customers drinking while Biff waits “stolidly, his elbow resting on the counter and his thumb mashing the tip of his long nose.” As is his habit, he is watching. Singer differentiates him from the other characters, writing to his friend that those others “all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.” But as for Biff, what he does is “watch.”

Biff’s eyes are “cold and staring, half-concealed by the cynical droop of his eyelids. On the fifth finger of his calloused hand there was a woman’s wedding ring.” Early in the novel, there is a scene in Biff’s bedroom in which he and his wife, Alice, quarrel about one of their customers, Jake Blount, who his wife complains has been eating and drinking and talking wild for a week without paying a cent. She wants him kicked out, for “he’s nothing but a bum and a freak.” Biff responds that he likes freaks. “I reckon you do!” Alice shouts back, “I just reckon you certainly ought to, Mister Brannon—being as you’re one yourself.” In response, Biff accuses his wife of not having “any real kindness. . . . Or maybe it’s curiosity I mean,” he elaborates, adding, “You don’t ever see or notice anything important that goes on. You never watch and think and try to figure anything out.” His list keeps growing: “The enjoyment of a spectacle is something you have never known. . . . You don’t know what it is to store up a whole lot of details and then come upon something real.”