Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers

Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, the earth assumes order.  A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small gray honeycomb, complete.  The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry: a dark parallelogram of pine woods, square fields, rectangles of sward.  On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a kind of monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination.  But down below the earth is round.  The earth is finite.  From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation.  The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole.

...The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes.  Even the eyes of the enemy.

I picked up Carson McCullers' novel Clock Without Hands--the only work of narrative fiction I hadn't read of hers--at a used bookstore in Atlanta.  It was a lucky find, I thought; I love reading books set in the places of I'm traveling, and few people capture Georgia and the South in general as well as McCullers.  But McCullers' Georgia, even moreso here than in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is hardly picturesque--it's fetid, corrupt, swamplike.

The novel focuses on four men: J.T. Malone, a small-town pharmacist who learns he has terminal leukemia; Jester Clane, an idealistic teenager; Sherman Pew, an angry black teenager and orphan with blue eyes (paging Toni Morrison) whom Jester falls in love with; and Judge Fox Clane, a genteel old racist who employs Sherman as a servant.  It's the Judge that's really the central character here.  He's an icon of the old Southern guard: vociferously opposed to integration even as he gets on well with Sherman, and his other black servants, on a personal level.  His political ambitions center around a plan to recognize Confederate scrip money, which he just happens to have an enormous stash of in his attic.  He considers himself upright, objective; but we know that he has sent innocent black men to their death, telling himself "he, himself, was only an instrument of the law.  So, no matter how grave the miscarriage was, he could not pine forever."  We also know that he keeps the secret of Sherman's parentage to himself in an act of misguided paternalism.

His bigotry puts him at odds with his grandson, Jester, whose beliefs are newly developed and crude but passionate.  But Jester's nascent liberalism doesn't extend to his own homosexuality, which torments him: "If it turned out he was homosexual like men in the Kinsey Report, Jester had vowed that he would kill himself."  I was surprised, actually, how explicit Jester's sexuality is dealt with here: after meeting Sherman for the first time he races to a brothel, where he loses his virginity to a woman but while thinking about Sherman the whole time.  The relationship between the two young men is a bravura bit of character work: they clearly care deeply about each other, but the difference between their station in life transforms that care into endless petty sniping and one-upsmanship.  Jester tries to get Sherman to admit they are friends, but Sherman is too angry to admit such emotions into his life:

All Sherman's life he had thought that all white men were crazy, and the more prominent their positions the more lunatic their words and behavior.  In this matter, Sherman considered he had the sober ice-cold truth on his side.  The politicians, from governors to congressmen, down to sheriffs and wardens, were alike in their bigotry and violence.  Sherman brooded over every lynching, bombing, or indignity his race had suffered.  In this Sherman had the vulnerability and sensitivity of an adolescent.  Drawn to broodings and atrocities, he felt that every evil was reserved for him personally.  So he lived in a stasis of dread and suspense.  This attitude was supported by facts.

Sherman is a capable servant for the Judge, who lets him have free reign in the house.  But he refuses, when asked, to write letters for the Judge about segregation and the Confederate money.  While the Judge tries to soften the conversation, returning to old tired tropes about "happy peonage" and the faithful slave who stayed with his master after emancipation, it's refreshing to hear Sherman call literal bullshit: "Still, a n----- would rather be a lamppost in Harlem," he tells the Judge, "than the governor of Georgia."  In many ways, Sherman is a kind of substitute son for the Judge, who has lost his own son and is in the process of losing, metaphorically speaking, his grandson, but the Judge's rigid bigotry prevents him from really hearing Sherman.  And in the end their relationship crumbles, and the worst occurs: Sherman moves into a house in the white part of town, in a pique of indignation and--spoiler spoiler spoiler--the Judge leads a band of vigilantes in bombing his house.

It's the pharmacist, J. T. Malone, who draws the assignment, but he refuses.  Close to death, he realizes that the easy racism he has embraced his entire life is morally hazardous, and he doesn't want to endanger his immortal soul.  "What the fuck is an immortal soul?" someone asks, and Malone replies: "I don't know... But if I have one, I don't want to lose it."  Later, Jester, enraged at the loss of his friend, almost murders the eventual perpetrator, a poor white named Sammy Lank, but a flash of empathy even for Sammy, his poverty, his idiocy, makes him reconsider.

I found myself wondering: How is this book, which focuses on white men considering and reconsidering their own racism, different from something like Green Book or Driving Miss Daisy?  I think it's because those movies are meant to make white people feel better, and Clock Without Hands actually wants you to feel very bad.  And it did make me feel bad.  I can't remember the last time a book made me feel something so viscerally.  The racism that seems so violent and intractable in this novel remains so violent and intractable.  Even before Sherman's murder, there's a scene in which Jester, trying to chase down a young black man who has stolen a few dollars from another, causes the man's death at the hands of the police.  And while the narrative just kind of barrels past it, McCullers seems to say, look at the way we just barrel past deaths like these.  It seemed so horribly fresh, sadly current.  (And as an aside, I couldn't read this story without thinking about the plot in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in which Willie loses both his legs because he gets frostbite in jail.)  Though Clock Without Hands ends with the news of federally mandated school integration, it's ultimately pessimistic about our national ability to root out and deal with the rot of racism.

McCullers is better than anyone else at finding the intersection between the political and the universal.  One of the book's big themes is grief: the Judge can't get over the deaths of his wife and son.  Sherman grieves for the mother he has never known, and J. T. experiences a kind of anticipatory grief as he faces his own death:

But now he dwelt on inexplicable deaths.  He thought of children, exact and delicate as jewels in their white satin coffins.  And that pretty singing teacher who swallowed a bone at a fish fry and died within the hour.  And Johnny Clane, and the Milan boys who died during the first world war and the last.  And how many others?  How?  Why?  He was aware of the knocking sound in the basement.  It was a rat--last week a rat had overturned a bottle of asafetida and for days the stench was so terrible that his porter refused to work in the basement.  There was no rhythm in death--only the rhythm of the rat, and the stench of corruption.  And the pretty singing teacher, the blond young flesh of Johnny Clane--the jewel-like children--all ended in the liquefying corpse and coffin stench.

Yikes!  But at the same time McCullers challenges us to interrogate whose deaths exactly we find inexplicable.  We're saddened by the death of children, and the "blond young flesh" of the Judge's son, but who takes time to mourn for Grown Boy, killed by the police, or Sherman, killed by a judge?  Or the many sentence to death by the Judge through entirely legal means?  Death is so very sad, and empathy is so necessary--that's what McCullers says over and over again, in every novel--but it is so easy to extend empathy only to those who look and think like us.  What would radical empathy look like?  How would it transform our communities, ourselves?  Clock Without Hands doesn't really seem to believe that it's possible, as necessary as it is.

Black Boy by Richard Wright

This was the culture from which I sprang. This was the terror from which I fled.

My students enjoy Black Boy. Though they wouldn't want to admit it, what they like best is its conventionality; it is far less alien to them than King Lear or Oedipus the King or The Importance of Being Earnest, both in method and culture. It reassures them of what they already know: that racism is bad, and that there was a distant time (how distant, who knows or cares) in which nobody knew that. For my part, I find the absence of grumbling a relief. But I also find their comfort ironic, because Black Boy is essentially a novel of discomfort, of severe isolation from the social world, and I wonder if the years since its publication have robbed it of some of its strange and powerful loneliness.

The American South of the novel's first half is a place in which Wright is repeatedly assured from his childhood that he and others like him do not belong. Starved for civilized thought, he pretends to be on an errand from a white boss to check out books from a Memphis library. When other whites see him with a book of Mencken's, they warn him that he'll "addle his brains," not only denigrating his right to the skills, like reading, which produce social mobility, but his right to the participate in the medium of society. This tactic, Wright laments, has worked:

Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.

The young Richard's endless shuffle of new homes--the family bounces around Tennessee and Arkansas, never staying anywhere long enough for Richard to complete a year of school--becomes a symbol of Southern society's refusal to provide blacks with a spiritual or cultural home.

But what makes Black Boy most remarkable to me is its stark depiction of Wright's individual isolation. As a boy, he constantly clashes with authority, particularly his puritan grandmother and other assorted family members, whom he paints as selfish and vindictive. His agnosticism sets him against not only them but his community as a whole, though he yearns to be a part of it:

Nevertheless, I was so starved for association with people that I allowed myself to be seduced by it all, and for a few months I lived the life of an optimist. A revival began at the church and my classmates at school urged me to attend. More because I liked them than from any interest in religion, I consented. As the sermon progressed night after night, my mother tried to persuade me to join, to save my soul at last, to become a member of a responsible community church.

Gulled by the promise of inclusion, Richard allows himself to be baptized, but is unable to bring his heart and mind around. This is the fundamental tension of the book, the impossible negotiation between individuality and community, which requires some level of submission. Repeatedly Richard finds that he is unable to refashion himself into what's expected of him, whether as an obedient son, an ardent churchgoer, or an obsequious black.

In the book's second half, which follows him to Chicago, he casts his lot in with the Communist party for these very reasons. For Richard, the communists represent the ultimate vision of community. He begins an ambitious writing project profiling communist leaders, thinking:

At last, I thought, I would reveal dramas of hope, fear, love, and hate that existed in these humble people. I would make these lives merge with the lives of the mass of mankind. I knew I could. My life had prepared me for this.

But the Party turns out to be every bit as authoritarian as the society Richard had escaped. They squabble over petty differences, and pressure him to abandon his writing project in favor of community organizing, for which he has no passion or skill. In fact, many are suspicious of Richard's talent and erudition, deriding him as an "intellectual" despite his meager formal education. To be an intellectual is the antithesis of revolutionary fervor, which is reactionary and obedient. To be an intellectual is almost like being a Trotskyite. Branded with heresy, Richard reluctantly leaves the Party before he is forced out.

It seems to me that Wright is driven to agony by the essential futility of a writer's task. Though the goal is communitarian--to share some parcel of existence--the method is fundamentally individual. Society cannot write; a person can, yet the strength of his work relies on the depth of his originality. The individual-community tension cannot be resolved; the yearning for both cannot be satisfied. That makes Black Boy a very strange and troubling book, one that rejects its own ability to accomplish its most basic goals.

Black Boy by Richard Wright

Though I have not been posting for a while, I have been reading: This is one of about five reviews I have in my backlog. As it turns out, teaching in an actually functioning school has certain demands and some things have fallen by the wayside--reviews being one of them. I apologize, and promise never again to sacrifice my blog stewardship for something as trivial as the education of American youth.

In this case, the two are not exclusive--I read Black Boy because I thought it was going to be the next book I would read in my senior class; but when we discovered that there was only one full class set I had to turn my attention (not without some pleasure) to Pride and Prejudice.

Which is not to say I didn't like Black Boy--I did. But I didn't connect with it like many do. Why not, I wondered? I briefly considered that it may be because I simply don't have a point of reference for Wright's narrative; I can't relate to it, as my students often say.

It is the quintessential outsider narrative: Wright grows up in the Jim Crow South, a place and time not amenable to the ambitions of young blacks. Richard is fiercely intelligent, but his poverty means that his schooling is intermittent and he never connects with his classmates. Work is scarce and demeaning, and usually involves submitting to the tyranny of a white boss who fails to even imagine that a black child may have aspirations, or can write. At home, things are not much better: Richard fails to grow into the religious mold his grandmother and aunts and uncles expect of him; his father is absent from his earliest days. Wright subtitled the memoir American Hunger, and recalls that he is perpetually starving:

Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night with hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly.

First he associates the hunger with the absence of his father, but it is more; it is the starvation of all that it means to be human, the deprivation of the things which sustain life and thought. He survives meagerly, snatching at scraps of knowledge as he does scraps at food.

But I am not an outsider. I am not so progressive to admit that, in the great scheme of things, I am a have and not a have-not. Though I thought this, I rejected it: I had forgotten that relatability is one of the great smokescreens of reading. (As if we should never stoop to understand what we do not recognize as like ourselves.)

Instead, I think that Black Boy failed to resonate with me because I suspect there is some measure of airbrushing in Wright's accounts of himself. It isn't a self-hagiography; he hardly paints himself as a saint, but his sins are sins of youthful ignorance. For example, he takes a job delivering a newspaper because he likes the serials printed on the back, but fails to notice that the paper itself is militantly pro-Jim Crow. Contrast the scene in which Richard, desperate to please his grandmother, tells her that he would believe if he saw an angel--which she mishears as fact and tells the church that her grandson has had a vision. These misunderstandings lead to Richard being beaten, but always through the intolerance and narrow-mindedness of his family; he admits to no malice or ill intention. This pattern continues into the book's restored second half, which traces Wright's dalliances with the Chicago Communist community, which finds his free-thinking suspicious and seeks to eradicate it as his family did.

Ultimately, I think we are meant to see Wright as a victim. Not a victim to be pitied, but to be championed because of his ultimate success, but a victim all the same. I think this is the source of ambivalence for this book--yet it makes me want to read Native Son, whose protagonist seems more conflicted. That's the kind I like.

Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

The Vicksburg siege produced other oddities. The Confederacy experimented with camels, and one colonel used a dromedary to carry his personal baggage until a Union sharpshooter killed the animal. There were also Vicksburg´s famed caves, dug by civilians as protection against the Union bombardment. Some of these burrows became elaborate affairs, furnished with carpets and beds and serviced by slaves. But most were crude, crowded dugouts that one resident described as ¨rat holes.¨Like the soldiers, civilians also saw food supplies dwindle to a meager daily ration. When beef ran out, they ate mule meat, frogs and rats.

Tony Horwitz´s book about the Confederacy´s lasting legacy makes for great reading. Horwitz has met some of the strangest people and relates some of the oddest facts I´ve never heard about a war we all studied in high school. Horwitz, posessing an interest in the War Between the States (I´m going to try and work in as many Civil War euphemisms into this article as possible) since childhood, sets off on what turns into a multi year mission to examine several aspects of the war and its effects on the South today.

Horwitz begins his journey with a troupe of Confederate reinactors led by Robert Lee Hodges (named after the South´s most famous general, and generally dismissive of ¨farbs,¨or those who only take their reinactments halfway). As he travels throughout most of the South, he happens upon the Sons, Daughters and Children of the Confederacy, a group that allows him to see just how reticent some Southerners are to let the War of Northern Aggression go unmemorialized. Horwitz´s travels turn into an exploration of anything and everything having to do with the war, including but not limited to the Confederate flag, Southern Jews, race relations in Southern Kentucky, and the Klan. He even relates a story from Vicksburg of a minie ball, a type of shot, that passed through a soldier´s genitals and into the abdomen (and presumably uterus) of a nearby woman, impregnating her. Or so her mother said when confronted with her unmarried daughter´s pregnancy.

This book was full of interesting facts and stories. My copy is completely dog eared from trying to pinpoint funny stories, and I´m leaving it here in Honduras with Wheeler, an 82 year old missionary who is interested in the War of Northern Aggression. It took me a while to read because while interesting, it was dense. And had the uncanny ability to put me to sleep after about 5 pages. Read it if you like historical nonfiction or the Civil War. Otherwise, it may not hold your attention. I thought Horwitz´s writing style was similar to Bill Bryson...this book is written travel log style.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

"I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

Last year, after several aborted attempts, I finally made it through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It took some doing, but by the time I finished it, I was really enjoying Faulkner's mastery of the stream-of-consciousness style and especially his lyrical writing. I intended to follow up with The Sound and the Fury, but then I read Chris's review and, since it sounded approximately 10x more difficult than As I Lay Dying, I wussed out... until now.

The Sound and the Fury may be Faulkner's best known and most critically acclaimed work, and also his most complex, although this is coming before I've read Absolom Absolom. It follows one family, the Compsons, over about a decade. The actual storyline is a dark southern Gothic tale of family, betrayal, incest, and a mentally retarded manchild. So it's basically Anne of Green Gables.

The actual narrative is tough to summarize, and at some points, even to follow--I found out upon reading chapter summaries that I'd completely missed a major event; the book is really more about the characters and the way thy see and interact with one another than a storyline. Each section of the book is narrated by a different character, except the last which has an omniscient third-person narrator. The first section is narrated by Benjy, the aforementioned manchild who has no sense of time or place and whose narration skips from the past to the future without warning. The second is narrated by Quentin Compson, the neurotic, intelligent younger brother, and the third by Jason Compson, the cruel, cynical eldest child who takes an iron fist control over the family after the death of the father. Tying all these disparate narrators together is the enigmatic figure of Caddie Compson. Even with three different perspectives on her, we never get a firm grasp on what she actually is. To Quentin, she represents his repressed incestuous thoughts, but also his need for security and to protect. To Benjy, she is his only steady link to the real, linear world. To Jason, she is a thankless whore whose only contribution to the family was Quentin II, her illegitimate child and the bane of Jason's existence.

The Sound and the Fury is a tough book, both narratively and thematically. The Compson family and their neuroses are fully explored and the story itself is both intense and moving, but the actual heft of the book eludes me. At a base level, it seems to be about family and what constitutes it. Benjy, for example, is a much better brother to Caddie than Jason, and Dilsey, the Compsons' slave, is more of a mother to all the children than their own biological mother. I can't help but feel there's a lot that I'm missing here. Unlike Chris, I did feel myself connected to this band of misfits, but much like Benjy, I can't quite tie it all together.

I'm not sure my review makes it clear how much I enjoyed this book, but I thought it was great, and even enjoyed the Benjy section, which a lot of readers find offputting. Faulkner is a master stylist, and it was worth reading just for that, even if I can't quite figure it all out.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

It all started with Twilight. This summer I went on a business trip to Salt Lake City. While I was there, the last book in Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series was released at midnight. After seeing countless girls and women (no dudes) waiting in line hours before the release, I walked into the Barnes and Noble and casually edged by the vampire book table. Yes, every Barnes and Noble or Borders worth their salt has a vampire table now. I wasn't really keen on being seen actually looking at a book on the cheesily decorated vampire table...nevermind buying one then.

It took a few more months (and some friends' testimonials) to actually buy Twilight. Which I read in a night. I finished the series in 5 days. In order to do this, I read in public. I read at work. I read on the Metro. I removed the covers from the books so people wouldn't realize I was reading the newest tween phenomenon. I loved those books. And I covertly began recommending the book to my friends. Well, the ones who wouldn't make fun of me.

So when I heard about this series, the "Southern Vampire" books or the "Sookie Stackhouse" novels, I was more open-minded. I checked one out at the library. I was well-pleased by its glittery cover. My esteem for it was bolstered by the fact that a new HBO series, TrueBlood, was based on it. And while it didn't quite live up to Twilight, it was pretty good. Not literary masterpiece good (by far), but entertaining.

Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress living in Northern Louisiana, a few years after vampires, now a nationally recognized minority group, have "come out of the coffin." Sookie is a sweet girl but doesn't have much luck with the menfolk because she can read their minds. However, most people in town don't really believe she has a special power. The just think she's kind of crazy. Sookie meets a vampire for the first time when one named Bill walks into her bar one night. Typical romance novel ensues for a bit - he senses she's different, she saves his life, he saves hers, they start to date, have descriptive-but-not-graphic sex scenes. Their relationship unfolds along the backdrop of a string of unsolved murders in town. Additionally, it turns out that some other vampires, ones that aren't trying to "mainstream" into human society like Bill, get a whiff of Sookie's gift. Bill and Sookie find themselves trying to solve a murder mystery and protect Sookie from some vampires that really, really vant to suck her blood (haha).

This book was great for what I wanted right now - something light and fun after the dryer book I just finished. I wouldn't recommend it to any of you guys, it's definitely a chick book. I don't even know if I'd recommend it to all Twilight fans. Twilight had a little something extra going on, kind of a darkly gothic vibe. This book, even given its subject matter, was strictly romance and mystery. No undertones. And for all you haters out there (Mr. Chilton), I fully recognize that this book is no literary treasure. Some lines were awkwardly red-neck, and Bill and Sookie's relationship was a little too earnest at times for the lighthearted spirit of the rest of the book. Overall, this book probably falls somewhere in between The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada in the great literary scheme of things.

I'm totally going to read the other 8 books in these series. And blog about them. But not right away. Next, I need to read something just a touch more edifying. And then, when I'm ready, I'll return to Sookie and Bill.