Carson McCullers

  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 are 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, jerky 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 pa