Southern gothic

Since the New Year I have not read anything new, going back to old favourites (A Fan's Notes, A Confederacy of Dunces, Tropic of Cancer) and things I have never got around to reading.

One of the 'never got round to' books is Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. About ten years ago, I went through a phase of Southern American literature, but I got burnt out reading about the freaks, idiot man-children, moonshine-soaked pastors, whiskey priests, redneck racists, eccentrics, hucksters, con men and other grotesques who seemed to make up the entire population of Dixie in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lonely Hunter does have the freaks; two of the main characters are a deaf-mute and an out of control alcoholic communist. But they are more sympathetically drawn than the characters in, say, Flannery O'Connor's stuff. What the book is really about is being an outsider. Four alienated people - the alcoholic; the repressed, possibly gay owner of an all-night cafe; the tomboyish teenage girl who dreams of becoming the next Mozart; a black doctor who chafes at the South's racism and the plight of his people - are drawn to the deaf-mute Singer, impelled to spill out their stories to him.

Singer doesn't answer, of course, but by reading lips, he listens, and maybe that is what people really need, someone just to acknowledge their story. With an overriding theme of loneliness and that much of the action takes place in a 1930s cafe at night, I constantly thought of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, of how we are often cut off and isolated from the world, even when sitting next to them at a greasy spoon counter.

McCullers was 23 when she wrote it which seems well-nigh impossible; it is far too wise to have been written by someone so young. But she had a short, sickly life (three strokes by the time she was 30, dead at 50) and perhaps she sensed innately that her time was short. There is something poignant about this photo, her peculiar avian beauty augmented by the haunted, vaguely troubled look in her eyes.