Books: The Member of the Funeral

CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS (241 pp.) —Carson McCullers—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

Violence colors the surface of Southern writing, but its core is a sense of violation. In Southern historical memory, the great act of violation was. of course, the Civil War and its aftermath. Put as baldly and inartistically as Margaret Mitchell put it, the lament of the South in Gone With the Wind was: a rape—of a people as well as a person—is a rape. Among greatly talented Southern writers, the theme of violation is indirectly stated but pervades the whole texture of life. In

Faulkner, the social order is violated, debasing the semifeudal values of a landed gentry. In Tennessee Williams, what is violated is love and a kind of vagrant individuality. In Carson McCullers, there is the violation of innocence. At its best, this mixture of grief and grievance is poetic, at its worst, bathetic. As craftsmen, the Southern writers are generally sloppy; they represent the triumph of mood over matter.

The Imprisoned Self. What happens when the mood fails is sadly apparent in Clock Without Hands, a novel without direction or much visible point except as a tame foray into race relations. Novelist McCullers drops story threads and conies close to losing the entire narrative spool. A major character is suddenly reduced to a bit part. Motivations are inept and mystifying. Her people are all of a piece or all in pieces. What redeems some of these flaws is the special McCullers gift, the moment of high emotion when a lonely soul rapping on the wall of his imprisoned self hears an answering knock.

In Clock she finds her lonely souls, the innocent and the unarmed, in an aged judge, two adolescent boys, one Negro, the other white, and a dying middle-aged druggist. J. T. Malone, the druggist, is a drab fixture in the small Southern town of Milan who has emptied his life filling prescriptions. His approaching death from leukemia is the biggest thing that ever happened to him. For a time, he and his gnawing terror promise to dominate Clock, but he is destined for a fictional fate worse than death—to become a symbol of the brevity of life and life-in-death. His friend, ancient Judge Clane, is a Claghorn who never made the U.S. Senate but did get to the House of Representatives. He drinks bourbon and talks Bourbon: “Imagine a future where delicate little white girls must share their desks with coal-black niggers in order to learn to read and write.”

The Testing Age. The judge’s grandson Jester is just old enough, at 17, to question the judge’s values without having any clear-cut standards of his own. He is at the testing age. He tests his bravery soloing a plane and his manhood with a prostitute. But the test of his humanity comes when he tries to befriend a fellow teen-ager named Sherman Pew. Sherman is a blue-eyed Negro orphan who was found in a church pew. He is as wary as a porcupine and just about as tactful. In odd moments of disarming color-blind candor, Sherman and Jester are as glowingly close as two lovers.

Yet these characters never find reality as absorbing as their own besetting fantasy. Fantasy is the reprisal of the powerless against a world they cannot change. The fantasy of the dying druggist is simply that he is not dying, even while he is. The fantasy of the judge is that he can get the Government to redeem Confederate money, $10 million of which he happens to have. Jester’s fantasy revolves around the suicide of his father: if he can discover the cause of that, he feels, he will establish his own identity. Sherman is also an identity searcher, but his fantasy is that his mother is some noted Negro show business celebrity who was raped by a white man. All of these fantasies are punctured by melodramatic devices—including the single most horrifying episode in the book, the strangulation of Jester’s dog—that leave both novel and characters thoroughly deflated.

The Mooning Tradition. Ever since she created that yearning, harum-scarum, twelve-year-old Frankie who wanted to be The Member of the Wedding, Novelist McCullers has been part of the U.S. tradition of mooning, a tradition to which Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, and William Saroyan, at his infrequent best, belonged. But where Frankie shed her fantasies for the more abundant life of growing up, the characters in the current novel are stripped of their fantasies only to wither away. Clock Without Hands is thus a kind of Member of the Funeral. Death is admittedly the theme Novelist McCullers chose for her novel, but its dark and powerful presence is not felt. Instead, there is only death’s counterfeit, the absence of life.