The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Her name was Rita Achenbach. She was short and feisty with tussled brown hair. She walked and talked fast - in a hurry, very busy, and always purposeful. She was tough but emotional and always cried when we talked about the Vietnam War. She smoked - Marlboros I presumed. I saw her husband a few times. He drove an old Ford Bronco, wore white t-shirts and a cowboy hat and mustache without irony in a mid-1990s, Pennsylvania suburb. They looked like they were a couple that had always been together.
Mrs. Achenbach was my high school English teacher. I went to a small Catholic high school and I had Mrs. Achenbach for 10th and 12th grade honors English. I wanted to become a teacher because of her. I did become a teacher because of her. She told me not to do it. Years later I still wonder if I should have taken her warning personally. (I didn’t and still don’t even though she was right.)
She went to college in the South - the University of Alabama, if I remember correctly - and we read a lot of books from the South. She introduced me to Carson McCullers (Ballad of the Sad Cafe) and, most importantly, William Faulkner. In 10th grade it was As I Lay Dying, in 12th, A Light in August. And I knew where my heart was. It was in her class, in her books, struggling to show that I got it or at least that I felt it. Reading The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was like being transported back all those years, sitting in an old wooden desk, with a plaid skirt hanging just to the knee, thinking and writing about the symbolism of the South.
What can I say? I’ve never been to the South. A weekend trip to Knoxville, TN doesn’t quite count as having the Southern experience. And yet. Each time I read Southern literary classics it is so familiar - almost like coming home. I am comfortable among those characters, lost in a continually changing and confusing identity and trying to find a way out of internal and external turmoil. The lost is my home.
I should have loved The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. It is a beautiful book. I found it hard to put down. And, when I did, I found it hard to pick back up. Reading it felt like I hit my saturation point. It felt a little too textbook. I recently discovered it was her first novel and for some reason I feel like that explains a lot. I get it. I wish I would have read it in high school or college. And if I were still teaching high school (and had a choice), I would assign it.
While wonderfully written and beautifully sad (I’m not sure I can add too many more adverbs to describe an American classic without sounding too much like a high schooler myself), I feel there are reasons it is a classic besides how well it is written and it’s compelling characters - both Mick Kelley and Biff Brannon almost brought me to tears. Is it a criticism if the book is too good? I felt I knew the book before I finished reading it - as if I was back in Mrs. Achenbach’s class discussing Southern Gothic literature and religion (in Catholic school all literature goes back to religion - can anyone name the Jesus symbol?*).
*Funny, how we were never assigned the Bible - as literature, of course.
