Now based in Athens, Georgia, musician and filmmaker Jim White discovered The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter when he moved to Europe in his early 20s. As he puts it, he first read Carson McCullers “somewhere between Faulkner and [Jack Butler's] Jujitsu for Christ.” In this excerpt from an interview with the NEA, White discusses his take on McCullers’s debut novel as “American” rather than “Southern” fiction.
Well whenever I see a work of art, I always look to see where’s the creator in this. And it’s strange because in [The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter], every character seems like an incarnation of [Carson McCullers] . . . .Each one of those people’s hearts had a hole in the center of it, and they were all hunting. And it was like she needed all those voices. Much like a person writing a symphony needs French horns and tympani and piccolos to express a profound musical thought, she needed all those characters to express, it seems to me, an existential thought. . . .
It doesn’t at all feel like a southern gothic novel. It feels like an American existential novel. All the characters in this novel, it seems to me, are looking for God without calling it God, which is why it’s interesting that the characters are . . . all satellites of Singer, the central character. And if you read southern novels, Jesus is always in the thick of things. If he’s not the center of things, he’s in tandem with the center or he’s running parallel. And there is no Jesus in this. In fact, she takes great pains to have her characters rule out Jesus as a possibility. . .and that really interested me, because when you’re desperate and your life is unraveling, and you take no solace in the notion of God, how do you fix things?
That’s what this book deals with. The doctor [is] seeking social justice, and Jake Blount, the drunk, he’s looking for economic equality. And Mick is looking for a faraway place where she can escape the endemic poverty—not just economic poverty, but the poverty of the mind—because she has this powerful mind that is never going to be fed what it needs to be fed. All the characters have this hunger to connect to something, but it’s not God, and in the south, that’s quite an anomaly, which is why I don’t think it’s a southern novel, so much as it’s an American novel.
Hear more on Carson McCullers and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter from Jim White, Mary Louise Parker, Gore Vidal and others on The Big Read radio show.
Members of the Attleboro Historic Preservation Society don period garb for a rainy but rousing reading of poetry by Edgar Allan Poe. Photo courtesy Attleboro Public Library.
Attleboro Public Library is one of two dozen organizations across the country that are turning to the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe during the 2009-2010 Big Read. Project Co-chair Victor Bonneville filed this report from the field, which proves that even inclement weather’s no match for intrepid Big Readers! (Thanks to Joan Pilkington-Smyth for sending in pix and keeping us posted on APL’s Big Read activities.)
Our cemetery walk was advertised as “Poe in Love,” with readings of Poe’s poetry to and from Sarah Helen Whitman. The concept was to meander around the Kirk Burial Ground, which is one of Attleboro’s oldest burial grounds and is located behind the Second Congregational Church. Ted Moxham from the church would provide some background about the burial ground and select six stones of interest to discuss. At each stone I would give some information regarding Poe’s romance with Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence, Rhode Island. (We had recently done a Poe Walk in Providence, visiting Sarah’s house and the Providence Athenaeum where Poe and Sarah met.)
This would be followed by Poe’s poems “Spirits of the Dead,” “Annabel Lee,” “To Helen,” “Our Island of Dreams,” and Walt Whitman’s “Lines.” The concluding poem would be “Alone.” Since Poe proposed to Sarah in a cemetery and because both were fascinated by death and the afterlife, we thought the site was an appropriate setting for poetry among the gravestones. Alas, the weather failed to cooperate. With northeast winds and rain outside, we had to move the event into the church where the program was held minus the gravestone and the cemetery setting! The readers were all members of the Attleboro Historic Preservation Society, which hosted the event as part of its monthly meeting. Poe’s poetry was also read by Brian Kirby, a city councilor.
Browse The Big Read calendar to find out where people are talking about Poe somewhere near you!
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is celebrating the writing of Edgar Allan Poe with a range of activities, including poetry readings, film screenings, and an exhibition, to name a few. Today’s Roadshow and Tell features just a few of the posters that the Ransom Center has created to promote Poe and The Big Read in and around Austin. Visit The Big Read website to learn more about the center’s Texas-sized calendar of events.
Bevo photo by Jan Allgood. All other photos by Pete Smith. All photos courtesy of Harry Ransom Center.
Happy Birthday Rudolfo Anaya! To celebrate, why not grab a slice of birthday cake and settle in to watch A Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya. Here’s the short version of the film—by Lawrence Bridges—to get you started.
In a world saturated with self-help books, I still swear by the words of courage, inspiration, and even caution that I’ve found in works of fiction. Here are a few of my favorite words to live by from the pages of The Big Read.
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” — Willa Cather, from My Antonia
“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”— Harper Lee, from To Kill a Mockingbird
“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime,/ And departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time . . . “— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“What a curiosity it was to hold a pen . . . An immersion into the living language: all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve!”— Cynthia Ozick, from The Shawl
“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.”— Marilynne Robinson, from Housekeeping
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”— Thornton Wilder, from The Bridge of San Luis Rey
“From today on, I’ll be whatever I choose to be at the moment . . . “— Rosario Castellanos, from “Cooking Lesson”
Frederick County, Maryland, has been abuzz with Maryland Public Television’s celebration of the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Frederick’s Big Read went Hollywood by partnering with the 72 Film Fest, a juried competition and celebration that brings professional and amateur filmmakers together to create original works in 72 hours based on secret guidelines.
To tie-in with The Big Read, this year’s criteria included “the influence of Edgar Allan Poe.” The finished films—including “Best of the Fest” winner A Mouse Eye View—were screened at the historic Weinberg Center for the Arts during the weekend of October 9-10. Congrats to filmmaker John Saunders! (And thanks to Elizabeth Cromwell at the Frederick County Public Libraries for providing us with this award-winning footage!)
The black bird’s on the move during Rockaway Public Library’s Big Read of The Maltese Falcon. Photo courtesy of the library
With nearly 30 books to his credit, Walter Mosley may be best known for his 11 mysteries featuring the deceptively-named L.A. detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. In this excerpt from an interview with the NEA, Mosley muses on the complex morality of another hardboiled California detective—Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.
Hammett is always talking about heroes who are flawed, and so here you have Sam Spade [in TheMaltese Falcon], who’s been having an affair with his partner’s wife. His partner gets murdered, and Spade has to figure out where he stands in relation to the world after the murder of this partner who he’s cuckolded. He meets a whole cast of characters, all of whom are untrustworthy, and he has to somehow find his way to making the right moral decision.
It’s always an interesting question when you’re talking about a novel. Well, how do novels work? Novels work on one level with character and character development. I think at the beginning of the novel, Sam Spade has one set of morals, which allows him, for instance, to cuckold his partner without having any disdain for him really. But he has to find a new moral code by the end of the book, so I don’t think that you could say what is his moral code, because it’s in flux, it’s changing. And even at the end, we’re still a little uncertain about it, because in order to make a decision, you have to almost always go against yourself, and I think that that’s a lot what the book is about. I think that [Spade] finds that he has conflicting desires, and because of those conflicting desires he comes up with a decision that nobody’s completely happy with, not the reader, not him, not Brigid O’Shaughnessey, not the Fat Man, not Joel Cairo, no one.
It’s an existentialist book inasmuch as somebody has to make a decision about how they’re going to live their life, and Sam Spade does that. And Sam Spade changes. He becomes a different man, even though I think he doesn’t believe it’s possible to become a different man.
Poets Lois Red Elk (left) and Mandy Broaddus Smoker at the Billings YMCA Big Read kickoff at the High Plains Book Fest. Photo courtesy of Billings YMCA
Montana’s Billings YMCA kicked off its Big Read of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine at the seventh annual High Plains Book Fest, which this year celebrated Native American literature. Featured writers at the book festival included Assiniboine and Sioux poet Mandy Broaddus Smoker, Northern Cheyenne poet and educator Franklin Rowland, Crow Indian poet—and Montana’s new poet laureate—Henry Real Bird, and Sioux Indian poet and actress Lois Red Elk. Here’s Red Elk’s answer to why she’s a reader as well as a writer.
I make it a practice to read something new every day to fill my brain cells with the accumulated knowledge of human kind. Reading is not only educating and entertaining, it restores my heart and soul, and it takes away fears and doubts. When Sitting Bull said, “Let us put our minds together to see what life we will make for our children,” my parents took that to mean I would read in both Dakota and English.
The YMCA plans to present more than 30 Big Read events—film screenings, book discussions, writing workshops and panel discussions—in five counties. Visit their page on The Big Read website for details.
Even Sam Spade might have trouble keeping track of the infamous falcon these days since it has been showing up all over Rockaway Township during Rockaway Public Library’s Big Read of The Maltese Falcon. Big Readers of all ages (the falcon sports a checked cape and cap when hiding from the 12-and-under crowd) have been sending the library their guesses of the falcon’s location for a chance to win movie tix. So far, the bookish bird has shown up at the Rockaway Town Square Mall, the library’s Hibernia branch, and the local recycling center. Who knows where it’s winging its way to next?
Check out The Big Read calendar to find out where they’re celebrating Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon near you.
Portrait of Edith Wharton, photographer unknown. From the collection of the Library of Congress.
Although on the surface Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club may not seem to have much in common, each novel is—in its own way—an investigation of the tension between the old ways and the new, between obeying the rules and breaking them. Who belongs and who doesn’t? Here’s what Tan has to say about why Wharton’s classic novel still feels current nearly a century after it was first published.
For me, The Age of Innocence has a lot to do with culture and society, and how we behave and conform so that we belong. It’s also about the ways in which others think we don’t belong, because of perhaps who our parents are, or how we dress or who we know, or how popular we are among others. . . .[W]e’re all concerned at some point in our lives about belonging. We’re especially concerned when we feel that we don’t belong, when a group of people has not accepted us, and you don’t quite know why. It wasn’t maybe necessarily anything you did, but to not belong is a huge threat, I think, to your existence. And you especially experience this in grade school and junior high and high school, and also when maybe you’re the new kid on the block, as I often was, because our family moved just about every year. In situations like that, you feel that someone decides whether you belong or not. And it may be because you wear plaid and not stripes, or you’re friends with somebody who others don’t like.
Often the rules and requirements are understood, but not spoken about. People notice why you’re less than they are, but they don’t tell you. Or you see something really embarrassing, but you pretend not to notice, even though you did. That is, to me, what The Age of Innocence is about, that pretense of innocence. . . .You’re measured by who your family is, you know, in the novel. You’re a Rushworth and you’re not one of the newer immigrants, you’re one of the older families. You didn’t have a quirky relative, a funny aunt who married too often, or your aunt didn’t dress you funny as a kid at the funeral. And all these things, your behavior, and what happened long ago are never forgotten. In this society that Edith Wharton talks about, all of this determines who you are throughout your life.
To learn more about Edith Wharton and her works, visit The Age of Innocencepage on The Big Read website.
