Anesthesia by Kate Cole-Adams

Source of book: I own this

 

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. Unfortunately, this book ended up being the biggest disappointment I have read in a long time. And the club concurred.

 

In fact, what I would say is that this book relies on false marketing promises, because it wasn’t much like it was advertised to be. 

 

The book is about anesthesia, yes, but the science content is seriously dumbed down, ill organized, repetitive, and misleading. Yes, I said misleading. 

 

The reason for this is that it buries the lede so far at the end, after having spent most of the book creating the impression that anesthesia traumatizes tens of thousands of people. In reality, while waking during anesthesia is fairly common (although still statistically low), most of the time it is brief and quickly corrected, and no lingering issues result. 

 

I think the reason that the author wrote the book the way she did is that she suffers from some sort of anxiety disorder - not just a fear of anesthesia, but a general mental illness that makes her dread a plethora of things. The book is at least half about her anxiety, and that is not how the book is marketed. Here too, the lede is buried. After pages and pages of all the things she thinks may go wrong with her anesthesia (for back surgery), it ends up being a nothing-burger. She goes under, the surgery goes reasonably well, she wakes up. She remembers nothing. So, for all that, eh? 

 

There are some interesting stories and interviews in the book. Although the stories my wife can tell are, honestly, better and more compelling. The interviews with anesthesiologists and psychologists are worth reading - indeed, their far more measured and scientific approaches to their research are quite a contrast to the author’s anxiety-driven approach. (Psychiatrist Bernard Levinson is mentioned as a “wonderful storyteller,” and his stories are indeed some of the most fascinating in the book.) They mostly do not tell her what she wants to hear; that is, what she actually wants to hear, not what she says she wants to hear. 

 

So, you want what is interesting and useful in the book? Here is your quick summary:

 

Anesthesia is a difficult art - and it is art more than pure science - because we do not actually know how it works. What does happen when we are knocked out? Where does the self go? Since we cannot remember anything, particularly pain, did we not experience it? This all makes it wicked-difficult to research and understand. 

 

But, we do know some things. In general, lighter anesthesia means better recovery - faster wakeups and fewer lingering complications. But walking that line means more likelihood of waking up, or of other issues such as movement during surgery. (That’s never a good thing.)

 

Modern anesthesia isn’t just a bit of ether, but rather a cocktail of drugs. These include anesthetics both intravenous and breathed, a paralytic, and memory blockers. The skill of an anesthesiologist is partly in keeping all of these in proportion in a way that works for the individual patient. 

 

Because of these challenges, people do occasionally wake up at least partly during surgeries, and in other cases have memories of things said and done that may appear later. For the most part, these are not a problem. 

 

Modern monitoring technology and practices can help determine how far under a person is, and these tools can help improve outcomes. 

 

But what perhaps makes for the best outcomes is appropriate communication before, during, and after surgery. Patients who understand how paralytics work, and the potential for brief waking, as well as the things that will be done to put them back under, are far less likely to feel negatively about waking up. (Hey, actual humanity in medicine seems to work every time it is tried!) Doctors and nurses should watch what they say during surgery, in case there is recall. (Again, don’t be an asshole.) 

 

There. That’s the book. At least the good parts. 

 

And I do have a few quotes. 

 

In humans, the clever front parts of the brain, tucked behind the forehead, can get us into trouble by trying to override this response. Among the complex mores that govern most human societies are sanctions against showing fear and its physical manifestations such as shaking and crying. We are embarrassed by our animal responses and work hard to hide them and their connotations of weakness by suppressing our natural recovery mechanisms. 

 

This is true, particularly about how we socialize males in our society. It does lead to negative outcomes. This is also only tangentially related to the topic of the book, in this case, the question of whether anesthesia utilizes our own defense mechanisms. 

 

Likewise, it is an aside about the subconscious that leads to an interesting observation that I wish the author had understood better in relation to the choices she made in writing the book. 

 

Yet the evidence of my own life tells me there are parts of myself that I do not recognize or necessarily welcome, but which influence the choices I make, the interests I pursue, the people I love and the way I love them. 

 

Another example of the buried lede problem is a passage during which she talks about buried memories supposedly retrieved during hypnosis. It is buried in a long paragraph, but the author concedes that it is probably impossible to know (when dealing with studies done long ago, and not duplicated) how many of the memories were genuine versus which ones were the product of suggestion during hypnosis. At least in this case, nobody went to prison for child molestation they didn’t commit. 

 

And that is before you get to the problem (as she later notes) of the role of memory. It isn’t a photograph, but more of a modeling that we can use for the future. We are a cludge, and our mental processes are about being good enough for what we need to do, not perfect. 

 

The book does include positive experiences among the anecdotes, which kind of undermines the author’s premise. Including the weird one where propofol gave a patient the subjective experience of a half hour orgasm. 

 

Perhaps one of the most intriguing speculations is that supposed memories of alien abduction seem as if they might be explained by subconscious (or semi-conscious) memories of anesthesia. I mean, the bright lights, the mucking around with the body, loss of control, and so on. But nobody appears to have done a study about this. 

 

Also plausible is the idea that the beginning stages of anesthesia can, for some people, grant access to emotions they have been defending against. (True story: one of my kids had a minor surgery at age three. They were downright hilarious after the Versed kicked in.) 

 

So, as I said, a disappointing book, one that could have been a lot better. What I personally would have preferred was a bit more respect from the author. Give me actual science - I’m fine with statistics and studies and so on. Explain things in more detail. Explore the topic, rather than going only deep enough to find your own anxiety. And, for goodness sake, find an editor to cut down the repetition and duplication of ideas. This book should have been half as long to say the same thing, and a quarter as long if there was less of the personal drama. 

 

As my wife put it, it would have been a much better book if Sam Kean or Mary Roach had written it. 

 

Best Short Stories by Black Authors (edited by Langston Hughes)

Source of book: I own this. 

 

This book was my second selection for Black History Month this year. (The other was Allensworth the Freedom Colony.)

 In 1967, poet and writer Langston Hughes, shortly before his death, put together an anthology of short stories by black writers - a “best of” the years 1899 to 1967. At that time, it was entitled The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, but the title has been updated for the currently in print edition. I purchased a “used” paperback of the reissue. 

 

There are a total of 47 stories, by 47 different authors, arranged roughly in the order of the author’s birth. Charles W. Chesnutt starts things off with “The Sheriff’s Children,” a classic that I had read before, and ends with “To Hell With Dying” by Alice Walker. Some stories are by familiar names, but others are by relatively obscure authors. Women are well represented.

 

The stories vary widely in topic, setting, characters, and mood. Many touch on racial issues of various kinds, from “passing” to the daily humiliations of living in a white supremacist society. But most striking was the way that the stories bring to life everyday experiences, whether with horror or humor. 

 

The book is solid from start to finish - nearly 500 pages of great writing. I can’t think of any clunkers among the stories, although there are a few that are standouts. Hughes did a great job finding and selecting the stories, creating a collection with tremendous variety and showcasing the talents of several generations of black authors.

 

At the back of the book there are several pages devoted to short biographies of the authors, which is particularly helpful for the more obscure ones.

 

There is no way I can discuss all 47 stories, but I made some notes about highlights. Starting with Chesnutt seems logical. I want to mention “The Sheriff’s Children” because I think it is a story everyone should read in school. The plot turns on the fact that the young black man who has been arrested and threatened with lynching is in fact the Sheriff’s son, who he sold down the river as a child. Perhaps the most unbelievable thing about slavery was that men literally sold their own children. I cannot imagine doing such a thing, but I guess I am a liberal commie or something. In an interesting twist, Chesnutt could have passed as a white man, but chose instead to become an activist with the NAACP. 

 

One of the interesting things about this book is that a number of authors better known for their poetry (Hughes included) also wrote prose. I loved “The Scapegoat” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The story is a humorous account of local politics, and local kingmaker Mr. Asbury. He runs the “Equal Rights Barbershop,” and brings in the black vote. Until he is targeted by a local black attorney who feels Asbury is getting a bit too uppity and encroaching on his territory. How that all sorts itself out is hilarious. I wanted to mention a line, though, spoken by the white judge who is kind of in cahoots with Asbury politically. 

 

“Asbury, you are - you are - well, you ought to be white, that’s all. When we find a black man like you we send him to State’s prison. If you were white, you’d go to the Senate.”

 

Another humorous story that I loved was “Miss Cynthie” by Rudolph Fisher. The story is about the titular character making a visit to New York City to see her son, who has moved there, married, and become fairly well off. She doesn’t know what he does, though. Her dream for him was that he become a doctor (to care for the body), a preacher (to care for souls), or at least an undertaker, as the next best thing to both. 

 

She is shocked, however, to realize that he and his wife are entertainers - they sing and dance and have become pretty big stars. This is horrifying to her - that stuff is sort of against her religion, and certainly her sense of propriety. She is won over, however, when her son sings the song that she taught him as a child, and she realizes that his music is also hers. 

 

Another heartwarming story is a very brief one by Hughes, “Thank You, Ma’am.” A young boy tries to steal a purse, only to find himself taken in by his intended victim. I love one exchange in particular. 

 

“You gonna take me to jail?” asked the boy, bending over the sink.

“Not with that face, I would not take you nowhere,” said the woman. 

 

“The Revolt of the Evil Fairies” by Ted Poston looks at colorism, in the context of elementary school drama. The school always does a weird version of Sleeping Beauty, with the script written for each year by the teacher. It always seems to involve a battle between the good fairies and the bad fairies. The young narrator notices that regardless of talent, the “good” parts always go to lighter skinned kids. Since the narrator is one of the best, he aspires to more than just a “bad fairy.” But he notices as well that throughout the community, lighter skinned people get the good stuff. The good jobs, the good professions, the better homes. The darker ones are stigmatized from birth, practically. As his friend puts it, “If you black, you black.” The story ends with a hilarious impromptu fight at the end of the play, but the humor does not detract from the central problem. 

 

Another story that takes a hard look at culture is “Almos’ A Man,” by Richard Wright. Dave, a young teen, is frustrated with the lack of respect he gets, so he decides that buying a gun will be the way to get it. This ends badly, of course. But Wright really captures the central stupidity of this facet of gun culture. Dave’s mom asks, why do you need a gun? Well, because anything can happen so we need a gun in the house. This sounds far too familiar to me. As does the “gun gets me respect” thing. In reality, though, as Dave’s mom knows, the people who want guns because they want respect or because “anything can happen” are literally the last people who should have guns. 

 

There are several stories that involve military men, and examine the problem of disrespect toward black soldiers. “Health Card” by Frank Yerby is particularly poignant. Johnny is recently married, and his wife is coming down by train to spend his brief leave with him. Unfortunately, the MPs decide to demand “health cards” from soldiers on leave - proof that they do not have untreated STIs before they go sleep with prostitutes. Johnny doesn’t have one, because he hardly needs one to sleep with his own wife. But he gets harassed by the white MPs, who spit tobacco on his wife’s shoes. He wants to go fight them, but she pulls him to the ground. He sobs, crying that “I ain’t no man.” She makes it clear that she wants him alive, and that she considers him to be not just a real man, but her man. This is a recurring theme in the book - black men treated like trash, and denied the right to retaliate. I wish I could say this is no longer an issue, but I know better. 

 

I wanted to mention an incident in “See How They Run” by Mary Elizabeth Vroman. A young teacher just starting out ends up serving in a rural school - a very different experience from her own privileged and city childhood. Part of her learning curve is figuring out how to teach the more “difficult” kids, those often from impoverished homes, with missing parents, and little background knowledge. 

 

One of the children is named C. T. The teacher, Miss Richards, cannot understand this. How can the name just be the initials? And can anything be done to fix it? I am reminded of my wife’s extended family, because there was a great uncle (or something - I forget all the connections, but this was some time ago) named C. V. Just the initials. The story there, however, is that his dad was named Custer Violet. Dad wanted to pass the name on, but was too kind to inflict the full name on his son. So C. V. it was. 

 

There is another passage in the story that I loved. Miss Richards aspires to teach, not merely keep order. The officious principal wants the children to be kept quiet and sedate, using as much violence as necessary to achieve that result. 

 

Ah, you dear, well-meaning, shortsighted, round, busy little man. Why are you not more concerned about how much the children have grown and learned in these past four months than you are about how much noise they make? I know Miss Nelson’s secret. Spare not the rod and spoil the child. Is that what you want me to do? Paralyze these kids with fear so that they will be afraid to move? afraid to question? afraid to grow? Why is it so fine for people not to know there are children in the building? Wasn’t the building built for children? 

 

Miss Richards determines never to become a disciplinarian. 

 

From now on I positively refuse to impose my will on any of these poor children by reason of my greater strength. 

 

This is something I have been struggling with regarding my upbringing, and also my own parenting. The old habits die so hard. What you learned as a child is so ingrained that even when you know it is wrong, you still do it, you still react out of that. The whole point of “christian” parenting of the James Dobson/Gary Ezzo/Michael Pearl/Bill Gothard belief system is to impose the will of the parent on children by brute force. To break the will of the child. To make them afraid particularly to question. Because that is rebellion. 

 

My parents weren’t full Ezzo, let alone Pearl, but they were very Dobson and Gothard, both of which taught the importance of enforcing unquestioning obedience. I must have been a thoroughly frustrating child, because my will never completely broke, and I pushed back even though I knew the consequences. But I can see now how that ingrown reaction to childish behavior still draws me toward an assertion of the will. God knows, I continue to fight back against the instinct, but the patterns are so hard to break. I can hope that I have done better, at least a little. 

 

In one case, the story is part of a novel. “The Blues Begins” by Sylvester Leaks is one of those. The story is tragic, and looks at the dysfunctional family dynamics of patriarchy combined with poverty. The part I wanted to quote, though, was the opening. 

 

Monday morning came and the blues began: Rent Man Blues, Insurance Man Blues, Washday Blues, White Folks Blues, and Got-damn-it-don’tcha-mess-wit-me Blues!

 

One of the more unusual settings was “Barbados” by Paule Marshall. Set on that island, it is a psychological drama of an old rich black man who hires a young girl as a servant. She wants to be treated as more of an equal, at least in the sense of humanity, but he is too tied to his status to notice. There is a particularly great line when he tries to get her to go home every night rather than sleeping in the small closet she has appropriated. He tries to get her to take her pay and leave, but she doesn’t.

 

[W]ith a futile gesture he swung away, the dollar hanging from his hand like a small sword gone limp. 

 

I love the double (or is it triple?) entendre there. The trifecta of male posturing. The dick, the dirk, and the dollar. 

 

“The Day the World Almost Came to an End” by Pearl Crayton is another humorous story, about a girl who convinces herself the world is ending. I love this line in particular:

 

In spite of the fact that my parents were churchgoing Christians, I was still holding on to being a sinner. Not that I had anything against religion, it was just a matter of integrity. 

 

There are a couple of stories involving France that bear mentioning. James Baldwin is such a phenomenal writer, and his story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” is amazing. It is about a black man who has been living in France as an ex-pat, marries a Swedish wife, has a kid, and is now returning to America as a successful musician. But he knows he is potentially in for a whole lot of shit. The story is mostly about his own fears and hopes rather than action. 

 

The other, “Old Blues Singers Never Die,” by Clifford Vincent Johnson, tells of an encounter in Paris between the blues singer River Bottom and a young soldier. The whole story is great, but how about this line?

 

And that big depression, what was that? It didn’t say nothing to no colored man because he hadn’t known nothing but depressions. 

 

I’ll end with a line from later in the story. A character is described as being “too proud to smell his own shit.” That’s a great line, and we all know exactly what it means. We know those people. 

 

There are so many more stories I could have highlighted. I strongly recommend this collection not just for Black History Month, but because it is a truly great anthology of short stories. 

 

Great Classic Women's Fiction

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

I like to sprinkle some classic literature in our audiobook playlist - a way to introduce the kids to some books we may not have time to read together but can get through on our road trips. 

 

I saw this one when I requested My Antonia in 2021, and put it on the list. The set has four CDs, one for each of the authors, and each author is read by a different narrator. As such, the set feels a bit like four different books. What ties the stories together is that they are about women and their lives inside and out of marriages. 

 

Since there are only ten stories, I figure I can touch on each of them, along with the authors. 

 

Willa Cather

 

This is the reason I ran across this set of stories. I love Cather, so you can find a number of posts about her books on this blog. The kids enjoyed My Antonia quite a bit. 

 

That said, I think that the two stories in this collection are not her strongest works. I have never been a fan of “On the Divide,” and “The Garden Lodge” seemed a bit flat to me. 

 

So, what are they about? “On the Divide” is Cather’s first story to be published in a national magazine. But it was submitted by one of her professors without her consent, and had been “retouched.” I was unable to find an analysis of just what this guy changed, but I can confirm that the story lacks the nuance that her later works would. 

 

The basic idea is that there is the loner, Canute, who decides at age 40 to go get a wife. When the vapid and directionless Lena teases him, he takes her by force and bullies a priest into marrying them. She is, quite naturally, terrified. At least he doesn’t rape her, I guess. He sleeps outside in the snow, crying, after she rejects him. The story implies that she eventually decides to be his wife after all. 

 

“The Garden Lodge” is a contrast to this idea. Caroline is married, whether happily or not, to the wealthy businessman Howard. They seem to have a comfortable, but not passionate relationship at this point, a sexless middle age. Caroline’s zest for life went out after her brother committed suicide and her father got in hopeless debt. However, some sort of fling with a visiting tenor seems to have revived her. Did they have an affair? Or just bond platonically over the love of opera? It isn’t clear. When Howard decides to tear down the Garden Lodge (which was the site of the fling), she objects, then spends a sleepless night in the lodge revisiting her memories of the fling. When morning comes, she decides to go ahead and let the lodge be replaced with a summer house, symbolically allowing her memories of the tenor to be replaced with new ones. 

 

As I said, not my favorite Cather stories. Chris McGlasson did a good job on the narration, though. 

 

Kate Chopin

 

I feel like I read a Kate Chopin story for high school, although for the life of me I cannot remember which one. I do not think it was one of the four stories in this collection, although maybe I ran across “A Pair of Silk Stockings” somewhere? In any case, I think I missed a lot of what makes Chopin great back then. 

 

In any case, these four stories were excellent. Chopin was a master of seemingly reinforcing Victorian gender roles while undermining them. She doesn’t do it with preachiness, either, but with strong storytelling and a few devastating lines. 

 

“A Point at Issue” is one of her earliest stories, and takes an interesting approach. Charles and Eleanor are a newly married couple, intent on living in a modern and egalitarian manner. As part of this, they determine to leave feelings out of things, and act on pure rationality as much as possible. 

 

They honeymoon in France, then Charles returns to America, leaving Eleanor in Paris so she can learn French and otherwise attain a higher level of sophistication. While back in America, Charles becomes drawn to a teen girl, and accidentally mentions her in a letter, causing Eleanor to become jealous. 

 

At the end of the year, Charles returns to Paris, and is shocked to find that Eleanor seems to be giving priority to a handsome young Frenchman. As it turns out, Charles has no romantic interest in the young girl, and the Frenchman is an artist who is painting a portrait of Eleanor to go with the one of Charles. 

 

The knife twist in the story, though, is that Charles “comes to peace” with what has happened by deciding that Eleanor is, after all, only a woman, and a little jealousy is natural for her. Completely forgetting, as the author observes in the last sentence, his own pangs. 

 

“A Pair of Silk Stockings” is familiar enough. A woman (maybe a widow?) has come into some unexpected money - not a lot, but a little. After realizing that her entire life she has scrimped and pinched to provide for children, she decides to go ahead and indulge a little. The stockings are the start - she buys herself some actually nice clothes and shoes for the first time, and goes to see a movie and have a restaurant meal. The brilliance of Chopin’s writing is the way her protagonist slowly allows herself to enjoy something for herself, rather than always living for others. 

 

“The Story of an Hour” is a classic twist story. It also contains a controversial word omission in some editions. (You can read a bit about it on the Kate Chopin International Society website.) A woman receives word of her husband’s death in an accident. After some moments of grief, she finds to her horror that she feels….free. As the original line puts it: “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself.” (Commonly omitted word emphasized.) The twist, of course, is that her husband shows up, alive. 

 

The final story by Chopin is “Desiree’s Baby.” This story is set before the Civil War, and draws on Chopin’s experience with the French Creole community in Louisiana. Desiree is the wife, whose parentage is unknown - she was abandoned by her parents. Her husband suddenly goes cold to her after they have a baby together, and she is unable to understand why. Until she sees her child next to the child of their slave woman - they look like siblings. And she realizes that her child shows African American traits. 

 

The shit really hits the fan over this, and Desiree takes her baby and disappears into the swamp, never to be seen again. The twist, though, isn’t that Desiree isn’t “pure” white - although that is likely true. Her husband is also part black - and he knows it. Rather than face up to his own truth, he punishes his wife. Oh, and the other kid is his too - he has been bonking the servant. Another truly devastating look at the double standard. That we listened to this one on our Allensworth trip was an interesting coincidence. 

 

Tamara Walters was the narrator, and I found her voice a bit grating. That may have just been me. 

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

Yep, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the two Gilman stories in this collection. It is so well known that it seems pointless to further analyze it. You can view it as gothic horror, an account of postpartum depression (which the author experienced), a takedown of the misogynist approach to the medical and psychological needs of women, a feminist work, and a number of other interpretations. However it speaks to you, it is a brilliantly written story. I do wonder if it is wasted on high schoolers, though. 

 

Gilman herself admitted that she wrote the story as revenge against the doctor who prescribed her own stultifying rest cure. Apparently it was effective, as the doctor changed his mode of treatment. 

 

The other story, “Three Thanksgivings,” is one I had never heard of. It touches on common Gilman themes: the question of financial independence for women, the imbalance of power in a marriage, and economic servitude. 

 

The protagonist, Mrs. Morrison, is the widow of a clergyman, with two grown children. She wishes to continue to live in her own house - the house her father built, and in which she has spent most of her life. However, she owes a mortgage to Mr. Butts, and it will come due in two years. Mr. Butts wants to marry her, although it seems at this time of life that he envisions her more as an unpaid servant than a lover. Mrs. Morrison is determined to remain independent, despite kind (but condescending) offers from her children to move in with them. 

 

Mrs. Morrison has the idea to repurpose the house as a kind of meeting hall and event location, primarily for women’s clubs, and she makes a go of it. 

 

The three thanksgivings are central to the story. The first two she spends with a child, after a gloating visit from Mr. Butts. The third, she invites her children to visit her at home, and dramatically pays off the mortgage. 

 

The ending line is superb. 

 

"Come, come, Mr. Butts! Don't quarrel with good money. Let us part

friends."

And they parted.

 

…but presumably he is unwilling to be friends. Like most patriarchal men, they don’t enjoy losing their economic superiority, and the control that comes with it. While not as iconic perhaps as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a delicious story. 

 

Jan Ahders’ narration was good. 

 

Edith Wharton

 

I have read a couple of Wharton’s novels, but I don’t believe I have read any of her short stories. The two here were very different from each other, but each fit the theme of the collection.

 

“The Pelican” was named after the myth that pelicans will stab their own chests to draw blood to feed their chicks if other food is not available. In this story, Mrs. Amyot, abandoned by her husband, and with a small infant to feed, takes to lecturing to support herself.

 

While she is not actually educated, and does an objectively poor job of getting her facts straight, she has a good manner. And anyway, people come to the lectures to see and be seen, not to actually learn anything. 

 

The story goes on in time for probably three decades, at which point the unnamed male narrator runs into Mrs. Amyot. Her fortunes wax and wane along with public taste, but she learns to re-invent herself as needed. 

 

The denouncement of the story comes when Lancelot, now a grown man with a family and career of his own, finds out that his mother is still leaning on the story that “she lectures to support her son” and is horrified - he hasn’t needed her money in years. 

 

What becomes apparent at the end, of course, is that Mrs. Amyot actually wasn’t much of a martyr, but actually liked supporting herself in style. Which, well, wouldn’t we all? But as a woman, her only acceptable reason for her career was to support her child, never for her own gratification and lifestyle. 

 

This story is incredibly witty throughout. I laughed at a lot of the lines, and enjoyed the digs at society. 

 

The other story, “The Fullness of Life,” is an exploration of what it means to have a true soulmate. The unnamed wife dies, and finds herself in a sort of paradise. The angel informs her that, since she claims to have never lived in true fullness of life, she would have the chance now. Her main complaint is her husband, who seems nice enough, but they never really connected. He was uninterested in art and music and history like she was. And he kept slamming the door! 

 

She then meets this man, who seems to be that soulmate she wanted. They finish each other’s sentences, they fell the same things about art and music, and are indeed practically the same person. 

 

But she decides this apparent paradise cannot make her happy, and decides to wait for her imperfect husband to join her. 

 

This is an early story, and one wonders if the rather conservative ending would have been written later in life. It feels a bit cliched - and in that sense makes a perfect bookend to Cather’s “On the Divide” - another story that ends in a seeming submission of a woman to a man that cannot be bothered to understand her needs. 

 

But the real best part of the story is in the first part. In a most devastating line, she says she is “fond of her husband.” That’s pretty bleak praise. She also says that she feels she is a house, and her husband never bothered to actually explore the rooms. (One could also see this as a bit of a sexual metaphor.) So, ending notwithstanding (and honestly, who wants a soulmate so familiar that there is nothing to explore?), this analysis of the laziness that so many men have toward the inner lives of their wives is spot on. The ease of accepting someone who does the dirty work around the house, serves as a pretty ornament, without seeking that deeper connection has certainly been endemic to men in most societies. Feminism ultimately isn’t solely about the externalities - the economic, social, and political equality of women - but also about the very necessity of considering women to be fully human in every way, with inner lives equal to men, and equally worth exploring. 

 

Marni Webb narrated these stories. 

 

Overall, an interesting selection. I was most disappointed, ironically, by the Cather stories, as I know she can write better ones. It was a pleasure to discover some more Kate Chopin, as an adult rather than a teen. I love short stories as a genre, and always like discovering new ones.

 

It is vitally important that a diversity of voices and the stories they tell are part of our culture - and our education. While all four of these authors were white - and of a particular time in history - they represent a voice that still resonates today. These questions of what true equality means, not just in society, but in our intimate relationships, remain vitally important to our understanding of each other. 

 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Source of book: I own this.

 

One of the fun things I have done since starting this blog is exploring Southern literature. Sure, we all get a bit of it in high school - “A Rose for Emily,” a Flannery O’Connor story or two, something by Ambrose Bierce, and of course To Kill A Mockingbird. For reasons I do not understand, Eudora Welty does not appear to be part of the standard curriculum (even though I think she was a superior writer to Faulkner.) And also for unknown reasons, Carson McCullers appears to be an afterthought. 

 

I found a used copy of her complete novels in a Library of America edition a year or so ago, and put The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on my list for this year. I have to say, it is an achingly beautiful book, a unique story, and one that I wish was more widely read. 

First, though, a bit about McCullers. She was quite the unusual character in a number of ways, unorthodox by the standards of her time (and even, perhaps in ours.) The character of Mick in the book is pretty obviously autobiographical (as are others in her family.) A girl who dresses in boys clothes, wishes she was a boy, takes on a “male” name, and seems more comfortable in male spaces, Mick also aspires to becoming a concert pianist. In real life, McCullers was literally on her way to study at Juliard when she lost her tuition money on the subway, worked odd jobs, returned home to recover from a bad bout of rheumatic fever (which damaged her heart badly, eventually leading to her early death at age 50), and switched to writing. 

 

After her first story was published at age 19, she married an ex-soldier, Reeves McCullers at age 20. By agreement, they intended to take turns in breadwinning and writing, but because Carson’s first novel (this one) became a hit, he never got his turn. 

 

Instead, they divorced, and then later remarried. It does not appear to have been a healthy relationship, with both of them suffering from depression and alcoholism. Finally, they made a suicide pact, which he followed through on - she didn’t. 

 

There is some indication that the marriage was an open marriage, but even if it wasn’t, neither of them was monogamous. Between her two marriages to him, she cohabited with editor George Davis, and then composer David Diamond. But she also aggressively pursued a series of women sexually, although it isn’t clear if she ever succeeded. 

 

During her whole life, McCullers’ closest friendships were with gay and lesbian people, many of them writers of the era (Tennessee Williams and W. H. Auden among others.) She continued to wear mens clothing and present as at least butch, if not explicitly non-binary or transgender as our current culture would understand it. While her lack of success in forming a lesbian relationship was a disappointment, she intentionally presented as lesbian in her personal life, and in her writing. 

 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter isn’t an explicitly queer book, but it certainly hints at it. Not just in the character of Mick, but in the relationship between the two deaf mutes who form the core of the story. 

 

The book opens with the pair, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, living together. Soon their happiness is ruined, when Antonapoulos has a bad mental break, and is placed in an asylum. Singer visits occasionally, when he can save enough money, but when his friend dies, he is heartbroken and commits suicide. (Sorry about the spoiler.) 

 

Most of the book takes place in the interim between these two traumas. The setting is a decaying small town in Georgia, in the 1930s. Although not central to the plot, the rise of fascism and antisemitism in Europe haunts the book, and McCullers appears to have intended it to have an anti-fascist. Singer was originally intended to be Jewish, but McCullers changed her mind and left him of vague ethnicity. 

 

After Antonapoulos is committed, Singer becomes a lonely man, and is latched onto by the other lonely characters. Mick, of course. Jake Blount, a communist labor organizer and alcoholic. Biff Brannon, the recently widowed proprietor of the town’s all-night diner. And Dr. Benedict Copeland, an elderly African American who has a single-minded focus on racial justice. (This leads to a bitter and thoroughly unnecessary blowup with Jake over how best to solve poverty in America.) 

 

Each of these characters opens up to Singer in a way that they cannot with anyone else. Because he rarely responds, yet appears to understand and sympathize, he is the perfect sounding board for them. When he is gone, they are all left once more lonely and alienated. 

 

Without having to spend extended time in description, McCullers manages to paint an unmistakable picture of the town, mired in poverty, neglected by government and the private sector alike, seen only as a source of cheap labor at starvation wages. She has a light touch with her writing, never letting the dark themes of the book become heavy, letting the characters speak and argue rather than making a didactic argument herself. 

 

One of the most notable features of the book - again, published in 1940, not 2020 - is that a main character is African American, but portrayed with equal detail, care, and humanity as the white characters. He (and the other black characters) are not portrayed with stereotypes, and not flat and one-dimensional or “types,” and speak with the same complexity of thought and motive (and flaws!) as the others. Dr. Copeland is frustrating in the same way that Jake is frustrating - they are both myopic and unable to think outside their ideological paradigms long enough to realize that they are on the same side, for example. It is difficult to overstate how much of a change this was at the time, or how rare it remained for decades thereafter. 

 

This was noted at the time by a rising young African American writer, Richard Wright. In his review of the book, he stated:

 

To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race. This cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically; it seems to stem from an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.

 

I have seen some scholars who consider the book to be an elaborate parable on government and democracy, with the characters standing in for specific ideas and roles. I think this is a bit of a stretch, although if reading it that way works for you, go for it. 

 

I see instead the theme of the book to be contained in the title. The characters are lonely and alienated, and are searching - hunting - for that connection to others, a relationship of the heart. Their hopes and dreams are all thwarted by their circumstances - poverty, prejudice, bereavement, generational trauma, their own weaknesses. But at least having someone to listen and understand gives them that connection. 

 

The tragedy of the book is that this ability to connect seems limited to a connection to Singer. Dr. Copeland and Jake should have been friends. Mick and Biff should have been friends. (And Biff certainly tries to befriend Jake and Mick, but Jake seems incapable of maturing enough to relate, while Mick’s need to help support her family drives her in the direction of conformity and exhaustion.) 

 

Thus, this is an achingly sad book, haunted by what might have been, what could have been, what should have been. It is astonishing that McCullers wrote with the insight she did in her very early 20s - this book reads like something written by someone of psychological maturity, something rarely seen in the young. (That’s not an insult. We should all hope to grow as we age, not regress.) 

 

There are so many wonderful lines in this book. McCullers had a true gift with words, and a deep way of thinking. Here are the highlights for me. This one is from Mick, after a disappointing attempt to make a functional instrument out of broken one, a hopeless task.

 

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

 

This line stood out to me because I think this is the phenomenon that led my parents into catastrophic mistakes, particularly their embrace of Bill Gothard. When you want so bad to have things turn out right, it is so easy to trust in whatever - and whoever - promises to give that to you. That Gothard was a liar, a predator, and a charlatan is apparent now, but he sounded so good. 

 

I liked the introduction in the book to Dr. Copeland. We first see him in his kitchen, reading Spinoza by the dim light, while he waits for patients to show up. He is, from the outset, portrayed as an intellectual, and a devoted doctor, as well as a bit philosophically crotchety. 

 

Mick’s dad is a watchmaker, just like her father; and like her father, isn’t particularly successful at it, which is why they have to run a boarding house and the teens have to work. There is a haunting line about what Mick comes to understand about him. 

 

Now she just suddenly knew that she knew about her Dad. He was lonesome and he was an old man. Because none of the kids went to him for anything and because he didn’t earn much money he felt like he was cut off from the family. And in his lonesomeness he wanted to be close to one of his kids - and they were all so busy that they didn’t know it. He felt like he wasn’t much real use to anybody.

 

Another scene involving Mick that was wonderful was her discovery of a musical work. She has the habit of listening when a neighbor plays the radio, and one day, Beethoven’s Eroica (Symphony #3) comes on. She is so transported by the music that she sings its tunes for months thereafter. While I do not remember the first time I heard the Eroica, I will never forget seeing it performed for the first time. I was a teen, and our youth symphony took a field trip to see the LA Phil perform. The first half of the concert was meh - a Gerald Levinson piece that didn’t do anything for me. I enjoyed the two Michael Tippet brass fanfares. But it was the Eroica - brilliantly conducted by Simon Rattle - that blew my mind. While picking a favorite Beethoven symphony is really an impossible task, I think Eroica is mine. 

 

I should also mention one of the subtle queer lines in the book. 

 

She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl. And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. 

 

Mick goes on to note that before puberty, and at old age, humans seem to be sexless, with their voices and appearances far more alike than different. This was one moment in the book that made me realize that McCullers would likely be considered non-binary or transgender today. And she has a point that the traits that culture defines as “masculine” or “feminine” are traits that all humans have by their nature. It seems so obvious once you see it, after you allow yourself to see past the ideology of gender that our culture constantly blasts us with. 

 

Dr. Copeland is an atheist, which is one reason he is lonely - he has lost a central connection to his own people and family, to whom religion is central to their very identity. There is a statement by an old man that sounded rather familiar. 

 

“I done thought and reasoned about the time when Jesus going to descend again to this earth. ‘Cause I done always wanted it so much it seem to me like it will be while I am living. I done studied about it many a time. And this here the way I done planned it.” 

 

My wife’s grandfather, near the end of his life, became obsessed with “End Times” stuff, particularly the stuff that purported to see signs of the end of the world in current events. Any of us ex-evangelicals who grew up in the 1980s know far too much about this part of the subculture. But what we have also noticed, is that this is a common end-of-life obsession. Those who most pushed this stuff, and who were the most obsessed with it as the focus of their religion, tended to be people who were feeling their mortality. Older people, of course. But also those who recently lost parents, or who had started to have medical problems or pain. There is a great desire to avoid death, and one way to cope with that is to find reasons to believe that one won’t have to die at all: Jesus is coming back during MY lifetime! And then, most of these folks have died, so apparently it didn’t work out for them. This has always puzzled me, because people who believe in a glorious afterlife shouldn’t care that much how they get there, or be so dang afraid of dying. But here we are. 

 

The worst part about this passage is that the old man goes on to say that he believes that he and all his family will stand before Jesus, and that Jesus will take pity on them, and make them white.

 

Ooof. 

 

This isn’t the only time I ran across this idea in a book. The notoriously racist Elsie Dinsmore books that the most fundie of Fundies adore had the heroine promising to her slaves that in Heaven, God will make them white. 

 

I had an argument online a few months ago about this issue and about whether people believed that women lacked souls. He (of course it was a he) asserted that because no formal doctrine-making body had ever declared that women have no souls or that black people would become white in heaven, it wasn’t an actual belief. I argued back that just because it wasn’t an “official doctrine” didn’t mean people didn’t believe it. In fact, the very fact that doctrinal gatekeepers felt it necessary to state outright that women had souls was strong evidence that the opposite was a common belief that they felt was necessary to contradict. 

 

For the same reason, when you see lines like this in multiple books written by different authors in different centuries, it is strong evidence that it was a widely held belief, even if no doctrinal gatekeepers ever asserted it. It is also an example of how white supremacy as an ideology runs far deeper than personal prejudice. It is woven into the fabric of our culture, which is why it isn’t just white people that have these underlying beliefs in the superiority of whiteness. 

 

Another line that was interesting described the coming of winter malaise and its effect on people. 

 

The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

 

That’s a great description. How many people do you know who don’t want to think beyond tomorrow - particularly in a way that anticipates change that may not be welcome to them, and so they shorten their thoughts? 

 

One of the most haunting scenes in the book is when Singer realizes that he cannot keep his hands still. His primary communication has always been sign language, and he has nobody who shares his language. His communication was without thinking, and without effort. And now, he talks to himself. 

 

Imagine if you will, moving to a foreign country with a different language. You can kind of get by in that other language, but it isn’t natural to you, and often you can’t keep up or express yourself in a way that you are understood. 

 

Now imagine that there is literally nobody in your life who speaks English. How much would you pine for someone - anyone - who you can just speak with naturally? That is what Singer experiences throughout this book. 

 

McCullers also touches on an issue that my wife and I have talked about a lot over the years. Bakersfield is a racially diverse town, even if the racist white element gets the most attention and still holds the political power. All of the hospitals have staff of many ethnicities, but even more to the point, the patients are a cross-section of the town, racially and economically. 

 

My wife is now ICU manager at a local hospital, and part of her job is dealing with difficult family members. This is a job that requires a lot of emotional intelligence, because there are always layers to any problem, and the immediate issue is rarely the root issue. 

 

So, a recent incident (but of a recurring nature) arose when the family of a patient was convinced that their family member was dying because of substandard care. This wasn’t entirely crazy, because the family is from an ethnicity that has, historically speaking, received substandard care here in the United States. In this particular case, the patient was receiving the same care as everyone else - that is one of my wife’s central goals for the unit, to be aware of cultural bias and actively work to assure excellent care to everyone. 

 

But you have to go a few layers below that. Here is what Dr. Copeland thinks about it, after a run where several of his patients have died. 

 

The five patients had not been lost because of any negligence on his part. The blame was in the long years of want which lay behind. The diets of cornbread and sowbelly and syrup, the crowding of four and five persons to a single room. The death of poverty. 

And that is the point. My wife’s patient was, in that sense, a victim of racial prejudice. Not in the ICU, but in the social issues that led to them being there in the first place. The death of poverty. The death of systemic injustice. 

 

In the course of the senseless argument between Dr. Copeland and Jake later in the book, Jake expresses the central question that eventually destroyed my right-wing belief system, the one I inherited from the family and subculture I was raised in. 

 

“We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars - and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.” 

 

This is still true - possibly even more true - 80 years later. The billionaires are now hundred-billionaires, while real wages have declined over my lifetime for most people. We still lose over 80,000 people a year to treatable medical issues, because we refuse to treat healthcare as public infrastructure. (Those are those victims of poverty mentioned above - when you can’t afford to treat your diabetes or heart disease or cancer.) 

 

Jake is right about this. And so is Dr. Copeland in his response to Jake’s assertion that America will either fall to fascism, or it will have to reform. 

 

“And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.”

 

We so easily forget that Hitler and other fascists of the 20th Century were inspired by the United States. Our genocide of Native Americans, and our segregation and brutalization of blacks. Yes, the Jim Crow south was fascist by any reasonable definition in the 1930s. And in increasing ways, it is trending that direction again. The appeal of Trumpism is that it is the kind of fascism we have already had, and that an awful lot of white people still look on with nostalgia and longing. 

 

Sometimes, as in this case, I go into a book knowing very little about it, and not really having set expectations. In this case, I was pleasantly surprised by just how good it is, not just a decent book, but a true classic. It is a shame that it seems to be less known and celebrated than other works of Southern literature. It is every bit the equal - and one might even say better - than the names everyone knows.