Essays

Carson McCullers

Loneliness . . . An American Malady

Carson McCullers (1917–1967), a Southern writer, was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1942 and in 1946. Her published works include The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflec­tions in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951), and Clock Without Hands (1961). This excerpt from The Mortgaged Heart (1971) sug­gests that the way by which we master loneliness is "to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self."

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his city, New York—consider the people in it, the eight million of us. An English friend of mine, when asked why he lived in New York City, said that he liked it here because he could be so alone. While it was my friend's desire to be alone, the aloneness of many Americans who live in cities is an involuntary and fearful thing. It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady. What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest of identity.

      To the spectator, the amateur philosopher, no motive among the complex ricochets of our desires and rejections seems stronger or more enduring than the will of the individual to claim his identity and belong. From infancy to death, the human being is obsessed by these dual motives. During our first weeks of life, the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him, and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes a pristine wonder.

      Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being solves. Indeed, it is this self-consciousness that removes us from lower animals. This primitive grasp of identity devel­ops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself.

      After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

      In The Member of the Wedding the lonely 12-year-old girl, Frankie Adams, articulates this universal need: "The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome."

      Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about per­sonal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it moti­vates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?"—and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

      For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unan­swered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance, and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

      The loneliness of the Americans does not have its source in xenophobia; as a nation we are an outgoing people, reaching always for immediate contacts, further experience. But we tend to seek out things as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyal­ties, knows little of the moral loneliness that is native to us Americans. While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick—not only from society in the way of all creative minds, but within the orbit of his own art.

      Thoreau took to the woods to seek the ultimate meaning of his life. His creed was simplicity and his modus vivendi the deliberate stripping of external life to the Spartan necessities in order that his inward life could freely flourish. His objective, as he put it, was to back the world into a

corner. And in that way did he discover "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which deter­mines, or rather indicates, his fate."

      On the other hand, Thomas Wolfe turned to the city, and in his wanderings around New York he continued his frenetic and lifelong search for the lost brother, the magic door. He too backed the world into a corner, and as he passed among the city's millions, returning their stares, he ex­perienced "That silent meeting [that] is the summary of all the meetings of men's lives."

      Whether in the pastoral joys of country life or in the labyrinthine city, we Americans are al­ways seeking. We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart—the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.

Suggestions for Discussion

How does the author establish the connections between loneliness and identity? between I and We? between lack of a sense of identity and fear? between fear and hatred or destruction? be­tween Thoreau's search and that of Thomas Wolfe?

Suggestions for Writing

1.   Develop or challenge Thoreau's belief, "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which deter­mines, or rather indicates, his fate."

2.   Develop an essay in which you argue that country life is or is not more conducive to the de­velopment of a sense of self than city life.