Monday morning

20 February 2017

— Two thousand raindrops making random patterns on my south windows.

Good Morning All,

Let’s see, before I so rudely interrupted myself yesterday, I wanted to natter a bit about Carson McCullers are her characters' ability to keep her company.

My guess—or my hope, anyway—is that you’ve read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Modern Library rates it 17th on the list of best English-language novels of the 20th Century. It is not about much, not plot-wise, anyway. It is about the characters: two deaf-mutes, one tomboy (possibly McCullers herself), one alcoholic labor agitator, one diner owner, and one black doctor. They are all lonely themselves.

Born in Georgia, McCullers writes in the sub-genre of Southern Gothic. Like Flannery O’Connors’s characters, hers tend to be the rejected, the misfits, the outsiders, the mistreated, the forgotten, and the oppressed. These, she says, are the ones who keep her company?

But that makes absolute and perfect sense to me. Most of my characters are misfits and outsiders and have been good company, not least during the first few years after I lost Britta. Of course the characters of other authors helped, Huck, Holden, Hesther, and Hamlet, to name four. Indeed, those first couple of widower years, I pretty much left it to them (along with Pip, Gogo & Didi, Meursault, Willie Loman, Amanda Wingfield, and several others) to teach my classes.

For the past several years, my two main characters, Donny Ensom and Jane Pelletier, have been excellent company. The novels in which they appear are probably not very good, but I suspect it must take close to as much emotional investment and mental energy to write a mediocre novel as does to write a good one. By that I mean, readers might not find Donny and Jane to be fully developed, but they are fully developed in my head, and I am grateful they remain so.

I am also grateful for Iris Noble, a no-nonsense alter-ego of mine who I suspect is more successful at writing poetry than am I. Dozens of times, stuck in the middle of a poem, I have said to myself, “How would Iris write the next line?” When I am in luck, she enters stage left and says, “Okay, shut up and pay attention.”

I better stop there. People will begin to think I should be fitted for a long-sleeve canvas sport-coat and provided with accommodations at the rubber room farm.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron