WAKE UP (Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers)

Member Name: lynn_bex

Product:	Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers
Date:	01/10/01 (808 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Live for the day, Here's to Equality, THINK WHAT YOU'RE SAYING & DOING

Disadvantages: Last Century's Story, Karma = what goes around, comes around, Mind what you say

CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS – Carson McCullers

Should you have stumbled upon my recent Nanci Griffith/Clock Without Hands Opinion in dooyoo’s Music Section, you will know that Nanci borrowed the ‘Clock Without Hands’ title of her current hit album from “Carson McCullers last novel… [which, according to Griffith, is]…a piece of fictional art based around the concept of complacency of emotion”.

I was deeply affected by Nanci Griffith’s album and, valuing her opinion, was sufficiently intrigued to yet again hop a London RouteMaster bus during my lunch break, - this time to visit Borders Book Shop in Oxford Street, where I was fairly sure that Carson McCullers book would be readily available.

It was, - and what a book this is!

First published in 1961, ‘Clock Without Hands’ is now classed as a Twentieth Century Classic but, with the passing of time, it seems to me to have an even greater and universal twenty-first-century relevance.

I would like to think that this book is still capable of changing the mind-sets of some of those readers who might be unaware of their own prejudices.

The book is written in the language of its time and place, so that many of the terms used are deeply offensive. Clearly this was the intention of the author who, in my view, was years ahead of her time.

Set in a Southern American town in 1953, Clock Without Hands explores not just the racial prejudice of the period but the double standards applied by the town’s leading whites to all forms of morality, from basic human rights to the [non] payment of taxes (because they might provide benefits to support the supposed undeserving…)

The book has four main characters:

J T MALONE, the local pharmacist. The story opens with a medical consultation, during which the 40-year old Malone (married, father of two) is diagnosed with leukaemia, having
“a year or fifteen months left to live”.

Although his doctor, Kenneth Hayden, is a long-time customer and friend, who explains the situation with great sensitivity, the devastated Malone is disbelieving and resentful.

Later, suddenly realising that Hayden is Jewish, Malone thinks back to his second year in medical school when he failed the examinations.
This is a painful, suppressed, memory.
Malone was forced to drop out of medical school (to subsequently train as a pharmacist,) because the ‘Jew Grinds’ “ran up the grade average so that an ordinary, average student had no fair chance”.

“Malone said to himself he had no prejudice….” [but] “… he [Hayden] was living and would live on – he and his like – while J T Malone had an incurable disease and would die within a year or fifteen months…”

JUDGE ‘FOX’ CLANE is the next major character and we encounter him holding forth to a bunch of his cronies as Malone absently walks through the front shop of his pharmacy, en route to the rear compounding section. As Malone passes, the old Judge, who often drops by for a pre-lunch drink on Sundays, is completing his familiar harangue against the Federal Government. The Judge pauses to greet his friend, “Be with you in a minute, JT,” for the two of them regularly sit in the rear of the shop, drinking bourbon and talking.
Malone is proud of his friendship with the Judge, and listens to his outpourings with trustful attentiveness, smothering any misgivings he might feel about the reactionary views of his old friend. The Judge is a former Congressman, who sometimes talks of running again for Congress, so Malone is content to believe what his friend tells him, responsibility being where it should be.

JESTER CLANE, the seventeen-year-old orphaned grandson of Judge Clane, is pivotal to this story. We m
eet Jester when he calls to collect the Judge from Malone’s pharmacy, interrupting ‘the drinking session’ in progress to take his grandfather home for dinner. During this ‘session’, Malone has confided in the Judge, telling of his illness and impending death. The Judge has been supportive, encouraging – and has drunk a great deal of whisky. Jester, having just completed a flying lesson, tells how he has “soloed” for the first time, whereupon his grandfather becomes somewhat emotional, thinking back to his dead son, Jester’s father…

Jester, whose flying skills will later figure in the story, deftly removes his grandfather’s whisky glass (Malone is offended on the Judge’s behalf) and hurries the old man along home for his Sunday dinner.

SHERMAN PEW makes a brief appearance early in the narrative, when Malone is startled by an encounter with a coloured boy with blue eyes, who seems to be following him. So disconcerted is Malone that, although he knows the boy by sight, he suddenly thinks of him not in the usual and harmless term of “coloured boy” but in the harsh racist term of “BAD NIGGER”. [Please remember that it was the author’s intention to shake her readers out of an appalling complacency and she used the common language of the day].

Malone feels that the young black man’s expression alternates from emotional sensitivity to deliberate sullenness and he is disconcerted. Later, Judge Clane reveals a little of the young man’s history: that he was the result of “something wrong between the sheets”. The infant was thereafter abandoned in a church pew and thus obtained his surname from the authorities.

Sherman Pew’s story is the greatest tragedy within this book, the young black man with the powerful blue eyes being at the centre of, and catalyst for, the terrible events that run parallel to M
alone’s re-awakening from his [as Nanci Griffith so wonderfully explained] “complacency of emotion”.

Malone does not reveal his illness to his family for some time, fearing that such knowledge might bring an awkward restoration of intimacy with his wife.

Preoccupied with parenthood, Malone and his wife no longer enjoy a passionate marriage. Indeed, although Martha Malone is an excellent wife and mother, Malone feels some resentment towards her, due to her unexpected success in business, through which she has become an effective contributor to the family finances.

Having confided in no one but the Judge, Malone is lonely and afraid. He thinks back to those who died before their time: Mr Greenlove, the old pharmacist; Miss Missy, the Judge’s wife; all the local boys who died during the first war, and the last; the pretty singing teacher who choked on a fish bone and was dead within the hour; and Johnny Clane, the Judge’s son and Jasper Clane’s father, who shot himself dead at the age of twenty-four, on Christmas afternoon, seventeen years ago.

Later, we will understand Johnny Clane’s suicide…

As the story progresses, Malone does confide in his wife, and they find a kind of peace. He also comes to realise that his dying has “quickened his livingness” and he begins to live the remainder of his life to the full. Visiting the dentist and needing extractions, he declines false teeth, opting instead for the more expensive bridges, even though he will not get good use from them.


Meanwhile, Sherman Pew, with the encouragement of the Judge’s grandson, seeks the mother who abandoned him, having formed the opinion that his mother was a black woman, of whom a white man took advantage.

Following a different strand of this inter-connected story, we have the Judge, who we now realise is both alcoholic and senile, employing Jasper Pew as a
house boy. At last we begin to see the connection between the two, which is far more terrible than anything we could have guessed, connecting also with the Judge’s views on white supremacy and the related suicide of his only son.

Finally discovering his true background in the most dreadful manner, the intelligent but totally disillusioned Sherman proceeds to challenge the system by, following other half-hearted protests, moving into an all-white neighbourhood…

Ignorant whites retain the upper hand in such districts and the terrible climax of this novel begins to unfold…

We learn of Judge Clane’s past connection to the Ku Klux Klan and are introduced to the drunken, unpleasant men who meet to discuss the turn of events that has brought a black man into their neighbourhood.

Here, Malone is to show a degree of heroism in unexpected circumstances so that his death, when it comes, is worthy of a decent man – no better or worse than any other man on earth, finally at peace with the world and himself…

Jasper Clane is another hero… And, as the book closes,……… remains our best hope for the future…

There are some very valuable lessons in “A Clock Without Hands” - and I wish I could tell you more without revealing the story….

These days, I don’t read as much as I used to but I listen to a great deal of music whilst going about my business – and can’t help wondering whether, had she been born twenty or thirty years later, Carson McCullers might have become a country songwriter….

Unlikely as it sounds, many of her themes are echoed in the country songs of the past few decades.

Certainly, her words seem to have been borrowed by not only the lovely Nanci Griffith with her “Clock Without Hands” but also by the likes of Kris Kristofferson. The latter frequently credits au
thors by announcing that he wrote [whatever song] “with a little help from John Steinbeck [or another]” - and a certain phrase in this book leapt from the page, shouting “Kristofferson!”, as I read it.


I intend to return to this author very shortly – and recommend her books to all fellow Pollyannas out there in dooyoo land.

We STILL believe we can make this world a better place, don’t we?

Lynn

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