If you’re looking for Carson McCullers, you won’t find her at the Heart Clinic, where in the waiting room the chairs are a pleasant pastel-green plastic, the color of hope, and comfortable, though the wait is not long, and the streaming station is set to 60’s and 70’s rock ‘n’ roll.
Carson’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” was published in 1940, when she was just twenty-three. We read it in high school in the mid 1960’s. The title comes from a poem by the Scottish poet William Sharp, published under his pseudonym, Fiona MacLeod. The word green appears in the 24 line poem 10 times. Here is the last stanza:
O never a green leaf whispers, where the green-gold branches swing:
O never a song I hear now, where one was wont to sing
Here in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.
Only a poet would say of the heart it is “a lonely hunter.” But notice MacLeod/Sharp didn’t say “the heart”; he said “my heart.” Carson took his personal reflection and turned it into a universal appeal. Is the heart a lonely hunter? The answer will depend on whom you ask. But meantime we might also play around with Carson’s title:
The Heart is a Garrulous Scavenger
The Heart is a Forlorn Blogger
The Heart is a Red Red Rose
The Heart is a Hollow Muscle
The word heart appears in Joyce’s “Ulysses” at least 200 times. Here is Stephen reflecting on one of his students in the “Nestor” episode:
Ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.
But Joyce’s use of the word includes the real thing, too, as we find when we first meet Bloom:
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
And this, meant to convey patience and forbearance in its context – Bloom thinking:
Wear the heart out of a stone, that.”
Of course many of the hearts are at the funeral for Paddy Dignam, but the young girls heart-worded “Nausicaa” episode begins with Gerty on the rocks close to sunset:
The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.
There is the sweetheart and the Sacred Heart. And times they might be the same. Or the heart is a flower. This from Molly Bloom:
I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is
And yes Molly Bloom has the last heart at the last of Joyce’s book “Ulysses” says:
yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes
The Coming of the Toads 