This was a fascinating novel, both timeless and incredibly dated. As I was reading it there were moments of incredulity that it’s nearly 75 years old and yet passages could be lifted right out of it and be happening today, especially with what we are witnessing with the current US administration.
Clock without Hands has been on my shelf for a little over a decade, but it’s been on my list for 20ish years at this point. I wrote a paper in undergrad about Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams living out and proud lives in a time when that wasn’t accepted or even legal in many places. I knew I wanted to read more of McCullers, but I had never gotten around to them until my random book title generator pulled this from my list and here we are.
Where this novel stood out for me is the intricate way the three stories intertwined and often battled with each other for prominence, but in the end they all evened out with life moving on and death being a part of life. On one hand you’ve got an old racist Judge who still thinks highly of the old-South with wild ideas of restitution and you’ve got Malone (a middle-aged pharmacist dying of cancer), neither of which are truly satisfied with their lives. And on the other you’ve got the next generation of southerner: Jester (a queer boy trying to figure out who he is as the Judge’s grandson, with wild ideas of equality for the races) and Sherman (a mixed-race boy who doesn’t know where he came from or really what to feel about society or do with his life).
Those were the moments when impulse and innocence were tarnished, the moments which end the end, and which, many months later, were to save him from another murder — in truth, to save his very soul. (102)
McCullers is a master of Southern Gothic and the way each of the four stories plays out reiterates this. The Judge’s and the two boys’ stories are revealed in such a way that you think you know what’s coming but you’re not 100% sure until you’re there and you’re wrong or you’re there and you’re right but you don’t feel satisfied either way. In part, this is because of McCullers’s slow rolling of the details, but also of the building up of ill-will against every character except for Jester. He’s not exactly lovable, but he’s also not as loath-able as the rest.
One thing I’ll note that I found truly fascinating was McCullers’s inclusion of a frank discussion of the Kinsey Report (Sexual Behavior in Human Males) in the novel. It was published in 1948—less than five years before this was published—and the fact that she included it and had Jester reacting to his own reading of the report and identifying that he was not heterosexual, but that there were others like him was incredibly important. At the time everyone was talking about the report, so it would make sense that it was included, but I’m not sure I’ve read any other contemporary novels that included it and had the generational divide so hilariously displayed as in the conversation between Jester and his grandfather:
‘Whether you realize it or not, I’m a grown man now,’ Jester said in a voice that squeaked a little, ‘and there’s such a thing called sex.’ The Judge, who was prudish about such topics, was relived when Verily poured him a cup of coffee. He drank silently, not knowing what to say.
‘Grandfather, have you ever read the Kinsey Report?”
The old Judge had read the book with salacious pleasure, first substituting for the jacket the dust cover of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. ‘It’s just tomfoolery and filth.’
‘It’s a scientific survey.’
‘Science, my foot.’ I have been an observer of human sin and nature for close on to ninety years, and I never saw a thing like that.’
. . .
‘It proves boys my age have sexual affairs, boys even younger, but at my age it’s a necessity — if they’re passionate I mean.’ Jester had read the book in the lending library and it had shocked him. He had read the report a second time and worried terribly. He was afraid, so terribly afraid, that he was not normal and the fear corkscrewed in him. No matter how many times he circled Reba’s house, he had never felt the normal sexual urge and his heart quaked with fear for himself, as more than anything else he yearned to be exactly like everyone else. (91-93)
By the end of the novel Malone and Sherman are dead; the Judge seems to have fallen from grace and Jester’s story is left open. I’m not 100% sure I like the ending, but the fact that he didn’t end up dead or in complete misery as a most likely queer character is something to cheer about from American writers in the 50s. For the longest time you could write queer characters but they had to have tragic stories and a run of the mill boring he lived story seems contrary and something to celebrate.
Recommendation: This wasn’t easy to read—especially with the way some of the protagonists referred to black people and the liberal use of the “n” word—but McCullers wrote a novel true to the time and didn’t shy away from controversy and the read was well worth it. Her inclusion of the Kinsey Report was fascinating, given her own same-sex relationships and the crowd she ran with at the time. The novel was incredibly well written with multiple stories woven together to form a cohesive if abrasive narrative that I’m sure I’ll think about off and on for a while.
Opening Line: “Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way.”
Closing Line: “And to Mrs. Malone who stood with the full glass in her hand, it sounded like a sigh.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.
Additional Quotes from Clock Without Hands
“All Sherman’s life he had thought all white men were crazy, and the more prominent their positions the more lunatic were their words and behavior. In this matter, Sherman considered he had the sober ice-cold truth on his side. The politicians, from governors to congressmen, down to sheriffs and wardens, were alike in the bigotry and violence.” (163)
“Secretly the Judge was excited. In the old days the Judge had been a Ku Kluxer and he missed it when the Klan was suppressed and he could not go to those white-sheeted meetings at Pine Mountain and fill himself with a secret and invisible power.” (219)