Now read this! Carson McCullers’ <I>Reflections in a Golden Eye</I>

Now read this! Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye

Posted on April 27th, 2009 by Christopher Guerin

A few weeks ago I recommended Carson McCullers’ stunning novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. Since then I’ve read her short novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is now my new favorite of her works. Like Ballad, Reflections is concerned with the grotesque, but while in the former work the main characters are physically grotesque, in the latter each of the six main characters is psychologically grotesque, each one a twisted character.

Set in a southern Army base in the 50’s, Reflections is about two couples, Captain Penderton and his wife Leonora, and Major Mason and his wife Alison. Captain Penderton is a deeply repressed homosexual married to a sensuous and wandering horsewoman, who is having an affair with his best friend, Major Mason, whose wife is so unhinged by this betrayal that she goes home one night and snips off her nipples with a pair of garden shears.

To round out the crew is Private Williams, a deeply repressed heterosexual who becomes a peeping tom after being afforded a glimpse of a naked Leonora through the backyard window. And then there’s Anacleto, Alison’s Filipino servant, a flamboyantly gay man.

Of course, none of this fits well on an Army base in the deep south, so the entire book has a stifled, almost claustrophobic feel to it, which is mitigated by McCullers swift plotting and simple, though expressive prose. Here is the memorable opening paragraph.

An Army Post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again. The general plan of a fort in itself adds to the monotony — the huge concrete barracks, the neat rows of officers’ homes built one precisely like the other, the gym, the chapel, the golf course and the swimming pools — all is designed according to a certain rigid pattern. But perhaps the dullness of a post is caused most of all by insularity and by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the army he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him. At the same time things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to re-occur. There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.

McCullers has chosen a milieu in which strict order and regimentation prevails to tell a story of great psychological and emotional disorder.

The catalyst of the book is Private Williams. When the somewhat cowardly Captain Penderton has a meltdown after thrashing his wife’s horse for turning runaway and nearly killing him, Private Williams, who is fond of sunbathing in the nude, appears out of nowhere and leads the horse away, to Penderton’s humiliation, though it engenders an obsession with the young soldier.

At first the Captain did not believe what he saw. Two yards from him, leaning against an oak tree, the young soldier whose face the Captain hated looked down at him. He was completely naked. His slim body glistened in the late sun. He stared at the Captain with vague, impersonal eyes as though looking at some insect he had never seen before. The Captain was too paralyzed by surprise to move. He tried to speak, but only a dry rattle came from his throat. As he watched him, the soldier turned his gaze to the horse. Firebird was still soaked with sweat and there were welts on his rump. In one afternoon the horse seemed to have changed from a thoroughbred to a plug fit for the plow.

Private William’s peeping soon takes the form of actually sneaking up to Leonora’s bedroom in the middle of the night to watch her while she sleeps. Alison becomes unhinged when she sees the soldier stealing into the house and, thinking it is her husband, tries, unsuccessfully to steel Penderton to action against the two supposed lovers.

The murder announced in the first paragraph, which ends the book, provides a conflagration of all the relationships involved.

If all this sounds overwrought, it’s not. McCullers’ great gift is to be able to describe such grotesque characters, and their behavior, as if they all lived next door.

This is a book of great tragedy and psychological insight and page for page is one of the richest short novels you’ll find in American literature.

Other recommended works: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Now Read This! appears every Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

Author Bio
Latest Posts

Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.