Book Tamers| book reviews

Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando are the main characters of the filmed version of this book. With their images in mind it’s hard to imagine this story as a simple Southern one, a violent coming out of the routine, a piece of news from the “local dramas” column. This short story is as awkward and disquieting as all of Carson McCullers’ writings; she prefers the depressing certainty that all of the world is different, that deviation is the new normality and this is probably where the first signs of McCullers’ fame as strange came from. However, more important is the fact that, two decades before Capote’s In Cold Blood, although in a different manner, Reflections in a Golden Eye searches for a meaning in crime and refuses the absolute portraits of victim and murderer. All the characters are victims and at the same time someone’s murderer.

The book’s most visible quality is concision: in less than 200 pages there appear a few stories so desperate and characters so minutely described, that it seems hard for the author to solve them till the end of the book. And still she does it in a very simple manner, through an expected denouement.

Until the end, the story has the aspect of a tense observation: on the one side private Williams grows an obsession for Leonora, captain Weldon Penderton’s wife, watching her quietly until he is discovered; on the other side, the captain, his wife and major Morris Langdon form a confused amorous triangle, given the captain’s latent homosexuality and Leonora’s appetite for flirting. Also, captain Penderton himself is examining private Williams, whose primitive calmness irritates and attracts him.

Private Williams ”had the strange, meditative face of a primitive man from Gaugain’s paintings”, is written somewhere, and this is a detail strong enough to indicate that the private’s opacity and simplicity are worse than fury and violence.

In the same sad, contemplative way, without facilitating any moral conclusion, is Penderton also described:

”This quantity of medicine caused him a unique, voluptuous sensation; it was as if a big, black bird halted on his chest, looked at him with fierce, golden eyes and stealthily embraced him with its dark wings.” He is an ailing man, overwhelmed by his aunts’ excessive carefulness, haunted by childhood memories, untruthful to himself, uncertain of whether he loves his wife or her lover; a complex character, with his soul caught in the strings of abstinence and cowardice.

The Major’s wife, Alison, and her devoted servant, Anacleto, represent another point of interest: two awkward, marginal figures, with their own childish and touching rituals, and their discussions about the quality of dreams, music, beautiful clothing materials, peacocks, as if making fun od the others’ so-called social-life:

”And the dinner from the evening of that last concert! Amacleto stepped victoriously and proudly behind her in the hotel’s dinning room, dressed-up in his orange velvet sack coat. When his turn to order came, he lifted the menu in front of his face, and completely closed his eyes. To the surprise of the colored waiter, he ordered in French.”

Their project of escaping the military fort’s somber reality, out of their status as observers, fails. In a way, their ridiculous plans have more meaning than the events that surround the amorous triangle Leonora- Morris- Weldon, followed by private Williams as by a shadow. However, without an ending, their project remains an illusion. Actually, the only way to come out of a situation that has made them both anxious watchers and watched, is death. But the final scene, of a grotesque beauty, motionless and perfect, casts doubt upon this solution: it might be that death doesn’t solve anything.

Doubt, dilemma are not unusual effects for the world Carson McCullers writes about, even if the author has the precision of a scalpel when it comes to evaluating the humane aspect: what is certain cannot be reached, what causes one fear is the thing closest to one, what one wishes for goes further when one believes it is the closest. Simple? This is another way of asking the question:

”Do you mean that any achievement gained with the price of normality is wrong and should not be let to bring happiness? said Captain Penderton.”

Written by Mihaela