Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers
McCullers second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, is set in an army camp during peace time. It concerns the relationships between five key figures – repressed and confused Captain Penderton, his unsatisfied flighty wife Leonora, who is having an affair with Major Langdon, whose wife Alison is suffering great mental and physical exhaustion. Outside of them is Private Williams, somewhat simple and quiet, but menacing. As with all of McCullers’ work it deals with the nuances of spiritual isolation, the ways in which we find ourselves completely alienated despite and because of our surroundings.
Reflections in a Golden Eye is set up as a tragedy from the very beginning, we are well aware that one of the characters is going to meet a violent end at the hands of another. Some of the imagery here is utterly horrific, but it shapes our knowledge of the characters. The novella is brutal in the refusal to soften these stark elements of the human psyche. Shockingly violent, in both actions and private thoughts. These lives are burdened with intense hatred for each other that it controls their entire spiritual beings disallowing them to fully comprehend themselves.
Captain Penderton, who on the whole had lived a most rigid and unemotional life, did not question this strange hate of his. Once or twice, when he awoke late at night after taking too much Seconal, he made himself uncomfortable by thinking back over his recent behaviour. But he made no real effort to force himself to an inward reckoning.
Captain Penderton is the most intriguing character, with his slow and painful realization of his attraction to the quiet soldier Private Williams which manifests itself in an absurd form of hate. This hate reveals itself because it is a frustrated attraction which can never be fulfilled. The closest that Penderton comes to self-realization, is when Langdon comments that his servant would be a better person if he acted normally, to which Penderton bitterly responds:
‘You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?’
‘Why, you put it exactly right,’ the Major said. ‘Don’t you agree with me?’
‘No,’ said the Captain, after a short pause. With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll-like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. ‘I don’t agree,’ he repeated absently.
It is typical McCullers’ in that it is unspeakably bleak, and delves into the darkest emotions. Knowing of McCullers’ personal life, and her dedicating Reflections in a Golden Eye to Annemarie Schwarzenbach – who she was immensely attracted to, but who constantly rejected her advances – speaks volumes about where she is coming from, and relates to the concept which she would come to struggle with in her later work The Ballad of the Sad Café, the eternal disparity between the lover and the beloved. I think it is a book that is going to benefit greatly from future re-readings.
(Yes, that is Elizabeth Taylor on the Penguin Modern Classics cover. A film version, starring Taylor and Marlon Brando and directed by John Huston was filmed in 1967. It is available to watch on YouTube.)
