Clock Without Hands (book and promotional pamphlet).
Inscribed to Louise Dahl-Wolfe
McCullers, Carson. Clock Without Hands. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.
8vo.; blue cloth; multicolored price-clipped dust-jacket; fine.
Together with:
[McCullers, Carson]. [Clock Without Hands: Promotional Pamphlet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.]
Slim 8vo.; printed wrappers, stapled; circle cut out of upper panel revealing photographic portrait of McCullers.
First edition of the last work published during McCullers’s short lifetime, together with Houghton Mifflin’s promotional pamphlet, with “A strange and compelling literary constellation” emblazoned on the upper panel on which also appear the titles of her other works. One of Dahl-Wolfe’s black and white portrait photos appears on the title page, as well as through the circle cut from the upper panel. Dedicated to Mary E. Mercer, M.D., whom Carr calls “her guardian spirit.” “She gave McCullers in her last years ‘a love, nurture, and comfort such as she had never known.’”
The first edition is a presentation copy, inscribed to old friend Louise Dahl-Wolfe: With gratitude and love Carson. McCullers was in the last stages of her terminal illness by the time Clock was published, which explains the faint and uneven hand of her inscription. It is also clear that she began to write “For,” which she crossed out to begin again, “With gratitude…”
When Louise Dahl-Wolfe arrived in Nyack, New York, to take publicity photos for Clock Without Hands, she was shocked to find that her old friend of several decades had become a virtual invalid:
Miss Dahl-Wolfe had not seen Carson for several years, and when she went to Nyack to take the pictures she was distressed to find [McCullers] in such a debilitated condition. “It was necessary to place Carson in a high-backed Victorian chair so that she would not have to hold her head erect by herself–she had such little strength in her neck,” recalled Miss Dahl-Wolfe. (Carr, p. 488)
Throughout the fifties Carson published stories in various magazines, worked on plays and composed this, her final novel. But her physical and emotional wellbeing were in perpetual decline: “her left arm, paralyzed by a stroke in 1947, becoming more painful and withered; and her beloved mother died unexpectedly. Her mental health was further complicated by severe depression,” after the failure of her play The Square Root of Wonderful. The completion of Clock Without Hands on December 1, 1960 given the turmoil of the preceding decades “ ‘cannot be regarded as anything other than a moral triumph,’ according to Oliver Evans.”
This novel contains the same deep structure as McCullers’s earlier work, the action centering on four lonely, alienated characters: J. T. Malone, a middle-aged pharmacist dying of leukemia; Judge Clain, an eighty-five-year-old reactionary segregationist; his orphaned grandson, Jester, who is searching both for his identity and for the reason behind his father's suicide; and Jester’s double, Sherman Pew, a black man with blue eyes who affects a Hathaway eye-patch and a five-syllable vocabulary to appear distinguished, serves only “Lord Calvert’s, bottled in bond, ninety-eight per cent proof,” and keeps a notebook in which he records injuries done the black race. None of these men find love, and although in the end Jester finds a measure of freedom and identity in deciding to become a lawyer, the novel remains profoundly pessimistic.
During her final seven years, Carson managed to complete some children’s verse and magazine pieces, as well as a musical adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café. “During this period McCullers enjoyed the friendship of Marielle Bancou, a New York artist; met her literary heroine, Isak Dinesen; and was cared for by Dr. Mary Mercer…. She began to dress, like Emily Dickinson, in white because, as Carr notes, McCullers was obsessed by ‘the image of whiteness and its ambivalent connotations [of everything and nothingness]. Soon she was granting inter
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