Book Review: Clock Without Hands, a novel by Carson McCullers (1961)

Clock Without Hands, published in 1961, was Carson McCullers’ final novel. McCullers died in 1967, at the young age of 50. Rheumatic fever had weakened her heart, and it was clear from early in her life that she would most likely not live out her full “three score and ten” years. McCullers left behind a substantial bibliography. 

Clock Without Hands received excellent reviews when it was published. The New York Herald Tribune proclaimed, “It may be too strong, too frank for many. But not a word could be added or taken away from this marvel of a novel.” (Quoted on the back cover of the 1963 Bantam paperback.) The Atlantic Monthly said it was “The most impressive of her novels.”  

Gore Vidal wrote in a review: “McCullers is marvelous to read, and her genius for prose remains one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture.” As any Gore Vidal fan knows, this praise is all the more impressive because Vidal was not known to express his enthusiasm very often. As Frasier Crane said in an episode of Frasier, “Gore Vidal? He hates everything!” 

The novel begins with pharmacist J.T. Malone learning that he has leukemia and only has about a year and a half to live. Malone is a quiet, unobtrusive Everyman. He is friends with the Judge, who is 85 years old, a former member of the House of Representatives, and a leading citizen of the small Georgia town in which the novel takes place.  

The Judge is really the main character of the novel, as most of the action revolves around him, his 17-year-old grandson Jester, and Sherman Pew, a young Black man with blue eyes who becomes the Judge’s secretary.  

The Judge still has dreams of getting back into politics, and he tells Jester of his idea to have Confederate currency redeemed by the U.S. government, including adjustments for inflation. It’s a truly bizarre idea, like a reverse reparations. It’s also evidence of how the Judge is living in the past and still adhering to the myth of the “Lost Cause.”  

The Judge is a larger-than-life character, and he dominates the novel. He is a convincing character, and I can picture him clearly in my mind. Jester and Sherman, not so much. Although Jester became slightly clearer in my mind when I imagined him being played by a young Anthony Perkins.  

Jester and Sherman are intrigued by each other, and they carry on a lot of homoerotic hate flirting that never turns into anything more serious. 

Clock Without Hands is an example of a novel that tackles an Important Issue in society, but the points the novel wants to make are achieved through cardboard characters who are archetypes and not fully fledged people.  

There are no major female characters in Clock Without Hands, and I think that’s a weakness of the novel. I would like to know more about Malone’s wife, and her Coca-Cola stock she owns that’s mentioned so many times. What is she like? How is she negotiating life in this small town? She would like to be an entrepreneur, but her husband doesn’t like the idea of her working outside of the home. And I wonder what the point was of having Malone in the story at all? I feel as though he could easily be taken out of the novel, and it wouldn’t be affected very much.  

As realistic as I found the Judge to be, I was skeptical when the Judge says to Sherman, “No, I’m not a bit religious.” (p.173) The Judge is so conventional in all of his thoughts and actions that we see, and so conservative. Why wouldn’t he be a churchgoer?  This was a man who was a Judge, who was a member of the esteemed House of Representatives of the United States, and man who was born around the year of our Lord 1868, in a small town in Georgia, and he says he’s not religious? Well, I bet you as sure as anything that if he wasn’t religious, he was the only freethinker in that there whole town! No, I picture the Judge attending one of those fine old solid Baptist churches. I reckon that he could even give a fine sermon some Sunday if’n he’d put his mind to it.  

I found Clock Without Hands to be the weakest of Carson McCullers’ novels. That being said, it’s still full of fine writing, but it pales in comparison to her masterpieces The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding.  

Book Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)

Cover of the 2008 paperback reissue of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion, 1968.

People either love Joan Didion or they can’t stand her. She inspires passionate fandom and vituperative criticism. She’s a writer who’s been on my radar for a long time, and with my interest in Tom Wolfe and New Journalism, I figured it was finally time for me to start reading some of her work.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was Didion’s first collection of non-fiction. Published in 1968, it’s become one of the seminal collections of New Journalism. The book is separated into three sections: “Life Styles in the Golden Land,” “Personals,” and “Seven Places of the Mind.” I found the first section the most interesting, because it features the most actual reporting from Didion.

The first essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” tells the complicated and bizarre story of Lucille Miller, a housewife who was convicted of murdering her husband by setting their Volkswagen Beetle on fire—with her husband still inside of it. It seems like a fairly complicated way to try to murder someone, and the story gets more twisted, as Lucille was having an affair with a married man, whose wife had recently died under, ahem, mysterious circumstances. Adding another layer to the case, Lucille’s husband was a depressed, suicidal dentist. The essay is a fascinating piece that is highly evocative of the landscape of the California desert.

“John Wayne: A Love Song” is an interesting essay, written from the set of the 1965 movie The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s first movie after battling lung cancer. Didion writes of the Duke: “When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it.” (p.30) Of course, John Wayne always spoke with authority, but it had never crossed my mind that his authority carried a sexual overtone. I suppose Wayne’s heterosexuality was just so obviously worn on his sleeve—he was the ultimate on screen embodiment of masculinity for several generations.

I found the strongest piece in the book to be the title essay, a look at the hippies of San Francisco during the beginning of the summer of 1967, the so-called “Summer of Love.” The essay is an interesting companion to Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his study of Ken Kesey and the whole wild scene happening around him and his followers in San Francisco.

A man named Steve has a fantastic insight in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” He tells Didion, “There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen. Here you know it’s not going to.” Didion then asks Steve what it is that’s supposed to happen. He replies, “I don’t know. Something. Anything.” (p.98) Steve’s observation is strikingly similar to the conclusion of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which the Merry Pranksters chant “We blew it!” over and over again. The quest has failed, and all of these grand hippie experiments have not produced the desired revolution in human relationships that they sought.

There’s also a short piece on Las Vegas weddings, featuring Didion’s observation: “Almost everyone notes that there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future…neither is there any logical sense of where one is.” (p.80) That still rings true for Las Vegas today.

Section I also features an interesting essay examining society’s fascination with Howard Hughes, and the myriad stories and rumors he engendered. There’s also a piece about the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, a school started by the folksinger and activist Joan Baez.

The more personal pieces in Section II were less interesting to me. Some of them are simply too short to go into their topics in detail. I’m really not that interested in reading Joan Didion’s thoughts “On Morality” in 1,000 words. The setting and introduction of “On Morality” is more interesting than any conclusions Didion ultimately comes to in the essay:

“As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact it is 119 degrees. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back.” (p.157)

I found that scene setting of more interest than Didion’s declaration later in the essay: “You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong,’ what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil.’” (p.162)

Didion’s 1964 essay on the movies, “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind” was a frustrating read for me. Didion is dismissive of John Frankenheimer’s 1964 Cold War thriller Seven Days in May. The plot of Seven Days in May hinges upon a right-wing general (Burt Lancaster) attempting to stage a military coup to take over the United States government from a liberal President (Frederic March) who has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Didion writes that Seven Days in May “appeared to be a fantasy in the most clinical sense of that word.” (p.153) John F. Kennedy, President at the time Seven Days in May was made, didn’t find it to be a fantasy. Kennedy had earned the ire of the more right-wing military commanders due to his refusal to use the full force of the U.S. military during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1963, Kennedy was also extending something of an olive branch to the Soviet Union, calling for a nuclear test ban treaty in his speech at American University on June 10, 1963.

When JFK’s friend Red Fay asked Kennedy if he thought the events depicted in the novel Seven Days in May could ever actually happen in the United States, Kennedy had an interesting response.

“It’s possible. But the conditions would have to be just right. If the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, ‘Is he too young and inexperienced?’ The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation and only God knows just what segment of Democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment. Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs it could happen. It won’t happen on my watch.” (The Pleasure of His Company, by Red Fay)

Didion is also dismissive of another Cold War classic from 1964: “Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which did have a little style, was scarcely a picture of relentless originality; rarely have we seen so much made over so little.” (p.154-5) Regardless of whether you like Dr. Strangelove, I think most people would have to admit that it’s original. It’s a comedy about nuclear war and the end of the world, hardly a topic that was often addressed in the movies. Didion doesn’t even mention the brilliance of Peter Sellers playing three roles: Group Captain Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and of course, the titular German scientist.

The essays in Section III are a bit of a mix of the first two sections: personal essays combined with reporting. They cover a variety of subjects: Sacramento, Pearl Harbor, Alcatraz—just after it had closed as a prison and before it became a tourist attraction—the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, and making it through your twenties. 

My favorite line in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion’s essay about her life in her twenties is this: “One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” (p.226) That’s a brilliant summary of the intense self-absorption most of us go through during our early twenties. 

I enjoyed Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Didion is an excellent writer. I suspect part of the dividing line about her writing is the degree to which she intrudes as an author into the narrative. You might think Didion intrudes unnecessarily into the narrative, or you might find it really interesting to read about her own thoughts and feelings. I go back and forth with it, sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes I found it frustrating and distracting. Didion consistently uses first person in her essays and reporting, whereas Tom Wolfe was loath to insert himself into his own reporting, even going so far as to invent euphemisms to refer to himself in his own writing without resorting to using first person. Wolfe wrote: 

“Sometimes I would put myself into the story and make sport of me. I would be ‘the man in the brown Borsalino hat,’ a large fuzzy Italian fedora I wore at the time, or ‘the man in the Big Lunch tie.’ I would write about myself in the third person, usually as a puzzled onlooker or someone who was in the way, which was often the case…anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17)

Of course, there’s nothing about Didion’s writing that is reminiscent of an announcer at a tennis match. She’s more like a friend whispering witty asides to you as you both watch the action transpiring.

Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe (1968)

The first edition of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe, 1968.

Writer Ken Kesey on the bus in the 1960's.

Tom Wolfe in 1968. One of the Merry Pranksters said to him, "You know, you've got on the wildest costume around."

Tom Wolfe’s seminal exploration of the hippie culture, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was published in August of 1968. Wolfe’s second collection of newspaper and magazine pieces, The Pump House Gang, was published on the same day. While The Pump House Gang is an excellent book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test has achieved the status of a classic work of non-fiction. It’s the first of Tom Wolfe’s three masterpieces, the others being, in my opinion, The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test tells the story of novelist Ken Kesey. As the book opens in late 1966, Kesey had produced two novels: the critically acclaimed and best-selling One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey was regarded as one of the best of the new generation of American novelists, and in 1966 was more famous than Wolfe, a journalist who had scored a surprise success with his debut collection of newspaper and magazine pieces the previous year, published under the unwieldy but memorable title The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Thanks to Wolfe’s reporting, Kesey is one of the few American authors who wrote a classic novel and is the subject of a classic non-fiction book written by another author. 

Nearly the whole book is a flashback, as Wolfe chronicles Kesey’s life, his experiences with the drug LSD, and the many friends and hangers-on he gathered around him, a group that called themselves the Merry Pranksters. A centerpiece of the book is the 1964 cross-country bus trip that Kesey and the Pranksters took, with the end goal of getting to New York City in time for the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion. Before that trip, Kesey had acquired an old school bus, which the Pranksters painted with wild colors and designs. On the top of the bus, where the destination was usually written, one of the Pranksters wrote “furthur,” later corrected to “further.” This word became a metaphor for where the bus was going—Wolfe refers many times in the book to a fictional place called “Edge City,” and the bus kept rolling on, past each new Edge City they kept discovering. 

Wolfe didn’t directly experience most of the events he chronicled in the book, which demonstrates what an amazing reporter he was. You forget that he wasn’t actually there because it’s all described so vividly, so intimately, that you feel he must have been there, stowed away on the bus somewhere, riding in the seat over the wheel well, taking notes in his hulking green notebook as the wind blows through the windows and makes his blue corduroy tie bend back against his chest, so you can see the tag, and you try to read it to figure out what store this guy shops at, where does he get these clothes? But the cool breeze stops and he grins and smooths out his tie again, hardly even breaking stride as he takes his notes!

One of the most notable of the Merry Pranksters was Neal Cassady, who exemplified the search for the next Edge City, as he served as the model for the character of Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s classic 1957 Beat novel On the Road. Cassady is a supporting player in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and he was behind the wheel for most of the cross-country trip to New York City in 1964. Unfortunately, Cassady was dead by the time Wolfe’s book was released, found unconscious beside railroad tracks in Mexico. 

Probably the most famous quote from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is Ken Kesey’s “You’re either on the bus…or off the bus.” (p.83) The quote can be taken literally, but it’s also a metaphor for the lifestyle that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were living. You were either part of the trip, or not. You could still be on the bus physically, and yet off the bus mentally. 

Wolfe hit on the idea that this new culture that Kesey and the Pranksters were embracing and celebrating through psychedelic drugs was actually quite similar to the beginnings of a new religion. As Wolfe wrote in the book:

“In fact, none of the great founded religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, none of them began with a philosophical framework or even a main idea. They all began with an overwhelming new experience, what Joachim Wach called ‘the experience of the holy,’ and Max Weber, ‘possession of the deity,’ the sense of being a vessel of the divine, of the All-one.” (p.126-7) 

For Kesey and the Pranksters, LSD was the key to this new experience. At the time the Pranksters were forming around Kesey, LSD was also still legal—it wouldn’t be criminalized in California until October 1966, just at the time of the opening scenes of the book. 

The book follows Kesey and the Pranksters as they go on numerous adventures, including trekking to the Cow Palace in San Francisco to attend a Beatles concert while high on LSD. The Pranksters also make unlikely friends with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. After Kesey is arrested by the cops twice for possession of marijuana he faces the possibility of five years in jail. So he decides to hoof it for Mexico, hoping that no one will find him there and that the United States won’t go to the trouble of extraditing him. After several months in Mexico, Kesey goes back into the United States and gets arrested by the FBI, after briefly taunting the authorities by appearing on television. 

Throughout all of their travels, the Pranksters meticulously document whatever is happening to them on Ampex tape recorders and 16mm movie cameras. The idea is that eventually they will make a movie of their cross-country trip, but no one can ever successfully edit all the hours and hours of rambling footage. Wolfe reveals to us that the film the Pranksters have been making has cost $70,000! (p.137) That’s the dirty little secret of the whole thing! They’re living this crazy, far-out existence, but it’s all thanks to Kesey’s royalties, earned out in the square, capitalist marketplace that they’re able to do it! If One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest hadn’t been such a massive hit, there’s no way they’d be able to afford to do all this crazy crap without anybody having a real job and bringing in the bread!

In an essay about the book A. Carl Bredahl sees the unfinished Pranksters movie as a key distinction separating Wolfe from the Pranksters: “Ultimately, the difference between Wolfe and the Pranksters is evidenced in Wolfe’s ability to keep his narrative eye focused on the physical world of the Pranksters and to unify The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in contrast to the talk and endless feet of film and electrical wires that the Pranksters can never manage to bring together.” (“An Exploration of Power: Tom Wolfe’s Acid Test,” by A. Carl Bredahl, collected in Tom Wolfe: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, editor, p.68) 

One of the weaknesses of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is that despite the colorful supporting cast, no one comes close to matching Ken Kesey for holding our interest. There’s Kesey, and then there’s everyone else. And that may have been accurate as to how things actually were—there’s the leader, and then all of the followers, and that certainly connects to seeing Kesey’s group as a new religious group. Mountain Girl is probably the most interesting supporting character, but since we never see events from her point of view she never becomes a major character.

Wolfe’s hyper-kinetic writing style fit the material perfectly. To describe this new way of living that Kesey and the Pranksters had, it was necessary to document it in a new language. Before he wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Wolfe had already been writing radically different articles in newspapers and magazines, using techniques like onomatopoeia, multiple exclamation points, and entering into the minds of his subjects to get his point across. Wolfe wrote that he would try “anything to avoid coming on like the usual non-fiction narrator, with a hush in my voice, like a radio announcer at a tennis match.” (The New Journalism, by Tom Wolfe, p.17) Had The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test been written in that flat, radio announcer voice the book would not have had the same impact. 

Despite the bright Day-Glo excitement of Wolfe’s prose, he steers clear of some of his pet words and phrases in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. No one in the book is arteriosclerotic, which was Wolfe’s favorite word in the articles featured in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. There’s also no mention of Streptelon, a fictional synthetic material that is referenced in nearly all of Wolfe’s books. And, despite how crowded it might have been on the bus, absolutely no one is packed shank to flank. 

From the beginning of his reporting, Wolfe never tried to fit in with the Pranksters. As he said in a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone, “I began to understand that it would really be a major mistake to try to fit into that world.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.149) Wolfe didn’t attempt to change his signature sartorial style either, as he explained in a 1981 interview in Saturday Review:

“One of the Pranksters, a girl known as Doris Delay said, ‘You know, you’ve got on the wildest costume around.’” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.165) In the same interview, Wolfe explains that the only time he ever caught any flak was from one of the Hells Angels, who angrily questioned what Wolfe was doing there. Once he ascertained that Wolfe was a writer from New York, he said “New York’s a shitty town.” “And then it was very quiet all around. People could tell this was a confrontation. And I suddenly realized that everyone was listening to how I’d answer…so my brain’s spinning, and I say ‘You’ve got a point there. I don’t know why I stay there…’ At this point he seemed to realize that he wasn’t going to get a fight or at least not one that he could be proud of; so he suddenly changed completely…” (Conversations, p.165-6) 

The huge success of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test threatened to pigeonhole Wolfe. In his Rolling Stone interview he described his travails on the lecture circuit during the 1970’s: “I would talk about art, and the first question would be, ‘What’s Ken Kesey doing now?’ And I can’t tell you how many times that happened. I began to see that I was perceived as a medium who could put them in touch with the other world.” (Conversations, p.152) 

Wolfe also dealt with people’s perceptions that he was a hippie or a druggie himself: “I think they really wanted me to be on the bus. In fact, I never was.” (Conversations, p.152) But in the answer to the next question, Wolfe admits that he took LSD while writing the book.

“Well, I actually did it once during the writing of the book; I’d started writing the book, and then I thought, well, this is one little piece of reporting I haven’t done. So I did do it; it scared the hell out of me. It was like tying yourself to a railroad track to see how big the train is. It was pretty big. I would never do it again.” (Conversations, p.152) 

Wolfe also mentions that he took LSD in his 1983 interview with Ron Reagan. (Conversations, p.196) And again in his 1987 Vanity Fair interview with Toby Thompson. “At first I thought I was having a gigantic heart attack—I felt like my heart was outside my body with these big veins…As I began to calm down, I had the feeling that I had entered into the sheen of this nubbly twist carpet—a really wretched carpet, made of Acrilan—and somehow this represented the people of America, in their democratic glory. It was cheap and yet it had a certain glossy excitement to it—I even felt sentimental about it. Somehow I was merging with this carpet. At the time, it seemed like a phenomenal insight, a breakthrough.” (Conversations, p.212) In a 1979 interview with Henry Allen, published in The Washington Post, Wolfe told the story of taking LSD, and the details about feeling as though he was having a heart attack and merging with the carpet are the same. 

However, in an interview with Financial Review in November of 2016, Wolfe said he never took LSD. "I probably have given that impression in the past, but I didn't. I felt it was really far too dangerous to take a chance – and they didn't try to pressure me."

So, which is it? Wolfe certainly describes his lone LSD experience vividly, and the details of his trip are the same in multiple interviews given years apart. If Wolfe didn’t take LSD, then why did he lie and say he did? And why only admit it 11 years after the book was published? If he was going to lie about having taken LSD, why wouldn’t he have started the lie in 1968, instead of 1979? Of course, the truth could be that in 2016 he simply forgot that he had taken LSD. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if he did or not. Wolfe captured the LSD experience in vivid prose, and writers are always writing about things they didn’t actually experience. Stephen Crane never saw combat, yet he vividly described the Civil War in The Red Badge of Courage. 

Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fairly quickly. In a 1974 interview he said, “See, there was a time problem in writing that book, too. It looked as if the whole psychedelic, hippie phenomenon was disappearing. So there was pressure to just get it done.” (Conversations, p.59) 

However, Wolfe also spent a long time researching various parts of the book.  In an interview just after the book was published, he said, “At one point, I thought I’d never finish—I was reading books on brain psychology, on religions, on sociology, books on psychology, cognitive psychology, all sorts of things.” (Conversations, p.19) 

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a huge best seller when it was published, and the book made Tom Wolfe a household name. In 1974, Wolfe recalled when he had an inkling about the book’s possibilities: “I remember the first time I knew the book might be successful was when I found out that the girls at the duplicating service were competing to get hold of the thing as it came in, chapter by chapter.” (Conversations, p.59)

In 1988, twenty years after the book was published, Wolfe had this to say about the hippie culture he had chronicled: 

“When I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I honestly thought it would stand up only until the highly educated people who were really involved—as I wasn’t—in the psychedelic world wrote their big novels. When I wrote Radical Chic, I thought it would stand up until, again, the highly educated people in the New Left wrote their books. Then I was going to be in trouble competitively. Those books were never written. That’s what’s astounding. Not that they were written and weren’t very good but that they were not written.” (Conversations, p.259) 

Wolfe’s feelings in the quote above tie into his idea, espoused in the 1973 collection The New Journalism, and again in the 1989 essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” that non-fiction was doing a better job of capturing the zeitgeist and explaining America than the fiction of the time. Once he turned his talents towards fiction, Wolfe pressed fiction writers to work more like reporters and do research on the subjects they were writing about. 

Fifty years later, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test remains one of the best books about the hippie movement and the 1960’s.