The End of F. Jasmine Addams

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING--Carson McCullers-- Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

In the sultry Georgia kitchen, Berenice Sadie Brown, the Negro cook, was dealing greasy cards. Berenice, an experienced woman, had had four husbands. One of her eyes was made of blue glass (husband No. 4 in a fit of temper had gouged out the original). John Henry West, who was six years old, "watched all of the cards very carefully, because he was in debt; he owed Berenice more than five million dollars." Frankie Addams, who was nearly 13, sat with her eyes closed and wondered how on earth she could convince Berenice and the rest of the world that her real name was F. Jasmine Addams, Esq.

Frankie is the pawky, gawky heroine of Carson McCullers' slim (195-page) new novel--she calls it a novella. Unlike Novelist McCullers' earlier books (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye), which were well filled with the complex, morbid relationships of adults, The Member of the Wedding is a serious attempt to recapture that elusive moment when childhood melts into adolescence. The result is often touching, always strictly limited by the small scope of its small characters. Like childhood, it is full of incident but devoid of a clear plot; always working its way ahead, but always doubling back on itself; two-faced, two-minded. The soiled elbows of Frankie, the brat, keep showing below the sleeves of the orange satin bridal dress which F. Jasmine Addams, Esq. wears to her older brother's wedding.

Frankie found that adolescence is one of the loneliest of human experiences. John Henry was too much of a kid to help her much. Berenice Brown was too much of an adult. When Berenice talked--her stationary blue eye still fixed on the evening paper, and her active brown eye roving around the room--adult life was fascinating but bafflingly ambiguous. According to Berenice, a man might wake up one morning and find to his surprise that he was "to all intents and purposes" a woman. And even if people stayed the way they were, their actions remained incomprehensible. "I have knew mens," said Berenice, "to fall in love with girls so ugly that you wonder if their eyes is straight. . . . I have knew womens to love veritable Satans and thank Jesus when they put their split hooves over the threshold." Nevertheless, Berenice decided: "What you ought to begin thinking about is a beau. . . . A nice little white boy beau." "What would I do with one?" demanded F. Jasmine. "Do, Foolish? Why, make him treat you to the picture show. For one thing."

But the last, long-drawn-out day of Frankie's childhood is highlighted not by a picture show, but by one of the few dramatic incidents in the novel--Frankie's narrow escape from a drunken soldier. The rest of The Member of the Wedding is devoted to an uncertain child's private meanderings through a stewing hot summer day, when the old ways and excitements have ceased to have meaning, and the most familiar streets and houses have lost their familiar look; when the ear catches nothing but sounds that are incomplete, and the eye is deceived by apparent glimpses of things that do not really exist. The culminating point of all this--the hysterical excitement that surrounds her brother's wedding and her vain attempt to run away from home--merely marks the dividing line between awkward F. Jasmine Addams, Esq., and the poised young high-school student named Frances Addams, who smiles condescendingly at old Berenice, and murmurs: "I am just mad about Michelangelo."

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