CARSON McCULLERS: A Life
by Mary V. Dearborn
Knopf. 496 pages, $40.
THE MEMORABLE TITLES were not hers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was suggested by an editor at Houghton Mifflin. (Her working title was “The Mute.”) And Reflections in a Golden Eye was a phrase taken from a T. S. Eliot poem (her title was “Army Post”). But the haunting quality of the prose was pure Carson McCullers.
She belonged to that generation of Southern writers whose work dealt with a topic that, as Mary Dearborn points out in the first new biography of McCullers in two decades, had previously been confined to pulp fiction in the U.S. She herself played up her own androgyny. The photograph that Louise Dahl-Wolfe took for Vogue of the young Carson McCullers after the success of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was part of her mystique. Dressed in a crisp white man’s shirt and jacket, she was hard to place. Tall, gawky, with shadows under her eyes, her prominent nose and receding chin were not conventionally pretty. The portrait reminds one of the photo on the back of Other Voices, Other Rooms of Truman Capote lounging on a couch while looking at the camera with an expression so disturbing that it could stand for Southern Gothic, which is what both he and McCullers exemplified.
Like her rival Capote and dear friend Tennessee Williams, McCullers wrote about outsiders. The main character in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a deaf mute whose beloved friend is also mute. In The Ballad of the Sad Café, a masculine woman falls in love with a dwarf. In Reflections in a Golden Eye, a homosexual Army officer becomes obsessed with a handsome soldier he sees riding naked on a horse on their Army base. Another officer’s wife finds companionship in her effeminate Filipino houseboy and later cuts off her nipples with garden shears. The word “lesbian” was never spoken aloud in the South of McCullers’ day, Dearborn says, but it was the very fact of the subject’s being taboo that enabled McCullers to write about outsiders like these. Homosexuality was the secret, the taboo, that informed much of Southern Gothic.
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was a literary sensation. Critics were amazed that a 23-year-old writer could have produced such a deep and mature work. It was followed by Reflections in a Golden Eye, and then a volume of short stories that included her most famous tale, “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” From the start, she was considered a type that she had referred to in the title of another story in that book: a “Wunderkind.”
Georgia, 1941. Courtesy AP Images.
Her family knew she had gifts from the start, especially her arts-loving mother, whose unconditional love gave McCullers a confidence that she wouldn’t lose for the rest of her life, and, paradoxically, a hunger for a love that she did not experience until late in the game. Her mother presided over the sort of home that people visited if they wanted to talk about books, listen to music, and drink—in a town that McCullers wanted to ditch for New York as soon as she could.
The first woman McCullers fell in love with was her piano teacher—the wife of the commanding officer of Fort Benning, an Army base near her hometown. Her musical abilities led the family to assume that McCullers was on her way to a career as a classical pianist, and not the writer that she abandoned her musical training to become. By the time she left Columbus for New York, she had married the other main character in Dearborn’s biography: a charming, handsome, fellow Southerner named Reeves McCullers, who wanted to write, too, though he left no evidence of having done so. Reeves was the “prettiest thing” McCullers had ever laid eyes on, and McCullers was the love of his life.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is set in a Southern town that sounds a lot like Columbus (which is even more clearly the setting for Reflections in a Golden Eye, so much so that the town was worried it would tarnish Fort Benning’s reputation). When they got to New York, McCullers and Reeves moved into a house that must have seemed like her mother’s house on steroids. The now legendary 7 Middagh Place in Brooklyn Heights was sort of an artists’ commune whose other occupants included W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, and the Black writer Richard Wright (author of Native Son). Wright didn’t know how he felt about McCullers. While he’d praised her for having written so sensitively about race, he wondered in private: “Why does she repel me so? The more I talk with her the more I feel that there is something in her that I cannot like; and she is one person that I want to like.” Wright left Middagh Place after a Black furnace repairman refused to work in a house that harbored a Black man (Wright) married to a white woman. Other times, other mores.
These other times are part of the pleasure of reading Dearborn’s engrossing book. McCullers came out of the same literary culture in which writers like Capote got their start by publishing short stories in women’s fashion magazines like Mademoiselle and Vogue. In New York, McCullers became close friends with George Davis, a gay man in charge of fiction at Harper’s Bazaar. And then there was Yaddo, the writers’ retreat at which McCullers was always welcome after The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter revealed her literary talent.
Her most commercially successful work, a wistful evocation of adolescent longing called The Member of the Wedding, was criticized by Edmund Wilson for lacking drama. Nevertheless, McCullers turned it into a play one summer while visiting Tennessee Williams in his rented cottage on Nantucket. She wrote the play seated at one end of the kitchen table while he worked on Summer and Smoke at the other end. (Surely that table belongs in a museum somewhere.)
Dearborn suggests that McCullers’ career was essentially over after The Member of the Wedding. After the commercial success of the play relieved her of financial anxieties, her main output consisted of The Ballad of the Sad Café, which Edward Albee would later turn into a play. Years later, she wrote The Square Root of Wonderful, a play based on her guilt over the way she had treated her husband Reeves, but it was not a success—too autobiographical, the critics said. It took years for her to finish Clock Without Hands, a novel about the racial situation in the U.S. She also worked on an autobiography called Illumination and Night Glare that was never published in her lifetime. But the magical efflorescence that earned her the epithet “Wunderkind” was compromised by a series of strokes (caused, it is now thought, by a strep throat in childhood that led to rheumatic fever), which turned her into an invalid later in life.
There’s not much literary analysis of McCullers’ works in this book; it’s more the kind of biography that people call novelistic, almost a soap opera in which one is constantly changing one’s mind about her and everyone else. It becomes toward the end profoundly sad—largely because of the denouement of her marriage and her physical deterioration, not to mention the drinking on the part of both Reeves and McCullers, which made it all so much worse. It reads at times like a B-list version of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. And then there was the sexual confusion. “Newton, I was born a man,” she told the scholar (and Capote mentor) Newton Arvin. “I think I was born a boy,” McCullers told Capote. But the larger question is: Why did Reeves fall so passionately in love with McCullers, and why did she not feel the same way about him? They divorced once and remarried and did not always live together. To watch this couple—whose shared dream when young was to become writers and escape to New York and Europe—come to such a sad end leads us to wonder just who was at fault. Capote said there was nothing wrong with Reeves “except her.”
But what was the reason for Reeves’ inability to find a steady job, to write, to stay sober? Part of it seems to have been doubts about his sexual orientation. When, one day, in despair, he confessed to Tennessee Williams that “I am a homosexual,” Williams laughed. “Lots of people are that,” he said, “without jumping out of hotel windows.” Reeves eventually joined in the laughter, but McCullers remained solemn. Years later, when Reeves’ brother Tom, ”in considerable pain,” told McCullers, “I think I’m homosexual,” her response was brusque: “Don’t be.”
The idea that McCullers might have had what Reeves called “imaginary friends,” his term for lesbians, drove him crazy. But despite the obsessive love he felt for her, she seemed to treat him, as time went on, as merely a caretaker—a caretaker of questionable reliability. McCullers was an alcoholic, too, but not as deranged as Reeves, who wrecked a car, forged checks, went in and out of sobriety, and seemed unable to find a home anywhere. What to Williams was, on that day at least, a reason to laugh was for Reeves a constant source of turmoil, a derangement.
People seemed either to love McCullers and want to protect her or to dislike her intensely, and that depended on which member of the marriage was considered the villain. Capote wept at Reeves’ funeral. Others seemed to be annoyed simply by her effusive personality. At Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, McCullers threw herself at the feet of Katherine Anne Porter, the doyenne of Southern letters at the time. Although Porter’s husband had warned his wife, after reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, that “That woman is a lesbian,” Porter was still willing to consider McCullers as a youthful acolyte. But after hearing McCullers gush, “I love you, Katherine Anne. You’re the only famous writer I have ever known,” Porter, who was revolted by lesbians (though most of her male friends were gay), decided that McCullers was not a “hopeful youngster” but “rotten to the bone already.”
Eudora Welty, who referred to McCullers as “that little wretch Carson” after Time magazine called The Heart Is a lonely Hunter a high point of Southern writing, “hated the ground McCullers walked on.” Cheryl Crawford, a producer who refused McCullers’ advances (but had an affair with Welty), disliked McCullers’ “necessity to devour her friends.” Maria Britneva, a close friend of Tennessee Williams, told Williams that McCullers was not really paralyzed on her left side by a stroke; she was faking her disabilities in order to receive attention (a theory that McCullers herself considered). The Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen “always felt Carson was a destroyer. For which reason I chose never to be closely involved with her,” though “her art was … great.” Gore Vidal said: “Fifteen minutes in the same room listening to one of her self-loving arias and I was gone,” even though “her genius for prose remains one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture.” Capote, spotting McCullers on the sidewalk one day as he was driving a car, wondered if he should run her over.
Andrew Lyndon, a friend and fellow Southern writer, “stressed that she was not a ‘monster.’ She was a genius with a strong sense of self-preservation in the midst of her seeming self-destruction.” Yet Dearborn does not hesitate to show us someone who could drive you crazy. After describing McCullers’ tendency to behave like a diva, which intensified after the success of The Member of the Wedding, she showed her cruelty to Reeves in a series of letters she wrote to him that are painful to read. She was madly ambitious. A famous Yaddo story has McCullers going to Katherine Anne Porter’s cottage, where she has holed up to escape McCullers’ ambush of affection, and knocking on the door repeatedly to no avail, though Porter was inside, ignoring her. When, two hours later, Porter thought it must be safe to go out, she opened the door and found McCullers lying across the doorsill. Porter stepped over her and continued on her way.
Some people were charmed when McCullers said that she loved them and then asked, “Can I touch you?” In England, that sort of thing did not go over well; her friend Edith Sitwell made fun of her gushiness behind her back. You either bought her act or you didn’t. But Dearborn ends the book with a pæan to the courage and willpower that allowed McCullers to survive all the years when she was increasingly in pain. She presents both sides of the ledger regarding Reeves as well. After taking his side in the marriage, she lists all the things he did that would have driven anyone to keep him at a distance.
Dearborn’s life is not what Joyce Carol Oates calls a “pathobiography,” despite whole paragraphs that do nothing but list the medications that McCullers was taking toward the end of her life, and the number of drinks she had every day. The facts only confirm the depths to which ill health had sunk her. Just before she died at the age of fifty, McCullers was scheduled to have her left leg amputated so she could get in and out of her wheelchair with less difficulty, but a stroke intervened, and then a coma from which she never awoke.
When she was a Wunderkind, McCullers, like Tennessee Williams and Thomas Mann, created poetic fables, mythical archetypes that our contemporaries can no longer invent, unless their heroes exist in medieval times or distant galaxies. Instead, we are reduced to autofiction. McCullers’ own career seems to illustrate the decline of the imagination in favor of the factual, the autobiographical, the memoiristic. (As Caleb Crain said of his most recent story in a New Yorker interview: “I committed autofiction.”) She seems, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, like Tennessee Williams, to have begun on Parnassus and ended up on a psychiatrist’s couch. Of course, Dearborn’s biography, like all biographies, reflects its time, namely our own. When they are discussed, McCullers’ works are seen through the prevailing prism of race, gender, and sexual orientation. But the book’s strength lies in its portrayal of a literary generation whose work introduced the subject of sexual nonconformity. McCullers’ ambition and gifts, her desire for a glamorous life, her search for love—she did not have the lesbian relationship she’d been searching for until the end of her life—not to mention the competitive nature of writers, their malice and cattiness, make for a mesmerizing story. And if the life was something of a mess, the novels were anything but. The works she left behind are imagined and written in a style that led Gore Vidal to cite “her genius for prose” and Tennessee Williams to claim that she was “the only real writer the South produced.”
Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
