fused 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 MademoiselleandVogue. 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 onSummer 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 secondrate 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 selfdestruction.” 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 When she was a Wunderkind, McCullers created poetic fables and mythical archetypes of a kind that our contemporaries no longer invent. March–April 2024 31
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