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.” 32 TheG&LR CARSON McCULLERS: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn Knopf. 496 pages, $40. Miriam searches me clean with Mediterranean vowels of — h(o)w do w(e) s(u)rv(i)ve? when I told her “baggage your worth in four assets.” Torchlight: for brightening the knowledge of black on our skin. ATMPin: for its rare abecedary. Green card: for how often we too are created without a work permit. Ticket: for a meal that’d account for that one-year gap, should we separate. we were once youths adoring rifles, Ak-47. till we were the ones gunned 24/7, lifeless beside the red-hot cannons waltzing in showmanship that witness the tip of our bodies absorb bullets, pollinating the pillow pricked cloud to gun powder. our thoughts, nearly vocalic. how-do-we-survive? in a state we’re smuggled — black as any naive contraband. a state I teach my scalp to duck the feral mug shots, & outrun the badge chasing to chew my whole clan. we’re reduced to that rib full of meat, crushed to ease suckle of our pigments: simple wonder that breeds us into returnees. the many verbs to bring us home, to let the boy feigning refugee for six months know his life was a sour trick. the many tense & careless inflections he lends to mourn his inability to roll with his passported cousins, regardless of how his body etches Atlanta — land of rest when diced to the ground. I too am handpicked without miss each time I land at seaports. 72 trials in a row, if I attempt a hyperbole. I overstate, because foretelling promises rebellion than remembrance. because parenthesis is parental advice, & that’s all there’s to your dictionaries: a sheaf of whispering leaves. that too, another language unfamiliar to us. we admit doors when we cross shorelines. some worm into thresholds. some turn warning. the rest are just shores. ASHLEY SOPHIA Miriam Searches Me Clean with Mediterranean Vowels
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