Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1959
Carson McCullers, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1959

Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American writer. Her first novel explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the South. Her other writings deal with a wide scope of personal and social issues in other geographical locations.

Contents

[edit] Early life

She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917 of middle class parentage. Her mother was the granddaughter of a plantation owner and Confederate War hero. Her father, similar to Wilbur Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was a well-to-do watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot extraction. From the age of five she took piano lessons, and at the age of 15 she received a typewriter from her father.

Two years later she was sent to the Juilliard School of Music in New York City to study piano, but never attended the school, having lost the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers worked in menial jobs and studied creative writing under Texas writer Dorothy Scarborough at night classes at Columbia University and Washington Square College. She decided to become a writer and published in 1936 an autobiographical piece, Wunderkind, in Story magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity and also appears in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe collection.

[edit] Marriage and career

In 1935 she moved to North Carolina, and in 1937 she married a soldier and struggling writer, Reeves McCullers. There she wrote her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in the Southern Gothic tradition. The title, suggested by McCullers's editor, was taken from Fiona MacLeod's poem 'The Lonely Hunter'. The novel itself was interpreted as an anti-fascist book. Altogether she published eight books. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), written at the age of twenty-three, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), are the most well-known. The novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) also depicts loneliness and the pain of unrequited love. She was an alumna of Yaddo in Saratoga, New York.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in 1968 with Alan Arkin in the lead role. Reflections in a Golden Eye was directed by John Huston (1967), starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Some of the film was shot in New York City and on Long Island, where Huston was permitted to use an abandoned Army installation. Many of the interiors and some of the exteriors were done in Italy. "I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York," said Huston in An Open Book (1980). "Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway. She was then in her early twenties, and had already suffered the first of a series of strokes. I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine. It wasn't palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity. But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life. And as her afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger."

[edit] Failed marriage and emotional struggles

McCullers's marriage was unsuccessful, with both parties having homosexual relationships; McCullers and Reeves separated in 1940 and divorced in 1941. After she separated from Reeves, she moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. In Brooklyn, McCullers became a member of the art commune February House. Among their friends were W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, and Paul and Jane Bowles. After World War II, McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

In 1945, McCullers and Reeves remarried. Three years later, she attempted suicide while depressed. In 1953, Reeves tried to convince McCullers to commit suicide with him, but she fled.[1] After McCullers left him, Reeves killed himself in their Paris hotel with an overdose of sleeping pills. McCullers's bittersweet play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), was an attempt to examine these traumatic experiences. The Member of the Wedding (1946) describes the feelings of a young girl at her brother's wedding. The Broadway production of the novel had a successful run in 1950–51 and was produced by the Young Vic in London in September 2007.

McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses and from alcoholism — she had contracted rheumatic fever at the age of fifteen and suffered from strokes since her youth. By the age of 31, her left side was entirely paralyzed. She died in Nyack, New York, on September 29, 1967, after a brain hemorrhage and the resultant stroke. McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), during her final months.

[edit] Criticism

"Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr. Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility. I prefer Miss McCullers to Mr. Faulkner because she writes more clearly; I prefer her to D. H. Lawrence because she has no message." – Graham Greene
"Moving, yes, but a minor author. And broken by illness at such a young age." – Arthur Miller

Although McCullers's oeuvre is often described as "Southern Gothic," she produced her famous works after leaving the South. Her eccentric characters suffer from loneliness that is interpreted with deep empathy. In a discussion with the Irish critic and writer Terence de Vere White she said: "Writing, for me, is a search for God." Gore Vidal praised her work as "one of the few satisfying achievements of our second-rate culture." Other critics have variously detected tragicomic or political elements in her writing.

[edit] Cultural References

McCullers narration of The Member of the Wedding was used by Jarvis Cocker on his debut album, Jarvis. It forms the introduction to the song Big Julie and consists of an edited (or slightly mangled) version of the opening lines of the book:

"It happened that green and crazy summer. It was a summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and she was a member of nothing in the world. And she was afraid."

Sue Denim (of Robots in Disguise) lists Carson McCullers under her "loves and influences" on the Robots' MySpace page, and, in her solo project Sue and the Unicorn, Denim references McCullers along with other writers in the song "For JT and Carson and Emily."

The Anniversary, a Kansas City band who released two albums through Vagrant Records, titled a song "Heart is a Lonely Hunter" on their album Designing a Nervous Breakdown.

Nanci Griffith's album Clock Without Hands is, in part, inspired by McCullers' novel.

[edit] Works

[edit] Novels

[edit] Other works

  • The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951), a short story collection comprising:
  • The Square Root of Wonderful (1958), a play.
  • Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (1964), a collection of poems.
  • The Mortgaged Heart (1972), a posthumous collection of writings, edited by her sister Rita.
  • Illumination and Night Glare (1999), her unfinished autobiography, published nearly 30 years after her death.

[edit] Collections

[edit] References

  1. ^ Dews, Carlos, Carson McCullers (1917-1967), The New Georgia Encyclopedia, November 7, 2005.

[edit] External links

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