Carson McCullers, 1917 - 1967
I. Biography of Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers is an enigma to many, even to most of those who knew her, including, to some extent, the author herself. Probably the easiest way to begin a biographical account of this Southern Gothic writer is to look to the words of an expert on the subject. Tennessee Williams, a longtime friend of the author has eloquently singled out the qualities that distinguished her from a host of other writers of her time in the following short analysis. It was written after the dusk of her sky-rocketing success and gives an account of her early impact on the writing community and the world:
"The great generation of writers that emerged in the twenties, poets such as Eliot,
Crane, Cummings, and Wallace Stevens, prose-writers such as Faulkner,
Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Katherine Anne Porter, has not been succeeded or
supplemented by any new figures of corresponding stature with the sole exception
of this prodigious young talent that first appeared in 1940 with the publication of
her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. She was at that time a girl of
twenty-two who had come to New York from Columbus, Georgia, to study music.
According to the legends that surround her early period in the city, she first
established her residence, quite unwittingly, in a house of prostitution, and she
found the other tenants of the house friendly and sympathetic and had not the
ghost of an idea of what illicit enterprise was going on there. One of the girls in
this establishment became her particular friend and undertook to guide her about
the town, which Carson McCullers found confusing quite imaginably... However a
misadventure befell her. Too much trust was confided in this mischievous guide,
and while she was being shown the subway route to the Julliard School of Music,
the companion and all of her tuition money, which the companion had offered to
keep for her, abruptly disappeared. Carson was abandoned penniless in the
subway, and some people say it took her several weeks to find her way out, and
when she did finally return to the light of day, it was in Brooklyn where she
became enmeshed in a vaguely similar menage whose personnel ranged from W.H.
Auden to Gypsy Rose Lee (he is referring to the brownstone artists’ colony). At an
rate, regardless of how much fantasy this legend may contain, the career of music
was abandoned in favor of writing, and somewhere, sometime, in the dank and
labyrinthine mysteries of the New York subway system, possibly between some
chewing gum vendor and some weight and character analysis given by a doll
Gypsy, a bronze tablet should be erected in the memory of the mischievous
comrade who made away with Carson’s money for the study of piano. To
paraphrase a familiar cliché of screen publicity-writers, perhaps a great musician
was lost but a great writer was found…" (Introduction to The Mortgaged Heart)
Lula Carson Smith was born on February 19, 1917. She was the oldest of three children and the daughter of jewelers (Lamar Smith and Marguerite Waters Smith). They were regarded as a highly respectable family of moderate means. Her great-grandfather was Major John Carson, whose seventy-five slaves and two thousand acres of rich farmland on Georgia’s Flint River provoked envy and admiration throughout the region (until Wilson’s Raiders set fire to his cotton stores and freed his slaves.) He never returned to his devastated lands and family after this for he died on a Civil War battlefield in Virginia.
Carson found herself to be cleverly adept at playing the piano at a young age. She shocked her mother at age six by sitting down and playing with both hands a song she heard for the first time that afternoon in a movie theatre. From then until late high school, she practiced fervently and hoped to carry her work on to a musical education at the New York Julliard School. However, at seventeen, she was diagnosed by doctors as having "pneumonia with complications." Later, she found to have had rheumatic fever. Too weak to play piano during her long recuperation, she took to writing plays in the style of a favorite author, Eugene O’Neill. She soon began to cast and direct these plays at home before an audience of family and neighbors.
In late high school Carson faced the crushing blow of losing her mentor and piano teacher Mary Tucker when she moved to another state. Having never recovered from the loss, she put aside her interest in piano permanently. As she hoped to cultivate her newfound love of writing, she made plans to leave for New York directly after graduation. She was barely seventeen when she arrived in Manhattan and registered for classes at Columbia University. While there, she studied with some of the best creative writing teachers in the city: Whit Burnett, Dorothy Scarborough, Helen Rose Hull, and Sylvia Chatfield Bates, who was considered to be NYU’s most successful teacher of creative writing.
Repeated attacks of anemia, pleurisy, and other respiratory ailments related to her still undiagnosed rheumatic fever interrupted her formal studies and frequently drove her south to recuperate. At just such a time was when she met Reeves McCullers, a Fort Bennington soldier from Alabama, who was also an aspiring writer. They were married on September 20, 1937. By 1940, she was already fading out of the romantic honeymoon phase of her marriage and left by herself to return to New York. After arriving, she took up residence in a boardinghouse arrangement of artists at a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, NY. She remained here for four years, and became acquainted with the likes of Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Edith Sitwell, and Tennessee Williams.
During her separation from Reeves, Carson realized that she had alternative sexual yearnings—she fell in love with a Swiss novelist named Annemarie Clarec-Schwartzenbach. However, only a short time later, her husband fell in love with a man with whom he moved to Rochester, NY. They divorced not simply because of the legal grounds of adultery, but also because Carson found that Reeves had absconded with some of her royalty checks when he left. Carson fell in love with a succession of other women, including Katherine Anne Porter. She was considered a lesbian by her friends in New York, and self-proclaimed her androgeny, but none of this was known by her family in the south.
When, in 1943, Reeves was recommissioned and sent to the European front, he wrote to Carson and begged forgiveness for his "foolish ways." The two exchanged letters throughout his stay and they remarried in 1945. They bought a house together in Paris. However, their life was tumultuous and Carson soon left him to move back to the states. He committed suicide in 1953.
Carson lived with her mother in Nyack, New York for a number of years, but Mrs. Smith died unexpectedly in 1955. Carson was devastated, and again alone. Over the next twelve years she became increasingly frail, though she continued to write until the end. She finally succumbed after laying comatose for 47 days from a massive brain hemorrhage. She died on September 29, 1967, at age fifty.
In 1971, her sister Margarita G. Smith, co-executor of Carson’s literary estate, published a volume of yet unpublished works by the author. The book was called The Mortgaged Heart.
(Exerpts from Pioneers & Caretakers, and Understanding Carson McCullers)
II. Chronology of McCullers’s Life
19 17—Lula Carson Smith is born on February 19 in Columbus, Georgia; first child of Marguerite Waters Smith and her
husband, Lamar, a successful jeweler.1933—Graduates from Columbus High School in June. She writes her first short story, "Sucker."
1934—Travels to New York City, where she enrolls in creative writing courses at Columbia University.
1936—In December, "Wunderkind" is published in Story Magazine. Seriously ill through the winter, she begins work 1937—Carson marries Reeves McCullers, an army corporal and aspiring writer, on September 20. They move toon "The Mute," which is to become The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
1940-41—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is published. Carson divorces Reeves and, with Harper’s Bazaar editor George Charlotte, North Carolina, where she writes her novel.
1942—The short story "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud" is selected immediately after publication for the 1942 edition of the Davis, rents a brownstone in Brooklyn which develops into an artist’s enclave. During the winter of 1940-41 McCullers suffers her first stroke. Her mother comes to New York, and after several weeks brings McCullers
back to Columbus to recuperate. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) is published in two installments in Harper’s
Bazaar.
1943—McCullers receives the Guggenheim fiction fellowship. The Ballad of the Sad Café, for which she receives a annual O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories anthology.
1945—Carson remarries Reeves, who has been discharged from the army for a wrist injury. They move in with Carson’s prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, appears in Harper’s Bazaar.
1946—The Member of the Wedding is published. McCullers spends the summer on Nantucket Island visiting Tennessee mother in Nyack, New York.
1947—Suffers second and third strokes, which leave her permanently partially disabled. Williams and rewriting The Member of the Wedding as a play. In the autumn she travels to Europe with her husband.
1950—The Member of the Wedding opens on Broadway. The play wins numerous awards.
1951—McCullers’s collected works are published by Houghton Mifflin as The Ballad of the Sad Café. Carson and
1953—Reeves commits suicide. Carson returns to the United States to live with her mother. Reeves buy a house outside Paris.
1955—McCullers spends the spring with Tennessee Williams in Key West, after their joint lecture appearances. In
1957—The play The Square Root of Wonderful makes an unsuccessful Broadway run. June, her mother dies unexpectedly.
1958-62—Suffers several severe illnesses.
1961—Clock Without Hands is published.
1962—McCullers undergoes surgery for cancer of the right breast.
1964—Publishes collection of children’s poems, Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig.
1967—In April McCullers is awarded the Henry Bellamann Award, a one-thousand-dollar grant. On August 15 she
1971—The Mortgaged Heart, a collection of short stories, poems, and essays, is published, edited by McCullers’s sister, suffers a massive cerebral hemorrhage and dies one month later, on September 29.
III. Publications and Works by Carson McCullers: Margarita G. Smith.
Books
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940)
Reflections in a Golden Eye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941—also adapted into a movie)
The Member of the Wedding (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
The Ballad of the Sad Café (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951—collection of short stories and novellas)
Clock Without Hands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961)
The Mortgaged Heart (published posthumously, previously unpublished works; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971)
Play
The Member of the Wedding (New York: New Directions, 1951)
The Square Root of Wonderful (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)
Short Stories
Sucker (Saturday Evening Post, 236:68-71; September 28, 1963)
Court in the West Eighties
Poldi
Breath from the Sky
The Orphanage
Instant of the Hour After
Like That
Wunderkind (Story, 9:61-73; December, 1936)
A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Harper’s Bazaar, 76:50ff; November 1942)
The Aliens
Untitled Piece
Correspondence (New Yorker, 18:36; February 7, 1942)
Art and Mr. Mahoney (Mademoiselle, 28:120ff; February 1949)
The Haunted Boy (Botteghe Obscure, 16:264-78; 1955 and Mademoiselle, 42:134ff; November 1955)
Who Has Seen the Wind? (Mademoiselle, 43:156ff; September 1956)
The March (Redbook, 128:64-65; March 1967)
Poetry
Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964—a volume of children’s poetry)
The Mortgaged Heart (1948)
When We Are Lost (1948)
The Dual Angel (in five parts—1952)
Incantation to Lucifer
Hymen, O Hymen
Love and the Rind of Time
The Dual Angel
Father, Upon Thy Image We Are Spanned
Stone Is Not Stone (1957)
Saraband
Essays and Articles
Look Homeward, Americans (Vogue, 96:74-75; December 1, 1940)
Night Watch Over Freedom (Vogue, 97:29; January 1, 1941)
Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood (Vogue, 97:62ff; March 1, 1941)
We Carried Our Banners—We were Pacifists, Too (Vogue, 97:42-43; July 15, 1941)
The Jockey (Mademoiselle, 17:15-16; August 23, 1941)
Madame Zilenski and the King of Finland (New Yorker, 17:15-18; December 20, 1941)
The Ballad of the Sad Café (Harper’s Bazaar, 77:72ff; November 1943)
How I Began to Write (Mademoiselle, 27:191ff; September 1948)
Our Heads Are Bowed
Home for Christmas (Mademoiselle, 30:53ff; December 1949)
The Vision Shared (Theatre Arts, 34:28-30; April 1950—autobiography)
The Sojourner (Mademoiselle, 31:90ff; May 1950)
A Domestic Dilemma (New York Post Magazine, p. 10; September 16, 1951)
The Discovery of Christmas Eve (Mademoiselle, 38:54ff; December 1953)
The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing (Esquire, 52:162-64; December 1959)
A Child’s View of Christmas (Redbook, 28:30; December 1961)
A Hospital Christmas Eve (McCall’s, 95:96-97; December 1967)
IV. Literary Criticism of McCullers’s Works
In her essay "The Flowering Dream," Carson McCullers wrote: "I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’ (2)" This idea runs like a current through her works, feeding life into her characters like the volts used by Dr. Frankenstein to create his monster. McCullers was passionate and closely attached to her creations. They were often bizarre and tortured characters, but each had a purpose and meaning within her stories.
McCullers herself explained her eccentric style in the following manner: "I… have my own reality, made out of language and voices and foliage. (2)" Some readers and critics are engrossed by that reality and accept it as particular to the genius of McCullers herself. As Marguerite Young has said, she is "sometimes depicted as a sensationalist reveling in the grotesque…" but she is more than that; "she is first of all the poetic symbolist, a seeker after those luminous meanings which always do transcend the boundaries of the stereotyped, the conventional, and the so-called normal (2)."
Others discredit her work. They scoff at the idea that she should be counted among the greatest Southern women writers in history. In his critical analysis of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Lawrence Graver has hinted at such improbability. He states that her "failures on the level of fable are more troublesome because they point to an ambivalence that was a permanent feature of Mrs. McCullers’s sensibility. There existed in her nature a continuing conflict between her nearer and further vision, between her desire to document the world and a desire to give it evocative poetic significance. (2)"
Oliver Evans has made the same suggestion, though his critical view was more forgiving. "…in some of McCullers’s work… one is uneasily aware of a struggle between the two levels, literal and symbolic, and I think this explains the unevenness that many readers have found in it… It is as though Camus were attempting to write, here and there, in the style of Flaubert—and succeeding. (2)" Evans’s critique would have turned compliment in the author’s eyes. Flaubert is one of McCullers’s favorite authors.
Though such criticism seems at first to negate the author’s value, in fact, the allegorical tendency is McCullers’s lifeblood. Evans goes so far as to say that "It is impossible to understand McCullers’s work unless one realizes that she conceives of fiction chiefly as parable. The reader who concerns himself exclusively with the realistic level of her stories will never fully appreciate them." In fact, Evans claims that, much like the teaching of Christ through parables, McCullers hopes to instill an understanding in her readers—a clearer focus on the inequity of life.
He says, "…she does not write to entertain but to teach, and what she has to teach
are those truths about human nature that she has learned from her experience, which
is profound, and from her observation, which, at the same time that it is
compassionate, is penetrating to the point of clairvoyance… her concern is with
nothing less than the soul of man."
But this critical examination may be a bit biased: Evans has called McCullers "the best allegorical writer on this side of the Atlantic since Hawthorne and Melville. (2)"
Another thematic tendency of McCullers’s is toward pathos. Richard Gray has suggested that "a paradox lurks at the heart of (the McCullers) experience, naturally attaching itself to the idea of a shared isolation." In other words, her characters may squirm under the weight of their own isolation, but they find solace in the search for camaraderie. Gray also states that "McCullers’s fiction at its best… shows how tough and really critical an emotion pathos can be. Her characters are pathetic, but they are pathetic in the finest sense." He explains his theory in this manner:
"…the melancholy we experience while contemplating Miss Amelia Evans (The
Heart…) or Frankie Addams (The Member…) stems principally from the shock of
recognition, our feeling that part of our own lives has been accurately defined… In
this way the pathetic is used as an agent of moral instruction… a means of telling us,
quietly and sadly, what we are and the most we can do and of advising us, by
inference, how we should behave. (2)"
Klaus Lubber calls the overall theme of McCullers’s books "man’s problematic and painful existence with various veerings from its proper course. (2)" This analysis may be a bit simplistic, but it emphasizes one important idea—the contemplation of human suffering. In fact, most of McCullers’s characters have achieved a perfect state of "spiritual isolation," as Oliver Evans calls it, and find that their only recourse from this condition is an epiphany of "the power of love."
Harold Bloom reiterates this theme in the introduction to his anthology, Modern Critical Views: Carson McCullers. "All of McCullers’s characters share a particular quirk in the exercise of their capacity to love—they exist, and eventually expire, by falling in love with a hopeless hope." He compared this "universal yearning for love" and eventual demise by it to what Freud called the "erotic illusion.(2)"
Lawrence Graver placed McCullers’s lovers in "the highest seat in the pantheon, for he has the restlessness and imagination to wish to break free from the constrictive prison of ego and connect with another person. His choices are often arbitrary and improbable, but once made he worships them with a constancy that can only inspire amazement. (4)"
Actually, at the heart of this need that all of McCullers’s characters express, there may be a deeper absence which is actually responsible for their crisis. Richard Gray suggests that this emptiness is caused by the fact that her characters "have not even the mere possibility of a tradition to sustain them; they can only hang… so disoriented as to have no point of reference, no common denominator with which to chart their disorientation. (2)"
Louise Westling asserts that this absence of history correlates directly to McCullers’s own sense of emptiness. She writes that the author’s heroines "live in a world practically devoid of traditional Southern femininity… they inhabit a flat present bereft of myth, history, or even family traditions. (6)" What gives power to this theory is the ideas of Gray, who states, "Her childhood… seems to have been a very quiet one. ‘Almost singularly lacking,’ as her biographer has put it, ‘in the excitement of external events.’" He describes her heritage as "shabbily genteel" and says that the Smith family "were inordinately embarrassed by their fallen circumstances and actively discouraged active intercourse with anybody from outside the home. (2)"
McCullers’s writing may have reflected her own longings for direction and meaning more accurately than even she suspected. Gray notes that as an adult, she was "always afraid of a full commitment to others, searching for the possibility of betrayal and claiming to find it even when it was not there, she seemed to draw a magic circle around herself for much of the time, and live in an inner world that was compounded equally of memory and imagination. (2)" Although this struggle brought McCullers endless frustrations, it also sparked an energy in her that inspired the creation of many powerful works.
Most of the scholarly criticism available on Carson McCullers’s work is focused primarily on her novels and novellas. Of that work, the most abundant discussion features her four most popular works, namely The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Reflections In a Golden Eye. These works were all produced within a six year period, undoubtedly her most productive period as a writer. The following is a collection of criticism and discussion of each of the aforementioned works.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter:
"Any reader who wishes to determine the characteristic strengths and limitations of Carson McCullers as a writer could do no better than to begin with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Not only is this first novel an admirably complete introduction to her themes and subject matter, but it raises in a complex and provacative way the major critical issues posed by all her important work. The scene is the deep South; the characters are estranged and disadvantaged; and the theme is loneliness and the inevitable frustrations of love."
"Rage, anger, and indignation are often in this story the other side of love, for Mrs. McCullers—like Keats—believed that a street fight is ugly, but the energies displayed can be beautiful. (4)"
(Graver, p.272)
"Surrounded by the tawdry everyday life of modern Southern towns, (McCullers’s characters) seem to exist in a void, alienated from the few models of femininity available to them. The only warmth provided by women comes from Negro cooks. Mick Kelly’s mother rarely appears in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and then only to issue impatient or dispirited orders about Mick’s babysitting chores or the management of the family’s boardinghouse. She is a scarcely believable stick figure by comparison with the vivid presence of Portia. The cook’s vigorous and compassionate views of the world provide the only adult guidance for Mick and her little brothers, yet Portia is more like a practical older sister or aunt for Mick than a mother. The real maternal figure in the novel is the androgynous café keeper Biff Brannon but Mick shies away from his solicitations. (6)" (Westling, p. 110)
"Much of the success of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is derived from (McCullers’s) capacity to become her characters, to leave the outside indifferent world that so easily dismisses people as niggers, objects, and freaks and enter the consciousness of the individual, bringing with her a sympathy that makes each of her characters valuable, if extraordinary human beings. (2)" (Cook, p. 75)
Reflections In a Golden Eye:
"In her novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, McCullers describes a world where the suffering imposed by isolation is unrelieved by the possibility of human idealism and individual struggle. It is a stark, blank world devoid of love and charm, where life exists on its lowest intellectual level.
"Tennessee Williams has written that (this novel) ‘…is one of the purest and most powerful of those works which are conceived in that Sense of The Awful which is the desperate black root of nearly all significant modern art, from the Guernica of Picasso to the cartoons of Charles Addams.’
"To evoke this ‘Sense of the Awful’ McCullers has substituted the impersonality of an army post for the varieties of a Southern Main Street. She has restrained her gift for the humorous and pathetic detail in the interests of a more austere tone and a tighter more rapidly moving plot. And she has transformed human oddity from a mark of individual personality into a sign of general human perversion. (It) is a short, violent drama about people so mired in their deviancy, so trapped by ‘instinctual necessity,’ and so bereft of all humor and hope, as to be beyond redemption as valuable, living personalities… they appear to us more as shadows than people—grotesque reflections. (2)" (Cook, p. 69)
The Member of the Wedding:
"The Member of the Wedding is McCullers’s best book because it remains complete in itself—a small but undeniably affecting story of adolescent joy and frustration. The plot, limited to a few days in the life of a twelve-year-old girl, is more skillfully managed than the elaborate murder story in Reflections in a Golden Eye, or the haunting but ultimately mechanical quest pattern in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The characters carry great conviction because McCullers is wholly in command of their limited psychologies, and does not strain to suggest that they are darkly symbolic of more than themselves. (4)"
(Gravers, p. 303)
The Ballad of the Sad Café:
"Much of what is permanently haunting in this grotesque little story is the product of McCullers’s easy relationship with the properties of the ballad world. Experience heightened far beyond the realm of plausibility is given a valid, poetic truth by the propriety of those conventions that make the miraculous seem oddly real. Dreams, superstitions, omens, numbers, musical motifs, all operate here to provide an authentic atmosphere for this perverse triangle of passions, and to make the inexplicable longings of the characters seem like dark elemental forces in the natural world. (4)" (Gravers, p.290)
"The Themes with which McCullers was mainly concerned in the first decade of her career are the spiritual isolation of the individual and the power of love to free him from this condition… it was in The Ballad of the Sad Café that the related themes of spiritual isolation and the nature and function of love received their fullest and most mature treaatment. It is the saddest of Mrs. McCullers’s novels at the same time that it is the most nearly perfect, with something of the formal beauty of a Bach fugue, for in it she reaches the profoundly pessimistic conclusions that ‘the state of being beloved is intolerable by many… the beloved fears and hates the lover.’ (2)" (Evans, p.24)
"The Ballad of the Sad Café is about the ‘crazy salad’ of every man: ugly and beautiful, heiress and outlaw, dwarf and amazon—they all choose love objects in ways that demonstrate that passion is the most permanent and amazing of all the human mysteries. (4)" (Gravers, p.292)
Works Cited
Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers & Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1965.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Values: Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1986.
Carr, Virginia Spencer. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: U of South Carolina Press,
1990.
Howard, Maureen, ed. Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An
Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1963.
Smith, Margarita G. Carson McCullers: The Mortgaged Heart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1971.
Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson
McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 1985.
(including: Graver, Lawrence. "Carson McCullers," p. 265 - 310.)
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