'Vain, querulous and a genius'

'Open-faced wunderkind from the Southern States' ... Carson McCullers in New York, 1955. Photograph: Bettman/Corbis

With her portraits of oddbods and adolescent girls, Carson McCullers has captured
the hearts of generations of readers. Just don't be fooled by her apparent innocence.
Her novels are darker and more political than they might seem, argues Ali Smith

Saturday March 8, 2008

The charming story goes - as told by the author herself - that Carson McCullers had the
inspiration for the central motif of The Member of the Wedding while she was running
down a road in Brooklyn late one Thanksgiving night in the early 1940s, chasing the
noise of a fire engine with Gypsy Rose Lee, one of her housemates at the time. "Just as
we were having brandy and coffee there was the sound of fire engines," McCullers wrote
near the end of her life in her autobiographical work, Illumination and Night Glare

Gypsy and I lit out to find the fire which was nearby. We didn't find it, but the fresh air
after the long, elaborate meal cleared my head and suddenly, breathlessly I said to Gypsy,
"Frankie is in love with the bride of her brother and wants to join the wedding."
"What!" Gypsy screamed, as until that time I had never mentioned Frankie or my struggle
to solve The Member of the Wedding
Until that time, Frankie was just a girl in love with her music teacher, a most banal
theme, but a swift enlightenment kindled my soul so that the book itself was radiantly
clear.
It is one of the most energised and affection-inspiring visions of McCullers that we have.
There she goes, the young, acclaimed American writer, tall and lanky, racing down the
road with her friend (who happens - as if reality were conjuring its own version of
McCullers's fictional style of unexpected juxtapositions - to be a celebrated stripper and
burlesque star as well as an aspiring novelist) till she's pulled up short by the equivalent
of a symbolic light-bulb flashing above her head, struck by the force of one of her own
moments of creativity.
McCullers always referred to these creative breakthroughs as moments of "illumination",
as a sort of lit-up, quite external force of magic, a "divine spark". She related this ignited
little story slightly differently to her good friend Tennessee Williams:
Suddenly I said: Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride. Then I cried and
cried . . . The illumination had focused the whole book. I couldn't use any
approximations. I wanted the language to be pure . . . worked on it five years.
Even in this more hard-working form, it is a sweetly innocent version of the vision of
Frankie's polyamorousness and the coming of what would become McCullers's most
renowned literary conceit. Frankie Addams's need to be part of things, her headlong,
hopeless crush on her brother's wedding, was the metaphor which, of all McCullers's
illuminations, would resonate most fully with her readers and, with the endearing energy
of her lonely-girl heroine, would win a deep and lasting affection for this novel above all
her others.
There is a great deal of sweetness in the prevalent vision of McCullers as the poet of
haunting oddbods, the laureate of American loneliness, the gifted bard of adolescent girls.
But any reader of McCullers with a half-open eye knows her routing of sentimentality as
one of the central actions of her fiction. The Member of the Wedding, published in 1946,
has, in more recent years, picked up critical kudos as a mid-20th-century gay classic. It
has influenced works as culturally inquiring and politically vibrant as Toni Morrison's
The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), the first line of which
profoundly echoes McCullers's novel. The Bell Jar's opening pages go out of their way to
suggest a close kinship between them. As Morrison and Plath knew, The Member of the
Wedding is a cutting piece of fiction, and its antecedents are equally sharp. But still the
sentimental image persists.
All through her life, the people who knew her, the critics who lauded her and the readers
who championed her fell for the child-self in both McCullers the woman and McCullers
the writer, the self seemingly in love with innocence, purity, illumination, maybe even a
little in love with herself as a purveyor of literary wistfulness. She was drawn to phrases
such as "the square root of wonderful", the title of her second play, which flopped badly;
or sentences as near twee as this: "Since livingness is made up of countless daily
miracles, most of which go unnoticed, Malone, in that season of sadness, noticed a little
miracle" - from her final novel, Clock Without Hands (1961).
McCullers had learned a kind of acceptable literary decorum early at the hands of the
publishing industry, when her editor at Houghton Mifflin altered, pretty much against her
will and only shortly before its publication, the title of her first novel, The Mute, to
something much more lyrical, much less direct, and very differently resonant. The final
title of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was adapted from a line in a 1914 poem by William
Sharp (whose real name was Fiona MacLeod): "But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts
/ on a lonely hill." It is her most unashamedly political novel, but it never does to
underestimate her sense of the connection between the social and the literary. It's always
wrong to sentimentalise McCullers - even on her own invitation - since her work is
always an unexpected, uneasy combination of miraculous and brutal, always concerned
with the marginalised and with social hierarchies, and is always more astutely and
contemporarily political than it might on the surface appear to be.
Richard Wright, the young black novelist, knew this at once when he read The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter on its publication in 1940 and wrote of the "astonishing humanity that
enables a white writer, for the first time in southern fiction, to handle Negro characters
with as much ease and justice as those of her own race".
But contrasting visions and versions of McCullers, along with her own unsettling literary
visions, have been startling readers since this debut. In her very early 20s, looking about
14 years old, "New York's new literary darling" first appeared to the public, sweet and
unlikely in her author photo, dressed in one of her husband's shirts and a tailored men's
jacket, leaning on a small pile of copies of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It was "a sit-up-
and-take-notice book for anyone to write, but that a round-faced, Dutch-bobbed girl of 22
should be its author simply makes hay of all literary rules and regulations". America's
critics wholeheartedly proclaimed her a miracle, the open-faced wunderkind from the
southern States who, if this book was anything to go by, would change the face of the
American novel.
In fact, for a while she was the face of the American novel (and it's interesting how very
fixated on her actual face, her appearance, her eyes, her androgyny, many commentators
were and are). "For those of us who arrived on the scene in the war years, McCullers was
the young writer . . . an American legend from the beginning," Gore Vidal wrote on the
publication of Clock Without Hands
Her fame was as much the creation of publicity as of talent. The publicity was the work
of those fashion magazines where a dish of black-eyed peas can be made to seem the roe
of some rare fish, photographed by Avedon; yet McCullers's dreaming, androgynous face
in its ikon elegance subtly confounded the chic of the lingerie ads all about her. For
unlike other "legends", her talent was as real as her face.
Only seven years after that auspicious debut, Simone de Beauvoir (who liked McCullers's
"little" novels for their "uniqueness and absence of moralism", though also reacted
against them, finding them "a little too womanly, too poetical and quivering and full of
secret meaning") wrote candidly to her lover, Nelson Algren, about McCullers, who was
living in Paris at the time: "Did I tell you the girl is now in the American hospital, half-
paralysed because she drinks so much? I heard it just before leaving Paris and I was
displeased at it. I was fond of her when I once saw her, her strange, ugly, sensitive face,
her slim elegant figure in grey flannel trousers, her hoarse southern voice. Maybe she
would have written really good books, but there is not much hope about her."
There she is, a new kind of 20th-century-wunderkind strung somewhere between hope
and hopelessness; stumbling and wrecked in suave postwar Paris or uncannily "real"
among the recipes and lingerie ads of the American fashion industry, whose magazines,
always brave enough to publish good literary writing, were where her work was often
found in the 40s.
In fact, some of the wildly differing ways of seeing McCullers the writer can be
characterised by a glance at the responses to her first two novels. Critics and readers who
had wholeheartedly embraced The Heart is a Lonely Hunter were shaken by the violence,
the near-gleeful display of seeming perverseness and the surfacing of disturbing
sexualities in her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941).
When it was serialised in Harper's Bazaar in 1940, it resulted in the cancellation of many
subscriptions, including that of General George Patton's wife. She was just one of the
readers unable to stomach a novel about homoerotic desires and wild repressions set on
an American army base, in which, for instance, a character posts a live kitten cold-
heartedly through the slot of a winter mailbox, and another, griefstricken, "had cut off the
tender nipples of her breasts with the garden shears" (and it is a typical McCullers touch
to use the word "tender" in this horrific image).
Surely this wasn't the same sensitive soul who'd remapped her American community so
movingly and poetically in her first novel? McCullers always maintained that she herself
found the violence and the repressive gothic in Reflections "hilariously funny", that she
wrote it very fast and for fun, simply to relax after the long and arduous work she'd done
on The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. But she knew, too, the consequences and necessities of
her own devil-may-care-seeming liberalness. After its publication, the Ku Klux Klan
phoned her home in Columbus and left a message: "we know from your first book that
you're a nigger-lover, and we know from this one that you're queer. We don't like queers
and nigger-lovers in this town."
Similarly, first reactions to The Member of the Wedding reveal its reviewers as tempted
to be precious. "Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed." Carson
McCullers's language has the "freshness, quaintness and gentleness of a sensitive child",
as the New York Times Book Review put it on publication. Delicate? Gentle? How is it
possible to encounter the toughness, the surreal domestic gothic of this novel, or consider
the brutal disaffection of the death of Frankie's cousin John Henry in its latter pages, and
still deal in words such as these?
It is "a deceptive piece of writing", as one of its finest and earliest critics, Marguerite
Young, herself an experimental writer of note, said in an essay, "and its candour may
betray the unwary reader into accepting it as what it first seems, a study of turbulent
adolescence". McCullers herself was apparently shaken by the response to the novel of
Edmund Wilson, at the time America's most eminent literary critic, who was so bemused
by a book about a subject he seems to have found anathema to any serious literature -
three days in the life of an adolescent girl - as to declare the story "utterly pointless".
Such examples of critical blindness are part of the reason why The Member of the
Wedding is a novel "very much tamed by its readers, touted as a tale for young adults
about young adults, an economical way to learn about the pangs of growing up", as
Patricia Yaeger puts it in Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing,
1930-1990 (2000). For although it is true that "as a portrait embodying the spirit and
detail of adolescence, Carson McCullers's Frankie Addams is an achievement comparable
to Twain's Huck Finn and Salinger's Holden Caulfield", as the critic Richard Cook put it,
readers and critics who give in to the easy attractiveness of seeing The Member of the
Wedding as merely a coming-of-age tale, a sweet momentary illumination of adolescence
before the disillusion of adulthood, are closing their eyes to the political heft and the
combination of hope, hopelessness and callousness that resonates throughout this very
funny, very dark novel.
The writing of The Member of the Wedding took five years (interrupted in 1941 while
McCullers dashed off The Ballad of the Sad Café in a matter of months), and she
laboured over every page. "It's one of those works that the least slip can ruin," she wrote
to Reeves. "It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it
otherwise."
It's a book that takes place in a summer so bright that the brightness is "black", a book
whose comedy and charm are always underlaid by a sense of mourning. It places itself
and its reader at the border between childhood and adolescence, the portal to adulthood -
at a crucial approaching point of change - then uses images of imprisonment, stagnation
and repetition. "Good prose should be fused with the light of poetry,' she wrote, "prose
should be like poetry; poetry should make sense like prose."
Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in February 1917;
her father was a jeweller and her mother brought their eldest child up convinced she'd be
a famous concert pianist; by the age of 10, she was performing pieces by Liszt,
Beethoven and Chopin. In her state, the segregation lines were still firmly drawn, but
McCullers wanted to know why black people had separate drinking fountains, why they
lived in poorer houses in poorer parts of town. Later in life she remembered yelling with
rage at the taxi driver who had refused to take her parents' black cook in his cab.
By the age of 13, she had jetissoned Lula in favour of the ungendered Carson; by 15,
after a bad bout of what seems to have been rheumatic fever which went undiagnosed for
years and caused many of her later health problems, she announced to friends that she
was planning to be famous as a writer rather than a pianist, since this would be less
physically strenuous. She left the south for New York at 17, eventually taking creative-
writing classes at Columbia University and NYU while she worked on The Mute; the
stories she wrote there, which dealt vividly and sensually with subjects such as
drunkenness and menstruation, pushed the boundaries of even New York creative-writing
school acceptability.
In 1937, she married Reeves McCullers, also an aspiring writer. "He was the best-looking
man I had ever seen. He also talked of Marx and Engels, and I knew he was a liberal,
which was important, to my mind, in a backward southern community." After her early
success, and after the relationship had revealed itself as the sometimes supportive, more
often destructive force it was (she and Reeves would split several times, remarry, then
split, then reform the relationship again, before Reeves's suicide in Paris in 1953), she
moved by herself across New York into a shared house in Middagh Street near the
Brooklyn Bridge. This extraordinary aesthetic hothouse was leased by her friend, the
Harper's Bazaar literary editor George Davies; its regular visitors and longer-term
housemates included WH Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Klaus and Erika Mann
(the exiled children of the German writer Thomas Mann), Richard Wright and his wife,
and Paul and Jane Bowles. It was a house that even brought the bookish out in Gypsy
Rose Lee, who wrote most of The G-String Murders while sharing the third floor with
McCullers.
It was through her Brooklyn friends in the early 1940s that McCullers met the beautiful,
androgynous, European photographer Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, who'd also had
an early literary success, and with whom McCullers fell deeply in unrequited and
unconsummated love. (Clarac-Schwarzenbach's untimely death in 1942 after a cycling
accident - she had fallen while riding a bike with no hands - was just one of the
bereavements McCullers suffered during the time of writing The Member of the
Wedding; another was the death of her father.)
McCullers was a lover of difference in both her life and her work; the erotic in her
writing is deeply connected to notions of sexual and racial difference. "That is one of the
things I love best about Brooklyn," she wrote in 1941. "Everyone is not expected to be
exactly like everyone else." Janet Flanner wryly noted that she would have driven "any
small town right off its rocker. Carson stood out with New Yorkers, even, as an eccentric
of the first water." Truman Capote remembered "the first time I saw her - a tall slender
wand of a girl, slightly stooped and with a fascinating face that was simultaneously merry
and melancholy". Klaus Mann, too, noted this clash of temperaments, "a strange mixture
of refinement and wildness, 'morbidezza' and 'naivety'".
She was capable of reading so deeply that she wouldn't notice her own house go up in
flames around her, as once happened when she was lost in Dostoevsky. Unable as a child
to stop reading Katherine Mansfield's stories when she went to the store for groceries, she
carried on as she asked for the goods at the counter, then under the street lamp outside. As
a fledgling writer, she was sacked from her day job as a book-keeper for a New York
company when the boss found her deep in Proust's Swann's Way under the big ledger.
As a student in New York, the girl from the South was so shy that she would sometimes
spend whole days with a book, shut in a tiny phone booth in Macy's department store,
one of the few places she felt safe. But on arrival in the city, one of the first things she did
was write to Greta Garbo to announce she'd like to come round for tea. Even though she
was an award-winning, fellowship-winning writer, she was perfectly capable of
infatuations that meant she'd stand for hours outside a freezing theatre to catch a glimpse
of a ballet dancer she'd fallen for, or, as Katherine Anne Porter found out at Yaddo, the
writers' colony, of lying on the ground outside her chosen beloved's door until the
beloved should pay her some attention (Porter simply opened the door at supper time and
stepped over McCullers as if she wasn't there).
"Carson burdened everybody who got close to her," Lillian Hellman said. "She was vain,
querulous and a genius," Vidal said. But there are very few literary figures who could
have two figures such as Marilyn Monroe and the Danish writer Isak Dinesen over for
lunch, as she did in 1959, sparking rumours of how well the unlikely pair danced
together, and how well she'd danced on the table herself.
"She needed a certain amount of alcohol in her system to function creatively," is the kind
way her first biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, put it. In one short story, McCullers calls
it "the rhythmic sorrow of alcohol". She drank all day, from breakfast onwards, for most
of her adult years, and died in 1967 aged only 50. In those three decades of writing life, a
life salvaged from this alcohol dependency and the poor health she suffered from the age
of 15 onwards (including three strokes before the age of 30, which left one half of her
body paralysed), she'd become an American literary standard-bearer. She had published
five striking and formally inventive novels, each one its own tour de force, alongside two
plays, one of which was a hugely successful adaptation of The Member of the Wedding
(which made McCullers enough money to see her through her remaining years), 20 short
stories, several non-fiction pieces and a small number of highly acclaimed poems.
Though her final novel, Clock Without Hands - an unexpectedly farcical work, more
jaunty in its expressionism than much of her other long fiction - was rather unfairly
panned by the critics, her critical standing had long been assured.
Over the years she cited her own influences as Flaubert and Chekhov as much as
Faulkner; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as much as Joyce and O'Neill; Hemingway and e e
cummings for their anti-war literature; and Lawrence and Fitzgerald, who both clearly
influenced her early short fiction pieces. Seeing her own southern tradition as parallel to
Russian realism, springing from the same "dominant characteristic" of "the cheapness of
human life", she wrote in 1941 about "the cruelty" of which the Southerners have been
accused, how this cruelty is fundamentally "only a sort of naivety, an acceptance of
spiritual inconsistencies without asking the reason why".
The formal risks she takes are thrilling and exhilarating. To some extent her style is
always concerned with unexpected juxtapositions, verbal, thematic and formal. She is
expert at the meeting of kindnesses and violences; an early autobiographical short story,
"Court in the West Eighties" (written in 1934, when she was first in New York), reveals a
constant preoccupation in her fiction - the struggle of connective potential against
hopeless, and often violent, division. Its protagonist is sitting at her window in a set of
apartment blocks, fascinated by the peculiar combination of intimacy and distance in the
very act of observing the lives of strangers around her: our eyes would meet and then one
of us would look away. You see all of us in the court saw each other sleep and dress and
live out our hours away from work, but none of us ever spoke. We were near enough to
throw our food into each others' windows, near enough so that a single machine gun
could have killed us all together in a flash. And still we acted as strangers.
The invisible lines that connect people or make people strangers to each other
preoccupied her, as did the surreally thin line she sensed between nurturing and violence.
One of her favourite mottoes was, she said, that of the Roman poet Terence: "Nothing
human is alien to me." She said: "I become the characters I write about. I am so immersed
in them that their motives are my own." Her preoccupation, revealed by almost every one
of her narrating voices, is the relationship between such self-involvement, and concepts
such as objectivity, omniscience, reportage, fixity.
Over time, her position on narratorial power seemed to shift; her narrator in Reflections
in a Golden Eye is relatively judgmental and closed compared to the narrator of her final
novel, Clock Without Hands, whose magnificent set-piece near the end is an aerial
descent from a position a great distance away to a new, necessary intimacy, as if she's
demanding not just that the fictional narrator meet the eye of the real human, but that the
eye of God meet the eye of man.
McCullers loved to write about eyes; she loved both their helpless, wide-open intimacy
and their ability to close - just as she loved to think or write about Christmas, but usually
only in the context of August's overwhelming heat. Her near-adolescent characters,
particularly the girls (all members, as it were, of the family of Frankie), long in their too-
hot summer discomforts for snow, for a new, white landscape, for some kind of an
escape. Snow, in one of her short stories - whose subject is writer's block and a writer's
social and personal disempowerment - is itself a muteness, an existential blank space, like
a blank page, a kind of disconnection which brings with it a combined sense of relief and
hopelessness.
She is aware of the inlay of mystery in the most mundane phrase, hones her language
down to leave it seeming so plain as to be near banal, while at the same time giving her
poorer characters a diva-like dandification when it comes to their love of stories, words,
rich vocabulary. This is usually their only power. "A lot of my life," Sherman says in
Clock Without Hands, "I've had to make up stories because the real, actual was either too
dull or too hard to take."
In her fiction of the 1930s and early 40s, she deals repeatedly with what she suggests is a
particular American blindness, or numbness, to world politics and to the war; she
repeatedly refers to the state of war-mangled Europe and uninvolved America in terms
that highlight notions of "isolation" which are both political and metaphysical. Often, in
throwaway comments, the poetic, highly charged state of adolescence is related by
McCullers to a state of being at war, dealing with war; in many ways, The Member of the
Wedding can be seen as a war novel, and as a comment on what McCullers sees as
America's own adolescent state. In fact, in one essay written for Vogue in 1940,
McCullers directly compares America itself to an adolescent, one feeling "the shock of
transition".
Such a yoked combination of adolescent and world power comes dangerously close to
bathos. But McCullers was never afraid of unlikely literary combinings. Mystery and
mundanity. Cruelty and naivety. Farce and tragedy. Tenderness and savagery. Charm and
violence. Debauchery and miracle. Feeling and numbness. Hopelessness and hope.
The most coolly crafted of her novels, The Member of the Wedding, a part hopeful, part
despairing call for the sanctioning of a different, more inclusive kind of love and a
rewrite of the conventional rules, is both a triumph and a tragedy of impossible
unifications. In being a book so crucially about possible and impossible unions, and with
typical McCullers flexibility of vision, it demonstrates, at the same time as it tragically
denies, a new definition of human connection.
For all its comedy, The Member of the Wedding is a dark, grieving vision. For all its
disillusion and loss, at its centre is a lasting, questioning, comic life force almost too big
for such a small book. It is also a vision of endless human promise - the story of three
marginalised people who sit in a kitchen, make an unexpected, new kind of harmony
together and dare, against all the odds, to reinvent the fixed world in their imaginations as
different, and better. The Member of the Wedding and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter are
reissued on March 27 by Penguin Classics.