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MCCULLERS, CARSON 1917-1967

WRITER

Prodigy

By the time she was twenty-nine years old, Carson McCullers had already produced three novels (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter [1940], Refections in a Golden Eye [1941], and The Member of the Wedding [1946]). The first and last of the three are her most memorable and guaranteed her a place in the literature of the 1940s as well as in American literary history. Poor health and a tumultuous emotional life cut short her work in full flower, but by her twenty-third birthday she had already fulfilled her mother's prediction that Carson would one day become famous.

Prelude

She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on 19 February 1917. Childhood was to become a major theme in her work, especially in The Member of the Wedding. She was a tall girl (5'8" by age thirteen) and was seen as freakish by her peers. Her mother considered her destined. She gained early proficiency at the piano and was heading toward a career in music. At seventeen she went north to New York to attend The Juilliard School of Music and take writing classes at Columbia University. She had shown little literary bent but had been influenced deeply by her charismatic, storytelling mother. When she lost her tuition money for Juilliard on a New York subway, fate seemed to have chosen writing for her. She found odd jobs and began studying writing at Columbia under Whit Burnett. She wrote "Wunderkind," and Burnett published the story in his popular Story magazine. In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers, who would become her on-again, off-again companion through life. The marriage became a distant union as her writing career flourished while his foundered.

Flowering

Marriage gave her the personal security to write, and within two years she had completed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The novel gained immediate critical attention. It contained the themes of alienation and solitude, often self-imposed, that would mark McCullers's work. It is the story of John Singer, a deaf-mute who, because he is without voice, becomes the receptacle of confidences of the lonely people around him. The novel is "contrapuntal," in McCullers's words, with Singer receiving the voices of others. Her musical education showed through. Her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, displayed McCullers's penchant for the grotesque characters that would mark all of her work. The plot involves bisexuality and masochism, and the book was uniformly panned as sensationalistic. Despite suffering the first of several cerebral strokes in 1941, McCullers continued writing prolifically. Her marriage had disintegrated. She had begun a long association with Yaddo, a writers' conference in Saratoga, New York. Both she and her husband had begun experimenting with bisexuality. What many call her finest work, "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe", appeared in Harpers Bazaar in 1943. It was followed by The Member of the Wedding in 1946. The story is of Frankie Addams, a young tomboy on the edge of adolescence. Like most of McCullers's characters, she is alone, yet seeking attachment, in her case in the form of her relationship with her brother Jarvis and his fiancée Janice Williams. The novel is realistic and lyrical, lacking the Southern Gothic character of her early work and undoubtedly her best full-length work.

Playwright

McCullers was a great friend and companion of playwright Tennessee Williams. In 1946 Williams suggested that The Member of the Wedding could be adapted for the stage. McCullers began to work on it, though she knew little of drama and had seen only a few Broadway plays herself. Another stroke slowed her down, but in 1949 the play opened to rave reviews in New York, running for 501 performances. The play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the 1948-1949 season and was sold to Hollywood, giving McCullers financial stability for the first time in her life. She was thirty-two years old.

Health

But her career was essentially over. Her health was terrible. A spastic arm made writing difficult for her. She had trouble working. She became depressed with Reeves and left him in Paris as he tried to convince her to commit suicide with him. He killed himself weeks later. She was still writing, but it was laborious. A second and final play, The Square Root of Wonderfull opened in October 1956 and closed weeks later after forty-five performances. The failure of the play, an attempted homage to her mother and a working out of her husband's suicide, sent her reeling into depression. She survived with the help of a friend, Dr. Mary Mercer, and completed one final novel, Clock Without Hands. It failed critically, not coming close to the work of her prodigious years. It is again southern and freakish, as though McCullers, in failing health, was trying to return to the character of her finest work. She lived for seven more years in terrible health. She worked very little but watched as John Huston filmed Reflections in a Golden Eye and as Edward Albee adapted "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" for the stage. On 20 September 1967 Carson McCullers died. She was fifty years old.

Themes and Legacy

McCullers's place is as a regionalist writer of southern grotesque works. Her legacy is a compassionate look at the lonely, whether neurotic adults or undefined children seeking connection. Her characters recognize their state but seem unable to change. In fact they further isolate themselves with their erratic behavior. Her imagination bore fruit early and fast, as though cognizant of the short time it had to produce, and gained McCullers a firm place in American literary history.