McCULLERS, (Lula) Carson

Nationality: American. Born: Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, 19 February 1917. Education: Columbus High School, graduated 1933; attended classes at Columbia University, New York, and New York University, 1934-36. Family: Married James Reeves McCullers, Jr., in 1937 (divorced 1941); remarried in 1945 (died 1953). Career: Lived in Charlotte, 1937-38, and Fayetteville, 1938-39, both North Carolina, New York City, 1940-44, and Nyack, New York, after 1944. Awards: Bread Loaf Writers Conference fellowship, 1940; Guggenheim fellowship, 1942, 1946; American Academy grant, 1943; New York Drama Critics Circle award, 1950; Donaldson award, for drama, 1950; Theatre Club gold medal, 1950; University of Mississippi grant, 1966; Bellamann award, 1967. Member: American Academy, 1952. Died: 29 September 1967.

Publications

Short Stories

The Member of the Wedding (novella). 1946.

The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of McCullers.1951; as Collected Short Stories, 1961; as The Shorter Novels and Stories of McCullers, 1972.

Seven. 1954.

Novels

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. 1940.

Reflections in a Golden Eye. 1941.

Clock without Hands. 1961.

Plays

The Member of the Wedding, from her own novel (produced1949). 1951.

The Square Root of Wonderful (produced 1957). 1958.

Television Plays:

The Invisible Wall, from her story "The Sojourner," 1953; The Sojourner, from her own story, 1964.

Poetry

The Twisted Trinity, music by David Diamond. 1946.

Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (for children). 1964.

Other

The Mortgaged Heart (uncollected writings), edited by MargaritaG. Smith. 1971.

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Bibliography:

Katherine Anne Porter and McCullers: A Reference Guide by Robert F. Kiernan, 1976; McCullers: A Descriptive Listing and Annotated Bibliography of Criticism by Adrian M. Shapiro, Jackson R. Bryer, and Kathleen Field, 1980.

Critical Studies:

McCullers: Her Life and Work by Oliver Evans, 1965, as The Ballad of McCullers, 1966; McCullers by Lawrence Graver, 1969; McCullers by Dale Edmonds, 1969; The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr, 1975; McCullers by Richard M. Cook, 1975; McCullers' The Member of the Wedding: Aspects of Structure and Style by Eleanor Wikborg, 1975; McCullers by Margaret B. McDowell, 1980; Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers by Judith Giblin James, 1995.

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Carson McCullers identified herself as a Southern realist influenced by the mature work of Ellen Glasgow and by the nineteenth-century Russian realists. In her fiction—her stories; her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; and the second of her two novellas, Member of the Wedding—she does pursue a sharp and detailed realism. But in her first novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and in all of her novels after The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, she exhibited a penchant for the fantastic, the romantic, the grotesque, and the bizarre. The topics and themes in her novels and her short fiction are similar—guilt, death, rejection, complicated love, and the psychic conflict between freedom and security ("belonging" or becoming a "joined person" allows you to be "caught," while being an "unjoined" or free person makes you vulnerable to loneliness). Miss Amelia in The Ballad of the Sad Café and Frankie and Berenice in Member of the Wedding are all dominated by this psychic struggle, and none finds a balance between freedom and captivity. Frankie struggles to belong by fantasizing about "the we of me," by becoming a blood donor so her blood will flow in the veins of people all over the world, by aspiring to join many clubs, and by changing her name to F. Jasmine so that her J initial will link her with Jarvis and Janice as she joins them at the wedding and flies away to adventure but also remains safe with them. Berenice struggles to recreate her blissful marriage with Ludie, who died, by entering three disastrous marriages. She longs to "bust free" but settles for security with a good man, though he can't make her shiver. Reality cannot be escaped at any point in this novella, as the presence of war and death hover over the hot kitchen in which Berenice, Frankie, and little John Henry cling together during the "scared summer" in 1942.

McCullers's best story is "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland." In it she develops a complex pattern of contrasts and similarities between two college music teachers: the conventional Mr. Brook, "a somewhat pastel" figure who lectures on Mozart minuets and explains diminished sevenths and triads; and Madame Zilensky, a flamboyant woman newly arrived from Europe with three small sons. Imaginative and inspired, she teaches with dramatic force and fitful energy, losing no time in setting four dazed students at four pianos to play Bach fugues simultaneously. She shocks Brook with stories about the three men who fathered her boys, and she shocks him further when he realizes nothing she says is factual. Gradually McCullers reveals the divided selves within each of the two individuals. Zilensky denies her secret life—working to the point of exhaustion in her room each night on what Brook discovers are 12 "immense and beautiful symphonies"—though she brags each morning about her lively social life. Though he thinks he will catch her in a big lie and victoriously confront her, he never does. His determination to expose her dishonesty fades into an amusing game for him, and we recognize him as basically kind and tolerant. Madame Zilensky alters his quiet routine into a more zestful and creative world, and McCullers reveals that Brook also has secret evenings, indulging himself in the romantic by reading Blake poems as he rests by the fireside. He becomes far less pastel as we learn that when the music faculty departed for summer study in Salzburg, he inexplicably vanished—to go alone to Peru. McCullers's intricate techniques, convoluted comic effects, and exploration of the divided inner self of each of the two characters is superb, as is her shifting of contrasts and similarities and her intertwining use of music symbols—metronomes, loud pianos, delicate minuets, and contrapuntal patterns. The vital presence of music draws every thread of the story into place, making it one of the most thoughtful and complex comedies in American short fiction.

"The Jockey," another satire, incongruously juxtaposes tragedy and comedy. In the elegant Saratoga Hotel dining room Bitsy Barlow, a tiny long-time jockey, in a startling climax confronts three heavy-set men who have grown rich through exploitation of the jockeys. As they drink and eat rich foods, they complain that Bitsy may have gained three pounds. Bitsy watches them haughtily from the other side of the room as he drinks his liquor in two neat swallows, closes his cigarette case with a definite snap, and holds his body rigid as he marches to their table, pointedly digging sharp heels into the rug. His "precisely tailored" suit cloaks his grief and anger over the severe and permanent crippling of a younger jockey. His unwavering propriety gives the men no warning as he tells them of his friend's shrunken leg and then calls them libertines, and with aplomb he takes two of their French fries, chews them, and deliberately spits them on the beautiful rug. He again assumes his formal impeccable manner as he bows and with an air of hauteur marches past the curious diners, leaving the embarrassed men in silence. The precision of Bitsy's every move and the precision of McCullers's style remarkably produce shock, pity, and laughter.

The finest of McCullers's stories about adolescents are "Wunderkind," written when she was in high school, and "Correspondence," written not long after her graduation. Frances, the Wunderkind, is McCullers herself, slightly masked, and through Frances McCullers expressed her frustration at her inability to interpret feeling in music, in spite of long hours of practice. Frances's anxiety, revealed in her unspoken memories, her nervous behavior, and her cold hands, builds to a climax of despair, and the story suddenly stops. "Correspondence," McCullers's only epistolary fiction, presents a less engaging adolescent, Henky Evans. The story's distinction lies in its humorous satire and subtle revelation of Henky's failure to even suspect that she is narcissistic, really writing to herself rather than to the pen pal who never answers her letters.

Of McCullers's stories associated with alcohol abuse, "Domestic Dilemma" is artistically effective because of the depth of her characterization of Martin. The ambivalence of Martin's love-hate feelings for his alcoholic young wife, Emily, who neglects their children, and his sense of being caught in an unsolvable problem are movingly communicated. He himself seems surprised that his love still exists and that there is still some urgency in his cherishing of her, since the bond between them has become so fragile. Love in this story is a dominant and incomprehensible force, too complex to be separated from hatred, pity, memory, hope, or despair. "The Sojourner," written about the same time, also effectively characterizes a man's ambivalence about marriage and family, but Faris's selfishness makes the story more superficial and far less gripping.

It could be argued that McCullers's best works of short fiction—Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café, "Wunderkind," and "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland"—gain much of their strength through her subtle intertwining of realistic characters and action with meaningful imagery. The imagery is often related to snow, ice, or heat but even more significantly to music. Her musical imagery is usually kinetic and transitory rather than static, and it holds complexities and richness that deepen the simple text. It often relates to blues themes, to sudden stops that parallel the end of a dream or hope or that suggest the incompleteness of human personality and human life. Usually in the background the music produces anxiety and restlessness rather than satisfaction in the listener, as when a scale is not completed or when a blues tune stops "just at the time the tune should be laid." If blues tunes are characteristic in the short fiction, as in the sound of a chain gang's work song, so also is the merry tune of an organ grinder—a tune that amuses children and awakens childlikeness in adults but that also directs the behavior of a trapped monkey, ominously diverts the listener's attention from danger, and, like a Pied-Piper, lures the innocents, the dreamers, and the trusting toward the perils of human life.

—Margaret McDowell

See the essays on The Ballad of the Sad Café and "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud."