McCullers, Carson (1917–1967)

One of the most gifted and original writers to emerge from the American South in the 1940s, whose haunting novels and stories about loneliness and frustrated love have long appealed to readers, scholars, and critics throughout the world . Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917; died at Nyack Hospital in Nyack, New York, following a massive cerebral hemorrhage, on September 29, 1967; oldest child of Lamar Smith (a watchmaker and jeweler) and Marguerite Waters Smith (a homemaker); sister of Margarita G. Smith (fiction editor for Mademoiselle ); attended public schools in Columbus, graduating from Columbus High School in 1933; also studied piano for a dozen years; married James Reeves McCullers, on September 20, 1937 (divorced 1941, remarried February 1945); no children.

Attack of rheumatic fever marked the beginning of a long struggle against debilitating illness (1932); left for New York to study at the famed Juilliard School of Music but instead decided on a writing career (1934); took creative writing courses at Columbia University and New York University (1935–37); published first story, "Wunderkind," in Story (December 1936); after marriage, moved to Charlotte and then to Fayetteville, North Carolina; completed her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1937–39), which was published by Houghton Mifflin (June 1940); lived on and off at a home in Brooklyn Heights, New York, rented with celebrities such as W.H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee, who became lifelong friends (1940–42); published second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye at Houghton Mifflin, and suffered a stroke that temporarily impaired her vision (February 1941); also suffered repeated bouts of influenza, pneumonia, and pleurisy both before and after the stroke; published novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (August 1943); her father died and her mother Marguerite and younger sister Rita moved to Nyack to share her home (1944); remarried (1945); published her fourth novel, The Member of the Wedding , to universal acclaim (1946); suffered a second stroke that left her paralyzed on the left side (1947); unable to write, attempted suicide (1948); persuaded by Tennessee Williams to dramatize her 1946 novel, which was a huge success on Broadway (1950–51) and which restored her self-confidence; however, the suicide of her husband (1953), the sudden death of her mother (1955), and the failure of her second play, The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), undermined her ability to write; helped and encouraged by a psychiatrist and friend, Dr. Mary Mercer, was able to finish her fifth and last novel, Clock Without Hands (end of 1960); during the remaining seven years of life, wrote some stories and poems for Harper's Bazaar and other fashion magazines, and Houghton Mifflin publishedher collection of children's verses, Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig (1964).

With the exception of her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye , which took her only two months to write, it took McCullers three to six years to complete each of her other works. As a result, she finished a total of only 5 novels over a period of 30 years. Several editions of her best fiction, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and The Member of the Wedding remain in print. She also wrote a number of stories, essays and a few poems, most of which appeared in fashion magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Mademoiselle and Vogue from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s.

Carson McCullers, like most of the characters in her fiction, grew up in the deep South when segregation was in full force. Her father's jewelry and watchmaking business prospered during the postwar boom of the 1920s, and when Carson was a child the family moved from the downtown area to an upscale suburb of Columbus, Georgia, a mill town of some 30,000 inhabitants. As the family could well afford hired help, Carson and her younger siblings Lamar Smith, Jr. and Margarita G. Smith , known as Rita, became intimately acquainted with a succession of black housemaids who worked for the Smith family over the years. Some of McCullers' most memorable characters, such as the black maid Portia in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and the black housekeeper Berenice in The Member of the Wedding (1946), were drawn from life. In his 1940 review of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the eminent black writer Richard Wright praised McCullers' "astonishing humanity" that enabled "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."

From early childhood, Carson's parents, especially her mother Marguerite Waters Smith , were sure that their eldest child was a "wunderkind" or child prodigy. They noticed and nurtured her lively imagination, her passion for books, and her early interest in music. At the age of five, her parents bought her a piano and for the next twelve years, from approximately 1922 to 1934, Carson, inspired by two excellent teachers, practiced for at least four hours a day. Not surprisingly, music plays a prominent role in the lives of McCullers' most autobiographical adolescent characters, Frances in her first published story "Wunderkind" (1936), Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1941), and Frankie Addams in McCullers' masterpiece, The Member of the Wedding (1946).

When McCullers was 13, she dropped her baptismal name Lula in favor of her middle name, Carson. Oliver Evans, McCullers' first biographer, pointed out "that the names Mick and Frankie, like Carson's own, are, though sexually ambiguous, more generally applicable to boys than to girls." And like Mick of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Frankie of The Member of the Wedding, Carson was a tall, lanky tomboy who felt quite out of place in a region that viewed tall women (McCullers was 5′8½") as freaks, and androgyny as an abomination.

While Carson grew up in a warm, harmonious and supportive household, the world beyond her doorstep was hostile. She was often called a freak by children and adolescents, not only because of her height but because she was a voracious reader and a serious student of music, both rarities in small-town America. And to increase her estrangement from her contemporaries, at the age of 15 and in her senior year in high school, McCullers suffered a severe attack of rheumatic fever that kept her in bed for months. Misdiagnosed as "growing pains," the attack damaged her heart badly, although this was not known until much later. Ill health and finally invalidism were to plague McCullers for more than half of her relatively short life.

Although no one seems to have made the connection, it is possible that McCullers began to abandon the idea of a musical career because of the attack of rheumatic fever. However, she continued to study piano with her beloved teacher, Mary Tucker , the wife of an officer at nearby Fort Benning, until Colonel John Tucker was reassigned to a post in California in 1934. In retrospect, McCullers was wise to abandon the piano and devote herself to fiction, for the two strokes she suffered before the age of 30 left her with the use of only her right hand.

McCullers read every work of fiction in her family's library and at the local public library and began writing stories and plays before graduating from high school in 1933. Once again Lamar and Marguerite Smith fully supported their daughter, buying her a typewriter when it was clear that she was serious about writing. Carson was pleased enough with one story "Sucker" to show it to her parents; however, it was not published for another 30 years.

The decision to abandon music for writing was finally made for Carson after she left Columbus in 1934 to study music at Juilliard in New York. Her parents sold a valuable heirloom ring to pay for Carson's tuition at Juilliard and her living expenses in New York, but the money was somehow lost in the subway. To support herself and to pursue her true calling—writing—Carson worked at odd jobs in the city while studying creative writing in evening classes at Columbia University and later New York University.

Carson returned to Georgia in June 1935, working briefly for the Columbus Ledger. That same summer, Edwin Peacock, a good friend who encouraged her writing, introduced Carson to another aspiring writer, James Reeves McCullers, a well-spoken, well-read and charming young man originally from Alabama, who left the Army in 1936 to pursue a writing career in New York. The following year, Carson and Reeves were married in Columbus, and the couple moved first to Charlotte and then to Fayetteville in North Carolina where Reeves found work with a credit company. They agreed to alternate at breadwinning, and that once Carson was an established writer (her first published story, "Wunderkind," had already appeared in Story in December 1936) she would support Reeves while he took a turn at writing.

Carson McCullers">

Everything significant that has happened in my fiction has also happened to me—or it will happen eventually.

—Carson McCullers

The agreement never worked, and by the time Carson's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, catapulted her to fame in 1940 their marriage had unravelled. Reeves, it turned out, was not a gifted writer, which had a disastrous effect on his sense of self-worth. To make matters worse, both Carson and Reeves were bisexual, with Reeves the more passive of the two. Carson's pursuit of women completed the destruction of their first marriage. They reconciled after Reeves, who re-enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor, was thrice wounded in Europe, but their second marriage came to a tragic end when Reeves, severely alcoholic, took his own life in November 1953.

Domestic bliss and joyous sex are as rare in McCullers' fiction as they were in her own life. Most of her characters suffer spiritual loneliness, and are engaged in a frustrated search for communion with, and understanding by, their fellow human beings. The lover is seldom appreciated or even noticed by the loved one, and the loss of love often leads her characters to defeat, despair, and, in the case of the deaf-mute John Singer in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, to suicide. The themes of estrangement, frustrated love, and solitariness that inform Carson's novels, from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) to Clock Without Hands (1961), and her passionate plea for racial and social justice, gained her millions of readers in the United States and abroad.

A celebrity by the age of 23, McCullers befriended and was befriended by many of the famous that she met at the Yaddo Artists' Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the 1940s and at a house in Brooklyn Heights, New York, that Carson rented in the early 1940s with her mentor, George Davis, the fiction editor at Harper's Bazaar, the poet W.H. Auden, and the entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee . The house at 7 Middagh Street, which the diarist Anais Nin dubbed "February House" because some of its tenants were born under the sign of Pisces, was, from 1940 until the building was demolished in early 1945, the most extraordinary literary salon in the United States. Some of the leading writers, artists, and musicians of the war years either lived there for a time or visited its distinguished tenants.

In the mid-1940s, Carson also became a close friend of the dramatist Tennessee Williams, who convinced her to dramatize The Member of the Wedding. Because of Carson's paralyzing stroke in 1947, she was unable to finish the play for years, and it did not open until January 5,1950. The play featured Julie Harris as the motherless adolescent Frankie Addams, Brandon de Wilde as Frankie's young cousin John Henry, and the legendary Ethel Waters as the compassionate and nurturing housekeeper Berenice. Member of the Wedding was a runaway success, and played 501 performances until it closed in mid-March 1951. It won both the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Donaldson Award for Best Play of the 1950 season. Carson was also awarded a Gold Medal of the Theater Club as the Best Playwright of the year. Within two years, the play was made into a highly successful film starring the Broadway cast. Carson McCullers received many honors and awards from the 1940s through the early '60s, including two Guggenheim fellowships, but none of them pleased her more than those accorded Member of the Wedding.

By 1952 and at the age of 35, Carson McCullers was one of the most highly regarded and financially successful writers in the United States, but during the remaining 15 years of her life she suffered such devastating personal losses and so much physical pain that her writing faltered. First, her inability to grieve over her husband

Reeves' tragic death in 1953 was viewed as callousness by friends who had known them both. Two years later, her reaction to the sudden death of her mother, Marguerite Smith, with whom Carson and her younger sister Rita had shared a house in Nyack, New York, since the mid-1940s, brought renewed charges of callousness and irresponsibility. Marguerite Smith had devoted her life to her eldest daughter, nurturing her career and caring for Carson through one illness after another. Carson was not there when she was needed, and her sister Rita, still recovering from an appendectomy, had to make all the funeral arrangements with long-distance support from their brother, Lamar. Carson made matters worse when she insisted on claiming her third of their mother's estate despite the fact that she was much more affluent than her siblings.

Many of Carson's friends noticed that she was as contradictory as a child, and that under stress she could be callous, stingy, and morose while she was normally compassionate, generous, and animated. Constant physical pain and the growing fear of death may account for McCullers' otherwise inexplicable behavior at the passing of the two most important persons in her life.

Ever-debilitating illness certainly accounts for McCullers' decline as a writer, especially after her play The Square Root of Wonderful (1957), which concerns a failed writer who commits suicide, was a flop. It opened on Broadway on October 30, 1957, and closed on December 7, after only 45 performances. In February 1958, Carson's close friends, fearing for her life (she had made one attempt at suicide in 1948), brought her to the attention of Dr. Mary Mercer , an excellent psychiatrist who lived and practiced near Carson's home in Nyack. Everyone who has written about McCullers' last nine years agrees that Mary Mercer was an exemplary friend who not only saved her life but who, in Carson's estimation, saved her soul as well.

As a result of Mercer's help and guidance, Carson resumed writing a work she had begun years before, and when Clock Without Hands, a novel about a Southern pharmacist who is dying of leukemia, appeared in 1961, Carson dedicated it to Mercer. The critics treated McCullers' novel gently, but most agreed that it did not fulfill the promise of her earlier work. By the late 1990s, all of McCullers' novels of the 1940s and many of her stories were in print, but Clock Without Hands has been out of print for years.

McCullers' last years were brightened by the knowledge that another two of her novels, Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, were either filmed or were in production. She struck up an especially warm

friendship with the distinguished film director John Huston, and after he finished filming McCullers' gothic novel Reflections in a Golden Eye early in 1967, the bedridden but indomitable McCullers visited Huston at his home in Ireland. It was her last journey; on August 15, Carson McCullers suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and lay comatose in Nyack's hospital until her death on September 29, 1967.

At a memorial service at St. James Episcopal Church in Manhattan and at the burial service in Nyack's Oak Grove Cemetery, her sister Rita, her brother Lamar, and her ever faithful friend Mary Mercer greeted the countless celebrities from the literary, artistic and theatrical world including Carson's old friends W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, Janet Flanner , and Truman Capote, who came to bid farewell to one of America's most original writers.

Over 30 years after her death, Carson McCullers' fame remains undiminished. The universal and timeless themes of alienation, isolation, and loneliness that inform her fiction were more relevant than ever as the 20th century drew to a close and the 21st century began.

sources:

Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975.

Cook, Richard M., Carson McCullers. NY: Frederick Ungar, 1975.

Evans, Oliver. The Ballad of Carson McCullers. NY: Coward-McCann, 1965.

James, Judith Giblin. Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940–1990. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995.

McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. Boston: G.K. Hall, Twayne Publishers, Twayne United States Authors Series, No. 354, 1980.

Smith, Margarita G., ed. The Mortgaged Heart: Carson McCullers. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

suggested reading:

Dews, Carlos, ed. Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers. WI: University of Wisconsin, 1999.

McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1951.

——. Clock Without Hands. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

——. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1940.

——. The Member of the Wedding. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

——. Reflections in a Golden Eye. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

Rich, Nancy B. The Flowering Dream: The Historical Saga of Carson McCullers. Chapel Hill, NC: Chapel Hill Press, 1999.

related media:

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, adapted by Edward Albee, starring Colleen Dewhurst , Michael Dunn, directed by Alan Schneider, lighting by Jean Rosenthal , opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater on October 30, 1963, and ran for 123 performances.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (124 min. film), starring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke, Cicely Tyson , Warner Bros., 1968.

The Member of the Wedding (91 min. film), starring Julie Harris, Brandon de Wilde, Ethel Waters, produced by Stanley Kramer, directed by Fred Zinnemann, Columbia, 1952.

Reflections in a Golden Eye (109 min. film), starring Elizabeth Taylor , Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Brian Keith, produced by Ray Stark, directed by John Huston, Warner Bros., 1967.

Anna Macías , Professor Emerita of History, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio