Carson McCullers: A Life Hardcover - 2001

Details

• Title Carson McCullers: A Life
• Author Josyane Savigneau; Joan E. Howard (Translator)
• Binding Hardcover
• Edition First American E
• Pages 384
• Volumes 1
• Language ENG
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date 2001-02-19
• Illustrated Yes
• ISBN 9780395878200 / 0395878209
• Weight 1.54 lbs (0.70 kg)
• Dimensions 9.32 x 6.32 x 1.24 in (23.67 x 16.05 x 3.15 cm)
• Library of Congress subjects Southern States, Authors, American - 20th century - Biography
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 00046547
• Dewey Decimal Code B

Introduction

Carson McCullers would have been eighty-four years old on February 19, 2001, an age that would have made her our absolute contemporary. But she died prematurely, in 1967, at age fifty. She published only eight books, plus a posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and poems. That doesn’t sound like much to build an international reputation on. She attained one, however, and although she may not be very famous among the public at large, only rarely are serious readers unfamiliar with the work of this novelist from the American South. Could that be what annoys some of the people who knew and outlived her, causing them to minimize or obscure her writing, her status, her very existence?
John Brown, one of her first editors in the early 1940s, who became her friend and was a constant source of support during her stays in France (he was working at the time for the cultural service of the American embassy in Paris), seems to wonder what could possibly prompt a full-length biography of Carson McCullers: “Granted, there are some fine texts, but, even so, she was not really much of a writer.”1 “Moving, yes, but a minor author. And broken by illness at such a young age,” adds the American playwright Arthur Miller.2 André Bay, who was Carson McCullers’s French editor at Éditions Stock -- he had read her work in 1945, on John Brown’s recommendation -- does not share this skepticism: Obviously, if you use the entire history of American literature as a yardstick, and you line up the major works, you could conclude that Carson McCullers’s four novels and her corpus of short stories make her “not really much of a writer.” But there are “grand accidents.” And they are essential. They are also what gives meaning to literature. Carson McCullers is one of the finest of those “accidents.” No one has captured as she did the vast American sense of loneliness, and the suffering it causes, especially in the unreal, dreamlike South of her imaginings, which seems almost “bathed in rum.” For me, it is also Carson McCullers, daughter of the South fascinated by snow that she was, who holds the answer to the question “When the snow melts, where does the whiteness go?” It is in her work.3

The view that Carson McCullers was merely a promising talent broken and unfulfilled has been strongly contested by another Southern writer, Tennessee Williams, one of her closest friends from the late 1940s on. In the foreword he wrote in 1974 for the major American biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr, Tennessee Williams refuses to let commentators shut his friend away in her illness. No one can deny the suffering and infirmities that Carson McCullers had to live with for twenty years, but Tennessee Williams firmly states that the existence of a writer cannot be evaluated in terms of difficulties, any more than by the number of volumes produced. “When physical catastrophes reduce, too early, an artist’s power, his/her admirers must not and need not enter a plea nor offer apology,” he writes. “It is not quantity, after all, that the artist is to be judged by. It is quality of spirit and those occasions on which he/she was visited by assenting angels, and the number of those occasions is not the scale on which their importance is reckoned.”4 Several years after her death, in another testimony to her reputation, Carson McCullers was the object of a monumental biography (during her lifetime, and with her assistance, one brief biographical essay, The Ballad of Carson McCullers, had been written by Oliver Evans). Carson had the most meticulous biographer one can imagine. Virginia Spencer Carr, a professor from the South who published The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers in 1975, carried out an extremely methodical investigation, seeking to leave no moment of Carson McCullers’s existence hidden, from her birth to her final day.5 Granted, Carr faced obstacles in documenting the life of her subject. McCullers’s heirs refused to assist Carr in any way and barred her from citing the documents -- unpublished texts and letters -- preserved in the archives of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. At the time, Carson McCullers’s sister, Margarita Smith; her lawyer, Floria Lasky (now her literary executor); and her agent, Robert Lantz, were hoping to find a biographer of their own choosing. Mary Mercer, Carson McCullers’s doctor and friend during the last ten years of her life -- a key figure for that period -- also refused to speak with the biographer.
Virginia Spencer Carr nonetheless seems to have interviewed every other witness to Carson McCullers’s existence -- however mminor or ephemeral. When she herself was not free to travel, she sent someone else to question people for her. Recollections were obtained from peopllllle who had met the American novelist only in passing -- such as Simone de Beauvoir, who vaguely remembered an evening spent with her in Paris. By now, most of the women and men who provided information to Carr have died. No work on Carson McCullers could possibly be done without Carr’s incomparably precise text, containing scores of comments now impossible to collect. Nothing can be written without referring to those unique testimonials, which is to say that we cannot but pay homage to the research of Virginia Spencer Carr.
And yet, despite an appearance of neutrality often found in American biographies -- never a conjecture on points that are obscure or unexplained but a piling up of details, particulars, and testimonials as if all were of equal importance -- Virginia Spencer Carr’s work creates a rather negative image of Carson McCullers. The Lonely Hunter aims to be exhaustive, and it certainly comes close, but its portrait is cold, painted by a woman apparently unwilling to consider that a writer lives differently from people who don’t write, organizes her existence according to other criteria, feels different feelings, thinks other kinds of thoughts. A writer is not someone who on the one hand loves, hates, rejoices, becomes outraged, or suffers and then writes in her free time. Not only is a writer’s life partially refracted in fiction (that is, after all, what keeps the biographical enterprise from being inane), but the need to write fastens itself onto, indeed molds, every living moment. It is if not by that standard at least from that perspective that a writer’s life must be judged. Virginia Spencer Carr shows little warmth -- much less tenderness or compassion -- for her subject, who, visibly, shocks her puritanism and moralism. Carson McCullers is too free with her passions and her words, too independent, and too adept at surviving come what may so that she can continue to write.
A few years after Carr’s American summa, in 1979, Jacques Tournier, a French writer and translator as well as a great admirer of Carson McCullers, published a new biographical essay, Retour r Nayack [sic] (Return to Nyack), at Éditions du Seuil.6 It is an intimate, enthusiastic, and passionate work inspired by a journey Tournier made, following in Carson McCullers’s footsteps, from Columbus to Nyack via Paris. A slightly revised version of this book appeared in 1990 at Éditions Complexe. Called R la recherche de Carson McCullers (In search of Carson McCullers), it is an emotion- filled and sentimental quest for Reeves McCullers, Carson’s husband, who dreamed of being the writer that his wife alone became.
For Jacques Tournier, though he denies it and though his passion for Carson McCullers is undoubtedly sincere, everything must be read in relation to Reeves. The film he made on Carson for French television in 1995, like his book, proves it. According to Tournier, Carson’s life after the death of her husband -- that is, for fourteen years -- was nothing more than intense despair over his absence, a long lament, nights spent imagining that Reeves’s ghost had returned to roam in the garden of the author’s Nyack home.
. . .
Happily, alongside the skeptics Carson McCullers had some real friends who outlived her: Floria Lasky; Dr. Mary Mercer; Marielle Bancou, her other intimate during the 1950s and 1960s, a young designer at the time; and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a witness of the 1940s. The photos that Cartier-Bresson took of Carson in 1946 show both the admiration and the real tenderness he had for his subject. When these people speak of Carson McCullers, they evoke a person who is first and foremost a writer, a novelist entirely attached to her work. “Writing is my occupation,” Carson often said as she was fighting to continue her work at the height of her physical suffering. “I must do it. I have done it for so long.” Her devotion to her work served as proof of the exceptional talent, lucidity, and maturity already in evidence when, at twenty years of age, she started writing her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Much more than a woman destroyed by the death of the man she loved -- and she loved James Reeves McCullers, that much is certain -- Carson McCullers, in her life and in the comments of her friends, resembles the touching adolescents -- irritating, too, at once generous and egotistical, weak and yet uncommonly strong -- who are featured in two of her novels, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Mick) and The Member of the Wedding (Frankie). Adolescence seems to have remained intact in Carson, indestructible despite all the experiences of life -- the loves, the losses, and the afflictions of a body broken by illness -- preserving in her a young girl’s heart, with its angry outbursts and its torments. Society does not easily tolerate that kind of person, which may account for the obvious or latent hostility that Carson McCullers can arouse among those who have commented on her life. Further fanning the flames of jealousy and disapproval, she was a remarkable writer: she amassed in a small number of years the experiences of a long life, even marrying the same man twice; she achieved great successes and met with failures no less dizzying, became a triumphant Broadway playwright, and saw one of her novels being made into a film by John Huston, with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor as its stars. Through it all, with inconceivable determination, she held on against the torments of the body and the heart.
It might well irritate these naysayers to find that the adolescent spirit at the heart of Carson’s work -- the very mark of Carson McCullers -- is precisely what keeps her writing fresh. From one generation to the next, young readers are moved by Mick and Frankie, those girls who shot up too fast and refused to enter a world that didn’t suit them, rejecting the lies and the compromises of adult life.
Paul Bowles, an American writer who lived in the same house as Carson did in Brooklyn during the 1940s, very aptly described “the essentially childlike woman she [was] all her life,” insisting on the word childlike, which is nothing like infantile, to evoke the “born writer” spoken of by the British writer Edith Sitwell after she had read the novels of Carson McCullers. With “this exaggerated simplicity,” said Paul Bowles in 1970 to Virginia Spencer Carr, who had come to visit him in Tangiers, where he was living, “went a total devotion to writing and subjugation to it of all other facets of her existence. This undeviating seriousness did not give her the air of an adult, but rather that of a prodigious and slightly abnormal child who refused to go out and play because she was busy writing in her notebook.”7 Within the space of this peculiar paradox we must seek, more than thirty years after her death, the closest possible likeness of this strange woman-child, this writer so accomplished in her youth who never really grew up, who was seductive till the end, even when she was paralyzed and almost incapable of speaking, besieged by illness, and withdrawn into a thick fog of alcohol: Carson McCullers. We will have to find her in her books, in her stubborn will to keep on writing until the final day, which she did -- she was working on her autobiographical papers when she died. We must avoid the trap that others fell into when they set out in search of her and managed to conceal her instead, or almost made her disappear, as if Carson McCullers -- the accomplished writer and the “woman still a child” -- constituted a frightening chimera, foreign to the world as it should be, a ceaselessly improper, permanently unacceptable personality.

Originally published as Carson McCullers: Un Coeur de jeune fille, copyright © 1995 by Éditions Stock Translation © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company

"[Carson McCullers: A Life] is a hugely readable and remarkably sympathetic book that helps us to better understand a complex, enigmatic writer whose life and work continue to enthrall."

- F.P., Elle Magazine Elle