Carson McCullers’s lonely passion

It may be true that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) — but in the case of Carson McCullers it could also be an indefatigable and exhausting one. Born Lula Carson Smith into a struggling middle-class family in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, she grew up hungering for great passions — and, like Hunter’s teenage protagonist Mick (her characters often carry gender-neutral names), she fell in love with classical piano at a young age. (Then Carson — not Mick — fell in love with her female piano teacher.) She married young a twenty-year-old ex-serviceman named Reeves McCullers who, by all reports, was far more beautiful than her. Then together, almost whimsically, they launched themselves off to New York with little money and few contacts, where they competed to find out who would write the first successful stories and novels. Carson quickly left Reeves behind in everything except drinking.

Giving up an opportunity to study at Juilliard, she sold two stories to the significant editor-of-first-sales Whit Burnett, the founder of the literary magazine Story; and then sold Hunter as a chapter and outline to Harper, after applying for, and losing, the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Appearing in 1940 when McCullers was only twenty-three, Hunter extended Faulknerian rhapsodic rage into the lives of an angry, overweight Greek neurasthenic homosexual, an angry, boozy former labor-organizer, and an even angrier black doctor, prone to issuing justifiably enraged lectures about the Jim Crow south.

These loners find solace in one another through their mutual friendship with a mute Jewish homosexual, ironically named Singer, and Mick, a local girl exploring the ranges of love and passion available to her. Mick was the sort of character, filled with youthful poetry and desire, who would reverberate in many small-town American novels over the next decades, from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

At night, Mick goes looking for all the things McCullers longed for — music, friendship and sexual passion:

These nights were secret, and of the whole summer they were the most important time. In the dark she walked by herself and it was like she was the only person in the town. Almost every street came to be as plain to her in the night-time as her own home block. Some kids were afraid to walk through strange places in the dark, but she wasn’t. Girls were scared a man would come out from somewhere and put his teapot in them like they was married. Most girls were nuts. If a person the size of Joe Louis or Mountain Man Dean would jump out at her and want to fight she would run. But if it was somebody within twenty pounds her weight she would give him a good sock and go right on.

The nights were wonderful, and she didn’t have time to think about such things as being scared…

For McCullers, the rages of lonely men and women emerged mostly when they weren’t allowed to satisfy their deepest desires. In her second, shorter and even more adventurous novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), the protagonist, Captain Penderton, releases his frustrations (when he can’t make love to the men who make love to his unfaithful wife) by torturing kittens and horses. At times, he thinks, “the irritations, disappointments and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate.”

McCullers’s early books made her famous, sold well, and allowed her to meet lots of older writers and artists (usually women) whom she assaulted with an inexhaustible artillery of passionate letters, gifts and pleading. Then, after scaring off one unattainable lover after another (she often referred to them as her “imaginary friends”), she issued alternate barrages of tears and objurgations. Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter and Jane Bowles were just a few of the authors who began to worry about her showing up at Yaddo — an upscale writer’s refuge that McCullers treated like a combination of an AA summer camp and/or love hospital. Late in her brief life she called her relationship with a young Swiss journalist, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the “love of her life,” even though it physically amounted to little more than a kiss (and a lot of fruitless pleading).

Carson was never happy for very long unless she was unhappily in love. But when most of these women went off to their husbands, she went back to hers — where the two accomplished more drinking than love making. She and the equally troubled Reeves divorced in 1941 and remarried in 1945, and the intensity of their partnership seemed to survive everything but each other. It was easily the longest and most enduring unhappy relationship of her life, until Reeves committed suicide in 1953 after failing to convince Carson to join him. (At one point he showed her a tree where he proposed they hang themselves side by side.)

After publishing three now well-regarded novels in five years, McCullers’s passions burned too hot for her gangly body, and she spent the next decade or so adapting old stories to stage rather than producing new ones. By the time Clock Without Hands appeared in 1961, her various illnesses prevented her from venturing far from her bedroom. Whether it was her childhood bout of rheumatic fever or her drinking, she continued suffering strokes and fevers throughout the rest of her life until she died, mostly bedridden and partly paralyzed, at the age of fifty.

By all accounts, McCullers was a difficult person to handle — even for those who loved her. Gore Vidal, a long-time friend and admirer of her work, once said: “Fifteen minutes in the same room listening to one of her self-loving arias and I was gone.” Late in life, she forced friends and nurses to accompany her through a nightly bedtime ritual that dragged on so long that participants couldn’t bring themselves to divulge the details even years after her death. All they did reveal was that it began in the early evening with one incredibly huge serving of alcohol (her doctor restricted her to a glass per night but didn’t specify the size) and concluded much later with a beer before lights out.

Mary Dearborn’s Carson McCullers: A Life is well-written, hefty, responsible and absorbing, treating its subject with respect and compassion without dismissing her obviously thorny and difficult personality. It’s a true pleasure to read — or, at the very least, a lot more enjoyable to take to bed than Carson McCullers.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.