A novelist of the marginalized and ‘those struggling to understand who they are’
CARSON MCCULLERS A Life
MARY V. DEARBORN 496pp. Knopf. $40.
THOUGH SHE WAS NOT a deaf-mute engraver, a gay United States army captain, a Black Marxist physician or a dapper hunchback, Carson McCullers wrote all these characters, and wrote them well, and did so before her thirtieth birthday. For a biographer this bodes ill. There are some writers whose work composts fascinatingly into their biographies, and others whose work sits in their life story like a body in an anaerobic bog, weird and leathery and stubbornly separate. Both the unaccountable precocity of her achievements and the all-round freakiness of her imagination suggest that McCullers is the second kind of writer.
Perhaps this is one reason why few have attempted a biography. In the two decades since The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was selected for Oprah’s Book Club there has been a proliferation of work relating to McCullers – stage plays, memoirs, songs and subtly conversant novels such as Catherine Lacey’s Pew (2020) –but with the exception of one study translated from French, there has been no Life since Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter (1975), which was published just eight years after its subject’s death. Carr’s book was richly oral-historical and full of things you didn’t realize you wanted, such as a paragraph-long description of what the Hudson waterfront smelt like during McCullers’s first visit to Manhattan, and details of her opinions on small dogs (“too poky and inquisitive”), so for Mary V. Dearborn’s publishers to push this as “the first dimensional life” of the author seems a bit hard on Carr. But the point stands. McCullers, in her afterlife, has become a thing almost inconceivable: a canonical writer short on biographies.
The first surprise for those turning to her life from her work is that it began amid so much love. Marguerite Vera Smith – known to all as Bébé – had hoped for a boy, albeit largely, and obscurely, because she wanted to give her first child the name Enrico Caruso. In February 1917 she happily settled for a daughter, and Lula Carson. There were more important things to worry about than names, because she reckoned the infant was a genius and bound to be famous. Bébé could recite the first chapter of War and Peace from heart, hosted a salon of local artists at the family home in the Georgia mill town of Columbus, and patted lilac cologne into her beloved daughter’s hair. She was right. Carson dropped the “Lula” aged fifteen – a move away from the high Southernism of a double given name, and towards androgyny. “Smith” she replaced in 1937, on marrying a handsome soldier, himself an aspiring but secretive writer: James Reeves McCullers, or Reeves. Sitting toget
