On Nov. 21, 1940, novelist Carson McCullers threw a party with the writers and artists she shared a dilapidated home with in Brooklyn Heights. It was a Thanksgiving party, a housewarming party, and a birthday party for the British composer Benjamin Britten, one of the residents of the brownstone commune. After a meal of turkey and free-flowing champagne and wine, the many guests headed upstairs to sing, dance, and play drunken parlor games. The celebrations were briefly interrupted by the screaming sirens of a firetruck. Curious about the commotion, McCullers ran outside with her housemate, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Suddenly, she stopped, gripped her friend’s arm, and breathlessly exclaimed, “Frankie is in love with the bride of her brother and wants to join the wedding.”
Mary V. Dearborn recounts this incident in her new biography, Carson McCullers: A Life. The eureka moment in the street, what McCullers later called an “illumination,” was a creative spark that ignited the idea for her novel The Member of the Wedding. Dearborn reveals it wasn’t the only time a book took shape from something so random and tangential to the writing process. Gazing at the pattern in the carpet in her childhood home helped McCullers visualize the central character in her debut, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Hearing a comment from her husband about a Peeping Tom at Fort Benning teased out a plot strand in Reflections in a Golden Eye.
McCullers’s illuminations lit the way and allowed her to craft bold, modern fiction that broke conventions, explored taboo territory, and revolved around all manner of rebels, oddballs, misfits, and outcasts. But over the course of her short life, she was also blighted by self-styled “unilluminations,” when “the soul is flattened out.” Years of chronic health problems and alcoholism took their toll to the extent that writing became a challenge and functioning an ordeal. Dearborn’s study charts McCullers’s wild highs and devastating lows and shows how she battled on while being ground down, producing singular art drawn from what she termed “her sad, happy life.”
Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, the eldest of three children. An academic prodigy and piano maestro who read avidly, she dressed like a tomboy and, according to one observer, “played alongside of other children, never with them.” She was also a sickly child who all too readily caught and suffered from common viruses and rare infections. Destined for a career as a concert pianist, she changed tack and decided to become a writer. After a brief, awe-inspiring trip to New York in 1934, McCullers packed up and traded Columbus for Columbia to study creative writing.
It was during a visit home the following summer that she met Reeves McCullers, a handsome army cadet who, it was said, “could charm the skin off a snake.” The pair instantly hit it off and appeared to be a perfect match: Both were Southerners with writing aspirations and a capacity to talk, and drink, at length. They got married in 1937 and moved into an apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina, by which time McCullers had enjoyed her first small flush of success and experienced her first serious onslaught of illness. The former was the publication of her autobiographical tale “Wunderkind” in Story magazine. The latter comprised pneumonia, rheumatic fever, and an undiagnosed strep throat infection that led to later woes.
When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940, McCullers found herself with a boost in self-confidence and the financial means to relocate permanently to New York. Her book, about a ragtag group of lonely souls adrift in a small Southern city, did not make the bestseller lists, but it was critically acclaimed, and it transformed the 23-year-old author into a literary sensation. However, McCullers’s luck started to change drastically. In 1941, the same year her second novel appeared, she suffered her first stroke. Six years later, during a productive stay in France, where, her husband said, she “rather took literary Paris by storm,” she had two more debilitating strokes that left her partially paralyzed and in increasing pain for the rest of her life.
McCullers seldom found solace in her relationships. Despite her marriage, she pursued and fell headlong in love with older and more sophisticated women who didn’t reciprocate her affection. Dearborn traces failed romances such as McCullers’s adolescent yearning for her piano teacher, Mary Tucker, and the “flowering jazz passion” she felt for the Swiss-born writer and world traveler Annemarie Schwarzenbach. “She had a face,” McCullers wrote, “that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life.”
If Schwarzenbach haunted her, then Reeves McCullers troubled and tormented her throughout what a friend called their “abominable, cannibalistic relationship.” She divorced him and then remarried him, but the second time around, he routinely plunged into fits of despair and self-destructiveness. In 1953, after much talk of committing suicide, and after failing to persuade his wife to join him in death, he made good on his threat in a French hotel room.
McCullers found love, happiness, and stability five years later with a married woman, her psychiatrist, Mary Mercer. This lover’s counseling and support also helped McCullers professionally, enabling her to overcome writer’s block with the novel Clock Without Hands. But eventually, poor health caught up with her again. When she wasn’t bedbound at her home in Nyack, New York, barely able to hold a pen, she was in the hospital. “Sometimes I think God got me mixed up with Job,” she told a friend. “But Job never cursed God, and neither have I. I carry on.” She did so until her death in 1967 at the age of 50.
As with her 2017 biography of Ernest Hemingway, Dearborn’s life of McCullers makes use of a wealth of newly available material, from letters to journals to transcripts of her therapy sessions with Mercer. Dearborn is sympathetic toward her subject but still committed to painting a candid portrait. We see McCullers in various incarnations: She is, for Dearborn, a “literary lion” following her overnight success. She is also a tragic case, a rule-breaking nonconformist, and, in her own words, “a holy terror.” Dearborn informs us that McCullers was frequently needy and desperate for affirmation that she was loved. One woman she had a crush on reacted positively to her “formidable directness” but disliked her “necessity to devour her friends.”
Dearborn brings into sharp focus McCullers’s reliance on alcohol, a trait she inherited from her parents. She denied she had a problem and proved it by writing lucidly and brilliantly while nursing a thermos of tea and sherry. But at other times, she upped the measures, extended the drinking sprees, and spiraled out of control. “A fish couldn’t drink so much without sinking,” Tennessee Williams once remarked with concern. She sank often. When a friend visited her one morning in a hospital where she was supposedly having a break from the booze, he discovered her sitting up in bed with a tumbler of bourbon.
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We learn of McCullers’s friendships with writers, including W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, and Jane and Paul Bowles. Williams became her ardent admirer and single closest friend outside her family. Enthralled by her early talent (“It is so extraordinary it makes me ashamed of anything I might do,” he gushed of her debut), Williams gradually saw her existence as precarious and worried about the effects hostile criticism might have on her. But not every writer she encountered warmed to her. Katherine Anne Porter wearied of her obsessiveness, while Eudora Welty referred to her as “that little wretch.”
Dearborn provides shrewd insight into how McCullers honed her craft — how her characters developed and her books unfolded. She shows how McCullers’s work fits squarely in the Southern Gothic genre and makes a convincing case for her as a worthy successor to William Faulkner. Still, Dearborn’s critical evaluations aren’t all unadulterated praise. She singles out flaws in McCullers’s books and rightly states that by the time she reached 30, her best work was already behind her. But that work has endured, and Dearborn’s compelling and well-wrought biography gives us a fresh perspective on it and its unique creator.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
