The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1976) by Virginia Carr.
Good Reads meta-data is 600 pages, rated 4.23 by 667 litizens.
DNA: Dixie.
Verdict: Meets the standard.
Tagline: A betazoid.
Born Lula Carson Smith (1917-1967) this precocious and sickly girl-woman was a prodigy, an ill-fated infante incroyable. At fourteen she dropped the ‘Lula’ name and embraced the androgynous ‘Carson,’ a family name. When later she married James Reeves McCullers she took his name and kept it, though she did not always keep him or he her. When Mrs McCullers was 19 she began to write her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, hard though it is to believe that an adolescent, and one who was comfortably sheltered, could produce such empathy and insight into its cast of characters, but she did.
‘We are all homesick for a place we have never been called happiness.’ She didn’t say that but it fits. McCullers was a tormented and doomed genius, more often than not, silent and alone, like one of her characters.
How did this inconsolable soul emanate from a happy home? This is one of the questions the author deals with in a masterful fashion. It was precisely because she had a supportive and comfortable start in life that her senses extended, almost palpably, to those who were not so fortunate. When the preteen McCullers visited a travelling carnival, she went to the freak show and stood for hours watching the bearded lady, the enormously fat man, the boy with a flat head, the armless man, the legless woman, the dwarf, the pinhead, Andre the giant, half man-half woman, and other deformities of nature, and she wondered so hard about being them that she became one of them in her mind, on paper: an outcast, a reject, inferior, useless, a freak. She also wondered about a god that created such beings and then left them to their own devices.
While McCullers had many writing teachers, a high school graduate, she did not go to college, but rather enrolled in a variety of adult education writing classes. It was through these experiences that she found her way to publication. Even before The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, she had written much of what later become Reflections in a Golden Eye.
This biography meets my principal test: it shows the adult in the child and the child in the adult. In the girl Carson are the liniments that form the woman McCullers, and in the mature McCullers, the author shows, the sources in the girl Carson. One example is the cocktail of silent introvert and loud extrovert. Mostly, she was silent and brooding, or perhaps better, soaking up observations of the world and people around her, but she also liked, occasionally, to be the centre of attention, to be opinionated, noisey, and even ill-mannered. There was no in-between of normal conversational interaction.
She began telling stories as a child and never stopped. She was encouraged by her mother who never doubted her genius, and educated in part by her father, the watchmaker who stressed persistence and precision.
The biographer uses passages from McCullers’s novels and stories to describe and explain Carson’s life because she so closely identified with her deformed characters that she became, at least in her own mind, a grotesquerie herself. McCullers has been a posthumous recruit in the LGBTQAA1 alphabet world. All part of her Indiana Jones exploration into the far reaches of the human psyche, looking for a bottom to touch and finding nothing fixed and firm.
She published four novels, many short stories, and several plays.
Let this passage from her first published, though not her first written, work about tweenager Mick Kelly, who goes to bed hungry most nights, indicate the kind of fiction she wrote. Restless, Mick roams her small Georgia town on hot summer nights, and stops to listen to radios emanating from open windows because her family is too poor to own a radio or have the electricity to run it.
“Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her hand went up to her throat. It was like God walking through the night. The outside of her suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what followed, she sat there waiting and frozen, with her fists tight. After a while, the music come again, harder and loud. It was her, this music, walking in the daytime, in the hot sun. The music boiled inside her. She wanted to hang onto it, to all of it. The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough to remember it all. Then the opening music again, but this time with different instruments. It was like a hard hand had punched her. And then it ended. This music did not take a long time or short time. It had no time; it was time.”
Music was McCullers’s even greater passion than prose and she was never without it, Beethoven (Eroica above), Brahms, Mozart, Vivaldi, the Liszt goes on.
Her horribilis annus was 1944. Her father died. Her mother collapsed as a result. Carson had three strokes over the year that left her partly paralysed. In between the strokes her recurrent pulmonary affliction knocked her down. During one of the many visits a doctor told her that she could not have children. Then a cancer was discovered. She was accused of anti-Semitism and that wounded her. Her husband was an Army Ranger and his unit went up the bluff face on Normandy Beach with 50% casualties. She knew he was a Ranger and she knew his Ranger regiment took the bluff, per the news reporting, and from that source she also knew the casualty rate, but it was weeks before she learned he had survived, though twice wounded.
Through much of life she was a stick figure with a withered arm. Several surgeries on a leg to restore circulation did not succeed and it atrophied. Recurrent stokes. Near constant pain treated with alcohol and drugs. The press photographs required all too often by publishers were agony for her. She had to psych and pretty herself up, mask her deformed arm in long sleeves and forgo the sling she often wore to keep it out of the way. She would greet an interviewing journalist or photographer seated so as not to reveal how hard it was for her to move. The photographs of her standing were choreographed. Yet through this all those voices of the neglected and rejected that had gestated within her leaked out onto the page, sometimes dictated, sometimes typed with the good hand or written. She was an oracle through whom the speechless spoke.
Reeves McCullers, that husband, survived Normandy with wounds and later when he was herding German prisoners onto trucks, he waited for the next truck, a German naval officer who was at the head of line read the name stencilled on his shirt – ‘McCullers,’ and in English said, pointing, ‘An unusual name. Did you write The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? A very moving book.’ It seems this German had read it in captured booty earlier. Reeves told the German it was his wife who wrote it, and then he, the German, dug into his kit bag and handed over a piece of Belgian lace, saying, ‘Give it to her from a grateful reader.’ After the war, the textile hung as silent testament on the walls of their digs. Throughout her life, when her health permitted she read and replied to letters from readers.
Aside: It rivals the story I read elsewhere of the Luftwaffe pilot who on being shot down west of Bradford in Yorkshire, asked his capturers if he might see the Brontë’s cottage before being taken away.
The book is almost a diary of her day to day life, and I got bogged down in detail that did not, to this reader, add any more understanding of either the author or her works. In such a forrest few trees were visible. No doubt those whose accolades adorn the book cover had greater persistence than did I.
The movies I have seen derived from her books are pale watermarks of the intensity of the original. I expect most of her novels are now banned in Florida.