My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

I am hardly qualified to write a biography of Carson McCullers. Who am I to her? I slid my arms up the sleeves of her long lime-green wool coat, I folded her nightgowns, I labeled her socks. I made biscuits in the kitchen of her childhood home and I walked in the park where she used to play by herself. I have read enough biographies to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a fiction writer, and this is not a biography.

While working as an archivist at the University of Texas' Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland discovered a set of letters from a Swiss socialite named Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the American author Carson McCullers, letters of fondness that don't shy away from words like "love." The discovery led Shapland to embark on the project that would become My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a project in which Shapland plumbs the depths of McCullers' archives trying to reconstruct her relationships with women like Schwarzenbach and, in her later years, her therapist Mary Mercer, whose letters to and from Carson show too a profound intimacy. Shapland traces McCullers' life, quite literally: first as a researcher-in-residence at the museum that was her childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, and later as a resident at the Yaddo writers' colony in upstate New York McCullers joined a dozen times in her life.

For Shapland, the mission is personal: in recovering McCullers' lesbian relationships, she is able to recognize and affirm her own repressed and uncertain sexuality:

So it isn't about "Is Carson a lesbian?" or "Carson is a lesbian" or "What is a lesbian?" What I want to know is, how have lesbians gotten by and had relationships and found love and community? What does that look like? One answer: If we--writers, historians, biographers--can just start acknowledging the lesbian parts of ourselves and others, maybe we can start to know what it is. What it is to love women. But please, no more demands for certain kinds of proof, no more "doesn't count unless--" bullshit. Don't tell me there's just not enough evidence. Let's call a lesbian a lesbian. Loved another woman. Period. You loved your mother? Lesbian.

There is a danger, Shapland concedes, in applying labels to people who did not or could not apply them to themselves. She pores over an account McCullers provides to Mercer of the time McCullers' abusive husband demanded to know if she was a lesbian. In the moment McCullers demurred, but Shapland sees in the silence and uncertainty around McCullers' the very dynamics of erasure that continue today. She recalls being sat down by the director of the McCullers home and being told that, in no uncertain terms, McCullers was not a lesbian and had no romantic relationships with women--though one can plainly see in the letters and notes Shapland collects that McCullers' intimacy with Schwarzenbach and Mercer, and many others, the pitch and resonance of love. Shapland rejects the constant demands of proof that are made regarding the sexuality of historical figures, as if in the absence of proof of queerness one remains conscripted by heterosexuality.

To my mind, the director's insistence is not only shocking, but silly. When you read McCullers' books, queerness is there on the page: the repressed lust of the army captain in Reflections in a Golden Eye, the love of Singer for Antonopoulos in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Biff's androgyny in the same, the wild love of Jester for Sherman in Clock Without Hands. What's the point of looking at all of that and saying, Oh no, McCullers might have written all of that--but she herself could never be queer? The question's outside of my expertise and capacity, but the defensiveness of such a position, regarding a writer whose work is so clearly queer, baffles me. Yet this thought reveals what I found missing in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: a deeper investigation of her books themselves. They feel sometimes like an afterthought, far less important than the letters and the notes from therapy--which perhaps they are, but they might have provided a richer context than they do.

Still, Shapland does a great job illuminating McCullers' life. Having never read another biography, I had never heard of how tumultuous McCullers' two marriages to Reeves McCullers, a tormented and closeted gay man himself, who once tried to kill her. This marriage, for both obvious and insidious reasons, has apparently captured most of the imagination of McCullers' other biographers. But it's Shapland who shows, in painstaking and thoughtful detail, the love that exists between the lines, for which those other biographers failed to account. At times I did feel like Shapland's identification with McCullers became overpowering--it struck me as sort of cringeworthy, for example, to insist that McCullers would have been excited about the election of Hillary Clinton. But the story that Shapland tells of her own sexuality, which she comes to embrace wholeheartedly by tracing McCullers', proves in the end to be very powerful.

Pew by Catherine Lacey

If you ever need to--and I hope you never need to, but a person cannot be sure--if you ever need to sleep, if you ever so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones, and you're walking along a dark road with no one, and you're not sure how long you've been walking, and you keep looking down at your hands and not recognizing them, and you keep catching a reflection in darkened windows and not recognizing that reflection, and all you know is the desire to sleep, and all you have is no place to sleep, one thing you can do is look for a church.

The narrator of Catherine Lacey's Pew wakes up one morning in a church, where they've taken shelter for the night. It's a Sunday morning, so the service has begun, and the members of the church are a little surprised to see the narrator lying in their pew. But they are compassionate people--or perhaps they like to think of themselves as compassionate people--so they take in this obvious vagrant and give them a place to stay. Because the narrator won't tell anyone their name, or even speak, they christen them "Pew."

Pew is of indeterminate age, race, and sex. Some look at them and fill in the blanks on their own accord: they see a girl, a boy, a young person, an older person, a white person, a person who is "brown," like another refugee adoptee in town. Those who are more confused beg Pew to tell them: What are you, Pew? But Pew will not tell, and perhaps does not know. For the members of this community, Pew's indeterminacy is a threat, an obstacle into sorting them into an ordered society: "It's what makes us civilized," one person says, "we can identify ourselves and we can identify each other! That's how we keep track of things, hold people accountable. That's how we know who were' related to and who's related to us." Is Pew one of us--or one of them?

Over a week, Pew is shuttled between various members of the congregation, some of whom are kinder than others, but all of whom are baffled by Pew. They do speak, sometimes, but never much, and only to those who seem a little on the margins of the community themselves. And yet Pew has a way of getting people to open up: a man tells Pew of his despair over his daughter's recent conversion to Christianity; an old woman confesses that her husband once lynched four black men. It's Pew's nullity, the sense they give of a blank space waiting to be filled, that allows people to unburden themselves this way. It seems obvious to me--and bolstered by Lacey's reference to Carson McCullers in the acknowledgements--that Pew is modeled on the character of Singer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a deaf-mute whose silence allows all of the other characters to imagine he is just like them. Lacey takes the character of Singer and turns the dials to eleven, so that the blankness becomes not just appealing but also threatening.

What I admired most about Pew is that it manages to tie together disparate types of prejudice--racism and sexism, principally--in a way that explores the way they function at deep levels. It doesn't seem cheap ("We're all one race--the human race") but it does expose the way our craving for stable identities is, in part, insidious. The novel also offers a critique of the way that the modern church deals with these issues: we're told that Pew has arrived just in time for something called the "Forgiveness Festival," and that any rumors of ritual human sacrifices are just rumors. When the Forgiveness Festival does come, at the book's climax, it's pretty anodyne: people wander around a big room blindfolded, bumping into each other and confessing their most horrible sins. Then they take the blindfolds off and offer each other forgiveness.

I'm a big believer in forgiveness; I think our larger culture actually has no sense of what forgiveness is or how it might be conducted. But Lacey's more targeted critique is spot on: this model of forgiveness does nothing to heal the real divisions between people, or address systems of power, especially in a town we know has a long and deeply rooted history of racist violence. How can a community heal if it literally blinds itself to pain? And yet, we register the irony of what we are willing to see and not see: the people of the town cannot deal with the limitations of perception that Pew presents. The people of Pew demand everything be visible but the way we harm each other; that's something that remains hidden.

Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers

Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, the earth assumes order.  A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small gray honeycomb, complete.  The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of property and bigotry: a dark parallelogram of pine woods, square fields, rectangles of sward.  On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a kind of monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination.  But down below the earth is round.  The earth is finite.  From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation.  The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole.

...The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes.  Even the eyes of the enemy.

I picked up Carson McCullers' novel Clock Without Hands--the only work of narrative fiction I hadn't read of hers--at a used bookstore in Atlanta.  It was a lucky find, I thought; I love reading books set in the places of I'm traveling, and few people capture Georgia and the South in general as well as McCullers.  But McCullers' Georgia, even moreso here than in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is hardly picturesque--it's fetid, corrupt, swamplike.

The novel focuses on four men: J.T. Malone, a small-town pharmacist who learns he has terminal leukemia; Jester Clane, an idealistic teenager; Sherman Pew, an angry black teenager and orphan with blue eyes (paging Toni Morrison) whom Jester falls in love with; and Judge Fox Clane, a genteel old racist who employs Sherman as a servant.  It's the Judge that's really the central character here.  He's an icon of the old Southern guard: vociferously opposed to integration even as he gets on well with Sherman, and his other black servants, on a personal level.  His political ambitions center around a plan to recognize Confederate scrip money, which he just happens to have an enormous stash of in his attic.  He considers himself upright, objective; but we know that he has sent innocent black men to their death, telling himself "he, himself, was only an instrument of the law.  So, no matter how grave the miscarriage was, he could not pine forever."  We also know that he keeps the secret of Sherman's parentage to himself in an act of misguided paternalism.

His bigotry puts him at odds with his grandson, Jester, whose beliefs are newly developed and crude but passionate.  But Jester's nascent liberalism doesn't extend to his own homosexuality, which torments him: "If it turned out he was homosexual like men in the Kinsey Report, Jester had vowed that he would kill himself."  I was surprised, actually, how explicit Jester's sexuality is dealt with here: after meeting Sherman for the first time he races to a brothel, where he loses his virginity to a woman but while thinking about Sherman the whole time.  The relationship between the two young men is a bravura bit of character work: they clearly care deeply about each other, but the difference between their station in life transforms that care into endless petty sniping and one-upsmanship.  Jester tries to get Sherman to admit they are friends, but Sherman is too angry to admit such emotions into his life:

All Sherman's life he had thought that all white men were crazy, and the more prominent their positions the more lunatic their words and behavior.  In this matter, Sherman considered he had the sober ice-cold truth on his side.  The politicians, from governors to congressmen, down to sheriffs and wardens, were alike in their bigotry and violence.  Sherman brooded over every lynching, bombing, or indignity his race had suffered.  In this Sherman had the vulnerability and sensitivity of an adolescent.  Drawn to broodings and atrocities, he felt that every evil was reserved for him personally.  So he lived in a stasis of dread and suspense.  This attitude was supported by facts.

Sherman is a capable servant for the Judge, who lets him have free reign in the house.  But he refuses, when asked, to write letters for the Judge about segregation and the Confederate money.  While the Judge tries to soften the conversation, returning to old tired tropes about "happy peonage" and the faithful slave who stayed with his master after emancipation, it's refreshing to hear Sherman call literal bullshit: "Still, a n----- would rather be a lamppost in Harlem," he tells the Judge, "than the governor of Georgia."  In many ways, Sherman is a kind of substitute son for the Judge, who has lost his own son and is in the process of losing, metaphorically speaking, his grandson, but the Judge's rigid bigotry prevents him from really hearing Sherman.  And in the end their relationship crumbles, and the worst occurs: Sherman moves into a house in the white part of town, in a pique of indignation and--spoiler spoiler spoiler--the Judge leads a band of vigilantes in bombing his house.

It's the pharmacist, J. T. Malone, who draws the assignment, but he refuses.  Close to death, he realizes that the easy racism he has embraced his entire life is morally hazardous, and he doesn't want to endanger his immortal soul.  "What the fuck is an immortal soul?" someone asks, and Malone replies: "I don't know... But if I have one, I don't want to lose it."  Later, Jester, enraged at the loss of his friend, almost murders the eventual perpetrator, a poor white named Sammy Lank, but a flash of empathy even for Sammy, his poverty, his idiocy, makes him reconsider.

I found myself wondering: How is this book, which focuses on white men considering and reconsidering their own racism, different from something like Green Book or Driving Miss Daisy?  I think it's because those movies are meant to make white people feel better, and Clock Without Hands actually wants you to feel very bad.  And it did make me feel bad.  I can't remember the last time a book made me feel something so viscerally.  The racism that seems so violent and intractable in this novel remains so violent and intractable.  Even before Sherman's murder, there's a scene in which Jester, trying to chase down a young black man who has stolen a few dollars from another, causes the man's death at the hands of the police.  And while the narrative just kind of barrels past it, McCullers seems to say, look at the way we just barrel past deaths like these.  It seemed so horribly fresh, sadly current.  (And as an aside, I couldn't read this story without thinking about the plot in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in which Willie loses both his legs because he gets frostbite in jail.)  Though Clock Without Hands ends with the news of federally mandated school integration, it's ultimately pessimistic about our national ability to root out and deal with the rot of racism.

McCullers is better than anyone else at finding the intersection between the political and the universal.  One of the book's big themes is grief: the Judge can't get over the deaths of his wife and son.  Sherman grieves for the mother he has never known, and J. T. experiences a kind of anticipatory grief as he faces his own death:

But now he dwelt on inexplicable deaths.  He thought of children, exact and delicate as jewels in their white satin coffins.  And that pretty singing teacher who swallowed a bone at a fish fry and died within the hour.  And Johnny Clane, and the Milan boys who died during the first world war and the last.  And how many others?  How?  Why?  He was aware of the knocking sound in the basement.  It was a rat--last week a rat had overturned a bottle of asafetida and for days the stench was so terrible that his porter refused to work in the basement.  There was no rhythm in death--only the rhythm of the rat, and the stench of corruption.  And the pretty singing teacher, the blond young flesh of Johnny Clane--the jewel-like children--all ended in the liquefying corpse and coffin stench.

Yikes!  But at the same time McCullers challenges us to interrogate whose deaths exactly we find inexplicable.  We're saddened by the death of children, and the "blond young flesh" of the Judge's son, but who takes time to mourn for Grown Boy, killed by the police, or Sherman, killed by a judge?  Or the many sentence to death by the Judge through entirely legal means?  Death is so very sad, and empathy is so necessary--that's what McCullers says over and over again, in every novel--but it is so easy to extend empathy only to those who look and think like us.  What would radical empathy look like?  How would it transform our communities, ourselves?  Clock Without Hands doesn't really seem to believe that it's possible, as necessary as it is.

The Mortgaged Heart by Carson McCullers

There is a time when everybody wants to run away--no matter how well they get along with their family.  They feel they have to leave because of something they have done, or something they want to do, or maybe they don't know why it is they run away.

There is a story among McCullers' earliest works collected here called "Instant of the Hour After."  It's about a couple who have just had a party, and when all the guests leave, they begin to sharpen their knives at each other.  They're both drunk, and letting the most toxic parts of their relationship hang loose, but being drunk is a sometimes thing for her.  He's a drunk that tonight, like many nights, has drunk to excess.  "Can't a person even think," he says, "without being called obscene or sick or drunk.  No.  No understanding of thought.  Of deep deep thought in blackness.  Of rich morasses.  Morasses.  With their asses."  It's a vivid story, full of telling detail, but it kind of spins in drunk, dizzy circles without progressing.  "I like this the least of anything you have done," writes McCullers' editor Sylvia Chatfield Bates in a note included here.

Compare that to another story, grouped with McCullers' later works, called "Who Has Seen the Wind?"  She presents a similar couple, a little older now, perhaps because McCullers also was when she wrote it.  The drunk husband is now a writer, suffering from an acute sense of writers' block, which is exacerbated by his drinking problem in a way that he refuses to recognize.  The conflict is the same, but suddenly the story is filled with action and agency: he pretends to bang on the typewriter so his wife will think he's working; he drifts to a party where he knows no one and unloads his own anxieties onto an optimistic young writer, he walks through subzero temperatures back home because he doesn't have enough money to call a cab.  By releasing the character from the confines of the bedroom, McCullers turns a closet drama into a piece of convincing realistic fiction.  I was really struck by this comment about writing and war, which reads like a dark inversion of Muriel Spark's assertion that time is never wasted for the artist because all experience is material:

He crossed on D-Day and his battalion went all the way to Schmitz.  In a cellar in a ruined town he saw a cat sniffing the face of a corpse.  He was afraid, but it was not the blank terror of the cafeteria or the anxiety of a white page on the typewriter.  Something was always happening--he found three Westphalian hams in the chimney of a peasant's house and he broke his arm in an automobile accident.  The war was the great experience of his generation, and to a writer every day was automatically of value because it was the war.  But when it was over what was there to write about--the calm cat and the corpse, the lord in England, the broken arm?

"Who Has Seen the Wind?" is the story that "Instant of the Hour After" wanted to be.  It's thrilling, in a way, to see so clearly the progression of an artist.  McCullers' early stories are good, but they're mainly experiments in image and voice, capturing a moment (that titular "instant") rather than telling a story.  And then somehow, through hard work and intuition, facing those same fears about writing as the protagonist of "Wind" (and the same addiction, I'm sad to observe), McCullers became a mature virtuoso of short fiction.  And I enjoyed reading the notes from her editors, who sadly observe that a story she had written was rejected by fifteen different publications.  It all gives an image of the artist's growth that's only possible because The Mortgaged Heart is a collection of unpublished odds and ends.

Among other things, it includes a brief precis of the plot of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which was written for I don't know what reason.  It's fun to see what changes McCullers ended up making--in the outline here the novel is called "The Mute" and there are several ancillary characters who ended up getting cut.  A moment where Mick and Harry try and fail to build a working glider is taken straight from another unpublished story, "Untitled Piece," and though that didn't make it into the novel either, you can see a trace of it in the impotent homemade violin that Mick tries to make.

Other pieces--especially McCullers' essays--are pretty inert and I've already forgotten a lot about them.  "Who Has Seen the Wind?" is the cream of the crop, along with some stories about Christmas, which apparently was a big passion of McCullers'.  In one harrowing story that seems like it might be taken from real life, the narrator listens to a story by her black housekeeper about how her son once set down his baby brother near a hearth on Christmas day and it burned alive because of an errant spark.  The narrator, getting the wrong message from this horrible story, places her new infant sibling down on the hearth hoping to get rid of it.  All ends up well in that story, but it's the kind of grotesque gothic detail that McCullers does so well.  She died so young, at fifty--it's great to see how that skill developed, but hard not to feel that we were robbed of seeing where it could go.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

And the confusing point is this: All useful things have a price, and are bought only with money, as that is the way the world is run. You know without having to reason about it the price of a bale of cotton, or a quart of molasses. But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.

Carson McCullers really only has one subject, I think: unrequited love.  More than anyone, she understands what it means for love to be unrequited--only very rarely are people consciously spurned by the objects of their affection.  Rather, most love goes unspoken, unseen by the person it adores, and often unacknowledged even by the person who possesses it.  Sometimes it's a romantic love, but not always, or even often: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is about the unrequited love of an entire town for the mute John Singer, and The Member of the Wedding is about Frankie's inability to share in the love of her brother and his fiancee.  The homosexual desire of the Captain in Reflections in a Golden Eye is buried so deep that even he doesn't even recognize it.

"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," the central novella of this collection of McCullers' stories, examines unrequited love in its most teen-movie of forms: the love triangle.  Miss Amelia, a bitter and taciturn shop-owner, is suddenly softened by the arrival in town of a hunchbacked dwarf claiming to be her cousin.  Cousin Lymon and Amelia open the title cafe together, which brings a new life to the town that parallels their own heightened feelings for each other.  But when Amelia's ex-husband, an amoral lout named Marvin Macy, returns, she watches helplessly as Cousin Lymon develops a puerile attachment to him.  He lurks around the cafe, causing mild trouble, until Amelia and Marvin Macy finally come to blows--and Cousin Lymon, at the last second, attacks Miss Amelia from behind.  Marvin and Lymon destroy the cafe on their way out of town:

They unlocked the private cabinet of curios and took everything in it.

They broke the mechanical piano.

They carved terrible words on the cafe tables.

They found the watch that opened in the back to show a picture of a waterfall and took that also.

They poured a gallon of sorghum syrup all over the kitchen floor and smashed the jars of preserves.

They went out in the swamp and completely wrecked the still, ruining the big new condenser and the cooler, and setting fire to the shack itself.

They fixed a dish of Miss Amelia's favorite food, grits with sausage, seasoned it with enough poison to kill of the county, and placed this dish temptingly on the cafe counter.

They did everything ruinous they could think of without actually breaking into the office where Miss Amelia stayed the night.  Then they went off together, the two of them.

I especially love the "terrible words" they carved on the tables--McCullers is a virtuoso at adding the telling detail, but she's just as canny about leaving some things out.  I also loved when, in a story called "The Jockey," the diminutive title figure carefully takes out a cigarette and cuts it in half with a penknife so it's his own size.  (McCullers loves weirdos--jockeys, dwarves, etc.)

The other stories are shorter, more experimental.  "Sad Cafe" has so many of McCullers' hallmarks--the small southern town, the physical oddball, etc.--that it might be the work of a particularly good imitator.  The other stories see her treading unfamiliar ground.  There are stories set in Ohio, and in New York City, where McCullers lived most of her adult life, but which seem outside the realm of her interests.  But each of them has the same lyric quality, the same interest in human failures and frailties, and the same vast empathy.

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

'You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness.  In short, it is better, because it is morally honorable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?'

'Why, you put it exactly right,' the Major said.  'Don't you agree with me?'

'No,' said the Captain, after a short pause.  With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself.  For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll-like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form.  The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion.  He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse.

The comparison I reached for immediately while reading Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye is the "four-square house" of The Good Soldier, which comes tumbling down when John Dowell realizes that his wife and best friend have been carrying on an affair for years.  But the "four-square house" of Reflections in a Golden Eye is rotten and termite-ridden to the core: its four pillars--two officers and their wives on a Southern army base during peacetime--already aware of the affair going on among them, and seething with loathing.  McCullers transforms Edwardian reserve and gentility into Southern Gothic, in which things like this happen:

They had been sitting like this late one night when suddenly Mrs. Langdon, who had a high temperature, left the room and ran over to her own house.  The Major did not follow her immediately, as he was comfortably stupefied with whiskey.  Then later Anacleto, the Langdons' Filipino servant, rushed wailing into the room with such a wild-eyed face that they followed him without a word.  They found Mrs. Langdon unconscious and she had cut off the tender nipples of her breasts with the garden shears.

Damn, Mrs. Langdon!  Mrs. Langdon--Alison--is the sensitive and sickly wife of Major Langdon, who is having an affair with the wife of his superior officer, Captain Penderton.  Leonora Penderton (hey--the same name as in The Good Soldier) is oversexed and frustrated by her marriage to the cold, aloof Captain, who seems mostly indifferent to his wife's affair.  Into this volatile group, McCullers adds a fifth--a private named Williams who sneaks into Mrs. Pendleton's room every night to watch her sleep, in the nude.

Williams is something of an enigma--he rarely speaks, and has no friends or close associates.  McCullers depicts him as a "natural," an idiot more at home in the woods than in the order of the barracks.  The Captain obsesses over Williams, whose inscrutability is both threatening and mysterious.  One scholar called Reflections in a Golden Eye one of the great "gay novels," and I admit that I missed the latent homosexuality suggested by the Captain's obsession.  What was clear was the fine line between loving and loathing; the Captain's boiling hatred for Pvt. Williams is closer to real love than anything else in the novel, except perhaps for the relationship between Alison Langdon and her flamboyant servant Anacleto.

McCullers is one of the great novelists of the outsider, the marginalized figure.  Even when she gives us a character with great status and power, like the Captain, she manages to find the deep secret within that puts him at the margins.  She has the same kind of sympathy for Alison Langdon in her sickbed, and even the bitterly objectified and lonely Mrs. Penderton.  The novel's most vivid and realized character, Anacleto, is an outsider twice over: a servant and a foreigner, clinging desperately and slavishly to Mrs. Langdon.  Yet, he professes the kind of bravado and eccentricity that only a marginalized figure can; he's made in the mold of the deaf hedonist Antonapoulos from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  McCullers' contempt, on the other hand, is saved for figures like Major Langdon, whose banality and conformity are far greater crimes than his infidelity.

As a closeted homosexual--if that's the best term for him--the Captain is shoved to the margins even of his own consciousness until that image comes to him, "distorted" and "doll-like."  Private Williams, so far outside the realm of human activity that not even McCullers seems to understand or comprehend him, threatens the teetering social stability of these four even without their knowledge.  It's no surprise when the novel, which hums with barely suppressed menace, erupts finally into grand violence.  McCullers wrote in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter that "violence is the most precious flower of poverty"; but she was too often aware of the many ways, poverty besides, people are forced into invisibility and indignity.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

And as she sickened with this feeling a thought and explanation suddenly came to her, so that she knew and almost said aloud: They are the we of me.  Yesterday, and all the twelve years of her life, she had been only Frankie.  She was an I person who had to walk around and do things by herself.  All other people had a we to claim, all other except her.  When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, her church.  The we of her father was the store.  All members of clubs have a we to belong to and talk about.  The soldiers in the army can say we, and even the criminals on chain-gangs.  But the old Frankie had no we to claim, unless it would be the terrible summer we of her and John Henry and Berenice--and that was the last we in the world she wanted.  Now all this was suddenly over and changed.  There was her brother and the bride, and it was though when first she saw them something she had known inside of her: They are the we of me.

Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding opens by saying, "It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.  This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.  She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world."  Mick Kelly, one of the protagonists of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, claims that "[s]he wasn't a member of any bunch."  Both Frankie and Mick spend their summers wandering around, isolated from other teenagers, hanging out with those much younger than them if they hang out with anyone at all.  They share the same anxieties about maturing, especially the fact that they have endured sudden growth spurts and are now taller than their peers.  Both seem to have a closer relationship with their family's black servants than with their parents.

If I thought about it, there would probably be dozens of other similarities--so many that you might uncharitably say that The Member of the Wedding is a rehash by an author who only has one idea.  But I prefer to think of this short novel as a variation on a theme, a single riff plucked out of the fugue that is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and sent off on a jazz solo.  (In fact, at one point McCullers writes that in Frankie "a jazz sadness quivered her nerves.")

Frankie responds to her isolation and anxiety by developing an obsession with her older brother and his upcoming wedding.  As her caretaker Berenice says, she is "in love with" their wedding, and she makes plans to escape the boredom of her life by running away with the newlyweds after the wedding:

Frankie stood looking into the sky.  For when the old question came to her--the who she was and what she would be in the world, and why she was standing there that minute--when the old question came to her, she did not feel hurt and unanswered.  At last she knew just who she was and understood where she was going.  She loved her brother and the bride and she was a member of the wedding.  The three of them would go into the world and they would always be together.

Just as in Lonely Hunter, McCullers' ability to write from a child's perspective is really uncanny.  Frankie and Mick can be precocious at times, but they never seem like adults disguised in children's clothes.  In Member, McCullers gives Frankie a companion in six-year old John Henry, and their conversations are perfectly attuned, I think, to the way kids talk.  The triangular relationship between Frankie, John Henry, and their caretaker Berenice--one which Frankie is constantly trying to extricate herself from, and then returning to--is the heart of the novel.  I was really struck by these comments by Berenice on her ex-husbands, which serve as a warning to Frankie:

"Why, don't you see what I was doing?" asked Berenice.  "I loved Ludie and he was the first man I ever loved.  Therefore, I had to go and copy myself forever afterward.  What I did was to marry off little pieces of Ludie whenever I come across them.  It was just my misfortune they all turned out to be the wrong pieces... You and that wedding at Winter Hill," Berenice said finally.  "That is what I am warning about.  I can see right through them two gray eyes of yours like they was glass.  And what I see is the saddest piece of foolishness I ever knew."

Later on there's a really fantastic scene where Frankie, yearning to be older, hangs around a taproom until a drunken soldier asks her on a date.  She, however, does not know what drunkenness looks like, and interprets it as eccentricity.  This all leads to a very frightening scene in his hotel room which very nearly becomes a sexual assault; again, perhaps like the scene between Mick Kelly and Harry Minowitz at the lake in Lonely Hunter.  But here the danger and the fear are amplified, and make a stark contrast to the adult world of intimacy and companionship that Frankie thinks she will be able to enter at the wedding.

We know, of course, that Berenice is right; Frankie will never be part of her brother's marriage in the way that she wants to be.  Yet when the moment comes, when we think we are prepared for the final sadness, McCullers finds a way to make the ending even more heartbreaking.  Despite being a third as long, The Member of the Wedding is nearly as moving and sad as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and seems to me like an author honing her most deeply held ideas, rather than an uninspired retread.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

During the moonlit January nights Singer continued to walk about the streets of the town each evening when he was not engaged.  The rumors about him grew bolder.  An old Negro woman told hundreds of people that he knew the ways of the spirits come back from the dead.  A certain piece-worker claimed that he had worked with the mute at another mill somewhere else in the state--and the tales he told were unique.  The rich thought that he was rich and the poor considered him a poor man like themselves.  And as there was no way to disprove these rumors they grew marvelous and very real.  Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.

Why are we lonely?  There are more people in the world now than there have ever been.  If you really wanted to, most of us could meet a hundred people a day only a few miles from our homes, but does any of us suppose that we would find among them any really kindred soul, even if we tried for a hundred years?  The diversity of people is both our wonder and our tragedy; our personalities, our goals, our experiences are too different to really eradicate loneliness.  We want desperately to communicate, to share ourselves, but we talk past each other, wanting to be understood but not seeking to understand.

John Singer, the central character--I wouldn't say protagonist or main character, exactly--of Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is genial and kind, and also a deaf-mute.  He is talked at because he cannot talk back, and in him everyone sees a perfect companion.  He acts as a lightning rod for loneliness, attracting the most isolated souls in his small Georgia town: Biff, a restaurant owner whose wife has recently died; Mick, a young girl who dreams of a career in music; Jake, a manic revolutionary who rails about social injustice.

My favorite, though, is Doctor Copeland, a black doctor obsessed with what he calls his "strong, true purpose," the education and advancement of his race.  Except for Singer, Copeland is the novel's most achingly tragic character:

When he was seventeen years old they had sent him north with eighty dollars hidden in his shoe.  He had worked in a blacksmith's shop and as a waiter and as a bellboy in a hotel.  And all the while he studied and read and went to school.  His father died and his mother did not live long without him.  After ten years of struggle he was a doctor and he knew his mission and he came south again.

He married and made a home.  He went endlessly from house to house and spoke the mission and the truth.  The hopeless suffering of his people made in him a madness, a wild and evil feeling of destruction.  In his heart there was a savage violence, and once he grasped the poker from the hearth and struck down his wife.

Copeland feels acutely the suffering of his people, but he cannot connect with the suffering of individuals, not even his own family.  He cannot understand their religiosity or their refusal to take up the mantle of the "strong, true purpose" at the expense of their own lives.  When his son-in-law loses his legs from being abandoned in a freezing prison cell, he finds that his erudition and understanding have not equipped him to do anything, or even commiserate with his daughter.  He rants to Singer about justice and equality, but like the others he can only figure out how to communicate with himself.

Singer enjoys the company of these people but is baffled when, the four of them coming to visit him at once by sheer chance, they cannot get along together.  For his part, he cares most for his deaf-mute friend Antonapoulos, who has been shipped off to a mental ward.  What the others make of Singer, Singer makes of Antonapoulos, holding him dear even though he is clearly mad:

This was the friend to whom he told all that was in his heart.  This was the Antonapoulos who no one knew was wise but him.  And as the year passed his friend seemed to grow larger in his mind, and his face looked out in a very grave and subtle way from the darkness at night.  The memories of his friend changed in his mind so that he remembered nothing that was wrong or foolish--only the wise and good.

It is also the Antonapoulos who "got drunk and threw a bowl of macaroni in his face."  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter suggests that there is something fundamentally tragic about being human, that we are stuck in a cycle of projecting ourselves onto those around us and despairing to find that those projections are proven false.  Most horrifyingly it suggests that Singer is right when he suggests that Antonapoulos is wise, though not in the way that Singer believes: that true wisdom comes from throwing off the need for human companionship, which inexorably fails, and embracing the primitive joys of feeding, sleeping, and emotion without reason or language.

Would it be easier for the characters of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter if they could step outside of themselves and see the folly of this cycle?  The novel is conspicuously (appropriately?) mute on the subject.  The existence of the novel itself, though not the experience of the characters, suggests that it is possible, but on the other hand it does not alleviate the essential tragedy of watching it happen.