Photo from OWN via YouTube
February 19, 1917– Carson McCullers:
Next to music, beer was best.
She was an artist who lived hard, died young, and left a stunning legacy.
A few people I know have expressed outrage that Oregon’s Governor was identified by the media as openly bisexual, one even calling for an apology from what is left of our little newspaper, The Oregonian, saying that her sexuality has no bearing on her public service. I disagree. Someday perhaps, no one will care, but it was only a decade ago that such a thing as an openly gay or bisexual public official would have been unthinkable. I think back on how Portland elected an openly gay mayor, Sam Adams, who didn’t brush off the Gay label and he paid a price in our little liberal bubble. An openly bisexual Governor is still newsworthy. Besides, I dig girl-on-girl action.
Carson McCullers camouflaged her love for other women in her fiction, yet gay themes are present in much of her work. The loneliness that her characters face is even more potent due to her own alienation because of her sexuality. She was married twice, to the same gay man, and she was frequently falling in love with both women and men.
McCullers wrestled with her bisexuality throughout her personal and literary life. Her deepest attachments were to her husband, Reeves McCullers, and openly gay composer David Diamond, who was in love with her husband.
McCullers had to deal with complicated and ultimately destructive love triangles. But, who among us has not?
She created fictional worlds peopled with characters engaged in three-way relationships. In her novels: Mick in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1940), Frankie from The Member Of The Wedding (1946), Miss Amelia in The Ballad Of The Sad Café (1951) and Weldon Penderton from Reflections In A Golden Eye (1941), all reflect the McCuller’s sexual conundrums and inability to fit into the social structures of the American South.
She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her mother’s grandfather was a Confederate war hero. Her father was a watchmaker and jeweler of French Huguenot descent. Starting at 10-years-old, she took piano lessons; five years later, her father gave her a typewriter to encourage her story writing.
In 1934, at just 17-years-old, she left home, traveling by steamship to New York City, planning to study piano at The Juilliard School. After falling ill with rheumatic fever, she returned to Georgia to recuperate, and changed her mind about studying music. Returning to NYC she worked odd jobs while pursuing a writing career and attended night classes at Columbia University. In 1936 she published Wunderkind, about a music prodigy’s adolescent insecurity and losses. It first appeared in Story magazine.
In 1935, she met McCullers, a handsome soldier and aspiring writer. There was no question for either of them that they were meant to be together and their tumultuous love affair began. Reeves really knew how to win a girl’s heart; he bought her beer and cigarettes instead of flowers.
They married in 1937 and settled in Charlotte, North Carolina. The happy couple spent every moment together drinking heavily; they would each go through a bottle of cognac each day. Reeves had army duties, but he was home much of the time, yet he wrote nothing. Sick or not, she wrote all the time.
Reeves’ family was shocked that he “allowed” her to wear men’s slacks, shirts, blazers and loafers. Reeves loved her that way.
At 23-years-old, her first book was published to great acclaim, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, a favorite of mine. She was propelled to celebrity status and notoriety for this story about racism in the American South. That first novel is only slightly more legendary than her tumultuous life.
The pair drank and argued so much that Carson filed for divorce. She was often ill, losing some of her vision and suffering stabbing head pains. She was partially paralyzed for the rest of her life. She had pneumonia, pleurisy, and strep. At times, she could barely type, but always kept writing.
McCullers landed a major fellowship grant and began writing
Tennessee Williams:
Carson’s major theme: the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.
In 1944 she suffered a nervous breakdown and a major case of the flu. Though she had divorced Reeves, they were rarely apart. They married again in 1945. He wanted to take care of her.
With Reeves in Venice, 1945, photo from BBC via YouTube
The story then repeats itself: Carson suffered illness and strokes that leave her crippled and paralyzed. She was always writing, but her husband never started writing. They entertained in their home. They drank. He quit drinking and then started again. They both had same-sex liaisons.
After she finally left Reeves for good, McCullers moved back to NYC to live with a gay guy, writer George Davis, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar. In Brooklyn, she joined Davis as members of the art commune ”February House”. She was there from 1940 – 1945, and among the other residents were writers Richard Wright and Christopher Isherwood, composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Benjamin Britten and his boyfriend Peter Pears; poet W. H. Auden, ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee, and writers Paul and Jane Bowles. It was a fevered couple of years, with partying fueled by the appetites of youth and by the shared sense of urgency among the friends. It seems that McCullers slept with Lee and Jane Bowles, but not any of the boys at ”February House”.
Wright had reviewed The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter before he ever met McCullers. In it he said:
…she shows astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern Fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.
After World War II, McCullers lived mostly in Paris where she palled around with Americans Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin, and William S. Burroughs, plus Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Samuel Beckett. Her close friends during those years also included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. After the publication of Capote’s first two novels, McCullers became convinced that certain passages had been plagiarized from her own work. She broke ties with Capote, but he never lost his fondness for McCullers and is the only person to attend both Reeves’ funeral in Paris and McCullers’s funeral in New York several years later.
Tennessee Williams:
Carson’s major theme: the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love.
She put down her pen for the final time, after suffering a brain hemorrhage in 1967. She was just 50-years-old.
Photo via YouTube
McCullers dictated her unfinished autobiography, Illumination And The Night Glare, during her final months. After her death, a collection of essays, poems and stories was released, appropriately titled, The Mortgaged Heart.
She wrote a stage adaptation of The Member Of The Wedding which had a successful run on Broadway in 1950–51. Many know her works largely by their film adaptations. The Ballad Of The Sad Café (1991), Merchant Ivory production, directed by Simon Callow, stars Vanessa Redgrave and Keith Carradine. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter was adapted as a film in 1968, with Alan Arkin in the lead role. Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967) is directed by John Huston and stars Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. In his memoir, An Open Book (1980), Huston writes:
I first met Carson McCullers during the war when I was visiting Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith in upstate New York. Carson lived nearby, and one day when Buzz and I were out for a walk she hailed us from her doorway. She was then in her early 20s and had already suffered the first of a series of strokes. I remember her as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in mine. It wasn’t palsy, rather a quiver of animal timidity. But there was nothing timid or frail about the manner in which Carson McCullers faced life. And as her afflictions multiplied, she only grew stronger.
