LULA BELLE (Carson McCullers in general)

Name: lynn_bex

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Product:	Carson McCullers in general
Date:	28/07/02 (205 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Though provoking author, Beautifully crafted books, Capable of changing mind-sets

Disadvantages: Deeply unfortunate in her own life

The books of Carson McCullers having been published and re-published as Penguin Classics/Twentieth-Century Classics, we can learn from any fly-leaf [that]:-

“Carson McCullers was born at Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. Always a delicate person, as a young adult she began experiencing strokes, and at the age of thirty-one her entire left side was paralysed. For a while she could only use one finger to type, and for years before her death, as her sister informs us, she could not sit at a desk to work. In 1938 she married James Reeves McCullers, a corporal in the US army. The marriage was not a success and they divorced. They continued to keep in touch and subsequently remarried, separating finally in 1953; he later committed suicide.”

The blurb goes on to list Carson’s works with their background information, but, given that McCullers lived until 1967, I found the standard Penguin précis incredibly sparse and disappointing, so set off to do a little research of my own.

The first port of was my own bookshelf, with its [albeit 1990] Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, by Kenneth McLeish. This is a cross-reference work, purporting to lead from one particular book or author to similar works, on the premise that “one good book leads to another.”

OR NOT, in this instance…

“Reading McCullers is like visiting a freak-show,” says the Good Reading Guide, “her characters are repulsive but fascinating, kin to the more macabre human figures in modern horror videos,” a generalisation so sweeping that it all but took my breath away, leaving me even more determined to seek out the real Carson McCullers…

~~
Lula Carson Smith, later to become Carson McCullers, was born on 19 February 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, USA, the first of three children to be born to Lamar and Marguerite Waters Smith.

An exceptionally bright child, the young Lula was both mus
ically gifted and a prolific writer. She took piano lessons from an early age, dropped her first name soon after, and then announced her ambition to become a concert pianist, whereupon her parents placed her under the tutorage of Mary Tucker, a professional concert musician, who soon confirmed their eldest child’s natural ability.

However, at the age of 15, Carson suffered a serious illness, [later diagnosed as probable rheumatic fever] and this led to the first of a series of debilitating strokes, following which, she decided to become a professional writer, rather than a concert pianist.

That said, upon reading “Wunderkind,” one of McCullers’ earliest works and the first to be published, [this is the tale of a talented but disillusioned teenage pianist and her tutor] it seems possible that the young Carson was actually a born writer who, having been moulded into the persona of a musical protégé, was later, through personal tragedy, able to re-evaluate and resume the original pattern of her life.

This early and particularly glum period notwithstanding, we can learn from Carson’s own words, [taken from an article published in “Mademoiselle,” September 1948, and later reproduced in “The Mortgaged Heart,” a posthumous collection of McCullers’ works edited by her younger sister, Margarita G Smith] that she was, from an early age, “A Writer” - and clearly not without humour…

Carson herself sets the scene of her childhood by describing her old Georgia home, which had two sitting-rooms: a back-one and a front-one, with folding doors between the two which, for her purposes, represented the auditorium and stage…

[Carson says]
“As the eldest child in our family I was the custodian of the cakes, the boss of all our shows… [from hashed-over movies to Shakespeare and…] …shows I made up and sometimes wrote down in my n
ickel Big Chief notebooks. The cast was everlastingly the same – my Younger Brother, Baby Sister and Myself. The cast was the most serious handicap. Baby Sister was in those days a stomachy ten-year-old, who was terrible in death scenes, fainting spells and such like necessary parts. When Baby Sister swooned to a sudden death she would prudently look around beforehand and fall very carefully on a sofa or chair. (Once, I remember, such a death fall broke both legs of one of Mamma’s favourite chairs.)”

The same magazine article goes on to tell how Carson’s sitting-room shows ended when she discovered the books of Eugene O’Neill and later the works of Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy and others. With these influences, she began to write more complex works of her own, which were impractical for performance under the old conditions and were instead shared by means of what Carson called “readings” to her long-suffering parents.

By 1934/35 Carson was strong enough to continue her studies in New York City, an adventure for which she yearned, and it was here that she met her future husband, James Reeves McCullers.

In 1936, “Wunderkind” was published in “Story” magazine but Carson was again suffering from a serious illness; it was during this period and her later convalescence that she began to sketch out the story line of what would later become “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” surely one of the finest works in 20th Century literature.

On 20 September 1937, the former Lula Carson Smith married James Reeves McCullers Junior, and the newlyweds moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Although only 20 years old at the time of her marriage, Carson was already in poor health but she continued to write, producing drafts of what would later become classics including “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” “The Memb
er of the Wedding” and “The Ballad of the Sad Café.”

“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” was published in June 1940, and “Reflections in a Golden Eye” appeared in October and November 1940, when it was initially published in two instalments in “Harper’s Bazaar.”

Having been ill throughout the winter, by February 1941, Carson was very poorly indeed, suffering from impaired vision, partial paralysis and debilitating head pains, before pleurisy and double pneumonia were confirmed. Nonetheless, she continued to write during this period and then, after three-and-a-half years of troubled marriage, issued divorce proceedings against Reeves McCullers.

From 1942 to 1944, whilst soaring to the professional heights that saw her honoured with a number of awards and scholarships, Carson experienced personal “lows” with continuing ill health and personal difficulties culminating in what seems to have been some kind of nervous breakdown. She then lost her father to a fatal heart attack in August 1944.

Despite their earlier differences, Carson and Reeves McCullers had stayed in touch and they remarried in March 1945, though the relationship does not appear to have been any more stable at the second attempt.
~~
There are suggestions that this may have been a somewhat “modern” or “open” [ahem, shall we say “bohemian” ?] marriage – but I don’t think we will investigate this aspect any further…
~~
“The Member of the Wedding” was published to great acclaim in 1946 but the following year Carson suffered two serious strokes and was partially paralysed; despondent, she attempted suicide in March 1948 and was hospitalised. Fortunately, she was by now a well established member of America’s literary elite and had the support of her contemporaries, notably Tennessee Williams. Whilst recuperating wit
h Williams, she revised and adapted “The Member of the Wedding” into a stage play, which opened on Broadway in January 1950, going on to win the New York Drama Critics’ Award for best play of the season.

By 1953 the marriage of Carson and Reeves had run its course and Reeves made an unsuccessful suicide attempt, having first tried to pressurise Carson into to joining him in a double-suicide. Terrified, Carson relocated to France, where Reeves followed, finally killing himself in a Paris hotel in November 1953.

Carson had become close to Tennessee Williams and his circle and travelled with him to Key West in 1955, in order to work on a number of incomplete works, including “Clock Without Hands,” and a musical adaptation of “The Ballad of the Sad Café” but, devastated by the unexpected death of her mother in June of that year she was able to complete little work.

McCullers’ next completed major work was a play, “The Square Root of Wonderful” which opened on Broadway in October 1957 but was not well received and closed after only 45 performances. Carson was deeply depressed by this failure and had difficulty in continuing work on her other manuscripts, turning instead to writing magazine articles, poems and children’s verse.

“Clock Without Hands” was finally completed and published in September 1961 but this was to be McCullers’ last major work.

By 1962 Carson was virtually wheelchair-bound then, in June of that year, was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Later the same year she had major surgery on her left hand, which had been paralysed by one of her strokes.
In November 1964 “Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig,” a collection of children’s verses, was published, but Carson’s health was by now in terminal decline following a fall earlier that year, when she had suffered a broken hip
and smashed elbow.

In 1966 the film script of “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” was completed by the screen writer, Thomas Ryan, who read his work to Carson for her approval. At the same time Carson was working with Mary Rodgers on her adaptation into a musical of “The Member of the Wedding.”

In April 1967, Carson received the 1966 Henry Bellamann Award for her outstanding contribution to literature but on 15 August she suffered one last stroke and a massive brain haemorrhage. She remained in a coma until 29 September 1967, when she died, aged 50, but leaving a tremendous legacy in the form of her literary works.

Carson McCullers is not as widely read as she deserves and perhaps only a minority view her books as “great literature” but I believe that they touch on universal truths. In particular, McCullers looks deep into her characters and investigates the inner loneliness that is, if we are honest, a part of all humankind.

Carson herself explained that she used Frankie, the central character of “The Member of the Wedding” to articulate this universal need to belong, when the 12 year old girl said: “The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a WE except me. Not to belong to a WE makes you lonesome”.

McCullers went on to explain that “Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the WE …” and also stated that in her view, fear is a primary source of evil.

These are recurring themes in her works and, touching upon such universal truths, these novels are quite capable of changing viewpoints, mind-sets and lives.

Oh, what’s that?

Can you hear something?

Sounds like trickling or dripping, do you think?

Oh, now I know what it is… It’s our dooyoo miles dribbling away… (Thanks guys.)



Lynn

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