Southern Gothic Writer: Carson McCullers
The Life of Lula Carson Smith
“The writer is by nature a dreamer—a conscious dreamer.” —Carson McCullers
Born February 19, 1917, Lula Carson Smith was the daughter of Lamar Smith and Vera Marguerite Waters. Described as "an unremarkable student," she preferred the solitary study of the piano—beginning formal piano study at age ten. However, Carson had to give up her dream of being a pianist after a rheumatic fever left her without the stamina for the demands of a concert career and even practice. While recuperating from the illness, she began reading immensely and considered writing as a pursuit. In 1934, at age seventeen, Carson went to New York City, seemingly to study piano at Juilliard, but actually to pursue her "secret ambition" to write. She worked various jobs to support herself and studied creative writing at different universities. However, in the fall of 1936, she was bedridden for several months due to a respiratory infection. During this time, Carson began work on her first novel; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. She also had her first short story, "Wunderkind," published in an of Story magazine.
In September 1937, she married James Reeves McCullers Jr., but from the beginning, the marriage was troubled by alcoholism and sexual ambivalence. They moved to New York in 1940 when The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, divorced in 1941–only to reconcile and remarry in 1945.
During the separation from Reeves in 1941, they temporarily reconciled; but both soon fell in love with the American composer David Diamond. This complicated love triangle led to another separation and influenced her next novel, The Ballad of the Sad Café as well as The Member of the Wedding. During this second separation, Carson fell in love with many women and pursued them with "great determination." Her most documented and extended love obsession, though, was with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, to whom Carson dedicated her novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye.
In 1945, Carson and Reeves remarried, but three years in, while severely depressed, she attempted suicide. Later, in 1953, Reeves tried to persuade her to commit suicide with him, but she ran away, and Reeves killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Drawing upon this traumatic experience, she wrote her play, The Square Root of Wonderful, in 1957.
During the final fifteen years of her life, Carson experienced a decline in not only her health but in her creative abilities. She was bedridden by paralysis due to a series of debilitating strokes.
At the time of her death, Carson was working on an autobiography "Illumination and Night Glare." On August 15, 1967, Carson McCullers suffered her final cerebral stroke, was in a coma for forty-six days, and died at age fifty in the Nyack Hospital—buried in Nyacks Oak Hill Cemetery on the banks of the Hudson River.
The Career of Carson McCullers
Carson's first published story was described as "a thinly disguised autobiographical piece" called Wunderkind. Telling the story of a fifteen-year-old girl who realizes she is not the musical prodigy her parents told her she was. She quits music and loses the affection of her parents and friends. Her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published in 1940, when Carson was only 23. It was a "desperately sad story" about a deaf mute who cares for a mentally impaired deaf-mute. The novel explores the inability of the characters are capable of giving the love and understanding others need. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was a best-seller and instantly established McCullers on the American literary scene.
Her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, "shattered expectations" regarding its unconventional subject matter. It was written as Carson's marriage fell apart; she took a female lover, and her husband took a male lover. The novel is about the relationships among Captain Penderton, Major Langdon, the two wives; a homosexual houseboy, Anacleto; and Private Williams. The novel is "full of perverse scenes" and ends with a murder. Most critics, however, found the characters grotesque and unsympathetic.
That same year she completed her long novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café. Written in the guise of a folk tale with a nameless narrator—the story of a female giant who is in love with a hunchback. The giant's husband returns from prison and starts a relationship with the hunchback. The story ends in a brawl between the married couple and the destruction of the café. Many critics considered the story McCuller's finest work. Tennessee Williams himself said it was "among the masterpieces of the language."
In 1946, her novel, The Member of the Wedding, was published. Carson had been working on the story off and on since 1940. It concerns an awkward, lonely adolescent girl who tries to become a member of her brother's wedding party to overcome her isolation. The Member of the Wedding is "a sympathetic portrayal of adolescent misery." It won a great reception from critics and the public and was even adapted for the stage and eventually film.
Carson's difficulties, declining health, and grief--were said to have greatly diminished her literary output. In 1953, she wrote a television play, The Invisible Wall, for CBS. She also wrote her second and last stage play, The Square Root of Wonderful--which was a failure--in 1958. Her final novel was published in 1961–-Clock Without Hands—which returned to the themes Carson first raised in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Clock Without Hands is the sort of a bigoted Southern patriarch, Judge Clane, who is raising his orphaned grandson. The judge, who still believes in the principles of the old confederacy, wants to send his grandson to military school, but the grandson is more interested in music and flying.
In 1964, her second and last television screenplay, The Sojourner, aired on NBC. That year, her book of poems for children, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig, was also published. After Carson died in 1967, several of her additional works were published posthumously. The Mortgaged Heart: The Previously Uncollected Writings of Carson McCullers came out in 1971. Another children's book, Sucker, was published in 1986, and another volume of short stories, Collected Stories, was published in 1987.
Reflections of a Golden Eye
Carson McCuller's second novel—Reflections in a Golden Eye—is set at an American Southern army base during the 1930s and portrays the lives of six interconnected people who are "alienated from themselves and the world in different ways." Reflections in a Golden Eye is one of the few works of American literature published in the first half of the 20th century that presents themes of homosexual desire.
Carson wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye, in a short time, "for fun," she said. The idea for the story originated when she first went to Fort Benning as an adolescent. She also drew on her experience of where she and Reeves lived for a while in Fayetteville.
The story, understandably, caused considerable shock in conservative southern communities, as Americans were generally unprepared for a "fictional treatment of homosexuality." The novel is generally about sex and its "various distortions" as it also involves sadomasochism, voyeurism, and intimate relations with horses.
The twists and turns of what can only be described as a "love hexagon" of sorts include Captain Penderton, who is impotent with his wife Leonora but drawn to her lover Major Langdon. Major Langdon's wife, Alison, is sickly and aware of the affairs her husband takes part in. Mrs. Langdon is also in a relationship with the Filipino houseboy, Anacleto. The other character is Private Williams, who has an "affinity" for nature and is the only one who can tame Leonora's stallion. Captain Penderton hates Private Williams but harbors a secret desire for him that even he is unaware of. After seeing Leonora naked through a window, Private Williams becomes obsessed with her and eventually creeps into her room at night to watch her sleep.
As the affairs and creeping continue, it eventually concludes when Alison Langdon, thinking she saw her husband in Leonora's room, catches Private Langdon there instead and tells Captain Penderton. When Penderton discovers Williams in his wife's bedroom, he shoots him without words said.
Throughout the story, it is inferred that the silent Private Williams" enacts a psychodrama that repeats, in different terms, the sexual impotence of Penderton." And when Penderton shoots the Private upon catching him in his wife's room, there is a sense that Penderton is killing his impotent shadow self.
Even though Reflections in a Golden Eye involves murder, voyeurism, sadism, self-mutilation, and repressed gay desire, it examines the topics at hand through a filter of what can only be described as commonplace or ordinary and every day.
Carson McCullers in Closing
“I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen.”
—Carson McCullers
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