Overview
"Writing is my occupation," Carson McCullers often said. "I must do it. I have done it for so long." The beloved author of such classics as THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, and REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, McCullers began writing her first best-selling novel at the age of twenty. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with stories and language—and of the creation of a body of work that continues to draw new generations of readers.
In CARSON MCCULLERS: A LIFE, Josyane Savigneau gives us at last a truly popular biography of one of America's greatest women novelists. Carson McCullers's life story rivals the plot of any of her novels. A brilliant, sensitive artist who had a painful small-town childhood in the South and early international success, she was crippled by a mysterious disease in early adulthood. A woman who composed the most romantic of letters, she struggled to find lasting happiness with her husband, Reeves, whom she married twice. Carson wrote often of the loneliness of the human condiiton, and yet she surrounded herself with a constellation of witty, always entertaining celebrities: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, John Huston, and Edward Albee, among others.
The first biographer to have the full cooperation of the McCullers esate, Josyane Savigneau has uncovered the private Carson McCullers, a woman who never really grew up yet was always seductive, a woman whose candor and immense emotional needs sometimes overshadowed her great charm, generosity, loyalty, humor, and deep intelligence. Above all, Carson was a life force, a person who needed to write and who did so despite great physical pain, up until the very end. Published to rave reviews in France, this passionate biography is one that "must [be] read . . . to measure the full extent of McCullers's torment and her determination to overcome her suffering" (L'EXPRESS).
Editorials
LEAFING THROUGH the new biography by Josyane Savigneau, the reader is apt to murmur incredulously, "You call this a life?" In many ways Carson McCullers, born Lula Carson Smith of deadly dull Columbia, Georgia, resembled Frankie, the gangly tomboy heroine of one of her best-known works, The Member of the Wedding. McCullers, too, dressed like a boy in baggy shorts and sneakers, at a time (she was born in 1917) when it was regarded as eccentric and unseemly to do so. She had a child's directness and a childish egotism; and a childlike fear of sleeping alone. She fell prey to schoolgirl crushes, including an infatuation with Greta Garbo.
McCullers had a woefully adult combination of bad habits, poor judgment and rotten luck. From her late teens onward she drank heavily, only to drink more after she met the handsome, brave and sadly untalented Reeves McCullers. They got along best when he was serving overseas during World War II. Otherwise, their life together was a perpetual brouhaha of binges, bad behavior and abortive fresh starts, as they married, divorced and married again.
But as if illustrating the dictum that a writer is someone who writes, McCullers never stopped working. In 1940, at the age of twenty-three, she completed her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. It was an enormous and instant success. In a matter of weeks, McCullers went from being a rural nobody to a celebrity recognized on the streets of New York. She was photographed by Henri Cartier Bresson; lived in an artistic cooperative whose members included W.H. Auden, the composer Benjamin Britain and Gypsy Rose Lee; and became fast friends with Tennessee Williams. Much later inlife, when her novel Reflections in a Golden Eye was adapted as a film starring Marlon Brando and her works had been translated into several languages, she would host the oddest of celebrity lunches, introducing the Danish master of the short story Isak Dinesen to Marilyn Monroe.
But such moments were hard won. After bouts of pneumonia and tuberculosis, McCullers suffered a series of undiagnosed strokes in her early thirties that left her crippled and without the use of her left hand. Reeves, who never managed to establish a career of any kind, eventually succumbed to alcoholism and committed suicide. McCullers died at the age of fifty, having lived for most of two decades with constant pain and her own battles with addiction.
This is a life of such gaiety and sorrow, ambition and modesty, stupid excess and brilliant discipline that it requires more skill and judgment than are displayed in this biography to get the proportions right. Savigneau defends McCullers so fiercely, and in many cases so unnecessarily, that she appears less authoritative than puppyish in her enthusiasm. She alludes to Arthur Miller, who knew McCullers. "Moving, yes," he wrote succinctly, "but a minor author. And broken by illness at such a young age."
Because Savigneau's own response to McCullers is ardent and proprietary, she chooses to interpret these entirely fair remarks not as scrupulous but envious. Mentioning McCullers' international reputation, she fumes, "Could that be what annoys some of the people who knew and outlived her, causing them to minimize her writing, her status, her very existence?"
Approvingly, she quotes McCullers' French editor Andre Bay. "Obviously if you use the entire history of American literature as a yardstick..." Bay begins (without explaining why one shouldn't), "you could conclude that Carson McCullers' four novels and corpus of short stories make her not much of a writer. But there are grand accidents. And they are essential. They are also what give meaning to literature. Carson McCullers is one of the finest of those accidents." What Bay means by this is anyone's guess. Why should McCullers' work or talent be regarded as more accidental, say, than Flannery O'Connor's or Dostoevsky's or, for that matter, Arthur Miller's? And why should accidents be what gives meaning to literature? Savigneau explains none of this nonsense. She merely plows onward, doing quixotic battle with imaginary "naysayers" who, she posits without evidence, may be irritated to discover that the adolescent spirit of McCullers' work is what has kept it fresh.
The glorification of McCullers' girlishness—the title of the original French edition was Carson McCullers: A Heart of a Young Girl, so the translator has indeed spared us something—is merely one tiresome aspect of Savigneau's work. After excoriating American biographers for their "appearance of neutrality," achieved by the "piling up of details, particulars and testimonials as if all are of equal importance," she veers off in the opposite direction, of vague, unsupported assertion. She raises, for example, the issue of the "monstrousness" of McCullers' mother, but never gives us the details that would substantiate such a charge or render it groundless.
The nuances of character are lost on Savigneau, which means that she can never sharply draw any of the individuals who figure here. We see McCullers as if by accident (not, alas, the accident Bay was talking about) when Savigneau quotes a line that suddenly brings the novelist sharply to life: "Obscurity is the privilege of all young things." The sly, tender humor of such a line is something utterly characteristic of McCullers, and utterly unnoticed by Savigneau.
—Penelope Mesic