Carson McCullers: Three Books

A novel, A Biography, and an Autobiography

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, with a proud family lineage of judges, lawyers, editors, journalists, novelists, and farmers, I am always immediately perked when I learn that a writer is from the South- that sprawling chunk of land that contains multitudes of types of peoples and places, but still- there is a connective tissue named Southern.

I pulled Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter from the cat piss smelling shelves of a tiny used bookstore in a small town, just a short drive from my own. I was in my 20’s and had never heard of McCullers. I was going to read it straight away from the title alone, but when I read that the author was from the South, I was too excited to wait for home to begin reading. I stood like a flamingo, one leg up and crossed with the book open on the knee, an elbow pressing into the wooden shelving, and a hand holding the paperback open. As soon as the story began I knew it was for me.

What I didn’t know what anything about Carson McCullers. This was my favorite part of reading as an audodictat who had a baby at 19 and never any money or time for writing retreats and college classes after I gave up night courses, a few shy of an AA, at 21. I also think it’s the most rewarding way to read any piece of literature on first pass.

In the last ten years I’ve developed a habit of finding and reading an author’s work, and then reading books that have been published about them- memoirs by others who include the author, biographies, biographies of other writers that include the author, etc. For McCullers, I’ve read two companions to her work: Carson McCullers by Mary V. Dearborn, and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland. But first, the beloved The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

When I arrived home with my dusty paperback copy of Carson’s first novel ( I had also grabbed The Lover by Marguerite Duras, another novel I fell hard for. What an absolute dream of a used bookstore trip that was. ) I had read a few chapters between the bookstore and the car ride home- as a passenger. I had the immediate opinion that I was reading a classic, an important book. Her voice! Those sentences! The courage of singularity! The characters! And I love strangeness. I can’t live without it because without strangeness, depth disappears. Even in simple beauty, strangeness abides. The butt of a bee pulsates; the star is dead.

Carson belongs to the lineage of Southern Gothic writers known for characters who are often called freaks and misfits. The Southern landscape and history makes perfect sense as a producer of this type of writer, with the horror of slavery and the insect-hum mythic quality of the air, trees, waterholes and fields. Carson’s characters are humming; they bring with them irrevocably rooted desires and passions that have their say in the end. In Carson’s world- as in most of the actual world- the structure of day to day life will not hold out permanently against the truths of inner life. What is real inside of us will either be expressed or will express itself. If left to push its way out on its own, interior reality often turns into something unwieldy, dangerous, even.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter speaks the story of a few characters in a small, Southern town in the 1930’s, with focus on two people. Singer, who is deaf and mute, is the recipient of many secrets while he carries his own- a never-ending obsessive love of his male roommate, who has gone insane and been institutionalized. Mick is a child, and Carson’s expression of Mick’s experience of the world gobsmacked me. I have never read such a true expression of what it can feel like to be a child. And surely it rang even more so this way for me because like Carson (who loosely based Mick on herself) I was a white child in a Southern town who felt profoundly isolated, sought beauty everywhere, and lived a very intense, interior life. It was the 80’s when I lived in Jackson, and my town was primarily Black and poor. I understood racism as a concept because of my parents teachings, but it was so far from my lived experience that it baffled me well into adulthood. My isolation came from family trauma, not my town. I was the only white girl in a school of Black kids and teachers, and they loved me and I loved them. We were the only white family in our neighborhood, and that never meant anything to me either, other than noticing it as a fact. I was called honky a few times, otherwise, life was life. Carson’s expression of Mick’s interior process as she observes racism in her town resonated with me.

After I finished The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I did what I often have done when I fall that hard for a book- I put it on one of my bookshelves and didn’t read any of her other work. Sometimes I read as many books by an author as I can, but with Carson, I felt that this book was so perfect, nothing else could match it. And imagine how Carson must have felt a year or two after its publication, because most of the world responded this way to this singular book, and the pressure to produce something new and amazing was enormous.

Until I saw the spine for Carson McCullers by Mary Dearborn, a big, fat biography. I grabbed it from my work and began reading that night. It’s very well written and stops each time Carson is working on a piece or has published a book to have a discussion about the book as a piece of literature; one of my favorite parts of literary biographies. After reading the beginning, which was wonderful, I began to slightly dread reading it at night. Carson’s life was so, so, hard. She suffered tremendously, and she was, in Dearborn’s telling, often a complete mess and very difficult for the people who loved her. She suffered physically ( early in life stroke which led to severe, disabling pain and paralysis ) and emotionally ( brutally documented alcoholism, nicotine addiction, insomnia, a young marriage that veered quickly into cheating, divorcing, remarrying, etc, and which fueled both their addictions).

Dearborn often mentions people around Carson who believe she is faking her illness, and it was hard to get a firm grasp on Dearborn’s own leanings about this subject. I got the impression it’s possible she believed Carson was at least exaggerating her physical issues. As someone who has lived my entire adult life with two autoimmune conditions that have severely impacted my physical health and stamina, I felt my gut clenching at these parts. I felt really upset for Carson, for how she had to not only live with such an awful struggle, but then the additional isolation and sadness that must have come from not being fully believed by some.

Carson’s group, including actors, playwrights, writers of course, and family, mostly pretended that her raging alcoholism didn’t exist, even though she was drinking so much on a daily basis that I started to get a little nauseous just reading about it. She woke and drank with breakfast, throughout the day, and then to go to sleep. From this one account of her life, I’d think alcoholism ruined her life. I haven’t read enough points of view on her life to have a certainty. And perhaps it’s unfair to say her life was ruined, although it is my take. With the talent Carson had, the years ahead of her ( THIALH was published when she was 23- plenty has been written about that) and the opportunities that came her way, she could have had so much more, internally and externally, than she did.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Dearborn’s passages about Carson’s love and sex life, either. Not that the biographer is supposed to take a position, but my favorite biographies are where the author either feels completely neutral behind the words or is championing the writer. Dearborn does seem to take an excessively neutral position on the matter despite the many female crushes and affairs that Carson had.

I am sympathetic to Dearborn because Carson’s sexuality and her love life are notoriously mysterious. The times she was living in were not allowing of open queerness, and Carson didn’t leave much written record when it came to identifying or discussion her sexuality. A handful of times Carson directly said she was not a lesbian, but she also seemed confused as to what that term meant, exactly. Her letters to crushes or lovers are typical of others written by women before a certain time, where the line between ‘best friends and I adore you’ and ‘I want to take your breasts into my mouth’ is never said. Still, Dearborn does seem to have gone out of her way to repeatedly add commentary insinuating that it is ambiguous if Carson was queer or not. This baffles me, although even as I write that, I think how hard it must have been as a biographer to know how to present the facts that she had. It’s an enormous thing, to be the speaker for someone else, and perhaps the author wanted to lean in the direction of ambiguity, as Carson did. However, Carson spent her last years alive in a loving relationship with a woman. She gets the last word on her own life, as she lived it.

After this, I finally grabbed My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a book I’ve been meaning to read for a while. The title intrigued me- how can this be an autobiography if it’s about Carson? Is it an imagined autobiography? It turns out it is some of both, as well as a memoir of Shapland’s life from the time she encountered Carson’s estate held in a university through her following stay at Carson’s childhood home in Columbus, Georgia. The home in Georgia was kept as a museum for Carson enthusiasts, though they confusingly let the author take up residency there for a period of weeks. During this time, she reflects on the cache of personal letters that Carson bequeathed to the university, letters which had a deeply personal impact on Shapland, reminding her of her “own letters from my late teens and early twenties [when I was]attempting to articulate a self she had not yet fully become.”

Like Carson, Shapland had not come out publicly as queer, and was still forming her own identity at the time she first read the correspondences. To Shapland, the ambiguity of Carson’s sexuality was clearly a forced construct that Carson experienced largely due to her particular time and her particular childhood. When Carson was asked by her boyfriend, Reeves, (later her husband) if she was a lesbian, she responded first with no, and then offered that she had ‘intense feelings’ for women. Shapland writes, ““A woman does not know she is a lesbian … because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian.”

Shapland is critical of the biographies she has read of Carson (without naming them) and writes, “all of her profound emotional relationships with women are either dismissed or ridiculed.” In her own biography of Carson, Mary Dearborn does not ridicule Carson’s relationships, but there is a repeated element of raised eyebrow, as well as dismissal. For example, Dearborn frequently mentions that others viewed Carson as love-hungry, obsessively codependent, and liable to fall in love with older women and claim a relationship of some kind when, it is suggested, the other woman does not reciprocate. It is the choosing of what information, what quotes, and what facts to highlight and repeat that can give the reader an idea of not only the biographical subject’s lived experience, but the author’s perspective on what those facts mean.

Reading along as Shapland corresponds Carson’s romantic and sexual life with her own, I thought repeatedly about the power of narrative. It is life-changing for Shapland to read Carson’s letters and books, giving her a greater understanding of herself. In sharing that process with the reader, she spotlights the ways that we can fiercely associate with and almost claim ownership over writers and their work. At some points, Shapland addresses this dynamic, writing how different people have different versions of Carson that they understand, and how “my Carson” feels like THE Carson to her. Reading all of these books gave me the exact opposite experience, where I felt profoundly how far the distance is from a person’s lived experience and our understanding of it is. I don’t “have” a Carson, but I have an idea of her, and I accept that. What is most important to me is that I have Carson’s book, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and that- as a reader- I claim.