Poet of the Month 052: CARSON McCULLERS

CARSON McCULLERS 
 c 1952

 

 

 

WHEN WE ARE LOST

 

When we are lost what image tells?
Nothing resembles nothing.  Yet nothing
Is not blank.  It is configured Hell:
Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,
Demanding furniture.  All unrelated
And with air between.

 

The terror.  Is it of Space, of Time?
Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?
To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized.  While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

 

 

December 1952

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lula Carson Smith was born on 19 February 1917 in the town of Columbus in western Georgia, the eldest child of Lamar Smith, a local jeweler, and his wife Vera Marguerite 'Bebe' Smith (née Waters).  Her brother Lamar Smith Jr followed her into the world in 1919 and was himself followed, in 1922, by her sister Margarita Gachet Smith.

 

McCullers, who dropped the 'Lula' from her name when she was thirteen, originally dreamed of becoming a concert pianist.  This ambition changed, however, when she contracted rheumatic fever in 1932 –– an event which persuaded her, along with the voracious reading she had done since early childhood, that she ought to become a writer. 

 

In September 1934 she left Georgia for New York City where she enrolled in writing courses at Columbia University, supporting herself by working odd jobs after losing the money she was given by her family in what would remain, until the end of her life, unexplained circumstances.  She returned to Columbia in 1935 to continue her studies and was followed there by a young soldier named Reeves McCullers Jr whom she had met in Georgia through a mutual friend the previous summer.  It was Reeves, now out of the army and studying at Columbia himself, who took her home to her family when she once again became seriously ill in November 1935.  Forced to spend weeks in bed recuperating, she began the story, at that time titled The Mute, that would eventually become her first novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  

 

McCullers married Reeves in September 1937 and moved with him to North Carolina shortly after the ceremony where she continued to work on The Mute, eventually submitting an outline of the novel to a fiction contest run by Boston-based publishers Houghton Mifflin.  Her outline won her the contest's second prize of $500 and automatic acceptance of the book upon completion.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published on 4 June 1940, making the twenty-three year old McCullers an overnight critical and commercial success, as popular with the notoriously hard to impress New York critics as she was (and continues to be) with readers all around the world.  By this time, however, she was separated from her husband, with whom she would continue to have a difficult on-again, off-again relationship until his death, by suicide, on 18 November 1953 in a Paris hotel room.  (They had divorced in 1941, only to remarry in 1945 in what proved to be a disastrous move for both of them.)

 

Although McCuller's second novel Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), a story about obsessional love set on a military base, did not repeat the runaway success of her first novel her reputation was assured with the 1943 publication of the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café in the widely read fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar.  The story was reprinted in Best American Short Stories of 1944, a boost for her confidence which encouraged her to complete The Member of the Wedding, the novel many critics now believe to be her masterpiece. This book was published, again by Houghton Mifflin, to largely favorable reviews on 19 March 1946 and McCullers went on to successfully adapt it for the stage, with the dramatized version, starring Julie Harris, black jazz singer Ethel Waters and newly discovered child actor Brandon de Wilde, opening on Broadway on 5 January 1950 and running for 501 performances.  The cast repeated their roles in the 1952 film version directed by Fred Zinnemann, with the 27 year old Julie Harris earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her moving and convincing portrayal of the story's 12 year old protagonist Frankie Addams.

 

McCullers published what would be her final novel, Clock Without Hands, in 1960.  It was preceded by another play titled The Square Root of Wonderful, based in large part on her doomed marriage to Reeves, which premiered on 30 October 1957 and closed, to her great disappointment, after only 45 performances.  The fact that she was able to complete these works was nothing short of a miracle, given the atrocious state of her health which had been in gradual decline since the late 1930s and saw her suffer a stroke in 1947 that affected her ability to read and left her with a paralyzed left arm.  Now considered to be one of North America's greatest and most compassionate writers, she died on 29 September 1967 in Nyack, New York after suffering another brain hemorrhage that left her comatose for 47 days. 

 

Unlike many novelists, who often begin their careers as poets, McCullers did not start writing poetry until she was well into her thirties.  Nor was much of her work in this medium ever published during her lifetime.  As her sister Margarita explained in her notes for The Mortgaged Heart, a posthumous collection of her uncollected work that appeared in 1972, much of her poetry was left unfinished in 'handwritten manuscripts that are unclear.'  She did, however, give a few public readings of her poems over the years and also managed to record some of them for MGM Records prior to her death.  'I remember best one evening,' her sister wrote, 'at a university lecture.  After she had recited "Stone Is Not Stone" in her gentle Southern voice, there was a long silence.  Then suddenly a young student stood up and said, "Mrs McCullers, I love you".'

 

 

 

Use the link below read more about the life and work of North American novelist, playwright, essayist and poet CARSON McCULLERS:

 

 

 

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/carson-mccullers-1917-1967

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use these links to watch a 1956 interview with CARSON McCULLERS and view a news story about Lover Beloved: An Evening with Carson McCullers, a musical play based on her life and work conceived and performed by singer/songwriter SUZANNE VEGA.

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDY_NPbkRs

 


 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfdFQ5qVimc

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 040: HELENE MULLINS

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 035: EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY

 

 

 
Poet of the Month 025: JOSEPHINE MILES

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 19 March 2021

 

The Women in Black (1993) by MADELEINE ST JOHN [Re-Post]

The Text Publishing Company, 2012

 

 

 

'I don't suppose you mean to make a career in the retail trade?' said Miss Cartright.

    'Oh, no!' cried Lisa.
    Miss Cartright laughed. 
  'It's quite all right, Lisa.  It doesn't suit everybody.  But as long as you are working here, you will be expected to work hard, and as if it were your permanent job.  Do you understand that?'
  'Oh, of course,' said Lisa, desperately.  'Of course; I do understand.  I'll work very hard.'
   And Miss Cartright, thinking it might be rather quaint to see the girl in such a context, decided to put her in Ladies' Cocktail, where she could give a hand to Magda in Model Gowns now and then because, although she looked so childish, she was evidently bright as well as willing, and might be quite useful, all things considered.

 

 

The Novel:  Shy, seventeen year old Lesley Miles has just finished her Leaving Certificate (the 1960s equivalent to today's SAT exam, Baccalauréat, GSCE A-Level or HSC, depending which part of the world you happen to call home).  Needing a job to keep her busy over the Christmas holidays and earn her a little extra cash while she awaits her exam results, she applies for a position as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Sydney's famous FG Goode Department Store ('Serving the People of Sydney since 1895').  Although she is unaware of it when she arrives for her interview –– where she daringly decides to write her name as 'Lisa' on the application form, replacing the long detested 'Lesley' she was christened by her mother –– the relatively short amount of time she will spend working behind the counter at Goode's will prove to be transformative for her and for her fellow 'women in black' in many pleasantly surprising but as yet unsuspected ways. 

 

She is sent, by the indomitable Miss Cartright, to work in the Ladies Cocktail department on the store's second floor, where she ably assists Miss Fay Baines, Mrs Patty Williams and Miss Jacobs –– its alterations specialist who has worked at Goode's 'since before the War' –– in their efforts to fit and clothe the bustling female hordes who descend upon them each sale time like swarms of bargain-hunting locusts.  Thanks to the whimsicality of Miss Cartright, Lisa is also called upon to occasionally assist the exotic and formidable Magda –– a newly-arrived immigrant with an unpronounceable Slovenian surname who also speaks fluent French –– otherwise known as the 'guardian of the rose pink cave of Model Gowns.'  Only the city's richest, most fashion-conscious (and silliest) women can afford to shop in Model Gowns, where they are sold one-off haute couture creations –– suitable for any cocktail party or similarly well-to-do social occasion –– by this enigmatic, ever-tactful and perpetually unflappable 'Continental' salesperson.    

 

Magda is unlike anybody the quiet and bookish Lisa has ever encountered before.  She speaks differently (because she is 'a New Australian'), dresses differently –– she is permitted to wear her own clothes to work, as long as they are black, rather than being forced to wear the unflattering black frock the store provides –– and discusses novels like Anna Karenina and French clothing designers with her as though she considers the newcomer her social, cultural and intellectual equal.  Magda more or less adopts Lisa during her time at Goode's, encouraging her in her ambition to become a poet (or an actress, Lisa has not yet quite decided which it will be) and inviting her to boisterous, fun-filled parties held at her tiny Cremorne flat.  In addition to sampling her first glass of wine and first slice of salami at one of these parties, Lisa is also introduced to Magda's husband Stefan and their livewire friend Rudi, newly arrived from Hungary via Melbourne, and to a clever boy her own age named Michael.  

 

But Magda does not confine herself to broadening the horizons of this yet-to-blossom school leaver.  She also invites Fay Baines –– twenty-nine years old, unmarried, a former would-be showgirl who has an unfortunate habit of falling in love with the wrong sort of men –– to her New Year's Eve party, introducing her to Rudi as per his request that Magda should find him 'a nice healthy Australian girl to marry.'  Even the unhappy home life of Patty Williams, childless and married to the taciturn and uninspired Frank, takes a turn for the better after Frank leaves her, only to return a fortnight later to discover that he no longer calls the shots in their new, sexually exciting marriage.  Only Miss Jacobs –– stolid, uncomplaining, solitary –– fails to be drawn into the spell that Magda's refreshing forthrightness appears to have cast over the lives of her delighted but somewhat flummoxed co-workers.  

 

But the spell, like all such spells, is quickly broken.  Lisa receives her Leaving results, which are excellent and promise a bright future for her at Sydney University if only she and her mother can persuade her stick-in-the-mud father to let her attend this hotbed of libertine sinfulness.  Happily they do, meaning, less happily, that Lisa must give up her job at Goode's.  Meanwhile, Fay becomes engaged to Rudi ('the nicest man I've ever met' is how she describes him to a disbelieving friend) and Patty, childless and miserable about it for so long, learns that she is finally pregnant.  Only Magda is left, biding her time in Model Gowns until she and the ever-charming Stefan can save enough money to allow her to open a shop of her own in swanky Double Bay.  

 

 

André Deutsch Ltd UK, 1993

 

 

The Women in Black is a slim little gem of a novel, a charming modern update of the Cinderella story that manages to be witty and positive while never losing its ironic edge or becoming crassly sentimental.  It captures the time and place in which it is set –– a quieter, far less pretentious Sydney doing its best to survive the Christmas/New Year 'retail rush' of 1960 and 1961 –– in a way that is wistful, engaging and at the same time elegantly satirical.  For anybody who grew up in Sydney in the 1960s (or even the 1970s or the 1980s) it will bring back fond memories of a time when the city's department stores seemed like treasure-laden palaces and the act of shopping itself was a perplexing, wearying but generally far more pleasurable experience than it often is today.  The world of FG Goode's Department Store –– based on the still-existing David Jones' Department Store that has been a beloved city institution since 1838 –– is a vanished world but no less appealing or intriguing for having been relegated so irretrievably to the past.  The Women in Black recreates a time when life was not necessarily better or easier but was certainly a lot simpler and, it might be ventured, a bit more fun for a variety of reasons. 

 

MADELEINE ST JOHN, c 1993

 

 

 

The Writer:  Madeleine St John was born in Sydney on 12 November 1941 but spent most of her adult life in London, the city in which three of her four published novels are set.  'I was brought up,' she once told a friend, 'on the idea that England was where I came from, in a deep sense where I belonged.  Australia was a deviation of one's essence.'  England, she added, '…was everything one had hoped for and continues to be so.'

 

St John (which she pronounced 'sin-jin' all her life in the supposedly 'true' English style) grew up in the genteel northern Sydney suburb of Castlecrag.  Her father Edward St John was a Queen's Councillor and a well-known Liberal politician who was considered something of a renegade by his party for speaking out against apartheid and in favour of other radical ideas like nuclear disarmament.  (He also gained attention for exposing the somewhat convoluted sex life of John Gorton, Australia's nineteenth Prime Minister).  Her mother Sylvette, born in Paris, was of Romanian-Jewish descent and unfortunately took her own life when Madeleine, who adored her, was twelve.  This event, she later confessed, 'obviously changed everything.'  Her father remarried and St John would live in what her half brother would call 'self-imposed exile' from him and his 'new' family for the remainder of her life.  She rarely discussed her family and only then, according to friends like Bruce Beresford, to draw attention to their alleged (but never conclusively proven) ill treatment of her.

 

After becoming a boarder at St Catherine's School in Waverley with her younger sister Collette –– an experience she likened to attending Lowood, the grim educational institution featured in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre –– she went on to obtain a Master's Degree in English at Sydney University, where her friends and fellow students included Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, Robert Hughes, Bruce Beresford (who has just directed what was, for more than twenty years, his unproduced screen adaptation of The Women in Black retitled Ladies in Black) and the future maestro of Australian Shakespearean actors, the great John Bell.  She graduated in 1963 and almost immediately married a fellow student named Chris Tillam, moving first to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco with him so they could be together while he studied filmmaking.

 

In 1968 St John relocated to London, fully expecting that her husband would join her there once his studies were complete.  Tillam chose not to do this, so she lived a semi-bohemian existence in flats shared with a succession of her fellow Australian emigrés before finding a permanent home in what was, at that time, the seedy and somewhat down-at-heel suburb of Notting Hill.  During this period, while supporting herself as a bookseller, a clerk and sometimes as a secretary, she became a follower of an Indian mystic named Swami Jr, wore Indian clothes and, for a time, called herself by an Indian name.  But this flirtation with Eastern mysticism proved, in the end, to be a passing fad.  A devoted churchgoer all her life, St John soon began attending services again each Sunday as she had done, very unfashionably, throughout her university days. 

   

 

The Text Publishing Company, 2009

 

 

Firmly settled in London, St John spent eight years attempting to write a biography of Madame Blavatsky, the Russian-born co-founder of the spiritual system known as 'Theosophy,' before permanently abandoning the project some time in the early 1990s.  She wrote her first novel, The Women in Black, in six months –– she claimed that none of it was autobiographical, modestly explaining that she lacked the ability to 'pull off' such a feat –– and it was published by the UK firm of André Deutsch in 1993.  Three more novels –– A Pure Clear Light (1996), The Essence of The Thing (1997) and Stairway to Paradise (1999) –– followed, the last of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, making her the first Australian female author to be nominated for the award and a bugbear for certain members of the British literary establishment who took offence at her honest outsider's depiction of English mores and manners.  Her own reaction to the nomination was anything but self-aggrandizing.  'There are squillions of books out there,' she told a reporter.  'Who knows what the best six are?  It's not about me being brilliant.  It's about me being lucky… We won't know for a hundred years the truth about whether it's any good.  It's one of the things about literature; you just can't tell until you're dead.'

 

A heavy smoker all her life –– her tin of Virginia Gold tobacco remained within arm's reach on her night table right until the end –– Madeleine St John died of emphysema, in her beloved London, on 18 June 2006.  In addition to four well-regarded novels, she also left behind her Notting Hill flat, a few dozen assorted paperbacks, one hundred handwritten pages of an uncompleted manuscript and a will stipulating that none of her work should ever be translated into any foreign language.  She remained a mysterious, somewhat elusive figure even to her closest friends, a writer who seemed to value her privacy to the point of making a recluse of herself in order to protect it.    

 

 

 

Print and digital copies of The Women in Black and other novels by MADELEINE ST JOHN can be ordered directly from the Text Publishing website.

 

 

 

 

Another review of The Women in Black can be read on the blog The Resident Judge of Port Phillip. 

 

 

The long awaited BRUCE BERESFORD film adaptation of The Women in Black, retitled Ladies in Black, premiered in Sydney on 20 September 2018 and is currently on general release in Australia and many other parts of the world.  It stars ANGOURIE RICE as Lisa, JULIA ORMOND as Magda, RACHAEL TAYLOR as Fay Baines, NONI HAZELHURST as Miss Cartright, VINCENT PEREZ as Stefan, RYAN CORR as Rudi and ALISON McGIRR as Patty Williams.

 

   

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 

The Watch Tower (1966) by ELIZABETH HARROWER

 

 

 

A Private Man (2004) by MALCOLM KNOX

 

 

 

The Commandant (1975) by JESSICA ANDERSON

 

Originally posted 3 October 2013 

 

 

 
Last updated 16 March 2021 

 

 

The Write Advice 115: EL DOCTOROW

It’s not calculated at all.  It never has been.  One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing.  To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing… The inventions of the book come as discoveries.  At a certain point, of course, you figure out what your premises are and what you’re doing.  But certainly, with the beginnings of the work, you really don’t know what’s going to happen…  
  It’s not a terribly rational way to work.  It’s hard to explain.  I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people.  I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

The Art of Fiction #94 [The Paris Review #101, Winter 1986]


 

Use the link below to read a 2015 article about North American novelist EL DOCTOROW (1931–2015):

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/23/el-doctorow-great-american-novelist

 

 

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