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| 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:
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.
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Last updated 19 March 2021
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