Books: Little Precious

THE LONELY HUNTER

by VIRGINIA SPENCER CARR 600 pages. Doubleday. $12.50.

Her eyes were black and fierce below the camouflage of little-girl bangs. They seemed curiously separate—not quite a matching pair. By the age of 13 she had reached a height of 5 ft. 8½ in., and lest the home-town folks of Columbus, Ga., think she was one of them, Lula Carson (as she was baptized) wore knee socks and tennis shoes while the other Southern teenie-belles were wearing heels. The opening lines of Carson McCullers’ most famous work, The Member of the Wedding, can be read as her epitaph: “She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.”

Alas, Virginia Spencer Carr is capable of ungainly paraphrase: “Carson quivered inside and yearned for acceptance.” An associate professor of English at Columbus College in McCullers’ birthplace, she spends the bare minimum of her 600 pages analyzing McCullers’ texts. Instead, Author Carr vainly seeks to characterize the Creative Process: “She sank again into her pillows and gazed off with her great dark eyes into an imagined land called up at will.”

In spite of herself, the biographer has succeeded. She has written one of those windy, overweight Southern books —the Gone With the Wind syndrome —that can do everything wrong except bore the reader. For seven indefatigable years she has tracked her subject: to New York City, where Carson lived in a household that included W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Richard Wright, among others; to the obligatory artists’ colonies (Yaddo, Bread Loaf); even to London and Paris. Early on, she grabs her fey and monstrous main character by the toe and never lets go. The ghost of McCullers does the rest.

Almost everybody who knew Carson felt that friendship with her was an act of survival. “Carson burdened everyone who got close to her,” Lillian Hellman complained. “I always felt Carson was a destroyer,” concluded Elizabeth Bowen. As for Carson herself, she seemed “indestructible”—in the almost despairing word of her husband Reeves McCullers (who killed himself in a Paris hotel room after 16 years of marriage).

She needed resiliency to survive. Her youth was permanently maimed by a suffocating, overambitious mother who called her only “Little Precious.” Her puerile “maturity” was filled with weeks of chain-smoking and drinking straight gin. Carson was hardly into her 20s when she suffered the first of several strokes. Anemia, pleurisy, a rheumatic heart and cancer followed in lethal succession. She was afflicted with a melodramatic bisexuality, a condition that made her fall in love with husbands and wives. Like the protagonist in her story A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, she could say: “Son, I can love anything.” Nevertheless, Biographer Carr judges, she preferred women. Her often unrequited infatuations ranged from Isak Dinesen to Marilyn Monroe. “I was born a man,” Carson once declared with a peculiar amalgam of imagination and truth.

Survival of all this was purchased at an awful cost. The prodigy’s creative energies evaporated prematurely. By the time she was 25, all of her major works had been conceived. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), made her a celebrity at 23. Her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, was published the following year. By that time she had also begun work on both The Member of the Wedding (which she would adapt into a 1950 Broadway smash starring Julie Harris and Ethel Waters) and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (adapted disastrously by Edward Albee).

Carson’s overall assessment of her work: “I have more to say than Hemingway, and, God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.” The eight years since her death at 50 have not found many who agree. Her style, like the hearts and XXXs she scrawled at the end of her letters, now seems too breathless, too flamboyant. She was a hot writer, too explicit in her grotesque symbols for deformed love and lives misshapen by loneliness. The cooler mode of Flannery O’Connor is more to today’s taste. But there are a hugeness of appetite, a shameless naivete of feeling to McCullers that recall an America far older than a generation ago. A poet of tall tales of damnation, she wrote of a time and place that seemed peopled by myths and driven by obsessions; and she lived as she wrote.