Though primarily known as a writer of novels and plays, Carson McCullers did also write a little poetry. She even published a book of children’s verse, Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig, which I believe was only given one print run and seems to be rather scarce today. There are always a few copies on AbeBooks, but always just that little bit out of my price range, perhaps one day I will treat myself to my own copy. Until then, a very small selection of her poetry is available in the posthumous collection of her writing edited by her sister, Margarita G. Smith, The Mortgaged Heart. All of the poetry published in this volume is also available online. The anecdote from Margarita Smith refers to “Stone is Not Stone”
This poem called ‘Saraband’ was recorded for MGM records for Carson McCullers Reads (one day I will get that record converted), although McCullers was reciting her poems from memory and forgot four of the lines. I love how appropriately musical the rhythm of this piece is, especially when read aloud. It’s so rhythmic and soothing, especially with couplets such as the darkly beautiful “crown a host of unassorted sorrows/you never could manage one by one”, which reminds me of Elliott Smith lyrics.
Saraband
Select your sorrows if you can,
Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.
Adjust to a world divided
Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles
What natural alchemy lends
To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair
The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth’s fabled stare.
If you must cross the April park, be brisk:
Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar
Lest you be held as a security risk
Solicit only the evening star.
Your desperate nerves fuse laughter with disaster
And higgledy piggledy giggle once begun
Crown a host of unassorted sorrows
You never could manage one by one.
The world that jibes your tenderness
Jails your lust.
Bewildered by the paradox of all your musts
Turning from horizon to horizon, noonday to dusk:
It may be only you can understand:
On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold
When the sky is a mild blue of a Chinese bowl
The bones of Hart Crane, sailors and the drugstore man
Beat on the ocean’s floor the same saraband.
About her poetry, I remember best one evening 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.’
(Margarita Smith on Carson McCullers’ poetry in The Mortgaged Heart)
[Photo Credit: Carson McCullers in 1959, by Carl Van Vechten from the Library of Congress collection]
Written in the months of 1967 leading up to her death, Illumination & Night Glare (edited by Carlos L. Dews and published in 1999) was Carson McCullers’ final attempt to shape the mythology of her own persona, to create the legacy of herself she wished to leave to the world and to record her own perception of herself. Rather than taking the structure of a typical biographical account, McCullers’ narrative of her own life is fluid, shifting between the stages of her life in a sweetly sentimental ramble. Perhaps it is the unfinished nature of the manuscript, but Illumination & Night Glare feels like sitting in the same room as Carson McCullers and listening to her tell all the interesting little tales that make up her life story.
The illuminations of the title are the flashes and bursts of inspiration and creativity that defined her direction with her work when she least expected it. The inspirations were strange and unpredictable to her, but she appreciated it them coming as they did after months of struggle. The night glares are the periods of debilitating illness and harrowing setbacks and life circumstances. She never bemoans the fact of her illnesses, in fact she points to other creative individuals who also overcame physical impediment to achieve great works, taking instead great pride in the ability to overcome.
My life has been almost completely filled with work and love, thank goodness. Work has not always been easy, nor has love, may I add.
McCullers is surprisingly open about the disappointing sexual dimension of her relationship with Reeves, yet rather coyly ambiguous when it comes to her other affections, especially Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, although it appears their relationship was just as fraught. As she approaches her remarriage to Reeves, she becomes shyly reticent, claiming often that she didn’t know why she went back to him, a sentiment which is betrayed by her tender letters to him during the war. Carson’s portrayal of Reeves is much kinder than any to be found in other biographical accounts, or from comments from people who were close to the pair. She creates a more sympathetic image of a deeply troubled man.
It was a shock, the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him; he was the best looking man I had ever seen. he also talked of Marx and Engels, and I knew he was a liberal, which was important, to my mind, in a backward Southern community. Edwin, Reeves and I spent whole days together, and one night when Reeves and I were walking alone, looking up at the stars, I did not realize how time had passed, and when Reeves brought me home, my parents were distressed, as it was two o’clock in the morning. However, my mother was also charmed by Reeves, and he would bring her beautiful records. [...] I was eighteen years old, and this was my first love.
The manuscript ends on a wistful recollection of happier times, and the important, if complex, position Reeves held in her emotional life.
“But you must [have] had happy times,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “I remember one night we climbed up on the mansard roof of our house just to see the moon. We had good times, and that’s what made it so difficult. If he had been all bad, it would have been such a relief because I would have been able to leave him without so much struggle. And don’t forget, he was of enormous value to me at the time I wrote [The Heart is a Lonely Hunter] and [Reflections in a Golden Eye.] I was completely absorbed in my work, and if the food burned up he never chided me. More important, he read and criticized each chapter as it was being done. Once I asked him if he thought [Heart] was any good. He reflected for a long time, and then he said, ‘No, it’s not good, it’s great.’”
While providing an honest account of Reeves McCullers, it also shows Carson as she wanted to be seen – not the victim of a number of physical ailments or damaged relationships, but first and foremost as a writer. From her nurtured childhood – revealing that the moment her mother thought she was a genius, young Lula Carson sat at the piano and played a song she’d heard only hours before, was actually premeditated and practiced beforehand – to her stunted musical career, success in her early twenties, her complex relationships and friendships, and the disappointments of her later works. She writes enthusiastically of her own literary inspirations – Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Wolfe, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and E.M. Forster. The lively days of 7 Middagh Street – the house in which she lived with W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, George Davis and Richard Wright among others – seems an idyllic creative atmosphere, although it resulted more in partying than being conducive to a positive writing environment.
Buffered by the truly touching and often desperate letters between Reeves and Carson during the time between their marriages while Reeves was serving his country in World War Two, and McCullers’ original outline for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Illumination & Night Glare is a amicable recollection of a tumultuous life told with the requisite hope and understanding one has come to expect from McCullers.
On this day 42 years ago, September 29th 1967, the writer Carson McCullers died at the age of 50.
Carson McCullers photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe in Central Park, April 1941
I only discovered her writing this year, something which I am eternally grateful for. I think reading this incredibly talented author at any other time in my life would have lessened the impact her writing had on me. The sparseness of her words, her evocative descriptions of the minutiae of every day life, her complete understanding of being outcast, of loneliness, and most importantly, of the struggle toward love. Her work, and the story of her life, continue to provide me with endless inspiration.
If you’ve yet to experience McCullers devastatingly perceptive prose, here is a link to a full text copy of one of my favourite of her short stories “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” originally published in 1942, and available in print with the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. I also strongly recommend her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, published when she was just 23. I am going to be reading, writing about and re-reading a lot more of McCullers in the future but in the meantime, here’s a small sample dedicated to the responsible (!) number of whiskeys I threw down last night in her honour:
And that is not all. It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man – then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harboured far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. [...] Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk Miss Amelia’s liquor. He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy – but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there.
(from The Ballad of the Sad Café)
And as Charles Bukowski in his eponymous poem about her wrote;
“all her books of
terrified lonelinessall her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love[...]
and everything
continued just
as
she had written it”
