The carapace of coolness is too much for Claire, also. She breaks the silence by saying that it’s not healthy to live our life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. “Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them.”
I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert – to tell stories and to make our lives worthwhile tales in the process.

I’m not sure if back in 2003 I quite would have appreciated the blunt truths offered in Coupland’s novel, those moments of acidic humour that cut to the core of post-war Western consumer existence. Let’s face it, I was eighteen with the whole world ahead of me and still believed I was on the cusp of immersing myself in a world of thoughts and ideas that would open up numerous opportunities that I couldn’t even fathom. Uh, yeah. But now, with most (oh my god) of my twenties behind me, I come to Generation X with a different perspective, from the point where you’re no longer “the youth” anymore, and a new generation is fast usurping your own (which you never quite felt apart of anyway), and you realize that although you’re supposed to be an adult, you have no fucking idea what you’re supposed to be doing.

And for this particularly knotty stage of life, Generation X is perfect. Admittedly, there are some differences between the generation of the characters of the novel and my own – theirs is a landscape noticeably untouched by the internet, although the comic frames and neologisms within the text do point toward that sort of multi-textuality that we’d become used to with the growth of the internet; and if this is an accelerated culture, what can we say about ours, hyper-acceleration? (an issue Coupland would expand upon in 2009′s Generation A) – but the general sense of distrust of consumer culture, of apathy and exhaustion, of alienation and of the unknown, still resonates strongly, perhaps the byproduct of mid-twenties malaise no matter the generational setting. Here there is the pleasure of small recognitions of self and experience which legitimize those experiences and perceptions, or at the very least, offer the consolation that you are not alone in sensing the strangeness, the contradictory and the futile.

But I get this feeling–
It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it boils down to the fact that we’re middle class.
You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.
And any small moment of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning’s will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Okay, so that’s all my guts spewed up in words for all to see, but what about the actual novel? Generation X features three twenty-somethings, Andy, Dag and Claire, who have removed themselves from their peers and their expectations to work menial jobs in California, where they tell stories to each other, revealing truths about themselves and their lives through fiction and an extensive frame of cultural reference and understanding, in this way being able to openly speak about and simultaneously cover up the unspeakable fears they hold about where their lives are headed. It’s not all doom and generational gloom, but it’s also sharp and funny. While Generation X hails the power of stories and fiction to give us control over our lives, I wonder whether the search for our own narrative is also the very thing that entangles us with this distinct anxiety and alienation, especially when our narratives don’t measure up to those we see in film, television, literature, internet, other people?

What have I learned from this rereading experience? That Generation X and I have not grown apart, nor are we disgusted by our slight changes over time, but that we are closer than ever, a sort of book and reader eclipse in which our stories begin to overlap. It may not always be this way, we’ve both got a lot of changing to do yet, but for now, the pages between these blindingly neon covers are of the greatest comfort.

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]

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.

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 loneliness

all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love

[...]

and everything
continued just
as
she had written it”