Tag Archives: Carson McCullers

Letter: Carson McCullers to Reeve McCullers, late December 1944.

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Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (1999)As I mentioned in yesterday’s review of Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, McCullers is reluctant to reveal her feelings or her reasons for returning to marry Reeves a second time in 1945. The inclusion of the war letters between Carson and Reeves – an inclusion that Carson herself dictated in the original manuscript of her autobiography – betrays this reticence, and instead shows a tender, strongly felt bond between the two. Whether it was the separation of distance or time or a heightened emotional response in reaction to the war, or a combination remains to be seen, but I think McCullers more than understood the unpredictable ways of human affection. As I mentioned yesterday, Illumination & Night Glare offers a different view of Reeves, and being able to read his letters, his thoughts and his feelings helps to soften the image of him as a hard-drinking, bitterly disappointed, jealous, suicidal young man; which, of course, he ultimately was, but reading his letters and Carson’s perception of their relationship shows the other dimensions of his personality. This letter, written in late December 1944, is from Carson to Reeves, who has been injured in the war and is in hospital in England. Carson doesn’t have the address for the hospital, and any correspondence coming through from Reeves is delayed by about a month.

Carson and Reeves McCullers in Paris, 1947

“My Beloved Reeves,

This morning both Mrs. Clay and the postman knocked on our door and handed me a letter. It’s the first time in many weeks I’d not been waiting for the mail in the hall, and they were so happy to hand me the letter. Then, when it was opened it was the beautiful letter written Dec. 3 at the rest camp behind the lines. I have been reading it all during the day. But still I know no more about where you are now. Sometimes I picture you in an English hospital, without letters, with no boxes from me — and I weep when I think that the letter will have to go all the way to Belgium or Germany and then be forwarded to you. Surely I will know soon where you are. I am still possessed, really possessed, with the fancy that you may be on the way home. Every time the telephone rings I tremble all over and expect to hear your precious voice. I try not to be this way, for I am probably letting myself in for the cruelest kind of disappointment. There is no way of saying how much I long for you. — I won’t go on in this tack, because I know there is nothing we can do about it. But surely soon I will hear from you. Soon you will be able to answer all the questions I have been writing you these past weeks since you were wounded.

Reeves, my own darling, I have read many war books, letters, and stories. But your letters to me are the most powerful, suggestive, pieces of writing about war I have ever read. I have showed a few of the letters, parts of them, to other people — and it has been suggested that they ought to be published. Bessie (to whom I read certain parts) is especially insistent about this. Write me what you think. Of course I know they were written with no such intention — they were written only to me, and they are the dearest treasure I possess. You may not like it that I read parts of the letters to anyone else, but I don’t think you will be angry with me. These days it seems I cannot open my mouth without talking about you, without shaping the conversation so that it turns constantly on you.

I know my letters to you fail sometimes even to make sense. They are only the letters of a desperate woman, a little unbalanced sometimes by fear.

My darling heart, it is a bright cold day again. I am quite well again, and yesterday for the first time I went out with Mama for a walk. The river is frozen hard along the shore. The sunrises are especially lovely now; and we are up to see them almost every day. Sometimes the sky is a pure geranium color, and the sun is fiery gold across the ice.

This morning I worked for four hours. There is none of that inner composure, the first essential with me for work, the fruitful tranquility of the old days when I lived with you and worked and we were happy. There is none of that now, but I believe that there will be other times like those for us in the future. And in the meantime, in spite of crying nerves, I will try to work. I failed to finish the story by Christmas but maybe by the middle of March it will be done.

Reeves dearest, everything I see and feel is connected so closely with you. The music I hear and the books I read. For a Christmas present I was given a beautiful pair of velvet slippers, lined with a soft lambswool and very warm and beautiful. I think you might be able to wear them, for they are so soft that even if they are a little tight they wouldn’t hurt you. I long for you to have them as I know how you feel about stepping on a cold floor. I long to look after you and spoil you — and be spoiled a little by you too. Oh Reeves, I love you so deeply and tenderly, and I feel that we, each of us, has so much to make up for to the other.

It is late afternoon, four thirty. I have been here at the typewriter, dreaming and writing, for about two hours. Now I shall go in to Mama, and start one of our endless conversations about you. I adore you.

Your,
Carson”

[Photo of Carson and Reeves McCullers in Paris, 1947  from The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr]

Illumination & Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers (1999)

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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.

Book Loot: Week Ending February 14th, 2010

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In lieu of a grossly indulgent stacks of newly acquired books – yes, yet again! Has it really been over a month since I bought a book? – here are a few interesting articles that caught my eye during the week, in between continuing frustrations with library school administration, starting back at school for the year, work, and glittering literary events. The picture to the left is Ernest Hemingway kicking a can and I’m posting it because it is Ernest Hemingway kicking a can.

The Book Depository‘s announcement of the winners of their recent bookmark design competition could having me placing several orders in the hopes of receiving one. I’d be hoping for Myles Egan’s effort “Bob was so stuck into his book he didn’t realize he was in SPACE”. Well, I think we’ve all been there Bob.

From The Guardian we have a look at literature’s most mind-blowing drugs. Following a failed attempt to read Burroughs The Naked Lunch, Darragh McManus considers a number of fictional drugs. I believe there was also a heavily fictionalized version of adrenochrome in Hunter S. Thompson‘s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, though existing as a pigment, it’s extraction and effects as a psychotropic drug were in the novel highly exaggerated. Any particularly lethal literary concoction that you’d be interested in dabbling in?

The Guardian also revealed Britain’s top 250 most borrowed books in their library system in 2009, in both raw data and again with a bit of analysis. Popular fiction wins out over non-fiction in the libraries. I wonder if there is similar evidence for Australian libraries available anywhere online.

The posthumous discussion of J.D. Salinger‘s work continues, with Michael Greenberg of the New York Review of Books blog looking at conformity and authenticity in Franny and Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye. I think Greenberg, without even explicitly stating it, taps into why Salinger speaks so much to young people – his characters feel like they are outsiders while appearing to the world as insiders.

And finally, I really love this piece on the discovery of a 19th century plantation ledger which may have inspired William Faulkner‘s Yoknapatawpha novels. It’s always the most unlikely sources that serve as inspiration, and it is encouraging that that was true of Faulkner as well. (And I also really love the badass photo of Faulkner with a pipe on the article.)

The next week on Start Narrative Here is devoted to the life and work of Carson McCullers, February 19th marks the 93rd anniversary of her birth and while I do like my original idea of cooking up some ‘Spuds Carson’ as outlined in Illumination & Night Glare (and let’s face it, I might do it anyway), a week long celebration of her writing is probably a lot easier to share with you. There will be some poetry, some love letters, some reviews, and as always a lot of McCullers love.

Book Loot: Week Ending February 7th, 2010

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The Bath by Alfred Stevens (1867)No, no dangerously leaning piles of new books this week either. My continuing level of self-restraint surprises you all, doesn’t it?

The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas officially opens next week with A Gala Night of Storytelling. I’m very excited to be attending so many wonderful – and mostly free – events over the coming months, as I’ve never really gone to any sort of literary events before. A combination of not really being interested, seeing reading as a solely solitary pursuit, and an illogical presumption that I wouldn’t fit in. This year I’ve decided to throw all self-doubt aside and just go for it, and hopefully I’ll enjoy myself.

Speaking of events, in preparation for a little festivity I am planning for the anniversary of a certain author’s birth in a few weeks, I discovered this photograph of Carson McCullers by Louise Dahl-Wolfe on flickr that I hadn’t seen before. I really haven’t changed all that much from when I was twelve and hunting out new pictures of Hanson, only now it’s with Southern gothic writers from the 1940s.

Painting: “The Bath” (1867) by Alfred Stevens.

Book Loot: Week Ending January 17th, 2010

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Book Loot: Week Ending January 17th, 2010[photo now attached. I was having some issues with my wordpress image uploader, which I dealt with in a mature way, no yelling at inanimate objects, throwing things or tiny pinprick tears of frustration. No, really.]

I won After the Fireworks through Library Thing’s Early Reviewer program, it’s a lovely edition of Huxley’s novella from Hesperus Press. Savigneau’s McCullers biography was bought on eBay over a month ago and once I sent the seller an email about its whereabouts, of course it arrived the next day.

In terms of reading, I think I’ve burnt myself out on contemporary fiction for the time being, everything I’ve read so far this year was only published in the last couple of years and I’m ready for something a bit older now. I’ve been eyeing off my stacks of Penguin and Vintage paperbacks with something approaching licentiousness. Contemporary fiction is good for a while, but there is no way I could only read the latest releases. Like wine, whiskey or cheese, good literature only gets better with age.

Here’s a bit of an audio treat for the end of week: Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, reading and discussing Carson McCullers‘ short story “The Jockey” for the New Yorker fiction podcast.

Book Loot: Week Ending December 6th, 2009

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This week I found a link on tumblr to the handmade bags of Olympia le Tan (incidentally, my parents planned to name me Olympia – because I was born during the 1984 Olympics, gimmicky I know  … anyway! sometimes I still wonder whether life would have turned out differently if I’d been named Olympia. Would my nickname be Oly? Pia? Lympy?) via the We Love You So blog, and was intrigued with the idea of a purse embroidered with the first edition cover of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Then I found the price tag. You, too, can pick up one of these little darlings for $1,500. Let me just repeat that for you. $1,500. Honey, you could get an actual first edition of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – possibly even signed by Carson herself – for that kind of money, and let’s face it that’s surely going to be more of investment in the long run.

Book Loot: Week Ending November 8th, 2009

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It’s been rather quiet around these parts lately and for that, I apologize. I now have all of my assignments for the semester completed and handed in, and while working on them over the past couple of weeks resorted to my favourite procrastination technique – Gilmore Girls and knitting – totally rock and roll, I know; and didn’t find much time for reading. I visited the libraries over the past couple of days and stocked up on some books to start reading now that I am on “holidays” and I’m very, very much looking forward to it. What else are 34°C days for if not finding an air-conditioned space and reading?

On to the acquisitions for the week!:

Book Loot: Week Ending November 8th, 2009

Book Loot: Week Ending November 8th, 2009

The copy of Infinite Jest was secondhand, but it had the original cover price sticker on it – put out on the shelf in July 2009. It’s clear from the spine that the original person (whose name is written on the first page, but I’m not about to publicly call them out on it.) didn’t read it but … July 2009? That’s a pretty quick turnaround. Oh well, their efficient tendency to not hoard books they haven’t read is the gain of one who does hoard books they haven’t read (yet). Summer project perhaps?

And something very dear to my heart:

Book Loot: Week Ending November 8th, 2009 - Carson McCullers record

Yes, a recording of Carson McCullers in 1958 reading excerpts from The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café and the Heart is a Lonely Hunter as well as some of her poetry. I got this for an absolute steal on ebay and I absolutely plan on arranging to get it digitized. What you think I just have a record player lying about amongst all those books? Googling this baby only brings up 8 results – well 9 I suppose once this entry gets indexed.

And, finally, some of the stuff I have out from the library at the moment, who knows how much of it will actually get read:

Library Loot - Week Ending November 8th, 2009

Library Loot - Week Ending November 8th, 2009

Book Loot: Week Ending 25th October, 2009

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I have been waiting for this one for a few weeks now – I know, impatient – and was worried it wasn’t going to arrive at all – I know, paranoid – but it did and I’m pretty sure I will love it. There are photos of Carson and Reeves I haven’t seen before, and a happy snap of Carson and Tennessee which is really beautiful. Also, it includes a collection of letters sent between Carson and Reeves during World War 2 when Reeves was stationed in Europe. The parts I’ve allowed myself to read seem very sweet, very touching.

I’ve been rather well behaved on the book buying front for a while now, the local library is having a big pre-loved/ex-library book sale this week and I’m expecting to donate a fair amount of cash for their efforts. It is all in the name of charity though, so, come on, as if I could possibly say no!

Suzanne Munshower over at the Guardian contemplates e-book versus printed books:

One aspect of the electronic reader that tempts me – and I’m an old fuddy duddy so I have to admit it might be the only one – is its space-saving ability. Is there a reader out there who doesn’t occasionally feel crushed by possessing too many books?

My sister moved out this week and we did a bit of a swap. Two James Dean prints – which she has been bugging me about for years – and my small bookshelf for a larger bookshelf. How could I resist the lure of a bigger bookshelf? At the moment though, while her old room gets cleaned out, all of my books, ALL 456 OF THEM, are stacked in piles around my room. Some of them are manageable and have been for a while, but the rest of them are in a chaotic mess waiting to be re-shelved in their new home. Sigh. So yes, the possibility of crushing by Penguin paperback is at an all time high at the moment.

The fortieth anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac prompted this article about his legacy. The article is not particularly enlightening but some of the comments are thought-provoking. I, myself, love Kerouac. That said, I have never finished On the Road. (To add to the guilt, I own two different copies of it, as it was originally published, and the original scroll version.) I’ve read a number of his other books and loved most of them, but I’ve never actually made it to the end of On the Road. It’s not out of a dislike or boredom, I’ve just never actually finished it. I’ve read halfway many, many times. I’ve even read half of it out loud to a friend but … you get the idea. Does this make me a terrible Kerouac fan? I don’t know, but I love his writing and energy in his other books, and I’m always intrigued by new appraisals and interpretation and re-tellings of his life, misunderstood or not. Possible reading goal for for 2010: to FINISH reading On the Road, possibly even both versions?

(Now that I think about it, I’m the same with Bret Easton Ellis; I’ve read and loved all of his books but have never made it all the way through American Psycho. Weird.)

Congratulations to everyone who completed the 24 hour Read-a-Thon this weekend! I had intended to participate but real life plans kind of interfered. Thanks to all the cheerleaders that stopped by just in case I was participating, maybe next time I’ll actually do the reading marathon, I would really love to.

Book Loot: Week Ending October 11th, 2009

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A few ebay purchases arrived this week, a pay day and an unusually restrained visit to the Federation Square book market.

Book Loot: Week Ending October 11th 2009

This week I’ve been reading The Sandman comics/graphic novels/whatever your preferred term of endearment/books by Neil Gaiman. Immensely enjoyable, but I don’t feel adequate reviewing them, I don’t know how to speak about them. Maybe a summary post when I finish all of them off? I’ve also just started Truman Capote’s first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Although, I am expecting McCullers’ unfinished autobiography – Illumination and Night Glare – to arrive this week and I can see myself ignoring everything else and devouring that quite easily in a day or so. I don’t really know what I’ll find myself reading next.

How do you choose what to read next? Do you plan your reading ahead of time, knowing what book you will be picking up next, or do you act solely on instinct?

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (1941)

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Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

McCullers second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, is set in an army camp during peace time. It concerns the relationships between five key figures – repressed and confused Captain Penderton, his unsatisfied flighty wife Leonora, who is having an affair with Major Langdon, whose wife Alison is suffering great mental and physical exhaustion. Outside of them is Private Williams, somewhat simple and quiet, but menacing. As with all of McCullers’ work it deals with the nuances of spiritual isolation, the ways in which we find ourselves completely alienated despite and because of our surroundings.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is set up as a tragedy from the very beginning, we are well aware that one of the characters is going to meet a violent end at the hands of another. Some of the imagery here is utterly horrific, but it shapes our knowledge of the characters. The novella is brutal in the refusal to soften these stark elements of the human psyche. Shockingly violent, in both actions and private thoughts. These lives are burdened with intense hatred for each other that it controls their entire spiritual beings disallowing them to fully comprehend themselves.

Captain Penderton, who on the whole had lived a most rigid and unemotional life, did not question this strange hate of his. Once or twice, when he awoke late at night after taking too much Seconal, he made himself uncomfortable by thinking back over his recent behaviour. But he made no real effort to force himself to an inward reckoning.

Captain Penderton is the most intriguing character, with his slow and painful realization of his attraction to the quiet soldier Private Williams which manifests itself in an absurd form of hate. This hate reveals itself because it is a frustrated attraction which can never be fulfilled. The closest that Penderton comes to self-realization, is when Langdon comments that his servant would be a better person if he acted normally, to which Penderton bitterly responds:

‘You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?’
‘Why, you put it exactly right,’ the Major said. ‘Don’t you agree with me?’
‘No,’ said the Captain, after a short pause. With gruesome vividness the Captain suddenly looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll-like image, mean of countenance and grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. ‘I don’t agree,’ he repeated absently.

It is typical McCullers’ in that it is unspeakably bleak, and delves into the darkest emotions. Knowing of McCullers’ personal life, and her dedicating Reflections in a Golden Eye to Annemarie Schwarzenbach – who she was immensely attracted to, but who constantly rejected her advances – speaks volumes about where she is coming from, and relates to the concept which she would come to struggle with in her later work The Ballad of the Sad Café, the eternal disparity between the lover and the beloved. I think it is a book that is going to benefit greatly from future re-readings.

(Yes, that is Elizabeth Taylor on the Penguin Modern Classics cover. A film version, starring Taylor and Marlon Brando and directed by John Huston was filmed in 1967. It is available to watch on YouTube.)