It has been seven years since McCullers (1917-67) had her centennial, when the Library of America released her complete works in two volumes. That was an occasion, which many critics took, to revisit her work, which includes the novels “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1940) and “The Member of the Wedding” (1946), and the story collection “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1951).
Special notice was paid, and justly so, to McCullers’s gifts for portraying loners and misfits, for addressing taboo topics such as mental illness and alcoholism and same-sex relationships. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in The New York Review of Books, “McCullers seemed to have identified with whatever is trans- in the human psyche, seeing it as the very fuel of desire.” Dearborn elaborates on these themes but essentially tells a straightforward story, vastly more in touch with the life than with the work.
Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Ga. Her father was a jeweler, and her lively and well-educated mother took pride in her precocious daughter, whom the family called “Sister.” Carson — she began using her sexually ambiguous middle name in high school — thought she might become a concert pianist. She skipped college and headed for New York City, where she took writing classes at Columbia University. At 19, she married Reeves McCullers, a charming Alabama-born high school football star and future war hero — and future alcoholic.
The publishing world loves a Cinderella story and will invent one if necessary. McCullers was the real thing. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” was published when she was just 23, and literary Manhattan fell at her feet. She was photographed for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Truman Capote called her “a tall, slender wand of a girl” whose voice had a “gentle heat, like a blissful summer afternoon that is slow but not sleepy.” She was gawky and tall and androgynous; she wore crisp men’s clothing, with a special fondness for white dress shirts and spotless white sneakers. Alfred Kazin, whom she got to know at Yaddo, saw her most clearly:
Carson was pure sensibility, pure nerve along which all the suffering of the South and the Smith family passed. She was all feeling, an anvil on which life rained down blows. … Tremulous elfin, self-pitying charm. Always problems of identity. Internality of the American Dostoevskian sort without the slightest political sense of the word. … The southern isolato.
McCullers was an eccentric. She was needy and smothering and given to extravagant language and gestures. In the short run, these things can be enormously attractive. In the long run, they can make everyone hate you. By the end of this biography, when she has fallen apart from drinking and illness, a lot of contumely is dumped on McCullers by enemies and friends alike. Her Southern accent was adorable until people began to mock it behind her back.
The young McCullers moved into a large, Tudoresque apartment building in Brooklyn Heights with a gaggle of other artists, including the poet W.H. Auden, the composer Benjamin Britten and the statuesque burlesque star and writer Gypsy Rose Lee. This largely gay and lesbian commune became famous; other artists lined up to try gain admission if not residence. There are great scenes, such as the time McCullers and Lee chased a fire truck down the street because they both loved a good conflagration. The pair may have had, briefly, a physical relationship.
