The Sad Life of Carson McCullers
The novels and stories of American writer, Carson McCullers, are populated by sad and lonely characters. They are perpetually seeking a sense of belonging, yet in some sense, they know that belonging is impossible. They remain outcasts and often meet tragic ends.
McCullers’ life was not that different from many of her characters. Plagued by loneliness, burdens of sexual orientation, and extreme alcoholism, McCullers sought the same sense of belonging and love that always seemed elusive and difficult to attain. Mary V. Dearborn’s new biography on McCullers seeks to illuminate her life, and does so with great care, honesty, and clarity.
Meticulously researched, Dearborn’s book shows McCullers in the fullness of her being. We witness a young girl—a “wunderkind”—being doted on by her mother. Early on, she was encouraged to become a pianist, and although she showed talent and promise, McCullers chose the path of a writer.
Growing up in Georgia, McCullers drew on the Southern themes and characters often presented as “freaks.” She left the South and made her way to New York (she would end up moving from the South to the East Coast many times throughout her short life, as well as living in Europe). Her writing career took off with the publication of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The reviews were glowing; she was recognized as an incredible talent with much promise.
But despite the success (even though it certainly gave McCullers a psychological boost she needed), she continued to unravel both physically and emotionally. After having rheumatic fever and strep throat as a young girl, McCullers spent the rest of her life battling one illness or other. She had numerous strokes and heart issues, which were only made worse by her alcoholism.
Dearborn writes about alcoholism in McCullers’ family with great care, yet she doesn’t shy away from the truth. “Alcoholism reached far back in Carson’s history,” writes Dearborn, “beginning with her grandfather Charles Thomas Waters…Carson’s father, Lamar Sr., was more drunk than sober in the year or so before his death.” McCullers’ sister, Rita, too, was an alcoholic, although “she attended AA meetings from the late 1940s on.” Dearborn points out that the societal relationship to alcohol at that point in time was strange. Everyone drank and everyone was in denial that they had a drinking problem.
This denial was one of the themes in McCullers’ life. While dispersing judgment on others, she was incapable of seeing that she was indeed an alcoholic just like those that she judged. This was especially true in regards to McCullers’ relationship to her husband, Reeves, who was also an alcoholic. Although he did seek help through the AA, Reeves’ life ultimately ended as a result of depression and addiction. As Dearborn writes, “Reeves’s body was found in his elegant room at the Hôtel Château-Frontenac, still paid for by Sheriff. He had taken an overdose of barbiturates on top of alcohol and choked on his vomit, dying of asphyxiation.”
Carson and Reeves’ relationship was filled with contradictions, and Dearborn illuminates these quite well. They were strangely drawn to each other, yet at some point, Carson divorces him, but then remarries him. It was hardly a marriage made in heaven. The pair enabled one another to continuously drink. They also accepted each other’s struggles, especially those relating to their respective sexual orientations.
Although they married each other, and barely consummated their marriage, both Carson and Reeves struggled in how to express their sexual orientations. Carson appeared to have been more comfortable in her homosexuality. Even throughout their relationship, Carson had many affairs with women, or better yet, she attempted to do so. Reeves, on the other hand, appears to have mostly suppressed his homosexual desires, perhaps out of confusion about whether he was truly gay.
Drinking excessively was not the only way sadness entered Carson’s life. Her relationships were always mired in drama. She was very emotionally needy, and for whatever reason, she sought sexual affairs with women older than herself. Given this, she often found herself in echelons of society she truly did not belong in. Not only was she not inherently wealthy (despite the fact that she was financially secure thanks to her writing career) but she also the lacked cosmopolitanism and worldliness of many women she grew attached to.
She never quite consummated most of these love affairs. There was a sense of furtiveness coupled with extreme emotional neediness. It was not surprising that many women reacted with suspicion and unease. They found her to be an odd curiosity, and although they willingly accepted some kind of lesbian affair with her, they kept her at a distance, as if she was not one of them. Whether that had to do with Carson’s own relationship to homosexuality, her deep emotional neediness and penchant for self-destruction, or simply by the fact that she came from the South is open to analysis.
Dearborn notes that there were “levels of reticence [that] surrounded Carson and sexual preference…informed by the South, where the word lesbian was never used—ever.” This situation informed Carson’s literary work. Dearborn writes, “…the Southern Gothic strain gave misfit artists like Carson the freedom to write about all kinds of taboo subjects, usually race but also homosexuality and any other topic deemed freakish, often with great sympathy, and even to make them the stuff of fine literature, as long as no one—the writer, her characters, or the critics—directly named the taboo.”
This was obviously a good literary strategy but one can only imagine that because of the further denial or at very least, ignoring of her homosexuality, Carson became further alienated and lonely. It certainly did not help that almost all of her love affairs were incomplete, as if eros itself was never realized, perhaps not even in any spiritual fashion, let alone physical.
Judging from Dearborn’s biography and the material she was working with, Carson didn’t feel a great amount of guilt about her lesbianism. The unease about it came more from within—a metaphysical point that had more to do with her overall intensity of emotion than being a lesbian. She often acted rather like a naïve child than a woman. Perhaps she purposely infantilized herself in order to gain attention from the older women. After all, her objects of desire were women who were either older or in some way, more powerful than how Carson perceived herself. It should be noted that Carson spent most of her life in some kind of invalid state, which merely by its bodily virtue would make her weak.
There was a continuous sense and a pattern of self-destruction, not only because of drinking but also because of Carson’s temperament. Reeves was part of the problem. They both encouraged each other’s destruction whether they understood that or not. Others could not bear to be around the pair, not because they were “bad” people but because their dramatic self-destruction and drinking made life difficult. For example, American writer, Richard Wright and his wife, Ellen, wished to help both Reeves and Carson but their relationship and the effect on others was exhausting. They kept their distance.
Exhaustion is perhaps one word to describe much of Carson’s life. Toward the end, she became so sick that she needed a wheelchair, and at some point, she had such terrible bed sores and leg pains that doctors scheduled a leg amputation in order for her to be able to sit in the wheelchair. She was clearly on the descent toward death.
Carson deemed herself an atheist, yet she envied others who believed in God. Toward the end of her life, she said “I don’t know what I’d do without my friends. They are the we of me…The sad, happy life of Carson McCullers. Sometimes I think God got me mixed up with Job. But Job never cursed God and neither have I. I carry on.”
In a way, this shows a great strength and an odd faith. But then again, Carson was an oddity in every way—a quiet soul, plagued by illness, booze, always seeking love, not quite sure on how to receive it or give it. Dearborn’s portrait of Carson McCullers is not just that of an artist as a woman but also a human being, genuinely seeking belonging.
Emina Melonic's work has appeared in National Review, The New Criterion, The Imaginative Conservative, American Greatness, Splice Today, VoegelinView, and New English Review, among others.
