Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  IT IS THE SUMMER of 1941, and I am helping a friend to pack. My friend is called Mac, and he lives in a room across the hall from me. In the late afternoon, when the weather was fine and the sky over the city a pale grey-blue, we have often met up on the roof.

  Mac would sit leaning against a chimney, usually with a book, as after office hours he goes to night classes at N.Y.U. Nearly always Sugar would be on the roof with him, her head resting on one of his knees. Sugar is a very small, very smart terrier who has the most finicky of manners. Now as we are packing, Sugar sits in the corner of the room, and occasionally she whines and gives a little shiver, as she knows that something is happening that she does not understand. We are packing because Mac has volunteered for the Army and has been accepted; he is going off to fight.

  The room is in mad disorder—with books, clothes, and phonograph records on the floor. Scattered about are old newspapers with their blunt, black head-lines of destruction, their captions of ruin. Mac sorts out his possessions quickly, not hesitating about the things he can take with him and the things he will leave behind. Much must be left.

  Mac is twenty-three—with a short, wiry body and red hair. He has a freckled face, and his expression is now rather sombre and scowling, as he is cutting a wisdom tooth and keeps feeling out the sore spot with his tongue. As we crate the records with excelsior and nail the boxes of books, we are both of us intent on that inward reckoning that departure and great change bring about.

  What few words we say aloud are only the flotsam of thoughts within us. Our meditations probably follow the same track. Our backgrounds are similar. We have known secure childhoods, in homes neither rich nor very poor. We have had our share of formal education and have been allowed to seek for and to affirm our own spiritual values. In short, we have grown up as Americans. And we have much to think over, much to remember, and not a little to regret.

  “But why did it take me so long? Huh?” Mac is saying. “Glued to the radio, talking, talking. Doing nothing. Why? Answer me that one!”

  Sugar looks up at the sound of his voice. Mac has had her for six years. She sits across the table from him when he has his meals at home, and eats exactly what he eats—eggs for breakfast, carrots, anything. Whenever he offers her some special dainty he holds it close to her nose, and before taking it she has a pretty way of raising her right paw in a gesture halfway between begging and benediction.

  But Mac pays no attention to Sugar now.

  “There is this,” he says. “A virtue is a virtue only insofar as it leads to good. But when it can be used as a weakness, as an instrument to make way for evil. . . .”

  Mac balls up a sweater and throws it on a pile of clothes in the corner. “You know what I mean.”

  I do know what he means. We were all of us pacifists. In our adolescence and our youth, we had no notion that we would ever have to fight. War was evil. The last World War had no place in our memories, but we had heard and read all about it. Our heroes in childhood were not soldiers, but great adventurers.

  There was Byrd. There was Lindbergh—I thought he was wonderful and wrote him a long letter to tell him so. But that was in 1927, ages ago.

  Then later in High School. My High School was like any one of thousands of High Schools in America. On Thursdays, we studied a subject called current events. My teacher had a great spirit and a passion to instil in us the horrors of war. She need not have been so anxious; we were born to the pacifist point of view.

  I remember the physical gestures and peculiarities of this teacher better than anything ever said in class—the way she rapped the top of her head with a pencil to emphasize a point, the way that, when she was exasperated, she took off her glasses, pressed her fingers to her eyeballs, and said, “Oh pshaw! Pshaw! Pshaw!” There was always a giggle when this happened, and she would put her glasses back on and peer all around resentfully.

  A disarmament conference—the League of Nations—a new party in the German Reich led by a man called Hitler. None of these things meant very much. Everybody knew there could never be another war. What country could start such a thing again? And if in the future it happened—why that would be in Europe. And American faces would never rot in European mud again.

  “They told the truth. They were right,” Mac says, and I look up at him. He is still packing books. Among them are Company K, A Farewell to Arms, The Road to War, and The Enormous Room. It was in our adolescence that the culmination of all the agony and destruction of the past war was finally expressed. The influence of these books on us can not be exaggerated. Mac arranges the volumes in stacks according to their size.

  “They were right, but only for their time. They could not have realized then that there are worse things even than war. You know?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  The books are now packed in their boxes, and Mac stops off for a rest. He goes over to the medicine cabinet, opens his mouth very wide, and paints his sore gum with iodine. Then he sits down on a packing-case, his forehead propped on his fists, his face pink and sweating.

  “Listen!” Mac says suddenly. “Do you remember May the first, 1935? Can you think back that far?”

  Sugar looks up at him, and, as he gives her no notice, she sighs so deeply that her ribs stand out, and she drops her head down on her paws.

  “That May day was my first year at University, and I was a member of a students’ club. We marched in the parade. I was carrying a big banner AGAINST WAR AND FASCISM. Everything was either black or white. War was evil, Fascism was evil—they were the same. We never knew then that we would ever have to choose between them.”

  “They were marching that year in Germany, too,” I said quickly. “But they weren’t choosing the banners they marched to.”

  “Yeah,” Mac says. “They were marching all right.”

  Mac starts folding his good suit to put into the bag. “It was Spain,” he says. “It was Spain that waked most of us up. . . .

  “That was the first round, and we lost it. Then afterward we were forced to pull our punches for so long that most of us just gave up. We didn’t make this war, so why should we have to fight in it. Why I ask you? Let’s just sit around punch drunk and see what happens. Maybe that gorilla on the other side won’t even notice that we’re in the ring.”

  There is truth in what he has just said. The last year has a weird, drunken quality. The Blitzkrieg—the collapse of Europe—funereal radio voices affirming each new loss—the debris that was once Democracy. We in America have not been able to grasp it all at once. We were prepared to fight for the betterment of Democracy, and to fight with Democratic means—that in itself is no paltry battle.

  We never knew that the full force of our barrage would have to be turned outward in order to escape complete annihilation. We have been demoralized. It has taken us long, too long, to come to terms with our inward selves, to adjust our traditions to necessity, to reach the state of conviction that impels action. We have had to re-examine our ideals, and to leave much behind. We have had to face a moral crisis for which we were scantily equipped. But at last we have reached our conclusions and are ready to act. We have come through.

  Democracy—intellectual and moral freedom, the liberty to work and live in the way most productive for us, the right to establish our individual spiritual values—that is the breath of the American ideal. And we Americans will fight to preserve it. We have clenched our giant fist; it will not open until we are victorious.

  “Thank the Lord it’s over,” Mac says.

  He may be speaking of the past indecisions, or of the packing. We have finished. The room has a sad, naked look with the boxes and suitcases piled up on the dusty floor. Mac goes down-stairs for beer, and when he comes back we close the door and go up to the roof. It is a quiet, warm late afternoon. Wet clothes are hanging on a line, and pigeons strut along the parapet. We sit resting with our backs against a chimney.

  Mac opens the beer. Because of the warmth, the foam geysers up over the neck of th
e bottle and spills on his hand and arm. He holds out his arm to Sugar, and she licks it daintily. Evidently the taste pleases her, for very slowly she raises her right paw and begs for more; he draws her in between his knees and scratches her behind the ears. To-morrow Sugar will be sent on the train to Mac’s brother in Delaware.

  For a long time we are silent. When Mac speaks his voice is controlled and quiet:

  “They say we know what we are fighting against, but that we don’t make ourselves plain about what we are fighting for. They want us to stop off to form slogans. It is like asking a man who is being choked and in danger of suffocation why he puts up a struggle. He does not say to himself that he fights because with his wind-pipe clutched he can not get air. He does not remind himself that air contains oxygen, and it is by the process of oxidation that the body derives the energy by which it functions. He does not lie still and tell himself that he has three minutes of grace in which to find out his reasons for wanting to fight off his oppressor and to breathe. A man in such peril simply fights. He fights for release, for air, for life, and he struggles with every ounce of power in his body. He does not stop fighting until all trace of consciousness has left him, or until breath has been granted him once more.”

  Dark comes on. An airplane cruises in the deepening sky. Mac does not say anything further, there is no more need to talk. To-morrow he will be in the Army.

  And Mac, the thousands of others like him, does not face the struggle ahead of us with hopped-up, specious feelings of glory. He knows what it will cost his generation in personal self-denial and in suffering. But he is done with questioning, finished with doubt.

  Love’s Not Time’s Fool (by a War Wife)

  SOMEHOW I feel that this will be the last letter that will reach you while you are still here in America. During these last days, through the long journey of the troop train, my heart has been with you each hour. And now, tonight, I have such an insistent premonition that your embarkation will come off sooner than human reason can grasp. Yet I feel no panic. I hear within me no crying out. I realize that I cannot hope to know any details of your departure, and that it may be weeks before you may be able to write me where—on what island, what continent—you have been sent. But this suspense is part of the suffering we must face until the war is won. The times demand an emotional tenacity such as few of us have ever been called upon to sustain before. I know it of you, that your only fear will be for me, that I shall be afraid. That is why I want to write to you now of the thing that has made possible the faith and courage that I have at last gained—I want to write you of our love.

  In all the long months while you were in training, when—except for my two scrambled visits to Fort B.—we have been separated, I have little by little gone through a sort of moral evolution. It has not been easy, for creation and growth are never a casual process. But it was necessary. When first you went into the Army and I was left alone, I knew that I would have to reconstruct my whole existence. Our life together, short as it has been in ordinary reckoning, had become a world in itself, and almost a world sufficient in itself. So when you went away I was left with a paralyzing feeling of incompleteness. No more of those mad Sunday morning breakfasts, with their dear sweet gluttony, with your profound concern for Orphan Annie and mine for Flip Corkin. No more banging around together drinking beer in queer little places on Saturday night. No more of the evenings when we read together or listened to the phonograph or simply sat and smoked and talked. . . .

  The loss of these familiar simplicities is hard enough to get adjusted to. But such a separation causes also a strange inward aloneness that is less tangible and more difficult to overcome. It was as though the walls of my house had suddenly collapsed and left me alone and exposed in a world that continued to go on, that would not stop to offer solace and shelter. The physical isolation was bearable, but I was faced by the moral isolation that a human being will not and cannot endure. And this suffering can only be helped by means of some profound spiritual experience.

  For you and me, and for all of us, there is an urgent necessity to believe in something larger than ourselves and our individual destinies. We know a deep necessity to affirm life, to believe in a future of creation rather than destruction, to have faith in ourselves and in the future of mankind. Because never have the forces of destruction and hate been so intricately organized. Never has there been more need in the world for love.

  When I write you of love, my darling, it is hard for me to put into a letter just what that word now means to me. It is like trying to put down a definitive for God. I am writing, first, of our love for each other—of the love the two of us have made together. Love is not some strange sweet accident that cannot be accounted for. A love such as ours is a creative experience. Both of us have brought to it the best of ourselves. In our life together, it has grown in the proportion that we ourselves have grown in spirit. Our love has become the prime foundation of the life of each of us.

  Now, in these times of world catastrophe, it is useless to deny that our love is threatened. So long as our love was dependent only on ourselves we could with reason feel serene. But now you and I face long separation, suspense, the agony of knowing that we are half a world apart. We must face even the possibility of death. So it would be foolish not to admit within ourselves that our love is endangered. We will both have to fight to preserve it, you in your way and I in mine.

  You will be fighting as a unit in an army which is fighting a machine determined to extinguish all of our concepts of life, of moral integrity, and of love. You are not only fighting for our own personal love, but for the rights of all human beings to love and live in a world of order and security. However hard it may be, your fight is a struggle which is planned and directed, and your duty is at all times clear. That is your contribution to the preservation of our love. We have to admit within ourselves that this contribution may be total. In any case, your part in our fight to preserve our love will take the utmost of the strength and power in you.

  I know that always, during these times, you have put yourself in my place. Your part in this war, in this fight for our love, is more immediate than mine. But I, and all other women whose loved ones are fighting in this war, have a struggle also—and it is not an easy one. We know that during such times of catastrophe the casualties cannot only be reckoned physically. For every soldier wounded in actual combat, there are other personalities twisted or shattered by strain and fear. These psychological casualties are less obvious, and there are no sulfa miracle cures to check the sicknesses of the soul.

  This letter is meant as a pledge to you that I will not be such a casualty. There are ways of fighting these psychological dangers. I can, and will, maintain a bulwark against the insidious threats that lie in wait for me, as they do for all the women of men at war. It will mean a conscious, determined, fiercely vigilant effort; and I believe that it is fine that it should be so. I shall feel nearer to you that way.

  First, there is one white lie that I shall not utter, either to you or myself: that I do not feel fear. Fear is one of the prime realities of these times. When we were too lazy or too ignorant to know our enemy and fear him, we came near losing the world that is blessedly ours. It is right to fear, when it brings courage and fury to a job that must be done. I know for myself that this awareness of what I have at stake has made me work as I have never worked before. I deliberately chose to become a Nurse’s Aide because its demands upon me would be unrelenting, because every second of my time in the hospital I feel myself as a functioning unit in this fight against hate and death. I am worn out when I get home at night, but it is a good fatigue, for which I am grateful.

  There is no time left over in my life for useless and fabricated anxieties. You see, my darling, I feel fear, but somehow I am not afraid. It’s a funny distinction maybe, but you will understand. To be afraid means to me a panicky yielding to anxiety; it means cowering in nightmarish shadows. Fear for a beloved one can translate itself into a multipl
icity of minor anxieties that, if not controlled, can result in a deadly paralysis of body and soul. This will not happen to me, I promise you. I have found that against fear and loneliness work is an indispensable weapon (yes, only a year ago I would have felt horribly stuffy telling you such a thing, but now, and thank God, simple truths no longer call for an apology).

  But don’t, don’t think of me working myself into a coma and coming home to repeat little homilies to myself. You have had my letters every day, so you know that I have tried to keep up some fairly normal social life. When you went away I went through a time when it was hard for me to be with people, even those who are closest to me. I was living for the most part in the memory of our life together, and it became a cherished, a familiar inward world, to which I could withdraw in times of deepest need. That will always be so. But the danger of such an inward world is that it can become a way of escaping from reality. And that I have learned not to do.

  If you could see me some mornings walking the three blocks along our street toward the subway, with a nod here, a hello there, a gay wave of the hand to the little candy-store man at the corner, you would blink and . . . well, laugh at and with me. Yet I would hate to see this new neighborliness go, when the war is over. I’ve come to know all these people through the air-raid drills, the campaigns, the collections, the sudden spontaneous talks in the shops, by the newsstand. Neither you nor I are exactly folksy types, but I know, from your letters about the men with you, and from what I’m feeling about people these days, we are better off, more genuinely you and me, now that we are no longer on the sidelines. I feel that we are going to love each other as much, and like each other more, when we are again together. It’s odd, but these days I am with you not only when I am listening to our Mozart quintet, but when I am explaining her ration card to that deaf old lady three doors down. . . .