Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  This leads me to the thing that constantly I keep in mind. I am not alone. All around me I see other women who are faced with exactly my situation. And as a soldier can find protection in the spirit of camaraderie that always accompanies the horrors of war, so those of us who are working together here at home can find strength in the knowledge that our emotions are shared by all of those around us. These are the times when people must reach out to each other. We must feel that we are a necessary and integral part of something larger than ourselves. We must assume our individual responsibilities to the limit of our capacity. We must give all that is in us. And in these times, when hatred and cruelty are so entrenched, we each of us must give that most precious gift of all, our love.

  I have finally come back to the word that is the subject of this letter. I want you to know that my love for you has given my life, my capacity for all experience, an intensity and vigor that I would not have otherwise. I want you to know that because of you my love for others, my faith in the ultimate triumph of the human spirit, has been nourished and sustained. And I want you to know that I will fight with all that is in me to preserve this love—just as you will be fighting your part in this battle, somewhere far away. We know what we are fighting for. We know that it will not be easy, that the obstacles ahead of us are real and tragic obstacles. But love such as ours has the tenacity and power to overcome even the conditions with which we are now faced. Tonight I keep thinking of the sonnet you love so well:

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds——

  Our love is an ever fixed mark, which we will work toward and fight for. And in spite of separation, a separation the length of which we cannot know, our love is not time’s fool. And in the final victory I know we will have won our own triumph—the preservation of our love, our life together.

  Our Heads Are Bowed

  ON THANKSGIVING, this November 1945, the day that is set aside for ritual gratitude to God, our heads are bowed. This day of thanks is a national day, and never has our country had more to be grateful for, and at the same time never have we so needed godly counsel. After the long years of universal agony and waste, the war is ended; today we rejoice in peace. But there is a gravity in our rejoicing, the sense of loss, the quiet sternness of power when combined with conscience. In a world of shattered cities and ruin, our land is one of the very few that has escaped the physical destruction of this war, a country of unblemished wholeness on this globe of misery and stunned want. It is with the deference proper to the suffering of unreckoned others that on this day our heads are bowed.

  Thanksgiving is essentially a family day. It is the Thursday of November when the separate members of the family assemble to join in a day of shared feasting, mutual prayer. It comes at the end of the harvest season, when the bright grain is barned and the fruits of the earth have matured in all their lavish varieties—a season of golden richness before the fallow of the wintertime. But although our earth has been undisturbed by the wreck of war, we have known a more insidious disruption. These last Thanksgivings have been marked by absences. Our husbands, brothers and loved ones have been missing from the family gatherings; the strength of the nation has been away. So that at best our feasts were bleak. A great part of those who have been absent will not be in our homes today. They will observe another Thanksgiving in unfamiliar weathers and distant lands. And there are others coming homeward on the seas. But peace for most of us has restored a measure of serenity. The torn nerves can become more tranquil, the individual anguish of suspense has been eased or put at rest. It is in the time of greatest calamity, war, that human beings realize how fugitive is personal happiness and what a fragile grasp we bring to the guidance of our personal lives. For war and chance are indivisible. The sense of hazard is now quieted, and on this day of gratitude the homes of most of us can be free of anxiety and alarm. Many of us are fortunate in having our soldiers close to us at home and able to lead our prayer. For our soldiers, whether at home or far away, who have endured the ghastliness of war and suffered the terrors and miseries of battle that made possible the peace, our heads are bowed.

  There is no family on this day who will not reflect the sorrow of those of us who have been dealt a deeper loss. There are our men in hospitals; most of these can with the aid of science—that science that can work equally for darkness as well as light—be cured and returned to us soon. But there are others who will never be whole again; the mutilated, blind and permanently maimed. For those who have suffered such affliction, we can only promise that the acknowledgment of our debt will endure through all our generation. The prisoners of war are home or soon will be here; we pray that those who have suffered the willful torments of our enemies will, with our love and patient care, soon overcome the shock, the debilitation, and regain the peace of health again. There are those loved ones who will never join with us in prayer again, those who have made the mute and final sacrifice of life. For the families of the dead only exquisite understanding of a poet can be trusted now.

  All the whole world is living without war,

  And yet I cannot find out any peace.

  We pause in the voiceless prayer that those who have known this extremity of loss will find the strength to resist lasting despair, and will, through patience and sorrow, succeed to peace. For the grieving today our heads are bowed.

  This is a national day, and we are a proud nation. Our land is broad, a country of many toils and many weathers. In another way our land is varied. We have not grown strong from bigotry and reasonless exclusions. We have grown mighty, not through prejudice and insularity, but by the peoples of many nations and the genius of varied racial strains. Our pride is not the narrow, distrustful pride of the weak. It is the pride of a generous nation, able to absorb the human gifts with which it has been endowed; and we pray that our pride will be free of all bigotry—the pride of the great as well as the strong. For this our heads are bowed.

  On Thanksgiving, 1945, we pray for a rare wisdom. The last of the weapons of this past war have made it certain that, if peace cannot be maintained, the future of mankind is precarious as it has never been in all of history. This past war has left whole continents of hunger, of the dazed lost. We pray that as a nation we will have the wisdom to justly and generously use our power, to work with others so that a lasting order can be secured. With the grave knowledge of our responsibility we pray for clarity of spirit, moral might. The soul of humanity must not be exceeded by the amoral mind. And so it is for the greatest of all blessings, wisdom of heart, that today, in humility, our heads are bowed. Amen.

  AMERICAN PLACES, AMERICAN IDENTITY

  Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood

  BROOKLYN, in a dignified way, is a fantastic place. The street where I now live has a quietness and sense of permanence that seem to belong to the nineteenth century. The street is very short. At one end, there are comfortable old houses, with gracious façades and pleasant backyards in the rear. Down on the next block, the street becomes more heterogeneous, for there is a fire station; a convent; and a small candy factory. The street is bordered with maple-trees, and in the autumn the children rake up the leaves and make bonfires in the gutter.

  It is strange in New York to find yourself living in a real neighbourhood. I buy my coal from the man who lives next-door. And I am very curious about the old lady living on my right. She has a mania for picking up stray, starving dogs. Besides a dozen of these dogs, she keeps a little green, shrewd monkey as her pet and chief companion. She is said to be very rich and very stingy. The druggist on the corner has told me she was once in jail for smashing the windows of a saloon in a temperance riot.

  “The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to—”

  On coming into the corner drug store in the evening, you are apt to hear a desperate voice repeating some such maxim. Mr. Parker, the druggist, sits behind the counter after supper, strug
gling with his daughter’s homework—she can’t seem to get on well in school. Mr. Parker has owned his store for thirty years. He has a pale face, with watery grey eyes and a silky little yellow mustache that he wets and combs out frequently. He is rather like a cat. And when I weigh myself, he sidles up quietly beside me and peers over my shoulder as I adjust the scale. When the weights are balanced, he always gives me a quick little glance, but he has never made any comment, nor indicated in any way whether he thought I weighed too little or too much.

  On every other subject, Mr. Parker is very talkative. He has always lived in Brooklyn, and his mind is a rag-bag for odd scraps of information. For instance, in our neighbourhood there is a narrow alley called Love Lane. “The alley comes by its name,” he told me, “because more than a century ago two bachelors by the name of DeBevoise lived in the corner house with their niece, a girl of such beauty that her suitors mooned in the alley half the night, writing poetry on the fence.” These same old uncles, Mr. Parker added, cultivated the first strawberries sold in New York in their back garden. It is pleasant to think of this old household—the parlour with the coloured glass windows glowing in the candlelight, the two old gentlemen brooding quietly over a game of chess, and the young niece, demure on a footstool, eating strawberries and cream.

  “The square of the hypotenuse—” As you go out of the drug store, Mr. Parker’s voice will carry on where he had left off, and his daughter will sit there, sadly popping her chewing-gum.

  Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister. Things move more slowly out here (the street-cars still rattle leisurely down most of the main streets), and there is a feeling for tradition.

  The history of Brooklyn is not so exciting as it is respectable. In the middle of the past century, many of the liberal intellectuals lived here, and Brooklyn was a hot-bed of abolitionist activity. Walt Whitman worked on the Brooklyn Daily Eagle until his anti-slavery editorials cost him his job. Henry Ward Beecher used to preach at the old Plymouth Church. Talleyrand lived here on Fulton Street during his exile in America, and he used to walk primly every day beneath the elm-trees. Whittier stayed frequently at the old Hooper home.

  The first native of Brooklyn I got to know when I first came out here was the electrician who did some work at my house. He is a lively young Italian with a warm, quick face and a pleasant way of whistling operatic arias while on the job. On the third day he was working for me, he brought in a bottle of bright homemade wine, as his first child, a boy, had been born the night before. The wine was sour and clean to the tongue, and when we had drunk some of it the electrician invited me to a little supper to be held a week later at his house on the other side of Brooklyn, near Sheepshead Bay. The party was a fine occasion. The old grandfather who had come over from Italy sixty years ago was there. At night, the old man fishes for eels out in the Bay, and when the weather is fine he spends most of the day lying in a cart in the backyard, out in the sun. He had the face of a charming old satyr, and he held the new baby with the casualness of one who has walked the floor with many babies in his day.

  “He is very ugly, this little one,” he kept saying. “But it is clear that he will be smart. Smart and very ugly.”

  The food at the party was rich, wholesome Italian fare—provolone cheese, salami, pastries, and more of the red wine. A stream of kinsmen and neighbours kept coming in and out of the house all evening. This family had lived in the same house near the Bay for three generations, and the grandfather had not been out of Brooklyn for years.

  Here in Brooklyn there is always the feeling of the sea. On the streets near the water-front, the air has a fresh, coarse smell, and there are many seagulls. One of the most gaudy streets I know stretches between Brooklyn Bridge and the Navy Yard. At three o’clock in the morning, when the rest of the city is silent and dark, you can come suddenly on a little area as vivacious as a country fair. It is Sands Street, the place where sailors spend their evenings when they come here to port. At any hour of the night some excitement is going on in Sands Street. The sunburned sailors swagger up and down the sidewalks with their girls. The bars are crowded, and there are dancing, music, and straight liquor at cheap prices.

  These Sands Street bars have their own curious traditions also. Some of the women you find there are vivid old dowagers of the street who have such names as The Duchess or Submarine Mary. Every tooth in Submarine Mary’s head is made of solid gold—and her smile is rich-looking and satisfied. She and the rest of these old habitués are greatly respected. They have a stable list of sailor pals and are known from Buenos Aires to Zanzibar. They are conscious of their fame and don’t bother to dance or flirt like the younger girls, but sit comfortably in the centre of the room with their knitting, keeping a sharp eye on all that goes on. In one bar, there is a little hunchback who struts in proudly every evening, and is petted by everyone, given free drinks, and treated as a sort of mascot by the proprietor. There is a saying among sailors that when they die they want to go to Sands Street.

  Cutting through the business and financial centre of Brooklyn is Fulton Street. Here are to be found dozens of junk and antique shops that are exciting to people who like old and fabulous things. I came to be quite at home in these places, as I bought most of my furniture there. If you know what you are about, there are good bargains to be found—old carved sideboards, elegant pier-glasses, beautiful Lazy Susans, and other odd pieces can be bought at half the price you would pay anywhere else. These shops have a musty, poky atmosphere, and the people who own them are an incredible crew.

  The woman from whom I got most of my things is called Miss Kate. She is lean, dark, and haggard, and she suffers much from cold. When you go into the junk-shop, you will most likely find her hovering over a little coal stove in the back room. She sleeps every night wrapped in a Persian rug and lying on a green velvet Victorian couch. She has one of the handsomest and dirtiest faces I can remember.

  Across the street from Miss Kate, there is a competitor with whom she often quarrels violently over prices—but still she always refers to him as “Ein Edler Mensch,” and once when he was to be evicted for failure to pay the rent she put up the cash for him.

  “Miss Kate is a good woman,” this competitor said to me. “But she dislikes washing herself. So she only bathes once a year, when it is summer. I expect she’s just about the dirtiest woman in Brooklyn.” His voice as he said this was not at all malicious; rather, there was in it a quality of wondering pride. That is one of the things I love best about Brooklyn. Everyone is not expected to be exactly like everyone else.

  Loneliness . . . An American Malady

  THIS CITY, NEW YORK—consider the people in it, the eight million of us. An English friend of mine, when asked why he lived in New York City, said that he liked it here because he could be so alone. While it was my friend’s desire to be alone, the aloneness of many Americans who live in cities is an involuntary and fearful thing. It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady. What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest for identity.

  To the spectator, the amateur philosopher, no motive among the complex ricochets of our desires and rejections seems stronger or more enduring than the will of the individual to claim his identity and belong. From infancy to death, the human being is obsessed by these dual motives. During our first weeks of life, the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him, and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes a pristine wonder.

  Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being solves. Indeed, it is this self-consciousness that removes us from lower animals. This primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutati
ons that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself.

  After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

  In The Member of the Wedding the lovely 12-year-old girl, Frankie Addams, articulates this universal need: “The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.”

  Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: “Who am I?” “Why am I?” “Where am I going?”—and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.

  For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

  The loneliness of Americans does not have its source in xenophobia; as a nation we are an outgoing people, reaching always for immediate contacts, further experience. But we tend to seek out things as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyalties, knows little of the moral loneliness that is native to us Americans. While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick—not only from society in the way of all creative minds, but within the orbit of his own art.