Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  At the same time, any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, “I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.”

  It seemed to me after my first experiences that the theatre was the most pragmatic of all art media. The first question of ordinary producers is: “Will it get across on Broadway?” The merit of a play is a secondary consideration and they shy from any play whose formula has not been proved a number of times.

  The Member of the Wedding is unconventional because it is not a literal kind of play. It is an inward play and the conflicts are inward conflicts. The antagonist is not personified, but is a human condition of life; the sense of moral isolation. In this respect, The Member of the Wedding has an affinity with classical plays—which we are not used to in the modern theatre where the protagonist and antagonist are present in palpable conflict on the stage. The play has other abstract values; it is concerned with the weight of time, the hazard of human existence, bolts of chance. The reaction of the characters to these abstract phenomena projects the movement of the play. Some observers who failed to apprehend this modus operandi felt the play to be fragmentary because they did not account for this aesthetic concept.

  This design was intuitive. Each creative work is determined by its own chemistry; the artist can only precipitate the inherent reactions if he approached the work subjectively. I must say I did not realize the proper dimensions of this play, the values of the unseen qualities involved, until the work had taken on its own life. An uncanny aspect of creation is that the artist approaches his destiny (or the destiny of his work) circuitously and only when the chemistry is sufficiently advanced does he realize the dimension of his work. I know that was my experience in writing The Member of the Wedding.

  I foresaw that this play had also another problem as a lyric tragicomedy. The funniness and the grief are often co-existent in a single line and I did not know how an audience would respond to this. But Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon de Wilde, under the superb direction of Harold Clurman, brought to their fugue-like parts a dazzling precision and harmony.

  Some observers have wondered if any drama as unconventional as this should be called a play. I cannot comment on that. I only know that The Member of the Wedding is a vision that a number of artists have realized with fidelity and love.

  Playwright Tells of Pangs

  I AM writing this from a hotel room in Princeton. Now that “The Square Root of Wonderful” is in production and the script is in order, I think back to the time when I first started this play. That was almost three years ago.

  Saint Subber called me on the telephone and asked to come to Nyack to see me. Being involved with other work, I was not too hospitable. But the year before, I had written a seedling version of a play which I knew was not too good and with a great deal of diffidence, showed it to him. He too knew that it was not good but could see the promise and asked me to work on it. I said I would think it over and call him the next day.

  In the night, I suddenly saw the opening scene. Saint came to Nyack the following day and the play that had withered, began to flourish. But it was to take about three years to fulfill itself and many a time, Saint and I would quarrel and cuss each other out. I talked about a whip-carrying guard in a salt mine, but still the play had hold of me and he had faith.

  I am drawn to the theatre because it is one of the most strict forms of art. Don’t think I am passing esthetic judgments, but to me a play is like a fugue, the first theme is announced, then developed and finally resolved.

  “The Member of the Wedding” was like a cameo—“The Square Root of Wonderful” is a larger play, but the rules of my esthetic sense are the same. The theme of “The Square Root of Wonderful” is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin; as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and the love, which is the square root of wonderful.

  It is not seemly to belly-ache about the problems of play writing, but I remember one dismal afternoon in spring, when the snow lay porous and melting on the road. Saint took me out to a beautiful French restaurant, but we hardly touched the good food or drank the wine. Knowing that the play we had then was not the square root of wonderful, we sat defeated and desolate.

  Then we drove back to Nyack without saying a word. The next day I started again, putting a different emphasis on the characters involved, but the weights changed so radically that I realized that this was not what I wanted either.

  One of the main problems was to handle tragedy and comedy almost simultaneously. If there is a funny scene or love scene in the face of sickness or ruin, it is offensive unless it is handled with the proper emotional progression. But those two elements had to be there, and after that second evolution, I started the next and almost final version.

  Now I sit in this hotel making those picayune last-minute changes which are irritating but so important when they are magnified on stage. I have learned from years of writing that you write out of abundance and strength, and deadlines are a hindrance. But in the theatre deadlines are necessary and often the abundance and strength flickers, but the author works on. As Tennessee Williams once told me: “It takes a tough old bird to work in the theatre.”

  The Dark Brilliance of Edward Albee

  THIS SUMMER I spent part of my vacation with Edward Albee at Water Island, a small community on Fire Island. I had already loved his work, so with this vacation I was well prepared to love him as a person. He is gentle and dignified, and his personality reflects his enormous talents. A great lover of nature, he would walk for miles on the beach. At night he would point out the stars to me. When I think about Edward I always think about stars and starlight.

  Other evenings he would read aloud. He read Happy Days by Samuel Beckett out loud. In preparation for the long reading of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, we had an early supper. Edward cooked a magnificent supper for us. (He’s a grand cook.)

  Another evening he read aloud the first act of The Ballad of the Sad Café, and I was thrilled by it. He is adapting The Ballad of the Sad Café for his next play.

  Edward started writing plays only four years ago. Before that he had written poetry, which surely is the best way for a serious writer to begin. His marvelous poems have been set to music by William Flanagan. His plays, The Zoo Story, The American Dream and The Death of Bessie Smith, have been performed Off Broadway, and like a comet in the sky they reached the whole world. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is his first Broadway production. This play, as luminous as the stars, is about the destruction of a dream. It has the passion of a Greek drama although the setting is in an Eastern college town. It shows malicious humiliation and love and tenderness and bitterness. It has in it compassion, the wildest humor and the dark brilliance that, to me, is peculiar to the genius of Edward Albee.

  POEMS

  The Mortgaged Heart

  The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone,

  Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim

  The lover’s senses, the mortgaged heart.

  Watch twice the orchard blossoms in gray rain

  And to the cold rose skies bring twin surprise.

  Endure each summons once, and once again;

  Experience multiplied by two—the duty recognized.

  Instruct the quivering spirit, instant nerve

  To schizophrenic master serve,

  Or like a homeless Doppelgänger

  Blind love might wander.

  The mortgage of the dead is known.

  Prepare the cherished wreath, the garland door.

  But the secluded ash, the humble bone—

  Do the dead know?

  When We Are Lost

  When we are lost what image tells?

/>   Nothing resembles nothing. Yet nothing

  Is not blank. It is configured Hell:

  Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,

  Demanding furniture. All unrelated

  And with air between.

  The terror. Is it of Space, of Time?

  Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?

  To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,

  All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)

  Is agony immobilized. While Time,

  The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

  The Dual Angel

  A Meditation on Origin and Choice

  INCANTATION TO LUCIFER

  Angel disarmed, lay down your cunning, finally tell

  The currents, stops and altitudes between Heaven and Hell.

  Or were the scalding stars too loud for your celestial velleities,

  The everlasting zones of emptiness uncanny to your imperious hand?

  Did you admit the shocks and shuttles of the circumstance,

  And were the aeons ever sinister

  Or were they just vulgar as a marathon dance?

  Did you keep camping all through chaos

  Comparing colors of infinity to neon lights?

  Forever were you inconsolable during the downward flight

  Spurning the comfort of affinity and rose, the rest of sunset, clarity,

  Avoiding rainbows in that desperate clash against the stars?

  Your tearless wizardry soon caught the rhyme

  Of universe, the planetary chimes, atomic quandary.

  It took you only a zone or two to riddle

  The top-secret density relating Space to Time.

  Did once your hurtling senses turn

  To paradise that you had robbed and spurned?

  Did you once wonder, one time weep?

  As earth nears, turn again defaulting eyes to paradise,

  Defaulting eyes, turn once again

  With the presentiment of further bliss

  Before you shudder with the first and final kiss.

  HYMEN, O HYMEN

  It was the time when the newest star was inchoate

  And there were only revolving seas and land still malleable.

  There was no garden at that time—but there was God.

  For when the sun burst God chose the minority side of firmament

  And settled on earth to study an experiment.

  We know nothing of that meeting, nothing at all

  Only the protean firelight fearful on the wall.

  Since we only know it happened it’s anybody’s guess

  How abdicated angel asked for and found God’s rest.

  Ecce, the emperor of velocity and glare

  The splendor from his awful odyssey, his starlit hair

  Landed on a rim of ocean, striding to shore

  The radiant grace and arrogance before

  The blue-veined instep faltered and slowly dimmed the pirate eyes.

  Ecce, the quailing emperor against a violet sea and the primeval skies.

  Behold this homage to a majesty almost impossible to explain

  For after the heavenly holdup God was left rather plain.

  Deliberate and unadorned, but after all what need

  Of scepter had the hand that hewed the Universe?

  And ruler of infinity has little use for speed.

  His visage black with wind and sun, almighty hand vibrant with strife

  Feeling in blank mysterious seas the secret miracle of life.

  Imagine the encounter when the polarities chance

  When stars of love and sorrow met Satan’s jeweled glance.

  We are told nothing of conception, really nothing at all.

  Only the firelit symbols of an antique nurse scary and changing on the wall.

  We are told nothing

  Of the vibrato of desire remorseless

  Until the solar-plexal swinging

  Orchestrates to all flesh singing.

  Post coitum, omnia tristia sunt.

  Sadness, then sleep, the blaze of noon, love’s gladness.

  There was no witness of this bridal night

  Only azoic seascape and interlocking angels’ might.

  So now we speculate with filial wonder,

  Fabricate that night of love and ponder

  On the quietude of Satan in our Father’s arms:

  Velocity stilled, the restful shade.

  Satan we can understand—but what was God’s will

  That cosmic night before we were made?

  The next day He completed His experiment

  Found in the seas that atom He willed alive

  Nursed in His awesome hand, taught to survive

  The shock of creation, watched with His love and care

  Astride in ocean and unknowing that Satan’s ocean-skipping eye was there

  Envisaging end in the beginning, wrestling with God’s life,

  The eye of guile had sliced the atom with Satanic knife.

  LOVE AND THE RIND OF TIME

  What is Time that man should be so mindful:

  The earth is aged 500 thousand millions of years,

  Allowing some hundred thousand millions of margin for error

  And man evolving a mere half-million years of consciousness, twilight and terror

  Only a flicker of eternity divides us from unknowing beast

  And how far are we from the fern, the rose, essential yeast?

  Indeed in these light aeons how far

  From animal to evening star?

  Skip time for now and fix the eye upon eternity

  Eye gazing backward or forward it is the same

  Whether Mozart or short-order cook with an infirmity

  Except the illuminations alter their shafts

  Except we would rather be Mozart, we want to last as long as possible, to radiate, to sing

  Although in eternity it may be the same thing.

  In God’s cosmos according to report

  Nothing lapses, no gene is lost

  After centuries may bustle in the sport

  Which will in time command the line.

  Those who find it a little harder to live

  And therefore live a little harder,

  As struggling gene in oceanic plant

  Predestine voluntary cells that give

  The evolutionary turn to fish, then beast

  With multiplying brain that dominates earth’s feasts.

  From weed to dinosaur through the peripheries of stars

  From furtherest star imperiled on the rind of time,

  How long to core of love in human mind?

  THE DUAL ANGEL

  The world dazed by Satanic glares

  Like country children spangled-eyed at county fairs

  Seeing no terror in trapeze, kinetic thrill of zones above listening,

  And the unheeded shrill of the world lost, rocketing in space,

  Despairs of those who are struck down upon Hell’s floor and die—or crawl awhile a little more.

  The screams are heard by blasted ears within the radiation zone

  And hanging eyes upon a cheek must see the charred and iridescent craze—

  Earth orphaned by atom, each man alone.

  The furious intellect relating furtherest space to beyondest time,

  Exalting abstractions, vaulting the 1 2 3,

  Defaulting from the simplest kinship, disjoining man from man,

  Seeing across oceans, and stumbling on a grain of sand. Almighty God!

  After the half a million years this is the century of decision

  Between obscenest suicide and Man’s transfigured vision.

  Here are the flowering plant, beast and the dual angel,

  The living who struggles with the weight of dead and,

  Recognizing victory, surmises radiance in lead.

  FATHER, UPON THY IMAGE WE ARE SPANNED

  Why are we split u
pon our double nature, how are we planned?

  Father, upon what image are we spanned?

  Turning helpless in the garden of right and wrong

  Mocked by the reversibles of good and evil

  Heir of the exile. Lucifer, and brother of Thy universal Son

  Who said it is finished when Thy synthesis was just begun.

  We suffer the sorrow of separation and division

  With a heart that blazes with Christ’s vision:

  That though we be deviously natured, dual-planned,

  Father, upon Thy image we are spanned.

  AVE

  Stone Is Not Stone

  There was a time when stone was stone

  And a face on the street was a finished face.

  Between the Thing, myself and God alone

  There was an instant symmetry.

  Since you have altered all my world this trinity is twisted:

  Stone is not stone

  And faces like the fractioned characters in dreams are incomplete

  Until in the child’s inchoate face

  I recognize your exiled eyes.

  The soldier climbs the glaring stair leaving your shadow.

  Tonight, this torn room sleeps

  Beneath the starlight bent by you.

  Saraband

  Select your sorrows if you can,

  Edit your ironies, even grieve with guile.

  Adjust to a world divided

  Which demands your candid senses stoop to labyrinthine wiles

  What natural alchemy lends

  To the scrubby grocery boy with dirty hair

  The lustre of Apollo, or Golden Hyacinth’s fabled stare.

  If you must cross the April park, be brisk:

  Avoid the cadence of the evening, eyes from afar