Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  I yearned for one particular thing; to get away from Columbus and to make my mark in the world. At first I wanted to be a concert pianist, and Mrs. Tucker encouraged me in this. Then I realized that Daddy would not be able to send me to Juilliard or any other great school of music to study. I know my Daddy was embarrassed about this, and loving him as I did, I quietly put away all thoughts of a music career, and told him I had switched “Professions,” and was going to be a writer. That was something I could do at home, and I wrote every morning.

  My first book was called “A Reed of Pan,” and it was, of course, about a musician who really studied and accomplished things. However, I was not satisfied with the book and did not send it to New York, although I’d heard of agents and so forth. I was sixteen years old and kept on writing. The next book was called “Brown River.” I don’t remember very much about it except it was strongly influenced by Sons and Lovers.

  My grandmother had willed “to her gray-eyed grandchild” the only article of value that she had: a beautiful emerald and diamond ring. I put it on my hand just once, because I knew that I had to sell it. My Daddy, who was a jeweler in the town, sold it so that I was able to go to New York and take a course in creative writing and philosophy.

  So, at last, I was leaving home and going to study. A girl I’d never met before was taking courses at Columbia, and she invited me to share her room with her. Daddy took one look at her and was dubious about the arrangements, because the girl had dyed hair, at a time when only “fast” girls dyed their hair. However, he let me go.

  I traveled by boat from Savannah to New York, so for the first time I saw the ocean, and later, marvel of marvels, I saw snow.

  My new friend lived upstairs over a linen shop. Immediately I noticed that she was seldom at home—in fact, she had a boy-friend with whom she spent the night. A man followed me upstairs and tried to put his arms around me but I pushed him away so violently that he ricocheted against the wall. So I was stuck there in that lonely room, with a sense of menace and a fear of strange men. In the daytime I’d go to Macy’s and just sit in a telephone booth where I knew I was safe. Then back to the horror of a sleepless night.

  Finally, I had the sense to go to the Dean of Women at Columbia, and ask her advice.

  “How old are you?” she asked me.

  “Seventeen,” I said proudly.

  “You’re much too young to be living alone in the city,” and she suggested a Girls’ Club for students.

  I got my belongings together and moved into the Parnassus Club. There, for the first time in more than a week, I slept. I slept for twenty-four hours.

  A girl at the Club was practicing a Bach fugue, and I felt completely at home. I made friends easily and thankfully. When my first and special friend told me that she was going to move to the Three Arts Club, I decided to join her.

  Since my financial means were somewhat slender, I got a job with a magazine called More Fun and New Comics. Me, a tragic writer, editing the funny papers. The job was to be the “front man” for, as I soon discovered, the magazines were being sued. I was sincerely grateful when they fired me after a couple of months.

  I coasted along when my Daddy sent me a small check. Then I was faced with the job situation again, and I found one with Mrs. Louise B. Field, who insisted on calling me a real estate “salesman.” I checked with customers about apartments in New York. The main part of the job, I remember, was getting sour cream for Mrs. Field, which she would eat with a long ice tea spoon. But once, when I was reading Proust behind the ledger and got involved in a long Proustian sentence, Mrs. Field caught me. She picked up the ledger and banged me over the head with it. Her parting, venomous shot was “you will never amount to anything in this world,” and banged me again with the ledger. So, under such circumstances, I was fired again.

  Meanwhile, my friend Edwin in Columbus had written me that while he was at the library he had met a young man and had invited him to his house for drinks. He said he was charming, and he thought that I would like him very much and we would get together when I came home. So in June of 1935 I went home and met Reeves McCullers at Edwin Peacock’s apartment. It was a shock, the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him; he was the best looking man I had ever seen. He also talked of Marx and Engels, and I knew he was a liberal, which was important, to my mind, in a backward Southern community. Edwin, Reeves and I spent whole days together, and one night when Reeves and I were walking alone, looking up at the stars, I did not realize how time had passed, and when Reeves brought me home, my parents were distressed, as it was two o’clock in the morning. However, my mother was also charmed by Reeves, and he would bring her beautiful records. At that time he was a clerk in the army at Fort Benning, Georgia. We both loved sports and often Reeves would borrow Edwin’s bicycle and we would go off to the Girl Scout camp, about thirty miles away. Mother would pack a lunch and we’d ride side by side, stopping off now and then for a cold Coke. Chess was his great hobby, and after swimming in the brown, cool water, we would play a game (he would always beat me). Then swimming again and then the long ride home. I was eighteen years old, and this was my first love. He was going to New York to study, and I knew his departure would be sad for me.

  I’d been writing for a couple of years and Reeves said he was going to be a writer also. Late that summer I developed a low-grade fever, and the doctor suspected tuberculosis, so I was kept at home. It turned out to be a childhood attack of rheumatic fever, but was never properly diagnosed as such.

  Reeves left at the beginning of the school year in early September, having bought himself out of the army. At the same time his aunt had left him some money which he very generously wanted to divide with me, but I refused and told him he would need it to get through school. I did not realize the lost quality of Reeves until he was truly lost.

  In the meantime, with Reeves gone and Edwin my only friend, I lived in the thought of his return at Christmas time. Fearful and ill, I spent my time writing and hoping and waiting for Reeves. He came back at Christmas and for the first time we drank sherry instead of the beer we had always drunk together. Occasionally he drank whiskey. No, I never recognized the lost quality of Reeves McCullers until it was much too late to save him or myself. He had a splendid constitution and I would not have recognized alcoholism in those days. We had never made love sexually because I told him I did not want that experience until I was clear in my mind that I would love him forever.

  After the Christmas holidays Reeves persuaded me to join him in New York. I was much better, although I still had the low-grade temperature. I told my parents I was going with him, and so we went to his apartment in Westchester.

  As soon as I arrived there Reeves dropped out of school, and we spent two months together. I told him I felt he should have a job before we married, so we went down South again. He went to Charlotte, North Carolina, while I stayed in Columbus. Finally, he wired he had a job and was coming to get me. When I think of my parents’ patience and understanding I can only marvel.

  “She’s the most truthful child I’ve ever known,” my father always said, but now that I’m an adult, I wonder at their patience and understanding.

  So Reeves and I were married in 1937 in the living room at home, and went to Charlotte to begin married life.

  My cousin insisted I was married in a green velvet gown and oxfords. Could be? I can’t remember. There was nobody at the wedding but Edwin and the immediate family. Edwin played the Bach double concerto for violins softly during the ceremony, and Mother wept as mothers are supposed to do, and Daddy blew his nose. After the ceremony we had the usual chicken salad and champagne.

  The first days of my married life were happy although I made the usual bride’s mistakes. I cooked a beautiful chicken, after carefully removing all the pin feathers, and put it in the oven, not realizing it also had to be cleaned. When Reeves came home he said, “What in the world is this awful odor in the house?”

  Absorbed in The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter, I had not noticed anything. Reeves opened the windows, turned on the electric fan and said, “Baby, what is it?” I told him I was cooking a chicken and it seemed to be rotten. It took a little time before we realized my mistake; I had neglected to clean the inside of the chicken. He just laughed and said, “We’d better eat at the S & W tonight.” In spite of that experience, married life was both exhilarating and a comfort. Every day when I’d finish my work, I would read it out loud to Reeves, and at one point I asked, “Do you think it’s good?”

  He said, “No! I don’t think it’s good—I know it’s great.”

  The outline, which I more or less stuck to, was a moral support to me. In this respect, I must say, I had never written so detailed an outline, and that was only done because of the Houghton Mifflin contest.

  I looked forward to Saturday, because that was the day I cleaned the apartment instead of writing. Reeves gave me moral support and wrang out the wash which was too heavy for me.

  We had no other friends and were content to be alone. On Saturday night, the house shining and my pencils sharpened and put away, we went to the wine store and bought a gallon of sherry, and occasionally Reeves would take me to the S & W, which was an inexpensive restaurant in town. I could feel in Reeves none of the unhappiness or dissatisfaction that later led to his ruin and death.

  Our aim in life during those days was to go to New York, and often we would just look at the parked cars with New York license plates and dream about the time when we, too, could go to the magic city.

  At 4:00 A.M. one morning, after about two years of marriage, and with my full consent, Reeves indeed set out for the city, while I waited at home. Home was not a pleasant place without him. I was more aware of the miserable surroundings after he left.

  It was a one-family home, divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The husband would come in and slap her, and the mother would cry.

  “If I ever get out of this house,” I would say to myself, but the words dwindled after the scream of the sick child, and the poor mother’s useless efforts to calm her. I hated to go to the toilet because of the stench. I know my parents would have helped if they had seen me in such misery, but I was too proud.

  After one day of job searching Reeves returned. He had found nothing, but he said he had some leads.

  A month later we went to New York, as I had gotten some money from Houghton Mifflin who had finally published The Heart. At that moment, Reeves had accepted an invitation to sail a boat to Nantucket (he was a good sailor) with a friend called Jack, whom we had met a few months previously. After the poverty we had suffered, I hesitated to take a train, so I took a bus alone and went to stay temporarily with Miss Mills, whom I’d met in one of my writing classes. She found me a cheap boarding house somewhere on the west side, where there, cut off and lonely, I passed the day that my first book was published.

  Meanwhile, I got a mysterious telegram from Robert Linscott, whom I vaguely recognized as one of my publishers, to meet him the next day at the Bedford Hotel. My solitude was lightened. It was June, 1940, and I wondered what dress I should wear. Since my work had removed me quite from the world of fashion, I saw that none of my old clothes would do. I went to Klein’s and in the heat and clamor of that store I bought a summer suit. So next day I was all ready for Mr. Linscott.

  In the meantime I had started a third novel; I guess that once started, I was unable to stop writing. It was to be a book about a Jew from Germany. I wanted advice desperately so I had written to Erika Mann asking for her help. She was very kind and set up an appointment with me, and it worked out that since both she and Mr. Linscott were staying at the Bedford Hotel, we were all able to meet each other for the first time that day in her room.

  We discussed the publication of Heart, and I told Mr. Linscott I’d already written a second novel.

  “One thing at a time, my dear,” he said.

  He invited me to come to Boston to stay with him and his family, and I promptly accepted. He was the best editor at Houghton Mifflin and he gave me good advice. At this same meeting I discussed the plans for my new book, and Miss Mann gave me welcome advice also.

  While we were thus engaged a stranger came into Erika’s room. She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life, beautiful, blonde, with straight short hair. There was a look of suffering on her face that I could not define. As she was bodily resplendent I could only think of Myshkin’s meeting with Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot, in which he experienced “terror, pity and love.” She was introduced by Erika as Madame Clarac. She was dressed in the height of simple summer fashion, that even I could recognize as a creation of one of the great Paris couturiers. I did not know that a dear friend of hers picked out all of her clothes, as Annemarie wouldn’t have cared or noticed.

  She asked me to call her Annemarie right away, and we became friends immediately. At her invitation, I saw her the next day and she said, “You don’t know what it means to be cured of this terrible habit.”

  “What terrible habit?” I asked.

  “Didn’t anybody tell you about me?”

  “No,” I said. “What’s there to tell?”

  “I’ve been taking morphine since I’m eighteen years old.”

  Knowing nothing of morphine or the effects of the habit, I was not as impressed as I should have been.

  She skipped abruptly to her wanderings in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and all the Far East. Fascinated as I was, I was bewildered.

  “I love you well enough to ask you to promise me that you will never take dope.”

  “Dope?” I said, as it was the last thing that would ever occur to me.

  Then she turned the conversation to her mother who had said when she was seventeen that she was a dope fiend, a communist and a lesbian.

  I asked how it all happened and she told me that it was in Germany, during the years just following World War One. She had left home because her mother had beat her regularly. She would run away but her mother would catch her and bring her back. At home she lived in a castle with her mother and an idiot brother, who could barely speak. That was her environment. Her father wanted to help her, but he was too much dominated by her mother, who, by the way, is said to be the richest woman in Switzerland. She finally ran away for good, and made friends with a distinguished German family.

  I asked her how long it had been since she’d given up morphine, and she answered “today.”

  We were out so late that night that Reeves was worried and furious with me when I came back.

  “By God!” he said. “What were you doing all night?”

  “Just talking.”

  “Are you in love with Mademoiselle Schwarzenbach?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  Quick and powerful as a panther Reeves slapped me on the face, and when I was trying to struggle up, he slapped me again. It was the first time I had ever been slapped in my life, and I was too surprised to speak. Later, I begged Reeves to try to get a job so he wouldn’t just be hanging around the apartment all day wasting time. The apartment, by the way, was on West 11th Street near the docks.

  He said he intended to get a job. Untrained, and in the Depression I knew it would be hard for him, but I knew also he ought to try. He would go to bars to drink, and then come back home and read. The utter uselessness of his life depressed me, and that complete moral depression lasted until his death. I was writing all the time which must have gotten on his nerves. I really don’t know how I stood those months.

  Then Harper’s Bazaar bought Reflections in a Golden Eye, for $500.00, and every morning I went to their office to work with the editor. George Davis was gifted, charming and corrupt. At one point he said, “Since you don’t get along with Reeves and live in such a miserable apartment, why don’t you live with me?”

  My prudery came through and I said, “Like b
rother and sister of course,” which made George burst into roars of laughter. Next day he told me he’d had a dream that we were actually living in the same house; he saw it as an old brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. He asked me if I would go with him and look for such a house? So we went to Brooklyn, talked with the agency, and found a simply charming old brownstone on Middagh Street. We signed the lease together, and after I’d set Reeves up in a better apartment, I felt free to move in with George.

  Meanwhile, George had a dear friend, the great poet W. H. Auden, who was also looking for rooms. We happily invited him to move in, and he had two friends, the very distinguished musician Benjamin Britten, and his friend Peter Pears. In turn they had good friends: Louis MacNeice, Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, Aaron Copland, Jane and Paul Bowles. Thank goodness the house was commodious. Everyone had their own room and there was a large parlor, a big dining room, and Gypsy Rose Lee, a friend of George’s and mine, found us a cook. Everyone went out of his way to give us gifts, as though we were some kind of a multiple bridal party. Our many friends were so happy for us that they furnished our home down to the grand piano, which was donated by Diana Vreeland. At last, after all the years of apartment misery I was living in a comfortable, even luxurious house. My room was of Empire green, very simple and with a small dressing room adjoining. We all paid our share of the expenses, so the house was not too costly.

  Wystan Auden, who at heart is a school teacher, talked with me about Kierkegaard, and for the first time I heard the Dichterliebe. Somewhat exhausted by all these new ideas, I would take refuge at Gypsy’s place, where one of the most complicated things was, “if you go out in the yard and find some lovely greenish apples, I will make a strudel tonight.”

  On her visits to New York my mother met and loved Gypsy; but she didn’t care for Annemarie.

  In spite of, or because of the stimulation of Brooklyn Heights, I was eternally home-sick. Then one day someone suggested that I go to Yaddo, an artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. It was quiet; lunch boxes were sent to the inhabitants in the middle of the day, and we only met at dinner. It was to become a haven to me for a number of years. The old town of Saratoga was dear to my home-sick heart, with the old United States Hotel, the New Worden Bar where every afternoon I would go in the Yaddo station wagon and have cocktails. I met there many distinguished people; Katherine Anne Porter, Eddy Newhouse, John Cheever, Colin McPhee, the great authority of Balinese music, and many others. During that same summer I met William Mayer, who was to be my friend and doctor until his death.