Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  Summer passed into fall and we would all go for long walks together. In the autumn weather tinged by coolness, and often with a beautiful harvest moon, Eddy Newhouse, who was a New Yorker story writer, insisted that I write something for The New Yorker. So one day I wrote a story called “The Jockey.” It took, as I remember, two days, and Eddy was pleased with it; so was The New Yorker. I can think of scads of rejections from The New Yorker in later days as The New Yorker has a certain style, which, I must say, is not my style. Still they paid by the word and paid better than anybody else, so when they offered me a contract to write for them exclusively, I accepted it.

  My agent situation, at that time, was as they say in the news, very fluid. First, I had an agent, Maxim Lieber, who suddenly joined the Communist Party and went away to Mexico, leaving my files in great disorder. Then at the beginning of the next summer I had a letter from a playwright I had heard about but never met. He was Tennessee Williams, and he said that he was in poor health and was afraid he might be dying, and wanted to meet me before that happened. I answered the letter, and soon joined him in Nantucket.

  That summer of 1946 was magnificent. It was a summer of sun and friendship. Every morning we would work at the same table, he at one end, and me at the other. He was working on Summer and Smoke, and I was beginning The Member of the Wedding, as a play, which had been published in novel form in 1946. I told Tennessee about my relations with Reeves. By accident, there was at Sconset, Margot von Opel, the wife of the Opel industrialist, and the friend of Annemarie’s who had always selected her clothes. Tennessee and I had “Spuds Carson” almost every day; that was my recipe, and it consisted of baked potatoes, mashed with butter, onions and cheese. After a long swim it was good fare. Then to break the monotony of the bill of fare Margot invited us to supper, and as she was a marvelous cook, it was always a haute-cuisine affair. Margot raised her own suckling pigs and Tennessee, possessed by some devil, fed them whiskey which made them go wild. So then we had wild shoats and hogs, and when peace was finally restored—a delicious dinner.

  I was a good swimmer, but Tennessee was excellent; swimming so far out that sometimes I was actually afraid he might drown. In the late sea-lulling afternoon I would play the piano or Tennessee would read poetry; Hart Crane was his favorite poet. It was Tennessee who introduced me to his agent, Audrey Wood, whom I found overbearing, but put up with until I could decide on another. Then my lawyer, Floria Lasky, who has been my close friend and legal advisor for twenty years, finally found me a suitable agent. There are no words of praise that I can find suitable enough for Floria Lasky. She just took me on when an out and out nut was suing me for $50,000. There was a legal procedure in which Tennessee and I appeared and swore that I’d written Member of the Wedding at his house in Nantucket. Naturally, I won the case. We never had to fight another case on any subject, but our meeting cemented an enduring friendship with her and her family.

  The meeting with Margot made me remember Annemarie and the war years. In 1941 Reeves had joined the 2nd Ranger Battalion, which is a task force whose methods were influenced by the Commandos.

  Before going overseas in 1943, he wrote me a pleading letter to join him at the port of embarkation, so that our emotional troubles could be reconciled. Carried away by the tide of war I joined him, and spent a few days with him at Fort Dix. Then he was sent to England where he went three times on special missions to Normandy. I worried ceaselessly about him and wrote him every day. He also wrote as frequently as possible.

  In the middle of these years of fury and disaster my father suddenly died of a coronary thrombosis. He died in 1944 at his jewelry store. He had in his hand a copy of The New Yorker that he was going to bring home to Mother, as it contained one of my stories. My mother called me on the phone and I met my sister, who was in New York, and together we returned home.

  A grotesque and horrible thing happened at my father’s funeral; it was as weird as something out of Flannery O’Connor. The regular preacher at the First Baptist Church was on a holiday, so that’s how the mistake must somehow have happened. The minister questioned Mother about the service she wanted, and she insisted on the 2nd Psalm, which she thought was the 103rd Psalm. However, Mother, in her distress, did not listen to the minister but insisted on what she thought was “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” She was dead wrong, but the relief minister not knowing the family circumstances and having protested all he could, proceeded to read instead that dreadful psalm, “The Psalm of the Sinners.”

  My father’s family had come down for the funeral, and it was decided that Mother should live with Rita and me in a house in the suburbs of New York. I knew of such a place, as I had visited Henry Varnum Poor and Bessie Breuer in New City, New York. So I asked them to look for a suitable place and they found one in Nyack, New York.

  Mother sold the family jewelry store and was therefore able to pay cash for the Nyack house. We moved to an apartment in Nyack, which was next door to the house I live in now, and shall probably live in the rest of my life. This house that mother had bought is a three story, beautiful, old Victorian house with a garden.

  Having settled in the house, I was able to turn again to the war news, which was bad, as I had just heard that Reeves was wounded. I couldn’t help but feel glad because that meant that he would be withdrawn from the firing line. Still I wondered how bad his wounds were until I learned from his brother, Tom, who had just returned from England, that he’d been wounded in the arm and would be home soon.

  As soon as he returned to Nyack, he immediately started a barrage to make me marry him again.

  I said, “Second marriages are so vulgar.”

  Naturally, I was happy to see him, but I said, “We’re much better as friends, without marriage.” Marriage, however, was his motive.

  I talked to Henry Varnum Poor, the great artist, and asked him his advice, and he said he could not give it to me. I also spoke with Dr. William Mayer, my doctor and psychiatrist, and he could only say, “Men don’t change essentially because of a war.”

  I had been hoping that there would be some sort of a miraculous change in Reeves because of his experiences. He was covered with campaign ribbons and when we walked down the street everyone looked at him. I, of course, was enormously impressed. He was so darn sweet that I forgot the reasons for my divorcing him in the first place.

  I went to stay with a friend of mine, Caroline H., whom I’d known at the Three Arts Club, and while I was living there, I wanted to visit Nancy, another friend from the Three Arts Club, but Reeves was mysteriously reluctant to let me go until one day as we were riding on a 5th Avenue bus, eating cherries, he said that he and Nancy had been lovers, but he didn’t care anything about her. I couldn’t reconcile the two statements.

  The reason I really divorced Reeves was that one day my father, who knew how careful I was about money, called me at Yaddo that my bank account was very seriously overdrawn. It was a mystery to me because I had only written a few small checks, but I told Daddy I would come home and clear up the misunderstanding. When I arrived, the cashier at the bank said “that it was a very clever forgery,” and who in the world did I know who would forge my name?

  Since Reeves was the only person who had access to my checks, and since two friends had told me that their checks had not been honored, it was clear that Reeves was a very sick man and needed more help than I could give him. When I faced him with this accusation, he denied it completely and imperturbably. I went to a lawyer and told him the story, and we were divorced at City Hall almost immediately. It was then that George offered me a home in Brooklyn. The year was 1940.

  The war was on and Reeves enlisted in the Rangers and I went home to Georgia, exhausted by the emotional strain. How beautiful was the old-fashioned home, and the holly tree that is the handsomest one in town. I had brought records and books with me. Reflections in a Golden Eye was just published, and this, with the attendant publicity, made quite a stir in town and especially at Fort Benning, the army post
nearby. Everybody accused me of writing about everybody else, so that I must say I didn’t realize the morals of the Post were that corrupt. I want to say now that all of the characters were completely imaginary, as was also the case with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

  The Ku Klux Klan even called me and said, “We are the Klan and we don’t like nigger lovers or fairies. Tonight will be your night.”

  I naturally called my Daddy and he quit work and came with a policeman to stand vigil over me. At the same time I was attacked with a very violent pneumonia in both lungs and erysipelas. I was unconscious for days and only later I said, “Daddy were you and two policemen going through the shrubbery around the house while I was sick?”

  He explained the circumstances, as I’d completely forgotten the threatening call from the Klan.

  At that time another strange and horrifying thing happened to me. It was my custom to get up with my father at 6:00 A.M., tote a few tokens of coal for the fires and have an oatmeal breakfast with him. One morning Daddy said, “Darling, will you see what time it is.” I looked at the clock, but though my vision was perfect, I could not understand the numerals. I went back to the table and sat down.

  I said, “Daddy, I’m afraid I’m sick.”

  My speech was a little halting too, but I was able to say, “I guess it’s just a sudden nervous breakdown. I think you’d better call Dr. Mayer.” Dr. Mayer was a dear friend of mine who practiced in New York, and whom I’d met several years before.

  So Daddy reached him in his office and William prescribed just quiet and more quiet. No drugs, alcohol or anything toxic; just rest. I stayed in bed for a few days, and with the doctor’s permission, I went out in the yard. When I tried to read I realized the pages meant nothing to me. Mother blamed it on Crime and Punishment which I’d been reading and took it away, but no book made any sense to me. I was soon able to call the doctor and ask if this was to be permanent, and he assured me it would not be. So I rested those dreadful months praying that my senses would come back to me.

  Then a marvelous thing happened, I conceived “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” and soon I got to the typewriter and began to write. It seemed that the horror disappeared almost as quickly as it came. I remember when I finished “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” I burst out crying with thanksgiving and emotion, but the sinister illness that haunted my life all during my youth till the time I was twenty-nine had asserted itself. I lived in a constant fear of strokes.

  After I had recovered, and the recovery was complete, I returned to Brooklyn, and wrote a few articles to cover my medical expenses, including “Brooklyn Is My Neighborhood,” which was published in Vogue in March of 1941.

  Sands Street in Brooklyn always had tender memories for me, imbued as it was with the recollections of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, and it was at a bar in Sands Street, in the company of W. H. Auden and George Davis that I saw and was fascinated by a remarkable couple. Among the customers there was a woman who was tall and strong as a giantess, and at her heels she had a little hunchback. I just observed them once, and it was not until some weeks later that the illumination of “The Ballad of the Sad Café” struck me.

  What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

  On a Thanksgiving Day where again I was living in Brooklyn Heights, the day had started miserably; never very sensible about pounds and arithmetic, I had bought a small turkey and the guest list was about twenty people. After some dirty looks at me George just picked up the turkey, took it out of the house, and exchanged it for an enormous bird more suitable for the occasion. I remember we had as our guests Aaron Copland, Gypsy Rose Lee, a whole contingent of the Russian Ballet, as well as our usual household. Just as we were having Brandy and coffee there was the sound of fire engines. Gypsy and I lit out to find the fire which was nearby. We didn’t find it, but the fresh air after the long, elaborate meal cleared my head and suddenly, breathlessly I said to Gypsy, “Frankie is in love with the bride of her brother and wants to join the wedding.”

  “What!” Gypsy screamed, as until that time I had never mentioned Frankie or my struggle to solve The Member of the Wedding. Until that time, Frankie was just a girl in love with her music teacher, a most banal theme, but a swift enlightenment kindled my soul so that the book itself was radiantly clear.

  “What!” Gypsy screamed again. “What were you saying?”

  But not able to explain it to her I only said, “Oh! Nothing.”

  I frequently spent the night with Gypsy as she was great company: witty, kind, very sensible, and utterly true to herself. Sometimes I would go to the theatre with her, but usually I went to bed early, as I was an early riser. Several times at about dawn someone would knock softly at her door and she would let the person in. He was a rather measly looking person, but behind him there were always two strong men, who had the look of bodyguards. He was introduced to me as Mr. Wexler.

  “Who’s her?” he asked in a tone of trepidation.

  “A friend of mine.”

  I went back to bed and looked at the silver light breaking in the city dawn. Then I looked down and saw a car as long as a hearse, and there were two more strong men at the entrance. I could not help but wonder.

  Finally one day I said to Gypsy, “Who is Mr. Wexler?”

  “He’s a very lonely man,” she said. “He squealed and was sent to Sing Sing. Do you understand that? He’s just come out.”

  “How did you happen to know him?”

  “He was very kind to me in my youth; made my mother straighten my teeth, and things like that.”

  “But who is he?” I insisted.

  “If you must know he is Waxy Gordon, the gangster.”

  I never heard of him, but didn’t ask any more questions. A few weeks later he was shot down near Gypsy’s neighborhood.

  The blessed light of “The Ballad of the Sad Café” started me writing again, and so I went home to Georgia to be free of any distractions. It was hard for my mother to understand my homesickness.

  “You have the most distinguished friends of anyone I know and yet you just want to stick here with your father and me.”

  I loved my home with its garden and the old familiar furniture. I had a few friends in Columbus, Helen Harvey and Kathleen Woodruff, and several others, but mostly I got up at 6 A.M. and worked all morning. I had a piano in my own bedroom and spent most of the afternoon playing it or reading. Occasionally a friend would come and get me and we would go out together, but on the whole Columbus gave me that same tranquility and calm that was so necessary to my work.

  I was waiting, of course, as the world was waiting. Waiting for news of the war. Now and then a serviceman from Fort Benning would come to call on me. Once when one of these officers said, “How would you like to fly down to the Gulf of Mexico and come back for dinner?” the horror of the proposal must have been reflected in my face, for I am deathly afraid of heights; I just tamely turned the conversation to the ice tea and sandwiches we were eating.

  Edwin Peacock was in Alaska, Reeves at a point unknown. I waited for a telegram and every telegram made me tremble.

  Erika Mann had persuaded Annemarie to go to a hospital in Westchester, where hopefully the doctors would be able to treat her addiction. I’d been home only a day or so when a wire came. It was not the wire I had been dreading about Reeves, but an almost equally upsetting one. “Have escaped from Blithe View. Staying at Freddy’s. What shall I do now?”

  I packed my still almost unpacked bags and went by train to Freddy’s apartment in New York. Since Freddy had no room for such sudden accommodation, he had draped a sheet between his studio where he saw his clients and Annemarie’s cubicle. When I arrived Annemarie was playing Mozart, the same Mozart over and over. She wanted me to call various p
eople, including Margot von Opel, and even, so irrational she was, Gypsy Rose Lee.

  I tried to calm her but she was in no mood to listen. I went to sit with Freddy and discuss the situation. As we were quietly talking Annemarie rushed into Freddy’s bathroom, banging the door. As Freddy and I sat there perturbed and frozen, we saw a thin trickle of blood come through the door sill of the bathroom. Freddy tried to lunge his way into the bathroom and he said to me, “Find a doctor.”

  I rushed downstairs in search of a doctor, and in my confusion I collided with a special delivery man who said, “What’s the hurry?”

  I said, “Tell me a doctor near here because a friend has just tried to commit suicide.”

  He rushed past me, leaving me to hunt for a doctor myself. After knocking at apartment doors I finally found one, but when I went to his office, he was out. Then I went back to Freddy’s to find what I could do next. When I entered the apartment there were about ten policemen there and Annemarie turned on me and said, “Why did you call the police?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, but I was too upset to try to explain further. They were going to take her to Bellevue and she was resisting. I talked desperately.

  “Haven’t you police officers ever known anyone who was hurt or crippled? This girl is far from home, a stranger here, in the middle of a war, unable to get home and distressed. Haven’t you ever had a friend or relation who has been so distressed that they momentarily wanted to take their own life?”