Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  1958

  Suffers depression after The Square Root of Wonderful closes. Begins therapy with Dr. Mary Mercer. (She would later write in her unfinished autobiography, “I not only liked Dr. Mercer immediately, I loved her, and just as important, I knew I could trust her with my very soul.”) Undergoes series of operations on left arm during February. Makes recording of readings from her work for MGM. Book version of The Square Root of Wonderful, with McCullers’s “personal preface,” published in July by Houghton Mifflin. Gives lecture at Columbia University in July. Discusses her work on CBS television program Lamp Unto My Feet in August. In December, French version of The Member of the Wedding produced at Alliance Française in Paris.

  1959

  Undergoes operations on left arm and wrist. Unable to work on longer works, writes children’s verse instead. Meets Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), one of her favorite writers, at January 21 meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters; hosts lunch for Dinesen, Arthur Miller, and Marilyn Monroe. “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing” appears in December Esquire.

  1960

  Application for a third Guggenheim Fellowship denied in April. Edward Albee proposes stage adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café to McCullers in July. Finishes Clock Without Hands in December.

  1961

  Screen rights to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter sold to Thomas Ryan in January. Theater production rights to Clock Without Hands bought by Kermit Bloomgarden in May. Has surgery on left hand in June. Part III of Clock Without Hands, “To Bear the Truth Alone,” published in July issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Clock Without Hands, dedicated to Mercer, published by Houghton Mifflin on September 18.

  1962

  Visits Mary Tucker in Virginia with Edward Albee during summer; with Mary Mercer, visits Albee on Fire Island. Meets William Faulkner when he lectures at West Point in late summer. In June, has cancerous breast removed, and undergoes microsurgery on hand. In England during October, attends Cheltenham Festival and visits Edith Sitwell on her seventy-fifth birthday.

  1963

  “The Dark Brilliance of Edward Albee” published in January Harper’s Bazaar; “Isak Dinesen: In Praise of Radiance” published in Saturday Review, March 16. McCullers travels with Mary Mercer to Charleston on April 12. Early short story “Sucker” published in Saturday Evening Post in September. (The story will be included in a posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and poems, The Mortgaged Heart, edited by McCullers’s sister, Margarita Smith, published by Houghton Mifflin. The collection also contains the unpublished poem “Saraband,” which she had read in her MGM recordings under the title “Select Your Sorrows If You Can,” and previously published stories such as “Court in the West Eighties,” “Poldi,” “Breath from the Sky,” “The Orphanage,” “Instant of the Hour After,” “Like That,” “The Aliens,” and “Untitled Piece.”) Edward Albee’s adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Café opens on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on October 30, with a cast including Colleen Dewhurst and Lou Antonio.

  1964

  The Ballad of the Sad Café closes on February 15 after 123 performances. Breaks right hip and elbow in a fall. New television dramatization of “The Sojourner,” adapted without McCullers’s involvement, is broadcast on NBC on May 25. Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig, a book of children’s poems, published by Houghton Mifflin in November.

  1965

  Carson McCullers: Her Life and Work by Oliver Evans, the first book-length study of McCullers, is published in London by Peter Owen (it appears in America a year later under the title The Ballad of Carson McCullers: A Biography); includes as an appendix “Author’s Outline of ‘The Mute,’” original outline of novel that would become The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Remains hospitalized for three months after July 14 surgery to reset broken hip; has leg operation in September. Receives Preis der jungen Generation (Younger Generation Prize) from German newspaper Die Welt in December.

  1966

  Collaborates with Marshall Barer and Mary Rodgers on musical adaptation (never realized) of The Member of the Wedding, and works on autobiography (published posthumously in 2001 as Illumination and Night Glare, edited by Carlos L. Dews). Filming begins in October on John Huston’s film adaptation of Reflections in a Golden Eye, starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. Awarded University of Mississippi Grant for the Humanities in November.

  1967

  Celebrates fiftieth birthday on February 19 with a stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Short story “The March” appears in March Redbook. Makes brief trip to visit John Huston in Ireland in April. Wins 1966 Henry Bellamann Award for “outstanding contribution to literature.” Writes essay “A Hospital Christmas Eve,” published posthumously in McCall’s in December. Suffers massive brain hemorrhage on August 15; undergoes tracheotomy at Nyack Hospital; visited in hospital by Tennessee Williams on September 8. Dies in Nyack Hospital, after forty-seven days in a coma, on September 29. Buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, on October 3.

  Note on the Texts

  This volume presents a selection from the stories, plays, and other writings of Carson McCullers. (Together with a companion volume, Carson McCullers: Complete Novels, it constitutes the Library of America edition of the author’s collected works.) It contains texts of twenty short stories, two three-act stage plays, a previously unpublished teleplay, twenty-one short works of nonfiction prose, five poems, and an uncompleted autobiography. An appendix presents a transcription of the teleplay as it was broadcast live on network television in 1953.

  Some of the texts reprinted here are drawn from the following four collections:

  The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, published, in hardcover, by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, on May 24, 1951. (A British edition, printed from the U.S. plates, was published, in hardcover, by the Cresset Press, London, on July 10, 1952.)

  Collected Short Stories and the novel Ballad of the Sad Café, by Carson McCullers, published, in hardcover, by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, on September 15, 1961. (After the first printing, the title of this volume was changed by the publisher to The Ballad of the Sad Café and Collected Short Stories. There was no British edition.)

  The Mortgaged Heart, by Carson McCullers, edited, and with an introduction and notes, by McCullers’s sister, Margarita G. Smith, published, in hardcover, by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, on October 25, 1971. (A British edition, offset from the first U.S. printing, was published by Barrie & Jenkins, London, in June 1972.) This volume posthumously collected fourteen short stories (eight of them previously unpublished), McCullers’s outline of her first novel, fifteen essays and articles, and five poems. (Smith and her publisher were scrupulous in reprinting McCullers’s previously published texts without change, except for the regularization of italicized titles of books and periodicals, some of which originally appeared within quotation marks.)

  Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers, edited, and with an introduction and notes, by Carlos L. Dews, published, in hardcover, by the University of Wisconsin Press, Madison (Wisconsin) and London (U.K.), on July 6, 1999. This volume posthumously published the autobiographical fragment “Illumination and Night Glare” together with a selection from the World War II correspondence of Carson and Reeves McCullers. It also reprinted, in an appendix, McCullers’s outline of her first novel.

  COMPLETE STORIES

  Under the rubric “Complete Stories” are collected the twelve short stories that McCullers published in books and periodicals from 1936 to 1967, together with eight early stories edited by Margarita G. Smith and published posthumously in Smith’s miscellany of McCullers’s shorter writings, The Mortgaged Heart (1971). Six of these twenty stories (“Wunderkind,” “The Jockey,” “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland,” “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.”, “The Sojourner,” and “A Domestic Dilemma”) were collected by McCullers in the omnibus volume The Ballad
of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers (1951). To these she added a seventh, “The Haunted Boy” (1955), when compiling her volume Collected Short Stories and the novel Ballad of the Sad Café (1961). The other stories were not collected by McCullers during her lifetime.

  “Sucker,” which according to McCullers was the first short story that she submitted to magazines, was written in Columbus, Georgia, circa 1934–35, when she was seventeen. It first appeared, almost thirty years later, in The Saturday Evening Post, September 28, 1963, 69–71. (For McCullers’s account of the writing of the story, see note 3.1.) It was collected, posthumously, by Margarita G. Smith in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Court in the West Eighties” was written in New York City during the spring of 1935, when McCullers was a special student in creative writing at Columbia University, and was submitted to magazines in the summer of 1935, simultaneously with “Sucker.” It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 20–29. The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Poldi” was written for Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s evening class in creative writing at New York University during the academic year 1935–36. It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 31–37. The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Breath from the Sky” was written for Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s evening class in creative writing at New York University during the academic year 1935–36. It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 39–48. (It was also serialized, as the second of three stories from The Mortgaged Heart, in Redbook, October 1971, 92, 228–33.) The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “The Orphanage” was written for Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s evening class in creative writing at New York University during the academic year 1935–36. It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 49–53. The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Instant of the Hour After” was written for Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s evening class in creative writing at New York University during the academic year 1935–36. It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 54–63. (It also was serialized, as the last of three stories from The Mortgaged Heart, in Redbook, October 1971, 93, 194–96.) The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Like That” was written for Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s evening class in creative writing at New York University during the academic year 1935–36. It was purchased by the editors of Story but was never published in the magazine. It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 64–73. (It also was serialized, as the first of three stories from The Mortgaged Heart, in Redbook, October 1971, 91, 166–70.) The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Wunderkind” was written for Sylvia Chatfield Bates’s evening class in creative writing class at New York University during the academic year 1935–36. McCullers’s first published work of fiction, it first appeared in Story 9 (December 1936), 61–73. It was collected by McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951) and reprinted by Margarita G. Smith in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). The text from The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “The Aliens” was written circa 1936–37 when McCullers was living in Columbus, Georgia, and developing material for her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 88–97. (The title was supplied by Smith.) The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “Untitled Piece” was written circa 1936–37 when McCullers was living in Columbus, Georgia, and developing material for her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940). It first appeared, posthumously, in Margarita G. Smith, ed., The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 98–123. (The title was supplied by Smith.) The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “The Jockey” was written at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, during the spring or summer of 1941. It first appeared in The New Yorker, August 23, 1941, 14–16. (For McCullers’s account of the composition of the story, see page 554 of the present volume.) It was collected by McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). The text from The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” was written at Yaddo during the summer of 1941. It first appeared in The New Yorker, December 20, 1941, 15–18. It was collected by McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). The text from The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “Correspondence” was written at Yaddo during the summer of 1941. It first appeared in The New Yorker, February 7, 1942, 15–18. It was collected, posthumously, by Margarita G. Smith in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” was written in Columbus, Georgia, in February 1942. It first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, November 1942, 50, 96–99. (For McCullers’s account of the composition of the story, see page 559 of the present volume.) It was collected by McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). The text from The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “Art and Mr. Mahoney” was written in Nyack, New York, in 1948. It first appeared in Mademoiselle, February 1949, 120, 184–86. It was collected, posthumously, by Margarita G. Smith in The Mortgaged Heart (1971), 160–63. The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “The Sojourner” was written in Nyack, New York, in 1949. It first appeared in Mademoiselle, May 1950, 90, 160–66. It was collected by McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). The text from The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “A Domestic Dilemma” was written in Nyack, New York, in 1950. It first appeared in The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), 115–27. (It was also serialized in The New York Post Sunday Magazine, September 16, 1951, M10–11.) The text from The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “The Haunted Boy” was written in Nyack, New York, circa 1954–55. It appeared simultaneously in Mademoiselle, November 1955, 134–25, 152–59, and the multilingual Italian journal Botteghe Oscure 16 (1955), 264–78. It was collected by McCullers in Collected Short Stories and the novel The Ballad of the Sad Café (1961) and was reprinted by Margarita G. Smith in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). The text from Collected Short Stories and the novel The Ballad of the Sad Café is used here.

  “Who Has Seen the Wind?,” a fictional variation on the material treated dramatically in McCullers’s play-in-progress The Square Root of Wonderful (produced 1957), was begun in Nyack, New York, in the fall of 1954 and completed in Key West, Florida, in May 1955. It first appeared in Mademoiselle, September 1956, 156–57, 174–88. It was collected, posthumously, by Margarita G. Smith in The Mortgaged Heart (1971). The text from The Mortgaged Heart is used here.

  “The March” was written in Nyack, New York, in 1966. It first appeared in Redbook, March 1967, 69, 114–23. The text from Redbook is used here.

  THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING: A PLAY

  McCullers’s fourth novel, The Member of the Wedding, was published on March 16, 1946. In May of that year Tennessee Williams, who at the age of thirty-four was enjoying his first great success with The Glass Menagerie, read the book and immediately sent McCullers, whom he had never met, a letter of admiration. Soon after that he invited her to visit him for a week at his vacation rental on Nantucket, during which he suggested that she make a stage adaptation of The Member of the Wedding. Their week together stretched out to a month, by the end of which she was hard at work on the play’s first act. She had a complete draft of the play by the end of the summer.

  Further work on the play was interrupted by European travel and then, in August and November of 1947, by two debilitating strokes followed by a long, difficult, and only partial recuperation. It was not until the summer of 1948 that McCullers was able to return to the play, but then, with the technical
advice of Tennessee Williams and the physical help of a personal secretary, the revisions went quickly. In the fall she sent the new version to Williams, who responded with an encouraging telegram—“SCRIPT A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER”—and by making arrangements for the play’s representation by his dramatic agent, Audrey Wood of the Liebling-Wood Agency. It was another year before Wood and McCullers found a producer (Robert Whitehead, later joined by Oliver Rea and Stanley Martineau) and engaged a director (originally Josh Logan, succeeded by Harold Clurman). Whitehead and his wife, Virginia Bolen, did the casting. Rehearsals began on November 28, and there was a one-week tryout engagement at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, beginning December 22.

  The Member of the Wedding opened at the Empire Theatre, 1430 Broadway, New York, on January 5, 1950, and closed on March 17, 1951. There were 501 Broadway performances. In April 1950, The Member of the Wedding was awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for the best play of 1949–50. In October a condensed version of the script appeared in John Chapman, ed., The Burns Mantle Best Plays of 1949–1950 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1950), 91–116. (McCullers apparently had no hand in this condensed version.)

  The Member of the Wedding was copyrighted as an unpublished work by Carson McCullers on September 26, 1949. The text was prepared for book publication, in collaboration with the editor Robert M. MacGregor of New Directions Publishing Company, during the fall of 1950. It was published, in hardcover, by New Directions, New York, on April 18, 1951. (There was no British edition.) The text of the first New Directions printing is used here.

  THE SOJOURNER

  In the midsummer of 1953, McCullers accepted a commission from the TV/Radio Workshop of the Ford Foundation to write a half-hour teleplay based on her short story “The Sojourner” (1950). A performance of the play, broadcast live from coast to coast, was to be the centerpiece of a December 1953 episode of the Workshop’s Sunday “arts magazine” Omnibus, which in September of that year was to begin its second season on CBS. There is much that is not known about the evolution of the project, but it is clear that McCullers’s conception of the teleplay changed over the course of several drafts. Although none are dated, four typescripts in the Carson McCullers Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, show the development of the script: the earlier typescripts (hereafter typescripts A and B, the latter incomplete) contain scenes set in Manhattan not included in the later typescripts or on the broadcast, and are shorter than the later versions; the later typescripts (typescripts C and D) are quite similar and contain all the scenes presented in the broadcast, albeit in different and sometimes extensively rewritten versions. Typescript C contains autograph revisions by McCullers; these changes and others were incorporated into typescript D, which is a fair copy, free of handwritten revisions.