Poet Laureate of Loneliness

McCullers wrote so sensitively about adolescents, biographer Josyane Savigneau suggests, because emotionally she remained one. “Subject to depression, she drank to lift her spirits,” literary scholar Robert Emmet Long writes of McCullers, “but her increasing use of alcohol turned her into an alcoholic obsessed by herself and what she considered the amazing beauty of her writing.”

McCullers’s bisexuality and tomboy sensibility further pushed her to the margins. She suffered her first stroke as a young woman, one of many health problems that plagued McCullers throughout her life. Her troubled relationship with husband Reeves McCullers—they married, divorced, then married each other again—ended with his suicide in 1953. By the time of her death in 1967 at age 50, Carson McCullers was widowed, broken, and bedridden.

In the five decades since her passing, the public memory of McCullers’s tortured life has faded, leaving readers better able to focus on the work she left behind. That literary legacy recently got a boost of attention via a Library of America volume published last year, the centennial of McCullers’s birth: McCullers: Stories, Plays & Other Writings, a follow-up to LOA’s 2001 collection of McCullers’s novels. (Both books are also available in a boxed set, which includes a slipcase adorned with a portrait of McCullers in her premature decline, her anguished face like a figure from Edvard Munch.)

Although LOA’s latest McCullers retrospective might look at first glance like an endless exercise in literary melancholia, her occasional essays for popular magazines display a delightful degree of warmth and charm. Two Christmas pieces fondly recall her early yuletides in small-town Georgia—holidays heartened by the middle-class contentment of her family and an emotional stability that her adolescence and precocious ambition would eventually disrupt. A third holiday essay details McCullers’s Christmas Eve in a physical rehabilitation ward after one of her strokes, where she finds comfort in the resolve of another patient, a double amputee. Perhaps the generally life-affirming voice of McCullers’s essays was shaped by what her editors at Mademoiselle and McCall’s wanted from her, but the tone of these first-person articles seems genuine.

In another essay, “How I Began to Write,” McCullers re-creates, with exquisite precision, how the adjoining rooms of her childhood home became a makeshift theater:

Clocks haunted McCullers’s writing; her last novel, one of her least successful ones, is titled Clock Without Hands. She was, like Welty, fascinated by the working of time and how its passage subtly changed perception. In tracing her literary origins to a girlhood enthusiasm for homemade drama, McCullers also hints at her abiding vision of literature as a proscenium in which playing to the balconies is a persistent temptation. As a performer on the page, McCullers could, like her contemporary and fellow Southerner James Agee, be something of a ham, crafting sentences that seemed more intent to dazzle than discern. In “Night Watch Over Freedom,” an essay about wartime Britain, she sometimes falls into the sort of self-consciously cosmic abstractions that clouded Agee’s journalism, a lapse perhaps not surprising when one remembers that she and Agee both often wrote under the fog of booze.

But then she appears to rub her eyes back into reality, painting this picture of brave, bomb-torn London’s most famous timepiece on New Year’s Eve, 1940:

In another essay, “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature,” McCullers argues that the American South’s parallels with 19th-century Russia, such as extremes of poverty and rigid class lines, make Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, and Tolstoy important models for Southern writers. She claimed Tolstoy as a favorite and looked to Russian authors as exemplars of what she called “a peculiar and intense realism.”

That realism informs the short fiction in Stories, Plays & Other Writings, as in “Breath from the Sky,” in which she evokes, in granular detail, the convalescence of a young woman at seaside recovering from ravaged lungs, perhaps from tuberculosis:

As in The Member of the Wedding, the main character in “Breath from the Sky,” Constance, finds herself at the margins of family life, the iron rail of routine running everyone past her like passengers on a passing train. Denied the intimacy of other people, she seeks solace in sea and sky, a theme sounded in another McCullers short story, “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” In that narrative, an abandoned husband concludes that romantic love should ideally grow from a more basic connection with creation, the earthy verities of trees, rocks, clouds. But what McCullers seems to depict is a kind of hollow transcendentalism, in which bonding with nature doesn’t so much complement human relationships as compensate for their absence.

Ultimately, though, McCullers appeared to recognize that there was no real substitute for friends and family. In a moving essay, “Loneliness . . . An American Malady,” she restates the essential longing of her character Frankie Addams, the heroine of The Member of the Wedding: “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.”

In the final stage of her life, too physically crippled to write for herself, McCullers dictated Illumination and Night Glare, a memoir never finished. Included in Stories, Plays & Other Writings, its opening lines sound more aspirational than fulfilled, but they say a lot about how McCullers wished to be remembered: “My life has been almost completely filled with work and love, thank goodness. Work has not always been easy, nor has love, may I add.”

Carson McCullers was America’s poet laureate of loneliness. Her work endures as a chronicle of human isolation and, at its best, an antidote for it.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.