Carson McCullers on Longing and Loneliness

Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, in the deeply southern state of Georgia. Daughter of a jewelry store owner and an aspiring pianist, her trajectory towards literary stardom began quite early, with the publication of her story “Wunderkind” at the age of 19 and at twenty-three, the commercial success and critical praise for her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

The novel centers around a deaf-mute in a small Georgia town and the four characters who reveal their pain, loneliness and longings to him. The novel is peopled with memorable characters and punctuated by stark, dramatic events and yet, it is the general feel of the novel, the pervasive chasm brought about by each person’s isolation—the wanting and the regretting and always, the longing—this brings about the novel’s lasting effect.

Actual tragedies that occur are presented quickly, without emotion, such as a wife’s death:

"Then in the afternoon of the eighth of October there was a sudden cry of pain from the room where they slept. Biff hurried upstairs. Within an hour they had taken a tumor almost the size of a newborn child. And then within another hour Alice was dead."

Biff is a café owner, emotionally stunted and closed off from the world because of his marriage, which has been dead for some time. And yet, with the actual death of Alice his younger self emerges, as he remembers their early courtship and the feelings that accompanied it. He contemplates people and life and death and struggles to continue mundane tasks. McCullers seems to be saying: Yes, bad things happen but the spaces between these events, the afterthoughts, the musings, the regrets, that is life.

Another character who confides in the deaf-mute Singer is Mick Kelly, an adolescent girl with great artistic longings. Drawn to music and plagued with bouts of intense feeling, she is the primary caregiver of her two younger brothers. When one of them accidentally shoots a neighbor girl, the event itself is told again in a straightforward fashion. Afterwards, as Mick careens between a desire to punish her brother and the intense love she feels for him, McCullers takes her time. Again, longing and loneliness. The tender pain of love. This is life.

"Mick got into bed with Bubber. He wouldn’t let her touch him or snug up to him. Then after another hour of crying and hiccoughing he went to sleep.

She was awake a long time. In the dark she put her arms around him and held him very close. She touched him all over and kissed him everywhere. He was so soft and little and there was this salty, boy smell about him. The love she felt was so hard that she had to squeeze him to her until her arms were tired."

Carson McCullers knew a thing or two about pain and longing. A bout of rheumatic fever inspired her to cease her studies at Juilliard School of Music and enroll instead in creative writing courses. Her marriage to James Reeves McCullers Jr. was stormy. Both were alcoholics and rumored to be bisexuals. There were affairs and fights and eventually, they separated. She was never in good health and two strokes in 1947 left her partially paralyzed and utterly devastated. There was a suicide attempt shortly afterwards. She had remarried her husband in 1945 but he also dealt with depression and when he suggested another suicide attempt, this time jointly, she fled and he ended his own life.

Always infirm, struggling with relationship difficulties, dependent on alcohol (she drank hot tea with sherry while writing, all day), McCullers certainly knew something of human isolation and suffering.

I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in June of 1997. This week, I re-read the book when it was chosen by my book club. I had forgotten the quiet power of this novel, the chords it touches in me, the many levels of its mastery. And I certainly hadn’t realized how much effect this novel and others in the same vein—Southern gothic—have had on my own writing. I read McCullers’ masterpiece during the period when I was writing my novel The Qualities of Wood, a story about a young woman with longings and loneliness, influenced by a tragedy but living in the spaces between.

I went back to my journals from the time to see if I had written anything about McCullers' book and found that I hadn’t. Instead, the writing in my journal during those years centered around a few topics: writing and its difficulties and pleasures, self-doubt and self-appraisal, and the main show: our struggles with infertility. Certainly, the most pronounced period of longing I have ever known. That all of these influences converged during the writing of my novel makes perfect sense to me now.

If you haven’t read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or Carson McCullers’ other works: The Ballad of the Sad Café and Member of the Wedding, delay no further. I didn’t enjoy Reflections in a Golden Eye quite as much, but it’s still worth a read. Detailed biography, courtesy of Oprah, here, and a story about an unlikely luncheon with McCullers, Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen here, courtesy of Kelly. 

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Runaround

I’m leaving tomorrow to run a relay race that starts in San Francisco and ends in Napa. Whoa, you say, you must be quite a runner. Not really. Extremely amateur. It’s a relay, so our team has twelve people and we all take turns. At the end, we drink wine.

Someone asked me yesterday which I like better, running or writing. I thought: Here is a person who has never put on a pair of running shoes. Because it is torture, really, a cruel mistress who punishes you if you’ve neglected her and turns her back when you’re in pain. Running is a love/hate endeavor and I think most runners would agree with that.

And I thought about these two activities and the ways they’re alike. Both are difficult most of the time and effortless on rare, sparkling occasions we learn to live for. Both require determined effort and mostly, both have to be done alone. Without cheers, without empathy, without quick rewards.

This race will be an exception to that rule. We’ll run together, with encouragement and laughs along the way, a shiny medal and a cold glass of something at the end. And wouldn’t it be great if we had some sort of writing event, just for fun, that ended with claps on the back and red, grinning faces? Actually, that sounds weird but you get the idea.

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Summer impressions

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
            ~Emily Dickinson

 After a weekend of sports, sun and swimming, we find ourselves facing sober September, still warm outside but the threat of Autumn carried gently in each evening’s breeze. Summer sure flew by, we say to each other over our sweating glasses, sand pressed between our toes, eyes squinting underneath the white sun. Kids frolick in the water, make adventure in nearby bushes and when it's time, watch the fire lick the blackening sky.

Summer, now  a series of impressions: water, seal-like, a solid, gliding form against my body; a baseball rocketing over tilted heads and upturned eyes; orange and pink streaks on the horizon; afternoon sounds of dogs and buzzing and cawing and skateboard wheels; warmth like a balm on prickly skin.

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Better, stronger, faster

With the passing of Neil Armstrong this week, scores of people are reminiscing about the beginnings of the space program and of course, that electrifying moment when the first moonwalk was televised for the world to see. In my own family, we were talking about this but also about my grandfather, who was the Director of Flight Operations for NASA when Armstrong was a test pilot, prior to his time in Florida and eventually, space. Notably, they ran tests on the X-15, a rocket-powered aircraft that set speed and altitude records in the early 1960s. In fact, the X-15 still holds the official world record for the fastest speed ever achieved by a manned aircraft. Here’s a story about a test flight gone slightly wrong: “Neil Armstrong’s X-15 flight over Pasadena.”

I grew up in Lancaster, California, where many families are associated with aircrafts in one way or another. Edwards Air Force base, where my grandfather worked, is located beside Rogers Dry Lake, a clearing amidst the desert terrain that provides a natural extension to the man-made runways. Because of this large, pre-existing landing area and the mostly clear weather year-round, the base is ideal for flight testing.

My grandpa died when I was eight years old. I remember him as a well-dressed, serious man with a tough veneer. He seemed to withdraw into the house whenever all of us were gathered—me, my siblings and cousins, 10 kids close in age; my mother says he would turn his hearing aid down so as not to hear us. (He had sustained hearing loss as a pilot). I remember that he took some satisfaction from his vehicles. They had a silver-bullet-shaped camper and a truck. They had a small, cart-like motorcycle they called the Tote Goat, a name that for some reason became attached to my youngest sister Theresa for many years.

We knew that he worked at the base with airplanes, but it wasn’t until his death that we began to understand the importance of his work. He knew local heroes like Joe Walker and national ones like John Glenn. On a wall in her spare room, my grandmother displayed a letter from President Ford, thanking her for his service. But there was one character from this cast that loomed larger than the rest: Bruce Peterson.

I’m sure you’ve never heard this name, but maybe you know another: Lee Majors. In 1974, The Six Million Dollar Man debuted on ABC with Majors as its star. The story centered around the character Steve Austin, an astronaut who had been injured in a crash and rebuilt with assorted bionic parts which made him “better, stronger, faster.” What many people don’t know is that the grainy footage at the start of each episode was actual NASA footage of a crash involving a Northrop M2-F2 “lifting body” craft and a pilot named Bruce Peterson. Unlike Steve Austin, Peterson did not have any bionic parts. He eventually recovered from his extensive injuries but lost the sight in one eye due to an infection. He passed away in 2006 in Laguna Niguel, which is very close to where I live now. Read Mr. Peterson's obituary here.

Footage of actual crash

Intro of the television show

But my brother and I sort of believed that maybe he had bionic parts, and when he came to my grandpa’s funeral wearing a black eye patch, we were awestruck. For many years, we bragged about shaking the “Bionic Man’s” hand.

I think Mr. Peterson, at least the way we thought of him, bridged the world of my grandfather’s work with ours. We were eight and ten, a time when television, stories, and real life seem to jumble together. A time when men were important and tall and did exciting things. So as the world mourns for that exuberant period where mankind reached beyond earth and built machines that would take them faster, higher, farther, I mourn for that, and for my grandpa, wishing he was here and could tell me all about it.

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What I learned on my summer vacation

Most writers tend to be solitary, introverted types and even if you’re not, the work inherently requires long periods without contact from the outside world. We write and we spend our free time with family and friends, many of whom may share our habits, experiences and views of the world. Every life can become somewhat sheltered and there are dangers to staying in your homogeneous group, never forcing yourself to confront “the other.”

I just spent seven days on a cruise ship with 2500 others. We were crammed into the long hallways, queued up in the buffet line, streamed into an Egyptian-designed theater for a musical tribute to New Orleans. And there are some things I learned about people (or at least was reminded of), and the ways we’re different and the ways we’re the same. Here are a few:

1)      Some people like to get up early and go to bed early. Some like to stay up late and sleep late. Some people sleep too much; some sleep too little.

2)      Some people are able to eat sweet n’ sour chicken and egg rolls at 10:30 in the morning and swallow it down with a mug of hot chocolate.

3)      Some people haven’t put on a swim suit in a very, very long time.

4)      Some people prefer to whisper, hunched over a table. Some people are more comfortable hollering across a crowded dining room to let their husband know they will be out by the dome pool.

5)      Everyone thinks their child/children are the funniest, cutest in the world.

6)      Most people are indulgent of other people’s children, to a point.

7)      Some people dance like they don’t care if anyone’s watching.

8)      Most people stare and wish they were dancing.

9)      Most people are long overdue for a good laugh.

10)  Some people will talk about anything that occurs to them, uninterrupted, in a nightmarish stream-of-consciousness fashion, if you let them.

11)  Most people have a hard time saying no to dessert (myself included).

12)  Some people are very anxious to put on a full body snowsuit, even for just a day of glacier viewing, even when it’s only in the forties or fifties outside, even when they won’t actually be coming into contact with snow.

13)  Some people have very attractive feet. Or hands. Or figures. Or hair. Some people don’t.

14)  Everyone appreciates a stunning view (except children).

15)  Some people like wet, cold climates where other people can’t imagine living.

16)  Most people are afraid to speak up.

17)  Everyone is willing to help, if you ask them.

18)  Some people will give up their seat for an elderly person. An elderly gentleman will give up his seat for a woman.

19)  Most people probably aren’t entirely themselves on a vacation.

20)  Most people are very happy to return to their homes after being away.

I found it alternately comforting and daunting, the variety within our species. But as a writer who enjoys, first and foremost, writing about people, the experience provided fertile ground for character farming. The woman who threw a fit because she had to remove her silver bangle bracelet for security. The man with the long ponytail who danced alone to a Michael Jackson medley. The older man who stared at the rugged mountains and green-blue water, jotting things down in a notebook and mumbling to himself. Watch for them. You never know when they may appear again.

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