On the body and the writer – Tom Seymour Evans in TLS:

‘In the two decades since The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was selected for Oprah’s Book Club there has been a proliferation of work relating to McCullers – stage plays, memoirs, songs and subtly conversant novels such as Catherine Lacey’s Pew (2020) – but with the exception of one study translated from French, there has been no Life since Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter (1975), which was published just eight years after its subject’s death. Carr’s book was richly oral-historical and full of things you didn’t realize you wanted, such as a paragraph-long description of what the Hudson waterfront smelt like during McCullers’s first visit to Manhattan, and details of her opinions on small dogs (“too poky and inquisitive”), so for Mary V. Dearborn’s publishers to push this as “the first dimensional life” of the author seems a bit hard on Carr. But the point stands. McCullers, in her afterlife, has become a thing almost inconceivable: a canonical writer short on biographies.’

(…)

‘Loneliness was McCullers’s theme. She wrote about the loneliness of the underclass, the racialized and those struggling to understand who they are; she wrote lonely jockeys, hero worshippers and wunderkinder. In her last novel, Clock Without Hands (1961), a drugstore owner is diagnosed with terminal leukaemia and decides not to tell his wife because it would induce communication of a sort he has become accustomed to living without. She took creative writing courses at Columbia, but emerged unscathed by show-don’t-tell orthodoxies: she often tells you that her characters are lonely, not least because this is what they’re telling themselves, and because the telling is a part of the loneliness. If this all sounds a bit adolescent, it was, deliberately so. Some of her most engaging characters were adolescents – Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Frankie in The Member of the Wedding – and some of her keenest readers have been too.’

(…)

‘Though McCullers sometimes described her characters as “symbolic”, you won’t find many symbols with such vividly realized gesture, voice and physicality. She knew better than most what it was to have a body, because she had an unruly one. In her teens, what was thought to be tuberculosis turned out to be strep throat, and what was thought to be healed wasn’t – strep throat led to rheumatic fever, which led to erysipelas and rheumatic heart disease. Her first stroke came at the age of twenty-four. The next, which struck six years later during an extended stay in Paris, rendered her left side partially paralyzed. Back in America she moved in with Bébé, who had relocated to Nyack in New York state after the death of McCullers’s father. Because her paralysis was neither total nor constant, McCullers sometimes feared that it was somehow willed, and also found herself vulnerable to bitter gossip among visitors, who noted that her “claw” disappeared when she wanted to play the piano. The increasingly gruelling work of supporting her, and of enabling her drinking, was taken on by Bébé, McCullers’s sister Rita and her cousin Jordan Massee, as well as by Tennessee Williams, one of few loyal and lasting friends. Most people fled her sooner or later. Truman Capote hung around long enough to commit plagiarism, which was one of the few ways he had of paying a sincere compliment.’

(…)

‘The two largest sub-entries under “McCullers, Carson” in the index are for “Williams, Tennessee, relationship with” and “drink, use/abuse by”. Her personal struggles and relationships dominate this book. That doesn’t mean that her work is entirely neglected, and there’s a logic to keeping it in the middle distance. Richard Wright suggested that what matters in her fictions is not the events, but the “projected mood”. Instead of reckoning with McCullers’s output in detail, Mary V. Dearborn reconstructs a figure who could plausibly have projected the mood we find in the work. After a fifty-year wait, it’s a less ambitious approach than some might like, but humility is preferable to overreach here. McCullers’s contemporaries loved to describe her, and from the big, bitchy seam of their descriptions that sits across this book it’s clear that their most ambitious attempts easily collapsed into convolution, contradiction and downright absurdity. Here comes Carson: like a Christmas, like an ornament, like a lemur, like a sharecropper, like an overcooked vegetable tinged with poison; the ice queen of the north, the iron butterfly. On and on they went, addicted to the attempt, precisely because it was bound to fail.’

Read the article here.

Good that her work isn’t entirely neglected – I guess that’s the problem with most biographies, the temptation to neglect the work is almost unavoidable.
And yes, she managed to write about people who are not like her, like a Black Marxist physician for example. This is only one of her many achievements.

The opening of ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’ is one of the best openings I’ve come across:

‘Inspired by a dwarf McCullers had seen at a bar in Brooklyn Heights, "The Ballad of the Sad Café" begins (again) with a description of a town: The town itself is dreary. . . . [It] is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world. . . . The largest building, in the very center of the town, is boarded up completely and leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute. . . . Nevertheless, on the second floor there is one window which is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town. It is a face like the terrible dim faces known in dreams—sexless and white, with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief.’

See here.

You never know what a dwarf in a bar in Brooklyn Heights leads to.