Collected Stories of Carson McCullers Read online

  Collected Stories of Carson McCullers

  Including The Member of the Wedding and The Ballad of the Sad Café

  Carson McCullers

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION BY

  Virginia Spencer Carr

  * * *

  A MARINER BOOK

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  Boston • New York

  * * *

  Copyright © 1987 by Floria V. Lasky, Executrix

  of the Estate of Carson McCullers

  Introduction copyright © 1987 by Virginia Spencer Carr

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Mariner Books edition 1998

  For information about permission to reprint

  selections from this book, write to Permissions,

  Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-

  PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

  ISBN 978-0-395-92505-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8

  The stories in this work have been previously published in:

  The Member of the Wedding. Copyright © 1946 by

  Carson McCullers; © renewed 1973 by Floria V. Lasky,

  Executrix of the Estate of Carson McCullers.

  The Mortgaged Heart. Copyright © 1971 by Floria V. Lasky,

  Executrix of the Estate of Carson McCullers.

  Collected Short Stories and the novel The Ballad of the

  Sad Café. Copyright © 1936, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1946,

  1950, 1951, 1955 by Carson McCullers.

  * * *

  Contents

  Introduction by Virginia Spencer Carr / vii

  Sucker / I

  Court in the West Eighties / II

  Poldi / 20

  Breath from the Sky / 27

  The Orphanage / 36

  Instant of the Hour After / 40

  Like That / 48

  Wunderkind / 58

  The Aliens / 71

  Untitled Piece / 80

  The Jockey / 104

  Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland / 110

  Correspondence / 119

  A Tree • A Rock • A Cloud / 125

  Art and Mr. Mahoney / 134

  The Sojourner / 138

  A Domestic Dilemma / 148

  The Haunted Boy / 158

  Who Has Seen the Wind? / 171

  The Ballad of the Sad Café / 195

  The Member of the Wedding / 255

  Bibliography / 393

  * * *

  Introduction

  Carson McCullers left behind an impressive literary legacy when she died at the age of fifty in 1967: five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, some two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children's verse, and a handful of distinguished poems. Her most acclaimed fiction appeared in the 1940s. McCullers was taken for a Wunderkind when she published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) at twenty-three. Set in a small Southern mill town resembling Columbus, Georgia, where she was born Lula Carson Smith on February 19, 1917, the novel reflects the author's milieu and is her most autobiographical tale.

  Reviews of McCullers's subsequent books were mixed. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), set on an army post not unlike Fort Benning on the outskirts of her hometown, disappointed readers and reviewers alike, who thought the characters bizarre, morbid, grotesque. Some recognized the novel as a beautifully sculpted, albeit chilling, tour de force. In the preface to a paperback reissue in 1950, Tennessee Williams called it a pure and powerful work "conceived in that Sense of the Awful which is the desperate black root of nearly all significant modern art."

  McCullers herself was partial to her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), which most critics consider—along with The Member of the Wedding (1946)—her best work. The stage version of The Member of the Wedding starred Julie Harris and Ethel Waters and launched young Brandon de Wilde's dramatic career. It swept most of the theater awards in 1950, had a long run on Broadway, and, along with the sale of its movie rights, made the playwright financially independent. It also broadened and enhanced her critical reputation and whetted her desire to write again for the theater. Seven years later The Square Root of Wonderful was produced on Broadway with Anne Baxter in the lead role of Mollie Lovejoy. The play was soundly drubbed by the critics and closed after a forty-five-day run.

  In 1951 an omnibus edition of McCullers's novels and selected short stories provoked new attention and acclaim by serious critics, but Clocks Without Hands (1961) was alternately praised and damned by reviewers who had waited fifteen years for her fifth novel. The book climbed to sixth place on the best-seller list, which carried it for five months and boosted McCullers's popularity among lay readers, but not her critical reputation. Meanwhile, her health had become so impaired during the last ten years of her life (she suffered three paralyzing strokes before she was thirty and was repeatedly hospitalized for surgery and death-threatening illnesses) that those who knew her well marveled that she was able to complete another major work.

  Yet the frail author kept on writing daily, for life itself depended upon her ability to spin out tales in manuscript as well as in her head. "I wouldn't want to live if I couldn't write," she told a friend during her last trip to Georgia, and to Edith Sitwell she said that writing was a "search for God."

  McCullers's fictional characters were her close friends (at times her demons) and more real to her than most of the reality that surrounded her. Her cousin Virginia Storey, who saw her intermittently throughout her life, said that "Carson loved to take the truth between her teeth and run with it, a habit she never got over."

  Despite her absence from the South for almost twenty-five years, McCullers continued to draw heavily from her roots there. In 1949 when a friend expressed surprise upon hearing that she was going back to Georgia for a visit—convinced that her life there had been a source of no little distress—McCullers answered glibly: "I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror." Ironically, the South of her imagination and memory was always truer than that conjured up by any visit, and merely arriving at the old train depot was enough to make her yearn for a quick retreat. To McCullers as she was growing up, as well as to Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding, snow, Alaska, and such fictional placc names as Winter Hill were symbols of escape from a hated environment.

  Whereas all of McCullers's novels are set in the South, at least half of the short stories are not, although her characters are often transplanted Southerners for whom their homeland remains a memory of pain and anguish. Unlike many of the characters in her novels, those in her short stories behave quite normally. They have none of the physical grotesqueries that mark her longer works. Another significant difference is the way McCullers transformed reality into fiction in her short tales. Readers who know something of her girlhood in Georgia recognize easily the autobiographical elements in such characters as Mick and Frankie, while the self-portraits in her short fiction are more cleverly disguised.

  In some of the short stories McCullers made her autobiographical characters young boys or men. Once out of the South and enjoying considerable fame as the young author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers readily acknowledged her sexual ambivalence. To poet Louis Untermeyer she said in 1940, "By the time I was six I was sure that I was born a man." McCullers often fell in love with women, but such infatuations seldom led to physical relationships. Although she adored such men as composer David Diamond, her cousin Jordan Massee, her Charleston friends Edwin Peacock and John Zeigler, psychiatrists Rowland F. Fullilo
ve and Sidney Isenberg, playwright Tennessee Williams, and director John Huston, probably the only man she knew intimately was Reeves McCullers, whom she married twice. In three of the short stories—"Instant of the Hour After," "Who Has Seen the Wind?" and "A Domestic Dilemma"—her husband appears full cloth.

  The most prevalent theme in McCullers's short fiction is that of rejection or unrequited love. The tide character in "Sucker," written soon after her graduation from high school, was rejected by his adolescent cousin Pete, whom he idolized. Pete, in love with Maybelle, discovered belatedly what became McCullers's basic tenet: "If a person admires you a lot you despise him and don't care—and it is the person who doesn't notice you that you are apt to admire."

  Another tale of unrequited love is "Poldi," which McCullers wrote at nineteen while studying with Sylvia Chatfield Bates, her creative writing teacher at New York University. Although the unattractive, overweight cellist Poldi appears to be the main character, it is the hapless lover Hans with whom the reader sympathizes. "Sucker" and "Poldi" are early examples of McCullers's pervading thesis of love, expressed poignantly six years later by the balladeer / narrator of The Ballad of the Sad Café to help explain Miss Amelia's outrageous love for the little hunchback Cousin Lymon:

  A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

  It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved.... The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

  "Wunderkind," her first published story, expresses rejection of a different sort. Here the main character is the young pianist Frances, who teeters between adolescence and maturity in an unsuccessful struggle to play with the passion, sensitivity, and technique she had once shown when taken for a Wunderkind. The pupil's painfully acquired self-knowledge leads to her stumbling flight from the master's studio, to which she knows she will never return. Frances's abject sense of loss is obviously her teacher's also, but in their confusion and hurt neither will admit it.

  "Wunderkind" is a subtle mirror image of McCullers's emotional and physical break at seventeen with her piano teacher Mary Tucker, with whom she worked assiduously for four years. McCullers aspired to become a concert pianist until her teacher informed her that the lessons would have to stop because of her husband's military transfer. The distressed pupil's means of handling the dark pronouncement was to declare that she had already decided to give up her musical career and become a writer instead.

  McCullers and her piano teacher were estranged for fifteen years. Finally, Mrs. Tucker wrote to congratulate her upon the dramatic success of The Member of the Wedding and to admit her own great hurt and disappointment over their break. McCullers explained that the tale could never have been written had it not been for Mrs. Tucker and her family, whom she would always love. They were her "we of me," just as in The Member of the Wedding Frankie believes that she has discovered her new identity by falling in love with her brother and his bride: "They are the we of me," insists Frankie, who is certain that the "three of them would go into the world" and always be together. Instead, she is dragged screaming from the honeymoon car.

  Another tale of rejection written for her creative writing class at NYU is "Breath from the Sky," a story in which a fragile young woman named Constance is about to be sent away to a sanatorium in Georgia for what appears to be advanced tuberculosis. The author herself suffered from rheumatic fever—misdiagnosed as tuberculosis—and at fifteen was sent to Alto, Georgia (called Mountain Heights in the tale), to recuperate. Constance's unspoken fear is that she will never return and that her siblings (McCullers named the sister Mick, who evolved into the more obviously autobiographical Mick in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) will continue their unfettered lives as though she had never existed. Implicit is that Constance's mother's apparent indifference is but her way of dealing with the tragedy. The reader may surmise by the end of the tale that "Breath from the Sky" is the mother's story as well, and McCullers's friends and relatives in Georgia were quick to recognize Constance's mother as the author's own.

  It is noteworthy that the children in McCullers's fiction lack strong emotional ties with their mothers. As her brother Lamar Smith saw it, "Sister did not want to strip herself that bare and reveal her utter dependency upon our mother. She was too vulnerable. She was our mother's favorite child, and somehow my sister Rita and I understood. We were convinced that Sister was a genius, and that our mother was too for helping it flower." Consequently, McCullers's fictional mothers—if they are mentioned at all—either die in childbirth, as does Frankie's in The Member of the Wedding, are too preoccupied in helping to support the family when the father cannot, as is Mick's in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; attempt suicide, as does Hugh's in "The Haunted Boy"; or drink too much, as does Emily Meadows in "A Domestic Dilemma." On the other hand, most of the fathers in McCullers's fiction are treated sympathetically. Like Mick and Frankie's fathers, they suffer because they fail to communicate with their daughters, who are vaguely aware and discomfited by a sense of loss but cannot breach it.

  In "The Haunted Boy," another story of wounded adolescence and rejection set in Georgia, Hugh is haunted by the fear that he will return from school one day and discover his mother lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor, just as he had before when she failed in a suicide attempt that sent her to the state mental hospital. The boy's hostility, resentment, and guilt suffered "for the mother he loved the best in the world" make him turn to his friend John for succor, but ]ohn is aloof to his needs. Hugh recognizes now that he hates John, for "you hate people you have to need so badly." The "haunted" boy's admission reflects the ambivalence of McCullers's own feelings toward her mother, on whom she had become increasingly dependent after her husband's suicide in 1953. "The Haunted Boy" was published five months after her mother's death (1955) and is but another version of McCullers's thesis of love.

  "Correspondence"—McCullers's only story in the epistolary form—is still another conversion of life into art. The tale consists of four letters from Henky Evans, a naive girl who pours out her adolescent heart to a Brazilian pen pal who never answers. Finally, she tells him that she cannot waste any more of her "valuable time" writing to him, but wants to know why he "put his name on the pen pal list" if he did not intend to fulfill his part of the agreement. In actuality, McCullers interrupted her work on The Ballad of the Sad Café to write this story, prompted by her husband's failure to answer her letters while she was at an artists' colony. Her realization at last that he had gone off secretly with their best friend—that she had been excluded from their "we of me"—was a decisive factor in their divorce.

  The concept of the "immense complexity of love"—a phrase from her short story "A Domestic Dilemma"—surfaces repeatedly in McCullers's various writings, especially in her domestic tales that reflect many aspects of her life with Reeves McCullers. The earliest story of domestic discord, "Instant of the Hour After," written at nineteen, depicts a wretched evening in the life of a young wife and husband whose marriage is disintegrating because of his inability to control his drinking. Although the wife loves her husband, she is put off by his torrent of meaningless words and sarcasm when he is drunk; she wonders vaguely what life might have been like had she married Phillip, their close friend. Phillip has already left the apartment when the story opens, for his chess game was aborted by his host's having passed out. McCullers was not married when she wrote this story, but she and Reeves were already living together in New York while he worked sporadically on a novel, having illusions of becoming a successful writer himself.

  They were married in 1937, a few months after McCullers presented "Instant of the Hour After" to Sylvia Chatfiel
d Bates for a critique. The unpleasant husband in the story is a ringer for Reeves, who was already well on his way to alcoholism at twenty-three. They were divorced in 1941, then remarried in 1945 upon his return home from the war, an injured and decorated company commander in the U.S. Army Rangers. Reeves was forced to retire with a medical disability although his wounds (to the wrist and hand) were not disabling. Without his own personal caUse or a job, he soon became hopelessly alcoholic. Countless embittered separations and reconciliations marked their troubled second marriage, which ended with Reeves's suicide in Paris.

  "Instant of the Hour After" is McCullers's only story in which both the husband and wife drink heavily. The young wife sees herself trapped with her husband in a bottle, "skeetering angrily up and down the cold blank glass like minute monkeys" until they collapse, exhausted, "looking like fleshy specimens in a laboratory. With nothing said between them." Despite her teacher's encouragement that she revise the tale, McCullers apparently found the material too close to home to attempt to rework it.

  Twenty years after she wrote "Instant of the Hour After"—three years after Reeves's suicide—McCullers treated a similar domestic crisis in "Who Has Seen the Wind?" Whereas the husband in "Instant of the Hour After" was twenty, the alcoholic husband—a failed writer—in the later tale was forty (Reeves's age when he died). The most convincing line in the story is the husband's warning, to an eager young man who has published one story in seven years, that a "small, one-story talent" is the "most treacherous thing that God can give." On the verge of insanity, the husband threatens to kill his wife, then disappears into a blinding snowstorm and "the unmarked way ahead." Before Reeves killed himself he had tried repeatedly to convince his wife to commit suicide with him.

  McCullers, who had tried to write "Who Has Seen the Wind?" as a play before turning it into the long story that was eventually published, attempted repeatedly to rework it for the theater. Finally, after three years and considerable revision of both plot and characterization, the tale became the play The Square Root of Wonderful, in which the protagonist has divorced the man to whom she was married twice, a failed writer of one successful novel.