At the cocktail party held upon the publication of Edmund White’s short biography of Proust, Fran Lebowitz congratulated White on his wonderful little book but lamented that he spent too many pages on Proust’s homosexuality. “Well, he was gay,” said White. “No, Edmund,” said Lebowitz. “You’re gay. Proust was a genius.”
The proper balance in biography between the artist’s life and work depends on the appeal of the artist’s life and work. Mary V. Dearborn, in her new biography of Carson McCullers, Carson McCullers: A Life, tells us exactly what we’re in for with the subtitle. McCullers’s work—The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, for example—gets scant attention and scanter analysis. Here, McCullers’s novels and plays seemingly appear out of thin air and disappear just as quickly, leaving nothing but a pile of cash behind. What analysis her corpus receives constists mostly of quoted remarks by reviewers. In the choice between writing about McCullers as a lesbian (bisexual? transgender?), a lesbian writer, or a writer who happened to be a lesbian, Dearborn has mostly chosen the first option.
This isn’t the first time Dearborn has opted, or rather settled, for gossip and speculation over context and meaning (see her biographies of Hemingway and Mailer). But to be fair to Dearborn, and as alluded to in the previous paragraph, sometimes an author’s life does merit more attention than the work. And in McCullers’s case, that probably holds true. Her books lack drama. Her life didn’t. She was chronically ill after suffering an undiagnosed stroke in her youth. As Dearborn writes, McCullers was “doomed before the age of twenty.”
McCullers married her on-again-off-again husband, Reeves, when she was only nineteen. They both wanted to write. He supported her until The Heart is a Lonely Hunter became a critical and commercial success. Then, from a combination of alcoholism, idleness, and undiagnosed PTSD, Reeves never got around to writing his novels and became increasingly mentally unstable. The two lived off McCullers’s successes—and, crude as it is to say, died from them. Success wasn’t the cause, but it was a catalyst to their demise. At thirty, McCullers suffered another stroke—this one diagnosed—and, after ignoring her doctor’s orders to stop her rampant drinking, suffered yet another, this one leaving her invalid (although some believed she was faking her condition). The crueler McCullers’s body became to her, the crueler she became to others, especially Reeves, who was periodically suicidal, partly because of his struggles with accepting his homosexuality. On one occasion, after Reeves threatened to throw himself out of a hotel window, McCullers phoned Tennessee Williams for help. When Williams arrived, he asked why Reeves was making such a scene. “I’m gay,” said Reeves. “Plenty of people are that,” said Williams, “without throwing themselves out a window.”
One of art’s supposed perks is the therapeutic outlet it provides for the artist. Why McCullers didn’t turn her dramatic life into dramatic masterpieces is something I would’ve liked Dearborn to discuss. McCullers had her autobiographical stand-ins—the girls who dressed as boys, to name just one. “That’s why I wear shorts,” says Mick Kelly in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. “I’d rather be a boy any day.” But McCullers deploys autobiographical details to stuff her fiction rather than expand it. Autobiographical details are treated as decorations rather than as tools for diagnosis or investigation. She was a hoarder of experience rather than an explorer of the mind, which is why her novels aren’t adventures but repositories—repositories, most often, of neuroses. Dialogue is where a writer really reveals herself, and McCullers therefore avoided dialogue at all costs. Dialogue forces movement. It moves the writer into the unknown. And that’s where McCullers refused to go. Whether her “friends” were right about her invalidity, about it being a charade, McCullers was very much an invalid in her writing. As an author with a reputation for danger, she was in fact pathetically safe.
There’s plenty more gossip in Carson McCullers than I’ve covered here. In fact, I’ve barely scratched the tragic surface. Biographies should inspire you to read their subjects’ work, either out of excitement or nasty curiosity. Dearborn’s biography doesn’t do that. Should you read this biography without having read McCullers’s work, you probably never will. But if you have, it’s worth reading for the fuller picture it provides of someone who could write with short-sighted splendor. McCullers’s life was a mess of alcohol, suicides, and illness. It’s no surprise that Dearborn could find plenty of McCullers’s contemporaries to gab about her eccentricity, her neediness, and her egocentrism. Her life was, on the whole, a life of pain. At one point, Dearborn quotes from an Emily Dickinson poem: “After great pain a formal feeling comes.” But for McCullers the pain never stopped. So the formal feeling never came. Like her novels, her life was always just the mean present.