PLEASE SEE index4000, please.

:":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":                   

                     University of California, San Diego
                                Geisel Library
                    Mandeville Special Collections Library



                                Register of the
                                Lew Welch Papers

                                  1943 -- 1971


                                    MSS 0013


                          This file created: 12/08/1995


 MSS 0013
 Lew Welch Papers

 Inclusive dates:  1943 -- 1971
 2.40 linear feet (7 archives boxes)

 ABSTRACT

 The papers of an important member of the West Coast Beat poetry
 community.  The collection is divided into four series: 1)
 Correspondence;  2) Writings; 3) Reviews and Announcements; and 4)
 Personal and Business Records.  The Correspondence series includes
 letters from Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Donald Allen, and 18 folders of
 material from Welch's mother, Dorothy Brownfield.  The Writings series
 includes poetry, prose, plays, essays, songs, scrolls, and notebooks.
 The collection as a whole contains information pertaining both to
 Welch's personal battle with recurring depression as well as his
 struggle to construct a Beat poetry that might do justice to his notion
 -- inherited from his hero, William Carlos Williams -- of "The American
 Idiom."


 ACCESSIONS

 Accession M-1974.002 acquired from Donald Allen on 01/01/1974;
 Processed by Stephen Hartnett, 10/01/1988.


 BIOGRAPHY

 Although Lewis Barrett Welch's life was marked by uncertainty and a lack
 of permanent goals, he gained an enduring position in the world of
 literature through his writings and personal influence. 

 Welch was born 16 August 1926 in Phoenix, Arizona, to Lewis Barrett
 Welch Sr. and Dorothy Brownfield Welch.  Mrs. Welch was the daughter of
 a wealthy Phoenix surgeon.  Lew Welch claimed that he began suffering
 mental breakdowns while still a baby, about which he once told David
 Melzer, "I went to the loony bin when I was fourteen months old. . . It
 is the world's record.  Even among my beat generation friends.  I have
 the world's record.  I copped out, I went crazy, split, I said 'forget
 it!'"

 Following the birth of Welch's sister his parents marriage broke up, and
 Dorothy Welch moved the family to California in 1929. Welch was three at
 the time, and for most of his childhood his mother moved from town to
 town in California.  He attended schools in Santa Monica, Coronado, La
 Mesa, and El Cajon.  In Palo Alto Welch finished high school.

 While still in school Welch enlisted in the Air Force, and he entered
 the Force following graduation.  He spent less than a year in the
 service and then returned to California, where he  enrolled at Stockton
 Junior College.  While at Stockton he met James Wilson, a teacher who
 encouraged him to write.  It was Wilson who suggested that Welch study
 at Reed College, a school in Oregon with a reputation for a progressive
 faculty and student body.

 Welch entered Reed College in 1948, and the following year moved into a
 house with Gary Snyder; the following year they were joined by Philip
 Whalen.  By the fall of 1949 Welch was co-editor of the school's
 literary magazine and was writing constantly.  He wrote his senior
 thesis on Gertrude Stein and graduated in 1950.

 The period following Welch's graduation was marked by turbulence.
 During the summer of 1950 he planned to move to Chile, and he asked his
 mother for a $1000 loan for the trip.  By fall he had changed his plans
 and remained in Oregon.  Late in the year he met William Carlos
 Williams, who was to become Welch's hero.  Welch went to visit Williams
 in New Jersey and ultimately rented an apartment in New York City.  His
 initial enthusiasm for the city soon diminished, however, and after a
 brief stay in Florida he moved to Chicago.  There he enrolled in the
 Master's program at the University of Chicago.  Again, he quickly became
 discouraged and depressed, and in 1951 suffered a nervous breakdown.

 Welch dropped out of school and began undergoing psychoanalysis. 
 He lived a relatively tranquil life for the next five years, and in 1953
 he went to work preparing ads for Montgomery Ward.  Shortly thereafter
 he married Mary Garber.  

 For a number of years Welch showed his poetry only to close friends.
 With the emergence of the Beat movement, however, Welch's friends Philip
 Whalen and Gary Snyder began receiving national attention.  Welch's
 desire to devote himself completely to his poetry was revived.  He
 transferred to the Oakland office of Montgomery Ward and soon became a
 part of the San Francisco poetry scene.  In 1958 he was fired from his
 job.  His marriage fell apart soon after.

 At the same time, however, Welch's poetry was beginning to meet with
 some success.  Donald Allen included one of Welch's poems in The New
 American Poetry -- the important anthology published in 1960.  That same
 year Welch's first book, Wobbly Rock, was published.  He was drinking
 heavily during this time, but he continued to write extensively.  For a
 time he lived with his mother in Reno, Nevada, and then in a cabin in

 the Trinity Alps.  He moved back to San Francisco in 1963, and in 1965
 published three books.  

 In 1965 Welch began teaching a poetry workshop offered through the
 Extension program of the University of California at Berkeley.  Despite
 his burgeoning success, Welch's bouts with depression and heavy drinking
 continued.  After the breakup of another relationship in 1971 Welch
 returned to the mountains.  On 23 May 1971, Gary Snyder went up to
 Welch's campsite and found a suicide note in Welch's truck.  Despite an
 extensive search, Welch's body was never recovered.

:":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":

Carson McCullers

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


This [section developed by] A. Hershey. 


Carson McCullers, 1917 - 1967

 

I. Biography of Carson McCullers 

 

Carson McCullers is an enigma to many, even to most of those who knew her, including, to
some extent, the author herself. Probably the easiest way to begin a biographical account
of this Southern Gothic writer is to look to the words of an expert on the subject.
Tennessee Williams, a longtime friend of the author has eloquently singled out the
qualities that distinguished her from a host of other writers of her time in the
following short analysis. It was written after the dusk of her sky-rocketing success and
gives an account of her early impact on the writing community and the world:
 

"The great generation of writers that emerged in the twenties, poets such as Eliot, 

Crane, Cummings, and Wallace Stevens, prose-writers such as Faulkner, 

Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Katherine Anne Porter, has not been succeeded or 

supplemented by any new figures of corresponding stature with the sole exception 

of this prodigious young talent that first appeared in 1940 with the publication of 

her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. She was at that time a girl of 

twenty-two who had come to New York from Columbus, Georgia, to study music. 

According to the legends that surround her early period in the city, she first 

established her residence, quite unwittingly, in a house of prostitution, and she 

found the other tenants of the house friendly and sympathetic and had not the 

ghost of an idea of what illicit enterprise was going on there. One of the girls in 

this establishment became her particular friend and undertook to guide her about 

the town, which Carson McCullers found confusing quite imaginably... However a 

misadventure befell her. Too much trust was confided in this mischievous guide, 

and while she was being shown the subway route to the Julliard School of Music, 

the companion and all of her tuition money, which the companion had offered to 

keep for her, abruptly disappeared. Carson was abandoned penniless in the 

subway, and some people say it took her several weeks to find her way out, and 

when she did finally return to the light of day, it was in Brooklyn where she 

became enmeshed in a vaguely similar menage whose personnel ranged from W.H. 

Auden to Gypsy Rose Lee (he is referring to the brownstone artists’ colony). At an 

rate, regardless of how much fantasy this legend may contain, the career of music 

was abandoned in favor of writing, and somewhere, sometime, in the dank and 

labyrinthine mysteries of the New York subway system, possibly between some 

chewing gum vendor and some weight and character analysis given by a doll 

Gypsy, a bronze tablet should be erected in the memory of the mischievous 

comrade who made away with Carson’s money for the study of piano. To 

paraphrase a familiar cliché of screen publicity-writers, perhaps a great musician 

was lost but a great writer was found…" (Introduction to The Mortgaged Heart)
 

Lula Carson Smith was born on February 19, 1917. She was the oldest of three children and
the daughter of jewelers (Lamar Smith and Marguerite Waters Smith). They were regarded as
a highly respectable family of moderate means. Her great-grandfather was Major John
Carson, whose seventy-five slaves and two thousand acres of rich farmland on Georgia’s
Flint River provoked envy and admiration throughout the region (until Wilson’s Raiders
set fire to his cotton stores and freed his slaves.) He never returned to his devastated
lands and family after this for he died on a Civil War battlefield in Virginia.

Carson found herself to be cleverly adept at playing the piano at a young age. She
shocked her mother at age six by sitting down and playing with both hands a song she
heard for the first time that afternoon in a movie theatre. From then until late high
school, she practiced fervently and hoped to carry her work on to a musical education at
the New York Julliard School. However, at seventeen, she was diagnosed by doctors as
having "pneumonia with complications." Later, she found to have had rheumatic fever. Too
weak to play piano during her long recuperation, she took to writing plays in the style
of a favorite author, Eugene O’Neill. She soon began to cast and direct these plays at
home before an audience of family and neighbors.

In late high school Carson faced the crushing blow of losing her mentor and piano teacher
Mary Tucker when she moved to another state. Having never recovered from the loss, she
put aside her interest in piano permanently. As she hoped to cultivate her newfound love
of writing, she made plans to leave for New York directly after graduation. She was
barely seventeen when she arrived in Manhattan and registered for classes at Columbia
University. While there, she studied with some of the best creative writing teachers in
the city: Whit Burnett, Dorothy Scarborough, Helen Rose Hull, and Sylvia Chatfield Bates,
who was considered to be NYU’s most successful teacher of creative writing.

Repeated attacks of anemia, pleurisy, and other respiratory ailments related to her still
undiagnosed rheumatic fever interrupted her formal studies and frequently drove her south
to recuperate. At just such a time was when she met Reeves McCullers, a Fort Bennington
soldier from Alabama, who was also an aspiring writer. They were married on September 20,
1937. By 1940, she was already fading out of the romantic honeymoon phase of her marriage
and left by herself to return to New York. After arriving, she took up residence in a
boardinghouse arrangement of artists at a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, NY. She
remained here for four years, and became acquainted with the likes of Truman Capote, Isak
Dinesen, Edith Sitwell, and Tennessee Williams.

During her separation from Reeves, Carson realized that she had alternative sexual
yearnings—she fell in love with a Swiss novelist named Annemarie Clarec-Schwartzenbach.
However, only a short time later, her husband fell in love with a man with whom he moved
to Rochester, NY. They divorced not simply because of the legal grounds of adultery, but
also because Carson found that Reeves had absconded with some of her royalty checks when
he left. Carson fell in love with a succession of other women, including Katherine Anne
Porter. She was considered a lesbian by her friends in New York, and self-proclaimed her
androgeny, but none of this was known by her family in the south.

When, in 1943, Reeves was recommissioned and sent to the European front, he wrote to
Carson and begged forgiveness for his "foolish ways." The two exchanged letters
throughout his stay and they remarried in 1945. They bought a house together in Paris.
However, their life was tumultuous and Carson soon left him to move back to the states.
He committed suicide in 1953.

Carson lived with her mother in Nyack, New York for a number of years, but Mrs. Smith
died unexpectedly in 1955. Carson was devastated, and again alone. Over the next twelve
years she became increasingly frail, though she continued to write until the end. She
finally succumbed after laying comatose for 47 days from a massive brain hemorrhage. She
died on September 29, 1967, at age fifty.

In 1971, her sister Margarita G. Smith, co-executor of Carson’s literary estate,
published a volume of yet unpublished works by the author. The book was called The
Mortgaged Heart.

(Exerpts from Pioneers & Caretakers, and Understanding Carson McCullers)

 

II. Chronology of McCullers’s Life 

 

19 17—Lula Carson Smith is born on February 19 in Columbus, Georgia; first child of Marguerite Waters Smith and her 

husband, Lamar, a successful jeweler.

 

1933—Graduates from Columbus High School in June. She writes her first short story, "Sucker."

 

1934—Travels to New York City, where she enrolls in creative writing courses at Columbia University.

 

1936—In December, "Wunderkind" is published in Story Magazine. Seriously ill through the winter, she begins work 

on "The Mute," which is to become The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

 

1937—Carson marries Reeves McCullers, an army corporal and aspiring writer, on September 20. They move to 

Charlotte, North Carolina, where she writes her novel.

 

1940-41—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is published. Carson divorces Reeves and, with Harper’s Bazaar editor George 

Davis, rents a brownstone in Brooklyn which develops into an artist’s enclave. During the winter of 1940-41 

McCullers suffers her first stroke. Her mother comes to New York, and after several weeks brings McCullers 

back to Columbus to recuperate. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) is published in two installments in Harper’s 

Bazaar.

 

1942—The short story "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud" is selected immediately after publication for the 1942 edition of the 

annual O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories anthology.

 

1943—McCullers receives the Guggenheim fiction fellowship. The Ballad of the Sad Café, for which she receives a 

prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, appears in Harper’s Bazaar.

 

1945—Carson remarries Reeves, who has been discharged from the army for a wrist injury. They move in with Carson’s 

mother in Nyack, New York.

 

1946—The Member of the Wedding is published. McCullers spends the summer on Nantucket Island visiting Tennessee 

Williams and rewriting The Member of the Wedding as a play. In the autumn she travels to Europe with her 

husband.

 

1947—Suffers second and third strokes, which leave her permanently partially disabled.

 

1950—The Member of the Wedding opens on Broadway. The play wins numerous awards.

 

1951—McCullers’s collected works are published by Houghton Mifflin as The Ballad of the Sad Café. Carson and 

Reeves buy a house outside Paris.

 

1953—Reeves commits suicide. Carson returns to the United States to live with her mother.

 

1955—McCullers spends the spring with Tennessee Williams in Key West, after their joint lecture appearances. In 

June, her mother dies unexpectedly.

 

1957—The play The Square Root of Wonderful makes an unsuccessful Broadway run.

 

1958-62—Suffers several severe illnesses.

 

1961—Clock Without Hands is published.

 

1962—McCullers undergoes surgery for cancer of the right breast.

 

1964—Publishes collection of children’s poems, Sweet as a Pickle, Clean as a Pig.

 

1967—In April McCullers is awarded the Henry Bellamann Award, a one-thousand-dollar grant. On August 15 she 

suffers a massive cerebral hemorrhage and dies one month later, on September 29.

 

1971—The Mortgaged Heart, a collection of short stories, poems, and essays, is published, edited by McCullers’s sister, 

Margarita G. Smith.

 

III. Publications and Works by Carson McCullers:

 

Books

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940)

Reflections in a Golden Eye (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941—also adapted into a movie)

The Member of the Wedding (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1946)

The Ballad of the Sad Café (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951—collection of short stories and novellas)

Clock Without Hands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961)

The Mortgaged Heart (published posthumously, previously unpublished works; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971)

 

Play

The Member of the Wedding (New York: New Directions, 1951) 

The Square Root of Wonderful (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958)

 

Short Stories

Sucker (Saturday Evening Post, 236:68-71; September 28, 1963)

Court in the West Eighties

Poldi

Breath from the Sky

The Orphanage

Instant of the Hour After

Like That

Wunderkind (Story, 9:61-73; December, 1936)

A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Harper’s Bazaar, 76:50ff; November 1942)

The Aliens

Untitled Piece

Correspondence (New Yorker, 18:36; February 7, 1942)

Art and Mr. Mahoney (Mademoiselle, 28:120ff; February 1949)

The Haunted Boy (Botteghe Obscure, 16:264-78; 1955 and Mademoiselle, 42:134ff; November 1955)

Who Has Seen the Wind? (Mademoiselle, 43:156ff; September 1956)

The March (Redbook, 128:64-65; March 1967)

 

Poetry

Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964—a volume of children’s poetry)

The Mortgaged Heart (1948)

When We Are Lost (1948)

The Dual Angel (in five parts—1952)

Incantation to Lucifer

Hymen, O Hymen

Love and the Rind of Time

The Dual Angel

Father, Upon Thy Image We Are Spanned

Stone Is Not Stone (1957)

Saraband

 

Essays and Articles

Look Homeward, Americans (Vogue, 96:74-75; December 1, 1940) 

Night Watch Over Freedom (Vogue, 97:29; January 1, 1941)

Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood (Vogue, 97:62ff; March 1, 1941) 

We Carried Our Banners—We were Pacifists, Too (Vogue, 97:42-43; July 15, 1941)

The Jockey (Mademoiselle, 17:15-16; August 23, 1941)

Madame Zilenski and the King of Finland (New Yorker, 17:15-18; December 20, 1941) 

The Ballad of the Sad Café (Harper’s Bazaar, 77:72ff; November 1943)

How I Began to Write (Mademoiselle, 27:191ff; September 1948)

Our Heads Are Bowed

Home for Christmas (Mademoiselle, 30:53ff; December 1949)

The Vision Shared (Theatre Arts, 34:28-30; April 1950—autobiography)

The Sojourner (Mademoiselle, 31:90ff; May 1950)

A Domestic Dilemma (New York Post Magazine, p. 10; September 16, 1951)

The Discovery of Christmas Eve (Mademoiselle, 38:54ff; December 1953)

The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing (Esquire, 52:162-64; December 1959)

A Child’s View of Christmas (Redbook, 28:30; December 1961)

A Hospital Christmas Eve (McCall’s, 95:96-97; December 1967)

 

IV. Literary Criticism of McCullers’s Works

 

In her essay "The Flowering Dream," Carson McCullers wrote: "I become the characters I
write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’
(2)" This idea runs like a current through her works, feeding life into her characters
like the volts used by Dr. Frankenstein to create his monster. McCullers was passionate
and closely attached to her creations. They were often bizarre and tortured characters,
but each had a purpose and meaning within her stories.

McCullers herself explained her eccentric style in the following manner: "I… have my own
reality, made out of language and voices and foliage. (2)" Some readers and critics are
engrossed by that reality and accept it as particular to the genius of McCullers herself.
As Marguerite Young has said, she is "sometimes depicted as a sensationalist reveling in
the grotesque…" but she is more than that; "she is first of all the poetic symbolist, a
seeker after those luminous meanings which always do transcend the boundaries of the
stereotyped, the conventional, and the so-called normal (2)."

Others discredit her work. They scoff at the idea that she should be counted among the
greatest Southern women writers in history. In his critical analysis of The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter, Lawrence Graver has hinted at such improbability. He states that
her "failures on the level of fable are more troublesome because they point to an
ambivalence that was a permanent feature of Mrs. McCullers’s sensibility. There existed
in her nature a continuing conflict between her nearer and further vision, between her
desire to document the world and a desire to give it evocative poetic significance. (2)"

Oliver Evans has made the same suggestion, though his critical view was more forgiving. "…
in some of McCullers’s work… one is uneasily aware of a struggle between the two levels,
literal and symbolic, and I think this explains the unevenness that many readers have
found in it… It is as though Camus were attempting to write, here and there, in the style
of Flaubert—and succeeding. (2)" Evans’s critique would have turned compliment in the
author’s eyes. Flaubert is one of McCullers’s favorite authors.

Though such criticism seems at first to negate the author’s value, in fact, the
allegorical tendency is McCullers’s lifeblood. Evans goes so far as to say that "It is
impossible to understand McCullers’s work unless one realizes that she conceives of
fiction chiefly as parable. The reader who concerns himself exclusively with the
realistic level of her stories will never fully appreciate them." In fact, Evans claims
that, much like the teaching of Christ through parables, McCullers hopes to instill an
understanding in her readers—a clearer focus on the inequity of life.

He says, "…she does not write to entertain but to teach, and what she has to teach
are those truths about human nature that she has learned from her experience, which
is profound, and from her observation, which, at the same time that it is
compassionate, is penetrating to the point of clairvoyance… her concern is with
nothing less than the soul of man."

But this critical examination may be a bit biased: Evans has called McCullers "the best
allegorical writer on this side of the Atlantic since Hawthorne and Melville. (2)"

Another thematic tendency of McCullers’s is toward pathos. Richard Gray has suggested
that "a paradox lurks at the heart of (the McCullers) experience, naturally attaching
itself to the idea of a shared isolation." In other words, her characters may squirm
under the weight of their own isolation, but they find solace in the search for
camaraderie. Gray also states that "McCullers’s fiction at its best… shows how tough and
really critical an emotion pathos can be. Her characters are pathetic, but they are
pathetic in the finest sense." He explains his theory in this manner:


"…the melancholy we experience while contemplating Miss Amelia Evans (The 

Heart…) or Frankie Addams (The Member…) stems principally from the shock of 

recognition, our feeling that part of our own lives has been accurately defined… In 

this way the pathetic is used as an agent of moral instruction… a means of telling us, 

quietly and sadly, what we are and the most we can do and of advising us, by 

inference, how we should behave. (2)"

 

Klaus Lubber calls the overall theme of McCullers’s books "man’s problematic and painful
existence with various veerings from its proper course. (2)" This analysis may be a bit
simplistic, but it emphasizes one important idea—the contemplation of human suffering. In
fact, most of McCullers’s characters have achieved a perfect state of "spiritual
isolation," as Oliver Evans calls it, and find that their only recourse from this
condition is an epiphany of "the power of love."

Harold Bloom reiterates this theme in the introduction to his anthology, Modern Critical
Views: Carson McCullers. "All of McCullers’s characters share a particular quirk in the
exercise of their capacity to love—they exist, and eventually expire, by falling in love
with a hopeless hope." He compared this "universal yearning for love" and eventual demise
by it to what Freud called the "erotic illusion.(2)"

Lawrence Graver placed McCullers’s lovers in "the highest seat in the pantheon, for he
has the restlessness and imagination to wish to break free from the constrictive prison
of ego and connect with another person. His choices are often arbitrary and improbable,
but once made he worships them with a constancy that can only inspire amazement. (4)"

Actually, at the heart of this need that all of McCullers’s characters express, there may
be a deeper absence which is actually responsible for their crisis. Richard Gray suggests
that this emptiness is caused by the fact that her characters "have not even the mere
possibility of a tradition to sustain them; they can only hang… so disoriented as to have
no point of reference, no common denominator with which to chart their disorientation.
(2)"

Louise Westling asserts that this absence of history correlates directly to McCullers’s
own sense of emptiness. She writes that the author’s heroines "live in a world
practically devoid of traditional Southern femininity… they inhabit a flat present bereft
of myth, history, or even family traditions. (6)" What gives power to this theory is the
ideas of Gray, who states, "Her childhood… seems to have been a very quiet one. ‘Almost
singularly lacking,’ as her biographer has put it, ‘in the excitement of external
events.’" He describes her heritage as "shabbily genteel" and says that the Smith
family "were inordinately embarrassed by their fallen circumstances and actively
discouraged active intercourse with anybody from outside the home. (2)"
 
McCullers’s writing may have reflected her own longings for direction and meaning more
accurately than even she suspected. Gray notes that as an adult, she was "always afraid
of a full commitment to others, searching for the possibility of betrayal and claiming to
find it even when it was not there, she seemed to draw a magic circle around herself for
much of the time, and live in an inner world that was compounded equally of memory and
imagination. (2)" Although this struggle brought McCullers endless frustrations, it also
sparked an energy in her that inspired the creation of many powerful works.

Most of the scholarly criticism available on Carson McCullers’s work is focused primarily
on her novels and novellas. Of that work, the most abundant discussion features her four
most popular works, namely The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café, The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and Reflections In a Golden Eye. These works were all produced
within a six year period, undoubtedly her most productive period as a writer. The
following is a collection of criticism and discussion of each of the aforementioned works.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter:

"Any reader who wishes to determine the characteristic strengths and limitations of
Carson McCullers as a writer could do no better than to begin with The Heart is a Lonely
Hunter. Not only is this first novel an admirably complete introduction to her themes and
subject matter, but it raises in a complex and provacative way the major critical issues
posed by all her important work. The scene is the deep South; the characters are stranged
and disadvantaged; and the theme is loneliness and the inevitable frustrations of love."
 
"Rage, anger, and indignation are often in this story the other side of love, for Mrs.
McCullers—like Keats—believed that a street fight is ugly, but the energies displayed can
be beautiful. (4)"

(Graver, p.272)

"Surrounded by the tawdry everyday life of modern Southern towns, (McCullers’s
characters) seem to exist in a void, alienated from the few models of femininity
available to them. The only warmth provided by women comes from Negro cooks. Mick 
Kelly’s mother rarely appears in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and then only to issue
impatient or dispirited orders about Mick’s babysitting chores or the management of the
family’s boardinghouse. She is a scarcely believable stick figure by comparison with the
vivid presence of Portia. The cook’s vigorous and compassionate views of the world
provide the only adult guidance for Mick and her little brothers, yet Portia is more like
a practical older sister or aunt for Mick than a mother. The real maternal figure in the
novel is the androgynous café keeper Biff Brannon but Mick shies away from his
solicitations. (6)" (Westling, p. 110)

"Much of the success of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is derived from (McCullers’s)
capacity to become her characters, to leave the outside indifferent world that so easily
dismisses people as niggers, objects, and freaks and enter the consciousness of the
individual, bringing with her a sympathy that makes each of her characters valuable, if
extraordinary human beings. (2)" (Cook, p. 75)

Reflections In a Golden Eye:

"In her novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, McCullers describes a world where the
suffering imposed by isolation is unrelieved by the possibility of human idealism and
individual struggle. It is a stark, blank world devoid of love and charm, where life
exists on its lowest intellectual level.

"Tennessee Williams has written that (this novel) ‘…is one of the purest and most
powerful of those works which are conceived in that Sense of The Awful which is the
esperate black root of nearly all significant modern art, from the Guernica of Picasso to
the cartoons of Charles Addams.’

"To evoke this ‘Sense of the Awful’ McCullers has substituted the impersonality of an
army post for the varieties of a Southern Main Street. She has restrained her gift for
the humorous and pathetic detail in the interests of a more austere tone and a tighter
more rapidly moving plot. And she has transformed human oddity from a mark of individual
personality into a sign of general human perversion. (It) is a short, violent drama about
people so mired in their deviancy, so trapped by ‘instinctual necessity,’ and so bereft
of all humor and hope, as to be beyond redemption as valuable, living personalities… they
appear to us more as shadows than people—grotesque reflections. (2)" (Cook, p. 69)

The Member of the Wedding:
 
"The Member of the Wedding is McCullers’s best book because it remains complete in itself—
a small but undeniably affecting story of adolescent joy and frustration. The plot,
limited to a few days in the life of a twelve-year-old girl, is more skillfully managed
than the elaborate murder story in Reflections in a Golden Eye, or the haunting but
ultimately mechanical quest pattern in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The characters carry
great conviction because McCullers is wholly in command of their limited psychologies,
and does not strain to suggest that they are darkly symbolic of more than themselves. (4)"

(Gravers, p. 303)

The Ballad of the Sad Café:

"Much of what is permanently haunting in this grotesque little story is the product of
McCullers’s easy relationship with the properties of the ballad world. Experience
heightened far beyond the realm of plausibility is given a valid, poetic truth by the
propriety of those conventions that make the miraculous seem oddly real. Dreams,
superstitions, omens, numbers, musical motifs, all operate here to provide an authentic
atmosphere for this perverse triangle of passions, and to make the inexplicable longings
of the characters seem like dark elemental forces in the natural world. (4)" (Gravers,
p.290)

"The Themes with which McCullers was mainly concerned in the first decade of her career
are the spiritual isolation of the individual and the power of love to free him from this
condition… it was in The Ballad of the Sad Café that the related themes of spiritual
isolation and the nature and function of love received their fullest and most mature
treatment. It is the saddest of Mrs. McCullers’s novels at the same time that it is the
most nearly perfect, with something of the formal beauty of a Bach fugue, for in it she
reaches the profoundly pessimistic conclusions that ‘the state of being beloved is
intolerable by many… the beloved fears and hates the lover.’ (2)" (Evans, p.24)

"The Ballad of the Sad Café is about the ‘crazy salad’ of every man: ugly and beautiful,
heiress and outlaw, dwarf and amazon—they all choose love objects in ways that
demonstrate that passion is the most permanent and amazing of all the human mysteries.
(4)" (Gravers, p.292)

Works Cited

Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers & Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1965.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Values: Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Carr, Virginia Spencer. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Howard, Maureen, ed. Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1963.

Smith, Margarita G. Carson McCullers: The Mortgaged Heart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971.

Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson

McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: U of Georgia Press, 1985.

(including: Graver, Lawrence. "Carson McCullers," p. 265 - 310.)

:":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":":


        V.U.

     Please See Index4000, Please.




Click Here To Get Your Site Hosted With FutureQuest