The Mortgaged Heart (2 page)

Like Frankie Addams rudely expelled from the paradise of her delusion, Frances is expelled, at the story's end, from the paradise of her music; she must leave a sacred place to hurry "down the street that had become confused with noise and bicycles and the games of other children." What an eerie prescience in "Wunderkind," the first published story by a literary prodigy who would have already strained and endangered her talent by the age of thirty-one, when McCullers suffered the first of numerous strokes.

"Sucker" and "Like That," early McCullers stories similarly concerned with highly sensitive young adolescents in conflict with their "normal" contemporaries, present, in simplified form, the classic paradigm of McCullers's prevailing theme of unrequited love. The insensitive high school boy who narrates "Sucker" takes for granted his young orphaned cousin's adulation, calling him by the derogatory name Sucker because the twelve-year-old is so gullible and vulnerable to hurt. "If a person admires you a lot you despise him. And don't care." Unexpectedly, and ironically, Sucker refuses to accept his cousin's estimation of him and by the story's end he has become suffused with a malevolent strength, and has claimed his true name, Richard.

In a later story collected in this volume, the suspensefully crafted "The Haunted Boy" (1955), McCullers revisits scenes of young-adolescent anxiety, depicting the ordeal of a high school boy as he anticipates a repetition of the bloody attempted suicide of his mother. Desperate not to be left alone in the house which, he's sure, contains his mothers mutilated body, Hugh virtually pleads with an older high school classmate to stay with him for a while. Unwisely, he confides in his friend that his mother has been hospitalized at the "big state hospital in Milledgeville"—that is, the insane asylum. When the mother returns home unharmed, maddeningly oblivious of her son's state of dread, he realizes that "something [is] finished" in his life and that he will "never cry again—or at least not until he [is] sixteen." This is a variant of the mote surreal, heightened world of
The Ballad of the Sad Café,
in which the storyteller states:

Love is a joint experience between the two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing.

"A small talent is God's greatest curse": this is the startling insight of the failed writer Ken Harris in McCullers's autobiographical story "Who Has Seen the Wind?" (1956). Told from the myopic narrative perspective of a frustrated alcoholic who bears more than a slight resemblance to McCullers's husband Reeves McCullers (who had committed suicide three years before), this long story has the feel of a condensed novel and is an unsparing portrait of the artist devoured by envy for his more successful contemporaries. It's also a sympathetic portrayal of a once gifted individual who can't endure living without the solace of art: "'Talent,' he said bitterly. A small, one-story talent—that is the most treacherous thing that God can give. To work on and on, hoping, believing until youth is wasted—I have seen this sort of thing so often.'"

By the story's end, Ken Harris has picked up a scissors to menace his frightened wife; he leaves her to wander in a drunken stupor the snowy Manhattan streets, where almost idly he contemplates death beneath the wheels of a subway train and wonders if it's true that "in the final
moment of death the brain blazes with all the images of the past—the apple trees, the loves, the cadences of lost voices—all fused and vivid in the dying brain."

Though none of the stories in
The Mortgaged Heart
is quite so accomplished as McCullers's frequently anthologized "The Jockey" (1941), a masterpiece of dramatic understatement, and the lyrical "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." (1942), each is of considerable interest in the context of her career, and all repay sympathetic attention.

Of the diverse nonfiction pieces gathered here, the most valuable are those concerned with the writing life. Far from being a merely intuitive writer, McCullers is an informed and insightful critic of her own work, as her commentary on the composition of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
originally titled
The Mute,
suggests. McCullers's insights into literature are shrewd and well reasoned and occasionally provocative. In "The Russian Realists and Southern Literature" she discusses Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the context of mid-twentieth-century "Southern Gothic" fiction, predominantly William Faulkner's, though she is clearly thinking of her own work as well: "a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail."

The most eloquent of the essays, "The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing," provides an intimate glimpse into McCullers's imagination:

Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor and the unconscious, and the struggle that goes on between them ... Illuminations are the grace of labor.

In McCullers's fiction, "grace" is all pervasive.

J
OYCE
C
AROL
O
ATES

O
F ALL THE CHARACTERS
in the work of Carson McCullers, the one who seemed to her family and friends most like the author herself was Frankie Addams: the vulnerable, exasperating and endearing adolescent of
The Member of the Wedding
who was looking for the "we of me." However, Carson once said that she was or became in the process of writing all the characters in her work. This is probably true of most real writers who often with pain draw from their unconscious what the rest of us would just as soon keep hidden from ourselves and others. So accept the fact that Carson was not only Frankie Addams but J. T. Malone, Miss Amelia and Captain Penderton; but familiarity with the work that she was able to finish would be only a partial clue to who and what she was. This was not simply because she had not finished what she had to say, but that she was the artist, and as she often quoted, "Nothing human is alien to me."

Before her death, I would have said that I knew Carson better than anyone did—that I knew her very well indeed. This would have been the truth as I saw it at the time, and at times I am still tempted to think that I knew her the best. After all, I knew her for forty-five years and lived with her off and on for much of that time. We shared the same heritage, the same parents, the same brother, the same room that looked out on the same holly tree and Japanese magnolia, and for the first twelve years of my life, the same mahogany bed. But we were sisters—sometimes intimate friends, sometimes enemies and at times strangers.

I remember very well the day that she told me—she did not ask me—that she had appointed me co-executor of her literary estate. I was annoyed. Unable to acknowledge her constant closeness to death, I resented her trying to force me to face it. Carson was there when I was born and would be there when I died. She had lived through enough close calls to prove to me that she was indestructible.

Her papers were no concern of mine when she was living and I had no idea what she had saved. I have been just as surprised by what is there as by what is not there. I can't find any letters from our mother who wrote her every day they were separated, but all the valentines from a year were committed for keeping. So it would seem that these archives are partially due to accidental circumstance—dependent on Carson's health and the whim of any part-time secretarial help she had from time to time. Those of us concerned with her estate hope that these files will go to a library before much longer and be made available for further study. Even then, scholars will find it difficult to distinguish the truth.

Carson saw her life one way and those intimate with her often perceived it differently. Intentionally or unintentionally, she added to the confusion about herself. An interviewer was more likely to be cannily interviewed than to extract an interview from her. Besides, she simply liked a good story and frequently embellished the more amusing ones of her life. The one person who singled out this quality in a particularly loving way was Tennessee Williams in his unpublished essay "Praise to Assenting Angels":

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 Katharine 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 appealed 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, since even to this day she hesitates to cross an urban street unattended, preferably on both sides. 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 Juilliard 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. At any 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 labytinthine 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 greater writer was found...

The original intention of this volume was to include most of Carson's previously published but uncollected work that otherwise would require assiduous research for an interested reader. But as I read through her papers, another concept for a collection evolved. Her papers included a good number of very early unpublished stories, most of them written before she was nineteen, in the late Sylvia Chatfield Bates' evening class in writing at New York University. Several of them still had the teacher's comment attached. My first reaction to this student material was that none of it should be published. After further reading I felt that all of it should eventually be published in a small edition by a university press. Now, four years after Carson's death, I believe a few selected examples belong in this volume to round out the glimpse of Carson's growth as a writer. I say "glimpse" because although the total material in this volume spans over thirty years, for the most part it was culled from her least-known work. This book does not include all of her previously uncollected or unpublished work, but rather a selection chosen
to illuminate in part the creative process and development of Carson McCullers. "Wunderkind" is reprinted here, although it appeared earlier in
The Ballad of the Sad Café
collection, because it is her first published story—a milestone in any author's life. The other early stories have either not been previously published or have never been collected in a Carson McCullers edition. The outline of "The Mute" is included as another milestone in Carson's period of development, particularly when we know it evolved as her first novel,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
As examples of her mature work, again I have chosen lesser-known stories in order to familiarize the reader with fresh material.

Many of the pieces in the Essays and Articles section were written on assignment or written after such promptings as unspecific as "Do you have any thoughts on Thanksgiving?" given out by an editor who knew her work. These "assignments" were welcome because Carson was in need of money and could take some quick time off from her fiction writing to take advantage of these suggestions. Although this kind of magazine journalism is not always her best work, a number of these pieces are included because they are little known and have never been collected.

Five of Carson's poems, published in magazines or recorded, are here. Most of her unpublished poetry is in longhand, difficult to decipher accurately, and in some cases, unfinished or uncollated; therefore, none of these poems are included.

So this book is to give some idea of the early work of a writer and to illustrate, within the range of material chosen from her least-known work, the development of that talent. My hope is that Carson would have approved. I am plagued with doubt because I wonder why Carson did not collect some of this material while she was living since money was always a problem. Her expenses were excessive—doctors, nursing care, hospitals and an invalid's more than ordinary necessities. However, writers usually think more about their current work and their future plans than about what has already been written and she may not have had the strength or the interest to put together such a book. In fact, she may have forgotten these early stories existed.