The Mortgaged Heart (3 page)

I have referred obliquely to Carson's precarious health and her suffering and I do not plan to go into detail here. As a child she was always delicate and intermittently sick in bed, even though she played tennis, rode horseback and swam in between bouts of illness. As a young adult she began experiencing strokes and by the age of thirty-one her entire left side was paralyzed. Subsequent strokes and operations limited her physical abilities even more. The myth of her typing novels with one finger probably started with her (in fact, it probably was true for a while), but for years before her death, she could not have sat at a desk or even typed in bed. Even so, writing was possible—sometimes in longhand, sometimes dictated in a voice that she hardly had the strength to project. It is a blessing in every way that, while very young, Carson gave up her design to be a concert pianist, a career which would have been impossible for her to pursue. (Of course, as any reader of Carson McCullers knows, she used her knowledge and love of music throughout her writing.) When we were children, she used to practice five hours a day. At the time, I did not think I was especially privileged to be awakened by a Bach fugue. The most graphic memory I have of those beautiful Bach-playing hands with long strong fingers was shortly before she died, when the sheets of her bed had to be changed and she was able with her good hand to pull herself over to one side of the bed. It was as if her last physical strength was still in that hand.

At the age of sixteen, Carson wrote her first novel (I think she called it
A Reed of Pan
—the manuscript no longer exists). I remember that she earned money to come to New York—her dream—by giving a series of lectures on music appreciation to a group of Mother's friends. Once in the city she gave up music as a career and turned to her other talent—writing. She studied with Sylvia Chatfield Bates and later with Whit Burnett, who with Martha Foley edited the famous
Story
magazine. She continued writing up until the last and massive brain hemorrhage seven weeks before she died at fifty on September 29, 1967.

Carson's life was tragic in so many ways that people who did not know her personally have heard of her courage but not of her ingenuousness, her folksy humor, her wit and kindness. No two of her friends can be in the same room for long before one of them begins "Remember the time that Carson..." and off they go with countless stories.

I think now of a time when she wanted me to straighten out her library. This was many years ago but even at that period it was difficult for her to walk with a cane for more than a few steps and she wanted to be able to tell whoever happened to be taking care of her at the time exactly where to put his hands on the Rilke poems,
Out of Africa, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
and on and on; it soon became clear that all the books she had were essential to her. Two young girls had come to help with the physical labor of making our homemade version of a library. It was obvious that the girls had not read much and had never read Carson McCullers or heard of her. They just knew that she was a writer and one asked if she had really read all those books. I was busy trying to narrow down the absolutely essential books so that they would fit in one bookcase when I heard the same girl making more polite conversation by saying, "I never did understand why that lady let Beth die in
Little Women.
" I didn't want to look at Sister, but the reflex was too sudden and now, thank God, I often see her expression of that moment when I think of her, rather than the way she was those last weeks. Her smile was so sweet and bemused, and she answered gently, seriously, "Yes, I cried too."

There were sorrows and tragedies in Carson's life other than her physical illness: two stormy marriages to the same James Reeves McCullers, his death followed by that of our mother and that of a favorite aunt, and many other difficult times. But it is important to note that there were moments of joy and anticipation of joy. She had recognition from sources that pleased her and she enjoyed fame from the time she was twenty-three when
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
was published. There were standing ovations for the magical Broadway production of
The Member of the Wedding.
There were invitations to presidential inaugurations and teas with Edith Sitwell and Marilyn Monroe, and her long and constant friendship with Tennessee Williams. Stage-struck like Frankie, she enjoyed having her picture taken with John Huston when she visited him at his castle in Ireland. She had two works in progress before her death and movies of
Reflections in a Golden Eye
and
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
were in production. She had many-friends who loved her, but more important a few whom she really loved.

She loved any kind of occasion, any to-do such as a party or Christmas, and she loved to plan for them. She was planning a party when she died. Other women might dread birthdays, but they were big events in her life. With her hair freshly washed, she would put on one of her best robes and wait for the telegrams, flowers, and—most important—the presents. In the South, if one had no intention of giving a birthday present or a Christmas present, a card was sent. Carson hated cards because it meant that the sender was not going to give her a present.

Well, there is much courage in this world and most of it we never see. Probably what is important here is not that Carson wrote with such incredible handicaps, but that what she wrote was beautiful and real to those of us who are willing to go with her to explore the human heart. What matters about this collection is not that it has been difficult for me but whether readers who admire her work will find it rewarding to discover these little-known writings.

I might like to think I knew Carson better than anyone did. But Tennessee Williams on his first meeting with her caught the real spirit of Carson and the Carson I like to remember. In the essay cited earlier, he wrote:

I should like to mention my first meeting with Carson McCullers. It occurred during the summer that I thought I was dying. I was performing a great many acts of piety that summer. I had rented a rather lopsided frame house on the island of Nantucket and had filled it with a remarkably random assortment of creatures animal and human. There was a young gentleman of Mexican-Indian extraction who was an angel of goodness except when he had a drink. The trouble was that he usually had a drink. Then there was a young lady studying for the opera and another young lady who painted various bits of refuse washed up by the sea. I remember they gave a rather cold and wet odor to the upper floor of the house where she arranged her still-lifes which she called arrangements. If the weather had been consistently bright and warm these arrangements would not have been so hard to take. But the weather was unrelentingly bleak so that the exceedingly dank climate of the arrangements did little to dispell my reflections upon things morbid. One night there was a great wind-storm. Promptly as if they had been waiting all year to make this gesture, every window on the North side of the house crashed in, and we were at the mercy of the elements. The young lady who painted the wet arrangements, the opera singer and the naturally-good-humored Mexican all were driven South to that side of the house where I was attempting to write a play that involved the Angel of Eternity. At that time a pregnant cat came into the building and gave birth to five or six kittens on the bed in our downstairs guest-room. It was about this time, immediately after the wind-storm and the invasion of cats, that Carson McCullers arrived to pay me a visit on the island, in response to the first fan-letter that I had ever written to a writer, written after I had read her latest book,
The Member of the Wedding.

The same morning that Carson arrived the two other female visitors, if my memory serves me accurately, took their departure, the one with her portfolio of arias and the other with several cases of moist canvases and wet arrangements, neither of them thanking me too convincingly for the hospitality of the house and as they departed, casting glances of veiled compassion upon the brand new arrival.

Carson was not dismayed by the state of the house. She had been in odd places before. She took an immediate fancy to the elated young Mexican and displayed considerable fondness for the cats and insisted that she would be comfortable in the downstairs bedroom where they were boarding. Almost immediately the summer weather improved. The sun came out with an air of permanence, the wind shifted to the South and it was suddenly warm enough for bathing. At the same time, almost immediately after Carson and the sun appeared on the island, I relinquished the romantic notion that I was a dying artist. My various psychosomatic symptoms were forgotten. There was warmth and light in the house, the odor of good cooking and the nearly-forgotten sight of clean dishes and silver. Also there was some coherent talk for a change. Long evening conversations over hot rum and tea, the reading of poetry aloud, bicycle rides and wanderings along moonlit dunes, and one night there was a marvelous display of the Aurora Borealis, great quivering sheets of white radiance sweeping over the island and the ghostly white fishermen's houses and fences. That night and that mysterious phenomenon of the sky will be always associated in my mind with the discovery of our friendship, or rather, more precisely, with the spirit of this new found friend, who seemed as curiously and beautifully unworldly as that night itself...

M
ARGARITA
G. S
MITH

D
URING THE COMPILATION
of this book, I have always called this first group of stories the "Carson Smith" stories, since that is the by-line that appears on the majority of them. Much of this early material was written in 1935 and 1936 for Sylvia Chatfield Bates' evening class at New York University when Carson was eighteen and nineteen. When the teacher's comment was saved, I include it. Only two manuscripts had no by-line: "The Aliens" and the one long untitled piece. Although I can be certain that both manuscripts predate
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
I can't be sure whether they were written before or after her marriage to Reeves McCullers at nineteen. None of these early stories that remained unpublished at Carson's death have been changed except for corrections of misspellings, typographical errors and some repetitions. Her own handwritten corrections on the original manuscripts have been followed as carefully as possible.

Although "Sucker" was not published until 1963 in the
Saturday Evening Post
(since then it has been widely reprinted), the magazine carried a note from the author saying: "...I think it was my first short story; at least it was the first story I was proud to read to my family ... I wrote it when I was seventeen, and my daddy had just given me my first typewriter. I remember writing the story in longhand, and then painfully typing it out..."

As the agent's letter which we include here indicates, Carson believed enough in "Court in the West Eighties" at the time she wrote it to have had it sent out when "Sucker" was making the rounds. And although "Poldi" is obviously part of the "court," too, there is nothing in the files that would indicate that Carson made any effort to get this
published. Instead, the young author lifted out a phrase that Miss Bates underlined and put it in "Wunderkind," referring to notes of music falling over each other "like a handful of marbles dropped downstairs." Attentive readers will see other such examples taken from her previously unpublished work.

Since Carson regarded "Sucker" as her first real story and, indeed, does not seem to have submitted the majority of these early manuscripts, perhaps the remaining material ("Poldi," "Breath from the Sky," "The Orphanage," "Instant of the Hour After," "The Aliens" and the last untitled piece) should be referred to as "exercises," in deference to the author. Whatever they are called, these examples of her early work are most interesting in their own right and are amazing for one so young.

"Wunderkind" was written in Miss Bates' class. In her comment she suggested that Carson make specific revisions and then submit the story to the
Story
magazine contest of 1936. Carson heeded Miss Bates' advice: it was published in
Story's
December 1936 issue when Carson was nineteen. I include it here, even though it appealed in her collection
The Ballad of the Sad Café,
because it marks the beginning of her professional career. Although
Story
also bought "Like That" the same year, it never appeared in the magazine and was recently discovered among the
Story
magazine archives at the Princeton University Library.

"The Aliens" and the untitled piece will be more interesting to the readers who know the author's novels. Both reflect the South of the Thirties and Carson's growing social consciousness. They take on even more importance when we see them suggesting later characters and themes. Although neither may have been intended as short stories (I have a feeling they were both early attempts at novels) I include them here because they seem to stand alone as stories. I suspect that "The Aliens" came first. There were three different versions of this manuscript, but the version included here seems to me to be the most self-contained. Any attempts to continue with Felix Kerr were abandoned until Mr. Minowitz appears in the untitled material.

Although a hint of the mute in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
is seen
in the silent redhead in "Court in the West Eighties," we know definitely that Mr. Minowitz eventually becomes Mr. Singer. Carson herself says, in "The Flowering Dream" (p. 274 in this volume), "For a whole year I worked on
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
without understanding it at all. Each character was talking to a central character, but why, I didn't know ... I had been working for five hours and I went outside. Suddenly, as I walked across a road, it occurred to me that Harry Minowitz, the character all the other characters were talking to, was a different man, a deaf mute, and immediately the name was changed to John Singer..." I have come to refer to this untitled piece as "a little bit of everything" since it also seems to contain the beginnings of Mick in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
and of Frankie in
The Member of the Wedding.