The Mortgaged Heart (38 page)

***

It is only with imagination and reality that you get to know the things a novel requires. Reality alone has never been that important to me. A teacher once said that one should write about one's own back yard; and by this, I suppose, she meant one should write about the things that one knows most intimately. But what is more intimate than one's own imagination? The imagination combines memory with insight, combines reality with the dream.

People ask me why I don't go back to the South mote often. But the South is a very emotional experience for me, fraught with all the memories of my childhood. When I go back South I always get into arguments, so that a visit to Columbus in Georgia is a stirring up of love and antagonism. The locale of my books might always be Southern, and the South always my homeland. I love the voices of Negroes—like brown rivers. I feel that in the short trips when I do go to the South, in my own memory and in the newspaper articles, I still have my own reality.

Many authors find it hard to write about new environments that they did not know in childhood. The voices reheard from childhood have a truer pitch. And the foliage—the trees of childhood—are remembered more exactly. When I work from within a different locale from the South, I have to wonder what time the flowers are in bloom—and what flowers? I hardly let characters speak unless they are Southern. Wolfe wrote brilliantly of Brooklyn, but more brilliantly of the Southern cadence and ways of speech. This is particularly true of Southern writers because it is not only their speech and the foliage, but their entire culture—which makes it a homeland within a homeland. No matter what the politics, the degree or non-degree of liberalism in a Southern writer, he is still bound to this peculiar regionalism of language and voices and foliage and memory.

Few Southern writers are truly cosmopolitan. When Faulkner writes about the R.A.F. and France, he is somehow not convincing—while I'm convinced in almost every line about Yoknapatawpha County. Indeed, to me
The Sound and the Fury
is probably the greatest American novel. It has an authenticity, a grandeur and, most of all, a tenderness that stems from the combination of reality and the dream that is the divine collusion.

Hemingway, on the contrary, is the most cosmopolitan of all the American writers. He is at home in Paris, in Spain, in America, the Indian stories of his childhood. Perhaps it is his style, which is a delivery, a beautifully worked out form of expression. As expert as Hemingway is at producing and convincing the reader of his various outlooks, emotionally he is a wanderer. In Hemingway's style some things are masked in the emotional content of his work. If I prefer Faulkner to Hemingway, it's because I am more touched by the familiar—the writing that reminds me of my own childhood and sets a standard for a remembering of the language. Hemingway seems to me to use language as a style of writing.

The writer by nature of his profession is a dreamer and a conscious dreamer. How, without love and the intuition that comes from love, can a human being place himself in the situation of another human being? He must imagine, and imagination takes humility, love, and great courage. How can you create a character without love and the struggle that goes with love?

For many years I have been working on a novel called
Clock Without Hands,
and will probably finish it in about two more years. My books take a long time. This novel is in process day by day of being focused. As a writer, I've always worked very hard. But as a writer, I've also known that hard work is not enough. In the process of hard work, there must come an illumination, a divine spark that puts the work into focus and balance.

When I asked Tennessee Williams how he first thought of
The Glass Menagerie,
he said it was suggested by a glass curtain he saw at the house of one of his grandfather's parishioners. From then on it became what he called a memory play. How the recollection of that glass curtain fitted into the memories of his boyhood, neither he nor I could understand, but then the unconscious is not easily understood.

How does creation begin in any art? As Tennessee wrote
The Glass Menagerie
as a memory play, I wrote "Wunderkind" when I was seventeen years old, and it was a memory, although not the reality of the memory—it was a foreshortening of that memory. It was about a young music student. I didn't write about my real music teacher—I wrote about the music we studied together because I thought it was truer. The imagination is truer than the reality.

The passionate, individual love—the old Tristan-Isolde love, the Eros love—is inferior to the love of God, to fellowship, to the love of Agape—the Greek god of the feast, the God of brotherly love—and of man. This is what I tried to show in
The Ballad of the Sad Café
in the strange love of Miss Amelia for the little hunchback, Cousin Lymon.

The writer's work is predicated not only on his personality but by the region in which he was born. I wonder sometimes if what they call the "Gothic" school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due largely to the cheapness of human life in the South. The Russians are like the Southern writers in that respect. In my childhood, the South was almost a feudal society. But the South is complicated by the racial problem more severely than the Russian society. To many a poor Southerner, the only pride that he has is the fact that he is white, and when one's self-pride is so pitiably debased, how can one learn to love? Above all, love is the main generator of all good writing. Love, passion, compassion are all welded together.

In any communication, a thing says to one person quite a different thing from what it says to another, but writing, in essence, is communication; and communication is the only access to love—to love, to conscience, to nature, to God, and to the dream. For myself, the further I go inro my own work and the more I read of those I love, the more aware I am of the dream and the logic of God, which indeed is a Divine collusion.

[
Esquire,
December 1959

C
ARSON'S CONCENTRATION
in her early writing was not on poetry as is often the case with beginners. She began with plays and a novel and although all of her fiction is musical and poetic, she did not write poetry as such until she was a well-established author. In later years, she liked to have her manuscript in progress read aloud, partially because her vision was more affected by the strokes than she let on and reading was difficult for her, but also, I think, because she listened for the rhythm and the cadence of the language—the sound as well as the meaning of the words.

Although Carson did publish
Sweet as a Vickie, Clean as a Pig,
a collection of verse for children which she thoroughly enjoyed writing, she published little of her other poetry. What she did publish or record is collected here. Much of what remains in her files is unfinished—that is, there are often several versions of the same poem or handwritten manuscripts that are unclear.

Carson always liked to share her poems on a personal level. "The Dual Angel," which was written in France in 1951, was sent out as her Christmas card that year. She often recited poems for her friends in her soft voice. At the M-G-M recording she recited from memory, as usual, and somehow left out four lines of "Saraband," which on the record is titled "Select Your Sorrows If You Can."

About her poetry, I remember best one evening at a university lecture. After she had recited "Stone Is Not Stone" in her gentle Southern voice, there was a long silence. Then suddenly a young student stood up and said, "Mrs. McCullers, I love you."

The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone,
Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim
The lover's senses, the mortgaged heart.

Watch twice the orchard blossoms in gray rain
And to the cold rose skies bring twin surprise.
Endure each summons once, and once again;
Experience multiplied by two—the duty recognized.
Instruct the quivering spirit, instant nerve
To schizophrenic master serve,
Or like a homeless Doppelgänger
Blind love might wander.

The mortgage of the dead is known.
Prepare the cherished wreath, the garland door.
But the secluded ash, the humble bone—
Do the dead know?

[
Voices,
September—December 1952. In somewhat different form, this poem appeared earlier in
New Directions
X, 1948.]

When we are lost what image tells?
Nothing resembles nothing. Yet nothing
Is not blank. It is configured Hell:
Of noticed clocks on winter afternoons, malignant stars,
Demanding furniture. All untelated
And with air between.

The terror. Is it of Space, of Time?
Or the joined trickery of both conceptions?
To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world.

[
Voices,
September—December 1952 and, in somewhat different form, in
New Directions
X, 1948. Also recorded for MGM records under the title "When We Are Lost What Image Tells?"]

A Meditation on Origin and Choice

INCANTATION TO LUCIFER

Angel disarmed, lay down your cunning, finally tell
The currents, stops and altitudes between Heaven and Hell.
Or were the scalding stars too loud for your celestial velleities,
The everlasting zones of emptiness uncanny to your imperious hand?
Did you admit the shocks and shuttles of the circumstance,
And were the aeons ever sinister
Or were they just vulgar as a marathon dance?
Did you keep camping all through chaos
Comparing colors of infinity to neon lights?

Forever were you inconsolable during the downward flight
Spurning the comfort of affinity and rose, the rest of sunset, clarity,
Avoiding rainbows in that desperate clash against the stars?
Your tearless wizardry soon caught the rhyme
Of universe, the planetary chimes, atomic quandary.
It took you only a zone or two to riddle
The top-secret density relating Space to Time.

Did once your hurtling senses turn
To paradise that you had robbed and spurned?
Did you once wonder, one time weep?
As earth nears, turn again defaulting eyes to paradise,
Defaulting eyes, turn once again
With the presentiment of further bliss
Before you shudder with the first and final kiss.

HYMEN, O HYMEN

It was the time when the newest star was inchoate
And there were only revolving seas and land still malleable.
There was no garden at that time—but there was God.
For when the sun burst God chose the minority side of firmament
And settled on earth to study an experiment.

We know nothing of that meeting, nothing at all
Only the protean firelight fearful on the wall.
Since we only know it happened it's anybody's guess
How abdicated angel asked for and found God's rest.

Ecce, the emperor of velocity and glare
The splendor from his awful odyssey, his starlit hair
Landed on a rim of ocean, striding to shore
The radiant grace and arrogance before
The blue-veined instep faltered and slowly dimmed the pirate eyes.
Ecce, the quailing emperor against a violet sea and the primeval skies.
Behold this homage to a majesty almost impossible to explain
For after the heavenly holdup God was left rather plain.
Deliberate and unadorned, but after all what need
Of scepter had the hand that hewed the Universe?
And ruler of infinity has little use for speed.
His visage black with wind and sun, almighty hand vibrant with strife
Feeling in blank mysterious seas the secret miracle of life.
Imagine the encounter when the polarities chance
When stars of love and sorrow met Satan's jeweled glance.

We are told nothing of conception, really nothing at all.
Only the firelit symbols of an antique nurse scary and changing on the wall.
We are told nothing
Of the vibrato of desire remorseless
Until the solar-plexal swinging
Orchestrates to all flesh singing.
Post coitum, omnia tristia sunt.
Sadness, then sleep, the blaze of noon, love's gladness.

There was no witness of this bridal night
Only azoic seascape and interlocking angels' might.
So now we speculate with filial wonder,
Fabricate that night of love and ponder
On the quietude of Satan in our Father's arms:
Velocity stilled, the restful shade.
Satan we can understand—but what was God's will
That cosmic night before we were made?

The next day He completed His experiment
Found in the seas that atom He willed alive
Nursed in His awesome hand, taught to survive
The shock of creation, watched with His love and care
Astride in ocean and unknowing that Satan's ocean-skipping eye was there
Envisaging end in the beginning, wrestling with God's life,
The eye of guile had sliced the atom with Satanic knife.

LOVE AND THE RIND OF TIME

What is Time that man should be so mindful:
The earth is aged 500 thousand millions of years,
Allowing some hundred thousand millions of margin for error
And man evolving a mere half-million years of consciousness,
twilight and terror
Only a flicker of eternity divides us from unknowing beast
And how far are we from the fern, the rose, essential yeast?
Indeed in these light aeons how far
From animal to evening star?

Skip time for now and fix the eye upon eternity
Eye gazing backward or forward it is the same
Whether Mozart or short-order cook with an infirmity
Except the illuminations alter their shafts
Except we would rather be Mozart, we want to last as long as
possible, to radiate, to sing
Although in eternity it may be the same thing.