Josyane Savigneau: Carson McCullers: A life

By PAT BASKETT

Remember The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding? Novels read in the 60s, although published in 1940 and 1946, novels of the American south, as seminal in forming that particular literary identity as the writings of Faulkner, Capote and Welty.

McCullers has left us not only these examples of her poignant, raw prose, but the legend of her life. Was she an alcoholic bitch who drove her husband to suicide in 1953?

Or was she the eternal adolescent, charming and then frustrating, the artist for whom little mattered except her writing?

On the other hand, consider the 20 years she spent partially paralysed before her death at 50 and the achievements of those years, and you see, as her friend Tennessee Williams described her, a person of rare and luminous health.

This biography (it's the seventh major work on McCullers' life) presents cogent reasons for holding to the latter two opinions - but without side-stepping McCullers' difficult personality.

She was born Lula Carson Smith in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, to a modest but fairly enlightened family where her prodigious talents as a pianist were encouraged and her penchant for men's shirts was tolerated.

Music was her first love but by age 20 she had switched to writing and begun The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

She had also married Reeves McCullers and embarked on their tumultuous existence of drinking and living apart, then together. Reeves, too, wanted to write and they set out with the intention that one would write while the other worked for alternate years.

When Carson achieved a contract for the draft of her first novel, her writing took priority and Reeves never had his turn, giving rise to the legend that Carson took advantage of him and that he died a frustrated writer.

Half of the book is also the story of his tragedy: his failure to make a name for himself in any career other than his achievements during the war for which he was decorated.

It was Reeves who insisted they go to Paris where one winter of 1946 or 1947 they are reported to have been drinking a whole bottle of cognac a day - each.

And it was in the village of Bachivillers, an hour from Paris, that he killed himself after Carson left him with their family of boxer dogs and returned to the US.

Carson, already paralysed after a stroke, continued her peripatetic ways, settling finally at Nyack, New York, where her devoted mother looked after her until her own death.

She was always writing or thinking about writing. Reflections in a Golden Eye was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, a book of poems for children was published and she worked on her autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare. The mainstay of her last 10 years was the psychiatrist Mary Mercer.

Savigneau's biography has the advantage of Mercer's agreement to an interview as well as access to many unpublished manuscripts and letters.

Other than McCullers' relatively short stay in France, the French connection is not clear. It matters not a whit. Savigneau understands a difficult character and her milieu and presents both in a narrative that is thought-provoking and immensely satisfying.

The Women's Press

$112.95

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.