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'Carson McCullers: A Life' Josyane Savigneau, translated by Joan E. Howard

Biographer treats McCullers with humanity

Sunday, March 04, 2001

By Elizabeth Bennett

	Carson McCullers: A Life By Josyane Savigneau, translated by Joan E. Howard Houghton Mifflin $30.00

When “The Lonely Hunter,” Virginia Spencer Carr’s biography of Carson McCullers, was published in 1975, it presented a fascinating portrait of an unbelievably neurotic personality. McCullers, the brilliant author of such classic novels as “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe,” was equally creative and destructive, Carr concluded, alienating almost everyone she knew with her exploitative, self-centered personality.

Now comes a new treatment by Le Monde book supplement editor Josyane Savigneau. A passionate advocate of McCullers, Savigneau attempts to show a warmer, more compassionate view of her subject.

Unfortunately, she rehashes much of Carr’s original research while shedding little new light on McCullers, a once-famous literary figure often dismissed today as a minor regional writer. But this revisionist biography is important because it revives interest in a deserving writer little known today outside literary circles.

Here are key events in McCullers’ life, as related by Savig-neau:

Born in Columbus, Ga., in 1917, Lula Carson Smith is a tall, gawky adolescent suffering the lonely, estranged youth she later refashioned into such novels as “The Member of the Wedding.” Married at 19 to Reeves McCullers, a soldier with a literary bent who killed himself at 40, she publishes her first novel at 23 to great literary acclaim.

“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” about deaf-mute John Singer, sets the tone for McCullers’ later work, focusing on isolated, often grotesque characters unable to relate and communicate. Moving to New York with her alcoholic husband, McCullers continues to work while consuming astonishing amounts of liquor -- drinking beer all day and switching to cognac in late afternoon.

She has constant health problems. A major illness at 15, later diagnosed as rheumatic fever, sets off a long physical decline that includes several strokes and leaves her paralyzed and in pain for much of the second half of her life before her death in 1967 in Nyack, N.Y., at 50.

Despite her limitations, McCullers becomes a celebrity, hobnobbing with leading figures of the mid-20th century and spending long periods in Europe. She strikes close friendships with Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote (though later falling out with Capote, as with so many other former friends).

She shares a house in Brooklyn Heights with Richard Wright and Paul Bowles and striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee. McCullers’ adaptation of “The Member of the Wedding” becomes a Broadway hit, winning the 1950 New York Drama Critics’ Award for best play.

But even her strongest supporters find McCullers “a terrible handful,” acknowledges Savig-neau. Sexually ambivalent, McCullers liked nothing better than to slip unannounced into the beds of her friends, both male and female. And her monumental self-confidence once inspired her to tell an admiring young acquaintance: “I have more to say than Hemingway and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.”

Defending such bizarre outbursts and behavior -- much of it mean-spirited -- is difficult. But that doesn’t stop Savigneau from constantly trying. Writers are different from other people and deserve special consideration, she argues.

Her passionate identification with her troubled subject becomes tiresome and irritating and helps explains why she got full cooperation from the McCullers estate. A more reliable source of information about Carson McCullers is Carr’s definitive biography.

Still, despite the problems in “Carson McCullers: A Life,” Savig-neau deserves credit. She focuses new attention on a writer who made an important contribution to the Southern literary renaissance and whose fans continue to love her work.

Elizabeth Bennett, former book editor of the Houston Post, is a free-lance writer in Houston.