An Intimate Side of Carson McCullers: A Guest Post from Mary V. Dearborn
The famed biographer is back with an in-depth look at an American literary icon in Carson McCullers: A Life. Here, Mary dives into the process of researching for her biographies and details the most interesting aspects of her journey through the archives of Carson’s life.
Hardcover $40.00
Carson McCullers: A Life
Carson McCullers: A Life
In Stock Online
Hardcover $40.00
Carson McCullers was a trailblazer in the American literary scene, and now acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn brings those creative exploits to life. Digging into McCullers’ private life and how it factored into her artistry, this is a window into a staple of the literary landscape that you’ve never seen before.
Carson McCullers was a trailblazer in the American literary scene, and now acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn brings those creative exploits to life. Digging into McCullers’ private life and how it factored into her artistry, this is a window into a staple of the literary landscape that you’ve never seen before.
Carson McCullers, like my other biographical subjects—Ernest Hemingway and Peggy Guggenheim, for instance—left lots of correspondence, along with manuscripts, photographs and other documents in university archives. (I have often jokingly remarked that a good part of my job as a biographer is reading my subject’s mail!) From such material I reconstruct the subject’s career; in Carson’s case, tracing the genesis of her first, remarkable novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and how her work grew out of that happy beginning. But to reconstruct the career, I need to understand the creator as a person, not just a writer. What experiences shaped her, and how? What informed her intimate relationships? In Carson’s case, I needed to determine her gender identity and gender preferences, because she was a lesbian who was married—twice, to the same man. What was that about? What were Carson’s hopes and dreams—and what fears or flaws prevented her from realizing them? Who invented the odd and eccentric characters who people Carson’s fiction? Who was Carson McCullers, this singular human being and author?
The bulk of Carson’s papers ended up in two university archives—one at Columbus State University in Georgia (Columbus was Carson’s home town) and the other at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The Columbus State University collection contained something a little different from what I usually encounter in the archive. In 1958, suffering writer’s block that prevented her from finishing her last novel, Clock Without Hands, Carson undertook therapy with Dr. Mary Mercer, a psychiatrist who lived and practiced in Nyack, New York, where Carson had lived since 1945. At Carson’s request, the sessions were recorded and transcribed. Fifty-five years later, Mercer left the transcripts of these psychotherapy sessions to the McCullers archive at Columbus State University. She had always refused to talk to scholars or biographers who sought her out in researching Carson’s life, citing doctor-patient confidentiality. But when it came time to donate her own papers and those relating to Carson that were in her possession, which included the remarkable transcripts, Mercer believed sufficient time had passed that she could make the transcripts, ranging from ten to twenty pages per session, available to scholars and readers. Those pages revealed extraordinary details about Carson’s early life in the Columbus household; her relationship with Reeves, her husband twice over; the struggles that went into her writing; and the frustrations and pain that punctuated her life after the series strokes that would cut short her life at the age of fifty. Most important, perhaps, I learned the tragic story of Carson’s first love, the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who died in a bicycle accident and whose face, Carson said, “would haunt me for the rest of my life.”
An odd complex of circumstances made it possible for me to see the transcripts of these remarkable psychotherapy sessions, giving me a unique opportunity to learn my subject’s intimate hopes, fears, and dreams as confided to her therapist. It was an entirely new experience for this biographer.