Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn

Carson McCullers: A Life

by Mary V. Dearborn

Knopf 2024

Acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn’s new book on twentieth-century Southern writer Carson McCullers is the first full-length biography to come out in decades. She argues that despite the novelist’s early successes—publishing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when she was only twenty-three years old to both critical and commercial acclaim—McCullers’s life ultimately became “the stuff of tragedy.” A key part of that tragedy, Dearborn argues, was poor health. When McCullers was in her teens, an untreated case of strep throat started a spiral of chronic illness. McCullers’s “body ultimately betrayed her” when she had a series of serious strokes not long afterward, paralyzing one side of her body by the time she was thirty and eventually leaving her bedbound.

Although Dearborn recounts McCullers’s experience of illness and disability, she seems surprisingly hesitant to explore how that experience might have contributed to the novelist’s creation of characters with disabilities—characters McCullers called “grotesque” whose “physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual capacity to love or receive love.” Given McCullers’s own experience of her ill and disabled body, contemporary author Patricia Lockwood was startled that critics of the time sometimes suggested that McCullers’s preoccupation with disfigured or deformed characters was excessive. “What kind of body did they want her to write about?” she asks.

Lockwood extends her use of illness as a metaphor for racism in her brilliant essay in the London Review of Books in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of McCullers’s birth: “The South itself had been abscessed since its inception,” wrote Lockwood. “Was [McCullers] to describe it without including its sickness?” Dearborn suggests (with little evidence) that McCullers “knew at an early age that something was fundamentally wrong with the system in which she was growing up,” and that she later “felt that as a Southern writer, she had a special imperative to address race.” She even calls McCullers “a white Southern antiracist” by the end of her life. Nevertheless, the biographer mostly refrains from considering how her racial attitudes might have influenced McCullers’s entire oeuvre.

While she acknowledges that there were already Southern authors (including William Faulkner) writing fiction “distinguished by darkly romantic Southern settings; bizarre characters, even freaks; and plots that hinged on motivations that were at once tragic and comic,” she does not explore how these authors might have shaped McCullers as a writer. Dearborn states only that McCullers “seemed a worthy successor” and does not consider what McCullers was trying to tell readers about the South.

In contrast, one aspect of identity Dearborn discusses in great detail is McCullers’s gender and sexuality. When young, the novelist started using her androgynous middle name and wearing men’s clothing. Several years later, the man she would eventually marry asked her if he was a lesbian. And then after their wedding, she fell in love with a woman who did not accept McCullers’s advances. Her new beloved was the first of many “imaginary friends,” as her husband referred to her female crushes – a term that “effectively neutralized them.” Dearborn spends a lot of time speculating about a number of these romances and crushes, many of which were short-lived or even completely unrequited until her long-term relationship with her former psychiatrist late in life.

Unlike Dearborn’s cursory thinking about the influence of disability, Southern identity, and race in McCullers’s writing, she looks much more seriously at how gender and sexuality might have shaped it. The fiction is full of characters who themselves are queer in some way, Dearborn points out, and so alienated from others that they cannot engage in egalitarian relationships. They were either lovers or beloveds, to use McCullers’s words, but never both. This theme of otherness in the context of loving relationships was at the heart of many of her novels, convincing Dearborn that “gender fluidity is a thread through her major works and is fundamental to the strangeness, the difference that marked the remarkable cast of characters” who are “not tortured by their sexuality; they simply are who they are.” She concludes, “queerness was … Carson’s defining trait as an artist.”

In McCullers’s autobiography Illumination and Night Glare – “a strange, unfinished document” as Dearborn writes—the novelist describes moments when she figured out how particular plots should resolve. These epiphanies were coupled in her mind with specific memories from her personal life. For example, McCullers was excitedly running after a firetruck in New York City with Gypsy Rose Lee when she suddenly came to understand that the protagonist of her current project wanted to run away with her brother and his fiancée after their wedding. Despite Dearborn’s reliance on these “illuminations,” she posits that “it is tempting to see events in her life as night glare, distracting her from her work.” This claim is unconvincing if it is about McCullers’s own understanding of the relationship between her work and life. Still, it points to a major limitation: her biography focuses almost exclusively on McCullers’s life, often merely summarizing her would-be affairs, her alcoholism and other self-destructive behaviors, and her quirky and sometimes-alienating personality. The biographer’s extended lists of publishers and editors with whom the novelist worked, fellow writers she met even briefly, and directors of and actors in stage and screen adaptations of her books simply come at the expense of significant engagement with McCullers’s writing.

It is only in her analysis of The Member of the Wedding in Chapter Nine that Dearborn offers any real insight into McCullers’s work. Here, McCullers the writer comes alive. If more of the pages of the volume offered that kind of understanding and vision, this would have been a fine book indeed. As it stands, with its skimpy discussion of influences on McCullers’s writing (other than her queer identity) and limited analysis of the fiction itself, Dearborn’s book is a disappointment.

Hannah Joyner lives in Washington, D.C. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work includes Unspeakable and From Pity to Pride. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.