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Carson McCullers only wrote four novels, but that's hardly surprisingly; outside writing, she had a fair bit to contend with. She contracted rheumatic fever at 15 and then suffered two severe strokes before reaching 30, which left her paralysed in her left arm. In her 40s, she had operations on her arm and wrist, underwent a mastectomy and broke her hip; in 1967, at the age of 50, she died.
Her love life was no less turbulent. She married Reeves McCullers in 1937, divorced him in 1941, then remarried him four years later, after he was severely injured in the battle of Normandy. In 1953, he tried to persuade her to join him in a suicide pact; when she refused, he killed himself anyway.
During McCullers' separation from Reeves, she took refuge in a communal house in Brooklyn that was almost too literary to be true. Paul and Jane Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, WH Auden and Benjamin Britten all slept at the house regularly, and it was during her time there, after a boozy Thanksgiving dinner, that the spark for her third novel, The Member Of The Wedding, was lit. On hearing a fire engine's siren, McCullers and Rose Lee gave chase through the streets, and McCullers had a sudden epiphany about the central concept of her book, which tells of a 12 year-old girl, Frankie, who is so in love with her brother, Jarvis, and his wife, Janice, that she thinks she can join them on their honeymoon.
It's an innocent, twinkling kind of backstory to accompany what could, from a distance, seem like an innocent, twinkling kind of book. Close inspection reveals it most definitely isn't. With its portrait of pre-teen awkwardness and self-delusion, The Member Of The Wedding has attracted youthful fans. But if the book is a female Catcher in the Rye for the American south, it's a very downtempo, febrile one. Much of the activity is interior – either inside Frankie's head, or in the kitchen, where she tells her family's black cook, Berenice, of her plans to leave town with Janice and Jarvis. When something that might be construed as "action" does finally occur, it's shockingly dark: an incident involving a soldier who mistakenly believes Frankie to be much older than she is. This is a book perfectly suited to readers who wrote off The Bell Jar as lightweight, plot-driven entertainment.
Awkward and lanky, like McCullers herself, Frankie is obsessed with the idea of "membership": other girls mock her height, asking her if it's "cold up there", and exclude her from the local clubhouse where they party with boys. But she wants to be a member of the right club: at a circus show, she is afraid of the freaks, "for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way". Janis and Jarvis (whose namesake Jarvis Cocker used McCullers's narration of the opening lines of the book on his song Big Julie), on the other hand, she sees as her escape route to a sense of belonging. The fact that McCullers never lets us get to know them – keeping them as distant, shiny, non-characters – is crucial to the novel's daydreaming sensibility.
Ali Smith has called the atmosphere the book conjures "numb and fevered". McCullers' evocative descriptions of place contribute in no small part to this. There's a feeling that, in the unnamed town where Frankie and Berenice live, it's always one long, lazy, unhappily hot evening. Here, at twilight, the sky becomes a "curious blue-green that soon faded to white" and "noises have a blurred sound … the slam of a screen door down the street, the voices of children, the whir of a lawn mower". There are smells of "crushed scuppernongs and dust" – and, in the afternoon, "bars of sunlight crossed the back yard like the bars of a bright strange jail". You know you're not dealing with a standard coming-of-age tale when there's time for crushed scuppernongs.
At the book's moral centre, Berenice attempts to talk Frankie out of her mania, asking her if she'll "be attempting to break into weddings for the rest of her life". There's a beautifully balanced moment just after that, when F Jasmine puts her fingers in her ears; McCullers reveals that "she did not put her fingers in very tight and she could still hear Berenice". The author is working on a small canvas here, but she's determined to do a small job as well as possible, and there's a perfectionism to the way she captures a certain kind of ungainly, outcast, overambitious innocence.
When McCullers arrived on the literary scene in her early 20s with her far more famous debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she still looked unusually childlike – "a tall slender wand of a girl," in the words of Truman Capote – and it's obvious here that the feeling of being 12 is still fresh in her head.
Changing her name to "F Jasmine", and making business cards with "Miss F Jasmine Addams Esq" printed on them, Frankie heads out into town and tells strangers of her plan to join Jarvis and Janice on their honeymoon. It's a sequence that, in a less troubled novel, might have been funny. But for all the hysterical, inconsequential misery Frankie bemoans in her life, there's a sense of real misery underlying it. Her father is absent and inattentive, her mother died giving birth to her, world war two is a malevolent hum in the background, and there's a reference to a mysterious boy called Barney who has shown her an "unknown sin". Much in the novel is only hinted at, as if McCullers were actively anticipating future readers who would pick it apart for meaning.
Apparently, when McCullers first travelled to New York from her Georgia home, she immediately wrote to Greta Garbo to announce she'd like to come round for tea – as one might write to a new neighbour in a small town. We don't know what will become of Frankie after The Member Of The Wedding – it's a book that leaves nigh on everything open to interpretation – but it's possible to imagine her, in her socially overreaching and unworldly way, going on to do much the same thing.
Comments
21 June 2012 7:49PM
Good call. This is a near-perfect book and criminally overlooked. There was a really good stage version - I think McCullers wrote the play too - at the Young Vic a few years ago that was excellent too.
21 June 2012 7:50PM
PS - can we have The Man Who Loved Children in this series at some point please?