The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (25 page)

This conversation with the deaf divas caught my attention because it seemed to be a straightforward representation of a common point of view in our culture today—one quite inimical both to the fictional world and the real one. It has in fact become so dominant not just in academia but everywhere that we don’t even notice it anymore. Implicit in this approach is a certain guideline for how to read a novel, whereby you are expected to identify with the characters, to see them as representative of certain types or social conditions. Of course, readers, like writers, are unpredictable. They are unruly, and no matter how many guidelines you give them, they will find their own way of connecting with a book. The problem with this utilitarian mind-set is that it distorts both fact and fiction in order to arrive at a certain predetermined conclusion, one that most often ends with uplift and a happy ending.

I have been teaching American fiction to sometimes reluctant and often eager students ever since I moved to Washington from Tehran in 1997. Some of my students over the years have asked me, “What’s the point of reading these books?” or “How will they help me solve my problems?” The question is not generally posed in such stark terms, but that is the gist of it. Often, in response, I will turn the question back to them: What is it that we are looking for when we read a novel? Must it be useful? Must it teach us something concrete? I am tempted to quote Nabokov: “Fancy is fertile only when it is futile.”

If our main expectation from a work of fiction is that it be factually correct or that it correlate to real life, that it cure us of our anxieties, improve our relationships with our mothers—in short, be aspirin for the soul—then we risk treating the novel as nothing more than a manual, in this case a manual for understanding deaf people—with not very successful results, because, unlike the former Miss America, Singer does not feel his life to be full of “blessings” and does not say, “I am happy even though I’m deaf.”

Singer is real. He has feelings and can touch people, which is why readers empathize with him. And on a metaphorical level, he reminds us of a larger, more universal truth that is as relevant in this century as it was in the last—this despite the technology that not only has improved hearing aids and facilitated our lives but has provided us with so many new ways of communicating. As human beings, we have a profound need for empathy. We need to be listened to and understood. And so the book is less about the challenges of a deaf person than it is about our difficulty communicating meaningfully with one another, a difficulty that no technology can heal. No hearing aid would help us understand the kind of isolation human beings feel when they cannot communicate and articulate their inner feelings, their desires and aspirations. Because the terrible truth is that you can learn to lip-read the world, but the world around you still might not hear you.

In her own life, Carson McCullers elicited from people either tenderness and a desire to protect or outrage and bitter resentment— “viper” and “bitch” were among the terms used to describe her. Joanna would have said that these twinned and contrary emotions were, on a larger scale, what the rest of the country tended to feel about her native South, tempting me to disagree. I was of course well aware of Flannery O’Connor’s statement that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

According to McCullers’s first biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, her mother claimed that she, while pregnant, had been “alerted by the oracles that her firstborn would be unique.” She was convinced the child would be a boy and decided to name him Enrico Caruso, in honor of the famous singer. The birth was difficult, which some believe accounted for her slightly misshapen head. In any event, the baby was not a boy, but a boyish girl, so she was named Lula Carson—Lula (which she later dropped) in honor of her beloved grandmother, and Carson after Caruso. And she did become a genius of a kind. Oprah’s Book Club called her a “southern belle,” a term that would have amused more than irritated her.

If her life was charmed, it was not so much in the way of most southern belles, but more like that of a heroine in a Tim Burton movie. To the conservative society into which she was born, Lula Carson was an odd specimen of a girl. To begin with, there was her appearance. She was tall and lanky, and as she grew into adolescence she would deliberately emphasize her boyish appearance by wearing white socks and sports shoes, which she even wore to her own wedding, along with a tailored suit and a sailor cap. Beginning at a young age, she was fond of carrying around a flask of sherry and hot tea.

From the start, she was different from the “normal” kids around her, enjoying the kind of status as an outsider that she would later pass along to her favorite protagonists, Mick in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
and Frankie in
The Member of the Wedding
. She was the type of odd girl whom boys were forced by their well-mannered parents to promise they would ask to dance. Most of her high school classmates thought her eccentric. Her skirts and dresses were always a little too long, and she wore dirty tennis shoes or brown Girl Scout oxfords when the popular girls were wearing hose and high heels. When she was young, some of the girls threw rocks at her when she walked by, snickering loudly and calling her “weird,” “freakish-looking” and “queer.” So perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that she would later empathize with “freaks,” who to her mind were not just people with physical disabilities but those who refused to act according to the norm. “Nature is not abnormal, only lifelessness is abnormal,” she would write in her essay “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing,” first published in
Esquire
. “Anything that pulses and moves and walks around the room, no matter what thing it is doing, is natural and human to a writer.”

Life in Columbus, Georgia, might have seemed limited and narrow, but Carson spent hours in her inner world, infinitely rich and various, keeping company with Mozart and Beethoven, Flaubert, Joyce and the Brontë sisters, D. H. Lawrence, Eugene O’Neill, Chekhov, Gogol and Tolstoy. Like Mick Kelly, she had an outer world and an inner, more private world of her own construction. I have sometimes thought of her as my ideal student. In her unfinished autobiography,
Illumination
and Night Glare,
she writes, “When I was about eleven my mother sent me to the grocery store and I carried a book, of course. It was by Katherine Mansfield. On the way I began reading and was so fascinated that I read under the streetlight and kept on reading as I asked for the supper groceries.” Later, she was apparently fired from a job because she was too busy reading Proust.

Like Mick, she spent many hours playing the piano. She was precocious, learning to play without any training. In 1932, when she was only fifteen, she caught rheumatic fever and was bedridden for a long time and started to contemplate her options in life. That was when she first considered becoming a writer. Her friend Helen Jackson said that when, in December of that year, she visited her at her home in Columbus, Carson told her, “I’ve got something important to tell you, Helen. I’ve given up my dream of being a concert pianist. But it’s O.K. I’m going to be a writer instead.”

Her childhood fever was misdiagnosed and mistreated, leading to a series of terrible strokes that would leave her almost half paralyzed by the age of thirty. By forty her body would be a wreck. In her last years, she would suffer though a number of intricate operations to relieve the spasms of an atrophying left hand, wrist, elbow and leg; to repair a shattered hip and elbow; to cope with repeated sieges of pneumonia, a severe heart attack, breast cancer. . . . And yet, through it all she was as busy as ever, writing and giving interviews. If in her first book, written when she was barely out of her teens, she could capture the life of the senses and portray pain in such a concrete manner, it was in part because pain was an organic part of her life; she resisted it most effectively by making it her own.

In September 1937, when she was twenty, Lula Carson Smith married the dazzlingly handsome Reeves McCullers. (“It was the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him,” she would later write; “he was the best looking man I had ever seen.”) They had been introduced through a common friend, Edwin Peacock. Reeves was an aspiring writer, but he never did write, and to the end of his life he would be bitter about the fact that he spent so much time taking care of his wife and trailing after her. Three years into their marriage, she published
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
and after that she became a literary sensation. They had what is called a tumultuous love-hate relationship, with extramarital affairs, a divorce and a remarriage, all of which ended on a note as morbid as Carson’s own stories. They had been living for a while in Bachvillers, near Paris, going through a period of contentment and activity followed by depression. In the summer of 1953, Reeves suddenly started talking about suicide, then one day he attempted to take his life by hanging himself from a pear tree in their orchard. The limb broke under his weight. Carson’s response, as she reported it, was, “Please, Reeves, if you
must
commit suicide, do it somewhere else. Just look what you did to my favorite pear tree.”

After that unsuccessful attempt, Reeves came up with another idea: a suicide pact. He took Carson to the barn to show her a rope. He picked it up and, pointing to the beam overhead, said, “See that rafter, Sister. It’s a good sturdy one. You know what we’re going to do? Hang ourselves from it. I tell you, it’s the best thing for us both.” Carson told Tennessee Williams, who was by then a good friend, that she thought she had dissuaded him from the idea of a double suicide, but a few days later, on their way to the American hospital in Paris, she noticed two lengths of rope in the back of the car. Reeves told her that instead of taking her to the hospital, he was going to the forest so they could hang themselves, but first they would stop to buy a bottle of brandy. “We’ll drink it for old times’ sake . . . our one last fling.”

While Reeves was in the liquor store, Carson jumped out of the car and hitchhiked to a friend’s house. She immediately made arrangements to leave Paris for New York. Two months later, on November 18, 1953, Reeves told friends he would be “going west” the next day. He sent a telegram to his wife in Nyack, New York, saying, “Going West—trunks on the way.”

During the First World War, when a man felt his death was imminent, he would say he was “going west.” Reeves was found dead the next day—he had committed suicide in his hotel room, alone.

After Reeves’s tragic death, Carson tried to banish him from her life. It may have been the easiest way to deal with the anguish and the pain. Meanwhile, her physical ailments continued to torment her. She could rarely sit and suffered from circulatory problems. For about a year, she had to elevate her left leg and hold it straight out in front of her. She was told at one point that she would have to have it amputated, though she was kept ignorant of the reason why. Only later did she learn that she had developed bone cancer. Despite this, she never stopped traveling and never stopped writing.

Notwithstanding her growing physical disabilities and the intensity of the pain she constantly suffered, Carson McCullers was very busy, so busy in fact that her workload might have made a healthy person ill with exhaustion. She struggled with writing and finally published a new novel,
Clock Without Hands
. She also wrote a play,
The Square Root of Wonderful,
and a collection of poems,
Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig;
worked on her unpublished memoirs,
Illumination and Night Glare;
wrote a number of essays and articles and even participated in the translation of her stories into plays and films, composing the libretto for a musical based on
The Ballad of the Sad Café
. In between surgeries and writing, Carson found ample time to tend to her social life and keep up with her friends—good old-fashioned American sturdiness, giving the finger to both life and death, something so little encouraged today, so little appreciated.

A few months before her death, in the spring of 1967, Carson traveled to Ireland to meet the director John Huston, who was making a film of her book
Reflections in a Golden Eye
,
starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. The invitation excited her so much that each morning she would wake up thinking about her love of Ireland, rereading Joyce’s
Dubliners,
listening to
Tristan und Isolde
because of its Irish setting. After months of strategic planning, finally she left in April 1967. She had to be driven from Shannon Airport to Huston’s estate in an ambulance. Yet she was determined to enjoy her time, drinking bourbon and smoking menthol cigarettes. She read Joyce, O’Casey and Yeats while holding court from her bed for a whole host of people who wanted to visit the famous American author. She even dictated “A Love Letter from Ireland.” A huge hassock stuffed with foam rubber was made to fit in the plane cabin for her return, creating a sort of chaise longue. She boarded first, and once she was made comfortable, Aer Lingus uncorked champagne for the first-class passengers to toast the famous author.

Despite the pain and anguish she suffered both physically and emotionally, McCullers maintained a certain youthfulness, which came to her rescue at her worst times. In life she was childish, egocentric and needy, depending on others to be with her and to take care of her. Perhaps nowhere does she combine this childlikeness and childishness, this state of protracted adolescence, which she invoked time and again to describe her native South, as effectively as in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
. And nowhere else does she identify so clearly this mix of childish petulance, freshness, resilience and transient growing pains with her beloved country, America.

In 1949, McCullers published an essay in
The Week
entitled, “Loneliness . . . An American Malady.” It was a short piece, but I have come to think of it as her credo, and I’ve returned to it many times over the years. She writes that Americans “tend to seek out things as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyalties, knows little of the moral loneliness that is native to us Americans. While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick—not only from society in the way of all creative minds but within the orbit of his own art. . . . Whether in the pastoral joys of country life or in the labyrinthine city, we Americans are always seeking. We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart—the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.”