The lonely passions of Carson McCullers

It may be true that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) – but in the case of Carson McCullers it could also be an indefatigable and exhausting one. Born Lula Carson Smith into a struggling middle-class family in Columbus, Georgia in 1917, she grew up hungering for great passions – and, like Hunter’s teenage protagonist Mick (her characters often carry gender-neutral names), she fell in love with classical piano at a young age. (Then Carson – not Mick – fell in love with her female piano teacher.) She married young a 20-year-old ex-serviceman named Reeves McCullers who, by all reports, was far more beautiful than her. Then together, almost whimsically, they launched themselves off to New York with little money and few contacts, where they competed to find out who would write the first successful stories and novels. Carson quickly left Reeves behind in everything except drinking.

Giving up an opportunity to study at Juilliard, she sold two stories to the significant editor-of-first-sales Whit Burnett, the founder of the literary magazine Story; and then sold Hunter as a chapter and outline to Harper, after applying for, and losing, the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. Appearing in 1940 when McCullers was only 23, Hunter extended Faulknerian rhapsodic rage into the lives of an angry, overweight Greek neurasthenic homosexual, an angry, boozy former labour-organiser, and an even angrier black doctor, prone to issuing justifiably enraged lectures about the Jim Crow south.

These loners find solace in one another through their mutual friendship with a mute Jewish homosexual, ironically named Singer, and Mick, a local girl exploring the ranges of love and passion available to her. Mick was the sort of character, filled with youthful poetry and desire, who would reverberate in many small-town American novels over the next decades, from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.