À la recherche de Carson McCullers : Retour à Nayack (Biographies, Autobiographies) (French Edition)
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But Savigneau sees a writer truly dedicated to her art, one who greatly suffered from illness and in whom "adolescence seems to have remained intact"; but the latter functioned as the wellspring from which her appealing novels and short stories flowed. Her mother was of utmost consequence in her life, even as an adult; but with her husband, Reeves McCullers, whom she married twice, she had a greatly problematic relationship, "at once destructive and perhaps indispensable. Critical of how Carson McCullers has been presented in previous biographical works, Savigneau Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life aimed to find McCullers the private "strange woman-child" not conceal her.
Indeed, Savigneau compassionately reveals the woman with a childlike face who continually lived the unsettling, emotional turmoil of an adolescent in an adult world but who also showed the incredible intelligence, talent, determination, and strength to overcome her human frailties. Thanks to access granted by the McCullers estate, Savigneau provides us with information from previously unpublished manuscripts and letters while also drawing heavily upon work done by Carlos L.
Although Carr's life remains the standard, Savigneau's heartfelt, honest portrait of one of the great novelists of the American South attests to McCullers's continuing international popularity. Highly recommended for academic and large public libraries.
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Southern States -- Biography. Summary "Writing is my occupation," Carson McCullers often said. Publisher's Weekly Review Despite her death in at the age of 50, novelist and playwright McCullers continues to inspire new works. Booklist Review Originally published in France, where southern American literature traditionally has been well received, this biography of Georgia fiction writer McCullers is the first one for which access to the subject's unpublished manuscripts and letters was permitted. Excerpts Introduction Carson McCullers would have been eighty-four years old on February 19, , an age that would have made her our absolute contemporary.
But she died prematurely, in , at age fifty.
Jacques Tournier
She published only eight books, plus a posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and poems. That doesn't sound like much to build an international reputation on. She attained one, however, and although she may not be very famous among the public at large, only rarely are serious readers unfamiliar with the work of this novelist from the American South.
Could that be what annoys some of the people who knew and outlived her, causing them to minimize or obscure her writing, her status, her very existence? John Brown, one of her first editors in the early s, who became her friend and was a constant source of support during her stays in France he was working at the time for the cultural service of the American embassy in Paris , seems to wonder what could possibly prompt a full-length biography of Carson McCullers: And broken by illness at such a young age," adds the American playwright Arthur Miller.
Obviously, if you use the entire history of American literature as a yardstick, and you line up the major works, you could conclude that Carson McCullers's four novels and her corpus of short stories make her "not really much of a writer. They are also what gives meaning to literature. Carson McCullers is one of the finest of those "accidents. In the foreword he wrote in for the major American biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr, Tennessee Williams refuses to let commentators shut his friend away in her illness.
No one can deny the suffering and infirmities that Carson McCullers had to live with for twenty years, but Tennessee Williams firmly states that the existence of a writer cannot be evaluated in terms of difficulties, any more than by the number of volumes produced.
Carson had the most meticulous biographer one can imagine. A Biography of Carson McCullers in , carried out an extremely methodical investigation, seeking to leave no moment of Carson McCullers's existence hidden, from her birth to her final day. McCullers's heirs refused to assist Carr in any way and barred her from citing the documents -- unpublished texts and letters -- preserved in the archives of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
At the time, Carson McCullers's sister, Margarita Smith; her lawyer, Floria Lasky now her literary executor ; and her agent, Robert Lantz, were hoping to find a biographer of their own choosing. Mary Mercer, Carson McCullers's doctor and friend during the last ten years of her life -- a key figure for that period -- also refused to speak with the biographer.
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Virginia Spencer Carr nonetheless seems to have interviewed every other witness to Carson McCullers's existence -- however mminor or ephemeral. When she herself was not free to travel, she sent someone else to question people for her. Recollections were obtained from peopllllle who had met the American novelist only in passing -- such as Simone de Beauvoir, who vaguely remembered an evening spent with her in Paris.
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By now, most of the women and men who provided information to Carr have died. No work on Carson McCullers could possibly be done without Carr's incomparably precise text, containing scores of comments now impossible to collect. Nothing can be written without referring to those unique testimonials, which is to say that we cannot but pay homage to the research of Virginia Spencer Carr.
And yet, despite an appearance of neutrality often found in American biographies -- never a conjecture on points that are obscure or unexplained but a piling up of details, particulars, and testimonials as if all were of equal importance -- Virginia Spencer Carr's work creates a rather negative image of Carson McCullers.
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The Lonely Hunter aims to be exhaustive, and it certainly comes close, but its portrait is cold, painted by a woman apparently unwilling to consider that a writer lives differently from people who don't write, organizes her existence according to other criteria, feels different feelings, thinks other kinds of thoughts. A writer is not someone who on the one hand loves, hates, rejoices, becomes outraged, or suffers and then writes in her free time. Not only is a writer's life partially refracted in fiction that is, after all, what keeps the biographical enterprise from being inane , but the need to write fastens itself onto, indeed molds, every living moment.
It is if not by that standard at least from that perspective that a writer's life must be judged.
Virginia Spencer Carr shows little warmth -- much less tenderness or compassion -- for her subject, who, visibly, shocks her puritanism and moralism. Carson McCullers is too free with her passions and her words, too independent, and too adept at surviving come what may so that she can continue to write. Called R la recherche de Carson McCullers In search of Carson McCullers , it is an emotion- filled and sentimental quest for Reeves McCullers, Carson's husband, who dreamed of being the writer that his wife alone became.
For Jacques Tournier, though he denies it and though his passion for Carson McCullers is undoubtedly sincere, everything must be read in relation to Reeves. The film he made on Carson for French television in , like his book, proves it. According to Tournier, Carson's life after the death of her husband -- that is, for fourteen years -- was nothing more than intense despair over his absence, a long lament, nights spent imagining that Reeves's ghost had returned to roam in the garden of the author's Nyack home.
Happily, alongside the skeptics Carson McCullers had some real friends who outlived her: Mary Mercer; Marielle Bancou, her other intimate during the s and s, a young designer at the time; and the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a witness of the s. The photos that Cartier-Bresson took of Carson in show both the admiration and the real tenderness he had for his subject.
Frankie "the European" p. McCullers's heirs refused to assist Carr in any way and barred her from citing the documents -- unpublished texts and letters -- preserved in the archives of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Mary Mercer, Carson McCullers's doctor and friend during the last ten years of her life -- a key figure for that period -- also refused to speak with the biographer. Paul Bowles, an American writer who lived in the same house as Carson did in Brooklyn during the s, very aptly described "the essentially childlike woman she [was] all her life," insisting on the word childlike, which is nothing like infantile, to evoke the "born writer" spoken of by the British writer Edith Sitwell after she had read the novels of Carson McCullers. Please try your request again later. I have done it for so long.
When these people speak of Carson McCullers, they evoke a person who is first and foremost a writer, a novelist entirely attached to her work. Much more than a woman destroyed by the death of the man she loved -- and she loved James Reeves McCullers, that much is certain -- Carson McCullers, in her life and in the comments of her friends, resembles the touching adolescents -- irritating, too, at once generous and egotistical, weak and yet uncommonly strong -- who are featured in two of her novels, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Mick and The Member of the Wedding Frankie.
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Carson McCullers : a life
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