February House Page 2

  Now, in June, as German troops breached the borders of France, the southern writer Carson McCullers’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, appeared—a work that would lead indirectly, through the relationship between the author and an editor in New York City, to the creation of a bridge between Europe’s crumbling culture and the burgeoning artistic life in America. The novel told of four outcasts in a small southern town—Mick Kelly, a young girl who longed to compose music but lacked the education; Jake Blount, a frustrated political activist to whom no one would listen; Biff Brannon, a café owner who quietly pondered his patrons’ lives; and Doctor Benedict Copeland, a Negro physician who railed against the system that victimized his patients. All four of these characters had been drawn into a friendship with a fifth misfit, a solitary deaf-mute named John Singer, who they believed understood them in profound ways that went beyond words. They failed to realize that Singer himself was grieving over the departure of his only friend, another mute who had been placed in an institution. This mutual misunderstanding—or spiritual deafness—would lead to a tragic end.

  Within days of its publication, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter became the literary sensation of the summer—not least due to the almost freakish youth of its gifted author. The literary critic Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker, called the novel a “sit-up-and-take-notice book for anyone to write, but that a round-faced, Dutch-bobbed girl of twenty-two should be its author simply makes hay of all literary rules and regulations.” McCullers, he noted, “deals familiarly with matters no nice twenty-two-year-old girl is supposed to be an authority on, drunks, down-and-outers, poor Negroes, perverts, workingmen, and the wide, fearsome solitudes of the human heart.” The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, he concluded, was “a first novel that reads like a fifth . . . a story with an extraordinary obsessive quality, eerie and nightmarish, yet believable.” Rose Feld added in the Sunday New York Times on June 16: “Maturity does not cover the quality of her work. It is something beyond that, something more akin to the vocation of pain to which a great poet is born.”

  It strained the imagination to believe that this tall, gawky, rail-thin southern girl, who had turned twenty-three in February but who looked no more than sixteen—a girl with little formal education who dressed in men’s long-sleeved shirts with loose cuffs flapping, loose corduroy trousers, and chunky shoes—could have created what some were calling a work of genius. The novel’s appearance sparked a buzz of curiosity. Who was this girl and where did she come from? How did she write such an astonishing book? Who helped her? What else had she written, and was it for sale?

  The young author herself, as self-conscious and shy as her photographs suggested, read the reviews of her novel in a dingy fifth-floor walk-up west of Greenwich Village, an apartment she and her husband, Reeves, had rented just days before. For Carson and Reeves McCullers, the spectacular success of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was as much of a shock as it was to everyone else. Until that month, they had been living in a miserable boardinghouse in Fayetteville, North Carolina, struggling to survive on Reeves’s earnings as manager of the local branch of the Retail Credit Corporation so that Carson could write. “We had no other friends and were content to be alone,” Carson would later write about that difficult period in their lives. Often, while awaiting the final $250 publication payment for her novel that would allow Reeves to quit his job and the couple to travel north, “we would just look at the parked cars with New York license plates and dream about the time when we, too, could go to the magic city.” And yet now, only weeks later, when the two young Southerners walked hand in hand up Fifth Avenue in New York, it was photographs of Carson’s own childlike face that gazed back at them from the bookshops’ display windows, and it was Carson’s name in the news.

  Carson had lived in New York before. She had first arrived at age seventeen, pursuing her mother’s dream for her to study piano at the Juilliard School. From before her birth in the small town of Columbus, Georgia, her mother had been convinced that her daughter was a genius, and for the first decade and a half of Carson’s life it was assumed that her gifts would express themselves through music. Carson was a talented player, though perhaps not sufficiently gifted for the performance career her mother had planned. As it happened, after a bout of rheumatic fever, misdiagnosed and improperly treated, Carson no longer had the physical stamina for the professional life of a musician. It was fortunate that, at least as legend would have it, she lost her tuition money on the subway before she could enroll in her first music course. Instead, Carson settled for a series of day jobs in the city and night classes in creative writing at Columbia and New York universities. She worked hard and attracted the attention of the noted literary mentor Sylvia Chatfield Bates before ill health and lack of funds forced her to return to the South at age twenty. There, at her mother’s house, she met and soon married twenty-four-year-old James Reeves McCullers, an army clerk at nearby Fort Benning. “It was a shock, the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him,” she later recalled; “he was the best looking man I had ever seen.” The bonds that truly united them, however, were a liberal political stance that distinguished them from most others in their southern milieu, a reverence for music and books, and a shared ambition to become great writers.

  Those early years in New York had been very different from this summer of 1940. Back then, the gangly teenager with the faunlike gaze—known by her maiden name, Carson Smith—had been so terrified by the city that she spent entire days curled up with a book in a telephone booth at Macy’s, the only place she felt safe. She made few friends aside from an occasional roommate and one or two girls in her college classes. Her part-time jobs left her feeling even more disoriented as she wandered lost through the outer boroughs, trying to deliver papers, or was reprimanded for reading Proust on the job. By the time she had found a congenial work situation—as a freelance dog walker, able to observe other New Yorkers without attracting notice herself—it was time to return home.

  But now, all of that had changed. Carson had a new identity, having taken her husband’s surname, and had gained new confidence through the completion of her novel. She had survived the rigors of the editorial process, despite what she considered “bizarre” changes (which she rejected for the most part) suggested by her highly respected editor, Robert Linscott. Perhaps most difficult of all, she had waited—a year longer than expected due to a misunderstanding of her contract—for the final publication payment so that she could return to New York. It was perhaps not surprising, therefore, that while Reeves could not stop exclaiming at the surreal quality of her sudden fame, Carson herself felt that certain private sense of inevitability and entitlement common to very young artists who achieve recognition with their first sustained effort.

  All her life, after all, Carson had fled the monotony and narrow thinking of her southern childhood in favor of the grand landscapes of the world’s great literature. Growing up, she was known for reading not just books but entire libraries. Other girls in bobby socks could hardly compete with Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Katherine Mansfield, and Thomas Wolfe. As a married woman, shunned by her neighbors for her aloof manner and her friendly relations with the local Negroes, it was these favorite authors to whom she turned in her imagination for solace and advice. If now she felt, as years later Norman Mailer would also feel in his early twenties, “prominent and empty,” with “a power over others not linked to anything [one] did, and a self not linked to anything [one] felt,” this was only because she had not yet found the door through which to finally join her fellow writers, the people she felt she had always known. But the door existed—Carson was sure of that. And it existed somewhere in New York. Now that she had proven herself as an author, she would surely soon become a member of that illustrious inner circle.

  And yet, for a brief period, not much happened. Her editor in Boston, with whom Carson had communicated only by mail, had not yet come to New York to meet her. Having returned to the city only recently herself,
Carson was not particularly easy for interviewers, editors, or literary hostesses to find. In the southern tradition of calling on neighbors of similar social standing, Carson had naïvely written to a number of celebrities—including the actress Greta Garbo and the émigré activist Erika Mann, the eldest offspring of the author of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice, Thomas Mann—requesting convenient times to visit. But it was too soon to expect a reply. Gradually, invitations would begin to filter in. But for a short time after the appearance of her novel, Carson and Reeves were suspended in a strange limbo between “before” and “after” the period when their lives were transformed—a stillness oddly similar to the pause in the nation at large that summer between its denial of the catastrophe taking place in Europe and its recognition of the need to take action.

  While she waited, Carson went on the rambling walks in which she had indulged all her life, reacquainting herself with the city for which she had yearned so passionately in previous years, a city that was already changing in subtle ways that she did not yet understand. On the surface, daily life in Manhattan appeared much the same. As in previous summers, Carson wrote, the neighborhood children, “their faces shrill and delicate,” raced through the narrow streets extending west toward the Hudson River, scrambling after balls and disappearing down flights of basement stairs. City trees still bloomed on the gray sidewalks, and the twilights in that season were “long and luminous and sweet.” What changes there were were subtle, under the surface—changes “not of the waking mind, but of the myth.” One noticed, for example, that after the fall of Paris, the loose cotton shirts and straw sandals of Mexico had become the new street fashion. Newspaper sales had grown more brisk, and the newsstands near the subway stations now collected crowds of readers.

  Carson noted, walking through her own Italian neighborhood shortly after Italy had entered the war, that a small grocery store had hung a red, white, and blue sign reading I LOVE AMERICA across its screen door. “A woman stood behind the counter near the entrance,” Carson observed. “Her hair, parted in the middle, was drawn back stiffly from her face, which was pale, angular, and rigid. She stood with her arms folded across her chest, the hands motionless and very white.”

  It was in the midst of this summer stillness, both private and public, that Carson received a message from George Davis, the fiction editor of the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Davis had read Carson’s novel and was eager to discuss the publication of her work in his magazine. Might she be available to meet for a drink? He preferred to meet new authors at the Russian Tea Room in Midtown, but there was always the Village’s Brevoort Hotel bar or even the White Horse Tavern near her home.

  The invitation was disarmingly friendly from such a well-known editor at such an important magazine. Despite its focus on women’s fashion, Harper’s Bazaar had also developed a reputation as a publisher of important new literary fiction, and George Davis was considered one of the most innovative editors in the business. Carson had been disappointed when, as recently as the previous fall, Davis’s office had rejected two of her stories, “Sucker” and “Court in the West Eighties”—as had the Virginia Quarterly, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Redbook, Esquire, American Mercury, the North American Review, the Yale Review, the Southern Review, and Story. It was gratifying to be wooed by this editor now that she was a success.

  If Carson had expected George Davis to resemble in any way her respectable editor from Boston, he disabused her of that notion from the moment he entered the bar. The same height as Carson though significantly pudgier, thirty-four-year-old George liked to dress in his friends’ castoffs or thrift shop bargains—eccentric ensembles often set off with a bright Parisian scarf that trailed behind as he slid, catlike, across a room. His green-eyed gaze, couched in the face of a matinee idol just beginning to go to seed, could size up a public space in an instant, focusing on his prey as his lips slid into a sardonic grin. Known throughout the literary set for his practical approach to writers’ needs, George made a point of ordering the best food and drink that Harper’s Bazaar could buy for himself and his author and then settled down to seduce.

  It was to be a pleasurable process, because in fact George considered The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter one of the best novels he had read in years—one that had affected him on a profound emotional level even as he admired its style. In his low-pitched, mellifluous voice, George told Carson how moved he had been by her depiction of a rural life that he, too, had experienced growing up in the small, slow farming community of Clinton, Michigan. Like her protagonist, the young Mick Kelly, George had wandered among the back fields and mysterious alleys of his hometown, and like the deaf-mute, John Singer, he had known what it was like to feel different from the others, derided and misunderstood. Perhaps the most affecting character for George, however, was Benedict Copeland, the hard-working Negro doctor who deplored the tragedy of his patients’ lives as he improvised skin grafts on burn victims and treated syphilitic children in crowded two-room shacks. George’s father, too, had been a country doctor, and so he had grown up hearing stories of babies delivered on kitchen tables, of the boy who fell into a vat of boiling oil, and of the abandoned urchin who died from a kick in the stomach by a rich man’s horse.

  At the end of the First World War, George’s family had moved to Detroit, where his father had helped treat many of the tens of thousands of victims of the Great Influenza Epidemic—a scourge that left coffins lined up along the streets for the gravediggers to collect, until the city ran out of coffins. George had been left alone to haunt the libraries and movie theaters and, as he grew older, to explore the back alleys of Detroit’s Greektown, a seedy district whose Prohibition “coffee houses” featured, in Davis’s words, “a marvellous swamp in sinister frondescence” with the sexually ambiguous Miss Elsie Ferguson on the piano, Miss Dixie dancing to the Prayer of the Moon Virgin, and command performances by Mother Fannie Starr, the Toledo Camp, the Awful Mrs. Eaton, and an assortment of “mysterious apparitions, anonymous madams from hell.”

  And that, naturally, George told Carson, had been only the beginning. With the help of a lonely French sister-in-law brought back from the war, he had learned to speak fluent French by the time he finished high school. After a few odd jobs in the bookshops and steel mills of Detroit and Chicago, he had fled to Paris in time to enjoy the final few years of the 1920s’ expatriate literary revelry. As luck would have it, George’s upstairs neighbors at the Hôtel Saint-Germain-des-Prés were none other than the thirty-five-year-old New Yorker columnist Janet Flanner (who wrote her “Letter from Paris” column under the name “Genêt”) and her olive-skinned, exotic-looking lover, Solita Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson of Troy, New York). With these two black-suited, white-gloved, wildly eccentric American women in charge, George, at twenty-one, soon found himself in the center of literary Paris, sharing bottles of vin ordinaire with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Anne Porter, Djuna Barnes, the Irish writer James Stern, the British novelist Ford Madox Ford, the historian George Dangerfield, and the midwestern novelist Glenway Wescott. The shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, who owned the Hours Press, was also part of this circle, along with her lover, Louis Aragon, who was editing La Revolution Surrealiste, and Margaret Anderson, the editor of the Little Review, a “Magazine of the Arts” whose motto, printed on the cover of each issue, read: “MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE.”

  With his excellent French, George soon gained entrée into Parisian groups as well—getting to know Jean Cocteau, who was then completing his novel Les Infants Terribles and an opera with Stravinsky, Oedipus-Rex, and the mischievous, cherub-faced artist Christian Bérard, whose neoromantic paintings of fashionable French women had inspired the designs of Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior. For a while George became Bérard’s closest friend, visiting his studio, where the pair pawed through old American movie magazines together, and roaming the city, where they could
indulge their shared appreciation for “the whole comedy of the bar and the street.” Both Bérard and Cocteau were addicted to opium, and George, in his provincialism, became fascinated by the “convoluted quiets, delicious fears of discovery, flatteringly harsh demands on the purse,” associated with their habit. Though not attracted to the drug himself, George had often sat with Bérard as he smoked, “his pipes and lamp not fastidiously arranged but hauled from under the bed on a messy breakfast tray,” or watched him sleep off the effects in his hotel room.

  Of course, all of them—the Americans, at least—were as poor as it was possible to be, George assured Carson, who listened in amazement to this first of what she would soon learn was just another of George Davis’s typically endless and captivating monologues. The rooms of their Parisian pensions were always freezing. Whoever had received an advance that month bought food and drinks for the rest. George recalled one night when, unable to afford a hotel room, he had stumbled through the narrow streets to a shop where another friend, the twenty-eight-year-old poet and freethinker Kay Boyle, sold hand-sewn Greek-inspired dance tunics for Isadora Duncan’s brother, Raymond. Boyle, who was writing a novel on the backs of envelopes when not tending customers, took George in, and the two spent the night side by side on the floor of the shop, with George wrapped in a Greek tunic to keep warm.

  And, of course, like everyone else in Paris in the 1920s, George had written a novel. Originally calling it “Like Brown’s Cows,” later “Mere Oblivion,” he intended for it to unmask, once and for all, the hypocrisy and tragedy of midwestern middle-class life. The completed novel, published by Harper Brothers as The Opening of a Door, was notable more for its exquisite style and use of language than for its strength of plot or even original content. Yet, to everyone’s surprise—George Davis’s most of all—it became one of the most critically acclaimed American novels of 1931. Clifton Fadiman, the same critic who had hailed Carson McCullers’s novel in The New Yorker, had written that year in the Nation, “The most important fact about this first novel is that it was written by a young man of twenty-four. The smoothness of the prose, the unity of the tone, the author’s calm refusal to pose any difficulties of whose solution he is not wholly confident: these are all the marks of a practiced craftsman. ‘The Opening of a Door’ is one of the most unfirstish first novels I have ever read. It is difficult to believe it the work of one so young.”