Arts and Letters

She had the most beautiful hands—of a kind one associates with great brain-surgeons or pianists. Actually, as a child, she had studied piano and had hoped to become a musician of concert quality. Instead, she became a literary musician, a wunderkind who, at the age of twenty-two, was capable of producing as original and strong a book as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; and to follow it, almost immediately, with an astringently rococo small classic, Reflections In A Golden Eye.

Carson's most familiar work, a tender semi-memoir, The Member of the Wedding, is also considered by many to be her finest book, and it is a lovely sustained prose lyric. Still, I have always felt that the center of McCullers's work is most hauntingly demonstrated in her short novel, The Ballad of the Sad Café. Her two dominant themes, loneliness and the perverse nature of love, were never more successfully intertwined than in this shimmering, moving story.

Yes, she had beautiful hands: fingers aristocratic as asparagus stalks. And I remember that the first time I saw her—a tall slender wand of a girl, slightly stooped and with a fascinating face that was simultaneously merry and melancholy—I remember thinking how beautiful her eyes were: the color of good clear coffee, or of a dark ale held to the firelight to warm. Her voice had the same quality, the same gentle heat, like a blissful summer afternoon that is slow but not sleepy.

Carson was born in Columbus, Georgia, the daughter of a watch repairer. When she was seventeen, two turning points occurred: she published, in the old Story magazine, her first short story; and she met and married a young soldier, Reeves McCullers, whom she subsequently divorced (and then, some years later, remarried). After the publication of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and its attendant success, she took residence in New York City, where she was a central figure in a beguiling communal household that included among its inmates W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, Paul and Jane Bowles, Oliver Smith, Gypsy Rose Lee, and a circus animal-trainer who roomed with a large chimpanzee. A very merry group indeed, and the time Carson spent there was perhaps the happiest period of her life; at least she often looked back on it with nostalgia. But her health, always uncertain, failed her, and finally she retired to the peace of a roomy old house overlooking the Hudson in Nyack, New York. Her widowed mother lived with her; also her loyal, charming sister, Margarita Smith. Except for a sojourn in Europe, and an occasional stay at Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, she never left this house until shortly before her death, when she was transported in a coma to a Nyack hospital.

However, her friends and admirers, of whom she had many and from all areas of the planet, went often to visit her in the house by the Hudson. Edith Sitwell went; and Marilyn Monroe; and Africans, Russians, Indians. Although she suffered greatly the last ten years of her life, enduring many painful operations, she was always good company, welcoming her friends as though they were birthday gifts. But really the gift was Carson herself; her genius, her distinguished spirit.