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  The Mortgaged Heart

  Carson McCullers

  * * *

  A MARINER BOOK

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON / NEW YORK

  * * *

  First Mariner Books edition 2005

  Copyright © 1971 by Floria V. Lasky, Executrix of the

  Estate of Carson McCullers

  Introduction copyright © 2005 by Joyce Carol Oates

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-618-05705-6 (pbk.)

  Portions of this book were originally published as follows:

  "The Russian Realists and Southern Literature" in Decision, copyright 1941 by Decision, Inc.; "The Flowering Dream" in Esquire; "The Haunted Boy," "How I Began to Write," "Our Heads Are Bowed," "Home for Christmas," "The Discovery of Christmas," 'Who Has Seen the Wind?," "Art and Mr. Mahoney," "The Dual Angel," and "Stone Is Not Stone in Mademoiselle; "A Hospital Christmas Eve," in McCall's; "Isak Dinesen: Winter's Tales" in The New Republic; "Correspondence" in The New Yorker; "Sucker" in Saturday Evening Post; "Isak Dinesen: In Praise of Radiance" in Saturday Review; "The Vision Shared" in Theatre Arts, copyright 1950 by John D. MacArthur; "Loneliness—An American Malady" in This Week, copyright—1949—New York Herald Tribune, Inc.; "Look Homeward Americans," "Night Watch Over Freedom," "Brooklyn Is My Neighborhood," and "We Carried Our Banners—We Were Pacifists Too" in Vogue; "The Mortgaged Heart" and "When We Are Lost" in Voices, copyright 1952 by Harold Vinal. "Like That," "Instant of the Hour After," and "Breath from the Sky" appeared in Redbook in October 1971 as excerpts from this volume.

  The outline for "The Mute" appeared in The Ballad of Carson McCullers by Oliver Evans, published in 1966 by Coward-McCann, copyright © 1965 by Peter Owen. The excerpt from an early, unpublished version of Tennessee Williams' Introduction to Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye is published by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporarion and Miss Audrey Wood, International Famous Agency, copyright © 1971 by Tennessee Williams. The editor is grateful to the estate of Sylvia Chatfield Bates for permission to reprint Miss Bates' comments. And to Random House, Inc., for permission to reprint the passage from Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, copyright 1938 by Random House, Inc.

  * * *

  The dead demand a double vision. A furthered zone,

  Ghostly decision of apportionment. For the dead can claim

  The lover's senses, the mortgaged heart.

  —CARSON MCCULLERS, from "The Mortgaged Heart"

  * * *

  Editor's Acknowledgments

  LIKE MANY OTHER BOOKS, this one evolved. Through several changes, the original intention to collect most of Carson McCullers' published but uncollected work in one volume remained the primary purpose, and I am grateful to the invaluable bibliographies of Robert Phillips, William T. Stanley and Stanley Stewart. This book makes no pretense at scholarship, and is not intended as a study of the author or her work—early or late. I leave that to those mote objectively qualified.

  I thank Floria V. Lasky, the executrix of the estate of Carson McCullers, who for twenty years was the author's friend, adviser and attorney. I also thank Robert Lantz, who opened his literary agency in the late 1950s with Carson as one of his first five clients. His admiration for her work and affection for the author have been matched by his skills in her behalf. In her will, the author appointed him literary coexecutor along with me. I thank him for his cooperation with this book and express appreciation to his entire staff for their graciousness.

  Jane Hawke Warwick has worked with me on Carson's papers and on this book. When Jane was Assistant Fiction Editor at Mademoiselle, she met Carson and accompanied her on lecture tours. Her memory is better than mine, and I respect her taste and judgment.

  Appreciation is due to Joyce Hartman, New York Editor of Houghton Mifflin Company, which has published Carson since 1940 and has kept all of her books in print. Mrs. Hartman, a long-time friend of Carson's, had the original concept for this book which we all agreed was a necessary step toward completion of a Carson McCullers library.

  I appreciate, too, the cooperation we have received from editors, legal representatives and publishers in clearing rights and permissions.

  I would like to squeeze in very personal thanks to those few intimate friends whose love and support made it possible for me to complete my part of this joint venture. They know who they are.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Introduction to the Mariner Edition by Joyce Carol Oates xiii

  Introduction by Margarita G. Smith xix

  SHORT STORIES

  Editor's Note 3

  EARLY STORIES

  Sucker 9

  Court in the West Eighties 20

  Poldi 31

  Breath from the Sky 39

  The Orphanage 49

  Instant of the Hour After 54

  Like That 64

  Wunderkind 74

  The Aliens 88

  Untitled Piece 98

  Author's Outline of "The Mute" (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) 124

  LATER STORIES

  Correspondence 153

  Art and Mr. Mahoney 160

  The Haunted Boy 164

  Who Has Seen the Wind? 178

  ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

  Editor's Note 205

  THE WAR YEARS

  Look Homeward, Americans 209

  Night Watch over Freedom 214

  Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood 216

  We Carried Our Banners—We Were Pacifists, Too 221

  Our Heads Are Bowed 227

  CHRISTMAS

  Home for Christmas 233

  The Discovery of Christmas 238

  A Hospital Christmas Eve 245

  WRITERS AND WRITING

  How I Began to Write 249

  The Russian Realists and Southern Literature 252

  Loneliness ... an American Malady 259

  The Vision Shared 262

  Isak Dinesen: Winter's Tales (book review) 266

  Isak Dinesen: In Praise of Radiance 269

  The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing 274

  POETRY

  Editor's Note 285

  The Mortgaged Heart 286

  When We Are Lost 287

  The Dual Angel 288

  Stone Is Not Stone 293

  Saraband 294

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION TO THE MARINER EDITION

  ...the marvelous solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind.

  —CARSON MCCULLERS, "How I Began to Write"

  CARSON MCCULLERS IS one of our great American originals. Like her distinguished and very different predecessors in what might be called the poetry of American loneliness—in the nineteenth century Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, in the twentieth century Sherwood Anderson, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Edward Hopper, among others—McCullers is both idiosyncratic and "universal"; as an inspired, surely obsessed, explorer of the region of the "marvelous solitary," McCullers is nonetheless capable of creating wonderfully sympathetic, vivid, and distinctive fictional characters. McCullers's singular power is to illuminate our common humanity within the confines of the isolated soul: the ever-elusive, ever-seductive "we of me."

  Born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, Carson was a prodigious young talent initially as promising in music as in writing. She would astonish the literary world with her first publishe
d novel, the critically acclaimed and best-selling The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, published in 1940 when she was only twenty-three; but already, in her teens, she was writing short fiction of exciting promise and distinction, notably "Wunderkind," her first published story (Story, 1936). In all, through a tragically foreshortened career afflicted by chronic poor health and excessive drinking, McCullers would write five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, numerous critical and memoirist pieces, and poems. When she died in 1967, at the age of fifty, she left behind a 128-page typescript of reminiscences and musings, dictated to a secretary after a severe stroke left her unable to write, a highly informal, conversational "autobiography" that was subsequently published under the title Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Biography of Carson McCullers (1999).

  "Illumination" is Carson McCullers's term for epiphany, inspiration, insight; "night glare" her term for her myriad illnesses, disastrous personal involvements, alcoholism, and overall bad luck: "the soul is flattened out, and one does not even dare to hope. At times like this I've tried praying but even prayers do not seem to help me ... I want to be able to write whether in sickness or in health, for, indeed, my health depends almost completely upon my writing." Casting back a coolly analytic eye on her famously prodigious career, McCullers concedes that she'd become an "established" literary figure when she was much too young to understand the ambivalent nature of such early success: "I was a bit of a holy terror. That, combined with all my illnesses, nearly destroyed me." Add to McCullers's circumstances her penchant for loving not wisely but too well, often attaching herself to individuals (Katherine Anne Porter, for instance) who could not abide her, and her bizarre bad judgment in remarrying the fatally alcoholic Reeves McCullers after she had divorced him (Reeves McCullers, who finally committed suicide in 1953, had tried to coerce McCullers to commit suicide with him), one can only marvel that she managed to create the extraordinary body of work she did. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said of himself in "The Crack-Up," McCullers was a "poor custodian" of her talent and of her life.

  While Carson McCullers's short fiction might be characterized as domestic realism, her longer works of fiction often evoke parables, fairy tales, and dreams, most clearly in the gothic melodrama The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951). Her debut novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, strikes this note of fairy-tale narrative in the first line: "In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together." John Singer, the deaf-mute whom we come to know, is, symbolically, a jeweler's assistant who possesses a mysterious charisma, drawing others to him to tell him their stories: in Singer's "eternal silence" they find a perhaps illusory comfort. (Singer himself is hopelessly in love with a companion deafmute, an obese and apparently retarded man who hasn't the capacity to return Singet's affection.) When Singer commits suicide, bereft by the death of his beloved, those who have been telling him their most intimate stories are astonished, for they'd idealized him as a kind of savior. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is most appealing in its depiction of the wonderfully rendered teenager Mick Kelly, an early version of McCullers's most famous fictitious character, the semi-autobiographical Frankie Addams of The Member of the Wedding (1946).

  The Member of the Wedding is perhaps McCullers's masterpiece, beautifully composed and imagined, one of our great portrayals of American family life and the singularly painful loneliness of adolescence. In a way that suggests Carson McCullers herself, twelve-year-old Frankie Addams is susceptible to infatuation; by degrees she falls under the spell of her brother's upcoming wedding and becomes vulnerable to the trauma and humiliation of loss:

  She hastened after [the married couple] with her own suitcase. The rest was like some nightmare show in which a wild girl in the audience breaks onto the stage to take upon herself an unplanned part that was never written or meant to be. You are the we of me, her heart was saying, but she could only say aloud, "Take me!" And they pleaded and begged her, but she was already in the car. At last she clung to the steering wheel until her father and somebody else had hauled and dragged her from the car, and even then she could only cry in the dust of the empty road: "Take me! Take me!" But there was only the wedding company to heat, for the bride and her brother had driven away.

  McCullers's most memorable fictitious characters are likely to be adolescents like Frankie and Mick, for McCullers's vision is essentially that of the precociously gifted (and epicene) adolescent: idealistic, impractical, romantically yearning, at the mercy of wayward and unpredictable emotions, fated to self-doubt and disillusion.

  In this gathering of McCullers's work in several genres, aptly titled The Mortgaged Heart, the most engaging stories are those whose protagonists are young adolescents. "Wunderkind," a remarkable story for so young a writer (McCullers was only seventeen when she wrote it), is a subtly rendered portrait of a wunderkind girl pianist suddenly forced to realize that her early, much-praised genius for the piano is rapidly abandoning her. More poignantly, the girl pianist is losing not only the consolation of her music but the love of her adored teacher, Mister Bilderbach; she is losing her very identity. For when the precocious child is no longer a wunderkind to be admired and applauded, what is she?

  What had begun to happen to her four months ago? The notes began springing out with a glib, dead intonation. Adolescence, she thought. Some kids played with promise—and worked and worked until, like her, the least little thing would start them crying, and worn out with trying to get the thing across—the longing thing they felt—something queer began to happen—But not she!

  Like Frankie Addams rudely expelled from the paradise of her delusion, Frances is expelled, at the story's end, from the paradise of her music; she must leave a sacred place to hurry "down the street that had become confused with noise and bicycles and the games of other children." What an eerie prescience in "Wunderkind," the first published story by a literary prodigy who would have already strained and endangered her talent by the age of thirty-one, when McCullers suffered the first of numerous strokes.

  "Sucker" and "Like That," early McCullers stories similarly concerned with highly sensitive young adolescents in conflict with their "normal" contemporaries, present, in simplified form, the classic paradigm of McCullers's prevailing theme of unrequited love. The insensitive high school boy who narrates "Sucker" takes for granted his young orphaned cousin's adulation, calling him by the derogatory name Sucker because the twelve-year-old is so gullible and vulnerable to hurt. "If a person admires you a lot you despise him. And don't care." Unexpectedly, and ironically, Sucker refuses to accept his cousin's estimation of him and by the story's end he has become suffused with a malevolent strength, and has claimed his true name, Richard.

  In a later story collected in this volume, the suspensefully crafted "The Haunted Boy" (1955), McCullers revisits scenes of young-adolescent anxiety, depicting the ordeal of a high school boy as he anticipates a repetition of the bloody attempted suicide of his mother. Desperate not to be left alone in the house which, he's sure, contains his mothers mutilated body, Hugh virtually pleads with an older high school classmate to stay with him for a while. Unwisely, he confides in his friend that his mother has been hospitalized at the "big state hospital in Milledgeville"—that is, the insane asylum. When the mother returns home unharmed, maddeningly oblivious of her son's state of dread, he realizes that "something [is] finished" in his life and that he will "never cry again—or at least not until he [is] sixteen." This is a variant of the mote surreal, heightened world of The Ballad of the Sad Café, in which the storyteller states:

  Love is a joint experience between the two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing.

  "A small
talent is God's greatest curse": this is the startling insight of the failed writer Ken Harris in McCullers's autobiographical story "Who Has Seen the Wind?" (1956). Told from the myopic narrative perspective of a frustrated alcoholic who bears more than a slight resemblance to McCullers's husband Reeves McCullers (who had committed suicide three years before), this long story has the feel of a condensed novel and is an unsparing portrait of the artist devoured by envy for his more successful contemporaries. It's also a sympathetic portrayal of a once gifted individual who can't endure living without the solace of art: "'Talent,' he said bitterly. A small, one-story talent—that is the most treacherous thing that God can give. To work on and on, hoping, believing until youth is wasted—I have seen this sort of thing so often.'"

  By the story's end, Ken Harris has picked up a scissors to menace his frightened wife; he leaves her to wander in a drunken stupor the snowy Manhattan streets, where almost idly he contemplates death beneath the wheels of a subway train and wonders if it's true that "in the final moment of death the brain blazes with all the images of the past—the apple trees, the loves, the cadences of lost voices—all fused and vivid in the dying brain."

  Though none of the stories in The Mortgaged Heart is quite so accomplished as McCullers's frequently anthologized "The Jockey" (1941), a masterpiece of dramatic understatement, and the lyrical "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud." (1942), each is of considerable interest in the context of her career, and all repay sympathetic attention.

  Of the diverse nonfiction pieces gathered here, the most valuable are those concerned with the writing life. Far from being a merely intuitive writer, McCullers is an informed and insightful critic of her own work, as her commentary on the composition of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, originally titled The Mute, suggests. McCullers's insights into literature are shrewd and well reasoned and occasionally provocative. In "The Russian Realists and Southern Literature" she discusses Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in the context of mid-twentieth-century "Southern Gothic" fiction, predominantly William Faulkner's, though she is clearly thinking of her own work as well: "a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail."