Miss Lonelyheart

Richard Shone

The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers Virginia Spencer Carr (Peter Owen 28.50)

In The Member of the Wedding the little girl Frank ie Addams—the marest we get to a self-portrait in Carson McCullers's fict ion— finds her solitariness an intolerable burden : 'She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.' Seeing a group of freaks on exhibition at the local fair and sensing some peculiar affinity, she resolves lo join in the pending marriage of her brother, thereby making him and his bride 'the we of me' as she calls it, The phrase aptly describes Carson McCullers's life-long Pursuit, a ravenous need for company, attention and love. She remained however, in the Words of Klaus Mann, 'uncannily versed in the secrets of all freaks and pariahs.' This child-like logic of the 'we of me' was ruthless'Y exploited at the expense of herself as much as of others. Only in the last few years of her life (she died in 1967 aged fifty) did she reach a state of relative calm but by then, ironically, She was almost a freak herself.

Carson McCullers is perhaps less well known now than at the time of her death, the Year the film of Reflections in a Golden Eye was released with Taylor and Brando. Certainly she was overpraised. in her lifetime, Tennessee Williams for example calling her the greatest writer of our country, if not of the world.' Her success was phenomenal right from the publication of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1940. Gradually the whole American literary machine was brought into action. Students were already grubbing through her papers for dissertations while She was alive. Honours and awards delighted her; her views on current events were avidly relayed; she even presented prizes, when in England, at the Cheltenham Festival. Now, When the stand she took for tolerance and freedom are as needed as they ever were, she is in danger of being overlooked. Though More limited (and with a smaller body of work) than her fellow Southerner Faulkner, her treatment of the implications of Southern society is more explicit. So secure is she in the suggestion of the universal from the particular that, unlike many regional writers, She does not date.

Columbus, Georgia was her hometown With its special 'language and voices and foliage and memory.' Born Lula Carson SMith,she was an independent girl, tall, boyish, passionately musical, writing parmur plays in nickel 'Big Chief' notebooks, cherished by an alert mother who was hostess to a small town group of cultured bachelors. Frankie Addams thought of becoming a Marine or a movie star in order to escape; at

seventeen Carson was bound for New York to attend 'creative writing' classes at Columbia University. Her first stories were published and in 1937 she married Reeves McCullers who had recently purchased his discharge from a successful army career in order to write. It soon became apparent that Carson was the writer and from then on we see the gradual disintegration of Reeves, unable to withstand the blast of Carson's demanding personality. Reading this long central portion of the book with its attendant quarrels, Carson's remorseless ill health and growing fame, their continual drinking, separations and reconciliations is like witnessing a snake swallowing a toad—one more heaving gulp and the toad is inches nearer its death. Complicating the situation were Carson's violent love affairs with women and Reeves' own ambivalent sexuality. It really becomes a mess. In 1942 they divorced and in 1945, after Reeves' distinguished war service, they remarried. Two years later while in Europe Carson suffered two strokes, the second paralysing her left side more or less Permanently.

In 1953 in a Paris hotel Reeves killed himself, Carson having fled back to America 'fearful of her life.' Thereafter, illness followed illness and in her last years Carson, often in great pain, was an invalid in a wheelchair, later spending most of her time in bed. She was, Reeves once said of her after a long pause, 'Indestructible She published one further novel Clock Without Hands in 1961. In these years she was surrounded by friends and helpers, sustained by alcohol, a sense of humour and her psychiatrist Mary Mercer who quite obviously helped prolong her life. It is an astonishing story in which one's irritation with a petulant, brilliant child gradually subsides. It cannot be said she was ever really peaceful—no one with so frenetic an imagination could be that—but she did seem to reach, in her own words, a state of 'Divine collusion' with life.

This mammoth biography runs to nearly six hundred pages, It's the life and times of Carson McCullers with a vengeance, and the teeth are really bared in the footnotes. It belongs to that tradition of American literary biography which seems to have as its motto, Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire. This is no advocation of suppression or the ironing out of insistent creases; the piling up of detail, as in this book, often makes for vivid re-creation. But the more we are handed, the more slippery the central character becomes. Some facts simply are less interesting than others and get in the way. It is interesting to know that Macey's store had fifty

telephone booths, in one of which Carson used to hide to gain a little peace. But all the inevitable vicissitudes of any Broadway production become extremely tedious. The whole book should have been drastically cut. Already well-established characters within the narrative are reintroduced with their various epithets too frequently-111e „. Young actor' or 'Carson's good friend.' But Virginia Carr's book has much to recommend it. This is by no means a hagiography, she doesn't blink her Southern eyelids at unsavoury details, and much of the narrative is exciting. Particularly lively is her evocation of the Brooklyn Heights commune where Carson lived in the early 'forties alongside W. H. Auden, George Davis and Gypsy Rose Lee, where Britten, Pears and Louis MacNeice were guests and where Auden presided at the long table with 'malicious dignity.' For a while Carson McCullers really belonged.

merit of the English political genius—and William lila man to whom England had incurred an everlasting debt.

So it is strange that the reign of 'Our Great Deliverer from Popery and Tyranny' should be so ill served by historians. Macaulay's great account peters out in 1697, and when G. M. Trevelyan turned to this period he chose as his subject England under Queen Anne. All we have for William's reign is a perceptive but very brief study by David Ogg, and William himself lacked an adequate biography in the English language until 1966.

The parliamentary history of the reign is particularly neglected, and still rests on an out-of-date study by Feiling published in 1924. Distinguished psephological historians like Geoffrey Holmes and W. A. Speck have focused their research on Anne's reign instead, and it does not seem that the relevant volumes of the official History of Parliament will appear for some years. Dennis Rubini's Court and Country (1967), one of the few recent monographs on the reign, while it has many things of value to offer, in general terms makes confusion worse confounded.

For the 1690s were a confused period. The Commons floundered in an attempt to cope with the very full and quite unaccustomed timetable now imposed upon it. The Church was deeply divided. The old king was feared, the new king distrusted. Party allegiances were tenuous and often contradictory, with the old Tory party of Church and King facing up to long-term opposition, the radical Whig opponents of the Stuart monarchy agonising as to whether they should form a Court party or not. In 1690 one observer likened English politics to those of Babel. Politicians like Robert Harley proved impossible to 'fix' in a party image at all. As for governments, they had as many colours as Jacob's coat, and even the Whig Junto administration formed in 1693, and hailed by Macaulay as the first party government, was by no means completely Whig.

Only a few months ago Brian Hill, in a history of party up to 1742, contrived to impose some order on this disorderly picture, but of necessity his was only a brief sketch. Henry Horwitz now gives us the full treatment, parliamentary history in depth, using printed and MS sources of every kind, many of them, I think, not used before, and ranging from the despatches of august foreign envoys to the letters and memoranda of the most obscure back-bench squire—from the Algemeen Rijksarchiev at The Hague or the Deutsches Zentralarchiv of the German Democratic Republic to the quaintly titled Pine Coffin MSS (apparently a family name and not a macabre receptacle for private papers).

Apart from parliamentary history for its own sake, what has it got to offer us ? First, it completes the work of Stephen Baxter and Brian Hill in rehabilitating King William's reputation as a parliamentary and political manager. The picture of a confused and arbitrary man, unable to comprehend English conditions, deafened and bewildered by conflicting advice, making random changes either at the dictates of his managers or in order to defy them, has never been entirely plausible and must now be abandoned. Instead, we have a tough, composed, determined operator, always very firmly in the driving seat, always with his finger on the pulse of parliament, well able to judge the English, though he usually found them wanting. We too often forget that he was raised in a very tough school indeed; nothing was more labyrinthine than the politics of the States General or the States of Holland, unless it was the politics of the city council of Amsterdam.

It also reminds us of the amazing facility with which England was able to finance an appallingly expensive war. A nation which in 1640 thought it could not find half a million a year for Charles F, which blenched at the idea of giving Charles II £1,200,000 in 1660, was by 1695 finding £5 million for the army and navy alone, plus another £800,000 for the Civil List. Horwitz permits us to understand much more clearly how this was accomplished in political terms. He also reminds us of the much greater control, if mainly retrospective, that these early parliaments had over war policy, compared with the supposedly more independent parliaments of our own century.

To say that it is not a full history of the reign, that the events of the war, a great deal of diplomacy, and many important domestic events are dealt with only in passing, would be to criticise it for being something it was never intended to be; but the unwary reader should be warned. It is more relevant to say that it lacks the intellectual grace, the subtlety of analysis that distinguished Geoffrey Holmes's British Politics in the Age of Anne, in some ways a companion book. But that would be to criticise it by the very highest standards, and perhaps unfairly. Horwitz does emerge from the narrative at intervals to offer some very interesting chapters of analysis. These involve points of great technical difficulty long disputed by historians, and it would be idle to attempt to deal with them here. But his findings tend to confirm that parties even at this early stage were more cohesive than the neo-Namierite historians of the period have been willing to allow.

If his analysis, and his narrative, have a defect, it lies in his reluctance to grapple with the problem of what constituted Whiggism in this period and what Toryism; and for a biographer of that staunch High Tory the Earl of Nottingham, he is curiously evasive about the Church question—or inclined perhaps to underrate it. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinarily valuable piece of history, illuminating the nature of parliament and its activities in a formative period of adolescence.

Only those who have attempted this kind of work can imagine the grinding labour so well disguised in its composition, and we should be grateful to him for undertaking it. It is a book whose conclusions may be questioned, and perhaps modified, but its basic structure will not be replaced.