The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers 1946

“Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange? ” 

― Carson McCullers, Member Of The Wedding

Carson McCullers is most famous for her southern Gothic coming of age novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  I think her shorter novel, A Member of the Wedding is in second place.  I really enjoyed them both.  McCuller is a master at bringing forth the state of mind of alienated adolescents, especially girls. I think her work is very American, rooted in a time and place where race concerns were paramount.  Her work needs no praise from me.

I want to advise my readers against buying  the Kindle edition of the book below.

This is a very poorly done Kindle edition.  I understand when books are turned into kindle editions via some OCR scanning programs it produces errors.  This book is full of them and it is clear the publisher did not have anyone look the text over before putting it on the market. There is also no clickable table of contents.  

To me this shows contempt for both Carson McCullers and readers.  

I really liked the stories in this collection.  

"The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" by Carson McCullers 1951

So far since I began The Reading Life I have posted on Carson McCuller's classic novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and two of her short stories.  I am currently working my way through The Collected Short Stories of Carson McCullers.  

The publishers of this collection should be ashamed of themselves.   It is riddled with ridiculous typos, ones that any proof reading would have found.  I would hesitate to endorse purchasing  the collection as the publisher should not be rewarded for this production.  Carson McCullers deserves better and so does the book buying public.  

Some classify The Ballad of the Sad Cafe as a novella.  In my edition it is fifty five pages.  I have found most of the short stories in the collection as down a level from two other Southern USA Gothic writers whose full short story collections I have read, Flannery O' Connor and Eudora Welty, maybe way down.   The Ballad of the Small Cafe is a miniature master piece.  Set in a small rural community in Georgia,  there are only three central characters in the story.  One is Miss Amelia, a very interesting unique character.  She is six foot two and sort of economically dominates the town.  She is very strange and McCullers does a flat out brilliant job bringing her to life for us.  She marries briefly for ten days and it was a total disaster. Her husband winds up in prison for a few years.  A strange four foot tall hunchback, Lymon, who says he is her cousin, plays a very big part in this story.   

This story is just so wonderful.  I do not want to spoil any of the plot action.  The conclusion shows us a stunning turn of events that I bet has produced lots of good class room conversations.   A movie was made of this a while ago and I hope Turner Classic Movies will show it soon.

I have begun to read her novel, The Member of the Wedding.  

 

"Sucker" by Carson McCullers (1963-First published in The Saturday Evening Post)

Carson McCullers

"she died of alcoholism
wrapped in a blanket
on a deck chair
on an ocean
steamer. 

all her books of
terrified loneliness 

all her books about
the cruelty
of loveless love 

were all that was left
of her 

as the strolling vacationer
discovered her body 

notified the captain 

and she was quickly dispatched
to somewhere else
on the ship 

as everything
continued just
as
she had written it."

Charles Bukowski

Carson McCullers (1917 to 1967 - Columbus, Georgia, USA) is an iconic Southern Gothic writer.  Her most famous book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is an American classic.  (There is more information on her in my posts on this novel and her short story, "The Jockey").  Her stories are set in much thrbsame venue as those of another great southern Gothic writeralso  from Georgia, Flannery O'Connor.  McClure's people are isolates, misfits, those on the margins of society.  Her work often deals with the racial issues that dominated the American south for many decades.  

"Sucker", said to have been written when McCullers was seventeen but not published until much latter, is about the relationship of a sixteen year old boy and his twelve year old cousin who shares his bedroom.  The younger boy, called "sucker",  idolizes the older boy.  The older boy has developed an interest in girls and has his first crush.  The very real brilliance of this story is shown after the older boy berates Sucker terribly, telling him he hates having him around.  He says this in a moment of anger but it destroys the relationship.  McClure does a marvelous job showing us how this changed how both boys  see each other.  It can be seen as a story of the loss of innocence.  

If you search, you can find this story online.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940, 178 pages)



 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is classic example of what is often called "Southern Gothic" literature.  Like others in this genre such as Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, McCullers deals with misfits and social outsiders in small towns in the American South of the 1930s, a period of legalized racism and gross social prejudice. McCullers (1917 to 1967-Columbus, Georgia, USA) wrote four novels and a number of short stories. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is by far her best known work. It was a best seller on publication and has never gone out of print. It is a dark deep look into an ugly period in American life. I think reading it is now almost a "rite of passage" for bookish young Americans. (The book is very regionalized and time centered in its diction and social references and will present an additional challenge to some readers for that reason.)     I have previously posted on one of her short stories, "The Jockey", which is a very  good work.


I have wanted to read this book for a very long time and I am so glad I have at last done so. There are just some amazing passages and scenes in this book. It is all the more amazing to think the author was only 23 when it was first published. The story line centers around a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a small "backwoods" American town. We meet a number of very lonely isolated people. There is Biff Branson the owner of a small cafe where a lot of the "action" of the novel takes place. Mick Kelley is the young female lead struggling to find herself and a friend. Rounding out the cast we have an alcoholic labor agitator ("outside agitators" were a big "bogey man" type of figure in the American South of the 1940s to the 1960s blamed for social unrest and the declining willingness of African Americans to accept discrimiation) and Doctor Copeland, an idealistic Marist African American,  who gives a great lecture on Marist and the American South.

There are a lot of blog posts on this novel.     What I liked best about it was the relatiionships between the two deaf men, the treatment of the reading life of Doctor Copeland and the novel's depiction of race relations.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter  is about coping with being alone.    It is about the roots of racial hatred.   It is beautifully written.    Some of the violence in the novel is almost over powering.   

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter  is a strange wonderful book, strange in the way Wuthering Heights is strange and Jane Eyre is not.     This may not be a "happy feel good book" but it does take a deep look into the night.   

I found The Heart is a Lonely Hunter  a compelling read.    Much of the prose is beautiful.    It  might  seem or be dated to some and requires a bit of understand of the time and setting.   I liked this book a lot.   


Mel u

"The Jockey" by Carson McCullers

"The  Jockey"  by Carson McCullers (1941-listened to as a Pod Cast-31 minutes)


"The Jockey"  by Carson McCullers" (1917 to 1967-Columbus, Georgia, USA) was first published in the New Yorker Magazine in 1941.   McCullers is best known for her very famous work, set in the American south (we have been there recently in the stories of Eudora Welty) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) .   You can read about her life here.

"Don't Worry Carson, I will make sure
you do not get lonely during Irish
Short Story Week"-Carmilla

I guess I should have known about this a long time ago, but The New Yorker (the number one place in the world for the publication of short stories) has about 60 short stories on line as pod casts.    The stories are from the archives of the magazine.    They are read by a contemporary story writer and there is a before and conversation about the story with the fiction editor of the magazine.   There are some really good stories there. I found stories by Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver and Frank O'Conner, for example.    Most pod casts are about 30 minutes long.   You can, of course, download them to an Ipod and listen latter.   I am sure you could also put it on a CD and listen while you drive.   It is all free and requires no registration.  Every month there is a new story.    


As "The Jockey" opens we are at the race track in Louisville Kentucky on the day of the annual Kentucky Derby, the most famous horse racing event in America.   It is also was at the time a very high status  social day for the rich and famous.     There is not a lot of plot to "The Jockey".    When we first meet the jockey we are in a bar at the Kentucky Downs in the company of someone know simply as "a rich man" and a few other nameless people.    A jockey walks into the bar and is described just as if he were a child in a green silk outfit.    I think it helps to know that at the time white Americans in the South often had small statues of black men in jockey outfits on their lawns.   The bar patrons begin to talk about the jockey as if he were not even there.   Jockeys were all very small, to keep the weight down for the horses.    Sadly this jockey had gained 3 pounds in just few days and now weighed an unacceptable 112 pounds.   The rich man says he heard the jockey was eating nothing but rose pedals in an effort to lose weight.     The jockey feels envy for the men in the bar talking about him.   It seems he in fact works for them.   McCullers used color symbolism in the story. For example, the green of the jockey's uniform is meant to symbolize his jealousy.  This passage will give you a good feel for the style of McCullers.

"He was wearing a suit of green Chinese silk that evening, tailored precisely and the size of a costume outfit for a child. The shirt was yellow, the tie striped with pastel colors. He had no hat with him and wore his hair brushed down in a stiff, wet bang on his forehead. His face was drawn, ageless, and gray. There were shadowed hollows at his temples and his mouth was set in a wiry smile. After a time he was aware that he had been seen by one of the three men he had been watching. But the jockey did not nod; he only raised his chin still higher and hooked the thumb of his tense hand in the pocket of his coat.

The three men at the corner table were a trainer, a bookie, and a rich man. The trainer was Sylvester -- a large, loosely built fellow with a flushed nose and slow blue eyes. The bookie was Simmons. The rich man was the owner of a horse named Seltzer, which the jockey had ridden that afternoon. The three of them drank whiskey with soda, and a white-coated waiter had just brought on the main course of the dinner."

The Jockey" is about class (now of course Derby Jockeys are very well paid), about treating people as tools, about assuming those without money or power have no real feelings.   I liked it a lot.   I will be listening to more of these pod casts and I have also found some other good sources for them online.

There is an interesting and a bit amusing account McCullers visit to Bowen Court  where she stayed for about a month with Elizabeth Bowen and Bowen's husband in Victoria Glendinning's biography of Bowen.     If McCullers stops by on Elizabeth Bowen Day (March 18) during Irish Short Story Week, maybe we will hear about how the visit went.  

McCullers is a GLBT author.

"Hope to see you next week"-Rory

Mel u