Cigarettes, weird bangs, wide men's shirts and jackets mask the emaciated body, and most of Carson McCullers' simplified versions use this photograph as a book cover. On September 29, 2017, exactly fifty years after McCullers' death, as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, she left behind four novels and a collection of short stories all into the public domain. Since last year, her masterpieces "Heart is a Lonely Hunter" and "Song of the Sad Cafe" have been included in the publishing plans of many domestic publishing houses and have been released one after another.
Carson McCullers
Carson McCullers was born on February 19, 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, an old Southern state that experienced colonialism, slavery, and the American Civil War. From the moment she handed over her debut novel, Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she was naturally put into the queue of Southern writers. Her mother, Margaret, was convinced that this child she had been given to her would be a great artist, and she had been guiding McCullers in her artistic work since she was a child. McCullers' earliest contact was not O'Neill, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and a large number of Russian writers who later made her crazy. From 1926 onwards, at the age of 10, McCullers studied piano with two teachers, and her first novel, The Prodigy, published in 1936, was based on this experience.
"McCullers Works Series", People's Literature Publishing House
The novel Prodigy, included in The Song of the Sad Cafe and The Mortgaged Heart, tells the story of a teenage girl who, under the harsh demands of a "prodigy" aura, eventually collapses and abandons the piano— and it is true that in 1932, after suffering her first serious stroke, McCullers decided to give up becoming a pianist and become a writer. Behind it is a painful experience. At the age of 13, McCullers studied with her second piano teacher, Mrs. Tucker, and the relationship she cherished ended with Mrs. Tucker's departure in 1934.
McCullers despaired of this, and she lost "my us" for the first time.
The feeling about Mrs. Tucker connects the perception of loneliness of this girl who is incompatible with her peers. She came to realize that everyone is spiritually lonely and that no matter how much one desires and tries to connect with others, it is useless. In many of McCullers's novels, emaciated and tall young women dressed like boys appear as abandoned, eager to be subordinate to a group, and when they become members of the group, they repeatedly question their situation and flee quickly. When Mick, a young girl in "Heart is a Lonely Hunter", stands alone in a hot and empty room, tears involuntarily pour into her eyes, and when she thinks of a crowded room, she thinks: "It is also strange that in a crowded house, a person can be so lonely." ”
"McCullers Classic Quadrilogy" set, Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
It all started with the green, crazy summer when Franchi was twelve. This summer, Franchi has been out of the group for a long time. She does not belong to any group and has no place in this world. Fran Ki became a lone ghost, wandering from door to door in fear. ”
The Members of the Wedding, published in 1946, is McCullers' positive interpretation of the theme of "My Us." The young girl Franchi is overwhelmed by the combination of the kitchen lady Bellinis and her cousin John, and she looks forward to leaving the town to attend her brother's wedding, becoming one of them, and never returning.
In 1958, while recording an excerpt of her novel for the MGM Studio, McCullers couldn't help but sob as she read this passage from Franchi: "I know that the bride and my brother are 'my we.'" So I'm going to go with them and go to the wedding. When my brother and bride leave the town this Sunday, I'm going to go with the two of them to Winter Mountain, and then, wherever they're going. I love both of them so deeply that we belong together. I love both of them so deeply because they are mine to us. ”
It's hard to argue that the novel isn't a retracement of What McCullers, who was halfway through his life at the time, was a retracement of his youth experience. In the six years she spent writing the novel, she experienced the death of her father, divorced her husband Livs and remarried, and met her best friend and Bole Tennessee Williams for the second half of her life. Of course, there was also the never-ending pain, and a year after completing "The Wedding Member", a second stroke left her paralyzed. The seven overhauled versions of The Wedding Member have also failed to undo McCullers' pessimistic view of loneliness and belonging. In the end, the novel ends with the death of her cousin John, and the girl's fantasy of "my us" is shattered.
Carson McCullers' Lonely Trilogy series, Modern Press
In Loneliness, an American Disease, McCullers writes, "There is no more powerful and enduring theme in the complex leaps between our desires and rejections than the individual will's quest for self-identity and belonging." From birth to near-death, humans have always been obsessed with this dual theme. ”
McCullers has similar ambivalence about the South and his mother. Since she went to New York alone at the age of 17 to study writing, she has repeatedly made up her mind never to return to the hot, remote, dead-silent Southern towns of her novels. Whenever she was mentally or physically tortured, she was desperate to get spoiled by her mother and had to return to the South. Margaret, the mother who shaped McCullers, always appears in most of her daughter's novels as missing.
Looking back, the novel "Prodigy" can be seen as a prototype of McCullers' spiritual world, a faint expression. It indirectly opened McCullers's identification with the increasing paranoid paranoia of the contradictory self. This woman, who has been tormented by illness all her life, always dragging her fragile shell carefully wandering in a mirror-filled room, in the opposition between reality and complex mirror images, she only wants to find a quiet foothold for her warm and melancholy soul.
"The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", translated by Wen Zeer, East China Normal University Press
Published in 1940, the debut novel The Heart is the Lonely Hunter is another extension of McCullers' theme of loneliness. The novel evolved from a short story about deaf-mutes that she conceived in 1936. Dumb Singh is often seen in the silent town, and he is the only person everyone in the town is willing to talk to. Black doctors who want equal rights, Blant, the fanatical idealist, the café owner who is on his way to the end of his marriage, and the confused teenage girl Mick, all believe that this gentle and always smiling mute can understand everything he says.
In Singh's letter to his loved one— another mute Antoni Paros— he put it this way: "The black, young girl, the man with the mustache, the owner of a New York café... They sit there, like people from different cities, they are even very rude, you know I always say, it is not right to be rude and not care about the feelings of others. That's it. I don't understand, so write to you because I think you'll understand. ”
Ironically, just as Singh couldn't and didn't want to respond to the lonely people who chattered at him, Antonopolos never wanted to respond to Singh's wordless and fervent love for him. McCullers wrote, "Most of us would rather love than be loved." Almost everyone is willing to be a lover... For the lover always wants to strip his lover so that his soul is exposed. The lover is madly eager to have any possible relationship with the beloved, even if this experience can only bring suffering to himself. ”
The deepest loves can't save loneliness, or perhaps they are inherently entangled, building a person and then destroying it. This is the most desperate vibrato that McCullers throws out in Heart is a Lonely Hunter. At the end of the novel, Singer takes the train to see Antoniparos expectantly, but is confronted with the news of his death. Singer, who had wandered the streets on countless lonely nights, "washed the ashtray and the cup, took a pistol out of his pocket and fired a shot in the chest."
"The Song of the Sad Cafe", translated by Xiao Er, East China Normal University Press
A more insane and brutal love story than Heart is a Lonely Hunter is McCullers' 1943 Song of the Sad Cafe. The novel revolves around the strong and tall Miss Emilia, the criminal Marvin and The Lo Pot LeeMon. In McCullers's imaginary world, filled with characters who are in trouble or physically handicapped like the former, she invests great attention and sympathy for them, just as she intuitively learned of their miserable situation when she first watched deformed people perform. And those deformed bodies often reveal the reason for their loneliness—their lack of ability to receive, to protect, to receive love.
Without the distinction between the disabled and the able-bodied, humanity is always faced with uniform loneliness, and the loneliness that McCullers wrote about fifty years ago is no different from the loneliness we face today. It's just that this world, which has made imagination part of reality, makes us more aware of the existence of this emotion, which is deeply rooted in the human experience with what one loves, cannot be thrown, cannot go down the river, and has to be seen when we open our eyes and close our eyes. Tennessee Williams once said of McCullers: "Carson's heart is often lonely, it is a tireless hunter, looking for those she can give, but it is a bright heart, and its brilliance overshadows all her shadows." ”
Or perhaps, what McCullers did was simply to capture and comfort those who were trapped in loneliness and could not be freed from the dilemma of contradiction. In this twilight moment, and only by following her voice closer to the night can we respond to ourselves.
"Song of the Sad Cafe", translated by Li Wenjun, Beijing Yanshan Publishing House
Published in 1961, The Clock Without Hands was McCullers' last novel, which took her nearly a decade. In this decade, the most important people in McCullers's life have left her one after another, accompanied her for sixteen years, and her husband Livs, who fell in love with and killed her, committed suicide, and the death of her mother Margaret made her almost collapse. This death-themed work gradually emerged from McCullers' life in the process of full-fledged wings.
Similar to Beckett's Death of Malone, Clock Without Hands begins with the pharmacist Malone's diagnosis of leukemia, interspersed with the old judge's plan to restore slavery, and the white boy Jester's attachment to the black boy Sherman, all of which end with the deaths of Malone and Sherman. Eventually, the endless love and loneliness that are entangled in McCullers's work are also able to end themselves with death.
Song of the Sad Cafe, translated by Zhao Pihui, Cultural Development Press
After finishing Clock Without Hands, McCullers developed a sense of loss, as if her spirit had been drained and her life had begun. In the six years since, McCullers has rarely produced works, and the formerly known as the "iron butterfly" dragged her weak body back and forth around the United States, and the woman who walked Europe began to spend more time in her hospital bed, and she needed the care and companionship of others at all times.
In April 1967, McCullers went to Ireland, where she loved, the last of her life, and prepared for her and friends for nearly five months. In a letter to John Houston, she said she had reread Joyce's The Dubliners, and that the last story in The Dubliners, The Dead, was her favorite short story. On August 15, McCullers suffered one last stroke, bleeding extensively in her brain and falling into a coma.
Reflection of Golden Eyes, translated by Chen Xiaoli, Shanghai Sanlian Publishing House
The anthology Mortgaged Heart was compiled and edited by her sister Margaret Smith after McCullers' death. The book contains a short essay by McCullers about his experiences in the hospital as a teenager, titled "Christmas Eve in the Hospital." McCullers wrote that he read Joyce's The Dead to the amputee Carol—
A few thuds on the pane caused him to turn his face to the window. The snow began to fall again. He looked at the snowflakes, slightly sleepy. Silver snowflakes dimmed slightly, falling obliquely toward the light of the street lamp. The time had come, for him, to embark on a journey to the West. Yes, the newspapers were right, there was almost snow all over Ireland. Snow fell softly on every part of the dim central plains, on treeless hills, gently on Alan's swamp, down the far west, still gently and softly in the dark and tyrannical waves of the Shannon River, and on every lone church cemetery on the hill where Mac Ferry was buried. It floated on several crucifixes and tombstones that were about to be dumped, on every spike erected in the small iron gates, and on the thorny thorns of the barren land. As he listened to the snowflakes pierce through the universe and drift down, his soul gradually sank, just as if the final outcome of their sinking to the end, descended on all the living and the deceased.
On September 29, 1967, after 47 days in a coma, Carson McCullers' exhausted heart stopped beating. The way she says goodbye to the world is as silent as she has always appeared—the photograph used as a book cover, the quiet and cold face of the reader unable to get any answer or response to love by staring into her pupils, and reopening it in the wilderness of emotional truth. Five days after his death, McCullers was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery on the Hudson River. The Southern writer, who has spent his life running between love and loneliness, between the two worlds of self and others, has returned to his beloved New York. The world has since lost this lone hunter.