In the past few weeks, there has been an escalating public debate about the social role of the white writer, stimulated by the novelist Lionel Shriver’s speech at a writers’ festival in early September. It is a cultural moment that has made white writers look in the mirror and wonder if we have been confusing it with a window. White writers are not used to being objectified in this way. One of our conceits has been to imagine ourselves as neutral, objective, and value-free. Yet this sense of “objectivity” is itself constructed, organized, and enforced. And, within the context of racist police violence and obstructions to voting, it is particularly striking that the current incarnation of this old question has reëmerged in the language of “rights.” As Shriver told her audience:
Shriver conveys an image of white writers besieged by fierce and powerful forces that are leveraging punitive controls. Yet, despite her stance, many writers of color have generously responded to Shriver’s talk instead of dismissing it with silence. The African-American novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote in the Times:
The writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, in the Los Angeles Times, contextualized the debate in terms of material realities:
But what of the white writer who wishes to be artistically engaged but who simultaneously does not want to re-create cultural dominance in her work? Are there complex, nuanced representations by other white people which we might turn toward? I suggest that one answer may lie in the unlikely legacy of a pale, sickly writer from the mid-twentieth century, who smoked and drank herself to death by the age of fifty, and whose own personal turmoil and self-destruction may be at the root of the enormous insights about difference found throughout her work.
In 1940, a white twenty-three-year-old woman, slight and awkwardly charming, from segregated Georgia, published an extraordinary novel, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Richard Wright, in his review in The New Republic, wrote:
The writer in question was Lula Carson Smith, known to history as Carson McCullers. In her subsequent novels “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” “Member of the Wedding,” and “Clock Without Hand” (typed with one finger when she was paralyzed from multiple strokes), in the novella and story collection “Ballad of the Sad Café,” in the memoir “Illumination and Night Glare” (dictated from her bed), and in two plays, “Member of the Wedding” and “The Square Root of Wonderful,” McCullers inhabits a startlingly broad range of characters: a Jewish, gay deaf man; a dwarf; a black Marxist doctor and his adult children; and a number of role-defying white girls with great dreams. McCullers had an almost singular ability to humanize any kind of person, many of whom had never appeared in American literature before she created them.
For example, Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” defies most black characters created by white authors, in any era. Middle-class and educated, Copeland is a physician, whose family life is emotionally complex; intellectually, he is a Marxist:
The only contemporary writer who approaches McCullers’s breadth of characterization is Caryl Phillips, the novelist from St. Kitts, who can inhabit a male slave owner so in love with a black slave that he frees him, and then reverses the crossing to chase him to Liberia; or a white woman in the eighteen-twenties, discovering the Caribbean for the first time; or other masterful illuminations of perspectives not his own. But McCullers remains the standard-bearer for white authors, and for almost twenty years now I have been on a journey to try to understand how she did it. Who does a white writer have to be in order to overcome the institutionalized ignorance in which we are shrouded?
I have tried—with varying degrees of success and failure—to capture in my novels, plays, and screenplays the world that I inhabit, one of difference. My first book, “Sophie Horowitz Story,” published in 1984, included what I believe to be the first Asian lesbian character in an American novel, not that the characterization succeeded beyond mere existence. In four novels about the AIDS crisis, I represented gay men with AIDS, sometimes in the first person. But black characters remained secondary. It was only in my novel “Shimmer,” from 1998, that I first started working with black co-protagonists. A historical novel set at the dawning of McCarthyism, “Shimmer” re-created the so-called American Dream fiction, with a young gay white woman and a young black straight man as the emblematic Americans striving to “make it”—but, in this case, discovering that the American Dream is simply not available to them.
I was proud of my research, my listening, my delving into plays and novels by black writers to attempt the re-creation that McCullers found with “ease”—the room of black people where no white person is present. This, of course, is the hardest work of a white writer, because that is a room we can never enter. Personally, “Shimmer” is a favorite of my novels, but the illusion of success came crashing down one day, some months after publication, when the novelist Jacqueline Woodson took me aside. She mentioned a section, halfway into the story, set in network-TV conference rooms where scripts for “Amos ‘n’ Andy” are being written. Jackie pointed to a scene where one of the black protagonists, a young woman researching her family’s history, comes to believe that her beloved grandfather, a proponent of “uplift,” was once married to a white woman. Jackie explained that this concern about hidden racial mixing was a white anxiety. She told me that black people know the history of slavery and rape, and don’t carry the same concepts of racial purity as white people. That, in fact, I had committed the error I most feared: putting white consciousness into the mind and mouth of a black character.
It was around this time that I first discovered Carson McCullers. I have since written a play about McCullers; I am currently writing a movie about her, and am about a third of the way through a novel in which her death plays a central role. For almost twenty years, I have tried to understand how McCullers embodied what Richard Wright called “an attitude towards life” that “cannot be accounted for stylistically or politically”—one that enabled her to imagine and create consciousness that was not her own, and also one that was not widely available in other novels or movies.
It would be easy to assume that someone with this gift had great empathy for others. But I think it’s fair to say that this was not the source of McCullers’s inspiration. I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a number of people who knew her before her tragic death, in 1967. One was the late writer Tobias Schneebaum, who was famed for having lived with “cannibals”—one of whom was his male lover, with whom he consumed human flesh. In his eighties, he told me about working as the secretary to the novelist Isabel Bolton, in the nineteen-forties, when she invited McCullers to lunch. McCullers showed up with three drunken sailors; chaos ensued. The late sculptor and diarist Anne Truitt, also in her eighties when we spoke, told me of the time she and her husband (an editor at Time) threw a party for McCullers in their Washington, D.C., home. McCullers showed up in a kimono and sat in a corner, refusing to mingle with the guests. The thing about these stories is that they were told with great glee, as though McCullers were still alive. And yet they were always about her making a scene, or creating problems, usually having to do with drinking. A picture emerges of a vulnerable person, but not a hugely empathetic one. As I read her work over and over, and read other people’s accounts and theories about her, I started to develop a picture of my own.
Years before Caitlyn Jenner or “Transparent,” I started to notice that McCullers had issues with her gender. The first evidence was the most superficial. Her given name was Lula, but she took on her middle name, Carson, reminiscent of the American cowboy Kit Carson. She wore men’s clothes, and was often photographed in a suit. Her main protagonists were young, boyish girls with men’s names: Frankie and Mick. In fact, Carson invented this American prototype of the queerish tomboy girl, now a classic, later seen in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Bastard Out of Carolina,” and “Harriet the Spy.” But there was more to it than that. As I met and spoke to more McCullers enthusiasts, it became apparent that what appeared to be her constant womanizing really came to nothing. Although she was married twice to the doomed Reeves McCullers, who himself may have had a brief relationship with the composer David Diamond, Carson notoriously chased women whom she never got.
On the surface, the story looked like a standard-issue lesbian trajectory, starting with a deep attachment to a music teacher, Mary Tucker, who helped McCullers attend Julliard in classical piano. This was followed by a typical McCullers misadventure, with a prostitute she met in New York who took all her money, forcing her back home to Columbus, Georgia. But then it became more overt. McCullers was deeply in love with a Swiss journalist, a lesbian drug addict named Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who in photographs appears to be a butch goddess—yet it was never consummated. At Yaddo, the artists’ residency where she lived for two years and wrote “Member of the Wedding,” McCullers was famously attached to Katherine Anne Porter, whose fame was parallel to Philip Roth’s in our time. Porter hated Carson, and kept her protégée Eudora Welty seated at a separate table for dinner from the rowdy queers: Carson, Truman Capote, and Newton Arvin (later fired from Smith College for ordering muscle magazines in the mail). But I found it unusual that, after all the years of loving and chasing women, many of whom were gay, Carson never slept with any of them. A fellow McCullers disciple, Dan Griffen, once told me that when McCullers and her best friend Tennessee Williams shared a summer house on Nantucket—where she wrote the stage version of “Member of the Wedding” and he wrote “Summer and Smoke” at the same table—she told him that she had slept with her housemate Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper. But Dan found it odd that she told this to no one else, including her openly gay cousin, Jordan Massey. As Dan pointed out, “If you lived with Gypsy, wouldn’t you say you’d slept with her, too?”
I started to realize that McCullers’s gender trouble was not of the homosexual kind, and it slowly dawned on me that, had she been alive today, not only would McCullers (and Williams and Capote) have probably been in A.A. and on antidepressants, she might have been living as a transgender man. She did once tell Capote, “I think I was born a boy,” which doesn’t, in and of itself, mean much—but how many of us, as little girls, have never had that thought? Most.
It may be that the “ease” with which Carson McCullers was able to inhabit any kind of person, in a manner that was recognizable to a reader as sophisticated as Richard Wright, did not come from empathy. No, perhaps it came from the simple fact of having an identity that history had not yet discovered. And, because she didn’t know who she was, she had no place to stand. So she could stand with others who officially did not exist. That coincidence of experience, in combination with a hugely original natural talent, with a supportive mother who recognized her genius, with an organic understanding of the difference between justice and injustice, and with a writerly lens of a dreamlike surrealistic quality, much like the hanging heat of West Georgia, produced a model white writer for all of us to learn from. And it gives us someone to aspire toward, even if her experience is something that we can never reach.
