Carson McCullers - Exploring the Depths of the Human Heart :: Biography Biographies Essays

Carson McCullers   - Exploring the Depths of the Human Heart      Ã‚  Ã‚   "With poignant insight and compassion Carson McCullers (1917-1967) wrote of human loneliness, unfulfilled love, and the frailty of the human heart."    Of all the characters in the work of Carson McCullers, the one who seemed to her family and friends to be most like the author herself was Frankie Addams: the vulnerable, exasperating, and endearing adolescent of The Member of the Wedding who was looking for the "we of me." However, Carson once said that was, or became in the process of writing, all the characters in her work. This is probable true of most real writers who often with pain draw from their unconscious what the rest of us would just as soon keep hidden from ourselves and others. So accept the fact that Carson was not only Frankie Addams but J.T. Malone, Miss Amelia, and Captain Penderton; but familiarity with the work that she was not able to finish would only be only a partial clue to who and what she was. This was not simply because she had not finished what she had to say, but that she was the artist, and as she often quoted, "Nothing human is alien to me."    So many people were unable to acknowledge Carson's constant closeness to death, and many more resented her for trying to make them face it, but she had lived through enough close calls to convince everyone that she was indestructible.    Carson saw her life one way and those intimate with her often perceived it differently. Intentionally or unintentionally, she added to the confusion about herself. An interviewer was more likely to be cannily interviewed than to extract an interview from her. Besides, she simply liked a good story and frequently embellished the more amusing ones of her life. The one person who singled out this quality in a particularly loving way was Tennessee Williams in his unpublished essay "Praise to Assenting Angels":    The great generation of writers that emerged in the twenties, poets such as Eliot, Crane, Cummings, and Wallace Stevens, prose-writers such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Katharine Anne Porter, has not been succeeded or supplemented by any new figures of corresponding stature with the sole exception of the prodigious young talent that first appeared in 1940 with the publication of her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.