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I hadn’t looked at Carson McCullers’ novels since I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter at 20, the age of that first novel’s precocious author when she became the toast of the literary circuits. A few weeks back, however, I found myself reviewing a book about the house in Brooklyn which, in 1939, became a self-invented literary commune, the brainchild of a clever young editor who thought that, if enough imaginative people were squeezed under a single roof and obliged to share living space, miracles would happen.
One of the true miracles to emerge from a house inhabited, in the space of a year, by Auden, Salvador and Gala Dali, Paul and Jane Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears and more improbably Gypsy Rose Lee, which was Carson McCullers’s second novel.
McCullers was one of the house’s first tenants, and the most worried, for a reason familiar to writers: she couldn’t find the angle from which to tell her story. It’s possible that it was her position as a wistful hanger-on in the Middagh street household, that kindled a spark into life.
The Member of the Wedding tells the story of a 12-year-old girl living in a southern town during a long hot summer. As the story develops, Frankie Addams morphs into F. Jasmine and then Frances. Each name marks a painful step towards maturity.
Most of the action takes place in the basement kitchen presided over by lush, outspoken Berenice, the black cook who acts as Frankie’s mother figure and comforter. Frankie’s misery is triggered by an absent, indifferent father, and by the fact she is excluded by the group of girls who were, in earlier years, her friends and allies. The wedding is due to take place at the end of the summer. Frankie’s confident expectation of being swept away by the bridal couple, her brother and his wife, is evidently not going to be fulfilled. By making us look through Frankie’s eyes, McCullers compels us to believe that the impossible may, just conceivably, occur.
McCullers writes in the languid southern style that now seems as dated as Scarlett O’Hara’s’s flirtatious ways. Her characters are exaggerated stereotypes; her metaphors are worked to death but the story is a work of pure magic. Frankie is as vivid a portrait of self-conscious early adolescence as Henry James’s Maisie, enshrined by the wild exoticism of McCullers’s flamboyant, incantatory prose. This is an unforgettable book by a writer who deserves to be more widely read outside her own country.
Miranda Seymour, celebrated both as a novelist and a biographer, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Visiting Professor of English Studies at the University of Nottingham Trent. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. |
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