by Azar Nafisi
Life in Columbus, Georgia, might have seemed limited and narrow, but Carson spent hours in her inner world, infinitely rich and various, keeping company with Mozart and Beethoven, Flaubert, Joyce and the Brontë sisters, D. H. Lawrence, Eugene O’Neill, Chekhov, Gogol and Tolstoy. Like Mick Kelly, she had an outer world and an inner, more private world of her own construction. I have sometimes thought of her as my ideal student. In her unfinished autobiography, Illumination and Night Glare, she writes, “When I was about eleven my mother sent me to the grocery store and I carried a book, of course. It was by Katherine Mansfield. On the way I began reading and was so fascinated that I read under the streetlight and kept on reading as I asked for the supper groceries.” Later, she was apparently fired from a job because she was too busy reading Proust.
Like Mick, she spent many hours playing the piano. She was precocious, learning to play without any training. In 1932, when she was only fifteen, she caught rheumatic fever and was bedridden for a long time and started to contemplate her options in life. That was when she first considered becoming a writer. Her friend Helen Jackson said that when, in December of that year, she visited her at her home in Columbus, Carson told her, “I’ve got something important to tell you, Helen. I’ve given up my dream of being a concert pianist. But it’s O.K. I’m going to be a writer instead.”
Her childhood fever was misdiagnosed and mistreated, leading to a series of terrible strokes that would leave her almost half paralyzed by the age of thirty. By forty her body would be a wreck. In her last years, she would suffer though a number of intricate operations to relieve the spasms of an atrophying left hand, wrist, elbow and leg; to repair a shattered hip and elbow; to cope with repeated sieges of pneumonia, a severe heart attack, breast cancer. . . . And yet, through it all she was as busy as ever, writing and giving interviews. If in her first book, written when she was barely out of her teens, she could capture the life of the senses and portray pain in such a concrete manner, it was in part because pain was an organic part of her life; she resisted it most effectively by making it her own.
8
In September 1937, when she was twenty, Lula Carson Smith married the dazzlingly handsome Reeves McCullers. (“It was the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him,” she would later write; “he was the best looking man I had ever seen.”) They had been introduced through a common friend, Edwin Peacock. Reeves was an aspiring writer, but he never did write, and to the end of his life he would be bitter about the fact that he spent so much time taking care of his wife and trailing after her. Three years into their marriage, she published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and after that she became a literary sensation. They had what is called a tumultuous love-hate relationship, with extramarital affairs, a divorce and a remarriage, all of which ended on a note as morbid as Carson’s own stories. They had been living for a while in Bachvillers, near Paris, going through a period of contentment and activity followed by depression. In the summer of 1953, Reeves suddenly started talking about suicide, then one day he attempted to take his life by hanging himself from a pear tree in their orchard. The limb broke under his weight. Carson’s response, as she reported it, was, “Please, Reeves, if you must commit suicide, do it somewhere else. Just look what you did to my favorite pear tree.”
After that unsuccessful attempt, Reeves came up with another idea: a suicide pact. He took Carson to the barn to show her a rope. He picked it up and, pointing to the beam overhead, said, “See that rafter, Sister. It’s a good sturdy one. You know what we’re going to do? Hang ourselves from it. I tell you, it’s the best thing for us both.” Carson told Tennessee Williams, who was by then a good friend, that she thought she had dissuaded him from the idea of a double suicide, but a few days later, on their way to the American hospital in Paris, she noticed two lengths of rope in the back of the car. Reeves told her that instead of taking her to the hospital, he was going to the forest so they could hang themselves, but first they would stop to buy a bottle of brandy. “We’ll drink it for old times’ sake . . . our one last fling.”
While Reeves was in the liquor store, Carson jumped out of the car and hitchhiked to a friend’s house. She immediately made arrangements to leave Paris for New York. Two months later, on November 18, 1953, Reeves told friends he would be “going west” the next day. He sent a telegram to his wife in Nyack, New York, saying, “Going West—trunks on the way.”
During the First World War, when a man felt his death was imminent, he would say he was “going west.” Reeves was found dead the next day—he had committed suicide in his hotel room, alone.
After Reeves’s tragic death, Carson tried to banish him from her life. It may have been the easiest way to deal with the anguish and the pain. Meanwhile, her physical ailments continued to torment her. She could rarely sit and suffered from circulatory problems. For about a year, she had to elevate her left leg and hold it straight out in front of her. She was told at one point that she would have to have it amputated, though she was kept ignorant of the reason why. Only later did she learn that she had developed bone cancer. Despite this, she never stopped traveling and never stopped writing.
Notwithstanding her growing physical disabilities and the intensity of the pain she constantly suffered, Carson McCullers was very busy, so busy in fact that her workload might have made a healthy person ill with exhaustion. She struggled with writing and finally published a new novel, Clock Without Hands. She also wrote a play, The Square Root of Wonderful, and a collection of poems, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig; worked on her unpublished memoirs, Illumination and Night Glare; wrote a number of essays and articles and even participated in the translation of her stories into plays and films, composing the libretto for a musical based on The Ballad of the Sad Café. In between surgeries and writing, Carson found ample time to tend to her social life and keep up with her friends—good old-fashioned American sturdiness, giving the finger to both life and death, something so little encouraged today, so little appreciated.
A few months before her death, in the spring of 1967, Carson traveled to Ireland to meet the director John Huston, who was making a film of her book Reflections in a Golden Eye, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. The invitation excited her so much that each morning she would wake up thinking about her love of Ireland, rereading Joyce’s Dubliners, listening to Tristan und Isolde because of its Irish setting. After months of strategic planning, finally she left in April 1967. She had to be driven from Shannon Airport to Huston’s estate in an ambulance. Yet she was determined to enjoy her time, drinking bourbon and smoking menthol cigarettes. She read Joyce, O’Casey and Yeats while holding court from her bed for a whole host of people who wanted to visit the famous American author. She even dictated “A Love Letter from Ireland.” A huge hassock stuffed with foam rubber was made to fit in the plane cabin for her return, creating a sort of chaise longue. She boarded first, and once she was made comfortable, Aer Lingus uncorked champagne for the first-class passengers to toast the famous author.
Despite the pain and anguish she suffered both physically and emotionally, McCullers maintained a certain youthfulness, which came to her rescue at her worst times. In life she was childish, egocentric and needy, depending on others to be with her and to take care of her. Perhaps nowhere does she combine this childlikeness and childishness, this state of protracted adolescence, which she invoked time and again to describe her native South, as effectively as in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. And nowhere else does she identify so clearly this mix of childish petulance, freshness, resilience and transient growing pains with her beloved country, America.
9
In 1949, McCullers published an essay in The Week entitled, “Loneliness . . . An American Malady.” It was a short piece, but I have come to think of it as her credo, and I’ve returned to it many times over the years. She writes that Americans “tend to seek out things as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyalties, knows little
of the moral loneliness that is native to us Americans. While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick—not only from society in the way of all creative minds but within the orbit of his own art. . . . Whether in the pastoral joys of country life or in the labyrinthine city, we Americans are always seeking. We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart—the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.”
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this very American form of solitude is essential to our democracy, springing forth as it does from a native self-reliance. I am reminded of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s short and searing pamphlet “The Solitude of the Self,” in which she proclaims that the need for equal rights comes innately from the seclusion of every woman in America who is born alone, is solely responsible for her own life and will die alone. Therefore, she needs to be able to sustain herself. Cady Stanton begins her essay by championing “the individuality of each human soul” and goes on to elaborate why every woman must live “in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island.”
In words that are more poetic and anguished than ideological and polemical, she writes, “The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings.” Then she relates how she once asked Prince Kropotkin, a Russian political prisoner, “how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper.” He responded, “In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I had ever learned.” He had a “world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailer or Czar could invade.”
McCullers was deeply musical, and in her outline she writes that the novel’s form is “contrapuntal throughout.” She goes on to explain: “Like a voice in a fugue each one of the main characters is an entirety in himself—but his personality takes on a new richness when contrasted and woven in with the other characters in the book.” The main characters all suffer from an inner isolation. Their suffering is unique, but they are all too preoccupied with their own obsessions to listen to one another or to anyone else, so they share this listless isolation.
As Joanna used to say, there are many different forms of loneliness. In some respects, the loneliness of solitude is far less chilling than the loneliness we feel when we are alone together. Joanna and I would pore over paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Edward Hopper showing people sitting or standing, within touching distance, and yet appearing to be lonelier than if they were by themselves. In all of these paintings, that feeling of loneliness is accentuated by silence—no one makes eye contact or speaks—by the evident inability to communicate and by the simultaneous awareness of the other person’s physical proximity.
Lately I have discovered a new kind of loneliness, peculiar to our time, for which I have yet to find proper artistic expression. I have seen it in photographs on the Internet of groups of young people who sit very close together, each one busy texting. What disturbs me most about these photographs is that the youth seem to have no consciousness of where they are or whom they are with. They are not lonely; they are wholly somewhere else. Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Hopper all attempted to convey a consciousness of this terrible isolation, and a certain anguish stays with you long after you have stopped looking at the painting, but we seem in our own time to have become numb to our surroundings.
In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the principal characters are equally unaware of their environment; they are too wrapped up in their own obsessions to see or hear one another, but their distractions give them no entertainment or comfort. They are disturbed by their inability to express themselves or communicate with others. It makes them restless. It also keeps them from knowing themselves, because for McCullers, the search for the self is inseparable from the need to connect with others. “For a baby,” McCullers writes, “the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes pristine wonder.” This consciousness of the self is indispensable not just philosophically but also pragmatically.
If, in the work of Hopper and Raymond Carver, loneliness is expressed through silence, in McCullers this solitary pain is communicated in words. Jake Blount, the agitator, best demonstrates the manic urge to pour out words, words that seem to have no hinges, no past or present to them—they do not reveal or clarify but confuse and frustrate. Biff stands behind the counter, observing, as Jake eagerly talks to Singer, the words coming “out of his throat like a cataract.” Biff notices that “the accent he used was always changing the kinds of words he used.” Jake is all over the place; he jumps from subject to subject and seems to belong everywhere and nowhere, and that, of course, is the problem.
10
I did not really properly say goodbye to Mike when I left the United States for Iran in 1979. I had told him what I had said to my other friends: “See you next year, or the year after.” I promised to come back for summer vacations. But once I was in Tehran, there was no coming back for summer vacations. I did not see him again until I returned to Oklahoma for two days in 1991 to give a talk on Iranian culture and film before heading on to Washington and then back to Tehran. To call that trip an emotional event is an understatement. I was elated and saddened and curious and absolutely dislocated. All I remember is faces: Dr. Gross, Dr. Yoch, Dr. Velie and Dr. Elconin, my beloved English teacher, who was very sick and died before my next visit to Norman, in 2001. There were some unfamiliar faces, too, telling me they had heard about me, had started to wonder what had happened to me. I saw Mike briefly on that visit—he was not there and then he was, standing a little aloof from the crowd after the discussion of an Iranian film I had just screened.
We had coffee together later and, like David Gross, my professor, fellow protester and dissertation chair, Mike told me that for a long time he’d thought I had died or been killed. After the revolution I had changed addresses in Tehran and he didn’t know how to find me. We talked a bit about old times, and at one point he said, “Don’t you remember, you wanted to seduce me into loving literature?” “Seduce” was a strange word for him to use, because Mike was so un-seducible in so many senses of the word—or so I believed. He was the type of person who was always on the periphery of one’s attention, not outstanding for being handsome or intelligent or particularly passionate; he was, if anything, outstanding despite or because of his lack of these qualities. There was an oddness about him; even when he was young he appeared older than his years; his shadow would fall somewhere between your line of vision and those good-looking, boyish young men who attracted your attention. He was there, and one got the impression that he would always be.
I reminded Mike of how he had taught me about Woody Guthrie and told me about his participation in the civil rights movement. I said I had thought of him and our conversation about African American writers and the civil rights movement when my first published work, a translation of two poems by Langston Hughes, came out and later when I wrote an introduction to Richard Wright’s American Hunger, a book I had taken with me to Iran. He remembered that Melville had been one of my favorite authors and reminded me of how I had once called him “Mr. I Prefer Not To” in reference to the character in Bartleby, the Scrivener—I’d told him he was as stubborn as old Bartleby. I had also called him Mr. Gradgrind, after Dickens’s character, because he would repeat so many times in our discussions “facts, Azar, it’s all about the facts. . . .” He remembered my love of Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and then there was Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is
Hard to Find.” “And the British,” he said. “You loved them, too, and some of the French, like Flaubert and Balzac. For a while you talked like a real proletarian, when you were reading Mike Gold and Henry Roth.”
He told me that the times had changed; there were the Reagan years, and now? “What now?” I asked. “We’ve come a long way from the civil rights movement,” he said. “That was an exciting time.” He started filling me in on the years since I had left. “It all started with Reagan,” he said, casting his eyes about him now, “followed by Bush and the Gulf War.”
Mike had always talked a lot, but as time went by, most of those who had listened or pretended to listen dispersed and left, and he was left talking to fewer people and then mainly to himself. His “enemy” did not kill him or put him in jail; it simply ignored him. Indifference, as McCullers reminds us, is among life’s worst punishments.
Norman had remained progressive, or at least there were progressive pockets. “You think New York and Chicago are hubs of protest,” Mike said, “but we have our own tradition right here. It goes back—yes, it goes back.” Then he told me how the other night at a bar, some rednecks had beaten two Pakistanis, thinking they were Iranian. I mentioned this anecdote in my speech that night, asking the audience to please not do that sort of a thing to me. It gave me an opening to remind them of how little they knew about these other countries, that they could not tell the difference between a Pakistani and an Iranian.
When it came to politics, Mike talked for so long, and I was so tired, that everything was becoming more jumbled and confused in my mind. A long time had passed since I had been away from America, from Norman, from Mike and from drinking coffee dressed that way with a man who was not my husband. It had been eleven years since I had left all of that behind. Perhaps since I was coming from Tehran for the first time in so many years and knew that I would return in a few days’ time, I felt Mike had little to complain about. He seemed dissatisfied with the U.S. government, but I pointed out that there were no morality squads and public executions. I felt that I had changed a great deal since we had last met but that he had not changed so much. He had remained the same Mike, without roots or attachments, ready to talk to you at the drop of a hat and always looking for that invisible something in the distance that tempted and eluded him.