Among those missing were Erika and Klaus’s younger brother, the historian Angelus Gottfried (“Golo”) Mann, who had served as an ambulance driver for the French forces until he was captured, and their uncle Heinrich, a popular writer and politician whose anti-Nazi stance had caused his books to be burned and banned. But the Mann siblings appeared as concerned about the intellectuals they did not know personally as they were about their own relatives. Even Klaus, ordinarily less passionate than his sister and something of a dilettante by nature, had been moved by Hitler’s methodical campaign against free expression to organize resistance efforts, tour America to lecture on the situation in Europe, and write several books decrying the evils of fascism wherever it was found. Every artist must take a stand, he insisted to Carson in his heavily accented English. This was not simply a conflict between nations. The future of Western culture itself was at stake.
To that end, Klaus had recently embarked on a new project to complement Erika’s rescue operation: the creation of a literary journal in New York committed to opening a dialogue between émigré artists, who could “warn an unaware and drowsy world” of the dangers spreading across Europe, and Americans artists, who would respond with their own views. Such a periodical would serve as a bridge of communication between the two cultures.
Carson was as captivated by Klaus’s plans as she was attracted to his air of moody, German romanticism. Klaus Mann had enjoyed a successful literary career in Berlin and was now attempting to write fiction in English in the United States, so he enjoyed talking about books with Carson. By the end of June, he had read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, describing it in his journal as “very arresting, in parts. An abysmal sadness, but remarkably devoid of sentimentality,” and Carson herself as “a strange mixture of refinement and wildness, ‘morbidezza’ and ‘naivete,’” and, in a way, herself a spiritual outsider, another kind of émigré.
Reeves McCullers sometimes accompanied Carson on her visits to this new circle of friends, all of whom appreciated his genial southern manners, good looks, and ability to tell a good story. Like Carson, he felt honored and excited to be included in their activities. But he was less than delighted when Carson developed an infatuation for Erika Mann’s friend, the thirty-two-year-old Swiss novelist and photographer Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach.
“She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” Carson later wrote about Annemarie. The daughter of a well-to-do Swiss silk merchant, with a slim build, short blond hair, and sad, sensitive expression, Annemarie was well known for her beauty. Dressed in couture ensembles supplied by her lover, the Baronessa Margot von Opel, the wife of the German automobile manufacturer, she inevitably appeared glamorous and sophisticated to Carson, but it was perhaps her highly androgynous appearance and personality that drew the young writer most strongly. Carson soon learned that, like herself, Annemarie had felt herself to be “like a boy” from early childhood, and she had dressed and been treated as a boy by her family. Both women had excelled at the piano as well, and both had enjoyed critical success with the publication of a novel at the age of twenty-three.
For Carson, these discoveries were not simply the happy coincidences of a new friendship but a means of connection, a signal that she had found a door into the desired larger world at last and, in Annemarie, a spiritual twin. In her confused excitement that summer, Carson found even Annemarie’s addiction to morphine romantic, as well as her profound depression over the events in Europe and her unhappy relationship with the baronessa.
Annemarie did not return Carson’s enthusiasm. She was accustomed to being pursued and, while she was fond of this American girl, she found Carson’s obsession with her rather alarming. She did what she could to discourage Carson, refusing most of her frequent invitations and extended favors.
Reeves witnessed Carson’s infatuation with increasing distress. He correctly perceived her yearning for Annemarie as an expression of her desire to leave her past behind. Carson’s introduction into this circle had opened not only new intellectual vistas but new sexual and emotional possibilities as well, possibilities that threatened to exclude him.
Even back in Fayetteville, there had been increasing tensions in their marriage as Reeves worked at a job he disliked to support Carson while she wrote. When they first married, the couple agreed to alternate, year by year, the responsibility of supporting the two of them, with Reeves taking the first turn at a job. “It was going to be a marriage of love and writing for both of us,” Carson recalled.
But by the end of the first year Carson had a publishing contract and was thereby obligated to keep writing, and at the end of the second year they agreed that it made more sense for her to continue with what was becoming a successful career. Now, with their fourth year of marriage approaching, Reeves sensed the passing of his own chance to become a successful novelist. He knew, too, that it was Carson’s nature to discount whatever she already had in favor of the shining object just out of reach. As she wrote in an early short story, “Sucker,” “There is one thing I have learned, but it makes me feel guilty and is hard to figure out. If a person admires you a lot you despise him and don’t care—and it is the person who doesn’t notice you that you are apt to admire.”
Unemployed, at loose ends, and envious of the opportunities opening up for Carson, the twenty-seven-year-old drowned his bitterness in alcohol, leaving the house for the bars in the morning and stumbling back home to lie in bed and read. Meanwhile, Carson tried to concentrate on her writing. The success of her first novel had increased the pressure to write a second masterpiece. Yet, though she had dabbled with at least two ideas—the one she had discussed with Erika about a friendship between a Jewish refugee and a black man in the South, and another evoking the emotional life of an adolescent girl in Georgia—nothing much had emerged. And now it was July, and the apartment was hot, and Carson found the stagnant air and Reeves’s drunken presence unbearable.
Carson had her own memories of her marriage to Reeves—memories that now seemed to foretell their current situation. She remembered, for instance, that on their wedding night she and Reeves had lain in bed together, sharing a box of candy. Much later that night, Carson had awakened to find Reeves wolfing down the rest of the candy in secret, without sharing it with her. To Carson, his urge to consume the candy offered early evidence of the greed and laziness that now led to his desire for the fruits of her success without having done any creative work himself. It seemed to Carson that her husband would never be happy until he had stolen more than his share of her happiness. And as long as she felt that way about him, she couldn’t focus on her work.
Carson began calling George Davis at home to confide her troubles. He listened sympathetically, but he also understood that part of Carson’s emotional volatility had much to do with the sudden changes in her life. Looking for a solution, he suggested that she work on something else for a while, something easier to finish. When he had first contacted Carson, it was in hope of acquiring a short story or essay from her. Was there anything among her papers that they might work on together and publish in Harper’s Bazaar? Carson invited George to climb the steps to her fifth-floor rooms and rummage through her trunk filled with papers. He soon came across an entire novella that she claimed to have completely forgotten. Called “Army Post,” it was based on a story Reeves had told her about an enlisted man at the Fort Bragg Army Base, near Fayetteville, who had been arrested for voyeurism. The tale began with a deceptively simple line, “An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again.” It then proceeded, step by quiet step, to relate a gothic tale of repressed sexuality and madness played out in a complex series of relationships among a repressed homosexual army officer, his sensual wife, a philandering fellow officer and his own disturbed and introverted wife, and the driven young enlisted man who forces their private fantasies out into the open.
The novella, featuring as it did the birth of a deformed infant, the t
orture of a stallion, a murder, and an army wife’s self-mutilation, in no way resembled the lyrical novel that had brought Carson fame. Its power was of another order altogether, classic and stark as a Greek tragedy. Yet Carson insisted that she had sketched it out quickly as a relaxing exercise after the hard work of completing her novel. George considered the results stunningly effective in a writer so young. Offering Carson a contract for $500—the same amount she had been paid for the publication of her novel—he arranged to work with her on the revisions at his office each morning to give her some time away from Reeves.
Only an editor brought up on the Little Reviews motto, “Making no compromise with the public taste,” would dare to publish a story so bizarre in a women’s fashion magazine in 1940, no matter how sophisticated the magazine claimed to be. But George had absorbed the basics of promotion at the feet of the French masters of spectacle, Christian Bérard and Jean Cocteau. Scandal and controversy, he had learned and still believed, not only sold magazines but, when it concerned literature, created new readers. It was the furor raised by stories like this one that kept the publishing industry’s blood circulating and writers like Carson in the public eye.
Carson was surprised to find that despite his wild lifestyle and well-known eccentricities, George approached his work with complete seriousness. During their morning sessions, he proved to be at least as gifted an editor as he was a raconteur. It was a revelation to Carson to observe his sensitivity to the rhythm and structure of prose, his “unslakable love of words and their correct usage,” and the patience with which he questioned her about a character’s motivation or worked with her on a passage or a page over and over until she got it right. This demonstrated respect for the prime importance of literature, and the spiritual life it expressed was another part of the “inner circle” experience for which Carson had yearned.
Their morning sessions were satisfying for another reason as well. Carson loved spending time in the atmosphere of “slick nuttiness” that prevailed at Harper’s Bazaar. Fashion mavens, photographers, designers, writers, and editors—all “indelibly entwined,” as one staff member described them—constantly invaded one another’s offices, exchanging jokes, weeping over romantic tragedies, and otherwise getting through the day together. While George was off overseeing the efforts of his assistant, a hard-working young woman Carson’s age named Frankie Abbe, to whip up a few paragraphs on “How Young People Live Today,” Carson might spot Diana Vreeland striding down the hall, trailing her minions and spouting such instant classics as, “We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.” If there was more hysteria in the atmosphere than usual that summer, it was understandable as the Paris couture shows had vanished, and no one knew what would fill September’s Fall Fashions issue. Meanwhile, the news from Europe was getting worse. In mid-July, Hitler launched an operation to land twenty German divisions on the southern coast of Britain. Rumors flew among the staff, a number of whom were émigrés, that this famous novelist or that well-known physicist had been captured by the Nazis, had escaped, or had been beheaded—no one knew which—and that the bombing of London would begin that week. The worse the news got, the more restless the atmosphere became at the magazine.
After their sessions, George and Carson frequently went out for lunch and drinks—the alcohol increasing in proportion to the food as the days grew steadily hotter. George was always eager to expand on the details of his great, tumultuous love affair, carried on mostly by post for the past nine years, with the French sailor Edouard, whom he had first met in Paris at the height of his writing success. Handsome but inconstant, Edouard showed a tendency to express his affection when he was most short of funds, then vanish once his pockets were replenished. The two had reunited twice during George’s trips to Europe, only to argue furiously and part in anger—then to reconcile by mail. George had done his best to bring Edouard to America after the outbreak of the war in Poland, but the sailor had delayed, and now, as France succumbed, no more news arrived.
It was not, in fact, as much a tragedy as it seemed after a few drinks, since George was happy to console himself with the sailors, stevedores, and other strong young men loitering around the parks and dockyards of New York. It seemed as though George preferred telling the story of his romance—embellishing the facts as needed—to actually living it. Others might have found it off-putting to hear him tell, in his confidential purr, of the time he picked up a sailor in Montmartre, accompanied him to his lodgings, and was halfway through the act of lovemaking when he realized that they were performing before a one-way mirror, on the other side of which was gathered an appreciative audience. But Carson merely sipped her sherry and countered with a story of her own—not as shocking as George’s perhaps, but a healthy start in the process of self-mythologizing in which both took such pleasure. George could soon picture almost as clearly as Carson the mahogany fixtures, French wallpaper, and polished antiques in her father’s jewelry shop in Columbus, as well as the bleak slum near the river that had so frightened her as a child.
All through that summer they held hands across the table at restaurants, met for stingers in Greenwich Village, and relaxed in George’s apartment—crammed full of such prized examples of Victorian gothic as velvet settees framed with bulls’ horns, pious porcelain vases in the shape of a woman’s hands, and framed, hand-tinted nineteenth-century Valentines adorned with sentimental verse—talking for hours at a stretch with no subject or idea, however world-encompassing or embarrassingly personal, excluded. Occasionally, on stifling weekends, George took Carson along to his friends’ country retreats. Lotte Lenya, George’s old friend from Paris, enjoyed playing hostess at her cottage less than an hour from the city while her husband, Kurt Weill, was working with Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart on their new musical, Lady in the Dark.
It was always fun to gossip with George about the theater, to listen to his long, loopy conversations with Carson, in which the younger writer called him “honey” and “George, precious” in her slow southern drawl while he patted her on the arm. Lenya, who had grown up poor and largely self-educated in Vienna, loved to read, though her tastes were eclectic, and she freely admitted that she most loved what she called trash. She felt a sympathy for Carson, so young but a fellow artist, and admired George’s generosity in acting as her mentor and friend. The serious literary conversation, however, never withstood the heavy drinking for long. On more than one afternoon Lenya’s two guests “sipped their way to either a giggling incoherence or a taciturn withdrawal that was practically a summer snooze.” Lenya would then serve hot dogs and refill the glasses of iced tea, leaving plenty of room in Carson’s glass for her customary sherry or gin.
The pair also visited Janet Flanner, who had fled from Paris and was now writing her New Yorker column at the ramshackle Tumble Inn in Croton-on-Hudson. Flanner, now in her late forties, had been struggling for some time with a difficult profile of Thomas Mann, and she was glad to vent her frustrations to someone new. She and Solita both fully enjoyed young Carson, so full of what Flanner termed the “energy of affection.” They treated her with the same generosity they had shown George a decade earlier—entertaining her with stories of their life in Paris (while Solita wept with George over the city’s demise), advising her on her career (both of them had published first novels, and neither had completed a second), and telling her in no uncertain terms to “face facts” and forget about Annemarie.
These outings failed to distract Carson from her worries, however, as a phenomenal heat wave descended, making life even more unbearable. The heat was so appalling that tens of thousands of New Yorkers fled to Coney Island, turning its beach into a mass of human flesh. Carson’s health, always delicate, began to falter. Her editor, who by then had met her in New York, arranged for her to retreat to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont for the final two weeks of August. Although Carson made sure that a spot was res
erved for Annemarie as well, the Swiss writer departed instead for the baronessa’s home on Nantucket. Disappointed—but satisfied, like George, that her romantic drama made a good story—Carson left New York determined to concentrate on her work.
Early in August, a new review of Carson’s novel had appeared in the New Republic written by Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, whose first novel had preceded Carson’s that year and whose short story “Almos’ a Man” had recently been published by George. Wright heaped praise on The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, remarking especially on the “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” He attributed this to “an attitude toward life which enables Miss McCullers to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness.” It was an unusual statement for an African American writer to make in 1940, and Carson’s fellow authors at Bread Loaf looked forward to meeting the child prodigy who had been thus praised.
Whereas two months earlier such attention would certainly have overwhelmed Carson, her experiences that summer had prepared her to turn the situation to her own advantage. Within days she was playing German lieder on the piano and drinking tumblers of gin with the fifty-four-year-old poet Louis Untermeyer, offering to sleep with him if he liked. (Untermeyer, though flattered, declined the offer.) She also had a chance to meet, if only in passing, Robert Frost, Wallace Stegner, John Marquand, and an even younger fellow Southerner, Eudora Welty. When Auden, just back from visiting Isherwood in California, arrived at Bread Loaf to give a reading, he and Carson swiped Stegner’s only bottle of bourbon—on a Sunday, Stegner would later point out, when it was impossible to buy another one—and retreated to a corner, where they drank the bottle down while exchanging confidences.
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