Book Review : These Short Stories Are Long on Desperation

Collected Stories by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin: $16.95; 392 pages)

Nakedly autobiographical, Carson McCullers’ novels, plays and stories were wrung out of personal anguish. In “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” written when she was 23, the misery is psychological, but her mood quickly darkened, and her second novel, “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” presages the intense physical suffering that would blight her life. Though “The Member of the Wedding” is a more accessible book, the novel and the play demonstrate the isolation and loneliness suffusing her entire body of work.

Virtually all McCullers characters are outsiders like 12-year-old Frankie Addams, desperately seeking an essential connections to the rest of humanity. “When Berenice said we , she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge of her church. The we of her father was the store. All members of clubs have a we to belong to and talk about. The soldiers in the army can say we , and even the criminals on the chain-gangs.”

Because alienation is impervious to literary fashion, the 19 stories and two novels included in this collection show no signs of age, though some were written almost 50 years ago.

Terse Prose

Spare and disciplined, McCullers’ style depends upon the enduring power of her themes for its effect. While her sensibility continued to remain Southern even after her move to the Hudson River town of Nyack, N.Y., her prose was terse and to the point, distilling the experiences of her Georgia girlhood. No Spanish moss drips from her sentences; the characters speak candidly; purely descriptive passages are minimal, but even so, McCullers writes supremely Southern fiction, full of idiomatic giveaways. (McCullers died in 1967 at age 50 of a debililating illness.)

People aren’t merely related, they’re blood kin. They don’t just shop, they trade at their favorite stores. They keep hound dogs, call each other by double names, and even their humdrum conversation vibrates with regional simile and metaphor. If you were to strip away everything but the dialogue, you’d never mistake these people for New Englanders or Midwesterners.

In a particularly revealing incident quoted in the introduction to the book, the author explained why she was returning to Georgia for a visit after having fled so eagerly. “I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.”

That sense of horror--diffused, altered and variously disguised, surfaces in every piece of her fiction from the first tentative vignettes to the mature novels. Love proffered and carelessly brushed aside is the overt theme of “Sucker” and “Poldi,” both written while she was in her teens.

In the first story, an orphaned boy brought up in a cousin’s family thinks of the narrator Pete as his older brother until Pete falls in love with the high-school belle and rejects the younger boy as if their shared childhood had never existed. Pete realizes his heartlessness only after the girl discards him, but by then it is too late to repair the damage. “But everything is so different that there seems nothing I can do to get it right . . . Sometimes this look in his eyes makes me almost believe that if Sucker could he would kill me.”

In “Poldi,” the setting is New York, the characters two young foreign musicians, the adolescent violinist Hans and the older cellist, Poldi Klein. Neither of them is attractive, both are “different”; dependent upon one another for companionship until Poldi becomes infatuated with an older man and casually compares Hans to her little brother.

Concert Pianist

“The Wunderkind” unfolds from the performer’s viewpoint, painfully familiar to McCullers from her own thwarted ambition to be a concert pianist. The story centers upon the traumatic moment when a young girl realizes that she’ll never fulfill the promise she showed as a child prodigy. “Correspondence” is a short series of letters written by a lonesome 14-year-old girl to a South American pen pal who never responds to her outpourings; made all the more poignant because this child is rejected by a total stranger.

Other stories deal with alcoholism, illness and suicide, the grim realities McCullers faced in later life. In “A Domestic Dilemma,” a young family moves from a small Southern town to a New York suburb where the wife turns to drink to blunt the effects of “the stricter lonelier mores of the North.” Quarreling, then helplessly watching as his wife sleeps, worried about the safety of his children, the husband understands that “sorrow parallels desire in the immense complexity of love.”

“Court in the West Eighties,” “The Orphanage” and “The Aliens” examine various faces of isolation with extraordinary frankness. Whether the central character is a young woman on her own in New York, a child in a Southern town or a Jewish refugee southbound on a bus to take up a new life, the theme is involuntary separation from the rest of humanity. In “The Sojourner,” a man living in Paris returns home for his father’s funeral and impulsively visits his ex-wife and her new family, only to be overwhelmed by the sense that he belongs nowhere; his tenuous relationship with a European woman and her child only a delusion.

“Who Has Seen the Wind?” is an excruciatingly graphic portrayal of a blocked writer, the author of one successful and admired novel. After leaving a party where he has been tormented by questions about his work, he returns to his empty apartment. Sitting alone on the bed, “he sobbed and bit his trousered knee”; a succinct and unforgettable image of the desperation in McCullers’ fiction.