TROUBLES IN A GOLDEN EYE
Starring Taylor and Brando with John Huston
by
William Russo & Jan Merlin
Smashwords Edition of Long Time Ago Books
Copyright © 2005 by William Russo & Jan Merlin
Library of Congress Number: 2005904265
ISBN: Hardcover 1-4134-9565-6
Softcover 1-4134-9564-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
CONTENTS
1. Army Post
2. Reflections and Troubles
3. A Friend in Tennessee
4. Eye on the Movies
5. Taylor and Clift, Together Again!
6. The Story of Three Scripts
7. Huston at the Helm
8. Brando the Golden Boy
9. Behind the Reflections
10. Horse Power.
11. As Though in Sleep .
12. Tiny and Grotesque
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
“Do you love me, master? Do you?”
Ariel, The Tempest (Act IV-Scene I)
Carson McCullers visits John Huston at his estate, St. Clerans, Ireland, 1967. Photograph courtesy of Irish Times, Ltd.
ONE: Army Post
Lula Carson Smith, at twenty-three years of age and under another name, became the elfin-faced author of a literary novella sensation when her earliest manuscripts went into print. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter started her career as a first-book masterpiece. Her second published work was misunderstood, despised, criticized, yet acquired a cult A work of art is a creation easy to misinterpret. Notions happen in art, but many motifs may come across as tiny and grotesque. So it was with a curious fiction of 1941.
There are readers and critics who contributed the biography of this novella – and others who participated in making a failed film as its counterpart. The general plan of a novel in itself adds to the imagination – the characters, the author’s personality, friends and their influences, all can be woven into the tale’s fabric. The success of a film is often the result of devoted viewers who never forget the story and its message.
There is a movie version of a novella filmed a few years ago that was murdered by the critics. Besides the author, the participants of this travesty included a legendary director, two major Oscar-winning film stars, two notable costars, a few untried actors, and a horse . . .
Reflections in a Golden Eye illustrated what might go awry during the process of creativity and publication, and for its curious transfer to filmmaking.
Carson admitted she loved to re-read her favorite stories annually, as a seasonal rite, and had first read “The Prussian Soldier” while in high school in 1934 when the notion of becoming a writer first fired her spirit. So, each spring she opened the D.H. Lawrence story and read it again, finding confirmation of the world order she saw a generation later, in regional America; Columbus, Georgia. So much like herself, D. H. Lawrence was a precocious writer who preceded her by a few decades. “The Prussian Soldier” was one of the first fully realized successes of Lawrence.
Originally entitled “Honour and Arms,” Lawrence believed the work transcended his early work of writing a “florid prose poem.” The imbalance of energy between the Prussian Captain and his orderly leads them to a violence that sweeps across each day and ends with a crushing finality. Lawrence wanted to show what occurred “behind the fights, triumphs and defeats of his fictionalized individuals” and the “permanent forces of nature exercising their timeless sway.” It was this quality of presenting the immutable world of mountains, sunsets, and clouds, against the tiny and grotesque struggle of people that grabbed the lanky girl from Georgia by the heartstrings. Convinced the correctness of her vision, she accepted beauty and perversity sitting side-by-side.
What sixteen-year-old Lula Carson Smith saw in the story matched her own perception of life in the American South. Always filtering Nature’s beauty against the helplessness of minor human actions, the expressions used by Lawrence became her hallmark. Lawrence, more than any other writer, presented her with the first overt expression of pristine, sweet, and merciless rain, sun, and clouds, in a story. Lula savored its memory and put it aside. Her interpretation of the Lawrence story would come a few years later, while living at a settlement far from home – near a Georgia army base named Fort Bragg.
In 1935 she sailed from Savannah to New York City, where – as Carson Smith – she intended to enroll at Columbia University and take creative writing classes. Working odd jobs and living hand-to-mouth, she never began her classes until February’s spring term. She studied for one course and one semester with two women professors (Dorothy Scarborough and Helen Rose Hull).
By the start of June in 1936, Carson returned to Georgia and tried her hand at journalism at the Columbus Ledger. Hating the reporter’s lot and uncreative use of detail, she left the job and soon met a sensitive young soldier named James Reeves McCullers through a mutual friend. Like Carson, the young corporal preferred his middle name as more literary, and called himself Reeves. In their pretensions, each one carved out a new identity that was more in keeping with their self-images and expectations.
Lula Smith was an awkward, slender girl who dressed in an unorthodox manner. Tall and boyish, she was dreamy in addition to her Ichabod Crane demeanor. Reeves stood an inch taller and felt as much out of his element as she in the rural South. Both felt they belonged in a more aesthetic society than the one they’d been born into.
The twosome shared an interest in writing. He was a raconteur in the Faulkner tradition, telling yarns of the people in their region. In soft-spoken twang, the stories were mythic in impact, serving as an aphrodisiac to Carson. They spent the entire summer together, bicycling over the countryside, and “skinny dipping” together. With a mutual friend, they discussed the fantasy of becoming a published writer; if it were to happen, both Reeves and Carson determined they would leave the South for New York and never look back.
When Carson departed for college in the fall of 1936, Reeves had two years to do on his U.S. Army enlistment. In those days, he could buy out of his contract, but without funds, he was trapped, unable to accompany Carson to New York. They considered themselves engaged, but the marriage they envisioned was aesthetic rather than conjugal. Not to be held back, Carson immediately connected with her professor, Sylvia Chatfield Bates, and ingratiated herself totally. Professor Bates introduced Carson to the editor of Story magazine. Whit Burnett was so impressed with the tomboy writer he bought two stories from her and immediately published one of them. Story was one of the foremost proving grounds for the writers of America. Carson Smith was on her way.
By using money from the estate of an aunt, Reeves purchased his military contract and was free to pursue his own writing career. He hastened to join Carson in New York. As much as Carson, he wanted to “become someone.” He too matriculated at Columbia in the Fall semester, seeing Carson as a soul-mate in their ambitions to be great writers.
By November, Carson fell ill with rheumatic fever, a month before her first publication date for “Wunderkind” in Story magazine. She was forced to return to Columbus, Georgia, accompanied by Reeves.
Once home in her mother’s house, Carson envisioned a novel of large scope. Its subject was a mute man with a motley crew of friends in a small Southern town. Over the winter of 1936 and 1937, she labored over characters and plot; the protagonist she named Mr. Singer. Though she wrote only a few pages during this time, she claimed the idea was in gestation while she chewed on her pencil. The characters spoke to her, and inspiration became the key to her writing. If the voices told her what to say, there was never any change or editing.
By March she felt well enough to visit Reeves in New York. He showed her the Hudson Valley, north of the city, where she’d make her home in a few short years. At this time, her visit was curtailed when illness felled her within a month, beginning a dour pattern to follow in her life.
Carson returned to Columbus in April; Reeves followed her within a month. Their bond, steeled by need for creativity, convinced Reeves he must marry Carson. To that end, he sought a job with a credit agency as an investigator. The job was demeaning to him for he desired to be as much a writer as Carson, but he had to earn money to allow her talent its full measure; his own literary interests began fading into the background.
On September 20th, 1937, Carson Smith became Carson McCullers. While Carson had merged herself with a husband who insured she had a patron of writing, he repaired. She complained of being cooped up in their new apartment during the winter in Charlotte. Saying apartment conditions were too cold, she worked all day in the warmer Public Library. Reeves met her there after his workday, and they ate out mostly. She made a practice of reading him her latest pages. Like a dutiful editor, he offered praise, criticism, the right word, dialogue, and other elements. He was gradually sublimating his own writing efforts, but they made a pact; during alternating years, each would support the other in their writing projects. First, Carson was given a year to work on The Mute.
In March of 1938, Reeves received a pay increase and a promotion from his credit bureau job. It included a transfer to Fayetteville. For Carson, moving there was a trip deeper into an intellectual Siberia. Though Reeves believed it meant he could better help his wife and his own writing careers, it was the beginning of a collapse in their marriage.
Fayetteville, Georgia, was in the throes of the Great Depression. It was a squalid world retaining the turmoil of summer storms, sweating restlessly in its sultry days and nights, finding a corresponding mirror in Carson’s inner core. She could not imagine a more demeaning environment for her budding aesthetic sense. Worst of all, it was a military town. Fort Bragg re-enforced the boredom and routine of her new life. The monotony caused her to make snide comments to the poor and trapped residents who responded with hostility to her condescending manner. Told she ought to leave if she so disliked the place, Carson McCullers agreed readily she was willing and would depart the first chance she had.
Because both husband and wife wished to settle someday in a new and strange Northern city neither had ever visited, Carson used her ties to Professor Bates who suggested a submission to a prominent Boston fellowship. The award required Carson to send off her first six chapters to The Mute and a total outline. It went to Houghton- Mifflin’s literary contest, a process where Carson won the attention of William March, a successful novelist who later penned The Bad Seed. With his enthusiastic backing, Carson was entering deeper into the world of literature while drowning in the backwaters of the Old South.
Carson hated Fayetteville intensely, yet its dreary ambiance struck something deep in her heart. As she wrote the chapters to her new novel, she absorbed every detail of life in this seedy community. It was a sink she’d plumb in two subsequent novels.
Condescending to townsfolk, she was a misfit who thought she deserved better. Her marriage turned into a rocky business arrangement since Carson’s dedication to her novels included her husband’s own hopes to be a writer. She fantasized, when she finished her book, she’d fly away on the wings of fame and fortune.
Townspeople were alienated when she socialized with blacks on the street. Public opinion took a back seat to Carson’s sense of right and the singular attitude she cultivated.
The ideal marriage of two artistic souls she and her husband thought they’d made was instead a chaste, platonic union. Whatever else marriage had promised, Carson considered it a shackle. Her husband and the dull world of a credit bureaucrat’s wife impeded her progress.
During the dismal summer months of 1938, Carson received a jolt to change her life forever. Prestigious Houghton-Mifflin contracted her to publish her unfinished novel.
The publisher’s advance of $250 was more than a check; it was her emancipation as an artist.
Reeves recognized his obligation, though it crushed his ego. His wife was on the verge of something big, and completion of her novel was paramount. Their pact to alternate writing careers for each year of their marriage died silently. Reeves did everything to help the book become a reality. In addition to his job, Reeves acted as caretaker of daily life for Carson. According to Virginia Spencer Carr, “He kept house, shopped, and cooked most of the evening meals . . . Carson had never cooked, laundered, or kept house before they were married, nor did she intend to spend any more time at it now than she could help. She was an artist, she reasoned.”
In July of 1938 Reeves decided Carson and he needed a vacation. With a paid week off from his duties at the credit bureau, the two drove to old haunts in hopes of rekindling their pleasant early days together. Then they made a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, to visit two old friends, Edward Peacock and John Ziegler who ran a bookstore. On her first evening there, elated by her new success, the friends insisted the novelist-in-progress read Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. In her unfinished memoir, Illuminations and Night Glare, McCullers noted, “. . . since I thought it was about big game hunting, I insisted just as firmly that I didn’t want to read it. In the end they got their way, for when Reeves and I were in the car on our way to Fayetteville, they slipped two books in my lap (Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales). I started in the car and read until sundown. Never had I felt such enchantment.”
The inspiration McCullers found in those books gave her further impetus to work on The Mute. She was fascinated by the narrative style, which she later called Dinesen’s “high-handedness.” What she liked and borrowed was the authorial point of view, detached and childlike, in its story-telling. The once-upon-a time approach, she likened to a “fairy tale.”
As autumn arrived, they rented larger quarters in Fayetteville. The spacious apartment was converted from a former old tavern. It had space and a fireplace. Its mood and style seemed to contribute to the best stretch of health that Carson enjoyed in her young adulthood. With this, she was able to work fully on The Mute. Money was an issue; Carson sold her wedding silver to underwrite their meager existence as a couple of Bohemians dwelling on the frontiers of ignorance in decaying Fayetteville, a military town that owed its existence to Fort Bragg.
Though Carson would never tolerate the notion of a writing collaboration with her husband, her manuscript took shape under his constant tutelage and support. Their race to finish the book meant everything to them: money, success, and a chance to move away from the South. Carson was always dreamy and absent-minded, Reeves in search of himself, and they shared the same fantasy of living in New York City amid artists and people who’d appreciate and recognize them for the talented writers they were. For Reeves, the completion of his wife’s novel meant he’d get his chance to write his books.
By the end of next April, an exhausted Carson sent off her manuscript to the publisher. She expected the second half of her advance to arrive immediately, but as she often did, Carson misunderstood the contractual terms. Her second payment was due on publication of the work, not receipt of the manuscript. She fired off a feverish tirade to Houghton-Mifflin, asking for money she felt she was owed. McCullers never let process interfere with her own sense of propriety. She accused the company of treating her like a “step-child.” Without her recompense, the two hopefuls couldn’t go to New York soon as they hoped.
Another complication put a cloud over the marriage. Reeves expected another transfer, deeper into the South, possibly to Savannah. His wife, on the verge of her first novel’s publication, might have no intention of following him. Her eye was on the sparrow, and it was flying northward. Seeking to distract her, Reeves passed along town gossip to Carson, alluding to a Peeping Tom at the married officer’s houses at Fort Bragg. Whether he meant it as an off-hand comment, or whether he thought it the germ of a story he or she might write, no one will ever know.
Sometime in the spring after finishing The Mute, she started a manuscript called Army Post. She worked on pages for two months, one draft, and put it away for almost two years. She said: “Afterward, I was so tired but I couldn’t stop” during the writing of this bizarre new tale. She “wrote like eating candy. Suddenly all the characters came to me . . . then when I finished that I put it in the drawer.” So she explained to Tennessee Williams, and he repeated the anecdote in a radio interview eight years later.
Some critical readers suggested the uncomfortable little second novel reflected a man’s eye – and that a man’s imagination was needed to capture the ambiance of the Army post, and since her husband, a veteran, knew intimately the workings and the personnel at Fort Bragg near Fayetteville, large portions of the storyline came from him. Fort Bragg, circa 1938, at the time the novella was inspired by reports of a Peeping Tom on the army post.
Nearly thirty years after the events, she recorded details of her memory of the creative stages of the second novel. “My husband casually mentioned that there was a voyeur at Fort Bragg, an Army Base near our town . . . I heard nothing more about it, but the idea stuck in my mind . . . I busied myself with housework, cleaned our small apartment every day until it was immaculate. I was tired. I didn’t want to start another book, but against my will the idea of a peeping-tom soldier had taken possession of me, so that I began ‘An Army Post in peacetime is a dull place.’ The locale established, the characters one by one, asserted themselves . . . the tale had taken over my life, and I had never written with such pleasure. The style of the story was of prime importance, and every day I thrilled with the marvel of words. My usual writing average was one page a day, but with this story, to my surprise and delight, I found myself finishing three, four and sometimes even six pages a day.”
Carson also claimed, though Reeves helped to the point of collaboration on the first novel, the second major work of fiction was her creation solely. The deal they had, she violated; they’d agreed to write in alternating years – the basis of the marriage accord – and one’s working supported the other’s writing for that year.
French critic Jacques Tournier believed the rumor Carson was “nothing but a surrogate pen” was absurd. In his estimation, the second novella was entirely her work and not her husband’s. Reeves showed his lack of creative power around this time, and he hitched a long ride on her “glory” and acted merely as a “sounding board” in subsequent years.
Tournier could not entirely dismiss Reeves’s contribution to the book. “He is in there for certain. Far more present than in Heart. He is there in the images of Fort Benning (sic), with everything he experienced at that post for four years, which he alone could have known . . . the camp, the barracks rooms, the soldiers’ life, everything that makes this inward-focused world of men real – Reeves was the one that made it possible for her to describe it. . . . When I say you get the impression that it’s someone else, it comes across so clearly that she never returned to that milieu again. Everything she wrote from then on had its source within herself.”
According to Carson in later comments about the creation of her second novel, everything was done “very lightly,” and she referred to Army Post as a “fairy tale.” The work was the result of what was for Carson called “illumination,” something that came to her after “hours of searching,” making it a “religious” experience.
Carson allowed herself deeper identification with the tale. She wrote in “Flowering Dream” essay, “I am so immersed in them (the six characters) that their motives are my own. When I write about a thief, I become one; when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man; when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, ‘nothing human is alien to me.’
Carson may have seen this tale as an inventive merging of Dinesen and Lawrence styles. She took various components of her life and seeded them into myriad characters – especially Alison who represented a part of her own sickliness and aesthetic mentality; Reeves, who was bisexual and attracted to soldiers, may have been the inspiration for Penderton.
Years later, Carson confessed she wasn’t aware of her husband becoming an alcoholic, nor did it occur to her. The fanciful authoress had tunnel vision, oblivious when Reeves McCullers was stumbling into a deep emotional chasm. Whether he gave in and surrendered his idea for the novella to his wife, or whether he was incapable of taking the manuscript and developing it, he was never the same man after Carson finished Army Post.
She created the manuscript in two months, May and June of 1939, and squirreled it away. Locked in a drawer, it was forgotten for over a year.
TWO: Reflections and Troubles
With the publication of her novel about the mute man, called The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson was not about to stay in the South she despised. Reeves couldn’t keep her down in Georgia, nor did he want to, especially when Houghton-Mifflin decided to give her the star treatment. An unsophisticated female novelist of twenty-three years descended on literature with all the fanfare afforded in America during the pre-World War II years could muster – and that was considerable.
Reeves planned to accompany his wife and find work as a credit investigator in New York. She chomped at the bit; he barely prevented her from leaving by train in May. They waited a few weeks until he could arrange to ship their books by rail to the north. They hoped never to reside in the South again.
Dedicated to writing, husband and wife knew destiny required them to reside in the literary capital of America. An apartment in Greenwich Village gave the couple a sense of a Bohemian lifestyle. They eagerly trudged many avenues and streets of lower Manhattan during the weeks after they arrived in order to see Carson’s picture in windows of the major bookstores. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published on June 4, 1940, to critical acclaim. The fresh-faced author with puffy chipmunk cheeks exploded onto the scene, a celebrity in an instant.
No sooner had Carson a copy of her novel in hand, she proceeded to visit another recent transplant to New York. Owning an international mystique and mania for privacy, Greta Garbo left Hollywood in 1939. She made one last film in 1941, but the seeds of her discontent were in force earlier. She shocked many with her free spirit and independent, androgynous air. Like Garbo, Carson preferred to don men’s clothes; the famous actress had for ten years been the secret idol of the backwater Southern girl.
Carson impulsively paid a call upon the reclusive movie star.
Garbo received the uninvited guest clutching the gift of her book, perhaps out of politeness, perhaps because she had no idea what was being offered. The gushing schoolgirl crush Carson’s image expressed hardly affected the cool and elegant Garbo. Conversation ensued. The elusive celebrity took the present and sent the agog fan on her way with a terse rebuff, but a dazed, deer-in-headlights encounter hardly daunted Carson McCullers.
Fulfilling an appointment to meet with her publisher at the Bedford Hotel in New York, Carson was obsequious when she needed to be. Robert Linscott was one of the most important editors in the world of publishing, and she made herself extremely agreeable to him. He invited her to stay with his family in Boston, and in an attempt to please Linscott, she enthusiastically told him she’d completed a second novel. Doubtless envisioning being brought a shopping bag full of manuscripts, he patiently responded, “One thing at a time, my dear,” he patiently responded.
Two characteristics emerged from deep in the recesses of Carson’s psyche, and these burgeoning attitudes, perhaps fatal flaws, dominated the remainder of her life. First, she was struck with an interest in fame and in those who basked in it. Second, her aggressive need to latch onto people and overwhelm them with her smothering helplessness began its initial manifestations with a cosmopolitan 32-year-old woman she met through friends.
Her burgeoning fame led her to meet artists and poets through Linscott: she made heady rounds of parties and social gatherings. Among those she befriended was Wystan Hugh Auden, one of the world’s most respected poets. The noted British émigré opened up another door for Carson. With the fall of Paris, many intellectuals, writers, and aristocrats, fled Europe to settle in New York. Among these was Thomas Mann’s daughter whose union with Auden was an arrangement for political cover. Wystan introduced Carson to meet his wife, Erika and her friends.
Foremost of interest to Carson was a neurasthenic woman named Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach. Married, a musician and writer, bearing an autocratic demeanor and ties to European royalty, Annemarie was involved in an affair with a Baroness residing in Nantucket. She became Carson’s obsession. The author saw in this aristocrat who wore men’s clothes, her own Doppelganger, a twin in spirit. Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. The admiration was unrequited.
On July 23rd, Clarac-Schwarzenbach wrote to her friend Klaus Mann, “... young Carson McCullers . . . has sparked such a violent crisis; she is seriously ill and lives in an imaginary world so bizarre, so remote from reality that it is absolutely impossible to get her to listen to reason. I thought I had acted with all due caution and had treated her gently, but she is waiting for me to arrive from one day to the next, convinced that I am her destiny.” The European aristocrat met privately with Reeves to discuss Carson’s mental state, but when the author learned of it, she began to turn on her husband – blaming Reeves with poisoning her attempt to achieve happiness.
Whatever physical setbacks McCullers suffered, they melted away in her rejuvenating whirl of Manhattan art circles. She was in her element. When the literary editor of Harper’s Bazaar took an interest, she jumped at the chance. Inviting him for an afternoon chat, she discussed her ambitions regarding her short stories. George Davis, young and energetic, had read the new novel and was intrigued. He wondered if she had any additional materials that were suitable for his magazine.
Davis discovered her to be an impish, gawky girl who downplayed her marriage and indicated her free spirit. They hit it off immediately and considered finding a big house in Brooklyn or the Bronx where they might hold Parisian style literary salons. In the meantime, George Davis wanted additional material for publishing. Carson told him to rummage through suitcases she brought with her to New York a few weeks earlier. There, he found her curious construction entitled Army Post. She professed to have forgotten about it. She certainly remembered to pack it and bring it along.
Its length intrigued Davis. It was actually a novella, nearly complete in its storyline. McCullers wondered if it were too long for a magazine – and Davis indicated that the length was perfect for a two-part serialization. When Davis began to read it, he saw that it was nothing like the first novel. Its stark beauty and grotesque plotline contained the possibility to shock and dare audiences.
According to Margaret McDowell, in her seminal Twayne author series book, the novella “. . . explores through the behavior of six characters, the violent, unusual, and unpredictable aspects of human behavior, which social convention and the uniformity quite often imposed by a military existence can almost obscure. The geographic and social limits of a Southern army base circumscribe the action and lend a semblance of unity to otherwise chaotic and unpredictable situations.”
McDowell’s analysis concluded that McCullers “suggests her principle theme: the contrast between the rigid discipline and monotony of the military establishment as opposed to the uncontrollable natural universe and to the permissive and egocentric behavior of the people who live on the base . . .”
When literary editor of Warner Brothers, Sam Marx, encountered the tale, he had to provide a synopsis for the studio. His opinion included a summary of the plot of the story: “The wife of a homosexual carries on an affair with her neighbor, who is married to an invalid. All four know the situation that exists between them and accept it with outward complacence, although inwardly concerned according to their individual characteristics. A young introvert falls in love with the wife. His presence in the neighborhood has been a constant disturbance to the emotions of the husband, finding him at his wife’s bedside, shoots and kills him.”
Marx deliberately avoided mentioning the military setting, though the tale was beyond question one of atmosphere and delicacy. The focus shifted among six people and a horse, yet by the end its total tragedy and irony centered on Private Elgee Williams, “a country youth who instinctively loves sunshine, plants, and animals. He relates easily to the horses for which he cares . . . for twelve nights he stealthily peers through the windows at Leonora (the Captain’s wife) and then begins each night at midnight to enter her room and squat motionless until almost dawn, watching her sleep.” Penderton “is also perversely attracted to men who . . . find his wife attractive.” Soon “Penderton’s frustrated demand for authority breaks into violence. He attempted to force Leonora’s uncontrollable horse, Firebird, to respond to his whimsical command . . .”
Indeed, much of the story’s later action occurred, symbolically, in darkness, at dusk, in the dead of night in unlit rooms. Captain Penderton stalked Private Williams “hypnotically fascinated by the youth’s freshness and beauty.”
Astounded by the work, George Davis immediately offered to buy it for printing in Harper’s Bazaar. The publishers, Houghton-Mifflin, thought the idea of a novella printed so soon after the first novel’s appearance might serve as an additional marketing stimulation. So long as they might publish the story as a book, they had no problem with the Harper’s Bazaar printing. Linscott had a few reservations when he read the manuscript, and he suggested Carson might want to go to Bread Loaf, a writer’s aggregate in Vermont, at the publisher’s expense through a Fellowship.
The point was to prepare the novella for publication. When Carson learned of the illustrious attendees at the conference, she was more than eager to participate. The book, she claimed, was written in a puff of ease. Carson had no intentions of changing anything about the book or honing it with any advice from experts at Bread Loaf. For once she heeded George Davis who suggested a new title. Carson had clearly preferred simple, almost pedestrian headings, but with the success of her first novel, the more rococo title became her fancy. The Mute became The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; and, Army Post found itself christened Reflections in a Golden Eye.
Over the years after its publication, the bizarre and evocative name sparked much debate as to its meaning (taken from a scene in the book in which a character paints a watercolor of a giant peacock with “one immense golden eye,” reflecting things tiny and grotesque). Davis referred Carson to a poem by T.S. Eliot. The work, little known, was called “Lines for an Old Man.”
Carson adapted the penultimate excerpt for her book’s title.
“Reflected from my golden eye
The dullard knows that he is mad.”
With arrangements from her Fellowship and the recommendation of Robert Linscott to Louis Untermeyer, McCullers was on her way to the prestigious mid-August creative writing seminar at Middlebury College. The Bread Loaf campus, formed on 30,000 acres in 1926 by Untermeyer, served then on the faculty of Middlebury. Its impact on invited writers grew to legendary heights by 1940. Guests lived in small cottages or the inn on the edge of the Green Mountains.
At conferences on writing created by Willa Cather and Robert Frost, writers honed their styles, improved drafts, and enjoyed the elevating camaraderie of fellow writers. Linscott believed these few weeks could not only help Carson edit her new novel, but would provide a healthy world to improve her tenuous condition.
However, for Carson, the social whirl – parties, drinks, social gatherings – led to more exhaustion, not rest. Indeed, she asked Untermeyer, one of her biggest supporters, if he wanted to sleep with her. He declined, and she disingenuously said she asked out of politeness.
Carson attended Bread Loaf to prepare Reflections in a Golden Eye for publication. Louis Untermeyer and others read the work in its typescript. Some expressed amazement when Carson told them she believed the story to be “hilariously funny.” Wallace Stegner gave it a cursory study it at this time, noting the grotesqueries “without admiring them.” Carson had no interest in deeply discussing the work, as she was apparently uninterested in Stegner’s opinion. Others expressed chagrin over scenes in which a kitten was stuffed into a mailbox and a woman cut off her nipples with garden shears. McCullers didn’t understand, nor tolerate, the fuss. This was her vision.