TROUBLES IN A GOLDEN EYE
Starring Taylor and Brando
with John Huston
William Russo & Jan Merlin
Published by Long Time Ago Books
Smashwords Edition
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.
This book was printed in the United States of America.
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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
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 . . .
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 readership, which indicated great art must be all of these qualities rolled into one. 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 of 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 an 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
certainly didn’t have a true wife. She wasn’t a cook, and frequently burned meals she
prepared. 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, North Carolina, 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.
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 her 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, he 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.
Over the duration of the Bread Loaf conference, she made few, if any changes, to
the original, despite spelling and tense flaws. She admitted she changed only one word
at publisher’s insistence. Yet, that contention seemed fanciful, and the book maintained
its typos and grammar errors for the eternity of its various printings and reprintings.
McCullers approached a representative from Doubleday to wheedle a better deal if, for
some reason, Houghton-Mifflin backed out.
She also invited Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach to join her, but the aristocrat
friend of Linscott declined repeatedly. Carson was ready to travel at once to Nantucket
if the mountain was unmovable. Reeves had to insist Carson not leave Bread Loaf early.
Clarac-Schwarzenbach wrote to Linscott on August 18th, “I’m deeply fond of her & I
wish the world would be different, easier for her to face. I wish I would be able never to
hurt her. But she is very innocent & cannot admit certain fatalities . . .”
On Wednesday, August 28th, as the Bread Loaf conference closed, Carson was
reluctant to leave Vermont where she rubbed elbows with Robert Frost, W.H. Auden,
Wallace Stegner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty. The notion the stimulation
by the best minds would be lost depressed her, but Untermeyer offered to take her to
Cape Cod en route to New York City because her health already seemed fragile. Clarac-
Schwarzenbach begged him to take care of her, thus alleviating a burdensome encounter
with Carson, which the European woman wanted to avoid. Within a matter of weeks at
Bread Loaf, Carson established she was a prototype celebrity hound – a literary groupie
in modern terms. Her husband, Reeves, and the life he represented were a bore, and she
moved away from him intellectually and aesthetically. Their physical relationship had
long ago evaporated.
Carson casually informed Reeves she’d dedicate the new novella to Annemarie, not
him. This was a severe blow to the man who gave her the original idea, who sat with her
during its writing and offered his insights into character and substance, and who supported her during its inception. With their marriage on the rocks, this news sent the entire relationship into an irrevocable tailspin.
After her stay on Cape Cod with Untermeyer and his family, Carson disdained
returning to Reeves and their Greenwich Village apartment. She had already grown
away from her husband in two months; she felt nothing for him after her stimulations at
Bread Loaf. Reflections was out of her hands and into the print phase; next came the
galleys. The novella transformed into its own creature, for good or bad. It had a life
independent of the author. The characters and their small, incidental world belonged to
‘literature.’
Paid $500 for the novella by George Davis, Carson oversaw her piece, not much
different than the version circulated at Bread Loaf, printed in Harper’s Bazaar in two
installments in the October and November issues of 1940. As a bonus, Editor George Davis asked Carson to move in with him when he learned she separated from Reeves. George Davis and she worked together, and they found digs in Brooklyn Heights at 7
Middagh Street. Their house became a salon for writers and artists like Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles.
The long excerpts in the back-to-back issues stirred no interest with the public and
critics. When Houghton Mifflin announced the serialized work would appear on the
company’s list of published novels for February, 1941, publicity attracted notice. Initial
reactions were poor, based mostly on the surprise at how different the second novel of
McCullers was from her first. From a romanticized study of a girl’s adolescent pains to
the bizarre antics of adults on an army post simply knocked the pins from under the
readership Carson developed with the subject of the first book.
Carson enjoyed the holidays of 1940 with her mother in Columbus, Georgia. Being
home with her was always a comfort, but the second novel tainted her visit. Her father,
upon reading the installment in Harper’s Bazaar, tossed the magazine away in disgust.
Neighbors castigated the young author for demeaning the nearby Fort Benning – though
the story was roughly based on Fort Bragg. Many officers at Fort Benning were amused
to “learn” of such goings-on at their post. Far more seriously, the McCullers family
received a threatening phone call from the Ku Klux Klan. As was her style, Carson
dismissed the reaction, but McCullers’s family – which must live in the South after
Carson returned north – did not.
When Carson discussed Reflections in a Golden Eye, she insisted the story was
tragio-comedy in the Russian Realist tradition. On other occasions, she referred to the
novella as “a fairy-tale.” Carson claimed the second novel’s inspiration came by way of
Isak Dinesen’s style and attitude, as well as the “beauty of her writing,” never mentioning
other influences.
All hell was about to break loose.
On February 15, 1941, Clifton Fadiman, the New Yorker’s prestigious book editor,
supporter of Rebecca West, Katharine Anne Porter, and many others, the man who
organized a book club for Phi Beta Kappa readers, tackled McCullers in the magazine.
His criticism noted that she was self-indulgent “in a curious private frenzy to which not
many readers will have the key.” He daintily accused Carson of writing “pointedly
reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence.” The point was sharp enough for the subtle readers of
the New Yorker. In essence, he suggested she borrowed Reflections from Lawrence’s
1913 short story, entitled The Prussian Soldier.
In Fadiman’s words, the story featured an officer “with ‘a sad penchant for becoming
enamored of his wife’s lovers.’ His wife is a muzzy-minded nymphomaniac in love with
their neighbor, the hearty, dumb Major Langdon. Major Langdon is married to an
overwrought lady who is only looking for a good opportunity to go completely cuckoo.
Her sole confidante is an aesthetic Filipino houseboy, one of the most preposterous
characters I have met in modern fiction. Mrs. McCullers treats him as if he were nothing
special. The situation is precipitated into tragedy by Private Williams, a moron with a
Peeping Tom complex. There’s also a horse who helps things along. The denouement
involves murder, lunacy, and stray hints of rape, homosexuality, and other items out of
Krafft-Ebing.”
According to one of the leading literary figures of the era, McCullers engaged in
“mimicry” that resulted in “an effect of falseness.” Though he admitted the writer had
talent, she needed to give herself a “humorous once-over.” Overall in his estimation, the
novella was an exercise in “grotesque and forced hallucinations.”
Fadiman’s allusion to D.H. Lawrence set off the firestorm in Carson’s young career.
The brief plot of Lawrence’s tale featured two characters – a captain and an enlisted
man. Nearly as important was the setting, which Lawrence emphasized from the opening,
with its “valley, wide and shallow, glittered with heat; dark green patches of rye, pale
young corn, fallow and meadow and black pine woods spread in a dull, hot diagram
under a glistening sky.” The first character, the orderly private, “walked on and on in
silence, staring at the mountains ahead, that rose sheer out of the land, and stood fold
behind fold, half earth, half heaven . . .”
There was also a horse, belonging to the captain whose personality is summed up
with a journalistic turn that borders on poetic, “a tall man of about forty” whose orderly
must give him rub-downs and “admired the amazing riding muscles of his loins.” Indeed,
the character of the young orderly was one of pure sensory ideal: “dark, expressionless
eyes, that seemed never to have thought, only to have received life direct through his
senses, and acted straight from instinct.” It was enough to irritate the officer who saw in
his orderly, “something so free and self-contained about him, and something in the
young fellow’s movement, that made the officer aware of him. And this irritated the
Prussian.”
As an orderly, the enlisted man spilled some wine on the table and nearly onto his
officer. They became joined in a gaze that inflamed their relationship and, for a year, the
officer harbored deep hatred for the orderly. But the soldier managed to maintain
“himself, protectively, impervious to the feelings of his master.” These incidents and
descriptions later found a parallel in the McCullers novella.
Lawrence examined the repressive sexual psychology of the military man whose
sadistic feelings emerged for an enlisted man. His narrative related, “The officer tried
hard not to admit the passion that had got hold of him. He would not know that his
feeling for his orderly was anything but that of a man incensed by his stupid, perverse
servant.”
The object of the officer’s obsession was a young enlisted man who fell into a
violent relationship with his captain. Without direct scenes to explain it, Lawrence reported how the connection of master and servant broke something in the young soldier whose inner “thighs” were bruised by the kicks the officer sadistically gave him.
The two characters had a fateful encounter in the woods. When they went out to a
forest on maneuvers, the two confront their hostile emotions in a lonely clearing: It
provided the orderly with a moment to vent his hatred. “The Captain had gone up into
the wood. The orderly plodded through the hot, powerfully smelling zone of the company’s atmosphere. He had a curious mass of energy inside him. The Captain was less real than himself. He approached the green entrance to the wood. There, in the half-shade, he saw the horse standing, the sunshine and the flickering shadow of leaves dancing over his brown body. There was a clearing where timber had lately been felled.”
In a moment of fury, the orderly strangled the captain and broke the neck of his
officer and left the body in a clearing in the woods, carefully laid out. He took the
officer’s horse for a time, riding alone and denying himself any water. When the horse
fled from him, the young orderly seemed to believe that Nature too had abandoned him.
In despair, he commits a self-destructive act by refusing himself water while wandering
in the forest. Lawrence’s complex psychological study ends with the orderly succumbing
to this suicidal denial.
With the soldier’s body was recovered by fellow enlisted men, Lawrence hinted at
unspoken shock. At the army post, the officer and his orderly were placed together in a
morgue where officials noted the bruises on the young soldier. “The doctors saw the
bruises on his legs, behind, and were silent.
“The bodies of the two men lay together, side by side, in the mortuary, the one
white and slender, but laid rigidly at rest, the other looking as if every moment it must
rouse into life again, so young and unused, from a slumber.”
Margaret McDowell, a literary expert and McCullers biographer, pointed out “some
notable similarities” between Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Prussian Soldier in
her Twayne critical assessment. She limited her comparison to plot points about two
young soldiers bedeviled by an older officer, rigid military life, as well as “unpredictable
violence,” and “abuse of power.” She agreed Carson and Lawrence shared the use of the
“symbolic role of landscape and the use of Nature.”
McDowell argued the works differed “significantly.” Because McCullers used satiric
irony and that Lawrence made his soldier far more “close to the world of animal nature”
as the main dissimilarity of their storylines. In fact, she noted the focus of Lawrence is on
two characters only (it is a short story) whereas McCullers opened up her novella to
include six major characters. Her conclusion was Lawrence “exists somewhere in the
background of the McCullers’ novel.” Yet, Margaret McDowell ignored the more stylistic
similarity caused by vocabulary, imagery, and metaphor.
Modern computer comparisons of language, the fingerprint of style, idiosyncratic
semantics and syntax, were evaluated and matched by an objective and methodical
program. Using two key segments from Reflections (the wild ride by Captain Penderton
on Firebird and his woodland encounter with Williams, and the final twenty paragraphs
of the novella about Williams coming to Penderton’s house) with the final two segments
of the short story (woodland encounters and the increasingly fetishistic relationship of
the officer and enlisted man) were submitted to computerized assessment to find syntax
parallelism, and semantic echoes. Each segment was 3,000 words approximately and
used only the two characters common to each story.
The computer-generated report revealed there was only an 11% overlap in syntax
and semantics. Of course, the program did not consider the large issues of themes, plot
points, parallel incidents, and miscellaneous details of narrative. Two long excerpts, which ran through MyDropBox.com computer programs, failed to find patterns of language similarity between the two, though obvious metaphoric themes were present.
The chief of operations at MyDropBox.com, Max Lytvyn responded: “Unfortunately, our system was not able to prove any distinct similarity in wording between the two documents. Although the idea behind the text could have been plagiarized, the wording was different enough to prevent any electronic matching possible.”
Over sixty years later, the best science of the age confirmed McCullers may have
been influenced, as are many writers, by other literature, but she did not “plagiarize”
Lawrence’s short story.
In mid-February of 1941, shortly after the charge of plagiarism emerged from the
New Yorker, the beleaguered author suffered a cerebral stroke, debilitating at age twenty-three, first manifesting itself as blindness and paralysis. She became ambulatory by late
March. On February 15th, Benjamin Poore at the New York Times printed a long review
without mentioning Carson’s stroke, nor was it likely he knew about it. He lambasted
Reflections as an “improbable collaboration of Cocteau and Faulkner.” He noted, “. . . in
spite of a state of almost continual emotional uproar, only one murder and one more
death come out of the whole thing.” As often the case in mid-twentieth century, critics
felt pressed to put a moral judgment on the literary proceedings.
Poore complained that characters were left “with practically no regrets whatever.”
When it came to endowing characters “with aberrations and festooning them with
psychoses, Miss McCullers is more than bountifully imaginative.” In a nutshell, he
concluded, “How they all affect one another makes a macabre, if generally unconvincing,
story.” The review made a final assessment that “. . . it is far too mechanically contrived.”
Overall, he found the story “certainly gruesome enough. But nothing stupid whatever.
Miss McCullers writes too well for that, even when obsessions obsess her.”
Within a few weeks on March 2nd, Fred Marsh of the New York Times reviewed the
story, explaining it depicted people with deep neuroses. He determined the author’s
“concerns and ours” put focus upon what she saw going on within the mind – because
her characters wore masks which pulsed with “strange distorted psyches.” His assessment
threw the ailing author a sop: “No one could say, however, that Miss McCullers has not
succeeded in making her genuine talent felt.” Yet, Marsh’s overall reaction was to note
the characters were “moving two by two through a puppet show that appears to be a
mere masquerade, seem only costumed . . . It is a brave talent, but not, I think, a sturdy
plant.”
Later McCullers commented in The Mortgaged Heart: “Spiritual isolation is the basis
of most of my themes. . . . Love, and especially love of a person who is incapable of
returning or receiving it, is at the heart of my selection of grotesque figure to write
bout – people whose physical incapacity is a symbol of their spiritual incapacity to love
or receive love – their spiritual isolation.”
On March 3, 1941, Otis Ferguson was one of the few critics to give a positive
review to Reflections in a Golden Eye in the New Republic on March 3, 1941, in which he called the novella “thorough treatment of human passions . . . its atmosphere of strange but true, its etched background of the army post, the customs, the look and feel of the weather, the key to it is in two principals. They are ranged against each other by such
extreme peculiarities of temperament and moved by such dumb, obscure forces, that
almost anything could be made logically to happen to either . . . The reader is never
identified with anyone in the book, and it seems that the price of such perfection in
having everything come out exact and even is that you have to play with a special deck
of cards, deliberately leaving the hearts out of it.”
On April 1st of that year, recovering her strength, Carson wrote in Harper’s Bazaar
that it was Dostoevsky who “opened a new door” to a “marvelous world” with stories
like Reflections. She asserted too she had the ability to accept “spiritual inconsistencies
without asking the reason why . . .” Almost as apology, the New Yorker published two of
her stories later in the year . . . but sympathy for her suffering did not ameliorate the
charge of copying Lawrence. It hung over her and meant her next book had to prove it
was her talent and vision that created the pages of the novella.
Critical judgments continued against her: in March 30, 1946, issue of the New
Yorker, no less than Edmund Wilson in a review entitled, Two Books That Leave You
Blank, disparaged McCullers as a writer. In Reflections he thought she “seems to have
difficulty in adjusting her abilities to a dramatically effective subject . . .” Perceiving
Reflections “was dramatic but quite unreal. I do not mean merely that what occurred in
it was fantastic but that it did not achieve the validity either of realistic fiction, supposed
to take place in the actual world, or of the imaginative poem in prose which is true to
psychological experience.”
Carson’s invitation to spend June to September 30, 1941, at the Yaddo artists’
colony turned into one of the best experiences of her life. At Saratoga Springs, she
received a great honor: giving her the unprecedented opportunity to spend the entire
summer at the resort. Here she could write without stress and with complete dedication,
like a woman with a mission. While most writers stayed only half the summer, she took
the most of her tenure. Working each day until 5:00 pm, she managed to complete her
next short novel. The Ballad of the Sad Café owed much to the year at Fayetteville,
Georgia, and it depicted the Southern poverty with sympathy. It shared more with the
second novel than the first. If anything, it confirmed she was the author of the second
book. Yaddo’s liberal atmosphere lent itself to sensational behavior. Katherine Anne
Porter was increasingly disturbed by Carson’s overt Lesbianism and her prattling
attempts to attach herself to many of the women in the colony. Carson took to drinking more and more, as there was unrestricted access to alcohol. This was compounded in July when she was informed that Reeves, now legally separated from her, was found to be forging checks on her account. He’d moved to Rochester and cohabitated with David Diamond, a choreographer of ballet. It made her decision to divorce him easier.
In February, her unrequited love, Annemarie, was committed to a mental hospital
for a short time. Upon release, Clarac-Schwarzenbach left for Europe, despite the war,
and traipsed from Lisbon to the Congo. Carson and Annemarie kept in correspondence
Distance having suited them so well, they were planning a professional partnership:
Carson would translate Annemarie’s novel into English, and they would help one another
with their projects. Carson dedicated the German version of Reflections to Annemarie. In
1942, during March Carson was awarded a large monetary stipend from the Guggenheim Foundation.
With Ballad of the Sad Café complete and near publication, she developed an idea
long germinating. It was called The Bride and Her Bother, and she’d toil on the manuscript for years. Despite chronic health problems, she saw Ballad published in August of 1943 in Harper’s Bazaar, and her cherished literary salon with George Davis gathered together diverse personalities like Richard Wright, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Paul Bowles (who frequently offered those he met something akin to hashish from a small tin he carried everywhere). Some visitors, like Lincoln Kirstein, found Carson insufferable: “I did not like her – you see, I knew her.”
By early September, letters from Annemarie’s international trek ceased. There were
rumors from war-torn Europe that her friend had committed suicide. Increasingly worried, Carson learned on December 1st that Annemarie had fallen off a bicycle, cracking her skull on a sharp rock. She was in a coma for six weeks before she died.
The tragic news left Carson with a sense of guilt she never wanted to shed. Her lost
friend became a subject of fantasy, wish fulfillment, and utter delusion, as time passed;
she could ascribe whatever motives and possibilities she wanted to their unconsummated
relationship. Carson also reconciled with Reeves, who’d taken up new life as an Army
officer and was stationed at Fort Dix.
Returning to Columbus, Georgia, before the holiday season, she sought solace
from her mother. The death of Annemarie exaggerated Carson’s awareness of illness
and made her more erratic in behavior. While recuperating from the shock of her
friend’s death at her mother’s home, Carson was celebrated by the locals who previously
ignored her. As a famous author, she attended many parties thrown in her honor. At one
soiree, she abruptly turned unpleasant when asked about Reflections in a Golden Eye. She barked out, “I’m not interested in that book. I am writing another.”
And, she left the party in a huff, claiming illness.
THREE
A Friend in Tennessee
In 1944 John Huston’s greatest films were ahead of him. That fall, he returned from
European service as a military filmmaker. He recently released The Battle of San Pietro,
a brutal anti-war film, created while under military censorship for the U.S. Army. He
was living in New York City, preparing another project about psychiatric problems in
soldiers at war. Let There Be Light would not see the light of day for over thirty years.
Huston himself had been traumatized by the deaths he’d seen in Italy during the worst
of the fighting. Some thought he became crueler from this; his films, henceforth, featured
a nearly sadistic moment, or a scene in which he allowed characters and incidents to be
coldly painful, watching another character with the detached objectivity of a disinterested
scientist.
Huston was part of an ascendant new generation of directors, waiting in the
wings for the war to end. He impressed traditional Hollywood with his pre-war
movie, The Maltese Falcon, making Humphrey Bogart a star. He had directed Bette
Davis and Olivia de Havilland. The motion picture, In This Our Life, was pure soap
opera, but his final commercial film before enlisting was Across the Pacific, containing
a rousing adventure theme that would always be at the center of his future and most
successful motion pictures. As he was still in the Army, he was unable to work openly
in Hollywood, but he wrote scripts – and contributed to studio movies without credit
during these years. He was a crown prince, anticipating a triumphant return to his
fairy tale kingdom.
During a respite after the release of Battle of San Pietro in the fall of 1944, he took a
motor trip up the Hudson Valley to visit with two friends from Hollywood, a married
couple often defying the conventions of the industry. Burgess Meredith and Paulette
Goddard kept a home in Nyack, New York, to keep them fresh from the influences of
the California movie business. Having much free time, Huston went to see them.
It was there he first met Carson McCullers.
When Carson’s father died that August, she moved her mother North to be with
her in New York State. The Hudson Valley impressed Carson; and, she found an apartment for them in Nyack. It was a good move; Carson’s health was fragile, and her mother was within constant reach.
On an autumn day, Carson reportedly saw John Huston and Burgess Meredith out
for a walk in the town. She beckoned to them from her porch. It was Huston who
recalled the event years later when he wrote his memoirs in Open Book. “I remember her
as a fragile thing with great shining eyes, and a tremor in her hand as she placed it in
mine.” He admired her strength and dedication to art, but there was something decidedly
pushy about an infirm writer nosing about from the front porch, calling to a celebrity