Carson McCullers

Yes, I wrote my senior HS thesis on her. I felt great kinship to Frankie from “The Member of the Wedding” and her agonizing loneliness. I know....

Another Mary who loves "The Member Of The Wedding" here, R1.

Flannery O’Connor was a nasty, closeted lesbian who despised other lesbians & gay men.

She seemed to be an interesting person. She was alcoholic and wrote about loneliness, but she seemed to have lots of friends, including a number of famous writers.

McCullers herself adapted her 1946 novel "The Member of the Wedding" into a 1950 Broadway play starring Julie Harris as Frankie and Ethel Waters as Berenice. Harris and Waters reprised their roles for the 1950 film version, for which Harris was nominated for an Oscar as best actress.

At the time I read her books, it would appear that I had a lot of friends, too. But as an adolescent the realization of “no we to me” was dawning, and I felt as if she was saying this secret out loud. I couldn’t talk to my friends about it.

I like Carson McCullers a lot, and the two books OP named are great. I think she goes too far overboard in much of her other work, though: "The Ballad of the Sad cafe" reads like it's trying to be an outright parody of the Southern Gothic.

Flannery O'Connor, at her best, is in a whole different class above though. She is a major, major writer: some of her stories (like "Everything that Rises Must Converge," "The Artificial N-gger," and "A Good Man is Hard to Find") are some of the best things written by anyone in the 20th century in any country. I am not a big fan of her novel "Wise Blood," but I think she was absolutely brilliant.

Lez?

"Flannery O’Connor was a nasty, closeted lesbian who despised other lesbians & gay men."

Where did you get THAT bullshit from? And I guess you don't know that dear Carson McCullers (her birth name was Lula Smith) was quite the fucked up lesbian. She'd develop wild "crushes" on women like Katherine Anne Porter and an uber-dyke named Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The "crushes" were not reciprocated, least of all sexually. It's doubtful that McCullers had much of sex life; she seemed to be perpetually stuck at the awkward age of twelve, the same age as Frankie in "The Member of the Wedding." She liked to sleep in beds with other people and give them "sloppy" kisses, but mature human sexuality seemed to be beyond her. She married a man who seemed opposite of her in many ways; Reeves McCullers was good looking, popular, an all around well liked guy with potential. But they clicked because he was, in fact, as fucked up as she. He was a closeted gay ()one of his lovers was Truman Capote) and that tormented him. Mental illness ran in his family; he had several siblings and they ALL committed suicide. He had aspirations to be a writer but she became the famous writer, leaving him in the dust. They were both hard core alcoholics. They had one of those dreadful "can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" relationships. They divorced, then remarried. She treated him like shit, expecting him to wait on her and tend her like he was a servant. He took it because he was morbidly co-dependent. He ended up committing suicide. Afterwards, she behaved as though his death was of no consequence. Talk about cunts; Carson McCullers was the definition of one.

By the way, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is better than ANYTHING Carson McCullers ever did.

R8 = triggered...

Flannery O’Conner’s story “What Rises Must Converge” could be today or tomorrow 2020.

Flannery O’Conner’s story “What Rises Must Converge” could be today or tomorrow 2020.

R9= Carson McCullers worshipping cunt

Girls! Girls! You’re both talented lesbians.

I’ve published scholarship on both. FOC was the more distinctive and original writer, though the somewhat smug Catholicism can get on your nerves if you read too much of her in a short time. Not a lesbian (Brad Gooch, who surely looked everywhere he could to find traces of it when he did the biography, makes the case for her as having fallen in love with a man deeply once, but was jilted)—frankly, so much of her adult life was spent being sick and intense pain from lupus and writing as much as she could before she died at 39 that there was little time for romances—and she spent most of her last years on the farm in Milledgeville. She had an ongoing correspondence and friendship with a rather forlorn lesbian—and her letters to her are kind, but make it clear that she was not interested in a romantic relationship with her.

McCullers has a much sloppier private life (alcohol, also an early death, feckless husband). I think her fiction really does appeal most deeply to adolescents and young adults and needs to be encountered then for the first time for optimal emotional nostalgia as you reread her later in life. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter really is extraordinary accomplishment for so young a writer, though I think The Member of the Wedding is a better piece of writing. Her late novels and novellas are so disappointing by comparison—though Reflections in a Golden Eye is a classic of (I think) unintentional camp. O’Connor hated her and thought her final novel, Click without Hands was the worst book she’d ever read. I think there was some envy there—McCullers sold better and had more fine.

The golden mean between them, in terms of US Southern White women writers is Eudora Welty, whose vision is less narrow than O’Connor’s and whose style is more accomplished than McCullers’. And Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories and novellas are superb, though Ship of Fools is almost unreadable and too broad a canvas for that writer.

But at her best (some of the stories, like “A Good Man...,” “Everything That Rises,” “The River,” and her amazing penultimate story “Revelation”—epiphany on the pig farm), she approaches the transcendence that Joyce fid in his short stories. The novels are fascinating wrecks—Wise Blood may be better as s film (directed by John Huston) and The Violent Bear It Away is so full of pain and anger that you can’t turn away.

14 here. Yes, it seems clear that McCullers had sapphic sentiments. There’s an interesting new book called “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” in which a young lesbian/queer writer engages the archive and finds definite queerness in McC’s life and writing. But it’s probably most accurate to call McC bisexual or fluid.

R14, Sugar... this is a lesbian.

Is R14 Miss Warwicke? It writes like miss warwicke. Terrible man. The worst of Datalounge.

So feminine!

"Brad Gooch, who surely looked everywhere he could to find traces of it when he did the biography, makes the case for her as having fallen in love with a man deeply once, but was jilted"

Sounds like me! I never got over Sonja Henie

R14. Not necessarily—a gangly and somewhat plain Southern spinster works as well. And in the latter pictures, the steroids they gave her to treat the lupus gave her the puffiness you see in 18. Not all plain women are lesbians.

She was a complicated person and artist. Included the ugliness and idiocy of race in many of her works, but was certainly a woman of her time and place and given to racist comments and bigotries from time to time. She often wrote (in letters) disparagingly of James Baldwin (she seemed to have little use for activists), but could also acknowledge when he wrote well.

As for you, Liberace, we do have testimony from the man who jilted her about their relationship. It’s not clear that they had sex (she may have died a virgin), but it seems clear, from many who knew her during the relationship she had that she was truly crushed when he returned to Denmark and married a year later.

r20, truly straight people don't give up on the opposite sex because one relationship didn't work out

" Sugar... this is a lesbian."

Being plain and unfeminine does not make one a lesbian, you dumb twat.

I'm aware of that, R22, the last thing I want is this woman being part of our tribe. Apparently, her fan gurls can't stand the thought of Flannery being a lesbian, either. Much like their idol, they are eaten up with self-loathing.

She belonged to an era when their Editor almost co-wrote the book with them. Spending sometimes years shaping the novel for public consumption. You have to read it with this in mind.

I think it’s interesting that in a place and time steeped in the myth of white southern belle dainty femininity, that these unapologetically plain, tough minded women emerged with their cat eye glasses and disturbing imagery.

I have investment inO’Connor being lesbian, straight, or mainly asexual. I do have an investment in getting the facts right,

"The last thing I want is this woman being part of our tribe. Apparently, her fan gurls can't stand the thought of Flannery being a lesbian, either. Much like their idol, they are eaten up with self-loathing."

Flannery O'Connor never had any "self loathing?" Why would she? You sound like you have a grudge against her. A grudge against Flannery O'Connor...that's fucked up.

I associate FOC with smug Catholic intellectuals I grew up around. (my parents were academics).

So I don’t like her.

Maybe I should try reading her.

Tennessee Williams was a friend of hers. He took her to meet his mentally fragile sister Rose. McCullers reacted in her usual overblown, rather socially awkward way by exclaiming "Oh Miss Rose, I'm so happy to meet you! Kiss me!" To which Rose reportedly replied "I have halitosis." I guess Rose didn't want to be the recipient of one of those "sloppy kisses" that McCullers liked to bestow on people.