Mary V. Dearborn is the author of the biography Carson McCullers: A Life. Dearborn's other books include Ernest Hemingway: A Biography. She lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of the writer Carson McCullers (1917-1967)?
A: I did read her in middle school, for summer reading. It made a great impression. Any girl of that age can relate to Frankie [in The Member of the Wedding]. Carson’s greatest strength is that we all feel like outsiders, and Frankie speaks to that.
In 2018, I saw a mention that it was Carson McCullers’ 101st birthday. I thought, how did that happen? I’d read a previous biography of her 25 years ago, but there hadn’t been one since and there was a space for one. I was really excited.
I saw where her papers are—half are at the University of Texas where many writers’ papers are. There are just as many papers from when Carson was in therapy with Mary Mercer, who became her dear friend and romantic partner. Mary Mercer had the papers with her until she died at 101 in 2013. She left them to Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia.
Carson had seen her [as a therapist] in the early ‘60s. Carson wanted her to record the conversations, and had them transcribed. There were 11 or 12 therapy sessions, and Mary Mercer left those to Columbus State University.
As a biographer, I was able to look at the transcripts of her psychiatric sessions—it was an extraordinary privilege. For a biographer, they were invaluable. I felt a little funny about it, but two things mitigated that—first, that Carson wanted there to be transcripts, and second, that Mary Mercer refused to talk about Carson after her death, but when Mary Mercer died, she left the papers to an archive. She knew what she was doing.
Q: What surprised you most in the course of your research?
A: I was really interested in her marriage—she was married twice to the same person, Reeves McCullers. To remarry a person, there must have been something there. But she was also a lesbian. She didn’t do this as a smokescreen—she loved Reeves.
Reeves loved her more than anybody on earth, and Carson knew that—she thought, I’m not going to give that up, I should be with that person. But it was a very painful marriage.
The first time it ended badly. She remarried him, and Reeves eventually killed himself. He was a severe alcoholic and was depressed. He slept with men—he was quite conflicted about it. It was a hard time to be gay.
And then Carson was getting famous. That didn’t bother him, but it made for strains. I was really interested in how this marriage worked or didn’t work. I was surprised at how complex the marriage was.
Q: Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times, “It’s to Dearborn’s credit that she suggests McCullers’s deep humanity, her subversive talents as a writer and lonely observer, and a strong sense of what McCullers herself called ‘her sad, happy life.’” What do you think of that description?
A: I love Carson calling it her “sad, happy life.” It’s pretty apt.
I like that Garner cites her subversive talents. We don’t think of her [that way]. She was a lesbian writer. She was very in-your-face. She dressed weirdly and didn’t follow conventions. Queer is perhaps a better term for her—anti-convention, going against the grain, absolute honesty. She put that in her life and at the center of her fiction.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about McCullers and her work?
A: These are books about outsiders. There’s a misconception that they’re girls’ books. The Member of the Wedding is about a 13-year-old who doesn’t fit in. Actually, the book is quite subversive. Carson said it’s a book about a girl who’s in love with her piano teacher.
It can be read as a girls’ book—there’s the movie with Julie Harris. It’s a charming movie--it’s moving but not sentimental. There’s some perception that [McCullers is] sentimental.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I don’t want to say yet. Carson was a dream subject, so complex—she’s a hard act to follow!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Read Carson McCullers! She was difficult, and what I would hope is that the descriptions of the books give you a taste and you want to know more. With these authors, there’s a process to get to know their work, and Carson repays that attention.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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