Adventure classics -- Longing to belong to the 'we of me'

The Member of the Wedding

by Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers had good reason to feel bitter about fellow Southern writer Harper Lee’s immediate entry into the club of successful writers. Lee achieved the feat with the instant acclaim for her first novel. It took McCullers three tries to achieve similar success with The Member of the Wedding, and not until the book’s adaptation as a play and movie was she able to gain financial independence as a writer.

Both McCullers’ and Lee’s stories about lonely girls struggling to understand life in a South paralyzed by rigid racial segregation. Both Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird are raised by black housekeepers after the deaths of their mothers, leaving their rather detached fathers pursued their own careers. The similarities seem to justify McCullers’ quip about Lee “poaching” on her literary territory.

What sets them apart is the size of their canvas. McCullers wrote deep where Lee wrote broad. The world continues to celebrate Lee’s novel while McCullers’ jeweled miniature has become what The Guardian’s Tom Cox termed an overlooked classic.

“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. . . Frankie had become an enjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid,” McCullers begins.

Even while Frankie affects to despise the tiny world she knows, her longing to become a member of something bigger than herself, some “we of me,” leads to her tragicomic fascination with her brother’s impending marriage. She will spend the entire preceding walking around her small town, telling the story of the wedding to every stranger she meets, longing “to be known for her true self and recognized.”

Of course, no one recognizes her true self, not even Frankie. Certainly not the drunken soldier whose attentions leave the reader gasping in horror but Frankie herself still innocent enough to believe she can accompany her brother and his bride on their honeymoon.

McCullers deals gently with Frankie’s final agony as the married pair leave without her. “The rest was like some nightmare show in which a wild girl in the audience breaks onto the stage to take upon herself an unplanned part that was never written or meant to be,” leaving Frankie heartbroken, and still longing as her creator would all her life for that elusive “we of me.”

Although still in her twenties when The Member of the Wedding was published in 1946, McCullers was almost as broken as Frankie. A bout with rheumatic fever in her teens was followed by a series of paralyzing strokes. At barely twenty, she married another aspiring young writer, Reeves McCullers, already teetering on the verge of alcoholism. She and Reeves would divorce, remarry and separate for the last time when she refused to join him in a suicide pact.

Knowing her dubious health, McCullers must have doubly envied Lee in 1960 -- a healthy young woman with success and the prospect of a long career ahead of her. But though McCullers was dead at fifty and Lee at 87 is still strong enough to have won a suit this month over the literary rights of To Kill a Mockingbird, she has yet to publish another book.

For a discussion of McCullers’ life and work, I liked Virginia Spencer Carr’s introduction to Carson McCullers: Collected Stories.

(Next Wednesday, in a September devoted to young protagonists, a young man learns about love, death and friendship in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)

Adventure classics -- A pair of yearlings

The Yearling

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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“I will bring a live rattlesnake and drop it on your desk if you are ever polite about my stuff and I catch you at it,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings teasingly wrote to her editor, as she agonized over what would become her most famous novel, The Yearling.

She was living on the small farm in Florida where she and her newly-divorced husband had moved early in their marriage. Drawn by the romance of the state’s still-wild scrubland and its moonshine-brewing inhabitants, Rawlings wrote short stories and two novels about the region. But editor Max Perkins intrigued her, biographer Elizabeth Silverthorne writes in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek, with his suggestion for “a book about a child in the scrub, which would be designed for what we have come to call younger readers.”

At first resistant, Rawlings became enthusiastic as she gained experience -- including a rattlesnake hunt -- about the marginalized lives of her neighbors in the scrubland. But she insisted that the book must never be labeled as “juvenile,” wishing to appeal to adults as well as children with the story of a year in the life of a boy and the fawn whose life and death usher him into adulthood.

Set in the decade after the Civil War, The Yearling tells the story of Jody Baxter, the twelve-year-old son of Ezra “Penny” Baxter and his wife Ora.

Injured in spirit by his war experience, Penny returns to his wife and Jody, their youngest, and only surviving child, and takes them from the semi-civilized life they have known to the scrub, “with gratitude for its peace and isolation.”

The many dead and stillborn children before Jody have embittered his mother. But for his father Penny, this last, late-born child is a source of unending delight.


So, although with foreboding, Penny allows Jody to bring up the fawn orphaned when rattlesnake-bitten Penny kills its mother, using her flesh to absorb the poison from his wound.

For a single year, fawn and lonely boy live together, through the backbreaking labor of farming, the devastation of flood, and the depredations of bears and wolves on the family’s livestock. But as Jody wavers on the outer edge of childhood, the fawn’s wild nature reasserts itself. When its destruction of their crops brings the family to the brink of starvation, Penny must give an order that will push Jody unwillingly into manhood.

With her farm’s orange crop lost to late freezes, Rawlings was delighted by the revenue generated when The Yearling was chosen as the Book-of-the-Month Club’s selection for April 1938. It would get a Pulitzer Prize and be made into an award-winning movie, brining Rawlings the friendship of fellow Southerner (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Margaret Mitchell, and enough fame to cause confusion between the characters created by the two writers.

As Rawlings observed with self-deprecating humor, while the movie was being filmed, “a middle-aged former southern belle flounced up to her at a cocktail party and said, ‘If I was just ten years younger, honey, I’d be right out there in Hollywood this minute, playing Scarlett in your book.’”

The book, the movie, and Silverthorne’s biography of Rawlings are available at
www.amazon.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a March of thrillers and suspense with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.)

Adventure classics -- The lost Buddies

“A Christmas Memory”

by Truman Capote

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It was no secret that Truman Capote’s 1959 short story, “A Christmas Memory,” drew heavily on his childhood in small town Alabama, cared for by the same family of elderly, unmarried Faulk cousins who had cared for his orphaned mother Lillie Mae before him.

For Capote (known as Truman Persons until adopted by his stepfather), the soul of the Faulk house was Nanny Rumbley Faulk, born in 1871 and known by everyone in the tiny town of Monroeville as “Sook.”

“When Truman Capote and I were children,” Capote’s cousin and contemporary, Jennings Faulk Carter, recalled later, “we always thought of Sook as our friend. Unlike the other adults who scolded, ruled, and otherwise tried to mold us into something they thought we should be, Sook was different. She let us be children, because in her own way she was as much a child as we were.”

“She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend,” Capote wrote in his best-remembered short story. “The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.”

“She might have been a little slow, but she wadn’t nothing like Truman made her out to be,” objected Jennings’ mother Mary Ida Carter (sister of Truman’s mother), as Marianne M. Moates writes in her biography, A Bridge of Childhood: Truman Capote’s Southern Years.

“He likes a good story, Mother,” Moates reported Jennings Carter replying. “He knows what will sell.”

“Well, he ought to try selling the truth,” was Mary Ida’s reply.

There was no doubt that Sook’s oddity and reclusiveness -- possibly the result of a severe childhood illness -- was the truth, even by Mary Ida’s definition. But how much else is truth -- historical truth -- and how much is Capote’s invention in his poignant story of the last Christmas together of an abandoned child and a childlike woman, each the other’s best friend? They bake fruitcakes together, make simple decorations and simple gifts for each other, while trying to evade the true adults, who “have power over us, and frequently make us cry.”

And how much truth had there been in the story of that first Buddy, the one Sook loved enough to bestow his name on the best friend of her second childhood? Was he only a charming figment of Capote’s imagination?

“When she saw Truman (on his last visit to Monroeville) she didn’t smile or open her arms as she had done so many times before,” Jennings Carter remembered. “She held him at arm’s length and looked at him. ‘My, my, Truman, you’ve grown. You’re grown now.’ Her Buddy was no longer the magic young person. . . (he) was one of those strange adults that Sook didn’t know how to respond to. She gave him one last look as if to say good-bye, then turned and walked slowly back to her room muttering, ‘Grown now. You’re grown now.’”

I turned to the family tree in Moates’s biography, listing the nicknames of the Faulk cousins -- “Sook” for Nanny, and “Bud” for her slightly-older brother, John Byron. Although he lived until 1934, in the 1880’s that first “Bud” would have become an adult, severing his relationship of fellow child and best friend with his sister Sook. As adulthood had placed Capote also outside Sook’s sphere. She never grew up, but her Buddies did, leaving her behind forever, the lost little girl.

Truman Capote

Both Moates’s book and “A Christmas Memory” are available on Amazon, but you can also watch the 1966 television version, narrated by Capote himself, by searching for Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" (1966) at www.youtube.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics continues a December of spirited classics with Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”)