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88 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
598 pages of a Unique Talent & Troubled Life, March 28, 2001
This review is from: The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Paperback)
Impressively detailed account of the life of one of America's great southern writers. In her lifetime, Carson McCullers was many things to many people, and the conflicting accounts are fascinating. She could be very charming and attentive, a soft-spoken original with deeply engaging, large eyes. But she was a difficult friend to many, becoming obsessively clingy and demanding of attention. A bitch and an angel; as unshakably sulky or as light-hearted as a child. Her hair she always carefully brushed, and yet sometimes she wore outfits so outlandish, she was mistaken for a tramp. (that's hobo, not slut). She was a sensitive and imaginative author who touched many hearts with her unsentimental writings about human longing. Reading this book has been a strange ride. As impartial as the text is, it is next-to-impossible to avoid getting emotional as the reader, as I will explain in a moment. The biographer has done a fantastic job of getting those who knew Carson to come forward with their various memories. It is very well-written, with family trees, thorough footnotes, many voices, interesting photos, an appendix consisting of summarized events in McCullers' life, and an excellent index. A generally well-edited and constructed biography, I find no fault with the biographer. It's the life of Carson McCullers that is so twisted and sour. That said, there are fun stories about living with Gypsy Rose Lee and of staying at Yaddo, the famous writers' retreat. But Carson's life was not easy. Tales of her drinking and near-delusional imagination, of her horrendous fights with husband Reeves McCullers, of lingering ill health, and of her leeching on friends has made reading this quite impartial book a considerably saddening adventure. Nestled in the text is the rather interesting nugget stating that, soon after McCullers hit the literary big time with her The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she was told during a psychiatric Rorschach evaluation that if her neuroses were to be cured, she would lose her ability to write so sensitively. (!) Increasingly, McCullers lived her life with a disturbing mix of exaggerated suffering, of need and meanness, along with what the biographer saw as an irresistible love of love itself. But this reviewer is sure that some of her friends must have felt like flies caught in a puddle of spilt honey. It has been interesting to read about how McCullers worked, and how she drew inspiration from real life events, acquaintances and their own tales. This haunting biography could be of interest to other writers, if only as a kind of caveat. The thoroughness of Carr's work allows an observant reader to glean lessons about the power of the human spirit and the destructiveness of the attitude that insanity fuels talent.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers--A Study in Trivial Pursuits, August 16, 2010
Out of respect for the work ethic, add an extra half star to this review. Of the many biographies I have read, Virginia Spencer Carr's "The Lonely Hunter" is by far the most torturous. As I slogged through 537 pages chronicling the life and times of this talented but complex personality, I couldn't help but think of the young schoolboy who when his teacher observed he showed an interest in sharks, brought him a book on that subject. Later she asked her student if he had learned much about sharks. The boy replied, "Yes, more than I wanted to know." One certainly can't accuse Ms. Carr of not doing her research (21 pages of source citations) in McCullers' biography. It's as if she needs to account for every hour of her subject's life. Like Carson's omnipresent thermos of hot tea and sherry, we are asked to sip every detail of her life to the very last drop.
I read "The Lonely Hunter" to learn more about a young woman who at the age of twenty-three wrote the wonderful novel "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." I was intrigued by how Carson, at such a young age, could write that poignant story with a skill and wisdom that comes only with practice and life experience. In this regard Carr delivers. She explains McCullers' fascination with "fringe" people, those human beings who because of physical, mental or social defects walk the darker paths of humankind. Thus the deaf mute John Singer in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." Carson's "we of me" concept, a sort of psychic menage a trois, many of which involved McCullers herself during her life, translates to similar relationships between the pages of her books.The young girl Mick Kelly in Carson's novel has her "inner room," where she keeps her dreams, her goals, her love of music, an expression of McCuller's own talent for and devotion to music. Carr relates, too, how her subject's thesis that an antagonism forms in "lover/beloved" realtionships manifests itself in Carson's stories. I was disappointed Carr did not reveal more about McCullers' austere writing style, her masterful use of the simple declarative sentence. And though the biographer cites the many books and authors Carson read, she makes no connection between these and McCullers' craft.
Carson McCullers was a complex human being as Spenser Carr so well reveals, a daughter fussed over and smothered by an adoring mother to the point Carson became a lifelong egocentric, a person to be suffered by her friends (though willingly by most), needy to the point of being parasitic. I found Carson's abandonment of her suicidal husband Reeves (she married him twice) indefensible. But as is often the case with many artists, they are ennobled only by their art.
Like her fellow Georgian and contemporary Flannery O'Connor (they lived only 130 miles apart, even were granted extended stays at the artists' colony Yaddo, but never met--strange...), Carson experienced health issues for much of her adult life (O'Connor died of lupus at the age of 39; McCullers age 50). And thanks to Spenser Carr the reader must endure it too; every trip to the hospital, every illness, every bout with the flu, nearly every runny nose, we are present at her bedside. McCullers' pregnancy and abortion, though, receives a scant paragraph and a half. (Given Carson's liberal attitudes toward sex, whether the father was husband Reeves or one of the many men in her life, the author never says.) Furthermore,an abortion would seem to be a major life event to an adult woman. But only a paragraph and a half??
Other readers might appreciate Carr's thorough research and meticulous attention to detail, but after the first few chapters the book to me became a drone of minutiae: like panning gold, I had to sift a great deal of sand before I came to the precious flecks. As I turned the final page, I found myself thinking much the same as the boy and his sharks--I learned much more about Carson McCullers than I needed--or wanted--to know.
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