Arrested Development

The long adolescence of Carson McCullers.

- By Maggie Doherty

McCullers was a brilliant but pampered writer, one who never quite grew up.

Throughout her life, the novelist Carson McCullers struck observers as preternaturally young. The biographer Leon Edel, who met her when she was thirty-seven, remarked on her "childish wonder."The French novelist Françoise Sagan wrote that she had the “laugh of a child forever lost." Like a child, she loved sweets, Christmas, and receiving presents on her birthday. Though she was tall a "slender wand of a girl," in the words of her protégé turned rival, Truman Capote-she was often described as "little": "an odd little 22-year old," a "little star."

If seemingly everyone agreed that McCullers was a child, they indulged her because she was a genius. The author of four novels, one novella, two plays, and sundry short stories and poems, McCullers ascended to literary fame when she was only twenty-three. Her début novel, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," wowed critics, who crowned her Faulkner's successor. In the decades that followed, McCullers devoted herself entirely to her work, relying on alcohol and an active fantasy life for inspiration. She relied, too, on a rotating cast of friends and family members, who cooked her meals, poured her drinks, listened to "her self-loving arias," and tucked her into bed at night. The playwright Tennessee Williams, McCullers's closest friend, thought she could be demanding, but he also thought that "when you remember the poetry of her work, you feel differently about her, appreciate her isolation and her longings, and you forgive her selfishness."