Carson McCullers: The Member of the Wedding

I finished this novel a little while back but it was so strange and haunting that it’s taken me a moment to assemble my thoughts on it. For all that Carson McCullers’s glinting prose is jewel bright and emotionally resonant, this is a troubled and oblique book; one that leaves you with the sense of the aching unsaid. The copy I was reading was a rescued bookstore return, which is to say the clump of paperback pages without their cover, and as I was reading, I gradually came to understand that backless paperback as a metaphor for both Carson McCullers and the central protagonist of the novel, the awkward adolescent, Frankie Addams. It felt so fragile in my hands with nothing but its naked glue binding to hold it all together, and as I held it up to the light, so that light glowed through the spine, reminding me constantly of its delicacy, the risk that at any moment it might fall apart. And yet that binding turned out to be extremely tenacious, and despite the constant handling the book received, it hasn’t lost a page, nor does it seem likely to. That combination of frailty and strength seems to me to lie at the heart of the solitary, sad world that McCullers creates.

When it was first reviewed in 1946, John Mason Brown said of the novel: ‘most of it takes place through the medium of desultory conversations between three really weird people sitting in an even weirder kitchen. Nothing, or almost nothing occurs here, and yet every page is filled with a sense of something having happened, happening, and about to happen.’ I could see why this had been made into a successful play as it is organised with the same dramatic intensity. Over the course of one long drawn out summer’s afternoon, Frankie Addams, motherless, aimless, and alone, chats, eats and plays cards with her obligatory companions, Berenice the coloured housekeeper who provides the voice of loving wisdom, and John Henry, Frankie’s little cousin who is as odd and eccentric as only the very young and wholly unself-conscious can be. There is a sense of distinct hierarchy in the world beyond the kitchen, and these three individuals find themselves hovering somewhere near the bottom of it. This situation is one that Frankie finds intolerable; excluded from the older girls’ club, recently moved back into her own bedroom after years of sleeping companionably alongside her father, and overwhelmingly jealous of her brother’s impending marriage, Frankie is unwittingly forced to face her own isolation.

‘She was an I person who had to walk around and do things by herself. All other people had a we to claim, all other except herself. When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge, or her church. The we of her father was the store. All members of clubs have a we to belong to and talk about. The soldiers in the army can say we, and even the criminals on chain-gangs. But the old Frankie had had no we to claim, unless it would be the terrible summer we of her and John Henry and Berenice – and that was the last we in the world she wanted.’

‘The we of me’ for Frankie abruptly becomes her brother and his new bride, and in a flash of projected desire that she takes for a premonition, Frankie is determined that after the wedding she should go and live with the newly-weds. This fantasy is profoundly transformative, reflected in the way she decides to call herself F. Jasmine, to mark a break away from her childhood self, but it is also emotional suicide, for everyone but Frankie can see that this is a plan that will never come good. Reason, however, is not about to make an impact on Frankie when this simple shift in perspective has turned her into a new person to herself, brightened the world and provided a repository for all the intense, excessive desires that have been so far denied an outlet. The wildness with which the new, improved Frankie bursts free is alarming, though. At one point in their conversation, as she gets carried away imagining her new life, she grabs a butcher’s knife from a drawer and runs around the table declaring: ‘We will just walk up to people and know them right away. We will be walking down a dark road and see a lighted house and knock on the door and strangers will rush to meet us and say: Come in! Come in! We will know decorated aviators and New York people and movie-stars. We will have thousands of friends…’ The ferociousness of emotions, their jumbled-up over-proximity to one another is the particular curse of the adolescent, but it is not too far from being a fundamental truth of the human condition. The recognition and adulation Frankie aspires to, and the implicit fury that they are refused her, combine to make the guilty, secret, inner conflict of most of humanity.

The French philosopher Georges Bataille, proposed that living is difficult because we know that we are ‘discontinuous’ beings, separate from one another in an intolerable way. The continuity of the womb, or ultimately of death, is the condition we truly desire, but in its absence we are forced to ever more extraordinary lengths to feel connection and union with others. ‘ “I think I have a vague idea what you were driving at”,’ Berenice tells Frankie. ‘ “We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught.” ‘ It’s hard not to read into these descriptions the life of Carson McCullers herself, caught by a series of strokes while still young, emotionally tied to a man she married twice, tormented by alcohol and thoughts of suicide. Yet McCullers was strong, too, and remained creative and engaged in her life until the very end. I won’t spoil the end of the book for people who might want to read it, but the fallout of the wedding, ugly and distressing as it is for Frankie, does not ultimately dim her spirit, nor her drive for self-preservation and self-glorification. Human beings may be stuck and separate and lacking purpose, this novel suggests, but the absurd life within them lives on relentlessly.

I’m not sure that the word ‘pleasure’ is the right one to describe the process of reading this book. It’s painful and recalcitrant, if lyrically written. McCullers’s prose brushes continually up against the surreal, and it’s very disconcerting, but it also works. Her descriptions ring vibrantly true and the world she creates is a hypnotic and powerful one. But unlike The Great Gatsby, say, where the suffering of life is rendered beautiful, McCullers’s voice refuses to sublimate what’s harsh and bitter. It was an experience to read her work, and whilst I think I will be drawn back to her other novels, I’ll want the aftertaste of this one to fade away first.