August Notebook

August is the difficult lesbian wife month

We now have the definitive Carson McCullers biography in Mary V. Dearborn’s Carson McCullers: A Life, which was published by Penguin earlier this year.

All the personal papers are finally available, all the archives unsealed, all the diaries and correspondence browsable, and Dearborn makes great use of them in this meticulous and tonally neutral old-school biography. While McCullers got married twice to the same man, her best and most devoted friend, Reeves McCullers, her sexual orientation was “older unavailable women”. Both Carson and Reeves had liaisons with other people, but Carson’s obsessive loves of sophisticated older ladies was a defining feature of her life in the way that Reeves bisexual affairs weren’t in his. Because the relationships were often all in her head (after a brief mutual infatuation, or a completely misread situation, the other woman would move on while Carson wouldn’t), Reeves called her women, somewhat cruelly, “imaginary friends”. No wonder McCullers’ novels are full of inarticulable, overwhelming yearning. Characters try to understand what is happening to them and fail - while the reader feels what they feel.