Virginia Spencer Carr (1929–2012)

It takes an extraordinary person to write such remarkable literature, and Carson McCullers was extraordinary to say the least. She has a complicated personality that ranged from vivacious and sweet to cold and sullen. She was an indulged child and an over-protected adult who lived as much in her own fantasies as she did in reality. She had an unusual number of friends who went to extreme lengths to prove their friendship, among them such notables as Tennessee Williams. She fed off of people and belonging, but I wonder if she ever felt a true part of anyone outside of herself.

She could sometimes seem very fragile, but her determination was limitless. Plagued by bad health and bad habits, she navigated her life like it was a story with an ever-changing plot, but belonging to someone else. After having known her husband Reeves for almost her entire life and having divorced and remarried him, and despite his attentive care during her illnesses, she dismissed his death as if it were just an inconvenience to her. That relationship seemed to me to speak volumes about her true character.

I do not think I would have liked her at all. She was far too needy and egotistical. Had she not been a brilliant writer, I doubt she would have garnered the love of so many. She was excused so much by everyone because of her genius and she seemed to take for granted that everyone else's needs would, by right, come in line behind her own. I would have loved to have had one ounce of her talent, however, and we could all do with some of her perseverance.

Carr managed to approach a very difficult subject with a great deal of care and honesty. She did not paint McCullers as anything other than a complex human being, neither good nor evil. I particularly enjoyed the section that dealt with the production of The Member of the Wedding for Broadway. So many of the people who made up McCullers friends and colleagues were well-known in their time, which made the reading all the more interesting. By the end of this thorough biography, you cannot help feeling that you know much of what made McCullers tick and have a deeper understanding of how her own life influenced her subjects and her work.… (mehr)

This is a voluminous, comprehensive, well-written book.

Carson was a precocious, musically gifted child who played the piano with prowess from an early age. She originally intended to study music at an illustrious college but when she lost the tuition money, she turned to writing instead.

Carson had always talked about how she was going to be rich and famous, though she didn’t know how; she thus proved the power of the spoken word. (Ok, I don’t know whether or not she actually became rich, but she certainly became famous.)

As a child, she was a prolific reader, reading all the classics – the books of Chekhov, Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Flaubert, James Joyce, etc. etc.

The book tells of Carson’s marriage and bisexual proclivities, of her female crushes, including on Greta Garbo, and her various friends, famous and otherwise.

I wasn’t able to get through the totality of this work, and skimmed through most of it. It is packed with information and I found it rather dense and not easy-to-read.

We are provided with many photos of Carson at various ages and of her family, friends and husband, Reeves.

Looking at the various photos of Carson, I found her astoundingly familiar, as though I’d known her well in a past or parallel life. I had never experienced this sort of thing before, strange!

Carson smoked excessively and constantly drank alcohol, so it was not surprising that she suffered severe health problems including several incapacitating strokes.

She died in 1967 at the age of 50.

The author presents us with detailed information about Carson’s life and relationships. I borrowed the book from the library, but you would need to own it to have the time and opportunity to fully appreciate it.… (mehr)

In 1989, Virginia Carr Spencer was researching into a biography of Tennessee Williams. Travelling to Tangier, Morocco, to interview William’s friend Paul Bowles, she quickly scrapped her plans, finding the author and composer much more interesting.

Carr rapidly became friends with the writer, well known for his tight-lipped attitude on his personal affairs, visiting and researching until Bowles’ death in 1999. Five years later, in Paul Bowles: A Life, Carr has released an engrossing yet superficial account of a life even richer than his fiction would hint at.

“At birth I was an exceptionally ugly infant,” Bowles begins his story. “I think my ugliness caused the dislike which my father immediately formed for me.”

Born to an authoritative father and a somewhat loving mother, Bowles developed a habit of ingrained secrecy that would last throughout his life. Embracing anything his father abhorred, Bowles ran away to Paris, trying his hand at every form of artistic expression.

Soon, Bowles’ life developed into a litany of the famous. He exchanges letters with Gertrude Stein. He becomes the student and lover of composer Aaron Copland. He writes the musical scores for Broadway productions by Williams, Orson Welles, and many others.

Later, his unusual marriage to Jane Auer, the both of them homosexual, would provide Bowles with a lifelong companion to his constant wanderlust. Wandering Europe and Africa with Jane in tow, each taking lovers along the way, provided Bowles with the impetus to try his hand at writing. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, is a seminal classic of Western alienation in a foreign land.

If there’s any aspect where Carr’s book truly suffers, it is that Bowles’ life was so full, so rich in detail, that a fully comprehensive picture of his life would be enormous. In trying to encompass a life devoted to exploration of the world and the self, a single-volume biography cannot help but seem shallow in comparison.

Where Carr succeeds is in illuminating portions of a life that up until now have remained shrouded, providing context where none previously existed. Bowles’ own biography, Without Stopping, a more poetic work than Carr’s, was so devoid of personal details, author William S. Burroughs famously described it as “without telling.”

It is also a lively representation of a bygone age of experimentation, where artists left America and traipsed the globe, suspicious of their homeland’s obsession with communism and fear of the unusual. There is a palpable sense of the end of an era when Jane falls ill, leading to Bowles’s realization that “at some point when I was not paying attention [life] had turned into a different sort of experience, to whose grimness I had grown so accustomed that I now took it for granted.”

Carr does not attempt any literary appreciation of Bowles’ writings, nor should she. Bowles’ many works stand alone as monuments of fiction. While not wholly satisfying, Paul Bowles: A Life proves that “Bowles was not a tourist, but a traveller.” A man of limitless gifts, Bowles was an explorer of the soul who never stopped.… (mehr)