Word: carsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...jammed local moviehouses, they are treacherously playing on nerves. One Cape Cod theater runs a telephone tape that announces, "Jaws is playing. See it before you go swimming." Shark jokes are all black; in an interview with "Hollywood's No. 1 star" on the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson asked a foam rubber great white, "How do you keep your teeth clean?" Snapped the shark: "I swallow people with naturals...
Alas, Virginia Spencer Carr is capable of ungainly paraphrase: "Carson quivered inside and yearned for acceptance." An associate professor of English at Columbus College in McCullers' birthplace, she spends the bare minimum of her 600 pages analyzing McCullers' texts. Instead, Author Carr vainly seeks to characterize the Creative Process: "She sank again into her pillows and gazed off with her great dark eyes into an imagined land called up at will...
...spite of herself, the biographer has succeeded. She has written one of those windy, overweight Southern books -the Gone With the Wind syndrome -that can do everything wrong except bore the reader. For seven indefatigable years she has tracked her subject: to New York City, where Carson lived in a household that included W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Richard Wright, among others; to the obligatory artists' colonies (Yaddo, Bread Loaf); even to London and Paris. Early on, she grabs her fey and monstrous main character by the toe and never lets go. The ghost of McCullers does the rest...
Almost everybody who knew Carson felt that friendship with her was an act of survival. "Carson burdened everyone who got close to her," Lillian Hellman complained. "I always felt Carson was a destroyer," concluded Elizabeth Bowen. As for Carson herself, she seemed "indestructible"-in the almost despairing word of her husband Reeves McCullers (who killed himself in a Paris hotel room after 16 years of marriage...
...needed resiliency to survive. Her youth was permanently maimed by a suffocating, overambitious mother who called her only "Little Precious." Her puerile "maturity" was filled with weeks of chain-smoking and drinking straight gin. Carson was hardly into her 20s when she suffered the first of several strokes. Anemia, pleurisy, a rheumatic heart and cancer followed in lethal succession. She was afflicted with a melodramatic bisexuality, a condition that made her fall in love with husbands and wives. Like the protagonist in her story A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, she could say: "Son, I can love anything." Nevertheless, Biographer...