Word: carsons
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...student dentist with a mooching Irish father (Alan Hale) whose philosophy is: "I was never in the world cut out to be a street cleaner and there's no use reaching for the stars." Cagney loses the neighborhood strawberry blonde (Rita Hay worth) to a chiselling contractor (Jack Carson) and on rebound marries her girl friend (Olivia de Havilland). Later they visit the contractor, grown rich, where they dine under newfangled electric light. "Isn't it dangerous?" asks Olivia. Says Carson: "Not if you pay the bill...
...when the shrill horn of plenty was heard in the rest of the land, did little to cheer the literary consciousness of the South. In those years Carson Mc-Cullers grew up in Columbus, Ga. with a hopeless passion for good music, fine writing, kindly human relationships. Her family was not well off, her opportunities were limited, her observations bitter. At 20 she married a fellow Southerner and started work on her first novel, a long, cloudy story of a deaf-mute. Appearing last year under the publishers' makeshift title of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter...
Somehow amid the sherry bottles, the inchoate housekeeping, the atonal music and the inspired chitchat, Carson got on with her writing. Then, on doctor's advice, she returned to her family in the South' for rest. This week her second novel was published, under a title (this time) of her own choosing: Reflections in a Golden Eye. It is not the work of a normal 24-year-old girl...
...sphere, the novel is a masterpiece. It is as mature and finished as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, though still more specialized. Its story is about life as Carson McCullers sees fit to create it in a Southern Army camp, and is almost desperately psychomedical. Within its 183 pages a child is born (some of whose fingers are grown together), an Army captain suffers from bisexual impotence, a half-witted private rides nude in the woods, a stallion is tortured, a murder is done, a heartbroken wife cuts off her nipples with garden shears...
...almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase. She makes its tortures seem at least as valid as the dull suburban tragedies from Farrell's or Dreiser's Midwest, commonly called lifelike. Reflections in a Golden Eye is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan...