- I am an American naturally and I'm a Southerner, and that's all, I guess.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] In early March, 1967, the writer Carson McCullers celebrates her 50th and last birthday at New York's Plaza Hotel.

She has traveled by ambulance from her home in Nyack, accompanied by her housekeeper, Ida Reeder, and receives her guests at her bedside in the city's most iconic hotel.

After several strokes, her hand is paralyzed and her ability to speak is reduced.

She has been unable to walk since the fall three years before.

Her novel, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," published in 1940, made her a prodigy on the American literary scene.

Her work comprises only five novels, two plays, and 22 short stories, almost all of which are set in the American South.

Her relatively small but powerful oeuvre is one of the most important in American literary history.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - I think that every writer writes of our own, of his own childhood scenes.

I think when you about 15, you really have, your impressions have already been set.

- One of the things that strikes me very much about your books is the openings.

Do you work very hard at them?

- Oh, very, very hard.

For instance, "The Member of the Wedding."

I struggled for a whole year before I got the first paragraph.

That's a long, long time.

- That's a long time.

- A whole year for one paragraph.

- [Tennessee] This is the first chapter, "The Member of the Wedding."

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- [Tennessee] "It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was 12 years old.

This was a summer when for a long time, she had not been a member.

She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.

Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.

In June, the trees were bright, dizzy green, but later the trees darkened and the town turned black and shrunken under the glare of the sun.

The sidewalks finally became too hot for Frankie's feet, and also she got herself in trouble.

The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer.

At last, the summer was like a green, thick dream or like a salad, crazy jungle under glass."

- I was exactly a child like that.

These unsupervised children who wander around in gangs and get into trouble.

This was my life.

So I thought it was amazing that she could show us the way we really were without sentimentality.

So I felt that she not only described these worlds, but really made them come to life in a way that I recognized.

- I had never read a writer that I felt so similar to.

I'd never felt, I'd never read a writer that I felt understood me as well and was writing about the same struggles that I was dealing with at the time myself.

And I always say that it's like Emily Dickinson's definition of poetry.

She's always said that, "You know it's poetry when it feels like the top of your head has been taken off."

And in reading Carson's work, it really felt like the top of my head had been taken off.

- So the first thing was I wrote a play about her.

Then I wrote a novel about her.

Then I wrote a movie about her.

I'm still not done, you know, because I think the biggest mystery for me about her is how come she was able to identify with so many different kinds of people and fully humanize them from within in a way that so few people have ever been able to do?

- I would say that the difference with McCullers is that there's a real sort of sympathy and empathy for those characters.

It isn't just that she frames them, it's that she gives us a sense of what it's like to be them, of what they feel.

- [Narrator] Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia on February 19th, 1917.

Both parents grew up in the South and came from immigrant families who owned plantations and kept slaves.

Even before she was born, her mother, Marguerite, was obsessed with the idea of giving birth to a genius, preferably a musical genius.

(gentle music) - When I was a child, my own chief interest in life was music.

Daddy brought home a piano when I was five years old and I had just left to it and began to play.

- [Interviewer] And were you very, very good when you were a child?

- Well, yes, I think I was pretty good.

- Carson's mother decided even before she was born that this child was going to be special.

This child was gonna be a genius.

She was expecting the child to be a boy.

She even had the name Caruso, Enrico Caruso, chosen as her child's name, so that she would predestine greatness even in the child's name.

I'm not sure she was disappointed when she was born a girl, but she obviously had to rethink her naming at least.

So even with her mother's milk, Carson would've grown up with this idea of her mother thinking that she was going to be a genius and always looking around for what it was she was going to be genius at.

- She loved music and she started taking lessons, I think as soon as her hands were big enough, and was very good.

It's very hard to figure out.

People talk many times about whether or not she could have been a concert pianist or not, but that's what she was training for.

And interestingly, you can see this in "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" and the character Kelly, the girl who's goes and listens to Beethoven in the bushes outside people's house and just says, her thing is, "I want to be a composer."

You know, "I didn't wanna be a concert pianist.

I wanted to write that music myself."

But nobody knew how a Southern girl could become a composer.

- [Speaker] "These nights were secret and of the whole summer, they were the most important time.

In the dark, she walked by herself and it was like she was the only person in the town.

Whenever she was in the dark, she thought about music.

While she walked along the streets, she would sing to herself and she felt like the whole town listened without knowing it was Mick Kelly.

She learned a lot about music during these free nights in the summertime.

When she walked out in the rich parts of town, every house had a radio.

All the windows were open, and she could hear the music very marvelous.

After a while, she knew which houses tuned in for the program she wanted to hear.

There was one special house that got all the good orchestras.

And at night, she would go to this house and sneak into the dark yard to listen.

There was beautiful shrubbery around this house.

And she would sit under a bush near the window, and after it was all over, she would stand in the dark yard with her hands in her pockets and think for a long time.

The announcer said something about Beethoven and they were going to play his third symphony.

How did it come?

For a minute, the opening balanced from one side to the other, like God strutting in the night.

The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart.

Each note like a hard, tight fist that socked at her heart.

And the first part was over.

The music left only this bad hurt in her and a blankness.

She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes.

She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her.

Now that it was over, there was only her heart like a rabbit, and this terrible hurt.

- I can't play the piano now 'cause my bad arm, see, but- - [Interviewer] But you like to hear it?

- But I love to hear music and hear it at home every day.

But I miss... I used to start the day with playing a few every day of Bach.

- Of Bach?

- Yes.

Huh?

- [Interviewer] Would agree with you.

Yes.

- And that would set the whole tone of my day, you know?

- [Narrator] The child prodigy Carson McCullers receives piano lessons from Mary Tucker, with whom she forms a very close bond.

She not only plays Bach, but also Beethoven and Liszt, whose "Hungarian Rhapsody Number Two" becomes her showpiece.

Mother Marguerite Smith invites her neighbors to her talented daughter's performances.

Her dreams seem to have come true.

- It's so rare for someone's mother to think that their daughter is a genius.

Like, I can't even think of another example of that.

Someone who will tell the people in the town, when the people in the town are complaining, "Oh, she wears pants.

She smokes."

And their mother is like, "Well, she has to because she's gonna be an artist someday."

This is so liberating, it's so freeing, and it's something that is, very sadly, so rare, you know?

So she was allowed to flower.

- Her mother doted on her.

She was her mother's favorite.

She always said so, and one has that feeling that that is very true.

So her mother was there all the time to give her what she needed, whether that was food, or affection, or support, or care through all her illnesses.

So this was a girl who was used to being deeply loved by her mother, but also her mother was demanding 'cause mother was demanding you have to be a genius.

You know?

So that's a big pressure on a little girl.

It's not unconditional.

With conditions.

- [Narrator] However, the child has another talent.

She writes plays and later short stories.

When she falls seriously ill with rheumatic fever at the age of 15, which is initially misdiagnosed as pneumonia, she begins to doubt whether she has enough stamina and talent for a career as a concert pianist.

- [Speaker] "That morning, after she had practiced from six until eight, her dad had made her sit down at the table with the family for breakfast.

She hated breakfast.

It gave her a sick feeling afterward.

But this morning, her dad had put a fried egg on her plate, and she had known that if it burst so that that slimy yellow oozed over the white, she would cry.

And that had happened.

The same feeling was upon her now, her hands still twitching unconsciously to the motions of the fugue, closed over her bony knees.

Tired, she was.

A wunderkind, a wunderkind, a wunderkind.

The syllables would come out rolling in the deep German way, roar against her ears, and then fall to a murmur, along with the faces circling, swelling in distortion, diminishing to pale blobs.

The keys of the piano hemmed her in, stiff, white, and dead-seeming.

Her hands rounded over the keys and then sank down.

The first notes were too loud, the other phrases followed dryly.

She tried again.

Her hands seemed separate from the music that was in her.

Her pale face leaned over too close to the keys.

She played through the first part and, obeying a nod from him, began the second.

There were no flaws that jarred on her, but the phrases shaped from her fingers before she had put into them the meaning that she felt.

She wanted to start it with subdued viciousness and progress to a feeling of deep, swollen sorrow.

Her mind told her that, but her hands seemed to gum in the keys like limp macaroni, and she could not imagine the music as it should be.

She felt that the marrows of her bones were hollow and there was no blood left in her.

Her heart that had been springing against her chest all afternoon, felt suddenly dead.

She saw it gray and limp and shriveled at the edges like an oyster.

Her lips shook like jelly and a surge of noiseless tears made the white keys blur in a watery line.

'I can't,' she whispered.

'I don't know why, but I just can't.

Can't anymore.'"

(tense music) - [Narrator] Carson McCullers grows up during the time of racial segregation in the Southern states.

Black and white neighborhoods are strictly segregated.

The descendants of slaves have only formal rights.

Even as a child, she sensed this injustice, witnessed several incidents in which Black people were humiliated, and repeatedly made it the subject of her works.

- [Speaker] "In my childhood, the South was almost a feudal society, but the South is complicated by the racial problem.

To many a poor Southerner, the only pride that he has is the fact that he's white.

And when one's self pride is so pitiably debased, how can one learn to love?

Above all, love is the main generator of all good writing.

Love, passion, compassion are all welded together."

- One of the big questions about her, and you see it from the beginning of her work, okay, she grew up in segregated Georgia, yet she has scenes in her work in which only Black people are in the room.

Now I don't know what it's like when only Black people are in the room, 'cause as soon as I'm in the room, it changes.

So how did she know this?

- As someone that had spent that much time in Columbus reading "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," really it touched me.

It felt like completely true to my experience of growing up in this environment and around this place.

That was what really jumped out and struck me, was that these voices sounded different, unique, and they each had a perspective that felt grounded and authentic.

The fact that a young white woman was able to not just inhabit the voice of a Black male character, but actually follow the character to his home, to intimate conversations with his family members, and it still feels true, I thought, wow, (laughs) she's really good.

- [Speaker] "Far from the main street, in one of the negro sections of town, Dr.

Benedict Mady Copeland sat in his dark kitchen alone.

It was past nine o'clock and the Sunday bells were silent now.

Dr.

Copeland's house was different from many other buildings nearby.

It was built solidly of brick and stucco.

All of his life, he knew there was a reason for his working.

He always knew that he was meant to teach his people.

All day, he would go with his bag from house to house, and on all things he would talk to them.

The whole Negro race was sick, and he was busy all the day and sometimes all the night.

After a long day, a great weariness would come in him.

The feeling that would come on him was a black, terrible feeling.

He would try to sit in his office and read and meditate, until he could be calm and start again.

He could not stop those terrible things.

And afterward, he could never understand.

A few nights ago, a drunken white man had come up to him and begun pulling him along the street.

He had his bag with him and he was sure someone was hurt.

But the drunkard had pulled him into a white man's restaurant, and the white men at the counter had begun hollering out with insolence.

He knew that the drunkard was making fun of him.

Even then, he had kept the dignity in him."

- I'm amazed that she, you know, Dr.

Copeland is a Marxist.

And she knows the Marxist line, you know, and it's very accurate, and she knew that to Reeves and Edwin Peacock.

But here she had in the "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," Blount goes to Copeland after there's been the tragedy in jail when Copeland's son is killed.

- [Speaker] "'In the face of brutality, I was prudent.

Before injustice, I held my peace.

I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole.

I believed in the tongue instead of the fist.

As an armor against oppression, I taught patience and faith in the human soul.

I know now how wrong I was.

I have been a traitor to myself and to my people.

All that is rot.

Now is the time to act and to act quickly, fight cunning with cunning and might with might.'

'How?'

Blount asks.

Copeland continues, 'By getting out and doing things, by calling crowds of people together and getting them to demonstrate.

I have a program.

It is a very simple concentrated plan.

I mean to focus on only one objective.

In August of this year, I plan to lead more than 1000 Negroes in this country on a march, a march to Washington, all of us together in one solid body.'"

(crowd murmurs) - The March on Washington was in 1963.

Yeah, so she put it, she had foreseen the whole thing.

She was a prophet.

She said this about herself, that she was a prophet and she had seen it and she put it in her book.

I think it's also likely that in that community, that the idea of a march on Washington was something that had been discussed for decades.

- She was immersing herself to the point that it doesn't feel like appropriation to me.

It feels like she knows something, maybe not from her own vantage point, but she knows something true about the worlds that she's inhabiting in the writing.

She's either observed it or she's been able to connect it to something in her own life that she can speak through.

- [Speaker] "I yearn for one particular thing, to get away from Columbus and to make my mark in the world.

At first, I wanted to be a concert pianist.

My grandmother had willed to her gray eyed grandchild the only article of value she had, a beautiful emerald and diamond ring.

I put it on my hand just once because I knew I had to sell it.

My daddy, who was a jeweler in the town, sold it.

So I was able to go to New York."

- [Carson] Then when I was 17 years old, I went to New York and two marvelous things happened.

The first time I saw snow, a lot of snow, and my first story was accepted by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley of "Story Magazine."

Oh, that was a day.

And I not only felt proud but rich.

I was paid $25 I spent on that same afternoon, this great celebration.

- [Narrator] In the midst of the great economic crisis in which around 25% of all Americans are unemployed, her first day in New York is above all a struggle for survival.

After her money is stolen during her first few days in New York, she has to get by with odd jobs to finance her creative writing courses.

Her accommodation with a young woman who also comes from Columbus is poor and her situation hopeless.

She spends days in a phone booth in Macy's department store to warm up and read, and works as a typist for a comic magazine or as a dog walker.

At the end of the first semester, she returns to Columbus.

(gentle music) - [Speaker] "So in June of 1935, I went home and met Reeves McCullers at Edwin Peacock's apartment.

It was a shock, the shock of pure beauty.

When I first saw him, he was the best looking man I had ever seen.

He also talked of Marx and Engels.

I knew he was liberal, which was important to my mind in a backward Southern community."

- [Narrator] In 1937, Carson Smith, who has dropped her middle name, Lula, and Reeves McCullers marry in her parents' living room.

Reeves, who was stationed as a soldier at nearby Fort Benning, has bought his way out of the army.

He postpones his dream of becoming a writer in order to support them both.

He has a job as an insurance broker in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they move into a small apartment.

Carson writes her first novel with the working title, "The Mute," later "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter."

When she finds a publisher for her novel, he realizes that his dream of writing himself has been destroyed for the time being.

The couple's love of drinking, which leads to his early addiction to alcohol, fuels his jealousy of her success.

After the publication of "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," the couple moves to New York.

(calm music) ♪ New York is my destination ♪ ♪ New York is where I will be from ♪ ♪ New York is made for grander things ♪ ♪ Just like me ♪ - [Narrator] In June, 1940, Carson has an appointment with her publisher, Robert Linscott, at the Bedford Hotel in New York.

The hotel was a refuge for European artists and intellectuals who had fled the war.

Among the immigrants were Erika and Klaus Mann, who worked from here for the resistance against national socialism.

Carson, who wants to seek advice from Erika Mann for a book project about Jews from Germany, visits her in her room and meets the travel writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach for the first time.

She falls in love immediately.

- [Speaker] "She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life.

Beautiful blonde with straight, short hair.

There was a look of suffering in her face that I could not define."

♪ I saw your face ♪ ♪ I knew you'd haunt me for all of my life ♪ - [Speaker] "As she was bodily resplendent, I could only think of Myshkin's meeting with Nastasya Filippovna in "The Idiot," in which he experienced terror, pity, and love.

She was introduced by Erika as Madam Clarac.

She asked me to call her Emery right away, and we became friends immediately.

At her invitation, I saw her the next day and she said, 'You don't know what it means to be cured of this terrible habit.'

'What terrible habit?'

I asked.

'Didn't anybody tell you about me?'

'No,' I said.

'What's there to tell?'

'I had been taking morphine since I was 18 years old.'

She skipped abruptly to her wanderings in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and all the far east.

Fascinated as I was, I was bewildered.

'Are you in love with Mademoiselle Schwarzenbach?'

I said, 'I don't know.'

Quick and powerful as a panther, Reeves slapped me on the face.

And when I was trying to struggle up, he slapped me again.

It was the first time I'd ever been slapped in my life, and I was too surprised to speak."

- The question of McCullers' sexuality, I think, is relevant to understanding her work.

But it's a very complex understanding.

It's a very complicated issue.

And in many ways, she was very far ahead of her time.

And I think even in the ideas of sort of sexuality and sexual identity and gender identity, she was far ahead because I think Carson resisted labels regarding her sexuality her entire life.

Because her experience of relationships, her experience of love, her experience of how she expressed her sexuality, transcended all the categories that we all have always used regarding gender and sexuality.

- This not knowing who she was and not knowing where she stood is what allowed her to enter into the mindsets of all these characters.

Deaf mute, Jews, gay Filipino, dwarf, you know, all these different kinds of people who hadn't been represented before.

- [Narrator] She dedicates her second novel, "Reflections in a Golden Eye," to Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

The setting is an American army camp in the South, and the main character is a major who falls in love with an army private who is working as a groom in the army base's stables.

In addition to repressed homosexuality, the story deals with power structures in the army, self-harm, voyeurism, and sadism.

The book was made into a film in 1967 by John Houston with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in the leading roles.

- [Carson] Well, after the strain of finishing "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," I just couldn't stop writing, it seemed like.

I just heard about this wire at an army post near where I was living.

And in some way or another, just I began to see that soldier and see the situation.

- [Narrator] As the location is very similar to Fort Benning, the book causes a scandal in her hometown.

She receives a phone call from members of the Ku Klux Klan, threatening her.

- [Carson] But Ten, when you read that first paragraph of... - [Tennessee] Here's the first paragraph of "Reflections in a Golden Eye."

"An army post in peace time is a dull place.

Things happen, but then they happen over and over again.

The general plan of a fort in itself adds to the monotony, the huge concrete barracks, the neat rows of officers' homes built one precisely like the other, the gym, the chapel, the golf course, and the swimming pool.

All is designed according to a certain rigid pattern.

But perhaps the dullness of a post is caused most of all by insularity and by a circuit of leisure and safety.

But once a man enters the army, he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him.

At the same time, things do occasionally happen on an army post that are not likely to reoccur.

There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.

The participants of this tragedy were two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.

- In many of your books, you do have some pretty odd people.

I mean, hunchbacks, cripples, and of course the deaf mutes.

Do they stand for more than themselves?

- I think there's a kind of allegory between them and a symbolism rather.

Of man's isolation to each other.

And the terrible need to try to communicate and not to be able to communicate.

- "First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons.

But the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries.

Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored up love which has laid quiet within the lover for a long time, hitherto.

And somehow every lover knows this.

He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing.

He comes to know a new strange loneliness, and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer.

So there is only one thing for the lover to do.

He must house his love within himself as best he can.

He must create for himself a whole new inward world, a world intense and strange, complete in itself."

- That is her great theme.

This human need to connect with other people, which to me is sort of the great overarching theme of all of McCullers' work.

And that applies to people wherever they're from.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Her relationship with Reeves becomes increasingly difficult when she learns that he has been forging her checks and plundering her bank account.

She divorces him in 1941.

In the meantime, she has made new friends in New York.

One of them is George Davies, an editor who published her novel, "Reflections in a Golden Eye," in two issues of "Harper's Bazaar Magazine."

He offers her the chance to move in with him and other friends in an artist's house in Brooklyn.

Among them, the British poet, WH Auden, the composer Benjamin Britten, the burlesque dancer, actress, and writer, Gypsy Rose Lee, the writers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Gala and Salvador Dali, and the siblings, Erika and Klaus Mann.

The shared house goes down in history as February House, so christened by the writer, Anais Nin, because almost all of the residents were born in February.

- This new group of people that she had just encountered after moving to New York, who were freely expressing their sexuality in a way that she was probably marveled at, having just arrived from Columbus, Georgia, where people were always having to, even if they were behaving, following their nature sexually, they had to do it in a hidden way.

They had to do it in a way that ultimately harmed them because they were having to live double lives or something.

So I think she was really, that early in her career at age 23, 24, was already clear about these issues.

And she would live that way the rest of her life.

(calm music) - [Narrator] Between 1940 and 1954, she repeatedly spent several months at the Yaddo artist residence in Saratoga Springs to write undisturbed, made possible by the director at the time, Elizabeth Ames.

Here she learns of the death of her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach, with whom she has been writing letters since they met in 1940, in which they affirm their affinity and affection for each other.

Schwarzenbach died on November 15th, 1942, from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident in Sils, Switzerland.

- [Speaker] "From Switzerland, she wrote the last of her many beautiful letters.

'Thank you forever, Carson.

Remember our moments of understanding and how much I loved you.

Don't forget the terrific obligation of work.

Be never seduced.

Write.

And darling, take care of yourself, as I will.

And never forget, please, what has touched us deeply.

Your Annemarie, with all my love and affection.'"

- [Narrator] Two years later, her father, Lamar Smith, dies in his jewelry shop in Columbus.

In his hand, he holds an issue of "The New Yorker," containing a short story by his daughter Carson.

Shortly afterwards, her mother Marguerite moves to Nyack, just up the Hudson River from New York City, and buys a house for herself and her two daughters, Rita and Carson.

In June 1946, Carson receives a letter from a famous playwright, Tennessee Williams.

He invites her to his summer house on the vacation island of Nantucket.

- [Carson] By the way, it was Tennessee who got me into writing "The Member of the Wedding."

One summer he wrote me and said that he had a house in Nantucket and he felt he was very sick, he might die, and would I come and spend the summer with him?

(laughs) And so when I got there, this other girl was just leaving, some... A singer.

(audience laughs) And she gave me this rather peculiar look, which I didn't understand until I got there.

It was a kind of look of veiled compassion.

(audience laughs) Oh, when I got in the house, there was Ten, just as sweet as ever.

I never met him, seen him before.

- Can you imagine, Tennessee Williams writes you a letter and begs you to come and spend the summer with him.

He rented a house in Nantucket and she went to Nantucket and he said she got off the boat, the ferry boat, and she had a baseball cap and slacks and was in a man's shirt.

And he greeted her at the boat and took her to this house.

And they spent the summer with a long table.

And Tennessee sat at one end of the table, writing "Summer in Smoke."

And Carson sat at the other end of the table, turning "The Member of the Wedding" into a play.

And the two of them wrote together.

He said, "She's the only person in my life that I could ever stand to be in the same room when I'm working."

- [Carson] Now he just said, "Now you ought to make a play of 'The Member of the Wedding.'"

I said I didn't know anything about plays.

So Ten just sat down, said, "Well, just," and just blocked out the play and just said, "Now here, this ought to go in.

This ought to go in."

And said, "Just sit down and write."

So he- - I should interrupt and say, she disregarded all the suggestions.

(audience laughs) - And she did the cooking, mostly canned green pea soup with some little frankfurters cut up in the soup, and mashed potatoes with olives chopped up in the mashed potatoes.

Sounds ghastly, but that was Carson's way of cooking.

- [Carson] And every window in the house was broken.

When I woke up every morning with my bare feet, I would step on a fish head.

You know, the cat would bring in the fish in the windows, eat them, see?

But it was a good summer, all in all.

I mean, it was... (audience laughs) (audience applauds) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Carson McCullers' third novel, "The Member of the Wedding," which became a Broadway hit in 1950 and was performed 501 times, was made into a film two years later with the same cast as in the stage play.

It centers on 12-year-old boyish Frankie, who feels isolated from the world and her surrogate family, Black housekeeper, Bernice, and her six-year-old cousin, John Henry.

The entire story takes place mainly in a kitchen in a small Southern town that Frankie wants to escape.

Her dream is to accompany her older brother and his bride on their honeymoon.

- Frankie, you're spoiling our wedding.

- No, I'm not!

- [Narrator] Her longing for togetherness she calls "the we of me" remains unfulfilled.

- We are going to more places than you ever thought about or even knew existed.

Just where we'll go first, I don't know.

And it doesn't matter, 'cause after we go to that place, we're going on to another.

Alaska, China, Iceland, South America, traveling on trains, letting it rip on motorcycles, flying all over the world in airplanes!

We'll have thousands and thousands of friends.

(gentle music) - [Speaker] "The sinister illness that haunted my life all during my youth till the time I was 29, had asserted itself.

I lived in a constant fear of strokes.

After I had recovered and the recovery was complete, I returned to Brooklyn and wrote a few articles to cover my medical expenses."

- [Narrator] In 1945, Reeves, who had reenlisted in the army and fought in Europe, returned from the war.

During the war years, the two had an intense correspondence.

- [Speaker] "He was covered with campaign ribbons.

And when we walked down the street, everyone looked at him.

I, of course, was enormously impressed.

He was so darn sweet that I forgot the reason for my divorcing him in the first place.

I knew he was not faithful to me sexually, but that did not matter to me.

Nor am I an especially maternal woman.

I don't know why I felt I owed such devotion to him.

Perhaps it was simply because he was the only man I had ever kissed and the awful tyranny of pity.

Before I really knew what had happened, we were remarried."

- It's complicated, you know, from anyone to deal with that relationship because she was primarily lesbian, I think.

But she also loved Reeves.

Not as much as he loved her, as it turned out, but it was an important relationship.

I mean, you know, they married and they divorced and then they get married again.

That's pretty hetero.

(laughs) Or not, as it turns out, not hetero, but it was an important relationship.

- Carson's idea of love in the end is not erotic at all.

It's brotherly love.

It's agape love.

And in the end, she and Reeves come to this sort of understanding, before they have their terrible fallout at the end of his life, that it's really all about agape love.

This is what's important in life.

That it's not the erotic.

The erotic is just something that comes and goes and it's not really that important.

That's what she believes.

It's not what I believe.

It's not what a lot of people believe, but I think it really was the root of her ideology is brotherly love, and she meant it.

(tense music) - [Narrator] Although Carson is now severely weakened after three strokes, the two go on extensive trips to Europe.

- I think McCullers' desire to travel comes from very early in her life.

Once she figured out Columbus wasn't a place that she found tolerable, she realized that there were places far away from home that would be far more welcoming to her.

First it was New York, of course, but even her fiction, you could see her characters often fantasizing about being in European places, often alpine places, places where there were snow, places where foreign languages were spoken.

As soon as World War II was over and her husband came home from the war, they immediately came here to Italy.

As early as 1946, they came to Italy and were fantasizing about Reeves finding a job in one of the international organizations that was providing assistance to Europeans.

That turned out not to be possible.

- [Narrator] After longer stays in Rome, she bought a house in France near Paris in 1952.

Reeves, who now finally wants to write a novel, empties the wine cellar under his writing room instead.

Carson's addiction to alcohol also worsens her health.

Reeves tries to persuade Carson to commit suicide together.

In mortal fear, she leaves France and returns to Nyack.

On November 19th, 1953, Reeves McCullers commits suicide in a Paris hotel.

(solemn music) While Carson was writing her new play, "The Square Root of Wonderful," in Nyack, which was performed on Broadway two years later, her mother, Marguerite Smith, died unexpectedly on June 10th, 1955.

(solemn music) The following year, her paralyzed arm, which was operated on several times, caused her unbearable pain.

She continued to work on her play with the help of friends because she could barely operate the typewriter herself.

- I wrote her a letter and I said, "This has changed my life.

Your writing has affected my life very deeply, and I would give anything to meet you."

So the phone rang and she, "This is Carson McCullers."

She spoke in a very... I don't know if your viewers will understand Southern accents, but she and Tennessee Williams sounded very much alike.

If an alligator could talk, it would sound like Carson McCullers.

But anyway, she said, "Goodness and truth are such precious things.

I'm sending you mine.

Come see me.

I live in a house on Main Street in Nyack, New York, the color of vanilla ice cream.

And come about drink time, (laughs) about drink time."

So I did.

And that was the first time I met her, and she greeted me at the door in a nightgown, tennis shoes, and a baseball cap.

We ate at a table, a marble table where Arthur Miller came to dinner and with Isak Dinesen.

And Isak Dinesen and Arthur Miller brought Marilyn Monroe.

I suppose in that little house in Nyack, New York, she entertained many very famous people.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] The failure of her play, "The Square Root of Wonderful," which is canceled after only 45 performances, plunges Carson into a depression.

- The worst thing about her illness is she had to depend on other people totally, as it turned out.

Now she'd done that all her life with her mother, but she was also a very independent sort, you know, and that just rubbed her the wrong way.

- [Narrator] A doctor friend from New York refers her to a psychiatrist who lives in Nyack, Dr.

Mary E. Mercer.

Carson decides to have some of the therapy sessions recorded.

The material is to be turned into an autobiography.

(calm music) (calm music continues) After a year, Mary Mercer ends the therapist-patient relationship when Carson overcame her writer's block.

(calm music) Dr.

Mary Mercer becomes her closest confidant, caring for her until her death and giving her new courage to face life.

- Her psychiatrist was obsessed with her.

That's how charismatic she was.

And that's also amazing about her because she was a physical wreck.

She had had three strokes.

Her body was in terrible shape.

And she controlled, she was still so charming and had so much charismatic power over these people, even though physically nothing was working.

You know, her will is just unbelievable.

- It's always been interesting to me that the works for which Carson McCullers is most famous, you know, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter," "Ballad of the Sad Cafe," "Reflections in a Golden Eye," "Member of the Wedding," she wrote or had those works underway all within a 10 year period.

It was an incredible burst of creativity.

And maybe it's one of the reasons why the overarching themes are common to all those stories, right?

It's almost like one writing project that she's working on.

And then she had great difficulty, of course, finishing that last novel, "Clock Without Hands."

And I think a lot of people might have just given up, but she didn't.

- I don't think I want to ever write a novel without loving the characters passionately.

No matter how mean they are.

- [Interviewer] Yes.

- You kinda write, I mean, to understand is forgive.

And not only to forgive, but to love.

(gentle music) - [Speaker] "Death is always the same, but every man dies his own death.

Malone had never thought about his own death, except perhaps in connection with his life insurance.

But for him, his own death lay in a shady, unpredictable future.

He was an ordinary man, and his death was simply a law of nature.

The countless daily miracles that make up a person's vitality usually go unnoticed.

Malone, however, noticed a small miracle and was amazed.

Every morning that sad summer, he had awoken with a strange dread.

What was it?

The terrible thing that was to happen to him?

What was it?

When?

Where?

Then, when he was fully conscious and he could no longer lie still, so tormented were his thoughts he had to get up and wander through the hall and the kitchen with no particular destination, just walking and waiting.

The greatest danger, losing oneself, can happen so silently as if it were nothing.

Any other loss of an arm, or a leg, or $5, of a wife and so on, is bound to strike one."

- [Narrator] After another productive phase, Carson's condition deteriorated rapidly from 1965 onwards.

After a fall in which she breaks her hip, she spends three months in a hospital and is subsequently cared for in her home by her housekeeper, Ida Reeder.

She can no longer leave her bed.

While her second novel, "Reflections in a Golden Eye," is being filmed in Rome by John Houston, she begins to work on her legacy, her autobiography, "Illuminations and Night Glare."

- She decided that she was tired of being a recluse and an invalid.

And so she called an ambulance to come and get her and Ida and take them to New York and put them up at the Plaza Hotel.

Ray Stark, who was the producer of the film, "Reflections in a Golden Eye," said, "I will pay for everything if you'll come to the city and do an interview with 'The New York Times' about the film."

And I was the interviewer.

(solemn music) - [Narrator] The ambulance trip to New York is a test for Carson's final journey.

John Houston has invited her to Ireland to his famous house, St.

Clarence.

Together with Ida Reeder, she's subjected to the rigors of an overseas flight that she can only manage in a stretch bed.

Her leg is completely paralyzed and is to be amputated.

She spends her time in Ireland lying in a room in the frequent company of John Houston.

- He brought the world to her and she sort of held court there and people came to her.

And it was just the idea of being there, whether she got to see much of the countryside or experience much of Ireland itself, it was the fact that she was so far from home that she found so satisfying.

- [Narrator] After her return to Nyack, she dictates the last chapters of her autobiography until she falls into a coma on August 15th after a final stroke and cerebral hemorrhage.

After 47 days, the writer Carson McCullers died on September 29th, 1967, at the age of 50.

- I still feel that in her art and in her soul, that she's right here.

She's still right here with us, and she's still perfectly contemporary.

That's how I feel it.

- You are asking if I'm a happier person than my characters.

Well, I think sometimes yes, I'm very wildly happy, especially with what goes well.

But when it goes badly and I'm blocked, I'm wildly unhappy, just suicidal unhappy.

But usually I'm just, I enjoy life very much and I'm happy.

And praise God for being in this world.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) - [Narrator] On October 3rd, she is buried next to her mother's grave in Oak Hill Cemetery, overlooking the Hudson River.

Dr.

Mary E. Mercer dies in 2013 at the age of 102.

♪ Lover, beloved, my brave cavalier ♪ ♪ All of his love raising hatred and fear ♪ ♪ Lover, beloved, each craving the touch ♪ ♪ Each bears the burden of loving too much ♪ ♪ Each bears the burden of loving too much ♪ ♪ The man across the Styx will send ♪ ♪ Flowers from beyond the end ♪ ♪ The man across the Styx will be ♪ ♪ Her lover for eternity ♪