Photo of the Day: Carson McCullers House, Nyack NY

Eighty-five years ago this month, a debut novel of unusual sensitivity, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published. The author, the Georgia-born Carson McCullers, achieved wide acclaim for this study of a deaf mute and those who encounter him.

In 1945, McCullers moved into the house in this photo, which I took last month on my way to the Nyack Public Library in Rockland County, NY. 

Here, for the next 22 years until her death in 1967, under increasingly difficult physical and emotional conditions, the author turned out additional novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and autobiographical works filled with compassion for the misfits and dreamers of the world—those similar to herself.

Here also, Marilyn Monroe, playwright husband Arthur Miller, and novelist Isak Dinesen came to lunch in February 1959 (an encounter I discussed in this blog post from 17 years ago).

From a sign outside, it appears that her former home is being renovated by Aurell Garcia Architects, so I did not step inside. It will be interesting to see how it will be used and visited when the process is completed.

Quote of the Day (Carson McCullers, on ‘The Most Fatal Thing a Man Can Do’)

“The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.”—American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet Carson McCullers (1917-1967), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1941)

Quote of the Day (Carson McCullers, on a ‘Dreary’ Southern Town)

“The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. On Saturdays the tenants from the near-by farms come in for a day of talk and trade. Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all the other places in the world. The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away. The winters here are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot.”— Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943)

This Day in Literary History (McCullers and Dinesen Meet Miller and Monroe)

February 5, 1959 – At the request of a writer she had come to admire, the Baroness Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), Carson McCullers held a luncheon at her home in Nyack, N.Y., that brought together the Out of Africa memoirist with America’s reigning sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, and Monroe’s husband, Arthur Miller.

A former colleague who has remained my great friend more than 20 years later introduced me to Nyack. In certain ways, this Rockland County village reminds me of my hometown, Englewood, N.J.—a community accessible to New York City by public transportation, multicultural, overwhelmingly Democratic in politics, and enjoying something of a downtown revival in recent years.

Yet, for all of Englewood’s galleries, Nyack has an even more powerful arts presence. Residents of the village have included not only McCullers, but also realist painter Edward Hopper, playwright Charles MacArthur and his wife Helen Hayes, and Rosie O’Donnell. The plethora of beautifully preserved Victorian homes are an artistic asset all by themselves.

I noticed on the Web that a link to the McCullers Center in town – presumably, the novelist’s longtime home – is no longer active. I hope that the home is still operating. If those walls could only talk!

For starters, I’d love to hear the voices from this particular encounter. I first became aware of this grand summit of celebrated female misfits when I read First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings, a 1994 collection of vivid color drawings and accompanying essays that originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, created by the husband-and-wife team of Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel. The 1975 Virginia Spencer Carr biography of McCullers, The Lonely Hunter, filled in the details.

At a joint meeting of the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in January 1959, McCullers not only had the chance to meet the Danish writer whose African tales she had admired for years, but also fulfill one of the latter’s wishes: to meet Monroe. Even the particular dietary requirements of “Tanya” (the English name by which Dinesen wanted to be known) – oysters, white grapes, and champagne – proved to be only a temporary obstacle.

At the dinner, the normally loquacious McCullers yielded the floor to her wraithlike foreign guest, who related a story that her Southern-born host later claimed was used verbatim in Dinesen’s collection Shadows on the Grass two years later. Monroe had her own tale to relate – her hilariously misguided attempt to whip up the kind of homemade noodles that her mother-in-law used to make in “the old country”.

Later, McCullers would claim that she played a record, whereupon the three women danced together on top of her black marble dining table—an account that Miller disputed, given the frail condition of the hostess and her 80-something-pound, wrinkled foreign guest.

No matter—what was true was that Dinesen compared the American actress to a lion cub in her vitality and innocence, and that, in Miller’s summation of the relationship between his wife and his hostess, “there was certainly a natural sympathy between the two women who lived close to death.”