Reflections in a Golden Eye.
Inscribed to Lousie Dahl-Wolfe
McCullers, Carson. Reflections In A Golden Eye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
8vo.; offsetting from clipping to front pastedown; grey and cream cloth, stamped in black and yellow; dust-jacket printed in imitation of the covers. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of McCullers’s second novel. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to McCullers’s close friend, the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe: For Louise, With my Appreciation & my Love. May We Always Be Good Friends, Carson. At the foot of the page she has added, (am writing very soon) / (love to Joseph). With a New York Times notice, September 30, 1967, affixed to the front pastedown.
Carson McCullers—born Lula Carson Smith (1917-67)—was singled out by her mother at an early age as the most artistically promising of her children, and was nurtured in her literary and, even more, her musical aspirations. She moved to New York at seventeen and, when financial difficulties dashed her hopes for Julliard training as a concert pianist, she turned to writing, enrolling in classes at NYU and Columbia.
Despite her turning away from music and toward writing as a career, McCullers remained a ready performer and used music, her first love, as a metaphor and motif in her fiction. Although she had appeared preoccupied with her music as a young girl, Carson had always written stories and plays. It was in New York, however, that avocation turned into vocation and her writing habits were solidified. Because McCullers became a slow, meticulous writer and reviser [and because she died so prematurely, at 50] she did not produce a voluminous oeuvre, publishing only four novels, a novella, a play, a dramatic adaptation of one of her novels, a volume of children's verse, and several dozen stories, poems, and essays.
Her first published story, “Wunderkind,” appeared in Story magazine in early 1936, the year she wrote it. Drawing on her knowledge of the life of the aspiring musician, she wrote of a young piano student called Frances,
who realizes that she lacks the fire of genius, unlike the foreigners of her acquaintance, in whom true musical brilliance resides: her piano teacher, Mr. Bilderbach; his friend the violinist, Mr. Lafkowitz; and her contemporary, Heime Israelsky. She plays competently, but without drama and emotion, feeling instead ‘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.’ With this epiphany, she loses her identity as a wunderkind and becomes like all the other children playing in the noisy neighborhood.
That summer she met army corporal James Reeves McCullers, and fell in love. After their wedding in the fall of 1937 they moved to North Carolina, where she wrote her first and most enduring novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. After two years she was ready to send a substantial portion of the manuscript, and outlines for the rest, to Houghton Mifflin, and was awarded a $1500 fellowship to finish it. (“In her outline for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, McCullers announces that the novel deals with ‘the theme of man’s revolt against his own inner isolation and his urge to express himself as fully as is possible.’ With a contrapuntal method in mind, the author contrasts this overarching theme with five counter-themes…”) After its 1939 publication, the McCullers moved to New York, “where Carson, alienated from her native region and needing to establish some human connections, found a new home” not just in the city itself, but in the critical accolades, the admiration from a community of writers, and with a woman.
As Cook writes: "Like the autobiographical heroines of her novels, [Carson] was always searching for a new, exciting friend, waiting to be invited to a grand occasion, looking for an appreciative a
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