Over the years, people have asked if I’ve ever encountered the ghost of the person I was writing about. The answer has always been no. But with Carson McCullers, the southern writer of novels such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, it’s a little different. I spent two weeks living in the Georgia house where she spent her childhood and adolescence in the 1920s. Something was up in that green-and-white bungalow on Stark Avenue, in Columbus. While I’ve still never met a ghost, in McCullers’s house, I came damn close.
McCullers’s childhood home is a handsome little place with a generous stucco front porch, low rooflines, high ceilings, and a deep backyard with a scuppernong arbor. There are camellia japonica shrubs in front and a holly tree as tall as the house in back. Her family moved there in 1926, when McCullers was nine, her brother eight, and her little sister four. McCullers left home in 1937, though she often returned for visits.
McCullers, considered a genius from birth and the most special member of her family, occupied the large front bedroom, which she shared with her sister, Rita. (Their parents and brother had smaller rooms.) McCullers staged schoolgirl plays in hers, the sliding wooden doors acting as stage curtains.
It’s a tranquil home in a peaceful neighborhood, and McCullers spent a happy childhood there. But the emotions of an adolescent girl are anything but peaceful. She played the piano obsessively and fell madly in love with her female piano teacher. She raced through Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. The house features in her 1946 novel, The Member of the Wedding, about 12-year-old Frankie Addams, who feels she belongs nowhere and to no one. Like Frankie, McCullers felt constitutionally like an outsider. She needed to leave Columbus for New York City to learn how to translate the outsize emotions she felt in the Stark Avenue house into art.
Carson McCullers played the piano obsessively and fell madly in love with her female piano teacher.
Her mother sold the house in 1944, after her husband died. The house went through several owners until a professor, Thornton Jordan, gave the house to Columbus State University, in 2003, when the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians opened. The childhood home was gradually filled with furniture from her house in Nyack, New York, where McCullers lived as an adult.
By the time I stayed there, almost every piece in the house had some connection to her. McCullers’s clothing was displayed, as were her household goods—from a silver service to a manual typewriter that always sent a shiver down my spine. If ghostly presences adhere to objects, this typewriter is a good candidate. Photos of McCullers and her family abounded, and a portrait of her painted by Emanuel Romano hung over the mantelpiece, which has first editions of McCullers’s books, including Clock Without Hands, inscribed to her psychiatrist turned lover.
Though the kitchen has been updated, the “breakfast nook,” a newly popular feature in the 1920s, is lined with shelves of china and glassware. In 1941, McCullers experienced the first of her many strokes in that nook, when she was just 24. (Because of untreated childhood strep throat and rheumatic fever, she had several strokes that led to her death, at age 50.) It initially manifested as a sudden inability to tell the time on the kitchen clock.
Columbus is home to the most extensive archive of McCullers’s work, and I made several trips to the Columbus State University Archives and Special Collections while researching my biography. In the winter of 2018, the Carson McCullers Center put me up in the extensive apartment added on to the kitchen in the back of her childhood house. The apartment looked out on a patio in the backyard and included an extensive library with many McCullers-related books. I passed two happy weeks there, reading her letters and manuscripts during the day, then coming home to her house at night. I fixed dinner in her kitchen and ate it in my comfortable apartment.
I spent many an evening on the front porch, the site of a heavy necking session with the man who would become her husband, Reeves McCullers—an event I found commemorated in her papers contained in the Columbus State archives. Though it felt a bit voyeuristic, I sensed her and Reeves as I passed lazy evenings gazing at the Georgia twilight.
While her ghost doesn’t inhabit the rooms, McCullers’s presence is everywhere. When I drifted through the house in the evenings, I fancied I could hear a trace of her practicing scales and racing through the Liszt. I imagined I could feel her most strongly in the suburban-looking breakfast nook—perhaps the least likely place for the incubation of this complicated, talented, and decidedly non-traditional American writer. The place has a powerful mojo, haunted or not.
Mary V. Dearborn is the author of several biographies, including of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer
