an invalid, though she contin- ued to write almost until her death. Alongside the great - physical challenges, McCullers suffered unhappily in her marriage, behaved self- destructively (a whole lot of drinking and smoking), and increasingly assumed the demeanor of a “wounded ani- mal.” She kept company with such gay literary luminaries as W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams, but her constant need for attention made her a difficult friend. The always tart-tongued Gore Vidal, though a fan of her work, reportedly claimed: “An hour with a dentist without Novocain was like a minute with Carson McCullers.” Ouch. A quote about love from The Ballad of the‘Sad Cafe’ may best illuminate the workings of McCullers’s own heart: “Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of rea- sons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experi- ence can cause him only pain.” ' The pain McCullers endured and caused is every- where evident on the page. Frankie Addams, the twelve year-old protagonist of The Member of the Wedding, is a motherless, lonely child, extremely sensitive to the slights of others, yet frequent- ly insensitive towards those who care for her, namely her family’s black cook Berenice and her little cousin John Henry West. The short novel’s dra- matic centerpiece is the impending wedding of Frankie’s brother Jarvis, who has just returned from Alaska to marry a girl named Janice in a place called Winter Hill. Frankie is infatuated with the idea of Alaska and of Winter Hill, with all things frozen and far away from the “green sick dream” that had been her Southern summer. She _ changes her name to F. Jasmine (to alliterate with Jarvis and Janice) and seizes onto the wedding as a means of escaping solitariness, sud- denly convinced her brother and his bride will take her away with them to live happi- ly-ever-after together as three. “They are the we of me” becomes Frankie’s — and the novel’s — mantra of belonging. F rankie’s adolescent plight — and the plights of many of McCullers’s charac- ters — should resonate with anyone who’s felt freakish and afraid, isolated in their child- hood surroundings. I’m guess- ing that might include most of us. lt’s not so much what hap- pens to Frankie that matters — the actual wedding is barely described, for instance — but how she perceives things along the way. Carson McCullers said she became her characters, whether that character was a deaf-mute, a closeted Captain, a black cook, a boy in high- heels, a socialist agitator, or a » A hunchback. F rankie’s declara- tion that she felt “‘exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me,’“ could apply to most any of McCullers’s char- acters and likely to McCullers herself. ' , V McCullers wrote that “spiritual isolation” was the thematic basis of her work and that, for her, writing was “a search for God.” One hopes and imagines she was success- ful in her quest. V Ernie McLeod is a native Vermonter currently checking out the queerness of Montreal. Reach him at mcle0d@middlebury. edu IN THE LIFE Vermont Public Television Movers & Shakers Check Local Listings for Dates and Times St. Johnsbury WVTB Channel 20 Rutland WVER Channel 28 Burlington WETK Channel 33 Windsor WVTA Channel 41 Manchester W36AX Channel 36 Bennington W53AS Channel 53 In a new episode, lTL compiles stories that exhibit the perseverance that gays and lesbians have shown during diffi- cult times. |TL’s coverage includes interviews with gay and lesbian partners about the loss of their loved ones on 9/11 and efforts to reconstruct their lives. Southern Comfort wins the Grand J_ury Prize for "Best Documentary" at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival for a story about transsexual partners. The acclaimed work in Laramie, Wyoming by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project goes from a stage production to an HBO film. 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