Mission Statement

This blog is devoted to a fictional road trip I may, or may not, take. The road trip focuses on Carson McCullers, and the community she was surrounded by. In her works McCullers often contemplated her feelings of isolation, and placed these feelings on many of her characters. I am interested in how the two seemingly opposite themes of cummunity and isolation function in the life of Carson McCullers, as well as in her story The Ballad of The Sad Cafe. 

McCullers Community Turned Theatre

The February House 

"The House in Brooklyn is a symbol for me...it's a risk, it's a gamble with myself and other."

In 1940 George Davis, the fiction editor at Harper's Bazaar, founded an artist colony called the February House. The house got its name from the birthdays of two of its most famous inhabitants, Carson McCullers, and Wynsten Hughs Auden. The house was a semi-dilapidated Victorian in Brooklyn New York. However, it housed many famous artist of the day. Davis' idea was to found a place where creative people could thrive with one another. Carson McCullers was one of these thriving artists. 

February House The Musical

"Bringing together some of the greatest and most colorful minds of a generation (W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee) George Davis tries to create his own utopia in a small house in Brooklyn in the 1940s.  The artists discover new ideas exploding at every turn as they find love, friendship and their own artistic voices in a time of war.  Written by up-and-coming composer Gabriel Kahane, the exciting score mixes elements of classical operetta, jazz, and musical comedy with modern folk-pop"

Quotes

"First of all, love is a joint experience between two person- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that is is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, bu these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long tome hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thin. 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 himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring- this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. 


Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of chehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else - but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a a love both violent ans debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. 


It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. 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 reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain."


― Carson McCullers

I decided to post this quote because it alludes to her complex relationship with Reeves, it also makes a statement about the nature of her other hetero and homosexual escapades. Lastly, it is the perfect quote to sum up the entirety of The Ballad of The Sad Cafe.