Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers

On the heels of Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light and Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, McCullers's disappointing unfinished autobiography should spark further debate over the ethics of publishing incomplete and flawed posthumous works by heralded authors. While McCullers (1917-1967) was one of the South's most lyrical and insightful novelists, this mishmash of a memoir is certainly one of her least successful ventures. Dews, a University of West Florida English professor, admits that the discursive, ""free-associative style of the narrative"" may be hard to follow, but he argues that a ""chain of associations"" provides its guiding organizational principle. Links in this ""chain"" include McCullers's relationship with her husband, Reeves McCullers, who killed himself in 1953; her maternal grandmother and friends, famous and otherwise; and her views on art. Still, the book remains a perplexing pastiche, and the author herself emerges as self-absorbed and dull. McCullers's discussions of other writers seem little more than exercises in name-dropping and benign gossip (surely, for example, more can be said of Isak Dinesen than that she had a late-life penchant for oysters and champagne). As for her own writing, McCullers too often expresses surprise over how ""illumination,"" or ""creative inspiration,"" would break upon her unexpectedly. But a long outline of McCullers's first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, reveals the intensive planning and discipline that her art required. (Sept.) FYI: In The Flowering Dream: The Historical Saga of Carson McCullers, Nancy B. Rich surveys McCullers's major works and contends that they form ""a saga of man's struggle for freedom in the western world."" (Chapel Hill Press [100 Eastwood Lake Rd., Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514], $25 136p ISBN 1-880849-14-3; Aug.)