When a talented poet from Mobile writes an extended poem in which she imagines a visit and conversation with one of the South’s most gifted writers, it is cause for a literary celebration. Such was the event that occurred in October of 2002, when I attended a conference at the Columbus (Georgia) Museum and heard Sue Walker read her new poem celebrating the life and fiction of Columbus native Carson McCullers.
It is especially appropriate that this poem be part of the Conecuh Series, which is dedicated to celebrating diversity in the South. No writer has written more honestly and compassionately about outsiders and misfits in American life than Carson McCullers, one of the South’s most original and daring authors. During her short lifetime she celebrated diversity in her characters, plots, and themes. From Frankie Addams to John Singer, the lonely outcasts of her fiction search frantically for “the we of me”—as do we all.
The meeting of McCullers readers and scholars in Columbus included Virginia Spencer Carr, the noted biographer whose Lonely Hunter is not only the definitive biography of Carson McCullers but is also a model of the genre. We are honored to have her introduction and endorsement. McCullers-Walker-Carr are an awesome and eloquent trio.
Sue Walker’s poem is an inspired interweaving of the symbiotic relationship between writer and reader who, ideally, live together in the timeless world of the word. Indeed, hearing the poet read her poem to the McCullers gathering at the Columbus Museum was an epiphanal experience for me. Now we are pleased to share it with a larger audience.
Foreword (2007)
Virginia Spencer Carr (1929–2012)
I first met Sue Walker, the author of It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers, when she and her husband visited me (with their twins in a stroller) more than a quarter of a century ago in Columbus, Georgia, and we have kept up with each other ever since. Sue was immersed in the writings of Carson McCullers for her Ph.D. dissertation, just as I had been in 1967 when I knew at once upon hearing of McCullers’s death at the age of fifty that she would be the subject of my own intensive study and dissertation, which I titled “Carson McCullers and the Search for Meaning.” McCullers’s search was mine, just as it became Sue’s, too.
A Brookstone School student in McCullers’s hometown, where I was living and teaching, said to me shortly after publication of The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Doubleday, 1975): “I can’t believe that you took seven years out of your life to write this book.” I replied, smiling: “Those seven years were my life, and I thank God for them.”
So, too, was Sue Walker’s life enhanced and unalterably changed by her encounter and prolonged love affair—what else can I call it?—with McCullers, during which time Sue became a first-rate poet, teacher, and founder/editor of an important poetry journal. Although different, indeed, from McCullers’s poetry, Sue’s own poem, “It’s Good Weather for Fudge,” is reminiscent of her mentor’s “The Dual Angel: A Meditation on Origin and Choice,” a poem that influenced Sue’s writing as well as my own.
It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers is, in a sense, Sue’s memoir, an entwining of McCullers’s life with Sue’s own growing-up years in Foley, Alabama. To read her poem is to revisit McCullers and the remarkable characters who course through everything she wrote, and to intuit that “It’s Good Weather for Fudge” reveals with delicious subtlety and humor something of the poet’s own extraordinary life.
Early in the poem, Sue writes:
The places of our childhood
mold who we are and stick
in our memories as if we had a glue pot
and had pasted them inside
the scrapbook of our brains.
We both attended the First Baptist Church,
got baptized and wondered
why there wasn’t within us
immediate transformation and change.
. . . You shouldn’t be laid to your eternal
rest up in New York in an alien graveyard,
and you already are resurrected,
so to speak. Every time somebody
buys The Member of the Wedding
or checks it out of the library,
your words live. Berenice Sadie Brown’s
created world and that of Frankie
Addams and little John Henry
are more lasting than bones,
and I want to join in and say
what I would do
if I could rearrange things
according to my liking.
Reading Sue Walker’s book is an intense and touching revisiting of each of McCullers’s books. Not only do the fictional characters depicted take on new life, but so, too, do McCullers’s friends—those who knew her personally, of course, and those who knew her only through her novels, short stories, poems, nonfiction, and letters to dear ones—most of them now deceased—yet were changed personally, our very beings enhanced, because she came into our lives.
Thank you, Carson.
Thank you, Sue.
Introduction
“Now some explanation is due for all this behavior. The time has come to speak about love.”
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
“Nobody gets anywhere without love.”
Sue Walker, “It’s Good Weather for Fudge”
Carlos Dews
“It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers”—a tender, intimate, and insightful imagined conversation between the most sensitive of novelists and the most perceptive of poets—is, quite simply, an expression of love. McCullers’s work as a writer was a vocation of the heart, an exploration of love and loneliness, motivated by her desire to have her boundless love returned. In recognition of her unceasing quest, a 1990s BBC Radio documentary on McCullers’s life and work was titled simply Love Me! Love, even if fleeting or sometimes imagined, was the balm that provided relief from McCullers’s experience of profound loneliness. McCullers’s oeuvre itself is a sustained call for love, understanding, and empathy. Sue Walker’s composition of “It’s Good Weather for Fudge” is an act of love, a response to the call issued by McCullers’s work.
The heart indeed is a lonely hunter, but, as Walker’s poem demonstrates, the hunt is made less lonely when there is hope of eventual success and by the knowledge that the world is populated by similarly lonely hunters. “It’s Good Weather for Fudge,” as a poem, is the purest form of response to McCullers. Sue Walker’s intimate conversation with McCullers allows her to respond to the implicit questions posed
