Cinematic Writing VI

"Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?"

"I still enjoy it."

"Please play, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readiness to perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.

She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridescent as a prism in a morning room. The first voice of the fugue, an announcement pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a second voice, and again repeated within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with countless ingenuities -- now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a single thing that does not fear surrender to the whole. Toward the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched insistence on the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair back and closed his eyes. In the following silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.

"Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris--" A door was closed.

The piano began again -- what was this music? Unplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of another time, another place -- it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, conflicts, ambivalent desires. Strange that the music, catalyst for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and clear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid.

"Miz Bailey, dinner is out on the table now."

Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk.

- Carson McCullers, excerpt from The Sojourner

Girl of my Dreams IV

Quoting Penguin Modern Classics -

Carson McCullers was born at Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 and died in Nyack, New York, in 1967. Although her life was short, and beset by serious illness - she suffered three strokes before she was thirty - McCullers created a substantial and impressive body of work... McCullers was only twenty-three when, in 1940, she burst onto the New York literacy scene with her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

McCuller's achievement has been recognised worldwide,.. V.S. Pritchett described her an 'incomparable storyteller'. WIlliam Trevor named The Heart is a Lovely Hunter as one of his ten desert-island novels: 'I value her perceptions, the casting of her spell, what she says and how she says it, her own enduring heart.'

She is one of the best storytellers of the past century - as I read on (addicted, and can hardly put down the book), she transformed my average tube journey into a swirl-wind of stories of many men and women in the deep south American wilderness, as the men and women poured their heart onto McCullers, and her narrative whispers so softly yet firmly into our ears.

And you will see no fragility in her body, but only her bright mind, her wide, bright eyes, burn right inside your eyes.