Suzanne Vega & Carson McCullers

I have been a long time Suzanne Vega fan, yet I missed her 2011 homage to the ill-fated southern (US) writer Carson McCullers, or at least I wasn't fully aware of it. I actually remember having heard something back in 2011 when I still lived in London. Now I learn that it was a musical stage piece written and performed by Suzanne Vega: Carson McCullers Talks about Love. And now in 2016, Suzanne has released a new album with songs adapted from the musical: Lover, Beloved: songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers. 

It was precisely just a few months ago that I discovered the literature of Carson McCullers, and I did so through the most frequent door into her world: her highly popular 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. And like so many others before me, I too was stunned by this 23 year old girl at the time who had managed to write such an incredible mature novel, her first. In 1940, when Lonely Hunter first appeared, McCullers was a shock for the reading public, by her obvious literary powers oddly combined with her fragile teen looks, even younger than her actual age.

It was McCullers herself who would later write that 1930's America, more specifically the "South", had become a great literary stage, to an extent that it could well be compared in literary potential to such spaces like czarist Russia. And along with William Faulkner  -and later other new writers like Harper Lee, Capote or Tenesse Williams-, it was also McCullers who would become one of the key figures to settle the reality of such a daring comparison. Yes, the American South seemed to have become some sort of a tragic dostoievskian space. With a biblic air to it. A literary space that demands the unfolding of human passions, or simply the exposition of the maddening complexity of human relations.

From a very early age, Carson McCullers had to fight against illness. She had rheumatic fever at 15, and suffered from continuous strokes throughout her entire life, which eventually left her half paralyzed in her early 30s. Finally in 1967, at just 50, she died from one final cerebral stroke. Her life was really a troubled one, in a physical as in an emotional sense: illness came along with alcoholism, sexual repression and a tragic relationship with her husband, Reeves McCullers, from whom she took her literary name.

It was around 1977, that the subtle and insightful 18-year-old Suzanne Vega came across a picture of Carson MacCullers, who had already been gone for a decade. She suddenly felt sort of intrigued by the clear physical resemblance. Some kind of discreet spiritual connection was at that point set into motion between her and Carson. 

Then in the early 1980s, Suzanne was studying English and drama at Barnard College, in New York. One day, her drama tutor came up with a funny project. He asked his students to disguise as an artistic or cultural figure from the past, and then respond to some questions as in a TV interview show, as if the students were actually the artistic figures. Of course, it was McCullers the past personality Suzanne inmediately picked to give life to.

Throughout the 1980s Suzanne established herself as a succesful iconic folk singer with such delightful works like Marlene on the Wall, Luka or Solitude Standing. And it was back in those days that she had started work in a play that would intend to explore that spiritual connection she had felt with Carson a few years before. The completion of this work would last for 30 years, as it would not be till 2011 that she finally completed it and put it on stage.

In 1967, the year Carson died, Suzanne was a child of eight. From that 1977, when Suzanne felt for the first time touched by the presence of Carson, until now it has been nearly 40 years. That is decades of connection for these kindred spirits. The result in creative terms is quite a nice one: an intriguing musical play and an album with a handful of smart songs. 

I love these two, Suzanne known to me for many years, and Carson, a recent discovery. And I feel delighted to know about this unexpected cultural link between them.