[Editor's Note: This story is part of an ongoing series about Southern writers and alcohol. Past ones include William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The writer, Kelly Boler, has a book on the subject. You should buy it!]

No one can dispute that as a writer, Carson McCullers was brilliant.  Her debut at age 23 with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter made her a card-carrying wunderkind, and for the rest of her life she captivated readers with novels and plays that portrayed lost souls and their sad, usually futile, attempts to find connection.  They had nothing on McCullers herself.  

As a woman, a wife, a human being, she was far more lost than any of her characters.  “I became an established literary figure overnight,” she wrote later.  “I was a bit of a holy terror.”  That was putting it mildly.  Writer and one-time housemate Klaus Mann called her “a strange mixture of refinement and wildness.” Novelist Elizabeth Bowen called her a destroyer, while a French publisher referred to her as a vampire.  A pretty bunch of worldly insults for a Columbus, Ga., girl made good.

To no one was Carson more cruel than her husband, Reeves.  Bisexuality and  addiction have run through more than one literary marriage -- Paul and Jane Bowles come to mind -- but none so destructively as the McCullers’.  It started as a love match, when 20-year old Carson approached the altar in a typical costume of a green velvet suit and Buster Browns.  Regarding their early intimate relations, she later wrote, “The sexual experience was not like D.H. Lawrence.”  They celebrated anyway, with pink champagne and tomatoes out of season.

The first years were happy, spent in writing, chess, reading aloud, and drinking gallons of sherry in a two-room flat.  Throughout her youthful, wild success, the drinking continued.  Her literary star rose with the publication of Reflections in a Golden Eye, Ballad of the Sad Café, and Member of the Wedding, but when she was supposed to meet her French publisher, he found her in the bed of a Paris hotel with a bottle of cognac. While living with Tennessee Williams and writing the stage script for Member of the Wedding, and Williams recalled that she drank a bottle of Johnny Walker every night, sitting on the staircase alone and mooning over imaginary romances. 

After she suffered a stroke at age 29, doctors said that she could “have two cans of beer every evening and one large drink -- or two small ones,” reported a cousin.  “Unfortunately, they didn’t define ‘large’ or ‘small.’”  Carson leaned on Reeves more than ever, to cut her food, dress her and pour her drinks. 

This man, who bore the brunt of her instability, was a sweet and gentle soul frustrated by his own, less successful attempts at writing.  They divorced and remarried after World War II, but when they competed for the affections of the same man and Reeves triumphed, she never forgave him.  Not that this stopped her from pursuing women.  She stalked Katherine Anne Porter and Djuna Barnes, to say nothing of Greta Garbo, to whom she wrote a love letter that rambled on for over a hundred pages. 

After his service in the war, Reeves entered Alcoholics Anonymous, but his resolve was shaken when Carson beckoned him to a farmhouse in France, where the couple drank gin by the tumbler and fought like dogs, often abusively. From there they went to Italy, where former friend Truman Capote noted that “Sister (the famous Carson McCullers, you remember her?) and Mr Sister are frequently to be observed staggering along the Veneto, but of course Sister and Mr Sister are to exalted, and usually too drunk, to recognize my poor presence.”

Shortly after, Carson abandoned Reeves, her partner of 18 years, in the French farmhouse without a penny.  He died there when he choked on his vomit after an overdose of pills.  Carson, living in Georgia, planned his funeral while drinking a bottle of bourbon.

She suffered still more strokes, until she was paralysed on one side.  The other side she able to lift a special silver cup she kept just for bourbon, which she lifted often, until her death at age 50 in 1967.