To call Carson McCullers an eccentric, as some have done, is one of the great understatements of all time. McCullers was deeply, prodigiously weird. Sensitive and vulnerable to an almost pathological degree (the actress Anne Baxter called her “skinless”), she was also a tough survivor, ruthlessly advancing her own agenda and interests at the expense of those she purported to love; “I always felt Carson was a destroyer,” her sometime friend Elizabeth Bowen commented, “for which reason I chose never to be closely involved with her.” McCullers was a monstrous egoist, who put her own talents second to none. (“I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner,” she once asserted, wrongly.) She was an emotional parasite; even her cousin Jordan Massee, who loved her dearly, admitted that “Carson is more demanding than anyone else I have ever known.” Lillian Hellman, who did not love her, complained that “Carson burdened everyone who got close to her. If you wanted burdens, liked burdens, you accepted Carson and her affection. I don’t like such burdens.” As for McCullers’s sex life, to this day no one seems to be able to figure out just what she did and didn’t get up to, although some have suggested that she and her husband, Reeves McCullers, could be aptly described by that well-known limerick,