On April 10, 2012, accomplished
biographer Virginia Carr died of natural causes. She was eighty-two.
Virginia Carr may be best remembered
for her biography of Carson McCullers. McCullers, a fellow Southern
writer, was known for her novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a
book esteemed not only for its writing quality but for its honest
portrayal of the outcast.
Southern
Gothic writing includes despair, death, and dysfunction, not as
inconvenient parts broken from the whole, but as the heart of
reality. In Hunter, a
small Georgian town's misfits are presented as real people deserving
a fair, loving look.
The
recently deceased Virginia Carr, in researching Hunter's
author, sought to provide a similar fair look. McCullers, like the
characters she created, was an outcast. Rheumatic fever left her
paralyzed on one side by her early thirties, just on the cusp of
authorial glory. She had been divorced and attempted suicide.
“Vanity
of vanity, all is vanity”. This is from the book of Ecclesiastes.
Its author lives long in both pleasure and virtue, all in the quest to
make sense of life and death. And “all is vanity” is the best
answer he comes up with.
This
same book ironically provides words for one of life's most hopeful
occasions: a wedding day. “Two are better than one – for if one
falls, a friend can help them up, but pity the one who falls and has
no one to help them.”
In
writing about the life of Carson McCullers, the recently deceased Virginia Carr
was seeking to help someone who had fallen and had no one to help
them up. To someone held in low regard, Carr sought
to give a fair, loving look.
This noble work parallels what McCullers
sought to accomplish for her characters, and the messy parts of life. It is the work of all good
writers, and it is God's work.
Jesus, who Christians believe to be God in human form, sought out those who had no one to help them up. On one occasion, there was a man with a withered hand, excluded from community life. He was on the fringes, and Jesus called him to the center of the temple, where he was healed.
On
another occasion, there was a tax collector who was disliked by his
peers but who happened to catch Jesus' interest. Jesus decided to go
to his home for dinner, giving him a fair, loving look.
We
mourn that we no longer have Virginia Carr to remind us of the
humanity and worth of people that we might overlook. But when we do choose to do so, we are
following in not only her footsteps, but those of every great
writer, and perhaps even those of the Author of the universe.
This piece was originally written
for a homiletics project in graduate school.
