It's Good Weather for Fudge. Sue Brannan Walker

at the Columbus Museum was an epiphanal experience for me. Now we are pleased to share it with a larger audience.

      Foreword (2007)

      Virginia Spencer Carr (1929–2012)

      I first met Sue Walker, the author of It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers, when she and her husband visited me (with their twins in a stroller) more than a quarter of a century ago in Columbus, Georgia, and we have kept up with each other ever since. Sue was immersed in the writings of Carson McCullers for her Ph.D. dissertation, just as I had been in 1967 when I knew at once upon hearing of McCullers’s death at the age of fifty that she would be the subject of my own intensive study and dissertation, which I titled “Carson McCullers and the Search for Meaning.” McCullers’s search was mine, just as it became Sue’s, too.

      A Brookstone School student in McCullers’s hometown, where I was living and teaching, said to me shortly after publication of The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (Doubleday, 1975): “I can’t believe that you took seven years out of your life to write this book.” I replied, smiling: “Those seven years were my life, and I thank God for them.”

      So, too, was Sue Walker’s life enhanced and unalterably changed by her encounter and prolonged love affair—what else can I call it?—with McCullers, during which time Sue became a first-rate poet, teacher, and founder/editor of an important poetry journal. Although different, indeed, from McCullers’s poetry, Sue’s own poem, “It’s Good Weather for Fudge,” is reminiscent of her mentor’s “The Dual Angel: A Meditation on Origin and Choice,” a poem that influenced Sue’s writing as well as my own.

      It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers is, in a sense, Sue’s memoir, an entwining of McCullers’s life with Sue’s own growing-up years in Foley, Alabama. To read her poem is to revisit McCullers and the remarkable characters who course through everything she wrote, and to intuit that “It’s Good Weather for Fudge” reveals with delicious subtlety and humor something of the poet’s own extraordinary life.

      Early in the poem, Sue writes:

      The places of our childhood

      mold who we are and stick

      in our memories as if we had a glue pot

      and had pasted them inside

      the scrapbook of our brains.

      We both attended the First Baptist Church,

      got baptized and wondered

      why there wasn’t within us

      immediate transformation and change.

      . . . You shouldn’t be laid to your eternal

      rest up in New York in an alien graveyard,

      and you already are resurrected,

      so to speak. Every time somebody

      buys The Member of the Wedding

      or checks it out of the library,

      your words live. Berenice Sadie Brown’s

      created world and that of Frankie

      Addams and little John Henry

      are more lasting than bones,

      and I want to join in and say

      what I would do

      if I could rearrange things

      according to my liking.

      Reading Sue Walker’s book is an intense and touching revisiting of each of McCullers’s books. Not only do the fictional characters depicted take on new life, but so, too, do McCullers’s friends—those who knew her personally, of course, and those who knew her only through her novels, short stories, poems, nonfiction, and letters to dear ones—most of them now deceased—yet were changed personally, our very beings enhanced, because she came into our lives.

      Thank you, Carson.

      Thank you, Sue.

      Introduction

      “Now some explanation is due for all this behavior. The time has come to speak about love.”

      Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café

      “Nobody gets anywhere without love.”

      Sue Walker, “It’s Good Weather for Fudge”

      Carlos Dews

      “It’s Good Weather for Fudge: Conversing with Carson McCullers”—a tender, intimate, and insightful imagined conversation between the most sensitive of novelists and the most perceptive of poets—is, quite simply, an expression of love. McCullers’s work as a writer was a vocation of the heart, an exploration of love and loneliness, motivated by her desire to have her boundless love returned. In recognition of her unceasing quest, a 1990s BBC Radio documentary on McCullers’s life and work was titled simply Love Me! Love, even if fleeting or sometimes imagined, was the balm that provided relief from McCullers’s experience of profound loneliness. McCullers’s oeuvre itself is a sustained call for love, understanding, and empathy. Sue Walker’s composition of “It’s Good Weather for Fudge” is an act of love, a response to the call issued by McCullers’s work.

      The heart indeed is a lonely hunter, but, as Walker’s poem demonstrates, the hunt is made less lonely when there is hope of eventual success and by the knowledge that the world is populated by similarly lonely hunters. “It’s Good Weather for Fudge,” as a poem, is the purest form of response to McCullers. Sue Walker’s intimate conversation with McCullers allows her to respond to the implicit questions posed to the world by McCullers’s work: Do you love me? Will you love me? Can you love me?

      In “It’s Good Weather for Fudge,” Walker revisits the milestones of her own life, makes profound personal links between those moments and McCullers’s life and the lives of her fictional characters, and weaves a tapestry of autobiographical and literary critical associations. Walker asks readers of the poem, as McCullers asked her readers, to join in a very personal conversation on love and to explore their own individual experiences of loneliness.

      “Not to belong to a ‘we’ makes you too lonesome. Until this afternoon I didn’t have a ‘we,’ but now after seeing Janice and Jarvis I suddenly realize something. . . . I know that the bride and my brother are the ‘we’ of me. . . . I love the two of them so much and we belong to be together. I love the two of them so much because they are the we of me.”

      Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

      Rarely do literary scholars, especially those such as myself who dedicate their careers to the study of a single author, speak frankly about our personal connections with or our feelings about our subjects. We rely instead on supposed objectivity to shield us from accusations of letting emotions influence what are supposed to be our dispassionate considerations of the work and lives we study. But literary scholars almost always have strong emotional justifications for the selections of their subjects. How else could we sustain the energy, engagement, and passion required to pursue our work, for decades, on a single subject?

      I have dedicated my entire professional life primarily to research on the life and work of Carson McCullers without having ever confessed in print to the very personal—dare I say, loving—relationship I have with McCullers. My own empathy for McCullers and her characters motivates my interest in her and my desire to champion her as a writer. And so I consider literary scholars like Sue Walker who are also skilled poets to be most fortunate. Their art grants them the freedom to speak from the heart without the scholar’s blush. Sue Walker’s “It’s Good Weather for Fudge” gives me the courage to admit to my emotional response to McCullers.

      “Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto.”

      Carson