She’s frail, neurasthenic, and too sensitive once, in a bout of depression, she cut off her nipples with garden shears. (The captain, who has no interest in the voluptuous flesh that transfixes Private Williams, is never there.) And rivaling the two men in misery is the Pendertons’ neighbor Allison, who is married to Leonora’s lover, Major Morris Langdon.
But Private Williams is himself a pretty forlorn specimen of humanity, a country boy, unsocialized as a new-born puppy, whose first glimpse of a naked woman-Leonora-drives him to some mighty creepy, obsessive behavior he takes to slipping into her bedroom at night to watch her sleep. Why not, she must have thought, write down this strange, upsetting story that had come to her, this hothouse tale of twisted desire and simmering violence? Why not become, for a while, these lost, unpleasant, desperately unhappy people? Captain Penderton is perhaps the most tormented and the most pathetic of them, despised by his wife, Leonora, and mooning over a quiet and unworldly enlisted man named Elgee Williams. She was living and writing at fantastic speed, as if she knew her time would be short.
When she began Army Post, McCullers was all of twenty-two years old, a sickly young woman from Georgia who had already been married for two years and had already written a novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, that had been accepted by a major publisher. “An army post in peacetime is a dull place,” it begins, but only a few sentences later, in the same calm tone, it tells us: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.” And then, “The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.” These are the dramatis personae, the characters she’ll become. She first called her short novel Army Post, and then, a little less drably, Reflections in a Golden Eye. I become the characters I write about and I bless the Latin poet Terence who said, ‘Nothing human is alien to me.’” Twenty years earlier, in 1939, she had dreamed up the sad story of repressed Captain Weldon Penderton and written it in a rush according to her biographer, Virginia Spencer Carr, she polished it off in a couple of months. “When I write about a thief,” she once said, “I become one when I write about Captain Penderton, I become a homosexual man when I write about a deaf mute, I become dumb during the time of the story.
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