Masterpiece at 24

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE--Carson McCullers--Houghton Mifflin ($2).

Publishers often complain that the South writes more books than it buys. All over the U. S., static small-town life is the frustration and inspiration of bright young talents. But the South's small towns inspire the most feverish talents of all. Led by William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Southerners write with brilliant intensity, but their subject matter runs to horror--sexual, psychological or economic.

The '20s, when the shrill horn of plenty was heard in the rest of the land, did little to cheer the literary consciousness of the South. In those years Carson Mc-Cullers grew up in Columbus, Ga. with a hopeless passion for good music, fine writing, kindly human relationships. Her family was not well off, her opportunities were limited, her observations bitter. At 20 she married a fellow Southerner and started work on her first novel, a long, cloudy story of a deaf-mute. Appearing last year under the publishers' makeshift title of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, it won great critical acclaim. With the money from her book, Carson McCullers moved to Manhattan in search of kindred spirits.

Obsessed since childhood with a sense of exile, she called on literary exiles, among them British Poet Wystan Hugh Auden and his wife Erika Mann. Soon she was invited to join a freakish household of esthetes in Brooklyn Heights. There, sickly, shy and elflike, she presided over a dinner table whose steady boarders were Auden, Anglo-Irish Poet Louis MacNeice (now back in England for military service), British Composer Benjamin Britten, Wisconsin-raised George Davis (literary editor of Harper's Bazaar). The old brownstone became a shabby Mecca for their friends. Russian Painter Pavel Tchelitchew decorated its walls, symphonies were composed at its piano, through it trooped painters, writers, musicians and such unclassifiable artists as Gypsy Rose Lee.

Somehow amid the sherry bottles, the inchoate housekeeping, the atonal music and the inspired chitchat, Carson got on with her writing. Then, on doctor's advice, she returned to her family in the South' for rest. This week her second novel was published, under a title (this time) of her own choosing: Reflections in a Golden Eye. It is not the work of a normal 24-year-old girl.

In its sphere, the novel is a masterpiece. It is as mature and finished as Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, though still more specialized. Its story is about life as Carson McCullers sees fit to create it in a Southern Army camp, and is almost desperately psychomedical. Within its 183 pages a child is born (some of whose fingers are grown together), an Army captain suffers from bisexual impotence, a half-witted private rides nude in the woods, a stallion is tortured, a murder is done, a heartbroken wife cuts off her nipples with garden shears.

In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase. She makes its tortures seem at least as valid as the dull suburban tragedies from Farrell's or Dreiser's Midwest, commonly called lifelike. Reflections in a Golden Eye is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan lucidity.

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