The
titles of Carson McCullers’s books had always struck a chord with me. The Heart
Is a Lonely Hunter. Like, same. But I’d never gotten around to reading any of
her work. Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them. Hers didn’t until the
second year of my PhD program, when I was an intern at the Harry Ransom Center,
which houses a giant collection of writers’ and artists’ books, papers,
photographs, and artworks at the University of Texas at Austin
One day,
a scholar wrote asking for letters between McCullers and Annemarie
Clarac-Schwarzenbach, whose name was utterly unfamiliar to me. I took the
freight elevator to the icy basement manuscript room, pulled the correspondence
folder—it was labeled 29.4, I still recall—and started reading it right there
in the stacks.
The
paper was browned with age and wrinkled at the edges. Annemarie’s handwriting
filled the page, which I read through the clear Mylar sleeves: “Carson, child,
my beloved, you know that, leaving the day after tomorrow, feeling half-afraid
and proud, leaving behind me all I care for, once again, and a wave of love—”
I looked
up at the rows of manuscript boxes that surrounded me, mind humming, face
flushed. “Love”—did that mean what I thought it did? Instinctively, I listened
for anyone who might be coming. Hearing only the ticktick of the sliding
electric shelves, I read on. To Carson, Annemarie recalled “talking as we did,
you and I, at that lunch time, you remember, at the corner near the Bedford
Hotel, with milk and bread and butter, ages ago.”
Annemarie’s
language in her letters to Carson was intimate, suggestive, or at least I read
it that way. You remember. I had received letters like these. I had written
letters like these to women I’d loved. Letters with words like darling and
baby. Another thing I recognized: The intimacy of Annemarie’s tone contained a
hint of plausible deniability, as though the “wave of love” she referred to
might not have been about Carson at all.
It was
very little to go on, and yet I felt utter certainty: Carson McCullers had
loved women. Or at least this woman had loved her. I wanted to know everything
about them both. I brought the folder upstairs, hurried to my 3 o’clock
reference desk shift, and started Googling. Annemarie, I discovered, was a
Swiss writer, photographer, silk heiress, and known lady-killer who spent time
in New York in the late 1930s and early ’40s, but there wasn’t much else.
Folder
29.4 held eight letters from Annemarie to Carson, but none of Carson’s replies.
One had the heading “On the Congo River, Sept. 1941.” Annemarie’s handwriting
was so small and insistent that the missives read long, though often they
covered only the front and back of a single sheet. Like mine, they were
overwrought, wrung with feeling and a need to declare it in writing. Other than
my own, I had never read love letters between women before.
I found
the letters at the tail end of the slow-burning catastrophe of my 20s: never
quite breaking up with my first love—a woman I’d met our freshman year of
college—after six closeted years together.
I didn’t
know whether I wanted to date women, but on the heels of emotional and sexual
manipulation by a male professor, the idea of dating men seemed pretty dismal.
Like most 25-year-olds, I couldn’t figure out what came next.
What
came next was Carson. I tried to tell a few people about the letters, but I
couldn’t explain why they were so significant to me. “She dated a woman,”
they’d say. “So?”
The
years that followed were overtaken by my desire to understand the magnitude of
Carson and Annemarie’s on-paper love. And to understand myself, too. I didn’t
realize I was starting a book that would take me seven years to research and
write. Within a week of finding the letters, without seeing any connection to
the photos of Annemarie I’d been Googling, I would chop my hair short. Within a
year, I would be calling myself a lesbian for the first time—albeit only
privately, in my mind and to a few close friends. Having grown up Catholic in
the Midwest, I struggled to claim my own sexuality. I was still trying it out,
working to get the word out of my mouth.
Four
years later, I would live in Carson’s childhood home for a month on a research
fellowship, and soon after I would move to Santa Fe with my new love,
Chelsea—we met as interns—abandoning my academic job search to finish a book
about Carson. Retrospect redefines everything in its path, and I am as hesitant
to ascribe fixed narrative meaning to my own life as any other. But I suppose
we could call those letters a turning point.
Finding
Carson McCullers' Secret Love Letters Helped Me Realize Who I Am. By Jenn
Shapland.
Oprah Magazine, December 20, 2019.
I came
to Carson first through her love letters, and then through her clothes. As an
intern at the Ransom Center, a vault of books and manuscripts, I was given a
choice of second-year projects. Anything I wanted to work on, any collection
that needed cataloging, any exhibition in the works could have been my focus.
After a year of detouring to push my library cart down aisles of typewriters,
eyeglasses, and most amazingly—clothes every time I was on the seventh floor, I
knew that I wanted to work on the personal effects collections. I was assigned
the clothing, objects, and miscellaneous housewares of four writers: Gertrude
Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Carson McCullers. Before
this project, I hadn’t thought all that much about an author’s clothes. But in
my hours with random assortments of garments—socks, suits, coats, hats, and
vests—I became more convinced of their potential for communing with lives past.
Since
I’d unearthed Annemarie’s letters and realized how insignificantly she came off
in Carson’s public story, I began to cling to Carson’s mentions of places and
objects for clues to who she was. Her clothes, her knickknacks, offered
something I came to see as more truthful: the honesty of objects. Description
can only expose so much of the self or contain so much of a memory or an
experience. Photos and objects offer alternative access points to Carson’s history
of identity formation and love. When I first reached for these objects, trying
to understand Carson’s story, I was reaching for an embodied history, a past I
could touch.
Carson’s
focus on clothes in her therapy sessions and in Illumination reveals their
importance to her, which I intuited while I catalogued them. Clothes gave her a
way to express an identity that was fluid, a way to change who she was to the
world each day. In April 1958, Carson laments to Mary her long lost status as
an “it girl,” wistful for her former stylishness. In her more elegant days, she
wore what she called costumes made by a friend, Joyce Davis, and her
girlfriends were the most attractive around. At bars like the Blue Angel, the
21 Club, and Alice’s Candle, they gallivanted in box-pleated skirts and
knee-high socks and peacoats. Named for the 1930 Marlene Dietrich film, the
Blue Angel was a cabaret in Manhattan where Barbra Streisand would later
perform. Carson mentions someone by the name of Crawford, but the first name is
blank. Joan? I marvel. In her years in New York, when she lived on and off at
February House, Carson spent her time with queer writers and tastemakers in
bars and cabarets all over town. This joyful memory is undercut by “Annamarie
and her agony, you know, and Gypsy, and Annette.” The drama of her twenties.
When I
catalogued Carson’s clothes, I took them off the hangers or out of their boxes
and laid them out on a piece of muslin on a large table. And then, for longer
than I’d ever done with my own clothes, I studied them. I looked and looked:
for tags and labels, any kind of brand or designer identification, fabric
contents. I looked at their linings, scanned them inch by inch for tears,
stains, and signs of wear—each a communication from its wearer in a previous
life. I measured and photographed each piece from several angles, never very
satisfied with my ability to recreate the life I saw and felt in the clothes.
If librarians and archivists are eminently mockable for their obsession with
the smell of books, I can profess that clothes are much more fragrant than
paper.
Traces
of perfumes, soaps, mothballs, body odors. From the clothes I want to say I
knew what Carson smelled like, but how could I ever describe it in words? I ran
my gloved hands over the rich tweed skirtsuit in teal that looks like something
she’d wear to meetings in New York with her publishers. Her long, pale
lime-green wool A-line coat appears to be lined in emerald silk, but it is more
likely polyester. She has several elaborately embroidered jackets and vests,
things worn to theater and film premieres. Certainly Carson was never one for
gowns. One item seems especially out of place, out of character: a gold lamé
jacket with magenta lining that still has the Saks price tags on it, from all
those years ago. It is the only item in the collection that looks unworn.
Perhaps it was a gift.
The
clothes in Carson’s collection consist mostly of long coats, vests, and
nightgowns, which, when I first encountered them, I didn’t understand at all.
Why would someone donate four cotton nightgowns to an archive? In a number of
photographs, she wears the long red wool coat with embroidered gold trim, a
garment with which I am deeply familiar. She called it her Russian coat, I
think because it made her feel somehow “Russian,” which could mean, knowing
Carson’s lifelong fascination with snowy climates, a person from a cold place.
But it could just as easily suggest a person with a deep understanding of Anna
Karenina. Carson refers frequently to Russian writers in her letters. I
photographed the red coat from a ladder, I described it in metadata, I housed
it in tissue and a box all its own. Like the clothes of our loved ones do, the
coat began to resemble Carson, to signify a part of her. Years into this tunnel
of research, I’ve solved the mystery of the collection of nightgowns and coats:
she was a sick person. She wore, predominately, nightgowns, and often put a
beautiful coat over them in photos. An interview with Rex Reed from 1967
describes how “she greets her guests in long white nightgowns and tennis
shoes.”
Carson
revisits memories of her appearance, her elegance, in Illumination. Her friend
in the last decade of her life, a French woman named Marielle Bancou, whom
Carson met on the bus from Nyack to New York, designed and made all of her “nightgowns
and dressing robes,” allowing her to be bedridden in style. If these were the
nightgowns I catalogued, they are lightweight cotton in pale yellow, blue, and
white, with simple lace collars, occasionally with ruffled sleeves. Some short
sleeved, some long sleeved, one sleeveless. They have a childlike quality,
something I may have worn to sleep in the summer when I was little. She writes
about a gift she received from Dawn Langley Simmons, a close friend whom she
met while visiting Edwin and John. Simmons gave Carson “one of her robes, a
beautiful Japanese garment which I wear often. I love Japanese and Chinese
robes and wear them on all state occasions. I have one, given to me by my
cousin Jordan Massee, which is 2,000 years old. It was worn in the old days on
protocol visits to the dowager empress, and handed down from one generation to
the next.”
The age of this robe is the only lie I
feel certain of in her autobiography. Having recently catalogued clothing only
a few decades old, I’m highly skeptical that any fabric would remain intact
that long unless elaborate preservation techniques were employed.
In Columbus, in the office of the Stark
Avenue house, a silk kimono hung on a dressmaker’s dummy under a sheet of
plastic, and the director told me that this was the kimono she alleged to be
2000 years old. The first thing I did after I was left alone in the house was
remove this plastic. It is a dark, rosy pink, almost purple, embroidered all
over with blue, pink, and green flowers and leaves. The wide beaded,
embroidered lapel circles the collar, crosses, and closes at the side of the
neck. I can see how wearing the garment on state occasions would make me feel
distinguished, vaguely ancient. I had brought my sewing machine with me to
Columbus, with coincidental plans to make a kimono, and this served as perfect
inspiration. After uncovering the kimono, I opened the heavy, yellowing floral
curtains, sat down at the massive desk, and looked across the room at the
garment, at my own face in the mirror hanging beside it.
A year
prior, surrounded, for the first time, by artists and writers at a residency in
Vermont, I took to wearing a long black silk robe with magenta polka dots over
my clothes every day. I had found it at a thrift store in Burlington. It was
April 2015, and I’d driven from full Texas summer blue through midatlantic
spring fog to a frozen, still snowing Vermont sky. The river outside my studio
window slowly thawed over the course of the month, and by the end what had been
solid ice was audibly rushing with snowmelt. In my first attempt to occupy the
position of “writer” in public for any extended period of time, I felt the need
to don what I deemed full writer drag: my robe, my knit hat, and my duck boots
preceding any version of me, any writing at all, as I swept into and out of the
dining room each day.
Toward
the end of my stay in Vermont I sat in my robe at the desk in my studio
surrounded by photos of McCullers’s clothes that I had catalogued and all the
photos of Annemarie I’d printed, a serial killer’s lair. I pulled up the first
draft of this book, which consisted of questions for the objects I’d
catalogued, on my laptop so those who wanted to could read it on their tour
around the writers’ studios. I don’t imagine anyone did. Writers’ studios tend
to be much less exciting than artists’: no paint or clay, no half-assembled
sculptures midroom, just a hard drive, maybe a notebook. A closed process. But
this was my first studio, my first designated, if temporary, writing space, and
I had papered the walls with lines I had written, one-sentence essays in india
ink on paper.
I was
sipping a plastic cup of red wine (having consumed half my bottle of bourbon
the first night, at the bonfire, pouring it into a camping mug and continuing
to drink because that’s what I assumed a writer was supposed to do at a
bonfire—What Would Carson Do?—and the next day, my first day to work, I was so
ill I did nothing but sit in my studio’s armchair in the fetal position,
periodically spilling down the hall to throw up in the bathroom beside some
poor poet’s studio. I still don’t know how those alcoholic writers do it). One
of the older men in residence, a photographer with shoulder-length gray hair,
came by my studio while I sat at my desk. He said he wanted to take my picture.
He said it was for his wife, so she could see what I was wearing, I think to
make it less weird that he was a man alone in a room with me taking my picture.
I let him. It is one of those pictures of a writer at her desk, ones we see
when Google Images searching for any writer, but I have never seen mine.
The
desk in the Stark Avenue house’s office was not Carson’s, and in fact I find it
odd that I have never seen mention of her desk. I think this one might have
been Rita’s at some point. Early on, Carson had several author photos taken
sitting at—more often sitting on—a desk, usually out on the porch. Each piece
of furniture that peoples the house in Columbus tells a story of its own: the
white slipcovered couch where she wrote Clock Without Hands, her beloved blue
armchair, the organ. When I picture Carson writing, I picture her reclined,
looking out a window.
From My
Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.
Cataloguing
Carson McCullers’ Clothes: Long Coats, Vests, and Gender Fluidity. By Jenn
Shapland. LitHub, February 18, 2020.
Jenn
Shapland is the author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House
Books), a Winter Spring 2020 Indies Introduce adult debut and a February 2020
Indie Next List pick.
“Shapland’s
book intertwines her experience of archiving Carson McCullers’ personal effects
with a fresh understanding of McCullers’ life as a lesbian through the deep
examination of therapy transcripts, love letters, and a residency in McCullers’
childhood home filled with her everyday household objects,” said Mimi Hannan of
La Playa Books in San Diego, California, who served on the bookseller panel
that selected Shapland’s debut for the Indies Introduce program.
Hannan
continued, “Shapland’s work closes the gap between researcher and subject and
lays bare the bias inherent in any biography. The book’s vignettes alternate
between McCullers’ life and Shapland’s, creating the sensation of peeking in
the window at moments in both women’s lives and coming away with a deeper
knowledge of McCullers through her effect on Shapland.”
Shapland’s
nonfiction has been published in O, the Oprah Magazine; Tin House; Outside
online; The Lifted Brow; Electric Literature; and elsewhere. Her essay
“Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded the 2019
Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism for “Thirteen Ways of Moving to the
Desert” and “Field Report: El Paso + Juárez.” She has a PhD in English from the
University of Texas at Austin and lives in New Mexico.
Here,
Hannan asks Shapland about her debut.
Mimi
Hannan: I’m neither queer nor have I read any Carson McCullers, but I
absolutely loved this book. Bringing your story into the biography, you made
history feel personal. What books provided inspiration to you for the structure
or genre of your book?
Jenn
Shapland: Biographies make me crazy, because they hold so many amazing true
stories, but they can be so daunting. They’re almost always strictly
chronological, and as a nonfiction writer, chronological order rarely feels
real or alive to me. But I’m invested in the power of life writing, and I knew
I wanted to write about Carson’s life. I just had to do it my own way. A bunch
of writers working in hybrid genres and short-form sections provided a way to
think about structuring the book. Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts combines memoir
and true crime, but also offers a biography of Nelson’s Aunt Jane Mixer in the
process of reckoning with her death. In both Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be
Lonely, Claudia Rankine allows small encounters and interactions in her daily
life to fuel a larger argument about marginalization and discrimination of
black women, and I definitely drew from her work, using similar material to
make a case for lesbian invisibility. I’ve loved Lydia Davis’ short stories for
a long time, and her most recent book, Can’t and Won’t, used recountings and
translations of other people’s stories (from Flaubert’s anecdotes to her own
dreams) as the material for her fiction. I also admire the way her titles
contribute so much to each story, and had her in the back of my mind when
titling chapters in My Autobiography.
MH:
There have been other biographies of Carson McCullers written, but yours is the
first to deeply examine her life as a lesbian. Are there other authors writing
about history from an #OwnVoices perspective whom you admire?
JS: I
definitely long for more of this work, and I’m constantly seeking it out (and
frequently disappointed when books fail to go there). Usually, it seems that
biographies and histories about queer people have been written by people who
aren’t queer and who aren’t invested in queer history. Many of the erasures and
elisions I discovered in published narratives of Carson’s life had all of the
facts in hand, but failed to make connections that, to me, were obvious.
Another way to put this: Queer readers have known that Carson’s life and work
were queer forever, but that knowledge never made it into the public record.
Meanwhile, marriages and divorces became the primary lenses for viewing a
person’s romantic life and sexual identity. Anything that wasn’t a legally
certified relationship, no matter how clear it might be in letters and
interviews, doesn’t make it into the official narrative. Pip Gordon’s new book
Gay Faulkner is a great approach to understanding a writer’s life and work in
terms of their relationship with queer people and ideas.
MH: At
what point did you think you had the makings of a book? Who were some of the
instrumental forces in helping you shape the book?
JS: I
began writing the book in earnest during a writing residency at Vermont Studio
Center while I was still in graduate school working on an unrelated project.
Being around other writers and artists who were serious about their work
changed everything for me, and the friendships I formed there, particularly
with artist Katie Loughmiller and poet Anis Mojgani, were my lifelines in the
early stages of writing. I had similar experiences at the Tin House Writers
Workshop, which showed me that even without an MFA or a foot in the publishing
world it’s possible to build a life around writing. My time at Yaddo actually wound
up in the book, because inhabiting the place where McCullers wrote several of
her novels had a major impact on my writing and research. Later on in the
process, my agent, Bill Clegg, and the book’s first editor, Emma
Komlos-Hrobsky, were generous, critical readers and I credit them with
believing in a fairly spare manuscript and encouraging it to become fully
fleshed book.
MH: If
you could imagine interacting with Carson, what would that setting look like?
What would you want to take away from the experience?
JS: I
picture her when she’s older, sitting in her favorite blue chair or on the
porch. I would ask her what she’s reading and I’d ask some burning questions
about her contemporaries, which would lead to some fabulous queer gossip (for
example: what is up with Patricia Highsmith?). I hope that we would laugh a lot
and feel a kind of kinship. But I’ve spent enough time thinking about how we
interact with people we don’t know to realize that’s all my wishful projection.
MH:
Since this interview is for an audience of booksellers and you spent some time
as a bookseller while you were writing and contemplating this book, I would be
remiss if I didn’t ask you a bookstore-related question! How did your
bookselling experience impact your book?
JS:
Working at BookPeople in Austin from 2009–2016 was the best job, because I got
to be surrounded by books and passionate readers and I had time to think.
Spending a lot of time in a bookstore makes it clear what subjects have gotten
a lot of attention, and what gaps remain to be filled, what connections have
yet to be made. The memoir section was right next to the biography section at
BookPeople, so perhaps my desire to bring those two genres together in my own
book was inspired while shelving.
An
Indies Introduce Q&A With Author Jenn Shapland. By Mimi Hannan. American Booksellers Association, January 28,
2020.
“I have
read enough biographies,” Jenn Shapland writes early in her new book, “to know,
in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a
fiction writer, and this is not a biography.”
I take
her point that biography is a subjective enterprise, though I wonder about the
hyperbole. The book’s title—My Autobiography of Carson McCullers—has already told
us that this is actually a memoir, with the writer using McCullers’s life to
comprehend her own. It’s a familiar device—like Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Julie
Powell’s Julia Child. Near the book’s end, Shapland reminds us, “Biography and
its presumptions have bothered me for some time.” This is so insistent that it
prompts the question: Does Shapland really intend to litigate the problems
inherent in biography as literary pursuit, or is she excusing the endeavor of
her own book?
As a
graduate student, Shapland was an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, the
University of Texas repository that buys up the ephemera of seemingly every
writer: Gabriel García Márquez, Don DeLillo, Rachel Cusk. An academic’s request
introduced Shapland to the correspondence between a woman named Annemarie
Clarac-Schwarzenbach and Carson McCullers, perhaps most famous for her 1940
novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, surely one of American literature’s most
remarkable debuts. Shapland’s interest is piqued:
‘Annemarie’s language in her letters to
Carson is intimate, suggestive, or I read it that way. You remember. I had
received letters like these. I had written letters like these to the women I’d
loved. It was very little to go on, and yet I felt an utter certainty: Carson
McCullers had loved women.’
This
suggestion that a writer firmly within the American canon—albeit one whom she’d
not read—might have loved women strikes a nerve. “I am as hesitant to ascribe
steady narrative meaning to my own life as to any other’s,” Shapland writes.
“But I suppose we could call those letters a turning point.” She’s moved to
catalog the writer’s effects, which have been waiting for a scholar’s attention
for years; she cuts her hair short and embraces the label lesbian; she abandons
her hunt for an academic job to write the book we’re reading. Whatever
transpired between Annemarie and Carson might be open to a biographer’s
interpretation; what happens between Jenn and Carson seems clearly like love.
If
McCullers provided salvation, helping Shapland emerge once and for all from the
closet, now the younger writer has an opportunity to return the favor. But she
is wary. She cites this, from Josyane Savigneau’s 2001 McCullers biography:
“The labels lesbian and bisexual ... have also been used by partisans of
homosexuality—both male and female—who would appropriate the writer for their
cause.” Shapland writes, “Her description positions me as a ‘partisan of
homosexuality’ seeking to ‘appropriate’ Carson’s story for my ‘cause.’ And
perhaps I am.”
This
circumspection is unnecessary and dulls the work’s effect. Authorial hesitation
is fine—probably commendable!—but its recurrence feels less like an
intellectual complication and more like nervous tic. To be queer—different in
whatever fashion you are—is superb preparation for the task of criticism. You
meet Harriet the Spy with that frisson of recognition. You read A Separate
Peace waiting for the teen protagonists to kiss (fraternal love, give me a
break). This is a survival strategy (You are not alone in the world) and we
learn to deploy it on the page and in reality.
Shapland
both is and is not looking for evidence. She notes the case of Eleanor
Roosevelt, whose relationship with Lorena Hickok was posthumously revised into
friendship. Queerness, like fog, dissipates over time: “If it can’t be proved
with direct evidence of sexual intimacy, it never happened. And if you’re
looking for evidence, it won’t ever be published.” In transcripts of
McCullers’s therapy sessions (recorded as raw material for an autobiography),
she seems to find it. Copyright constraints prohibit her from quoting most of
what she locates, but of course it’s immaterial. Queerness was in McCullers’s
dress, her work, her social circle, her life. To pretend otherwise is to
maintain that the sky is beige.
Shapland’s
is a quest for the self. A snatch of McCullers’s childhood memory recalls her
own. McCullers’s health troubles (she was partially paralyzed by a stroke at
31; she died at only 50) echo her own struggles with chronic illness. She sees
the book as atonement: “… for my own closeted years, I am determined to shed
light, to expose even those things that are difficult about a writer’s life. To
track the rewritings, the omissions, the revisions.” This is so ambitious as to
be impossible.
My
Autobiography might have dwelt even longer than it does on the resonances
between the lives of author and subject: Shapland cuts herself off, as though
she’s using McCullers cheaply. But we all read selfishly. This text is more
than mere fan letter, and if the author had allowed herself to go further, I
wonder what she might have found?
Her
understanding of archival practices and affection for McCullers make Shapland
an informed critic. She might have probed deeper into why the Ransom Center
holds McCullers’s coat as well as her correspondence. She stays as a guest at
McCullers’s childhood home and could have spent more time on why such sites
endure and whether they’re good stewards of an artist’s legacy. This book might
have been broader, a more robust hybrid of memoir and criticism. I will say,
though, that it made me return to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; I sense that
Shapland would consider that mission accomplished.
Finding
Carson McCullers. By Rumaan Alam. The New Republic , February 21, 2020.
When I
was 17, my uncle handed me a copy of The
Ballad of the Sad Café. I had never heard of Carson McCullers. I devoured the
collection. Years later I thanked him for the introduction, and he chuckled and
half-apologized. “Kind of bleak, for a teenager,” he said. What I would have
responded, were I someone who is able to come up with good things to say on the
spot, is: Being a teenager is already pretty bleak, so I might as well have
some company.
Carson came
to me, via said uncle, in my final years of high school, during my first dips
into the melancholia that has lingered in my peripheries for 10-plus years. I
grew up in rural New England; it was idyllic and I did love it, but I was
constantly aware of its smallness, its limitations. I was seen, I’m absolutely
certain, as “normal,” but inside I often felt despairing, lonely, impatient.
Like so many of Carson’s characters, I was desperate for my life — my real life
— to start.
Jenn
Shapland, whose My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is out today from Tin
House, was in her mid-20s when Carson came to her. (Shapland calls her Carson,
so I’m going to call her Carson, too.) She was in the archives of UT’s Ransom
Center, where she worked for two years as she earned her PhD. A scholar
requested the letters between Carson and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and Shapland
descended into the archives to retrieve them. What she found was a set of
intimate correspondences, in which she immediately detected romance. “Other than
my own, I had never read love letters between women before,” she writes. At the
time, Shapland was grappling with her own sexuality, her ambitions, her
identity. She, too, was hoping her life would start and questioning what that
life should be.
This discovery
set her on a years-long journey to unearth, retrace, understand, and even
embody Carson’s life — particularly her life of love. The resulting book
brilliantly interweaves Carson’s personal history with Shapland’s own. “To tell
another person’s story,” Shapland explains, “a writer must make that person
some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.” Shapland achieves
this identity merger, to some extent. She lives in Carson’s childhood home in
Columbus, Georgia, reads countless pages of transcripts from her therapy
sessions, visits Yaddo, and examines her subject’s collection of coats and
nightgowns, searching for clues, searching for answers, and in some ways,
searching for herself. To see these pieces fit together, Shapland writes, “[Y]ou
have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it’s like to be
closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in
even the most unlikely places.”
Carson’s
relationship with Annemarie is relatively well known and frequently cited, as
are her many friendships with other queer writers and artists, and her
fiction’s atypical empathy toward homosexuality, blackness, and disability in
the mid-20th century. Nonetheless, Carson is historically categorized as a
straight woman (she was married twice, to the same man) who entertained
“infatuations” and close friendships with other women. The question that
propels Shapland’s book is not whether or not Carson was a lesbian; she’s not
trying to prove, exactly. What she’s trying to do is see herself in history,
show herself (and us) that Carson and other queer people have always lived,
always loved, always made community for themselves.
One of
the ways Shapland asserts her own existence, and the existence of a rich
history of lesbians living and loving, is through the physical remnants of that
history. Carson’s clothes, some of which were given to the Ransom Center, are
crucial in this respect. Shapland measures and examines them in detail — more
than she ever has with her own clothing. She describes a room in Carson’s house
in Georgia which is lined with glass cases housing Carson’s old possessions:
things like eyeglasses, a cigarette case, a wallet. They are mundane objects,
but ones that prove Carson’s life, and thus make tangible the existence of a
person whose identity has been glossed over by popular memory. “[I]f indeed
there hardly is a lesbian history,” Shapland asks, “do I exist?”
At its
core, Shapland’s book is about gaps — in stories, in language, in history, in
ourselves — and how we attempt to fill them. Shapland casts aspersions on
historians and critics who have called Carson a tomboy (“whatever that is […] I
cannot imagine her displaying athletic ability, and she was by no means
butch”), or her wardrobe as “mannish” (“how many men wear lapels that large,
cuffs that long? What about all the embroidery, the beading? Though now I am
gender policing”). The challenge, as she sees it, “is how little common
language we have to communicate androgyny, ambiguity. We rely on binary terms
[…] to convey what is at heart both, or neither.” Shapland marvels at the
historical rewriting of Carson’s life, in which she had “obsessions” with women,
but of course, she was straight — because people are straight. Where there is
no equivocal language to account for equivocal history, there is only lack.
Shapland
detects queerness everywhere, but her findings are usually ignored, if not
outright refuted. The director of the Carson McCullers Center in Columbus tells
her “in no uncertain terms” that Carson and her therapist Dr. Mary Mercer were
“never romantically involved.” At Yaddo, the artist residency in the Hudson
Valley that Carson adored, and where she met another of her paramours, the
residency director Elizabeth Ames, Shapland sees holes in the tour guide’s
description of the benefactor family. She questions these relationships: Who
was involved with whom? And to what extent? “Women? Men? […] Were they all
enmeshed? None of these questions were answered on the tour, though I asked.”
Apparently, queerness is not part of Yaddo’s self-mythologizing. In a section
titled “Googling,” Shapland describes reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down
the Bones while at Yaddo: “[W]ithin a minute I was typing ‘Natalie Goldberg
lesbian’ into the search bar. I cannot tell you the number of times I have
typed this search with different women’s names.” What she finds, perhaps
unsurprisingly, and in a fitting metaphor for her entire project, is ambiguity.
Ambivalence
is reflected and refracted in the book’s very structure. My Autobiography of
Carson McCullers is made up of vignettes, some only a sentence long and some
that span deeply researched pages. These pieces are grouped and sorted by topic
and time, in keeping with Shapland’s archivist training, but there is also a
certain amount of slipperiness to them, a constant regenerating and layering
effect that renders the categories somewhat irrelevant. Shapland resists classification
and prescription at every turn, opting for gray over black-and-white whenever
possible. Her role, then, is less as biographer than as translator, rereading
and queering Carson’s life for an audience that has only had access to a
fraction of the story.
Of
course, for Carson and her contemporaries, it was expected that queer
“behaviors” be shrouded in normativity. As Freudian psychology gained
popularity, so too did the idea that long-term homosexual behavior —
particularly when undisguised by heterosexual partnership — was a pathology.
Carson adhered to these strictures, marrying Reeves McCullers for convenience
while engaging in intense affairs with women, residing in the famed February
House in Brooklyn, and living apart from Reeves for essentially their entire
marriage. It bears mentioning that Carson was accused of other pathologies, as
well — she was chronically ill, and doctors often explained away her sicknesses
as “psychological episodes.” In reality, she suffered a series of strokes, starting
at the age of 23, incurred partly due to a misdiagnosed bout of rheumatic fever
in her teens. Shapland, too, has a chronic illness that often leaves her
exhausted, diagnosed in her early 20s. Invisible illnesses put the sick in the
horrible position of constantly having to explain themselves, prove themselves,
or else pretend. “The psychologizing of illness complicates the relationship
between self and body,” Shapland writes. “If any malady can be connected to a
patient’s psychology it follows that […] they could cure themselves.” Carson
and Shapland are only two on an infinitely long list of women who were made to
feel crazy, instead of simply sick.
Shapland’s
book was catalyzed in part by Carson’s relationship with therapy and with her
therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer. Carson began seeing Mary when she was 41 and
convinced Mary to allow the sessions to be recorded and transcribed. Mary kept
them private until her death in 2012, and in 2014 they were released. “[B]oth
Mary and Carson describe these transcripts as an attempt at writing her
autobiography,” Shapland explains. There is a lot of talk about writers in
therapy, about writing as therapy, but therapy as writing? It’s an appealing
concept, and a convenient one for a writer who struggles with introspection.
Carson’s characters are, perhaps, more developed than Carson herself: “[I]t’s
clear enough that she, a writer renowned for her psychological insight and
emotional acuity on the page, is still at a loss as to how to articulate who
she is.” This technique may very well have been a way for Carson to remove
herself from her own mind, to analyze — or create — herself the way she would
one of her characters. Shapland fills some of the holes left by Carson’s
therapeutic testimony, chiming in to offer analysis where Carson couldn’t, or
wouldn’t.
Shapland
herself, on the other hand, is the archetypal therapy patient. Her experiences
in counseling are interspersed throughout the book, mirroring and offsetting
Carson’s sessions with Mary. Shapland is contemplative and anxious, plagued by
impostor syndrome. At every turn, she is astonished when doors are opened,
offers extended. All success feels like a fluke. She worries, even, that the
very essence of her project is corrupt: “I became afraid that in the very process
of trying to know her, I would somehow change her.”
At the
same time, Shapland feels protective of her singular relationship with Carson,
defensive when other people claim to “love” her. Through her rewriting of
Carson’s biography, a kind of ownership emerges: Oh, you love her, do you? Are
you writing a book about her? Not wanting to be one of these intrusive,
presumptuous people, I mentioned my anxiety about writing this review to my own
therapist: Am I attempting to take Carson away from Shapland? Am I
appropriating her? If one day I happen to meet Shapland, will I be able to
resist telling her I reviewed her book, stole a little piece of Carson’s
legacy, inserted myself into the story? (The outcome of this debate is
self-evident.)
My own
experiences with therapy started in high school, around the time I first read
Carson’s work. The routine remains an essential part of my emotional
well-being. In retrospect, it’s an interesting time to have begun such a
process: I was engaging in identity-making and personal storytelling at the
precipice of my adulthood. I hadn’t thought of it this way until I read
Shapland’s astute assessment that “[t]herapy has a lot in common with memoir:
It’s telling your story.” Successful counseling, Shapland asserts, is just narrative-making
through trial and error. At one point, she describes a session that helped her
“shape a new narrative, one that wasn’t so strict and unforgiving.” A good
therapist is like a good editor: she knows all your previous work, all your
tricks, and never lets you get away with lazy storytelling.
When I
read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the book for which Carson is probably most
famous, the man I was dating sneered over my shoulder, “Isn’t that a YA novel?”
Carson is not, for Library of Congress cataloging purposes, a young adult
author. But here is yet another place where official categories mean very
little. Her books do speak to a certain type of anguished, searching youth that
resonated with me when I was 17, and still does. Many of her characters (like
my favorite one, Frankie, the 12-year-old protagonist in The Member of the
Wedding who yearns to be part of something bigger and fixates on her brother’s
wedding) are struggling through adolescence, feeling like outsiders for reasons
that are invisible to everyone else.
That
sense of longing and displacement clearly resonates with Shapland and is in
part to thank for the existence of this book. In one of the very first
sections, Shapland describes the “slow burning catastrophe of [her] twenties,”
in which she realizes she’s halfway down the wrong path (academia) and isn’t
sure where to turn. “I could tell I wasn’t cut out to be an archivist. I didn’t
have the patience, and I spent too much time trying to solve mysteries of my
own creation,” she writes, after listing the other occupations she’s certain
she wouldn’t enjoy or be good at. Luckily for us, she turns to Carson, and
spends 200-plus pages proving herself wrong about the archivist bit. She is a
diligent, perceptive, and heartful researcher. Following along with
Shapland-as-detective is a delight, and the mystery she sets out to solve is
one of those wicked unsolvables: how do we account for the apertures in
language, history, and identity? Shapland describes “the only story [Carson]
ever wrote: a lonely misfit wrestles with her hidden self, unable to articulate
her own longings.” It seems Shapland, too, has written that story.
Rewriting
McCullers. By Ellie Duke. Los Angeles Review of Books , February 4, 2020
The
moment I found the archived letter that explicitly referred to Octavia Butler
as a lesbian, I immediately texted all the people in my contact list who might
give a damn. Sure, several of her obituaries used the word as if it were fact,
but that caused a bit of an uproar amongst the faithful crew who maintained
that she only ever claimed the identity of hermit. “We have proof!” I typed and
typed again. Of course, this was no certain proof—these weren’t Butler’s
archival materials or even the materials of someone who knew her all that well.
I didn’t care. The casual and confident use of the word “lesbian” by one of her
contemporaries was enough for me.
Our
(etymological) creation myth is well-known: a charismatic poet, an island of
women, and several scraps of papyrus containing poetic fragments of their love.
This piecemeal proof has inspired gaggles of scholars throughout the ages to
spend ample page space developing what’s become known as The Sappho Question.
“Was she? Wasn’t she? Would she have used the word?” It’s evident Sappho wrote
poems celebrating erotic love for women, yet somehow, such willful disbelief
persists. At the very least, let us name our namesake.
Now here
I am, typing “was Octavia Butler a lesbian” into Google. (As far as I can tell,
the jury’s out.) This isn’t the first time I’ve caught myself asking my own
version of The Question. “Was Emily Dickinson/Sylvia Plath/Julia Child a
lesbian.” Like Jenn Shapland, the most recent addition to my library of lesbian
writers, “I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve typed this search with
different women’s names.” She understands the compulsion. She won’t judge me.
Besides, we’re not attempting to disprove speculation in some act of lesbian
erasure masked as responsible scholarship. We’re asking The Question to give
our speculation legs.
Yes,
locating lesbians is about naming people as our kin, but it’s also about
collecting a body of literature that speaks to our experiences of desire,
identity, and language. We seek literature we can love that also loves us back.
Literature that feels lesbian, even when an explicitly lesbian character isn’t
present. Just as Bertha Harris claimed Djuna Barnes, so Shapland claims the
famously ambiguous southern novelist in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.
Or does she? She might refer to Carson McCullers as a lesbian, but “to claim”
implies ownership. This is something else.
Though
I’d never heard of Carson McCullers’ work until graduate school at a southern
institution, she was wildly popular during her lifetime. McCullers’ debut
novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), became an immediate bestseller, and
her second novel, Reflections in a Gold Eye (1941), was adapted into a film
starring Marlon Brando as a closeted US Army officer and Elizabeth Taylor as
his wife. She was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and was allowed to come and
go from Yaddo pretty much as she pleased. Richard Wright deemed her the first
white southern writer to handle black characters with as much ease as those of
her own race and Tennessee Williams considered her the greatest writer of her
generation. McCullers’ work consistently explores queer desires, yet the fact
that she married a man, divorced him, and then married and divorced him again
seemed to some biographers to be a case against lesbianism. Still, her intense
relationships with women are well-documented, and upon the release of
McCullers’ therapy session transcripts in 2013 (transcribed because McCullers
hoped to use them as the basis of her autobiography), the world gained even
more documentation.
In No
Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh describes two different ways of
thinking about “the emergence of desire,” both in terms of archival research
and more generally: it bursts forth from a single moment that drastically
alters the trajectory of your life, or it gradually accumulates through a repetition
of behaviors and longings. “While I know that my desire for [what the archive
might have to offer] is in reality a long accrual,” she writes, “I imagine it
as this single solitary moment.”
In the
study of lesbian history, the desire for proof is generally one the researcher
doesn’t expect or even want to have satisfied. Queer research can feel like a
secret club, where evidence is stored only within the blood that rushes from
our bellies to our cheeks and is exchanged via intuition and rumor. When Shapland
finds her proof, several years into researching McCullers, she’s overwhelmed by
the verification of that which she’d known all along. Her girlfriend doesn’t
share in her sense of shock. “‘Isn’t this what you were looking for?’” she
asks. “‘Well,’” responds Shapland, “‘I didn’t think I’d actually find it.’”
I’m not
ruining anything—this moment of discovery happens fairly early in the book.
Which is to say, proof might be relevant, but it’s not the point. Often, the
act of writing a biography is one on hand an attempt to uncover some previously
unseen truth about a person, and on the other an effort to establish narrative
or analytical meaning to the messiness of life. For Shapland, it’s more about
finding a way to accept the mess in all its absences and utterances and to be
honest with herself and her readers about what it is she wants from the
archive. Ultimately, Shapland’s book aims to behold a woman she’ll never meet
and to love her without laying claim.
McCullers
died before she finished her autobiography, released posthumously in its very
incomplete form as Illumination and Night Glare (2002). There is something
profoundly tender in the way Shapland treats the series of incompletions and
irresolutions she traces across the author’s life. Though McCullers ultimately
decided her therapy transcripts were worthless, Shapland sees a book in their
starts and stops, erasures, lost pages, and unprovable suggestions.
While
it’s unclear whether McCullers ever had sex with any of the women she longed
for—which for way too many people is the only acceptable “proof” of
lesbianism—Shapland leaves open the very real possibility without needing it to
be fact. What she sees in Carson, as she calls her, is “a familiarly protracted
becoming” that she can only render imperfectly: “I wonder, constantly, what I
might be omitting, revising, censoring. What I am unable to see or let be seen.
About Carson, and about myself.” This kind of love acknowledges the fundamental
separation between lover and beloved while also understanding that through our
most deeply-held desires, “we are shards of others.”
The act
of piecing ourselves together through each other shows up again and again in
lesbian literature. Sure, it can fringe on enmeshment when done possessively
and without regard for one’s own motivations, and that’s a stereotype that
makes for a handful of easy punchlines. But all jokes aside (cue joke about
humorless lesbians), what so often gets overlooked is the great possibility in
considering self-creation as a collaborative work of love in which we carry the
bodies of others within our own. “Nothing about you has faded,” says Jeanette
Winterson’s nameless narrator of Written on the Body. “You are still the colour
of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror its not my own face I
see. Your body is twice. Once you once me.” The woman that the narrator loves
is dead, but not. The narrator is the woman that she loves, but not. When we
continually re-make ourselves and each other through intimacy, we’re never done
becoming.
The
erotic, as Audre Lorde describes it, is “a measure between the beginnings of
our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Lesbian literature
seldom traffics in the rhetoric of the self-made hero; to live fully requires
tapping into the space between who we think we are and what we feel, which so
very often has to do with what or whom we desire. Lorde did not write a memoir,
but instead a “biomythography” she titled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,
after a Carriacou word meaning “women who work together as friends and lovers.”
To write of life as a myth might seem like a dishonest act of exaggeration or
idealization, yet Lorde uses the idea of mythos to frame the narration of life
as inextricable from the expansive web of stories that change us.When Shapland
dedicates her book to “Your Carson,” she gives her work over to her readers so
they too can behold McCullers, identify with her, and become themselves. She
belongs to no one and everyone and will remain, like the rest of us, eternally
and beautifully incomplete. So when I refer to Carson McCullers and Octavia
Butler as lesbians, I do so out of existential necessity, but also, and
especially, for the sake of love.
Googling
Literary Lesbians: On Carson McCullers and the Erotics of Incompletion. By
Sarah Heying. LitHub , February 4, 2020.
