Carson is forty-one when the transcripts begin, and it’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. In April 1958, she tells Mary in a letter that her writing comes to her from a place of instinct, rather than analysis, and that she only comprehends what she writes after it is finished. When she first goes to see Mary, she feels so unable to interpret her own feelings and behaviors she compares herself to a person who has had a lobe of her brain surgically removed. So often a search for identity, for self-knowledge, is something we associate with youth. But in my own life, identity was slow to develop, and I didn’t fully come into myself until my late twenties. Perhaps this is what I saw, from the start, in Carson: a familiarly protracted becoming.
Therapy has a lot in common with memoir: It’s telling your story. I first visited a therapist the same spring I found the Annemarie letters. In the therapist’s office, in the only dark corner of the fluorescent UT health center, I said over the gurgles of the cascading fountain on the table beside me, “I seem to have lost the narrative thread of my life.” I said, “I just don’t know what the narrative is anymore.” What I was trying to say, I think, was that I didn’t know how to talk my way through talk therapy without a story I could comprehend, a narrative logic into which I could insert my actions and my feelings. My behavior—the breakup, the roaches—felt illogical, self-destructive. And painfully naïve. “I was gawky and erratic and unmanageable to myself,” as Jill Johnston, author of Lesbian Nation, describes her experience of coming to terms with her identity. (Or Eileen Myles: “I still liked men. I mean I was trying to.”) That first therapist, a graduate student himself, didn’t have much to offer me. I spent a good part of our session meditating—sitting in silence—at his suggestion.
My next therapist, E, was three floors down in a sunlit office she shared with a woo-kitsch aficionado. For the next four years I sat surrounded by crystals, framed Rumi quotes, and praying Buddhas as E helped me shape a new narrative, one that wasn’t so strict and unforgiving. What I can tell you about my experience as a fledgling lesbian is that it took me a long time to accept and understand it, the identity, the word itself. Now I think of sexuality and identity, gender too, as processes of trial and error. You have to find what works for you. You need a narrative with room for messiness, one that can accommodate veering toward extremes.
As therapy, Carson and Mary’s sessions were life-changing. Carson’s quest for self-knowledge, which coincided with narrating her disastrous marriages and articulating her love for women, took place well into her adulthood. The tapes document a forty-one-year-old woman just figuring out who she is, dictating it in her soft southern purr. Carson’s letters to Mary after each session are awash in the joy of self-revelation, among other joys. But Carson never published her therapy transcripts. After reading them over, she was heartbroken to find them garbled and indecipherable. Yet I read them as if they were an unpublished manuscript, a draft tucked away in a drawer for a lifetime, only to find its way to a numbered folder in a numbered box in an archive. Carson may not have ultimately seen a book in them, but I do. I see the only story she ever wrote: a lonely misfit wrestles with her hidden self, unable to articulate her own longings.
According to Carson, after that first session, Mary invited her to lunch. They talked about books, though Mary had never read any of Carson’s. Their post-session lunches, which continued through April 1958, were for Carson “the solace and high point” of the day. Insisting that theirs was a strictly doctor-patient relationship for the duration of Carson’s therapy, Mary would later deny that these lunches ever took place.
Derangement, or Why I Write
As I searched through the existing writings about Carson in my downtime at the Ransom Center, I found over and over that her relationship with Annemarie was sidelined or left out of a story about her and Reeves. It doesn’t seem as if these are, for the most part, acts of outright censorship on the part of biographers or the people they interviewed. Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative, the one in which inexplicable crushes on and friendships with women surface briefly within the confines of an otherwise “normal” life. In the published biographies, Annemarie is just a one-sided obsession. (“Carson loved Annemarie far more than Annemarie could ever requite,” according to Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter, and “Annemarie did not return Carson’s enthusiasm,” writes Sherill Tippins in February House.) The more I read, the more it seemed that all of her profound emotional relationships with women were either dismissed or ridiculed. Mary becomes, in these retellings, some kind of nursemaid to a sickly, emotionally flatulent Carson, and the other significant women in Carson’s life—Mary Tucker, Elizabeth Ames, Janet Flanner, Natalia Danesi Murray, Marielle Bancou, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jane Bowles—all become minor characters.
Yet as I read and reread her letters and conversations with Mary, I found a fuller version of Carson’s life revealed through her relationships. I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others. Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer. There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring-to-have with wanting-to-be. It’s the combination of wants that makes these longings confusing, dangerous, and queer. There is a desire to know that is already knowing, a curiosity for what you deep down recognize, a lust for what you are or could be. Writer Richard Lawson describes it as “the muddied confusion over whether you want to be someone’s companion or if you want to step inside their skin, to inhabit the world as they do.”
It is by no means easy to track or trace relationships between women, past or present. Women’s relationships with other women are often disguised: by well-documented marriages to men, by a cultural refusal to see what is in full view or even to believe such relationships exist. In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down. Reasons for this layer one upon the other: a lesbian purposely hides her identity and remains closeted. A lesbian refuses to call herself a lesbian, disidentifying from the term and its associations for reasons personal or political. A woman does not know she is a lesbian—because she does not ever have a relationship with another woman, or because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian. I didn’t call myself one for several years: hence the “roommate.” Or, as in Carson’s case, her own self-understanding and identification are difficult to determine due to the efforts of those who outlived her and pushed her into the closet.
It was her retroactive closeting by peers and biographers that I found most disturbing. I took it personally. I began to feel unreal, deranged. If Carson was not a lesbian, if none of these women were lesbians, according to history, if indeed there hardly is a lesbian history, do I exist?
Rather than name or talk about Carson’s formative loves and friendships with women, the biographies cast them aside in favor of an account of her “tortured” relationship with Reeves McCullers, the man she married and unmarried twice in her life. The straight narrative is given the benefit of the doubt, and writers feel comfortable filling in the blanks to create a great and desperate love story out of what looks, on my reading, like a series of manipulations of a woman struggling to name her own desires. Perhaps it isn’t even as sinister as knowingly replacing one narrative with another. Maybe it’s just that the stories of her relationships with women are partial, hard to compile. To piece them together, you 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.
There are many ways to interpret a life. But what if we choose the most probable scenario, the path of least resistance, inste
ad of trying to talk our way out of what seems evident, instead of trying to explain away the obvious? Lesbian historian Emily Hamer writes, “We know that they were lesbians because this is the best explanation of their lives. . . . The standard of visibility is not a universal prerequisite for knowledge. We cannot see electricity but we know that electricity exists because electricity is the best explanation of why moving a light switch leads to the illumination of a light bulb.”
Savigneau doubts whether Carson ever experienced sexual desires, period “romantic obsessions” with certain women aside. She is, unfortunately, not alone in this opinion. She writes, “The labels lesbian and bisexual have been used by those who denigrate any form of marginality to distance themselves from Carson McCullers by categorizing her as an ‘abnormal artist.’ They have also been used by partisans of homosexuality—both male and female—who would appropriate the writer for their cause.” Savigneau’s biography came out in English in 2001. Her description positions me as a “partisan of homosexuality” seeking to “appropriate” Carson’s story for my “cause.” And perhaps I am.
Caves
After finding the therapy transcripts, I drove back to Carson’s house through a cloud of yellow-green pollen from trees in heavy flower. I had come to Columbus to be alone, to experience McCullers’s town and home, thinking that perhaps the buildings themselves, the trees, the streets would reveal what I couldn’t find in published writings about her. The foundation that manages Carson’s house had offered me a chance to stay there, and though the timing wasn’t perfect—I was in my last semester of graduate school and hadn’t finished the dissertation I’d be defending in a month—this residency seemed too good to pass up. I was also in the flush of new love and couldn’t believe I was choosing to be alone in Georgia for four weeks.
I hadn’t quite grasped that I would be living in a museum. When I arrived at the Stark Avenue house and glanced around at its closed floral curtains soaked in dust, and its sun-faded fan-art paintings of Carson’s face, I panicked. I suddenly felt alone, scared, unsure why I’d come all the way here and planned to stay a month. What connection did I even have to Carson, really? I’d read so much about her, but all I knew of her in three dimensions were the objects of hers I’d found at the Ransom Center: the shape of her feet in wool knee-high socks, the patina of her skin on an old cigarette lighter. Here she felt like a whole person I could neither see nor touch. I became afraid that, in the very process of trying to know her, I would somehow change her. Perhaps I had been expecting her to keep me company. But, needless to say, Carson wasn’t there.
Nor was she in any of the books I’d been devouring about her since I’d read the Annemarie letters. This project, this hunt for the Carson of Annemarie’s letters, had seemed at a distance like a useful escape from my dissertation and from the bleak academic job market. Now that I was padding around her house in socks, surrounded by her things, I felt daunted. I thought I would use my own life as a writer, as a queer person, as a chronically ill person, to tell Carson’s untold story. But after reading the transcripts, I realized that she’d already told it.
I called Chelsea and informed her I wasn’t going to be able to stick it out. All the rooms were dark, the house strange and musty. “What am I,” I demanded, “the living dead?” It was late February 2016, and too many of the neighboring lawns bore signs for nightmare right-wing candidates. Chelsea talked me down, reminded me that it always takes me a few beats to get used to a new space. I went to the grocery store. I bought orange lilies and a basil plant and things to eat. When I woke the next morning, the kitchen glowed with sunlight. The green things helped remind me that I, too, was a living thing. I was the one bringing life to this project. Lying in bed in the downstairs library, a wood-paneled, carpeted addition to the house I called my cave, I read an interview with Myles that offers writing, self-exposure or self-representation, as an antidote to—or an action of—loneliness: “You tell it cause you’re lonely—you’re the only person inside that life.” I wrote in my journal, “I always have to find my own way into things. Whatever is here I will make it myself from scratch. I will find it and assemble it or unbuild it.”
Within a few days, I started taking walks in the neighborhood. There’s a park a few blocks down the hill called Little Wildwood with huge trees and a sizable stone pyramid I assumed was a monument. When I crossed the park and approached the pyramid, I found no inscription or explanation for it, a glaring metaphor for the blankness I was feeling. The neighborhood is a cluster of old houses, some of them mansions, though not Carson’s. It reminded me of my hometown, a wealthy suburb on the north shore of Chicago where I never quite fit in. When I first read Carson’s fiction, sitting behind various desks in the Ransom Center, I felt an immediate connection to the small southern towns where her characters, often adolescents, strongly sense their own unbelonging and isolation. The suburbs of the Midwest of my childhood in the 1980s and ’90s resemble Columbus in their fondness for gossip, their sense of tradition, their prizing of normalcy at all costs (not to mention their tacit racism and homophobia). I didn’t meet, and rarely saw, any of the neighbors while I was in Columbus, though I frequently wondered what they thought of me strolling their empty streets, reading on the front porch, where by all appearances no one had sat in years. Outsiderness is a stance.
Chick-fil-A
The Chick-fil-A was how I knew where to turn for Carson’s house, which is green with another green house next door, and a code to get inside, and a feeling of dead dust. Her neighborhood, which used to perch on the rural outskirts of Columbus, now borders an excruciatingly typical main thoroughfare lined with fast food, a Rite Aid and a Walgreens, and a Circle K. I have never eaten Chick-fil-A, for obvious political reasons, but the drive-thru lane was always overflowing and blocking the turn for Stark Avenue. Instead, one night I ordered a pizza, and the delivery guy showed up on Carson’s porch and asked, “Do you live here?”
“Yes,” I said immediately, concerned that his handing over the pizza depended on a correct answer. “Well, sort of.”
The pizza man told me he goes by the place every day, he grew up nearby, and the historic registry sign out front made him think it was a museum.
“It is,” I told him, and he eyeballed me. I was thrilled by this awkward encounter, my first conversation with a person in days, and, pizza in hand, I closed the door behind him, sad to see him go. I wanted to play ghost a little longer.
Tree Houses and Telephone Booths
The house sits back from the street and is so unassuming I almost passed by it when I arrived. It has dark-green clapboards, cream window trim, and white stucco columns, with black wrought-iron railings flanking the steps to the porch. All of the windows are blanked out from within by closed curtains.
Carson wasn’t born in this house, but downtown on Thirteenth Street. The family moved to the suburbs when she was eight. As a child, Carson and her brother hid out in their backyard tree house, which had a pulley to bring up snacks they requested from the cook using an “elaborate signal system.” She doesn’t describe herself as unhappy, though she adds, “Years later when I was troubled I would still take refuge in that same tree house.” The snack-pulley detail is significant, as Carson writes that while she was growing up, her family never had dessert. “Perhaps that was because mother knew that every morning I would go to King’s grocery store and buy six bars of chocolate before I went to school. I would munch on these all during the day and I cannot recall how many times I was sent out of the room for eating in class.” In other words, Carson took care of herself. Mary tried to interpret this in their sessions: “What about the meaning of desserts and sweets in life? They are the things one earns only after eating one’s vegetables. And you needed the sweets because they substituted for love?” Carson’s autobiography doesn’t include many of the usual details about school or friendships with peers, but she talks about food a lot. And she talks about music. “My childhood was not lonely,” she writes in Illu
mination, “because when I was five years old in 1922, my Daddy bought a piano.”
Carson also found company in books. Her longtime favorite was the autobiography of dancer Isadora Duncan, My Life. “When I was fourteen years old, the great love of my life, which influenced the whole family, was Isadora Duncan,” she writes. She tried to start a dance company and informed her father that the family would be moving abroad to support her dancing dreams, which were short-lived. As a kid, Carson was frequently ill, with almost yearly bouts of pneumonia, and missed a lot of school. Her closest friends were adults: aunts and grandmothers were significant early on, and her nannies and maids all make appearances in Illumination—black women role models even if, in the 1920s small-town South, they were household servants. In therapy she calls her piano instructor, Mary Tucker, one of her first loves and describes her as a kind of personal deity. For years, she took lessons at Tucker’s house every Saturday and planned to be a musician, attending high school only sporadically and spending most of her time on music. Cue the song of the queer, creative childhood, the telltale signs of growing up isolated, independent, and artistic in a conservative place. She writes, “I yearned for one particular thing; to get away from Columbus and to make my mark in the world.”
In 1934, Carson escaped to New York, sailing from Savannah at seventeen. “For the first time I saw the ocean,” she writes, “and, later, marvel of marvels, I saw snow.” Beyond reaching the city, she didn’t have much of a plan. Though she’d set her sights on Juilliard, one way or another (either she determined her father, a watch repairman, couldn’t afford it, as she has it in Illumination, or she spent or gave away her tuition en route—to a prostitute who offered to show her to the subway, if you ask Tenn) she decided to pursue writing instead of music. On switching “professions” from musician to writer, she notes, “That was something I could do at home, and I wrote every morning.” Given her health, working at home seemed to Carson like a logical idea.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Page 2
