My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  Carson wasn’t comfortable in New York at first. Her roommate, a student at Columbia, had a boyfriend and was never home. On her way back to the room one day, a man came up the stairs behind Carson. He “tried to put his arms around me but I pushed him away so violently that he ricocheted against the wall,” she recalls. “So I was stuck there in that lonely room with a sense of menace and a fear of strange men. [In the daytime I’d go to Macy’s and just sit in the telephone booth where I knew I was safe. Then back to the horror of a sleepless night.]” She moved to women’s group housing at the Parnassus Club, then the Three Arts Club, and found sleep more easily surrounded by other creative women. I flashed back to my own six-month stint in New York, a semester at NYU my sophomore year of college, when I thought I’d finally find my people, my life, and everything I wanted that had yet to surface at my small, preppy Vermont school. Instead, I showed up in the city in Birkenstocks and knew immediately that I was on my own. I spent all my days alone in coffee shops and on benches and taking long, slow walks. I was queer but closeted. I mailed arduous letters to my girlfriend, abroad in Athens. I spent a lot of time at the Strand. I remember it as the loneliest time of my life.

  Carson had a series of jobs while she lived in the city: typist, waitress, piano player for dance classes, comics editor. She would often wake up at four or five in the morning to fulfill her daily writing quota. Whatever she wrote that she didn’t like, she destroyed, a practice that continued all her life. In Illumination, she claims she never had a job she wasn’t fired from, “a perfect record.” She began showing apartments for a real estate agent, Mrs. Louise B. Field. “The main part of the job, I remember, was getting sour cream for Mrs. Field, which she would eat with a long ice tea spoon. But once, when I was reading Proust behind the ledger and got involved in a long Proustian sentence, Mrs. Field caught me.” Fired again, her boss informed her she would “never amount to anything in this world.” I’m familiar with reading on the job. Chelsea claims that I spent the entire two years I worked at the Ransom Center sitting outside on a bench in the courtyard, reading in the sun. As I recall it, I was usually reading inside the building. After I found the Annemarie letters, I was reading all the center’s first-edition copies of Carson’s novels, trying to remember not to fold down the corners of the pages.

  That Girl

  Carson spent summers in Columbus with her new friend Edwin D. Peacock, a musician she had met at a Rachmaninoff concert who “introduced [her] to Marx and Engels” at seventeen. The books he gave her provided new language in which to parse the injustice she had sensed as a child upon seeing black people rooting through trash cans during the Depression. In her words, “I had realized . . . that there was something fearful and wrong with the world, but I had not in any way thought of it intellectually” prior to Edwin. Of their relationship, she clarifies, “I was not ‘in love,’ but it was a real friendship, which has indeed lasted throughout all my life.” Edwin later opened a bookstore in Charleston, South Carolina, with his partner, John Zeigler, and Carson would visit them in the summer at the beach. There are great photos of Carson surrounded by a throng of men in teeny bathing suits. Gay men formed Carson’s core social circle in many phases of her life. I wonder if gay men were easier to spot and befriend, or more prevalent among groups of writers in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s than lesbians. In the 1950s, “meeting other lesbians was very difficult,” Lorde writes in Zami. Regardless of the reason, Carson was most at home with queer friends from the time she was a teenager.

  During her second year in New York, enrolled in writing courses with Dorothy Scarborough and Helen Rose Hull at Columbia University, Carson got a letter from Edwin, who wanted to introduce her to his new friend, Reeves McCullers, an army clerk at Fort Benning in Georgia. According to Carson, Reeves was “the best looking man I had ever seen,” and “a liberal, which was important, to my mind, in a backward Southern community.” When Carson came home again for the summer, she, Edwin, and Reeves were inseparable. They were one of a series of Carson’s chosen families, and they spent whole days together. To her neighbors in Columbus, Carson was different on her return than the old Carson they knew before she left for New York. Now she chain-smoked and typed all day on the typewriter her father had given her, and the neighbors started to talk. They considered her to have “radical opinions.” After Carson fell off a horse at Fort Benning and “turned up braless” at the hospital, writer Elizabeth McCracken recounts in the Oxford American, the mother of an editor at the local paper subsequently responded to any mention of Carson: “‘Oh that girl . . . Well . . . She didn’t wear a brassiere.’”

  The following summer, she took a workshop with Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine, who would publish her first short story “Wunderkind” in 1936. In the winter, Carson came down with a fever, which was thought to be tuberculosis. Decades later, her doctor would determine that this had been rheumatic fever, which had damaged her heart and would cause her life-defining strokes and the paralysis of her left arm. While she was in Columbus recovering, Sylvia Chatfield Bates, her NYU writing teacher, sent her word of a first novel contest being held by Houghton Mifflin, and Carson submitted an outline called “The Mute,” a story about a deaf-mute man, John Singer, and his deaf-mute “friend” and roommate, Spiros Antonapoulos. In the preface to her outline—which Carlos Dews includes in the published version of Illumination—Carson writes, “Singer’s love for Antonapoulos threads through the whole book from the first page until the very end. No part of Singer is left untouched by this love and when they are separated his life is meaningless and he is only marking time until he can be with his friend again. Yet the four people who count themselves as Singer’s friends know nothing about Antonapoulos at all until the book is nearly ended.” This outline, which won the contest, would become The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Like her later works Reflections in a Golden Eye, Clock Without Hands, and “The Jockey,” Carson’s first novel boldly explores a hidden relationship between two men without naming or defining it.

  Qualifications

  Eleanor Roosevelt crossed the aisle at the 1961 Broadway premiere of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana to introduce herself to Carson, who was sitting with the playwright and his mother. Jordan Massee, Carson’s gay BFF and distant cousin, whom she called Boots, described this as “a tribute that meant more to Carson than the Pulitzer Prize.” Roosevelt, it was later revealed, had a long and well-documented lesbian relationship with a reporter named Lorena Hickok, which Susan Quinn unearthed and devoted nearly four hundred pages to in her biography Eleanor and Hick. “Yet,” Quinn writes,

  I still encounter people who are reluctant to believe that Eleanor Roosevelt was passionately involved with another woman. . . . I suspect that people react this way because they have a fixed idea of Eleanor Roosevelt, with her flowered hat and her purse and her sensible shoes, slightly bent forward as she marches off to make the world a better place. That Eleanor Roosevelt dwells in a world that transcends all the longings, hurts and excitements of passion. But that public persona masked the real Eleanor—as her letters to Hick make abundantly clear.

  The easy joke here: But aren’t lesbians supposed to love sensible shoes? However, if we stop short of making lesbians a joke for once, and take them seriously as people, as women, we find individuals who choose to make their lives and their bodies sites for their politics and their feminism. I would like to celebrate this choice by finding its every nuance and expression.

  The first researcher who had access to Eleanor and Hick’s letters, (which were opened to the public ten years after Hick’s death, as she had stipulated), a woman named Doris Faber, was appalled and insisted that the FDR library restrict the materials from public access. Stumbling upon their secret, she wanted it locked back up, Hick’s own wishes be damned. In her book The Life of Lorena Hickok: E. R.’s Friend, Faber turned their romance into a “friendship,” and even then people came after her for so much as suggesting any kind of intimacy, even
platonic, between Roosevelt and another woman. It seems Faber could hardly imagine such a thing. Nonetheless, these critics were distressed by the acknowledgment of even a close friendship between women. In the context of outright censorship of women’s relationships, it only makes sense that Carson’s story would be repackaged as a straight narrative. This ongoing suppression of details is even more troublesome given the burden of proof placed on queer relationships, both historical and present day: 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.

  I never expected to find any confirmation of Carson’s relationship with Mary Mercer, though I had my own reasons to suspect it. While she was alive, Mary didn’t breathe a word. In the years following Carson’s death, Mary was unwilling—unable—to speak openly with anyone about her. No one had access to the therapy transcripts or Carson’s letters to Mary, which Mary held back from the archive until her death in 2013. She refused biographers permission to use her letters (those that existed). Her censorship was thorough. When the Duke University Archives asked for her letters to Mary Tucker, Carson’s childhood piano teacher, with whom she developed a friendship after Carson died, Mary told Mary Tucker in a letter, “Destroy them.”

  It is strange to apply the expectations of discovery and evidence to a person’s life, let alone a person’s love life. As I read and researched Carson, I learned that evidence itself is slippery, and discoveries are never final. They shift as more voices, more sources are added to the mix. They shift according to the mood of the biographer or the critic, and according to my own mood, and according to the mood of the weather on the day I’m reading. I didn’t trust the discovery of Carson’s relationship with Mary that I found in the transcripts, in part because I suddenly didn’t trust myself as a reader. If Carson was a lesbian, and if her relationships bore that out, wouldn’t someone already have said so? Wouldn’t it be known beyond rumors in the queer community? It was a real mind-fuck, the back-and-forth between scanning indexes of heavily researched biographies that do not contain the words “gay” or “lesbian” or “homosexual” and reading Carson’s adamant descriptions of her own feelings and experiences. I also realized on some level that I was a confused queer person looking to Carson as a role model—I looked to everyone I met as a role model; I was in my midtwenties—and so I must have been reading into her queerness, seeing what I wanted to see. I must have been a partisan of the gay agenda. Already I was suspicious of my own desire for “proof.”

  In the introduction to his notes on her life, Boots writes, “I knew Carson too long and too well to be removed completely from the story of her life . . . but just what my role was, and how important, is not for me to decide. I am hardly qualified to write a biography of Carson McCullers.”

  I am hardly qualified to write a biography of Carson McCullers. Who am I to her? I slid my arms up the sleeves of her long lime-green wool coat, I folded her nightgowns, I labeled her socks. I made biscuits in the kitchen of her childhood home and I walked in the park where she used to play by herself. I have read enough biographies 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.

  Biographers usually seek to fill in gaps, to add narrative to strict chronology, to render a person’s life so that it reads like a nineteenth-century novel. But Carson’s is not an unwritten story. Rather, it is a story that has been written over, revised, and adjusted to suit various people’s needs. The more I read and researched, the more I began to question the versions of her life that exist and continue to circulate. I began to feel that someone—several someones—had put the jigsaw puzzle together all wrong, to form a picture of Carson that didn’t match the one I recognized. First, I had to take the puzzle apart and find all the faulty links. Then I began to reassemble it, a six-year process that took me from Austin, Texas, to Columbus, Georgia, to Saratoga Springs, New York, following leads and trying to fit the pieces together without knowing what the final version—my Carson—would look like. I’m still not sure how to know if I am done. It is customary when writing a biography to talk to as many people who personally knew the subject as possible, but I instinctively avoided this. I didn’t want to meet anyone. I didn’t want to encounter another person who might try to put the pieces back their own way, who would tell me where the pieces go. I wanted only the pieces in her words, and time.

  Carson’s biographies, both the full-length books and the life summaries that get rehashed whenever she is mentioned in print, take discrete forms. There is Carson the prodigy, the wunderkind, a shy small-town girl who bumbles her way to literary stardom. There’s Carson the drunk, sloppy and salty and probably exaggerating. And Carson the needy, ailing woman who is a burden to everyone who gets close to her. Carson the desperate, chasing down women and men; and Carson the manipulator, seducing and using others. Carson called herself “a bit of a holy terror” and said she was writing her autobiography to explain how her early success and her chronic illness “nearly destroyed” her. None of these is my Carson.

  “I never thought ‘my Jane’ might approximate the ‘real Jane’; I never even had designs on such a thing,” Maggie Nelson writes of her aunt, Jane Mixer, about whom she published two books. Reading these lines is deeply comforting to me, for what claim can I possibly make on a “real” Carson? She died twenty years before I was born. She was born seventy years before I was, on February 19, 1917. My birthday is the sixteenth. At most I can claim shared sun signs, and even that depends on your choice of astrological calendar. When I arrived at her childhood home a few weeks after my twenty-ninth birthday, when I had insisted to everyone who would listen that I was actually thirty, I found a partially eaten ninety-ninth birthday cake for Carson, with her face silk-screened onto the frosting, inhabiting the entire bottom shelf of the fridge. Apart from forlorn condiments and leftover bottles of cheap wine, the cake was the fridge’s sole occupant. The director of the McCullers Center told me, cordially, that I should help myself. Instead I squeezed my groceries in around the cake for several weeks, trying not to touch it, until an employee of the center arrived early to set up for an event and threw the whole thing into the trash can outside.

  Nelson writes, “But whoever ‘my Jane’ was, she had certainly been alive with me, for me, for some time.” Is my Carson alive? What would that mean? I think of her more as a poltergeist, able to inhabit the objects that I encounter, charging them with something close to, but not quite, life.

  I am trying to resurrect the exact moment of each of my subtle revelations about Carson: the white archival gloves holding up photographs by a corner, the lens of the camera, the air in the room, the glare of the overhead lights. Carson in a pinstriped suit and tall argyle socks, sitting at a piano. Carson lounging in the grass as a kid, in huge baggy shorts and her dad’s tie. How I long to preserve my first glimpses of these images, these things. All the while aware that as I preserve them in writing, I am removing older versions, overriding them, inevitably losing information—akin to what digital-era archivists, unknowing poets, call “lossiness.”

  A Free Love

  When Reeves first tried to hold Carson’s hand, she was appalled. She went home and told her father about it, insisting that such a step would be disruptive to their friendship. She repeated the same thing to Reeves when he tried to kiss her the next time they were out driving. But Reeves was determined. All summer Reeves had been borrowing Edwin’s bike to ride with Carson out to, of all places, a vacant Girl Scout camp, stopping for Cokes and eating picnics made by Bebe and swimming and playing chess. Reeves was getting ready to leave for New York, and apparently he wanted more from Carson than just a picnic. As she remembers it, the very next time he came to see her, post-attempted kiss, he asked her if she was a lesbian as they sat on the porch of the house on Stark Avenue, where I perched in 2016 listening to the rain night after night, hoping the pollen footprints would wash away.<
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  I’m piecing together these early days from the therapy transcripts, trying to understand how they fit with the other timelines, other versions I have read. Carson tells Mary that, that night, Reeves kissed her as Baudelaire describes kissing his mistress. Leave it to Carson to bring in some French poet at the crucial moment. No wonder so many of her biographers figure she never had sex. Afterward, whatever happened, Reeves asked Carson if she enjoyed it. Carson says she believes she liked it, though she was terrified her parents might come out and catch them in flagrante. He asked her again, and this time she said that indeed, she did enjoy it. Carson’s retelling of this event is ambivalent. She is distracted by the threat of being caught, unsure of her own feelings, and Reeves is persistent, pressuring. He tells her it doesn’t matter whether or not she’s a lesbian because he loves her, and then changes the subject to setting a wedding date. A year later they married. Carson’s articulated feelings, her uncertainty about whether or not she’s a lesbian, are somehow totally worthless here.

  After Edna St. Vincent Millay graduated from Vassar, where she had “smashes” on many a female classmate, she tried to continue to live as a lesbian in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. Bohemians, historian Lillian Faderman writes, were rapidly accepting bisexuality as another means to flout Victorian sensibilities and the previous century’s utter denial of women’s sexual autonomy. With the new writings of the sexologists in hand, women were recognizing that they had desires and that other women could fulfill them. Yet for Millay, who had gone by “Vincent” during her college years, exclusively loving women was not accepted, even by her progressive bisexual community in the Village. A man named Floyd Dell pressured her to go to bed with him, though “she was obviously ambivalent, insisting they remain fully clothed and refusing to have intercourse.” As to her reluctance, Dell told her, “‘I know your secret . . . You are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls in college.’” This line of reasoning, that women’s relationships with other women (especially in college) do not count as full, mature sexual experiences, continues to this day. Dell writes in his memoir that he felt it was his “‘duty to rescue her’” from her lesbian proclivities. He was unsuccessful in his mission.