My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  Carson tells Mary about a conversation she had with her parents before marrying Reeves at age twenty, an anecdote she later included in the opening of Illumination. She writes, “When I asked my mother about sex she asked me to come behind the holly tree & said with her sublime simplicity, ‘Sex, my darling, takes place where you sit down.’ I was therefore forced to read sex textbooks, which made it seem so very dull, as well as incredible.” Carson insisted that she live with Reeves before they married, telling her parents, “I don’t want to marry any man unless I know what sex is about . . . I want to know what I’m contracting with.” About her first sexual encounter with Reeves, she notes, “the sexual experience was not like D. H. Lawrence. No grand explosions or colored lights.” She explained to her parents that she longed to have the freedom and free love of Isadora Duncan, and not to be confined by marriage or convention. This is a classic Carson moment in her irreverence, her unwillingness to accept her parents’ shock as a tolerable reaction. But it also gives us a clue to her own ideas about sexuality and a sense of continuity that she had identified in herself since adolescence. She tells Mary that she wanted to be at liberty to love whomever she wanted, as though such freedom, such fluidity, could constitute an identity. For Carson, I think it does.

  The summer before fifth grade, I found a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Nancy Milford’s Zelda, on the second floor of the local library, in the nonfiction section I’d only recently discovered. The skylights made it the brightest part of the building. I sat down on a plastic stool between the shelves and started reading. I devoured the book that summer. I was fascinated. I don’t know why I picked it up, though the cover is striking: the title in white script on a background of peacock feathers, a photo of Zelda on the back cover at age thirty-one, sitting on a trunk in what appears to be an attic, in a polo shirt, a tutu, and pointe shoes. She was unprecedented. The book itself was bright green, I could see under the jacket, and the endpapers were an outrageous purple. Milford’s Zelda—audacious, creative, fiercely independent in her thinking—was my new junior high idol. Zelda loved and admired Isadora Duncan, so I did, too. It’s sad to realize now that Zelda Fitzgerald was the closest thing I had growing up to a lesbian role model. In the pages of her biography, I saw the outlines of who I might become. Looking back at the book, which I found a used copy of in my twenties, I am more intrigued by the overlap between myself and Milford, the biographer, whose prologue begins, “When I was young in the Midwest and had dreams of my own.”

  Alone in my red Civic for two days as I drove from central Texas to Carson’s house in 2016, I passed through Montgomery, Alabama, and though I was only a few hours from my destination, I decided to visit what I thought was Zelda’s childhood home, which had been made into a museum. I hadn’t read Zelda since I was young, but I remembered the stories of her glamorous southern upbringing, so foreign and yet familiar to me as a child of the snobbish Midwest. I walked up the garden path, let myself in the front door, and found myself in a museum devoted not to Zelda but to her husband and his work. In the back room hung Zelda’s flamboyant watercolor paper dolls, made for her daughter, Scottie, alongside some of her paintings. But otherwise, the house told the story of her husband’s life and writing. Her husband, who, as Milford’s biography taught me, stole her ideas for his fiction. Her husband, who destroyed her work. Who institutionalized her.

  The stories of women are paved over by others’ narratives so often that we rarely get to hear about how things went from their perspectives, from the inside. Constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces. I imagine this was what Carson found in Duncan’s book. In My Life, Duncan writes, “No woman has ever told the whole truth of her life. The autobiographies of the most famous women are a series of accounts of the outward existence, of petty details and anecdotes which give no realization of their real life. For the great moments of joy or agony they remain strangely silent.”

  Carson and Reeves married in the living room of her parents’ house in 1937, when she was twenty. Of the wedding, which only her family, Boots, and Edwin attended, Boots “insisted I was married in a green velvet gown and oxfords,” Carson writes. “Could be? I can’t remember.”

  Windows

  If biography is peering through the windows of someone’s house and describing what you see—or, less generously, as Janet Malcolm has it, if the biographer “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and the money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away”—memoir is peeking into the windows of your own life. A voyeurism of the self. An interior looting. Your description probably isn’t accurate—honesty has its limits, as does self-knowledge. In this case, I am perched outside my own windows as I try to see into Carson’s. Her house has been broken into, ransacked by looters. What am I looking for? What do they—the other biographers, critics, contemporaries—obscure from view?

  Carson tried to preserve her history, including her inner life. After Mary’s secretary, Barbara, transcribed the therapy tapes, Carson and Mary each got a copy to correct. When Carson was at Harkness Pavilion for one of several surgeries on her paralyzed left hand in the early 1960s, she pulled the transcript pages out of her hospital night table drawer and showed them to her agent, Robert Lantz. He took the stack home with him and found the material so memorable, he came to Mary looking for the pages after Carson’s death. Lantz writes that he understood from Carson that the tapes were transcribed in order to develop a manuscript from which Carson might write a full autobiography. He insists to Mary that the pages he read “had vitality, directness, immense humor and of course are now of great historic value. They should certainly become part of the material to be made available to an approved biographer.” Mary informed Lantz that the transcripts were Carson’s “psychiatric records” and therefore strictly confidential.

  To use her therapy transcripts as a source by which to construct Carson’s autobiography is to accept a correlation between speaking and writing. It is not the same to speak as it is to write, but I have found my own writing increasingly inflected by, and arising as, something spoken, from a need to speak. For me, Carson’s words are her words. I find it especially gratifying to hear her self-edit in the therapy sessions, changing the structure of a sentence, reframing a recollection, correcting and repeating herself so that all versions stand together on the page, a glut of words seeping forth without clear divisions, all in the interest of clarity.

  Illumination and Night Glare, her published autobiography, was dictated to friends, nurses, secretaries, and students in 1967, during the last four months of her life. It picks up several of the threads of the therapy transcripts. But even when these pages were published in 1999, Illumination and Night Glare remained obviously unfinished, the scraps of her story. I imagine she was just getting started. Neither the therapy transcripts, which weren’t made accessible until 2013, nor Illumination would figure largely in the biographies written about Carson, though they are the two surest examples of Carson telling her own version. While she was determined to write it, reciting her story from bed up to her last days, she never really had the chance. Who can tell the story of her own life?

  Unforeseen Events

  I started to imagine that I had come to Columbus to convalesce, as Carson did throughout her twenties, neither my first nor my last delusion. Carson’s bedridden state, her misdiagnoses, her various conditions that biographies make difficult to identify, gave me something tangible in common with her. She writes that in 1947, “finally, they discovered that I had a rheumatic heart condition as a child, and indeed too much running around put a strain on my heart so that it caused embolisms.” While I stayed at Carson’s, I struggled with my chronic illness, a heart condition that renders my body weak and constantly exhausted, prone to migraines and sudden sleep attacks, as I call them. It took months of testing for doctors to determine that my heart is too smal
l, my blood volume too low, to keep my body afloat. My initial days in the house were slow: I fell asleep in the middle of my first morning and when I woke up it was nearly evening. I spent that week working my way back to feeling somewhat normal. Too weak to sit up, I took notes in my phone and tried to be present in the house. To feel what it was like to live there, and to figure out how I got there.

  I hardly saw anyone while I was staying in Columbus, except a few students and professors at the brand-new university gym where I rowed every other day on the third floor, looking out on tall pines. One of the students working the front desk pretended she knew me so I could get a community membership for free: southern hospitality. And I got familiar with the librarians and local researchers hunting down their family trees at the university archive. The drive to campus along Hilton Avenue to Warm Springs Road threaded through mansions and old-growth trees, and it was what I saw most of in Columbus.

  The Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians held two events while I was in residence, and these were my only real social interactions all month. I rolled up my yoga mat and put away my sewing machine and tried to minimize my presence in the house. It wasn’t clear to me whether or not it would be appropriate for me to hide out downstairs during these events, though that was my first inclination. My mind was a funny mix of Carson’s biographies, which I was rereading diligently, and Super Tuesday election results and podcasts and Finnish lesbian cartoonist Tove Jansson’s memoir, and I didn’t quite know how I could surface from my cave and meet living people, let alone talk to them. But each time, at the last minute, I decided I should come up.

  It seemed as though I ought to be answering the door, offering drinks, and taking coats, but everyone just waltzed right in. My first week they held a David Diamond memorial marimba concert—Diamond was Carson’s friend, Reeves’s lover—in the living room where Carson used to stage plays with her brother and sister. (Carson directed and starred.) For a few hours, the quiet house echoed with eerie plunks and was filled with strangers. No one talked to me. It had been days since I’d spoken face-to-face with anyone; I had trouble remembering how. The guests left as abruptly as they’d arrived, wheeling out their marimbas and reinstating my solitude without asking permission.

  Later that month, I thought I would have better luck mingling at a student reading, with much of the English and writing department in attendance. But my main source of small talk was explaining why I was in the house. “I’m a writer,” I offered. “I’m working on a book about McCullers.” Using her last name seemed to make the enterprise more official, though I had yet to write a word about Carson. When I described the project and mentioned my interest in her relationships with women, I could have sworn multiple people backed away from me. Assuming I had made an odd impression but not sure why, I navigated the crowd into the back of the living room—my sewing room—and poured myself another glass of bad wine. Trying to use my body language as coded encouragement to the visitors to vacate the premises, I inched my way toward the door, where I landed on a new friend named Denis, who’d grown up Puerto Rican in Columbus. He didn’t know much about Carson, but understood, he told me, what it meant to be an outsider in a town this conservative. He told me about the neighborhood, and how segregated Columbus remains, which my drives had indicated. Right off the bat he warned me that people here might not be thrilled to talk to me about my project, though he was, and we talked until everyone left. Denis explained that Columbus had its own understanding of Carson McCullers and what aspects of her life it was willing to recognize. Her sexuality, among other things, was not on the list.

  I had arrived in Columbus thinking I might gain some context about Carson’s material life, but I wasn’t expecting to gain much insight into her personal life. I’d already rifled through the bulk of Carson’s papers at the Ransom Center in Austin. The Columbus Public Library had asked Carson for her papers in 1961, and she replied that she would send them only if the library desegregated. They refused, and her papers went to Texas. That hasn’t stopped the Columbus Library from retroactively celebrating her, naming the road that approaches their building Carson McCullers Way. During Carson’s life, Columbus State University’s archives, where the undestroyed portion of Mary’s papers were donated after her death, did not yet exist. I visited these archives on an offhand tip from the director of the Carson McCullers Center, but I assumed that anything worth finding had already been written about. At that point, I knew of Mary as Carson’s doctor and friend late in life. I’d come across photos of her at the Ransom Center when I scoured through all of Carson’s personal albums, making a list of “possible girlfriends,” but I hadn’t considered Mary. I thought, if nothing else, thrilled as I am by diagnosis, the medical records Mary kept might be interesting.

  On reading the therapy transcripts in the university’s archive, I was so befuddled—with joy, excitement, fear—I could barely look at them long enough to process what they contained. I was stunned. Here was Carson, in person, trying to tell her story, to understand her sexuality, in her own words. And Mary, a willing listener. And, miracle of miracles, there it was, plain as day: the word “lesbian.” I’m always reading queer histories that dance elaborately around the terminology of queerness, asserting that at the time, back then, people didn’t describe themselves the way we do now. The effect of this, for me, is an erasure of lesbians from history. One of our many Foucauldian hangovers. But the word “lesbian” was like a magnet, pulling everything I had been researching to face it. I skimmed the messy, typed pages, I scanned them and emailed them to myself, and then, not knowing why, I put them away for months. I wasn’t ready to deal with the Carson they contained, wasn’t prepared to take her at her word.

  Back at the house in the pink-and-yellow twilight, I called Chelsea and tried to explain to her the gravity of what I’d found. I walked in circles around the linoleum-floored kitchen, making curry soup with some previous resident’s butternut squash I’d found on the windowsill, and paced back and forth across the pink carpeted rooms while it simmered. Chelsea didn’t seem all that shocked. “Isn’t that what you were looking for?” she asked. I stopped and glanced at the timeline of photographs on the dining room walls. Most of them are of Carson and Reeves, documenting their meeting, their courtship, their two marriages, before and after the war. I sat down on the living room floor. “Well, I didn’t actually think I’d find it,” I said.

  Becomings

  Carson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.”

  Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The [husband] would come in and slap her, [and] the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy. Reeves had cheated on her with one of her friends, Nancy, which he told her their first night together. Their new marriage was already starting to disintegrate. Carson went home, and Reeves stayed in North Carolina.

  She returned to her parents’ house in Columbus to begin a new book, “The Bride of My Brother,” the original title for The Member of the Wedding. Sho
rtly thereafter, in what would become a pattern of reversals for them, separating and reuniting, Carson and Reeves used the advance from her first book to move to New York. Reeves chose to sail first to Nantucket with his old roommate (“roommate”?), Jack Adams. Carson rode the bus by herself. She spent the publication day of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, June 14, 1940, in a boardinghouse room, “cut off and lonely.” When the book appeared the reviews were staggering, especially for a twenty-three-year-old writer. They called her a child, baby-faced, and then in the same breath called her the new John Steinbeck. Richard Wright compared her to Faulkner, commending her “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In an ad for the book in the New York Times, T. S. Stribling called it “the literary find of the year.”