In the days following her book’s publication, her own face in bookshop windows was the only friendly face in the city. That lonely summer, after paying a call to Greta Garbo, her idol, and finding her less than hospitable, and while waiting to hear back from Erika Mann, a lesbian transplant from Europe and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, Carson received a telegram from her editor, Robert Linscott, to meet at the Bedford Hotel. Carson writes that she went right out and bought a new summer suit, wanting badly to look the part of celebrated young writer and unable to do so in her cotton sundresses schlepped from Georgia. At the Bedford, Carson recalls, “a stranger” arrived. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life,” she writes in Illumination, “beautiful, blonde, with straight short hair. She asked me to call her [Annemarie] right away, and we became friends immediately. At her invitation, I saw her the next day.”
Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach was one of the many lesbians Carson encountered in her new life in New York, and she was among the most glamorous. She wore custom suits from Paris, her hair was chicly cropped, and her features severe and gorgeous. Or, as female writer R. L. York puts it, “Her head was a Donatello David head; her blonde hair was smooth and cut like a boy’s; her blue eyes dark and slow moving; her mouth childish and soft with shyly parted lips. She wore a skirt and boy’s shirt and a blue blazer and she was not afraid of my dog.” When Carson and Annemarie met again the following day, they talked about Annemarie’s morphine addiction (Carson had never heard of the drug) and her travels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and the Far East.
Carson immediately fell hard for Annemarie. Who wouldn’t? She’d been dreaming of escaping Columbus and the South for years, and with her first book she had finally gotten out. The arrival of Annemarie offered her something else that she had been longing for without the language to express it. Annemarie told Carson that when she was seventeen, her mother had called her “a dope fiend, a communist, and a lesbian,” which was how she wound up in New York. Annemarie tried to remain polite to her mother, though she had little feeling for her. But when she would go home to Switzerland, York says, “she would don her most feminine blouse, pull her stockings straight, and set out to go visiting.” After she was gone, the neighbors would say, “‘Really a lovely girl, if it were not for the awful things one hears about her,’” York writes. “That was generally the epitaph.” Little remains of Carson’s interactions with Annemarie, but it’s clear from her letters and from the therapy transcripts that Carson was not shy about her feelings at the time or afterward. She did not disguise them or even question them. She loved Annemarie, and that was that.
Before I left for the house in Georgia, I spent several afternoons looking at over a thousand photos from Carson’s collection at the Ransom Center. Is it perhaps too intimate to keep using her first name? I no longer worked there, but Chelsea did, and she saw that a scholar had pulled all these boxes, so she told me to come in. The other scholar was doing some kind of project about tomboys. Carson really wasn’t a tomboy, whatever that is, as far as I can tell. I cannot imagine her displaying athletic ability, and she was by no means butch. The possessiveness I feel: I know her better. This feeling of kinship is common with beloved authors, Carson in particular. After visiting Columbus, novelist Elizabeth McCracken writes of Carson, “I begin to believe that if only I had a chance to talk to her . . . surely, at any time, if we’d met we’d become good friends. . . . I’d tell her she was better than that old Nunnally Johnson, that terrible Gore Vidal. We would’ve understood each other.” The illusion: feeling understood by someone does not equate to understanding them. But the illusion is powerful, convincing. It is rare to recognize when you are under its sway.
I came across a series of photos of Annemarie in Carson’s files. It seems Carson may have taken them when they were out on a walk one day, but where and when I can’t tell. It is possible that she collected them, and I can’t blame her. The day is sunny. Annemarie is striking, deeply androgynous yet somehow femme, something about the delicacy of her features. Today she would be a model. Céline would put her in an oversized boyfriend shirt and sell millions. This is the woman who shaped Carson’s entire idea of love, prior to Mary. In the photos she leans on a fence, crouches on a sidewalk, dares the camera. While I sifted through the photos and tried to understand where they came from, I could see Chelsea in a room just to my left, in a meeting. We’d been having a tense day over text, miscommunicating about plans, but when I walked in prepared to be somewhat irritated with her, there she was looking lovely, her long dark hair, her posture, and she smiled. And then waved. I love her.
After Reeves arrived in the city, he hung around their fifth floor Greenwich Village apartment all day, leaving only to go to the bars. Carson recalls staying out late one night with Annemarie and when she came home she found Reeves “worried and furious with me.” He asked her what they had been doing “all night.”
“Just talking,” she said.
“Are you in love with Mademoiselle Schwarzenbach?” (That “mademoiselle” sounds so condescending to me.)
“I don’t know,” she said. At that, he slapped her, then slapped her again, “quick and powerful as a panther.” In Illumination, Carson writes, “later, I begged Reeves to try to get a job so he wouldn’t be hanging around the apartment all day wasting time. The apartment, by the way, was on West 11th Street near the docks.” Carson’s “by the way” was likely code for saying she knew Reeves was spending his time with sailors down at the docks, pursuing men, possibly women. She concludes, “the utter uselessness of his life depressed me, and that complete moral depression lasted until his death. I was writing all the time which must [have gotten on] his nerves. I really don’t know how I stood those months,” referring to the months when they lived together.
February House
Carson got away from Reeves and their New York apartment long enough to attend her first literary retreat, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, in Middlebury, VT, in August 1940. She met Eudora Welty and Louis Untermeyer, in whom she found models for how she might occupy her new role as writer. She liked being with other writers; she felt at home with them. She began to imagine a different life for herself. When she came back to New York, she went into the Harper’s Bazaar offices every day to work with editor George Davis on Reflections in a Golden Eye, her second book, which they were publishing serially that fall. One day, he told Carson, “[since] you don’t get along with Reeves and live in such a miserable apartment, why don’t you live with me?” They decided that the answer to both their problems—her stifling marriage, his stifling budget—was to find a house where they could live and work together, with other writers and artists who were similarly inclined. George Davis was an openly gay man, but Carson still made sure that he meant for them to live together “as brother and sister.” “My prudery came through,” she wrote in Illumination. When they found a house in Brooklyn at 7 Middagh Street, Carson moved out of the apartment with Reeves. Reeves was allowed to come over for dinner, but he could not stay the night.
Soon enough the house was filled with queers: British poet Wystan (W. H.) Auden, whom Carson unfailingly called Winston; composer couple Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten; writer couple Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice. And, in time, renowned cabaret performer and struggling writer Gypsy Rose Lee, and Paul and Jane Bowles, a married couple who were both queer—a complicated, though common enough, marriage of convenience. Carson writes, “everyone had their own room and there was a large parlor and a big dining room, and Gypsy Rose Lee . . . found us a cook. Everyone went out of his way to give us gifts, as though we were some kind of a multiple bridal party.” Friends came to visit, including Annemarie, Erika Mann and her girlfriends, and lesbian power couple Janet Flanner and Solita Solano. Janet would become one of Carson’s “many-gendered mothers” (Dana Ward by way of Maggie Nelson) in the queer community, making introductions for her in New York and later in Europe.
Queerness wasn’t c
loseted at February House, so-named by writer Anaïs Nin because most of the residents were born in February. An Aquarius myself, I can see the appeal of living under one roof, but in separate bedrooms, with a troupe of fellow Aquarians: eccentric, creative, and independent creatures. Acceptance of others’ lives and relationships was a precondition for being invited over, and for several years it was a place to which many New York writers and artists longed to be invited. Reeves, deeply homophobic and in the midst of a lifelong struggle with his own sexuality, wasn’t fond of all the queer goings on at February House, especially in close proximity to Carson.
But Carson was finally at home. “At last, after all the years of apartment misery I was living in a comfortable, even luxurious house. My room was of Empire green, very simple and with a small dressing room adjoining. We all paid our share of the expenses, so the house was not too costly.” They threw parties—“I had the most wonderful sawdust parties in the world,” Carson tells Mary—which might refer to parties while the Middagh Street house was in the midst of renovations, or parties for which guests paid a fee or brought gifts. They were also trying to establish a steady working schedule for the house, but after-hours, Carson and George went regularly to the bars of Sands Street and to the cabarets. Brooklyn was full of sailors, to George’s delight, and in the war years, at least among certain circles, queer desire and behaviors were recognized and celebrated.
Imaginary Friends
At February House, Carson pined over Annemarie to Gypsy, who comforted her and told her she wasn’t worth her time. Apparently, everyone told Carson this. Annemarie was in a long, tortured relationship with the married Baroness Margot von Opel, not to mention a long, tortured relationship with morphine, not to mention she was still in love with Erika Mann. Many friends warned Carson against getting involved with her.
Though they aren’t easy to follow, the therapy transcripts allow Carson to speak loudly and clearly for herself, and a large portion of them focus on her relationship with Annemarie. The first recorded session begins with the words “I’ve been thinking of Annamarie S.” At first I thought “Annamarie” might be typo on the part of the transcriber, Barbara, or a phonetic reflection of the way Carson said her name, lilting and southern. But throughout Illumination, she writes her name as Anna Marie. How we make beloved others our own.
Carson was back in Georgia in November 1940, recovering from illness and taking a break from February House, when she heard that Annemarie had attempted suicide. After escaping Blithe View, the psychiatric institution where she’d been placed, Annemarie sent a telegram asking Carson to come see her at the mutual friend’s apartment where she was staying. Carson immediately boarded a night train for New York. When Carson arrived at the apartment, Annemarie was playing Mozart endlessly on the gramophone. She was delirious and desperate for morphine, and at first she didn’t even recognize Carson. Instead she started asking her for Dr. February, a woman Annemarie claimed gave her insulin shock treatments and then “made love” to her while she was institutionalized. She tells Mary she couldn’t believe Annemarie was asking for Dr. February after she had travelled so far to be with her. Carson was, naively but earnestly, expecting a warmer, more heartfelt welcome. Annemarie began asking Carson to get her some dope, so Carson took matters into her own hands and walked down the street to a bar. Carrying a martini in each hand several blocks back to Annemarie, she thought, Here goes the night. The transcript shifts abruptly back to Carson dictating a letter to Sir Carrol Reed about producing a film version of Reflections in a Golden Eye, but Carson revisits this one night with Annemarie in each subsequent session.
At their appointment four days later, Mary and Carson begin with a conversation about different types of love. Carson tells Mary that reciprocity in love does exist, but is extremely unlikely, because of the faith in another person it demands. She doesn’t finish the sentence, unable or unwilling to put into words what the effect of unrequited love might be in the abstract. Unrequited love, feelings unreturned, was a fear that haunted Carson. In these first few sessions, she describes her own experience with love as a series of triangulated pursuits and doomed missed connections. Biographers have used the triangulated or unfulfilled love stories in her novels (Frankie and her brother’s wedding, the private, the officer, and the wife in Reflections, Singer and Antonapoulos, Amelia and Cousin Lymon) to argue that Carson didn’t believe two people could love each other, that she never experienced true shared love, but only loved those who did not love her back, or failed to love those who loved her deeply. This, conveniently, makes it easy for biographers to dismiss Carson’s own professions of love for Annemarie and other women—they belie, just like all of her characters’, impossible longings.
And perhaps categorizing her own feelings as unrequited love was a way for Carson to avoid fully recognizing the implications of her longings, or what it would mean to carry them out. I can affirm that a reverse of this strategy was useful in my own life, and I imagine it is a common practice for many closeted queers, whose identities are unacknowledged even to themselves. We figure ourselves out via these longings, lustings, envies. Perhaps the fantasy of a crush leaves room for imagination, a space that makes crushes so luscious, so self-sustaining in their way. Without pursuing them, they can be so much more, can be anything we want them to be. They never have a chance to disappoint. Throughout adolescence and high school, even as I was heading into college, I constructed straight crushes and love interests as a sort of defense mechanism against ever pursuing a relationship or considering one seriously. I would develop a hopeless crush on some guy who I barely knew, or was older than I was, and when I sat up at night on the phone with friends who inevitably wanted to talk about guys, I always had someone to talk about. At the time, of course, I thought I was in love. I didn’t know it was a form of evasion. But it occurred to me years later that this was a convenient way to avoid ever actually dating anyone, or thinking seriously about my feelings. I didn’t realize I had feelings for another woman until my first girlfriend in college pursued me, and I had to come to terms with what I felt. It’s possible that, without her, I never would have allowed myself to desire anyone with awareness and serious intent. It takes the right circumstances, the right person for our own desires to out us to ourselves.
Perhaps Carson’s pining for impossible or unrelenting love interests throughout her life reflects a similar strategy, unconscious though it may have been. Carson called the other women she loved her “imaginary friends” with Reeves, and clearly their existence caused Reeves to feel insecure even when he and Carson weren’t married or officially together. Yet by calling them imaginary, it seems like Carson is trying to dismiss or downplay her own feelings. Were these friends imaginary because Carson did not pursue them romantically? Or imaginary because Carson only daydreamed about them, without taking action? Imaginary because somehow having feelings for them was not as real as having feelings for someone else? Savigneau writes that “imaginary friends” was a phrase both Carson and Reeves used to refer to “Carson’s passions. All too often they totally took over her life and her mind for several weeks or several months during which Carson used what she called her ‘beloved’ as an excuse to refuse somewhat more peremptorily to let Reeves come close or touch her.” An excuse. A buffer. An evasion. A way of protecting herself to assert herself/control the narrative.
Mary tells her, “I do believe that there is such a thing as mature love but it takes devotion and discipline on both people’s part. People are so starved for love, so greedy, that at the first sign of emotional attraction and response, their tendency is to clutch and wish to merge and in the end the hope for love escapes them. It takes a great deal of courtesy and ability to see and love the difference, the separateness of the other. To be willing to let the other person be himself, [sic] free, different.” I can’t help but flag the use of “himself” here, the presumption that love exists between an “I” and a “he,” despite Carson’s focus on Annemarie. But Mary off
ers Carson the idea of a love that respects the other, which she had never experienced herself. In a fashion that will become characteristic of their letters, Mary brings in a poet to help explain: “Rilke’s definition of mature love concerns this,” she says, “that two solitudes protect, border and salute each other. It is the difference between falling in love and standing in love.”
Knowing that their relationship will blossom into love during and following these months of therapy together, it is hard not to read these lines as a suggestion, as Mary opening up the possibility of love to Carson in more than just a theoretical way. I am especially struck by the emotional openness of Mary’s words to Carson in the transcripts, as so often on paper—in her letters to Carson’s lawyers and biographers—she comes off cold. Closed off. Destroy them. Perhaps this is the effect of reading only the history that exists in writing. Without the transcripts, their voices, their spoken rhythms are lost. I know so little about Mary, about who she was.
Carson responds by returning to the subject of Annemarie. Mary asks her why she and Annemarie had never slept together, the million-dollar question, and Carson insists at first that because Annemarie was so drugged out, she couldn’t possibly have made love to her. She loved her, respected her too much. But the passage ends with the beginning of a sentence suggesting that perhaps she may have.
The page ends there.
Prove It on Me Blues
Of course, this is killing me. The gaps in the transcript, the messiness of it all. I’ve been trying to find out if Carson and Annemarie did it for years now. When their relationship is acknowledged at all, it is usually given a disparaging account that is short on detail.
On the next page of the transcript, a handwritten addition to the typed version at the top of the page finishes the sentence, that yes, she could have made love to her.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Page 5
