My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  Several lines of blank space follow, and then, typed in all caps, separated by empty lines that may or may not indicate erasures (did Barbara erase as she transcribed? Was it hard to hear what Carson was saying? Are these just protracted pauses?), a fragment that reads like Sappho. She did sleep with Annemarie, though still she felt distanced from her, that they both sensed it.

  I put the pages down with an audible, exasperated sigh and suddenly came back into the small Columbus reading room. For the first time in hours I looked up from my round table covered in stacks of folders at the other researchers—pairs of sisters or cousins all trying to find out their genealogical histories—and I began to question my research impulses. I’d found the love letters four years ago. I recognized what I read. What more proof did I think I needed? What was I trying to prove? Historians demand proof from queer love stories that they never require of straight relationships. Unless someone was in the room when the two women had sex (and just what “sex” means between women is, for many historians, up for debate), there’s just no reason to include in the historical record that they were lesbians. At least that’s what it seems like to me.

  Part of this is a hangover from the romantic friendship, a well-documented and socially sanctioned kind of relationship between women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that bore all the trappings of romantic love—shared homes, finances, love letters—except sex, which was generally unacknowledged in all types of relationships. Whether or not we are aware of it, this prudish, Victorian version of women loving women shapes what we believe such relationships mean. The demand for proof itself became a useful way for women to hide the sexual nature of their relationships in the early twentieth century, as it had been in prior decades. They were innocent—straight—until proven guilty. Ma Rainey, a black singer-songwriter and the (lesbian) mother of the blues, incidentally also born in Columbus, Georgia, records this maneuver exquisitely in her song called “Prove It on Me Blues:” “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men. . . . They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me / They sure got to prove it on me.”

  In the UK, when lawmakers were revising the laws that criminalized gay sex to further discourage homosexual behavior, it was determined best not to outlaw sex between women. This is not because it was condoned, but because lawmakers—men—believed that if sex between women was so much as mentioned in the law, it would alert women to the possibility and encourage women to have sex with each other. Best to keep as many in the dark as possible. And so sex between women remained in most places legal and unspoken. Feminist author Stella Browne wrote in 1915, “the realities of women’s sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary . . . the conventionally ‘decently brought up girl,’ of the upper and middle classes, has no terms to define many of her sensations and experiences.” Certainly this dearth of language applies to Carson.

  Carson continues her account of that night with Annemarie in the words she has available. As Carson handed her the martini, a meager substitute for morphine, Annemarie threw a fit of jealousy over Margot von Opel, her married ex who had recently taken out a restraining order on her. Annemarie demanded that Carson call Margot at her house in Florida. Margot did not want to talk. Shifting gears, Annemarie ordered Carson to remove what she was wearing, and then she began to touch her. A blank in the manuscript follows, perhaps a long silence while Carson finds the precise, unfortunate words to describe what appears to be her first sexual encounter with a woman—if only I could share them with you. She was certain she had Annemarie at last, and she describes all of her systems—fluids—firing at once—she cried, she sweat, she got wet, though she isn’t sure how to say that. The ellipses in the transcript seem to indicate pauses, rather than missing words. Suddenly, juices flowing, Annemarie told Carson she was too skinny, she wanted Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson’s housemate, instead. According to Annemarie, people had seen Carson and Gypsy together at night clubs, and she knew that they had stayed together over weekends. She demanded that Carson fetch Gypsy for her, and offered to let her watch while they fucked. Carson fled the room naked. This moment of stark humiliation likely defined Carson’s understanding of love, of sex, of intimacy between women for many years.

  Moments later, Annemarie had locked herself in the bathroom, “cutting her wrists and trying to cut her throat.” The police showed up. At some point, Carson tells Mary, Carson picked up a chair and told the police that her grandfather had been an Irish cop like them, which was a lie, and that she refused to allow them to arrest Annemarie without calling a doctor. Annemarie’s doctor was called. Mary tells Carson, “everything you have said lent sanity to an insane situation. . . . You had to act under that much pressure. You could act. This is heroism.” On her way out of the apartment, Carson recalls in therapy, Annemarie came after her to ask for her forgiveness and to tell her she loved her. In Illumination, Carson notes only that as she left the apartment, Annemarie said “Thank you, my liebling,” and kissed her. “It was the first and last time we ever kissed each other,” Carson writes. She makes no mention in print of their other interactions that night, prompting Savigneau to write in her biography, “how likely are two lovers who never shared a passionate kiss?”

  Dedications

  Shortly after that night, Annemarie was given the option of being institutionalized or leaving the country, and she moved abroad. Carson dedicated her second book, Reflections in a Golden Eye, “For Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach.” Like Heart, the novel takes up hidden queer desire between men, this time on an army base. However, perhaps because the desire is more explicitly sexual in Reflections, or perhaps because it takes place on an army base that looks a lot like nearby Fort Benning, the book was not well received by her friends and neighbors back home in Georgia. In Reflections, a young private is obsessed with watching the wife of a captain sleep through the window of her house at night. The captain, meanwhile, lusts after the private without quite understanding his own interest. Carson’s inspiration came from a Peeping Tom incident at a nearby army base that Reeves had told her about years before. Contending with her angry neighbors in conservative Columbus, who apparently recognized too much of themselves in her (to them) salacious fiction, Carson teased, “everybody accused me of writing about everybody else, so that I must say I didn’t realize the morals of the [Army] post were that corrupt.”

  Home for a visit in the winter of 1941 after the book came out, Carson got a phone call from a member of the local KKK who threatened her life, telling her she wouldn’t be allowed to survive the night after publishing a book like Reflections. “We don’t like n—lovers or fairies,” they informed her, likely referring to her focus on black characters in Heart and on gay desire in Reflections. Carson’s father, Lamar, brought a policeman to the house to protect her. That same night, Carson came down with what they thought was pneumonia and spent several days unconscious. When she awoke, she had no recollection of the call and couldn’t understand the numbers on the clock to tell what time it was. Though no one knew it then, this was her first stroke. Her sight returned, but she was unable to walk for a month.

  By the fall of 1941, Carson had divorced Reeves. She had spent her first summer in residence at Yaddo, where she began a new work that would be called Ballad of the Sad Café. When she returned to New York, she learned from her father that over the summer, Reeves had forged her signature on the check she received from The New Yorker for her short story “The Jockey,” and had done the same with several of her royalties checks. Carson writes, “it was clear that Reeves was a very sick man and needed more help than I could give him. When I faced him with this accusation, he denied it completely and imperturbably. I went to a lawyer and told him the story, and we were divorced at City Hall almost immediately.” Reeves had been living with David Diamond while Carson was away. By all appearances Reeves and David had been sleeping together.

  After her split from Reeves, and after th
at night with Annemarie, Carson fell ill. She was alone in New York and couldn’t see properly. Bouts of temporary blindness were an effect of her stroke. She couldn’t make out the place to sign on a check and had to call her friend Muriel Rukeyser, a poet, for help. At that point, she again returned to Columbus to regain her strength and recuperate. Much to her surprise, Annemarie began to write to her, to apologize and explain what happened back in New York. While Annemarie seemed so heartless that night, what she calls “the last bad time,” reading these letters reveals shades of her love and devotion to Carson. As Carson saw, there was more to Annemarie than the suicidal addict, the cold seductress. In her own way, at a distance, she loved Carson back.

  Thysville, December 29th, 1941 Belgian Congo. . . . You don’t know, Carson, how happy your letter made me. . . . Further, I never regret anything, not even my experiences of the last bad time in N.Y., nor now the war experience of Africa, because we live in a world, and we only get to feel and live and write down the deeper sense, and the deepest agony, love, and [fraud? illegible] of our life by confronting it in an eternal struggle with the world-partner. . . . Carson, I can talk so easily to you, about things which really are the subject of my book: I think it deals with our own nun heritage, our relation to men, to what we call friend and enemy, our bitter loving fight with the world first, then with the angel who leads us back to the reborn calm of death and eternity. . . . In sad and lonely hours, I think of how close and with how infinite tenderness you and I would understand each other.

  Ambivalences

  Annemarie’s letters were a great comfort to Carson, helping her recover from her divorce and her frightening illness and find her way back into Member of the Wedding. But during these months, Carson spent many days and nights in her old bedroom in Columbus crying over Annemarie’s departure. When her sister Rita came home for a visit, she decided to out Carson to her parents. Rita was fifteen and just back from her first year of college. Carson was twenty and had had her heart broken by a woman.

  I knew I didn’t like Rita from a distance. In all the photos of the two of them, they look like sisters, which they are, but they look that way because their faces say so. They say maybe Rita can’t stand Carson and never could. Carson’s big eyes look straight into the camera or into her sister’s eyes if she faces her, but Rita cuts her eyes and looks away. Rita called both their parents into their shared bedroom and informed them that Carson was a lesbian. Everyone in the family called Carson “Sister.” Carson recalls that her dad responded to Rita by asking her what that was—as though he’d never heard the term “lesbian.” Rita explained that Carson had fallen in love with a woman, and therefore she couldn’t stand to stay in the same room as her. A moment of exposure, a possible recognition of Carson’s lesbian experience, was swiftly negated by her father, who told Rita that Sister was a beautiful and wonderful daughter and that Rita should aspire to be even half as wonderful as she. (His response gives a possible explanation for some of Rita’s palpable resentment of her older sister.)

  When I brought my first girlfriend home over the summer after my freshman year of college, home to my version of Columbus, a north-shore Chicago suburb, a WASP paradise, we were officially roommates. We—me, my “roommate,” and my parents—were sitting at the table after dinner, when my staunchly Catholic mom took the opportunity to read aloud to us from my notebooks that I had left behind over break, which she found in my room while I was away at school. All through childhood and adolescence at home, my mom had regularly rifled through my drawers, my closet. It was her house, she insisted; she had the right. My first year at college, I regularly filled and discarded notebooks, though after this incident I stopped writing for several years. Perhaps on some level I knew that by leaving them behind, she’d read them. My mom was infuriated. She made a spectacle of reading aloud about a relationship that we had barely admitted to each other, she read aloud “baby” and “love.” My girlfriend fled to the basement. It was nothing, I insisted to my parents. She could prove nothing. We were friends. I pressed hard on the ambiguity of my words, my handwriting, and refused to admit who or what I had written about. Instinctively I denied everything.

  Enraged, exposed, I fled the house with my love, to the Chicago Botanic Garden for a walk. There’s nowhere to go in the suburbs. As we circled the familiar paths, she said to me, “You know, she’s right. We should stop this.” Stop lying? I wondered. No. What she meant was we should stop being together, end our relationship, go back to being friends. My world shattered. “You aren’t real,” I heard. “You don’t matter. This love doesn’t count.”

  These exposures and their swift negations—one moment outed, the next told by my girlfriend that what I thought was love was to her a bad habit we ought to break—are just some of the bait-and-switch effects of closeting and denial. To be outed is a violation, but it is also a moment of freedom, of honesty, of finally being out of hiding. When what is real is never fully public, it ceases in effect to be real. I thought it was a problem with narrative, with story, with word choice, but suddenly I saw it as a breakdown in ontology. In being and its meaning. The language used to describe reality defines and determines that reality, more than I ever knew. Beneath my feet the meaning of our relationship shifted, and my ability to know my own identity slid away with it. If this wasn’t love, what was it? Who was I? And why couldn’t I speak up for it, call it by name? There was such loss and confusion in this rejection for me, in a relationship where any miscommunication could have been a denial of what I thought was real. Everything was so freighted. The world shattered at that moment, for if this was nothing, the fear became: will I ever have it again? If I’m back in the closet, how will I ever be anything but alone? Relying on one person to define what is possible is a product of relationships borne in secrecy. It’s also a reason to hang on to that relationship, no matter how painful it is. The denials of our love as public fact continued for six more years. I hung on for something. I waited. I moved to Austin with her, we set up our first apartment together. Again, we were roommates. We didn’t tell any of our old or new friends the truth. Because if we couldn’t name it to ourselves, what would we have said?

  Soon enough Carson was open with her mother, Bebe, about her relationships with Annemarie and with Reeves. (Bebe had met both Annemarie and Gypsy while visiting Carson at February House. She “loved Gypsy, but she didn’t care for Annamarie.”) According to Virginia Carr, Bebe “knew of Carson’s ambivalences and accepted them unquestioningly,” though her father was never fully informed. Presumably he would not have understood. Ambivalence, as far as I can tell, is a highly coded way for Carson’s first major biographer to communicate “lesbian” or “queer” or “not straight” desire. Ambivalence, which could just as easily suggest confusion, indecision. A woman who doesn’t know her own mind, her own wants.

  Convalescence

  Again and again Carson retreated to Columbus, to the South, to her mother, to her old house to convalesce and to write. Carson wrote in the morning and the afternoon, and then took her bath before dinner, but in her house I took baths just about all day. I could read there and write there and spend long stretches alone with my body, and the ceiling, and the medicinal smell of mustard bath. My aching head, my weak legs could finally relax underwater, in an all-pink bathroom at the front of the house with a sign that says Public Restroom that I chose to ignore. The other bathrooms were all blue and all teal, respectively, and the one downstairs had peeling wallpaper with ducks on it—I just couldn’t be in there. I don’t think I was meant to use that tub, I don’t think anyone was, but the bathroom was big and bright and airy, across the hall from what used to be Carson’s bedroom, and I felt at home there.

  When she was home, she stayed in the childhood bedroom she had shared with Rita, and where I sat at the marble table from Carson’s house in Nyack, New York, that now takes up the entire room. The room is at the front of the house and its windows look out on magnolias and rosebushes. This is the room whe
re I feel Carson’s presence most strongly, but I think that might be because her belongings—her suitcase, her wristwatch, a single worn white glove—line the walls in glass cases. It is shrine-like, and only once, at the end of my stay, did I venture in there after dark. The room’s closets have been converted into vitrines with glass windows for doors. Some of the objects they contain are things she held and used regularly. Her panto eyeglasses, her typewriter, a portable record player. A lighter, a cigarette case, an ice bucket. How these items conjure a lifestyle, a person’s body in motion. Carson lighting a cigarette, playing a record, filling her glass with ice. It’s her childhood bedroom, but no mementos from childhood remain. Instead, a metal shoehorn. A trunk. A key on a key ring, a checkbook, a wallet, a purse. All signal the adult Carson, from when she still went out regularly, still traveled and looked after herself. Symbols of the times when she was free and unconfined by infirmity. There’s a framed Cecil Beaton photo that Chelsea, when she came to pick me up at the end of the month, was horrified to see sitting out in the changing sunlight all day. And there I was pouring steam out under the bathroom door, making everything worse. But Georgia is basically a swamp, so it seemed to me it was only a matter of time before everything warped, curled, lost its crispness. I imagine the stationery sets in the cases have felt damp to the touch for years. Outside the windows that early spring, the Japanese magnolias were in bloom.

  On the boat, from Portuguese Angola to Lisbon. March 20th, 1942.

  My dear, dear little Carson,

  . . . if I didn’t write to you at once, Carson, my darling, I was deeply shaken by your letter. I do know that your illness is but the counterpart of your sensibility and talent, and I know that suffering and solitude burns our ego, burns all selfish weakness, frees us, and will deeply help your work. But to write, you need a certain strength. Oh Carson, be patient, you must get slowly well again! Believe me, even if you feel shaken and can’t write for a long time, this doesn’t matter: you will express what God wants you to express, and be what he meant you to be: we cannot judge the results (as, finally, we can’t and should not judge the effects of what we write), but we must give our greatest effort. Be patient. Don’t say that we will not meet again. This is also a more hazardous question, but I live with the intense wish of love and friendship towards you, the feeling that you live, and love me, and that you write in the same absolute spirit, and that your books might be better or purer than mine could be—this is a hope and consolation for me. Darling, let us be ready to meet each other, whenever it will be possible. And do, as you wrote, do everything to get well . . . The one I love is you as if you were my sister. I kiss you. Your Annemarie.