My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  Items Unlocated

  A handwritten note insists your eyeglasses went to Texas, along with the book you were reading and the ashtray at your bedside when you died. But Carson, I can’t find them anywhere.

  Womanish

  I spent hours looking at the photos of Carson in the Ransom Center, trying to understand something about her through her style. In some photos from her twenties, she wears a white dress, has long, waving hair past her breasts. In others, she wears a suit and a bob. I want so badly to meet her! I kept thinking, flipping through the folders. Clothes make visible what we feel or believe about ourselves, even if that identity is invisible to others. What we put on externalizes interior feeling, like a facial expression, but more intentional. This self-presentation takes as many forms as there are selves, and Carson’s expression was by no means static.

  Certain authors are known for their cultivated looks. Flannery O’Connor’s cat-eye glasses, David Foster Wallace’s damn bandanna, Gertrude Stein’s extremely short bangs and long vests, Zadie Smith’s head wraps. Carson had a look from the beginning. She often appears to have cut her own hair, possibly with pruning shears. Her bangs in early photos remind me of my own from childhood, when my mom used to cut them: short, crooked, and usually smushed down on part of my forehead from sleep. As Carson puts it,

  I wasn’t downright homely, but I was no beauty no matter how [Mother] fussed over me. I would have to sit at the kitchen table and be primped. Since my hair was straight as a poker she tried to make little ringlets, and in so doing only mashed the hair of my head. Every morning before I went to school, she told me to say ‘prunes or prisms,’ because she said it made my mouth be set in a nice sweet way.

  This scene from Illumination gives me flashbacks to picture days in grade school, when my mom would sit me in her bathroom and curl my stick-straight blonde hair under, even fashioning a sculptural half-moon with the bangs that protruded over my forehead. By the time I got to school, the curls would have fallen and the bangs would curve up and out, swooping salutes to impropriety. One year, second grade maybe, she got a comb stuck in my hair while curling. It was so stuck, my hair so fine and so acutely tangled, that it took her at least an hour—hours in my memory—to remove it, with so much pulling, so much passive aggression, that I threw up. I still can’t untangle a necklace or anything small without feeling quickly nauseous. Carson’s mom so badly didn’t want her to wear glasses that she whispered the exam letters to her at the eye doctor.

  Some of her baby photos show Carson dolled up as a little southern belle, a miniature princess swaddled in dresses and curls. There’s one in particular where she wears a white dress, her hair very done, and sits in a wicker sleigh pulled by some poor dog. But when she escaped her mother’s attempts to prettify her, Carson had her own style from very early on. I’ve mentioned the tie, the shorts. Eleanor Roosevelt writes, “attention and admiration were the things through all my childhood which I wanted, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration.” I see in Carson’s battles with her appearance the fact of growing up without the expected or desired traits of a woman, particularly a southern woman. The woman the world wanted her to be—with dainty features and demure affects—was deeply at odds with the woman she was.

  I felt this when I was young, too, an unfittingness. Clothes have always been a defining part of my life, a mode of expression that helps mediate, or exacerbate, a sense of unbelonging. As a kid, from the time I was two or three, I had a penchant for changing my outfit several times a day. My parents called me a fashion statement. By the time I was in fourth grade, I brought a change of clothes with me to school in my backpack and changed in the bathroom before first period. I can only recall one of these outfits, a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt. I think, more than anything, I wanted to go out into the world without any comments or questions from my mom, or my brother, about what I had on. I wanted to determine my look. I still change clothes several times a day, altering parts of what I’m wearing to fit my activity or mood. For several years—third through seventh grade, maybe—I purposely mismatched my socks, coordinating them with my outfits. A bold, embarrassing choice, one that didn’t win me new friends. But an expression, nonetheless. An assertion of difference. Of queerness, in retrospect. In the photos of Carson as a kid, in her shorts and knee-high argyle socks, I see a version of myself.

  Biographers and critics have loved to describe Carson’s wardrobe as “mannish,” which I find kind of absurd. How many men wear lapels that large, cuffs that long? What about all the embroidery, the beading? Though now I am gender policing. Emily Hamer historicizes that “to be identifiable as a lesbian, as a woman who was not heterosexual, a woman had to distance herself from heterosexual femininity”—e.g., curls. “In a world of two genders,” Hamer writes, “you can only distance yourself from conventional conceptions of femininity by gesturing towards masculinity.” This analysis of historical lesbian dress makes sense, but I don’t think it tells the whole story. I think lesbian style is much more nuanced than, “well, I’m not a traditional woman, so I’ll put on this menswear!” The problem, as I see it, is how little common language we have to communicate androgyny, ambiguity. We rely on binary terms, masculine vs. feminine, to convey what is at heart both, or neither. I tend to think of Carson’s look the way I think of Katharine Hepburn’s, say, or Janelle Monáe’s: not as that of a man but as that of a woman of a different order. Clothes offer a way to try on different identities, different manifestations of selfhood. They express more than gender, certainly more than binary gender, and more than sexuality, too. For Carson, they express her authorhood, her artist status, her illness, what made her feel most comfortable, what made her feel most dignified at even her least dignified moments.

  In a photo taken in June 1958 by Richard Avedon, Carson wears her red Russian coat over a striped shirt. Her hair is a messy pixie, and her face is almost absent of expression, yet her eyes look deep into the camera. Avedon writes, “I remember her saying to me, ‘I just want to look like Greta Garbo.’” When Carson was first coming into her own, it was a bold, scandalous choice for a woman to wear pants or shorts, one that Carson stuck to for most of her life. A headline from the 1930s reads “GARBO IN PANTS!” In Harper’s Bazaar in 1948, a review of restaurants in Paris mentions that “Carson McCullers used to astound the Parisians by appearing for lunch in her blue jeans” at La Méditerranée, where Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin were “a daily twosome.” I never know what to make of these coded but still quite obvious references to queer culture, to women toeing the line of femininity and straightness in public. Like when Carson and Tenn were featured on facing pages in a Vogue article called “Incessant Prizewinners,” Carson’s Russian coat, her lapels and cufflinks, her cigarette, her gaze all a clear reflection of Tenn. Of the day Carson asked to look like Greta Garbo—whose name she pronounced “Greeta”—Avedon says, “Even though she was in pain, she couldn’t have been giving more of herself. She had a complete understanding of the complexity and complicity between the sitter and the photographer and the fact that a portrait has nothing to do with the truth.”

  On Exposure

  All of these artifacts of Carson’s life, fragmentary though they may be—her photos, her clothing, her paralyzed arm that she hid or did not hide, her will, her letters—can also be seen as a memoir. They offer ways of representing, exposing herself to the world. She writes to Mary in a letter after their second therapy session that she had worked all her life to expose or transmute the truth of her soul. Carson was not trying to hide her identity but to express it. She didn’t write directly about herself, apart from what she wrote in her letters, and later, in Illumination, and I never came across a diary or mention of one. In her letters and in Illumination, her self-revelation, even her self-awareness on the page is incremental, sometimes painfully slow.

  In April 1958, Carson said to Mary that she had bared her whole self
to her, and that she had never shown so much of herself to anyone else, not Reeves, not Bebe, not Annemarie, not Oliver (Evans, who wrote an early analysis of her life and work), not Gypsy, or even Tenn. In her writing, as with her clothes, Carson attempted to make visible what she didn’t have language to communicate.

  Women writers and artists’ negotiations with self-representation have at times become so fraught that they, like Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, choose to remove themselves completely from the public eye. Ferrante describes “the creative space that absence opened up for me. Once I knew that the completed book would make its way in the world without me, once I knew that nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear beside the volume . . . it made me see something new about writing. I felt as though I had released the words from myself.” As in: the writing no longer had to do the work of creating a persona that corresponded with the author herself. This rejection of the expectation of authorial (self-)identification with her texts is already being challenged by those who would “out” Ferrante, tracking her identity through financial records. Like it or not, we leave traces of ourselves, our decisions, our interactions in the material world. And often we don’t have control over them.

  Ferrante, meanwhile, instead of an absence, has in recent years built a robust authorial presence, albeit a fictional one, through interviews, the publication of her editorial correspondence, and a weekly column. This fictional authorial persona is not so different from the authorial persona any writer contrives for herself. The “I” on the page is a construction, I am making her (“me”) up and choosing which details, which aspects of her I reveal. And some of what comes across is beyond my choosing, gives me away when I’m not even aware of it. Ferrante has just fleshed out her character, her “I,” given her room to speak and live and move in the world through correspondence written in her persona’s voice.

  She explains, “writing with the knowledge that I don’t have to appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom. It’s a corner of my own that I intend to defend, now that I’ve tried it. If I were deprived of it, I would feel abruptly impoverished.” With the word “impoverished,” Ferrante conjures an economy of freedom, of selflessness, of publiclessness. Of absence. Queer embodiment, like Carson’s, like mine, requires a presence, a negotiation with publicness. Invisible identities insist on being seen, or masked, or transformed, especially in the world of what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality.” Women are straight unless they give themselves away. It is impossible to wrestle with/determine/express queer identity without some negotiation with public scrutiny; presenting yourself to the world requires costumes and costume changes, which Carson was well known for.

  Writing, like clothing, can offer a way to express the unseen identities, longings, selves we carry—though this possibility is often taken as a certainty, used to suggest that writers leave absolutely everything of themselves on the page, their innermost experiences laid bare in prose. Marcel Proust claims, “that which enables us to see through the bodies of poets and lets us look into their souls is not their eyes, nor the events of their lives, but their books, precisely where their souls, with an instinctive desire, would like to be immortalized.” As in: the work contains the person in some kind of entirety. But I have to question this presumed connection between the book and the unfettered soul. Carson’s story of failed and unfinished attempts at her autobiography suggests that there are numerous obstacles between writing and self—soul—reification. It is impossible to reveal the full swath of the self on the page, in fiction or in memoir, just as it is impossible not to reveal parts of it.

  And who is to say there is one soul, one story that ought to be immortalized? In practice, we are constantly revising the stories we tell about authors’ lives and what they sought to communicate in their work. As readers we bring all of our own experiences and assumptions to bear on the author and what she writes. The author is immortalized, then, in a state of ongoing change, continuous retelling. And retelling inevitably brings to the surface some aspect of the teller and her motivations. Alive or dead, the author is a protean form, just as the self slips constantly beneath one’s feet. Carson is changing as I write about her, and so am I.

  Conflation

  Carson’s face—jowly but expressive—reminds me of my own. I can’t seem to help but find this overlap. It’s happened since I was young: when I read something, or watch something, and identify with someone, I begin to imagine that I look like them. I feel their face moving in mine. When I was at the writing residency in Vermont and had access to a color printer, I printed a full-page photo of Annemarie, whom I was researching at the time—and then another, and another, because she is frankly stunning and so are the photos—and put them up on my wall. Something shifted, suddenly in my head I looked like her. I don’t look like either of them, I’m sure. But I can feel my face changing as my allegiance shifts.

  The Hunt

  In the fall of 2016, recently arrived in Santa Fe and grading hundreds of student papers each week for a terrible online gig, I unexpectedly received an invitation off the wait-list to work on my McCullers project for five weeks at Yaddo. They wanted me to come the following week, and they would pay for my plane ticket. I interpreted this as a miracle. Yaddo was a dream of mine since I first started writing, and a goal for inhabiting the places that were most important to Carson. On my way to Vermont the previous year I had gone out of my way to stop at Yaddo, driving only as far as the sign that reads “Private area beyond here,” whereupon I turned around, rebuffed. Yaddo is a posh writers’ and artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, about two hours from the city, that has welcomed novelists, poets, composers, and visual artists since the 1920s. It was a long trip to New York from my corner of the Southwest. A dark train ride to Albuquerque for the red-eye to JFK, and by the following morning I was falling in and out of sleep on another train up the Hudson, leaves beginning to change along its banks. As a taxi drove me for the second time in my life through Yaddo’s gates, this time with permission to proceed past the two lakes and up the hill to the dark mansion, the driver, smirking in the rearview, wanted to know if they offered “turn-down service” for the artists. I told her I didn’t think so, but I could see why she might.

  My first night, late to dinner after falling asleep the second I arrived at my cabin, I took the empty seat beside a poet, a woman who kindly talked me through the procedures of a long and disorienting meal. She soon became one of my real friends. As is customary, a new arrival barely has a chance to eat dinner the first night: at the sight of an unfamiliar artist, the deeply isolated group of fifteen pounces and demands a detailed account of the stranger’s life and work. Or at least this was the way of things during the late fall I spent in residence. I relayed the details of my project to the poet, keenly aware that every other person at the table was listening through their own conversations. I told her that I was writing about Carson McCullers and her relationships with women, and she said, “Oh, so she was a—?” And trailed off. A what? A lesbian? Was she?

  After dinner, blissed out on roasted squash and bread pudding and homemade rum-raisin ice cream, I walked back to my cabin in the tall pines and paged through books on Yaddo and its history. I found myself scrutinizing the face of one woman in particular, Elizabeth Ames. Elizabeth was the director of Yaddo for nearly sixty years. Carson, age twenty-four, went to meet her after exchanging letters—Marjorie Peabody Waite, Elizabeth’s sister, had set up the meeting after encountering Carson in Columbus. Waite immediately wrote to her sister, the sole force behind bringing artists and writers to Yaddo, asking her to “please meet this shy, sweet girl from Columbus who wants so badly to work at Yaddo, but who wouldn’t dream of asking anyone to let her come.” They were to meet in Elizabeth’s hotel room. But when she arrived, Carson was so paralyzed with nerves that she had lost her voice and couldn’t face her. She sat in the lobby, crying. Eventually, Elizabeth came down, scanned the lobby, and found Carson with
out ever having seen her before. She brought the unspeaking young woman up to her room and fed her tea, and eventually Carson came back to life. I imagine their first encounter like the department store scene in the movie Carol, where Carol holds all the cards and young Therese can barely talk.

  Sitting up in my endless white bed, studying the books for photos of Elizabeth, I realized with a start that I was looking for clues. I was a sleuth. I was a huntress. I was hunting lesbians.

  Semantics

  It has dawned on me, through researching how Carson lived in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, and through living as a lesbian every day, that each time a woman in the twentieth century is referred to by the epithets “widowed” or “unmarried,” or when she is described as married but living away from her husband for a portion of the year—e.g., Georgia O’Keeffe—she is likely a lesbian to some degree or in some capacity.

  Can it work this way, I wonder? Can a woman be part lesbian? So often the mainstream narrative gives us a straight woman who has the occasional wild affair or fling with a woman. Or one who went with women when she was young, in college perhaps. Or she has bisexual tendencies, say. “Ambivalences.” Of Carson, they flag her “obsessive” crushes on various women and leave it at that. But I prefer the idea that we are all part lesbian, that we are lesbian to one degree or another. Is this semantics? To say that some part of every human being is a woman, and that part loves women, or has the capacity to do so. Jill Johnston: “All women are lesbians.”

  Separate Bedrooms

  It was at Yaddo, alone in her cottage, in November, 1942, that a telegram arrived informing Carson that Annemarie had died in Switzerland from brain injuries after a bicycle accident. She died, Carson tells Elizabeth in a letter, “with no one near.” Carson was still writing The Member of the Wedding and finding it impossible to finish the book. She walked among Yaddo’s enormous trees, grieving but also relieved. Carson decided to leave Yaddo and return to Columbus for the summer, to finish a new novel about a giantess and a hunchback, a mixed up hate-and-love affair between characters of indeterminate genders. From Columbus, Carson wrote to Elizabeth about how homesick she was for Yaddo, how stifling the summer months were in Georgia.