My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  After their separation, and Annemarie’s travels in Africa, Carson tells Elizabeth that her letters began to sound “certain and strong,” and Carson could finally “think of her with peace.”

  Carson writes in Illumination, “I don’t know of a friend whom I loved more, and was more grieved by her sudden death.” In Columbus, “fall had finally come after the grueling heat, and I would walk to a hill near my house and pick up pecans and put them in my leather jacket.”

  With the other residents I took a tour of the Trask mansion, where writers are housed in the summers at Yaddo, which was closed in 2016 for renovations. The Trasks—Spencer, a banker, and Katrina (Kate), a poet and novelist—decided to make Yaddo a writers’ and artists’ colony after all four of their children died in different tragic circumstances (drowning, diphtheria). Spencer died in a train accident in 1909—while shaving on the train, the story goes—and Kate remarried a friend and her husband’s, ahem, business partner, George Foster Peabody, just long enough to found Yaddo before she died. At the foot of the hill on which the mansion sits lies the rose garden Spencer had built for Kate, a maze of statues and mossy rocks.

  The mansion, rebuilt once after a fire, is dark-gray stone and looks haunted and damp from the outside. The interior is not centrally heated, which made breakfasts in the dining room appropriately icy. On the mornings that I made it to breakfast before nine, when they stopped serving, I kept on my knit hat and huge red sweater and down vest, and sat at the designated quiet table, trying not to converse. I ate what amounted to three breakfasts: a bowl of oatmeal while I waited for my poached egg and English muffin, plus a banana and yogurt to go. I savored every morsel.

  In the rest of the house, closed off to us apart from this tour, all of the furniture and rugs were covered with white sheets. Ghosts, ghosts. Carson, I found out later, had to switch rooms when she was given the largest suite her second year at Yaddo. Kate Trask’s room, painted pale pink and surrounded on three sides by windows with views of the mountains, gave her agoraphobia. Embarrassed, she swapped with her delighted neighbor without telling anyone. While I was there, residents staying in West House, where Kate and George lived together after Spencer’s death, were thrilled to learn that their room had been formerly occupied by, say, Sylvia Plath or Langston Hughes. I myself was relieved to be housed in a brand-new cabin a bit away from the other buildings, the first resident to stay there. This took the pressure off, a pressure amplified by getting in off the wait-list and showing up after only a week to mentally prepare. It already felt like I had a lot to prove. The cabin didn’t smell like anyone or anything except pine needles, which I kept finding in my bed each morning. I had room for all my thoughts, and none of the ghosts of anyone else’s.

  Life-size portraits of the four Trask children hang in the ballroom of the mansion. While everyone was studying the portraits, I noticed a large medallion on the wall that read “George Foster Peabody: Lover of Men.” I learned on the tour that Kate and Spencer Trask kept separate bedrooms, Spencer’s with its own entrance and staircase for his evening guests. Women? Men? Peabody? Or was Kate sleeping with Peabody while her husband was still alive? Were they all enmeshed? None of these questions were answered on the tour, though I asked. I also asked about Elizabeth, dying to know if she had some part in the romantic escapades of the Trask crew that the tour guide alluded to, but the guide affirmed my suspicions that Elizabeth is still an unknown quantity. She arrived at Yaddo after her sister Marjorie was adopted by Peabody. Marjorie was no child, but presumably Peabody’s lover. Such adoptions were typical enough practice at the time. Beyond this, little is recorded about Elizabeth’s personal life. But she was a force of knowledge and connection to artists and writers for much of the twentieth century.

  Wandering the grounds one damp day, I found their circle of graves:

  George Foster Peabody, Ever Close Friend

  Marjorie Peabody Waite

  Allena Gilbert Pardee, Ever in the Circle

  Elizabeth Ames

  Spencer Trask, Guardian Spirit Ever Here

  And a tall memorial to Katrina Trask with candles on it, covered in leaves, at the center. They were a family of some kind.

  Androgyny

  At Yaddo, Carson’s gaggle widened when she found herself sitting at the queer table. The Table of the Sensitives (“dubbed by some presumably heterosexual wag,” according to her friend Newton Arvin) introduced Carson to Lincoln Kirstein, a gay writer and ballet producer who knew one of her Brooklyn acquaintances, George Balanchine. Several biographers note that Carson sat at the queer table “unwittingly,” but come on. Of course she found the queer table, whether or not she knew its designation outright. Imagining the scene brings to mind another moment in Lorde’s Zami. Lorde, twenty years old, had recently arrived in Cuernavaca, Mexico, among a group of single and/or divorced women. “It never occurred to me that they were gay, or at least bisexual, themselves,” Lorde writes. “I never suspected because a large part of their existence was devoted toward concealing that fact.” Carson was in all likelihood more in-the-know about the sexual identities of the people she spent time with, but at first she may have instinctively gravitated there. Or, as a friend told me at a workshop once, “the queers always find each other, eventually.”

  Unlike life in Brooklyn, Yaddo had a strict privacy policy for its residents: no socializing, no visits with other guests until after four PM. Because meals are provided—breakfast and dinner in the mansion dining room, lunch picked up in a pail—Carson had no other obligations but to write and to attend dinner with the other guests. These rules, this schedule, applied to me during my stay. I am fairly certain they are still serving the same number of carrot sticks in each day’s lunch pail that they’ve been serving since the 1920s. I wonder if Carson ate hers? Mine piled up in the mini fridge, and I left a few outside my front door for a downy mouse I saw huddled by the window out of the snow.

  I found no queer table at Yaddo. We were a small enough group that we all ate together at one table most nights. However, I did find plenty of queers. On my first night, M, a gay painter from New York, walked his bike beside me as I headed back to the cabin. His new studio was even further out than the rest. In the dark, as we parted ways, he said that he had never imagined something he did would merit such bounty as this space. Neither had I.

  Communities of artists are often queer, androgynous places. This is one reason I love them. In the few that I’ve participated in and, to an extent, in my current life in Santa Fe, I thrill at the comfort and ease of conversations centered around work and ideas. Hardly anyone is talking about their kids. I never feel the same pressure to explain what I do, or why I do it, nor do I have to explain who I am. Still, I flinched when M asked me my gender pronouns at dinner one night early on in my stay. He said it was because my Instagram profile read “a cat and his kitten,” which referred to my cat, Elliott, and his kitten, Lou, but which he thought referred to me. I didn’t take offense or interpret the question as a demand to account for myself. I already recognized M as kindred. I was just surprised, never having been asked before. When I got back from dinner, I stood in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror for a long time. I was smiling; I think I was kind of pleased. I remember it as a happy moment. New heights in androgyny achieved! But I also instinctively took it as a kind of flirtation. Surely he was hitting on me somehow. I realize later what a gendered response this is. I hadn’t done a very good job so far at Yaddo with coming out to the other residents, telling them about Chelsea. I was more comfortable talking about Carson, so I kept coming out through my project. Despite the comforts of community, I felt isolated, unsure of my place in the group. It felt like all the other residents had helicoptered in directly from Skowhegan or MacDowell or some other swanky residency, not to mention they all had book deals and agents and galleries and MFAs and at least one had a Pulitzer Prize. They all seemed to know the same important people in New York, while I lived in Santa Fe in a loft with three cats
and graded papers for a living. As usual, I felt like an outsider. I was craving affection and closeness, and for a moment I let myself think that maybe this painter was into me because he couldn’t determine my gender without asking, though he was really being cautious, having just been at Skowhegan where he grew accustomed to asking for a person’s pronouns. But the misperception made me see myself anew among strangers. I learned that I love that blur, the murk, the shift that androgyny in appearance allows, not as a means of escape from one label or another, but rather as a means of occupation. I occupy the category woman, and that category must expand to contain me. In all my outfits.

  As a child, Carson changed her name from Lula to her middle name, Carson. Certainly her choice is the more androgynous name, one that is usually presumed to be masculine. “I’m writing a book about Carson McCullers,” I say. “Oh, who’s he?” most people reply. I wonder if that ambiguity was part of her choice, consciously or unconsciously, or if she just couldn’t stand the name Lula. When I was in college, I started heading my papers with my first initial and last name, J. Shapland, an experiment with how my work might be treated when authored by a neutral—i.e., potentially masculine—name. I can’t remember the outcome, only that I felt pleasantly not myself behind the initial at a time when I didn’t know how to be myself.

  As I flipped through her photos, I saw that Carson got more and more androgynous with age. Her hair only got shorter. She started out camping it up, in the costume of a grown man from the time she was a kid: she wore a huge tie and shorts and knee-socks and, in the photos, looks completely pleased with herself. Then came the lapels and cuffs, the pants, the look she’s best known for. It’s what she’s wearing on her first book cover. The same look that got her in trouble with family friends when she came back to Columbus and dressing across gender lines wasn’t funny or cute anymore, like it had been when she was a girl. People often mistook her for a man when they met her, even a boy. But as she got older, she leaned more toward silhouette-blurring, body- (and gender-) obscuring pieces, the pieces that introduced me to her when I catalogued them. Her woven vests, tunics, coats. And her nightgowns. The pieces she had made especially for her. I’ve started making my own clothes in the years since I began this project, frustrated that clothes in stores don’t really look or fit or feel the way I want to look and feel. Which is: not masculine, not feminine, but a both that becomes other.

  They/Them

  While at Yaddo I got an invitation from the Texas Book Festival to moderate a Q and A with Eileen Myles. I was several weeks in, and Yaddo was mist and trees and puddles and inch-thick layers of pine needles and leaves. Moss and ferns. Rain and rain. Lonely. I had just left Austin in June, in what felt like a frenzied rejection of the place and what it had come to represent to me: GOODBYE, Texas; goodbye, tech bros; goodbye academia and everything you stand for! But suddenly, from Saratoga Springs, Austin seemed very appealing, with its endless sunshine, tacos, good friends who’d known me longer than a week. Not to mention: Myles is my longtime hero. Each of their autobiographical novels—Chelsea Girls, Cool for You, Inferno—and their poems had gotten me through the past few years as I navigated my coming out, my decision to abandon an academic career, careerism in general. Eileen was and is a model for living on the outskirts of capitalism and convention. The last time Eileen was in Austin, I’d offered them a place to stay via Instagram. Though they didn’t take me up on it, the inscription in my copy of Inferno reads, “Thanks for the house.” After about a minute of concern that the trip would take me out of my writing zone in residence, I said yes, absolutely. As usual, in the back of my mind I suspected I was getting unofficial access, that I was likely the last choice for this job. Who was I to interview an icon? And perhaps the underlying doubt, the one that made leaving the residency for a weekend so enticing: who am I to write about one?

  A few days later, before I got in touch with Myles, I got an email from someone on the book-fest staff informing me that “Eileen goes by the pronoun ‘they.’” This was news to me: the person who claimed to have run the first “openly female” campaign for president in 1992 was going by “they”? I even went so far as to let this bother me for a moment. My lesbian hero disidentifying from womanhood? How could I process this? But then the real concern blossomed: I had to be on stage with Myles in a few weeks and I could not fuck this up. On the phone with Chelsea and my friends, freaking out, we tried to practice using “they,” but no one was successful every time. “She”s just slipped out.

  In Austin, the night before Eileen’s reading, I wrote out my introduction and questions: a script that would keep me sane and, I hoped, prevent any egregious pronoun errors. As Myles suggested I do in an email, I asked them what it means to be queer in being and in writing. I was too nervous to remember their exact words, but Myles answered something along the lines of constant shifting, the ever new. This part I do remember. Eileen: “I’ve earned better words than ‘Miss.’”

  Confidantes

  Back in my cabin, I needed to know more about Elizabeth Ames, but Yaddo’s archives had recently been moved off the grounds to the New York Public Library. Pat, one of the two residents in her seventies, was driving to the city the following week and offered me a ride. Again I left my comfortable cottage and my free meals, my daily poached eggs to order—my dad told me on the phone it sounded like I was in assisted living—on a lead to find yet another lesbian, or someone I presumed to be one.

  I had never been to the New York Public Library, any branch, even during my lonesome, clove-cigarette fueled stint on Water Street. Pat dropped me as close as she could get to the main library without getting trapped by traffic, despite my offer at each block to jump out. She was one of my residency mothers. After signing up for my third new library membership that month, I spent several hours rifling through Ames’s papers in the manuscript room: her notebooks, her letters, Yaddo records. She had an entire notebook devoted to pasted-in poems that she had cut from the newspaper or retyped, a catalog of lost and semi-lost women writers. Ann Rutledge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Widdemer, Jessie Rittenhouse, Katherine Mansfield, Elinor Wylie, Ruth Fitch Bartlett, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Gwendolyn Haste. How many of these do you recognize? (My friend Laura, a queer scholar, in response to this list of names: “Definitely a lesbian.”) Ames detailed her studies of Chinese philosophy, world religions, architecture, all in pencil. Nothing emerged about Ames herself or her personal life, though I did come across her lists of the writers she had invited into residence and where they were housed at Yaddo. And several menus, lists of recipes. The food at Yaddo has a long history. Each night at dinner, they serve fresh bread with butter balls, made by the kitchen staff using wooden paddles. I still don’t really know why. Tradition, like the carrot sticks. Nourishment. In Ames’s notes, I read Whipped cream, stiff.

  I requested a reel of microfilm that the records indicated contained some correspondence between Ames and McCullers. Vaguely disappointed with what I’d found so far—a few brief logistical exchanges with writers, a $10 phone bill to James Baldwin—I made the trip out of the manuscript room and down six flights of marble stairs to the frigid microfilm bunker. I felt odd carrying the reel such a long way in my hand. What if I dropped it? Or just walked out of the building? I considered putting it in my pocket for safety, but didn’t want it to look like I was stealing. Archives always conjure this mix of overwhelming constraint and bewildering freedom for me. The environment is at once completely controlled, down to what kind of paper and pencil you can use, and totally unrestricted: your hands turning the pages of someone’s letters and notebooks, your mind and heart reading them.

  Positioned in front of a viewing machine the size of my body, I began to scroll through the letters, past some correspondence between Elizabeth and other writers. Then I got to Carson. To get a sense of the scope, how many letters I would need to scan, I tried to scroll to the end. I scrolled for hours that afternoon, and gathered and saved nearly two hundred pages of lette
rs from Carson to Elizabeth. After their initial meeting in the hotel lobby, they had become close friends. In the letters, Carson is frank and open with Elizabeth about her love and affection for her, as well as her periodic romances with other women in New York, none of which appear in the biographies or anywhere else in Carson’s writing. With Ames, she felt she could be honest about who she was—or at least whom she loved—to an accepting, understanding confidante.

  In an undated letter she writes that she has “met someone,” and that their friendship “has about it an emotional quality that has disturbed me.” She goes on to describe a woman she met in New York, explaining that their relationship has “a tension” to it that is unlike her other friendships. While she mentions that the relationship is not necessarily “a sexual one,” she also says that her feelings for her close friends are her most significant “emotional experience[s].”

  She follows this vulnerable revelation to Elizabeth with a request to come back to Yaddo for the winter, and closes by telling her, “Today I gave in to our common vice. I ate about half a pound of chocolate, then gobbled up a box of nasty little cookies.” Carson wrote to Elizabeth when she was down and confused, scarfing down chocolate and in love with a lady director.