As she moved back and forth between New York, Yaddo, and Columbus throughout the 1940s, Carson continued to write to Elizabeth, detailing her struggle to finish Wedding after Annemarie’s death and amid ongoing drama with Reeves.
Carson tells Elizabeth that at Yaddo and in Columbus, she can feel things “deeply” without being “tormented” as she is in the city. She feels “at peace,” she says, and “happy in my room alone, shut in with my wedding.”
It’s a wedding that Frankie longs to join in the novel: not a person or a relationship, but the public, sanctioned manifestation of love as she understands it. None of Carson’s books portray out lesbians, but Wedding certainly comes closest. In Illumination, Carson recalls the moment she finally understood what Wedding was really about. Running down the street in the midst of a house fire, Carson told Gypsy, “‘Frankie is in love with the bride of her brother and wants to join the wedding.’” This straightforward statement of Frankie’s love for another woman will be transfigured in the book into a feeling that she can neither comprehend nor express, and will manifest not as love for the bride but as a desire to join the wedding. Each of her ideas for the book suggest a girl’s desire and love for a woman as Wedding’s overt subject. Prior to her house fire realization, Carson writes that “Frankie was just a girl in love with her music teacher, a most banal theme.” I wonder if she really felt the subject “banal,” or if she didn’t feel like she could write directly about a woman’s love for another woman. Either way, Frankie’s longing grows out of Carson’s attempt to address unspoken lesbian desire.
To Elizabeth, she writes, “I suppose this book is my autobiography.”
The High Line
I walked to Pat’s apartment along the High Line to catch a ride back to Saratoga Springs, back to the place where I felt I could feel deeply, without disruption. A billboard-sized copy of Zoe Leonard’s poem “I Want a President” was pasted up on the wall, in front of which an older couple was taking their photo. The first line reads “I want a dyke for president,” followed by “I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for president and I want someone with no health insurance . . .” The 2016 election was a few days away. I was walking along thinking about our first woman in office, how ready I felt for that, though the campaign had been a nightmare. Carson would have been furious at the rampant racism, unable to stand the misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton, or so, deep inside my version of her mind, I imagined. It was hard to believe it was really happening, but I felt somehow entitled to a woman president. Now, years into Trump’s presidency, I am learning, yet again, that history does not progress, does not move forward, cannot be understood as some sort of trajectory we can draw between past and future that goes through the present.
Like when I look at the history that surrounded Carson, all I can see in our present moment is a scatterplot of points and a best-fit line that never quite catches any of them. A lot of people talk about Carson McCullers as “ahead of her time,” given, I presume, her empathetic writing about gay men, interracial love, racism, and disability in the 1940s and ’50s. But perhaps, in light of a recent election and its aftermath that signal the ongoingness of racist and homophobic and misogynistic and ableist bigotry even during political moments that seem progressive, it feels more accurate to say that she was just plain empathetic to human differences. That it has nothing to with history, with “the times,” with generation. When I read Carson’s fiction, it is clear that empathy is a choice a person makes, moment to moment, in how they approach other people. On the page and off.
In the election’s wake, back at Yaddo, I stayed in bed and barely ate anything, falling asleep for three hours in the middle of the day for no reason but grief. I’d been dipping into a volume called The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, which uses her letters, diary entries, and newspapers to map her day-to-day life, an attempt to include every single event that has been recorded. A tick-tock. I guess that’s one way to write a biography: no writing at all, just transcription of events in strict chronological order without comment or explanation. Perhaps that is the ideal biography. I’ve been thinking historically about being a woman artist or a lesbian at a time in the past when people openly hated or denied or refused to take women seriously, when people didn’t really even believe women artists or lesbians were real, or that they mattered. As my friend, lesbian artist Harmony Hammond, writes of coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, “to be both a woman and an artist was considered a contradiction of identities.” And now suddenly I have no choice but to face the possibility that this moment is no different from Carson’s 1950s or Emily’s 1860s or Harmony’s 1970s, that history recurs or continues to be the same conversation, the same story, with the same limits, revised according to one’s political views.
It makes me think that there will never be a time when women or lesbians are real—when we call them by name, use the right words to recognize them/ourselves. It’s analogous to the concept of coming out, for the oft-cited reason that you never stop coming out as a queer person; every time you meet someone new you must find a way to broach the topic or risk closeting yourself. But also because I don’t feel like I was ever actually in. I feel more like, growing up in a conservative, reticent community, I just didn’t know—for lack of example and lack of vocabulary—what I was, what I could be, that I could love women and still be myself. All I had was Zelda Fitzgerald. I’m drawn to Carson’s story and to her fictions of growing up in places that feel cut off, isolated, conservative compared to some other world out there that one can’t quite access. Like when she asked Reeves what lesbians were, how they acted. It makes sense that February House and Yaddo meant so much to Carson, and came up so frequently in her therapy sessions with Mary even decades later. Communities of queers, of artists, can be tiny but mighty worlds in which to form a self.
Giddily picking out places we might live when we escaped Texas, Chelsea’s hometown, Birmingham, made the short list. But when we visited, I noticed that everywhere we went—every restaurant, store, bar—we were the only couple that wasn’t visibly straight. We couldn’t see a community where we’d belong, and the idea of starting our own seemed too daunting. Not so in Santa Fe. As we house hunted at a distance, just about every Craigslist ad for a rental came with a woman landlord: metalsmiths, weavers. We moved to Santa Fe in part because of the stereotype of women living on their own in New Mexico, which reflects a long history of lesbian artists and writers. Our current landlord, Jan, wove tapestries for Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. She calls herself an Amazon warrior.
And the significance does not escape me that, as I write this, I am living—housesitting—at Harmony’s, occupying the home of one of the greatest lesbian artists of our time, surrounded by books and paintings and postcards and photos that all confirm her love for women. The objects make it real.
Threesomes
Carson struggled with Wedding throughout the early and mid 1940s, but in the meantime, moving between Columbus and Yaddo, she quickly began and finished a new manuscript. The idea for The Ballad of the Sad Café came during one of her outings in Brooklyn and took shape in the following months.
She recalls the time she spent on Sands Street, cavorting with the memories of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, and the night she saw “a remarkable couple” who would serve as the “illumination” for her next book.
The main character in Ballad, the formidable Amelia, who runs the local café, presents as a full-grown dyke. Separated from her husband, to whom she was married for ten days before she rejected him (whereupon he beat her, went on a crime spree, and wound up in the state pen), she falls in some kind of love with a gentle little man who comes to town claiming to be her cousin Lymon. Her ex-husband returns and the two men gang up on Amelia, ransacking her store and leaving her, again, alone. Some have suggested that Cousin Lymon might be a rendering of Truman Capote, whom Carson helped introduce to the New York publishing world. She convinced her editor for Ballad at Harper’s Bazaar, Mar
y Lou Aswell, the longtime partner of the artist Agnes Sims, to publish Capote’s early work. Later on, Carson grew to resent Capote for imitating her work, and the two refused the share the same air.
At the time of Ballad’s writing, after she had divorced Reeves, Carson received an unusual marriage proposal, by letter, from their mutual friend David Diamond. Carson, who had just finished reading sexologist Havelock Ellis’s autobiography My Life, imagined he proposed a marriage of convenience, like Ellis’s with his wife, Edith. Edith Lees was a lesbian, or what Ellis referred to as an “invert,” and she had relationships with women throughout their marriage, with her husband’s knowledge. David had something more intimate in mind in marrying Carson, and Carson flat-out refused him. Carson told David that she wished Reeves could have understood her as Havelock understood Ellis. She seems not to have had the book’s tragic ending—Edith winds up (like Zelda, like Annemarie, like so so many women) in an asylum—in mind when she said this. Reeves had also read Ellis many years earlier, hidden in the back room of a Georgia library. Havelock and Edith’s lavender marriage, which served to conceal one or both partners’ queer sexual and romantic practices, may have been the marriage Carson longed for with Reeves, for whom, she told David, she had no remaining physical attraction.
At a time when sexuality was not well understood, Ellis’s autobiography of unconventional marriage was a vital source of definition for both Reeves and Carson. Ellis wrote a foreword to Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness for its 1928 publication, a novel in which the protagonist refers to herself as an invert. Carson calls herself an invert in her response to Diamond’s letter, drawing the term either directly from Ellis or from Hall’s novel. Diamond’s proposal came in 1941, and the Kinsey reports, which first suggested sexuality and gender as changing and continuous spectrums rather than fixed designations, would not be published until 1948.
Inversion theory understood gender as a strict binary, in which homosexuality could only be interpreted as a reversal of anatomical gender traits. Many people in the early twentieth century were reading Freud and Ellis and taking their emphases on binaries and opposites in gender and sexuality as gospel. Homosexuality was just beginning to formulate as an identity in opposition to heterosexuality, which itself only became a concept during this time period. While it was okay in some circles to experiment with non-heteronormative sexual relationships, Freud and others made it clear that long-term homosexual behavior, especially at the exclusion of heterosexual partnership, was a kind of pathology or reversal of “normal” gender and sexual expression, a disease that had to be eradicated. At the time, perhaps these ideas had more purchase: feminism had not yet exposed Freud as a raving misogynist, nor had the implications of Ellis’s horrifying affinity for eugenics fully revealed themselves.
While Carson was away from New York, Reeves moved into David’s apartment in Rochester. All evidence suggests that theirs was a romantic and physical relationship. Carson stopped communicating with David altogether, fearing interaction with him might bring Reeves back into her life. When Ballad was published, she told David, “Darling, The Ballad of the Sad Café is for you.”
Recliner
I caught a glimpse of myself framed in the floor-to-ceiling window of my studio at Yaddo: pajama clad, cross-legged in the leather recliner with a cup of coffee beside me. I spent nearly the entire five weeks in this chair, with a stack of books beside me and on my lap, my notebook nearby, and I slept and awoke, and I felt frailer than usual. One day I brought the white quilt from my bed and draped it over me, and that became the new routine. I watched through the window, down toward the lake below, one of the four lakes named for each of the four Trask children. Soon it was full of leaves and it was hard to tell where the water began. The trees were so tall that I had plenty of time to watch each leaf fall, fall, fall all the way down, and one day when I looked out the leaves had turned to snow.
When Carson was away from Yaddo, she wrote to Elizabeth about how badly she missed the “certain serenity and discipline” she found there. “All during this year,” she wrote in an undated letter from Columbus, “I shall imagine what you all are doing, and think about snow, and the green lakes frozen. It will be as though part of myself is there.”
Writer Helen Vendler says that, during her time at Yaddo, thought became a place to dwell, rather than a linear process. This room made of thought brought her back to being fifteen, when she first began writing what she thought of at the time as “real” poems. I can relate: I felt most in residence with my own thoughts when I was an adolescent. And I think I’m always trying to get back to this space, this intensity and the freedom to explore it, that Carson writes about in Wedding. This space is writing, it is a room, it is an armchair, a tree house, it is the nourishment I found in mugs of hot cocoa I made in my cabin, with scoops of healing pink Himalayan salt that Pat brought me from her apartment.
Patricia Highsmith, lesbian novelist, called her two months at Yaddo her “summer of peace.” She was only in residence once, in 1948, and no written record of her stay remains in the Yaddo archives. Nowhere in Elizabeth’s notes does she appear. At Yaddo, she wrote the bulk of Strangers on a Train and spent plenty of time drinking in Saratoga Springs after working hours. She found a queer community of her own while in residency, befriending the gay novelist Marc Brandel and talking to him at length about sexuality as they walked the grounds. (He soon proposed, four different times, hoping to establish a marriage of convenience.) When Highsmith died, unbeknownst to anyone at Yaddo, it was revealed that she had named Yaddo the sole beneficiary of her estate: $3 million at the time, plus any future royalties, including proceeds from films made from her books, like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train and, recently, Carol. Nestled in my brand-new cabin, I liked to imagine that the heated floors and walls of windows were derived directly from Carol’s box office success. Chelsea and I listened to the audiobooks of Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt on road trips when we were first in New Mexico, enthralled by Highsmith’s ability in both books to render creepy queer romance as transcontinental crime drama. She published The Price of Salt, on which Carol is based, in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, concerned, she wrote in 1990, that she might be labeled a “lesbian book writer” if she used her real name. She was also trying to protect the people on whom she based her characters. It’s her only novel that charts a lesbian romance, and it’s still credited as one of the first lesbian novels of the era to end happily—rather than with the typical death or straight marriage. I wonder if Carson read it.
Carson and Highsmith knew each other, though they weren’t close. Highsmith went to visit Carson in Nyack in 1949, toting along two of the women she was currently sleeping with, and they spent the afternoon with Carson, Bebe, Rita, and Reeves. While staying at Rosalind Constable’s house on Fire Island in 1950, Highsmith met up for drinks at Duffy’s Hotel with her current lover Anne, February House-mate Jane Bowles, “her agent Margo’s girlfriend,” gay composer Marc Blitztein, and Carson. In 1953, Highsmith learned from lesbian art gallerist Betty Parsons that Carson had “fallen madly” in love with one of Highsmith’s ex-lovers, the London psychoanalyst Kathryn Hamill Cohen, and had been waiting around London for three months hoping Kathryn might live with her. Like so many lesbians, then and now, Carson and Highsmith’s paths and love interests intersected repeatedly. Each of the women mentioned in this paragraph could easily have a book written about her just like this one.
Carson was in residence at Yaddo six times throughout the 1940s and one last time in 1954. Once, when she fell ill at Yaddo and went home to Columbus, she left behind all her summer clothes, “(my overalls and shorts etc).” She also left behind a book checked out from the Lucy Scribner Library at Skidmore college up the hill, where I spent many of my afternoons picking out stacks of books about Carson and Highsmith and the 1940s that I would cram into my backpack and tote back down the hill on one of Yaddo’s blue bikes, through piles of orange l
eaves.
Everyone’s favorite Yaddo anecdote, as I learned from talking to other residents, each of whom came to Saratoga Springs with their own mythology about Yaddo and its history, is (apart from John Cheever’s continual nudity and exposures to unsuspecting guests) the story about Carson McCullers chasing after Katherine Anne Porter. It’s a good one. As the legend goes, young, desperate Carson became obsessed with the elegant, older southern writer and tried again and again to approach her. Repeatedly rebuffed, Carson came to Katherine’s cabin and laid herself down in the entry way, where she waited for her to emerge for dinner. When Katherine finally came out, she stepped over Carson’s prone, pathetic body and the two never spoke again.
Katherine Anne Porter was avowedly repulsed by “Lesbians.” When she refers to them in writing she capitalizes the “L” as though referring to some kind of mythological monstresses. It wasn’t uncommon to think of lesbians as monsters or “sickos” in the post WWII years; so many of the images of lesbians that circulated in pulp novels codedly, intentionally made them out to be gorgons, diseased, hardly human. I naturally presume Katherine was repulsed by her own fear, by her own self. Thou doth protest too much, Kate. While all the versions of this story I’ve read make Carson out to be obsessed with Katherine, what if all she really wanted was a mentor? A friend?
Ontological Destabilization
After the election, my loneliness magnified. I had been surrounded by Trump lawn signs in Carson’s neighborhood in Columbus during the primary the previous spring, but I never saw them as anything but a desperate clinging to conservative worldviews that were clearly dying out. The lawn signs were delusional. At Yaddo in October, we read aloud, over breakfast, from the New York Times, a paper I slowly began to resent balking at the continuing stupidity of the campaign to elect a reality TV star to the highest public office. Jenny, my other residency mother, read us the groping stories, appalled. One day a Trump sign appeared at the entrance to Yaddo, right outside, and after dinner we marched as a group to rescue our creative haven from such an insult. We were too absorbed in our work, in our collective solitude, to recognize the bubble for what it was.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Page 10
