My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  In Sickness

  In the photo collection in Austin I found an image of Carson, washed out, grinning on an Adirondack chair. And then another of her in a V-neck sweater with her big collar and dark pants. The sweater looks like it’s from the ’70s but she didn’t live that long—a fashion premonition—and on the back I find this piece of darkness: “Carson before stroke.” Then another photo in a similar outfit but lighter, pleated pants and a collar tucked in, her posture less relaxed, her hands in fists, close to the house in Nyack, as though she couldn’t walk very far. Her face is totally aged, drooping on one side. It’s like she can’t smile hard enough with her left side, but she’s trying. “After stroke,” the back of the photo does not say.

  I struggle to comprehend the basic facts of Carson’s illness and decline. I see the photos where her arm is in a splint, where her arm is hidden behind another person. I study the closest thing to a biography Mary Mercer ended up writing about Carson, a six-page handwritten timeline she titles “Carson’s Activities and Illnesses, 1936–1967.” The first entries read, in their entirety:

  1936 Met Reeves (Summer)

  1937 (Oct.) Married Reeves

  1940 (Summer) Divorced Reeves

  (Winter) 1st stroke

  The entry following their remarriage is from June 1947: “Sudden hemianopsia [blindness] and numbness Rt. hand. Impaired peripheral vision Rt. eye.” Then in November, “Sudden, complete Left hemiplegia [paralysis].” My phone’s search history includes “stroke” and “hemianopsia.” I am trying to understand Carson the way I am trying to understand my own body: through research, diagnosis.

  The people around Carson throughout her life each had their own interpretations of her illness, and those who weren’t as close to her frequently questioned whether or not she was ever “really” sick. It is difficult to tell how much they knew of her medical history, to what extent Carson came out to others as a sick person. Boots writes, “Carson looks very well. She stays in bed a great deal of the time.” These statements seem to contradict one another—if she’s in bed all the time, doesn’t she look sick? On learning that Carson had a double operation late in her life, Truman Capote informed Boots, “Well, I think Carson enjoys ill health.” Boots replied, “There are people who enjoy the results of illness, but I have never known anyone who enjoyed illness.”

  Despite the best efforts of her interpreters, Carson speaks straightforwardly in her letters about how it feels to be in her body, and I take her at her word. “The last week was utter Hell,” she writes to Tenn in 1949. She explains, “This last year has been unspeakably difficult. My health has failed steadily. I can’t walk more than half a block, can’t play the piano of course or type, can’t smoke too much or, alas, get drunk. And neuritis has set in—the damaged nerves are constantly spastic and painful.” She was thirty-two years old when she wrote that. She describes a three-day migraine, a gland in her neck that “went wrong” and “a sort of convulsion at dawn after the third day.” In another letter, she tells Tenn that her pain and suffering would actually be humorous if it were happening to someone else. She isn’t afraid of dying, she’s afraid of another stroke. She writes, “The sinister illness that haunted my life all during my youth till the time I was twenty-nine had asserted itself. I lived in constant fear of strokes.”

  Carson, though she may not have always been the best caretaker of her body, struggled with her health from a very young age. Her first stroke, accompanied by partial paralysis and temporary blindness, happened the week before her twenty-fourth birthday, but it wasn’t diagnosed as such for years. In a letter to Mary, she writes that she had been tortured by strokes, which she thought of then as strange fainting incidents, since her twenties, when she would find herself suddenly on the floor, unable to move, terrified. Each day she felt daunted by the possibility of damage to her brain. Some doctors told her she had a genetic brain malfunction, others believed her symptoms to be psychological. Without a satisfactory diagnosis, it was easiest to conclude that her sudden blindness, paralysis, and incapacitating migraines were all in her head.

  When I started fainting, the doctors thought I was having seizures and began three months of testing on my brain to determine its condition. I was twenty-two, and I was told I could not drive at all, or climb stairs or ladders unattended. I had just started grad school and was teaching for the first time. Now, in addition to simply doubting my abilities, my intelligence, I was also made to question my brain and its basic functioning. Through months of scans and flashing lights I lived in constant paranoia, uncertain about the reliability of my own thoughts. The fullest diagnosis of what was actually a heart condition (hypovolemia and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS) came a few years later, as I was beginning to research Carson.

  To question, to cast doubt, on how a person experiences her own body is cruel and damaging, and all too common. Carson was misdiagnosed several times, starting with the rheumatic fever at eighteen that would eventually cause her strokes, which her doctor treated at the time as tuberculosis. Even her strokes were explained to her as psychological episodes, triggered by emotional trauma. The psychologizing of illness complicates the relationship between self and body. Susan Sontag points out that, on the one hand, to psychologize illness is to view “every form of social deviation” as illness: from criminal behavior to addiction to, say, homosexuality. But at the same time, if any malady can be connected to a patient’s psychology, it follows that on some conscious or unconscious level people can get sick on purpose, and if they really wanted to be well, they could cure themselves. Certainly this is how many people choose to interpret others’ addictions, and even their own: as bad habits. This double bind instills a pervasive sense that illness is not real, that what the self experiences is not valid. The chronically ill person, thus: the “invalid.”

  The confusion of these years indicates that Carson was drinking far more than she should have been, and it also suggests memory failures, a likely outcome of strokes and possibly a consequence of trauma. Carson spent much of 1948 ill at home in Nyack, after separating again from Reeves. In March, she ended up in Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic after slashing her left wrist. She told Dr. William Mayer, a psychiatrist she was confiding in during this period, that she and Reeves were separated, their second marriage only a formality. She stopped writing regularly to Tenn for a while, but soon he heard from Janet Flanner that Carson was not well. He came up with a plan for Carson to move out West with him, to a ranch in Mexico, where, he wrote, they could take care of his sister and work in “adjoining trances” as they had in Nantucket. Instead, Carson and Reeves reconciled again. Another form of self-destruction: choosing the person who harms you.

  Witch Hunt

  Carson planned a trip south with Bebe, to visit Boots and his partner, Paul Bigelow, in Macon, and Edwin and John in Charleston. On this trip, Carson was called suddenly to return to New York and offer assistance to Ames, who found herself under fire from a group of Yaddo writers for alleged communist sympathies. The war years had provided a degree of freedom for public queer expression, as bars and queer communities like February House brought people together and provided access to larger networks of queer people. In the years that followed, this freedom proved to be a resource for those seeking to prove a person’s “perversion” in the climate of McCarthyism. The Kinsey Reports, published in two installments in 1948 and 1953, indicated just how widespread and omnipresent gay people were, and government officials began to elide communist sympathies with queerness. Anyone with a secret identity must be a spy, and anyone with deviant inclinations must be removed from their jobs. The FBI granted ordinary citizens new license to monitor the behavior of their friends and neighbors in the interest of national security under the purview of the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare that grew alongside it.

  After providing a queer and political haven for its artists for many years, Yaddo was in for a scandal, what came to be called the “Lowell Affair.” In early Feb
ruary 1949, allegations of communist sympathies came out in the papers against a lesbian journalist named Agnes Smedley, who had been in residence at Yaddo for five years. In 1948, Ames had asked Smedley, who was rumored to be a communist, to leave Yaddo for fear of the consequences of her associations, but it was too late. Yaddo secretary Emma Townsend had been secretly informing the FBI for two years about “any guests who made what she considered disloyal remarks” during their stays, writes Ruth Price in Yaddo: Making American Culture. Without any proof against Smedley, the FBI showed up at Yaddo and began questioning residents and staff. One resident left the colony immediately. Four others took up arms against Ames for playing “a leading and fully conscious role” in a “dangerous communist conspiracy” at Yaddo. Freshly Catholic and bipolar poet Robert Lowell, along with his soon-to-be wife, writer Elizabeth Hardwick, twenty-four-year-old Flannery O’Connor, and writer Edward Maisel held a makeshift trial in one of Yaddo’s garages, questioning Ames and others about their involvement with Smedley.

  When they mentioned “involvement” with Smedley, though no one said this aloud, they meant romantic involvement. Smedley had stayed at Yaddo for several years to help Ames care for her ailing sister, Marjorie. Lowell et al. wanted Ames fired on the spot because she “was somehow deeply and mysteriously connected” with Smedley’s “political activities.” They considered her “totally unfitted for the position of executive director.” The word “unfitted” here is important. Joseph McCarthy made it clear in his Red Scare speeches not only that homosexuality was a kind of sociopathy but also that queer people were more likely to be swayed by communist ideas because of their “peculiar mental twists.” Smedley had been accused of, among other things, perverting young women at neighboring Skidmore College. To question Ames’s fitness for her job because of her connection to Smedley was to question her sexual orientation and, essentially, insist that Yaddo could not have a queer woman at its helm. Lowell was gunning for the directorship at Yaddo, according to several artists in residence at the time. If Ames was not fired immediately for her deep, mysterious involvement with Smedley, Lowell vowed to “blacken the name of Yaddo as widely as possible,” using his connections in the literary sphere and in Washington to do so.

  By several accounts, Lowell’s behavior at Yaddo in 1949 and in the ensuing years was manic; it eventually landed him in a McLean Hospital. Lowell had a vision of Ames and her crimes and prayed that she might be “purged” of her “pollution.” He had another vision of O’Connor anointed as a saint. Lowell’s only written recollections of those months come from his time in Indiana before his institutionalization: “Seven years ago I had an attack of pathological enthusiasm. The night before I was locked up I ran about the streets of Bloomington Indiana crying out against devils and homosexuals.”

  Carson was one of many writers and artists who came out in support of Elizabeth with letters and a petition signed by fifty-five of their number, which described “very grave political accusations that were arrived at overnight, and hurled at Mrs. Ames in an atmosphere strangely comparable to that of a purge trial,” with no evidence but Lowell’s visions and what Hardwick referred to as her “intuition.” When she heard the news, Carson and her mother boarded a train from Macon back to New York, where Carson hoped to be of assistance to her friend, but by the time she arrived the crisis had been resolved. The Yaddo board of directors met in March and dropped all charges against Elizabeth, who remained the director until 1969. However, a certain amount of psychological damage had been done, and Elizabeth was hospitalized after the scandal. The following year, the McCarthy trials began.

  When I find myself hoping for a Carson more willing to be open about her sexuality, when I wish that Carson would just come out already in a way that is more obvious and recognizable and in print, I think of Robert Lowell. And when I think of Robert Lowell, I always think of Eileen Myles’s poem “On the Death of Robert Lowell,” which ends,

  Take Robert Lowell.

  The old white-haired coot.

  Fucking dead.

  This Mad Desire for Travel

  In her thirties, Carson spent more and more time staying with her friends and avoiding Reeves, perhaps earning her the reputation as burdensome, needy, to some. She continued to write to Elizabeth and to work on the edits she got from Tenn for the play of The Member of the Wedding. It opened on Broadway to huge acclaim in January 1950, though Carson refused as always to attend the opening. She wasn’t feeling well that week and went to the doctor for some tests, where she learned she was pregnant. In Illumination, she writes that when Bebe found out about her condition, she told the doctor, who viewed the pregnancy as a blessing, that she’d “do something about it,” meaning an abortion: “You don’t know what it is to have a baby. It will kill my child.” Bebe was familiar with her daughter’s ongoing illness and so was deeply protective of her. She knew that, after three strokes, Carson couldn’t handle a pregnancy. Not to mention that Carson was drinking heavily. The doctor, according to Carson, still encouraged her to have the baby, but her mother intervened. Dr. Mayer, Carson’s psychiatrist at the time, was equally worried and made arrangements for her to terminate the pregnancy.

  When Carson narrates her pregnancy in Illumination, she does not mention telling Reeves or include him in recounting the doctor’s visit or the decision-making process. Frankly, it’s not clear who the father is. Carson states that she was so upset by her mother’s argument with the doctor, she miscarried that weekend. “The miscarriage was not easy,” she writes. She stayed home all weekend, Bebe refusing to call a doctor out of “some outlandish fear that either they might put the baby back or do something that would kill me in the end.” On Monday, Carson bled all over the taxi on the way to the hospital, where the chief gynecologist asked Reeves, “Why have you waited till now? Your wife is dying.” The doctor immediately started transfusions.

  In The Lonely Hunter, Carr suggests that Carson actually had an abortion, which would mean the anecdote in her autobiography is at least partially fabricated. If that is the case, perhaps she didn’t feel she could include the fact of an abortion in print, though she makes it clear that Bebe was outright demanding one. Savigneau states that Carson never wanted children, though I have yet to find confirmation of this in her own words. When she found out she was pregnant, Carson writes, she was “surprised but pleased.” However, in her narration she doesn’t mention whether she wanted to have the child, or wanted an abortion, or even whether she was upset about the miscarriage. She lets Bebe’s and the doctor’s opinions and voices shape the narrative.

  By the spring of 1950, she was well enough to travel to Ireland to visit Elizabeth Bowen, who later referred to her as “‘a terrible handful’” of a houseguest: Carson mistook the time difference and called in the middle of the night before her arrival, got bored with the quiet of the house and interrupted Bowen’s work, and generally just milled around until the evening, when guests arrived and drinks were served by what Carson called the “public fireplace,” where she could finally feel at home telling stories to anyone who would listen, and causing mild uproar. For her part, Carson enjoyed her stay, and in Illumination she recalls the “little floating duck” in the bathtub she used there. She met up with Reeves in Paris, and inevitably they separated again. Back in New York, Reeves took his own apartment and Carson went to stay on Fire Island with lesbian couple Marty Mann and Priscilla Peck, who had tried to get Reeves into a twelve-step program.

  Fire Island was already an active community for queer people (those who could afford it—mostly white, middle-class designers, cultural producers, and members of the theater world) when Carson came to visit. She was well known in Cherry Grove, the town at the center of the queer community on the island. One skit in the 1948 Cherry Grove Follies was called “Dismembering the Wedding,” “a send-up of Member of the Wedding,” in which “a butch-looking woman played the housekeeper Bernice Brown in a gingham apron and an eye-patch, a ‘girl’ played the tomboy Frankie Ada
ms in loafers and socks topped by a silver lamé dress and chiffon scarves, and a barelegged ‘boy’ played the young John Henry West in a T-shirt and tutu.” Visitors to Fire Island in the 1950s tended to conceal the place from their straight friends in the city, saying they’d spent the weekend on Long Island or in Southampton. In therapy with Mary, Carson describes the conundrum of a male friend of hers who is pining after a woman who has gone away for the weekend with another woman. Carson casually mentions to Mary that the two women shared a room on Fire Island, a telling shorthand for their relationship.

  When Tennessee Williams threw a party for the British writer Edith Sitwell in New York, Carson, meeting the writer for the first time, sat with Edith on the sofa and the two talked about their work all night. Carson mailed her copies of her novels, and after reading them, Edith invited her to visit her house in England. In the Ransom Center’s reading room, a squadron of marble busts of writers whose papers are housed in the archive perches on the shelves lining the periphery. Sitwell’s is the only bust in the room of a female writer.

  Carson continued to spend much of the year apart from Reeves, separated officially or effectively. While her marriage was an ongoing struggle for autonomy and, more than perhaps anything else, peace, her career had never been more solid. The movie rights to Wedding were purchased in 1951. With the money, Carson bought Bebe a house at 131 South Broadway in South Nyack, the house in which Carson would live for the rest of her life.

  Separated from Reeves, Carson decided to sail alone to England to visit her new friend, Edith. Aboard the Queen Elizabeth, as Carson recalls to Mary in therapy in 1958, she saw a man who looked exactly like Reeves. She saw him several times, at a distance. Then one day, she received a letter from Reeves “saying that he was on the boat, and that he was going to jump overboard unless I would reconcile with him.” It is hard to identify the beginning of the end of their relationship, given how difficult it was from the start, given Carson’s “ambivalence” going all the way back to the porch on Stark Avenue. During this period, Carson explains, “these threats and emotional blackmail became a daily pattern. If I wouldn’t take him back he would kill himself; the same refrain. I was hesitant to give a curt and truthful answer. I was always so afraid he would actually fulfill his threats, which in the end he did.” (After one of his attempts at hanging himself, a biographer writes, Carson “reportedly admonished him: ‘Please, Reeves, if you must commit suicide, do it somewhere else. Just look what you did to my favorite pear tree.’”) When she arrived in England, Carson sent Reeves back home. He returned to Nyack and lived with Bebe, while Carson stayed in England for three months visiting friends.