My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  The last day of my stay at the house, the director of the McCullers Center sat me down in a coffee shop with Bible verses decorating each table to tell me he had heard in no uncertain terms that Carson and Mary were “never romantically involved.” I’m wondering what that even means, “romantically involved,” because what else can we call it that Mary saved every single letter, postcard, telegram, and valentine that Carson wrote her during the nine years they spent together? Not to mention every tiny card that came stuck in a bouquet of flowers Carson sent her, at least fifty of which I dutifully scanned for my files. When Carson died, Rita tried to sell her house in Nyack and all it contained, but Mary, after a series of fraught letters, bought it and kept it exactly as it had been, even the gardens. These commodities, these records of consumer goods exchanged, this real estate are all that linger, all that we can point to and say “love.” The Stark Avenue house is full of Carson’s wedding photos, but the organ looms.

  Last Love

  Carson fell in love with Mary when she was forty-one. In Illumination she describes her “meeting with and love for Dr. Mary” as “the happiest and most rewarding experiences of my life.” Carson does not come out about their relationship any further in the book; her letters to Mary tell more. After Mary had discharged her as a patient in 1958, Carson wrote to her that she had illuminated her life, and that this light would continue to shine for the entire time that Carson went on loving her. She could imagine nothing that might take away from this illumination.

  When Mary traveled abroad, that summer after their therapy sessions concluded, she gave Carson her ring to keep her company. Carson wrote to her that she almost cried when she left, but the sight of Mary’s ring consoled her. She thanked Mary for allowing her to hold on to a piece of her while she was away. Mary replied in a handwritten draft that she saved, “It pleases me that that ring has been of comfort. It has done the same for me too in its time: its color, smoothness, weight and symmetry.” Her letter, an unsent draft, is the only example of her writing to Carson that she kept. It is riddled with revisions that I decide to read as signs of editorial affection. Why else would she need to get so exactly right her descriptions of the sea, of swimming, which she crossed out and rewrote in the margins?

  She tells Carson that she has “found a copy of Love in the Western World to take with me. I have read it carefully, thoughtfully. It may save us much time and I cannot thank you enough for putting it into my hands.” Love in the Western World, a comparative history of romantic love, suggests that while certain kinds of self-destructive passion are often celebrated in the pages of Western literature, love in its ideal form allows for a separateness of the beloved, rather than an annihilation of the self. The author, Denis de Rougemont, had visited February House back in the 1940s. It is unclear how and why this book became so important to Carson and Mary, how it would save them time. But it makes room for many different types and interpretations of love.

  When Carson died, Mary insisted that she be buried “wearing the silver and turquoise ring she had given her, which Carson wore constantly.”

  Not Yet

  Last year I took a dumb online quiz while friends were in town—we all took it—and learned that gifts are my “love language,” so it is possible that I imbue objects exchanged with more significance than others might. I read Carson and Mary’s love through these objects, and I realize that I do the same with mine and Chelsea’s. I think not of rings but of the amethyst pendant she gave me for my thirtieth birthday. When our friends in Santa Fe see it they ask if I ever use it as a pendulum for making decisions. I tell them not yet. I think of the blue Mexican blanket we took on our first picnic, to the golf course, where we fucked and talked for hours in the dark and got chased away by the sprinklers. The next day she texted that she hadn’t shaken the grass off the blanket, couldn’t bring herself to do it. I wrote back, Of course not. It’s our grass. It’s the blanket we cover the couch with at night now, in our loft in Santa Fe.

  It isn’t easy to narrate happiness or love, and it’s hard to prove their existence through recorded facts and descriptions. What is the precise evidence for love? Documentation of sexual encounters? Examples of daily intimacies? Easier to tell and to corroborate are stories of pain, dramatic events, betrayals. Love meanwhile lives in the mundane, the moment-to-moment exchanges, and can so easily become invisible after the people who shared it are no longer alive. But, of course, it leaves traces.

  First Loves

  Carson was in love with two Marys, Mary Tucker, her piano teacher, at the beginning of her life, and Mary Mercer, her therapist, at the end. After Carson died, the Marys started writing to each other about her. Most of this correspondence has been lost; these were the letters Mary Mercer asked be destroyed. Carson’s devotion to Mary Tucker was among the first of her inarticulable loves. She told Mary Mercer that everything she had loved had been untouchable, and that she couldn’t speak up about her feelings. Mary Tucker she thought of as superhuman, and couldn’t even bear to hug her. She was able to express how she felt only through music. Prior to Mary Mercer, Carson couldn’t pursue any kind of psychiatric help because she wasn’t able to share her story, in the same way, she suggests, that she wasn’t free to express her feelings for Mary Tucker. In July 1958, Carson writes to Mary Mercer of her desire for self-discipline, promising that she will cut back on her drinking. She then tells Mary that what she feels for her is as gentle and abiding as the love she once felt for Mary Tucker, and that, like her childhood love, this feeling could be generative and productive for her writing.

  On the porch with Reeves, when he asked if she was a lesbian, Carson said that she had loved Mary Tucker and Vera, a family friend, but hadn’t told them. She had always kept them at some remove. Unable to share her feelings physically or in words, Carson found other ways to show her love. Mary Tucker taught her to express her feelings through music; her creative outlet was also the outlet for her desire. In therapy, Carson explains how she communicated her love to Vera: fudge. While Vera was at Hollins College, and Carson was wildly in love with her, she made her fudge and sent it to her, one batch after the next, so that Vera had a supply the whole time she was in school. When Carson says she was in love, I believe she means she was in love.

  Dream

  After their first therapy session, Carson wrote a letter to Mary telling her about two dreams. In one, she is struggling to get her coat on and Mary offers her oyster stew. Oyster stew, lesbian readers! In the other, a doctor named Monique, who Carson knew in Paris appears, and Carson can’t reach her because things get in her way, causing her to despair. The dream shifts, and Carson is suddenly in the Alps. The image she conjures next, knowing that she arrived at Mary’s for their first session walking with a cane and couldn’t open the door due to partial paralysis, is fairly outrageous: in her dream, Carson is skiing. She alludes to Switzerland, recalling Annemarie’s homeland, and tells Mary parenthetically that Switzerland has for a long time had a great significance to her. In the dream, she feels tranquil, exultant. She tells Mary that she thinks Monique represents her, and that, by skiing together, she imagines that Mary can set her free.

  Carson links a woman from her past with feeling comfortable in her body. Monique taught her to ski in the ’40s, before her last strokes rendered her left side permanently paralyzed, and in this dream skiing is freedom: from queer obstacles, from despair. With Mary, and to Mary, Carson imagines a body unimpeded by the paralysis and weakness of her later years, a heart calmed.

  The next letter in the file, written two months later, begins with Carson declaring to Mary her sense of awe at their unexpected new love.

  Matters of Taste

  After reading over the transcripts of their therapy and informing Mary that it was all garbage, Carson started to type again, with one hand. The letters she wrote to Mary, the narrations of her dreams, these were the beginning of her return to writing.

  Carson’s life in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and her w
ritings from these years—a play, a novel, and a book of children’s poems—tend to be ignored or forgotten. Carlos Dews writes that “the final fifteen years of McCullers’s life saw a marked decline in her health and creative output.” Writer’s block is one of the themes of Illumination, and Carson describes “so many frightful times when I was ‘un-illuminated,’ and feared that I could never write again. This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?” In this case, Mary—or the revelations born of their conversations and ensuing partnership—is the spark that gets her writing when she thought she was stuck forever. In a letter to Mary early on in their therapy, she writes that her novel has drawn near to her at last, that she is overjoyed to have it close again.

  A few weeks after their therapy concluded, Carson returned to the manuscript she had started ten years before. With Mary’s help, she learned that she could have operations on her hand to make it more functional, which she did. She began to write again. After working on her last novel for the better part of a decade, Carson finished Clock Without Hands within a year of her sessions with Mary.

  Clock Without Hands, published in 1961, brings together Carson’s own experience with illness and decline, the racist and homophobic attitudes of small southern communities, and the first rumblings of the civil rights movement and white backlash: the bombings of homes purchased by black people in neighborhoods deemed “white” by the KKK. Of all McCullers’s fiction, this novel speaks most directly to our own moment. It documents the 1960s prominence of the KKK, the resentful persecution of blacks and queers, and a belief held by conservative white southerners in the unqualified rightness of their power and wealth. Flannery O’Connor “said that it was absolutely the worst book she had ever read,” according to Carr. Boots’s father, a judge on whom Carson based one of the characters, hated it so much he threw the book across the room when he finished reading it. According to Boots, “Daddy also objected to ‘those things in the book that a woman just ought not to be writing about.’. . . In that, he may seem to be the product of his generation and religious upbringing, but to him this is a matter of taste, not of morality.”

  Clock has an openly gay character, and another, Jester, who is trying to understand his love for another man. Jester asks his grandfather, the conservative judge, “Have you ever read the Kinsey Report?” The reference suggests Carson’s own piqued interest in its findings on human sexuality. She includes a joke for the reader familiar with the report: “The old Judge had read the book with salacious pleasure, first substituting for the jacket the dust cover of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” He tells his gay grandson that the landmark study he read clandestinely is “just tomfoolery and filth.”

  The year Clock was published, Mary quietly divorced her husband, Ray. Carson and Mary traveled together to visit friends—Edwin and John in Charleston, Mary Tucker in Virginia, and Edward Albee on Fire Island, where he and Carson worked on a stage production of The Ballad of the Sad Café. Albee wrote each morning for four hours, then, at night, returning from walking the beach, he read aloud to Carson and Mary. He read Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and his own Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the first act of Ballad. One of the major obstacles to staging Ballad was the question of Amelia’s motivations. Albee asked Carson for an explanation: “‘What went on upstairs when Marvin Macy tried to get in bed with Miss Amelia? Was Miss Amelia a lesbian?’” According to Albee, Carson wanted this left ambiguous.

  Carson held a now-famous lunch for Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, and Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen), a friend to whom she’d been writing for years, at her house in Nyack. She served oysters and champagne, the only things Blixen would eat at the time. Writing to Mary, who was traveling during the festivities, she says how she missed her at the party, that it was a day they would have relived together in their golden years. When Carson traveled, Mary came to meet her at the airport, the contemporary definition of love.

  I have yet to encounter another person who has read Clock Without Hands except at my urging, though when it came out it was a best seller. For the author photo, Carson had to sit in a high-backed chair because she could not hold her head up on her own. Perhaps it comes down to matters of taste whether we are interested in the later years of a woman writer’s life, whether we are interested in what she has to say when she is bedridden and wheelchair-bound, when she has to take heartburn medication to cope with the stress of a book deal. She was forty-four when the book came out and would not make it past fifty.

  Dedications

  Carson dedicated Clock Without Hands “For Mary E. Mercer, M.D.”

  Dream

  At the end of June 1958, four months after their first meeting, Carson began a letter to Mary with another dream. In the dream, she has her arms wrapped around Mary, hugging and kissing her, but Mary’s spirit feels far away and Carson doesn’t know how to express her love. Dream Carson reads a newspaper headline that Eudora Welty has drowned in the Hook River and identifies with Welty to such an extent that she substitutes her own name in the headline. As she relays her dreams in letters to Mary, Carson is often chasing after clues—Where did the name “Hook River” come from? Why Welty?—instead of recognizing the emotional content of what she is saying. I was holding you in my arms, embracing you, kissing you. Hers is a wonderful and maddening kind of obliviousness. A constant blind spot. But this very nonchalance could suggest that recounting this dream does not serve as a shocking confession, but a replay of scenarios that have actually occurred with Mary. She feels no need to explain herself, or how they ended up entwined in embrace.

  Your Name

  After she had been “fired” (her word) as Mary’s patient, Carson sent a letter to her former doctor. Early that morning, she wrote, she opened her eyes with Mary on her mind. She loved her and wanted to tell her so but didn’t want to wake her, so she waited to call her until eight, to say goodbye. Mary was flying to Spain with her then-husband, and Carson had been praying for her safety. The letter closes with Carson declaring that there isn’t a single word loving enough to call her. I imagine Mary blushing when she receives this letter. I imagine her quietly delighted. Is this projection?

  There isn’t a clear explanation for why their therapy ended so abruptly. At some point, they seem to have just turned off the tape recorder. They decided to embark on a new relationship. “Therapy went marvelously well,” Carson writes in Illumination, “and in less than a year, she discharged me as a patient. We have become devoted friends, and I cannot imagine life without our love and friendship.” Ah, “friendship.”

  All the materials Mary saved are in Carson’s voice (tapes, letters) or refer to legal battles following her death. Mary was careful to eliminate her own voice from the archive. Searching for Mary in her own words, trying to understand how she interpreted her relationship with Carson, I found myself—virtually—back in the McCullers papers at the Harry Ransom Center where I’d begun, just a few folders away from the Annemarie letters. From Santa Fe I ordered scans of Mary’s letters from an intern, a reincarnation of me. They took two months to arrive, and when they did I couldn’t bear to read them. After all that waiting, I was afraid. What if they somehow destroyed what I was working on? What if, in my desire to offer a version of Carson that I understood, in an effort to feel my own experience validated, I had manufactured the whole love story?

  The letters are filled with mundane travel details—they wrote to each other only when one of them was out of town. They describe sites and visits and meals and hotels, and, in Mary’s words, “missing, missing.” Mary went to England in 1960 and sent Carson a telegram on arrival, another when she received the flowers Carson had sent her.

  JULY 28 1960 IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL. MARY.

  AUG 9 1960 MUCH LOVE MARY

  AUG 10 1960 THE BEAUTY OF FLOWERS FROM MY BEST FRIEND ENCIRCLES US

  LOVE MARY

  She also sent a lett
er back, enclosing a sprig of heather that the archive scanned along with the page.

  Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh. Wed. My best friend has sent me flowers, before which, if she could see them, she would remain silent. No one could describe their beauty. Each day I wear a different colored rose. They are so radiant with a sturdy livingness that I can’t believe that they will ever perish . . . I enclose some heather from me to you. MMDM Mary

  Mary mentions how much she misses her cats back home in Nyack and above all encourages Carson to take care of herself and stay healthy.

  Tues night. Thank you for staying put and being. I know you promised to take especial care of yourself and I know you keep your word. So I do not worry. You and I shall have a great deal of fun living over this past week. It overflows. I prayed ‘your prayer’ by name last Sunday at a service at Westminister [sic] Abbey. Never have I heard such a choir. And I paused by the 3 Brontë sisters—“courage to endure”

  There is such a sense of presence—almost everywhere. There is no beginning—no end—even to this note. MMDM Mary.

  On another sheet, I find a clue to what Mary might have prayed at Westminster:

  Oh God, whose other name is Love,

  Take the radiance and energies of Carson’s love, which surrounds my days, and return them to her in full measure, increased by the love I have for her so that she stands illuminated and comforted. Give her the grace to express the essence of this abundance of loveliness in her life and in her work. Bless her and keep her. Amen.

  Forensics

  I approach all of Carson’s materials—the clothes, the letters, the transcripts, the stories—so cautiously, in my own way, trying not to disturb anything. Though to some readers it might seem as if I ride roughshod over the versions of history with which we’ve grown comfortable; that I am invading a story that is not mine. But the materials, the records themselves, I approach as if they were crime scenes. It’s the archivist in me. I seek to re-create things exactly as they were when I found them, as I found them. I try to show the whole approach, the materials and the gaps and the precise place and state I am in when I’m looking. Perhaps it is because I am approaching the dead. Approaching the beloved? I feel that if I can show my relationship to the materials, then others will see what I see.