While cataloging the final installment of David Foster Wallace’s papers at the Ransom Center in 2012, I had a desperate need to feel cautious. This collection was a major purchase for the center. I wrote in an essay, “I begin with a delicacy that is paralyzing. I fear getting anything out of order, out of place. I fear removing the rubber bands, the paper clips, the numbered Post-it notes. I’m distinctly aware that if I mess up, if I lose the order, the order is lost. This is a tender operation.” I realize now that I keep rewriting that one essay in different settings, trying to process those same feelings: loss, access, touch, erasures. I started working at the archive not long after a major archival scandal: Maria Bustillos published an article in The Awl in 2011 using the handwritten annotations in Wallace’s book collection, specifically his collection of so-called “self-help” books. These notes reflected his struggles with mental illness and made mention of his mother. From the buzz around the building, I learned that these revelations were so upsetting to Wallace’s family, they asked to pull some of the books they had sold to the Ransom Center from Wallace’s library collection. The center agreed and rehoused those books in sealed boxes, separate from the rest, refusing researchers access to them. In my first months as an intern, writing my MA thesis on Wallace—pre-Carson—I stood for hours in the aisle where his personal library is housed, reading the books he read (the unrestricted ones) and reading his annotations. There is a liveness, a presence to reading, and I took comfort in this sense of vitality, of sharing an intellectual project with the dead. Library books, especially annotated ones, or ones with page corners creased, or with notes or bookmarks or other ephemera tucked into them, have given me this same feeling, this reprieve from loneliness, since I was a kid. Someone else was here.
Processing the last installment of Wallace’s papers, his drafts and journals and endless floppy discs from his final, unfinished book,The Pale King, I grappled again with the problems of censorship. I had to flag any mention of home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses that appeared in the collection so that the real archivists could remove them, preventing any future researchers from having access to private information about Wallace’s friends and family members. These redactions seemed reasonable enough to me. No need to give DFW-hounds permission to stalk. But I was also instructed to flag instances where something “inappropriate” relating to Wallace’s family members might appear. I assume this was a strategy to avoid future publications that might upset the family or the Wallace estate. Reading through the papers, it soon became difficult to discern what might comprise “inappropriate” or “upsetting” information—Wallace’s narration of his own depression? Fictional representations of difficult family encounters? How was I to tell from the drafts and scattered notes what was fiction and what wasn’t? In the end, I flagged only one page, and I don’t know if the note was removed from the collection or not. It still forms a knot in my stomach to remember doing it.
Biography and its presumptions have bothered me for some time. Sometimes I think this project is an attempt at reparations (a failed one, in all likelihood): for my complicity in censorship at the archive, for my own closeted years, I am determined to shed light, to expose even those things that are difficult about a writer’s life. To track the rewritings, the omissions, the revisions. Though I wonder, constantly, what I might be omitting, revising, censoring. What I am unable to see or let be seen. About Carson, and about myself.
Expurgation
The impulse to shed light collides with the collector’s impulse, the need to gather up all the details. In Lorenza Foschini’s book-length encounter with Marcel Proust’s overcoat, her interest in a single article of clothing leads her to the story of a passionate collector who sought to salvage Proust from his own family—particularly his sister-in-law, Marthe—and their acts of censorship. I can’t help but hear echoes of Carson’s story in everything I read these days.
Foschini writes, “Proust’s homosexuality surrounded him like an invisible and insurmountable wall. His family’s unwillingness to understand this led to a history of silences that mutated into rancor. This in turn was transformed into acts of vandalism—papers destroyed, furniture abandoned.” She explains the motive behind the destruction later in the book. “What mattered to [Marthe] was to remove all traces of indecency liable to expose the family name to shame and disgrace. In this spirit of vengeance, Marcel Proust’s love letters were destroyed, as well as reams of his worldly correspondence, and most egregiously, innumerable drafts and working notes for his great masterwork.”
“Indecency” could easily have motivated Mary to destroy papers pertaining to Carson. The “indecency” of their relationship (Mary was, after all, religious), the breach of doctor/patient roles, the threat to Mary’s reputation as a therapist. As with Proust, as with so many queer writers and artists, there is no way to know fully what has been lost or destroyed. It is only possible to let absence speak.
Lies, Secrets, and Silence
To read Carson’s letters and therapy transcripts after reading the biographies and to continue to hear from strangers that Carson was not a lesbian, did not have a relationship with Mary, is unnerving. These flat-out lies are spoken as correctives, attempts to purify the record. But to know that Carson was a lesbian, to some extent, is to open up all of history: everyone may have been lesbian, no matter what the marriages or the records show. What freedom, what abundance live, in this realization.
While Carson was in Ireland in 1967, her very last trip abroad, visiting John Huston, who directed the film of Reflections in a Golden Eye with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, Mary wrote her:
Tues PM. A part of my heart rose with you into the skies and disappeared over the Atlantic. Use it to enjoy and bring it back soon. Mary.
On the eve of Carson’s return, Mary drew two fireplaces on the first page of her letter:
Saturday. Fires burning day and night in both homes to light your return. MMDM
These late years are represented by fewer letters. Perhaps Carson had run out of things to say, or perhaps she finally had someone she could talk to.
Myth Mania
Mary annotated and saved letters pertaining to Carson in a filing cabinet in her home. She marked a paragraph in a letter from Robert Lantz, one of Carson’s agents, in 1970, three years after her death. Lantz writes that it is less important to him that a biography offer a “literary evaluation” of Carson and her work. Rather, he longs for a version that presents “the living, extraordinary, unique, incredible lady” and “this fantastic tale of gallantry,” emphasizing Mary’s role in such a book’s creation: “we will all have to help because we were the people who knew her and to some degree understood her.” Whatever book Mary wanted—and certainly she didn’t write it herself, though she is helping write this one—she did not seem especially interested in Lantz’s mission to recover the “living, extraordinary, unique, incredible lady.” More than immortalization, he seems to strive for resurrection. Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” clearly never made its way into Lantz’s hands. I wonder, too, what “tale of gallantry” he’s talking about here: Carson’s ability to live and write in the face of illness? Mary’s heroic caretaking of Carson at the end of her life?
I imagine his request did not sit well with Mary. Writing after the publication of Carr’s biography The Lonely Hunter, Mary tells the young biographer Margaret Sullivan, “Carr’s book on Carson should not trouble you because her reach was for notoriety. Your book will be a quiet study of Carson’s work and its worth.” The control Mary tries to assert over Sullivan’s writing project feels to me, as a writer, strangling. And not exactly feminist, either, to tell her to write a “quiet study”—does that mean dull? Academic? A study that sticks to a version of Carson’s life as told solely through her fiction? If that’s the case, I start to wonder if Mary ever read Carson’s books. They are, in my opinion, anything but quiet.
Lantz expresses his hope that “the right biographer�
� might extract from Mary “the details of the story of the many illnesses, the many operations, the many triumphs” that marked Carson’s life.
Lantz wants the story of Carson’s illness, or so he says, appealing to Mary’s medical expertise. And she did leave behind the timeline of Carson’s “Activities and Illnesses.” But I find Boots’s timeline, though less detailed, to be more poignant. After nearly every surgery—ten surgeries on her left hand, one to remove her right breast—and each hospitalization, he notes, Mary was there.
Lantz envisioned Mary as the person to serve as this mythical “right biographer” for Carson. His “secret hope” was that Mary might “write it all down” so that Carson’s story could be seen through Mary’s eyes, “not only with [her] medical understanding but with [her] remarkable love and devotion to Carson.” Without saying or necessarily knowing anything about their relationship, Lantz makes it clear that he knows Mary was more than a doctor, more than a friend. It is this status that Mary refused to claim after Carson’s death, keeping her notes and her records, but giving no details of her life with Carson to anyone. Withholding is a means of possession.
For a long time, I didn’t read biographies, especially not biographies of writers. I couldn’t stand the way they labored to establish some kind of one-to-one correlation between the random events of a person’s life and her writing. Biographers broke into the house and rearranged the furniture to their liking. A few weeks after we started dating, Chelsea loaned me her well-worn copy of Edie, an oral history of Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s superstar, by Jean Stein. As I read, sinking down into the bathtub where I spent much of my last year of graduate school, my idea of biography as a form shifted. I began to see just how many ways a person’s life might be told. Stein crafts a narrative entirely out of other people’s words. It encompasses the contradicting opinions and stories about its subject’s life without trying to reconcile them. You can tell that some of the speakers are exaggerating, or trying to conceal something that perhaps the very next person will let out of the bag. It’s juicy. It’s alive. And unlike so many other biographies I’ve read, it feels true to life. Not true, whatever that means. But it does justice to the strangeness of memory, the unpredictability of human relationships, and it gives the lie to any instinct to impose a narrative rationale on unconnected events.
I began to wonder if that same principle Stein relies on—putting other voices into conversation to create an individual’s story—could also have room for the author herself.
Carson read and recorded some of her work with Stein in 1948. Stein writes of her own sensitivity to the task of recovering another’s voice:
[Carson] seemed tormented by the ordeal ahead, and I almost wished that I hadn’t suggested the project to her. During the reading I felt that she could hardly bear to communicate with her unknown audience. Later on I spent hours and hours splicing the tapes, eliminating her long pauses . . . even pulling syllables together. Looking back now, I think that it was dishonest to distort the way in which she expressed herself. But there remains untouched one shattering moment in which Miss McCullers broke down sobbing as she read the part of Frankie in a passage from The Member of the Wedding.
Stein’s Carson is fragile but expressive. As a biographer, Stein is concerned about what she might be editing out, how she has spliced the voice of another.
Recognition
After meeting with Floria Lasky, Carson’s lawyer, to talk about the estate, Mary wrote a note to herself: “Floria et al see me as C’s faithful doctor who was useful to her. C had to use everything & everyone. Yet, they want everything of meaning C ever did, said, or gave to me. Without acknowledging that C only did that if that person meant something to her. Problem: In Carson’s eyes I was of significance. In their eyes I’m not.” Reading little handwritten scraps alongside Mary’s long-winded exchanges with Carson’s lawyers, Rita, and the estate over her personal belongings allows me to see Mary not so much as a censoring, protecting possessor of Carson’s legacy, but as someone who wanted somehow to be included in that legacy—acknowledged. She just didn’t know how she might occupy that role without also outing herself, throwing her psychiatric practice, maybe even her faith, into question in the process.
When Margaret Sullivan, who began her biography of Carson while the author was still alive, asks to interview Mary after Carson’s death, Mary writes back, “I doubt if I will ever be able to talk to you or anyone about Carson now or perhaps ever.” This was 1971, four years after Carson’s death. Sullivan presses further, in 1975, asking basic, factual questions: “Who signed the certificate and what was the cause of death? Is this on file anywhere? Also was an autopsy performed and is this on file? Was the early rheumatic fever diagnosis borne out or would it be? I know nothing of the time or circumstance except the poem you read me—I should not ask you to go through the painful experience again but my biography must come to its close. Forgive me.” Mary does not respond to Sullivan, but asks her lawyer to do so. “Please respect the Doctor’s wishes,” he writes.
Sullivan can’t let it go. She writes Mary again, defensively. She insists she “only asked the questions any competent biographer would have to ask.” Two years later, when Sullivan asks Mary if she and her mother can come visit, Mary agrees but reiterates her wish to say nothing about Carson. “Time has made it abundantly clear that my public role in Carson’s life was that of a physician.” This statement raises many questions of its own, which Mary will never answer. How has time’s passing clarified her role? Why specify “public”? Why “physician,” rather than therapist? But perhaps most perplexingly: Why include these letters, along with the therapy transcripts and all the other documents of her nonpublic role in Carson’s life, in the set of papers she donated and made available to the public upon her death in 2013?
And here is where I come in, waving my rainbow flag. I think I know why she made this public—in fact, it’s very clear to me. Queer people have much to contribute to our collective knowledge of secrecy and its effects, though in this case it takes a queer ear, a familiarity with the interior of a closeted relationship, to hear it. Love must be public, shared. If you keep it to yourself, it doesn’t really exist; it has no practical use in the world. Mary knew this, on some level. She longed to be recognized, if only by the lawyers in charge of Carson’s estate. But she retreated after Carson was gone. She bought Carson’s house, but she did not speak about her. She internalized her love and grief, despite the fact that, while Carson was alive, the two were quite publicly a couple. Friends wrote letters to “Carson and Mary,” invited them to visit as a unit. Carson may not have consistently called herself a lesbian, or called herself anything, but she never denied her love for women. She never hid. After Carson died, they both went into the closet Carson had refused to occupy during her lifetime. Mary closed the door behind them.
In Columbus, the walls of Carson’s house are covered in photos: most are of family, friends, Reeves. In the front room that used to be her bedroom is a single framed black-and-white photo of Carson and Mary, both looking down. This is the only photo of Mary in the house. Unlike the timeline in the living room, this photo has no caption or wall text attached to it. But I recognize Mary instantly. They have identical haircuts.
The Silencing Force
Margaret Sullivan never finished her book.
Proximity
When I mention her name, most people don’t recognize it, or they mistake her for someone else. I have withstood lengthy plot summaries of Flannery O’Connor stories remembered from high school English, mentions of how much the person I am talking to loved No Country for Old Men—Carson McCullers as Cormac McCarthy. When people don’t recognize her name, I feel the need to mention that her books were well-known in her time, best sellers, that were made into movies and Broadway plays. Elizabeth Taylor! I add. But when the person does know Carson’s work, they reply to my mention of her name with a look, a sort of swoon. Isn’t she wonderful? I am never sure how to answer t
his; yes, I am writing a book about her? I love her, they say, as if this is possible. As I grew closer to Carson through research, it became more and more obvious that I was not alone in my sense of possession, of being possessed.
Everyone had a claim to lay, an attachment to prove. Everybody wanted a piece of her, including me. Eileen Myles:
On Thompson Street I lived on the same floor as Carson McCullers, at a different time, but still just a digit away. I was reading her bio in bed. I’m there with a hangover, the sheets and the curling smoke from my cigarette looming over the hidden ashtray making a toy town and suddenly I read that she was my neighbor. You know like in 1956. I walk out the door in my underwear and I’m standing there staring at hers. It was better than going to her grave, and my pure intention protected me because I was practically naked.
I hope my pure intention protects me, but as yet I cannot identify, let alone articulate, what that intention might be. I am having trouble letting go.
At what point, I wonder, will I again be able to watch a movie or read anything about the twentieth century without framing it by the events of her life: Was that before or after 1958? Before or after Mary?
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Page 15
