My
Autobiography
of Carson
McCullers

a memoir by

JENN SHAPLAND

VIRAGO

First published in the United States in 2020 by Tin House
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Virago Press

Copyright © 2020 Jenn Shapland

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

‘Queering the Archive’ interview by Sarah Neilson,
originally published in Bookforum, February 4, 2020

ISBN 978-0-349-01565-1

Interior design by Jakob Vala

Virago Press
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk

www.virago.co.uk

For your Carson

In the recognition of loving
lies an answer to despair.

—AUDRE LORDE,
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Contents

Author’s Note

Question

Articulation

Correspondence

The Soul’s Particular Territories

Derangement, or Why I Write

Caves

Chick-fil-A

Tree Houses and Telephone Booths

That Girl

Qualifications

A Free Love

Windows

Unforeseen Events

Becomings

February House

Imaginary Friends

Prove It on Me Blues

Dedications

Ambivalences

Convalescence

Parasites

Homebodies

Rules

My Rainbow Youth

Portals

Item 8

Items 42–45

Items Unlocated

Womanish

On Exposure

Conflation

The Hunt

Semantics

Separate Bedrooms

Androgyny

They/Them

Confidantes

The High Line

Threesomes

Recliner

Ontological Destabilization

Googling

Preaching

List of Carson’s Possible Girlfriends

Other Likely Lesbians

Second Marriages

Dedications

Fury and Disaster

In Sickness

Witch Hunt

This Mad Desire for Travel

Going West

Coping Mechanisms

Seismographs

Diagnosis

Blue Chair

Organ

Last Love

Not Yet

First Loves

Dream

Matters of Taste

Dedications

Dream

Your Name

Forensics

Expurgation

Lies, Secrets, and Silence

Myth Mania

Recognition

The Silencing Force

Proximity

Myopia

September 29, 1967

September 29, 2016

Love and Winter

The Dead

Dream

Note to Self

Euphemisms

Acknowledgments

Sources

Interview with the Author

Author’s Note

Due to copyright constraints, several documents, including letters, telegrams, and a set of transcripts made from Carson McCullers’s recorded therapy sessions, have been referenced without direct quotations throughout this book.

Question

Reeves asked Carson if she was a lesbian on the front porch of Carson’s house on Stark Avenue, after everyone had gone to bed. I picture them on a swing, though I know for a fact that no such swing exists. Carson answered with a swift denial, wished aloud that she wasn’t one, then expressed plain uncertainty.

I was the only patron in a small university archive in Columbus, Georgia, when I came across this exchange in a typed transcript dated March 1958. The transcript records Carson’s fifth therapy session with Dr. Mary Mercer, whom she visited for help with writer’s block. I read the question again. In her recollection, Carson told Reeves that she had loved a woman named Vera, another named Mary Tucker, but she wasn’t sure what he referred to when he said lesbians. She asked him, as though lesbians might be a club that she could consider joining, or an unfamiliar species she might study: How do lesbians behave? Where do they live? How do they interact?

Despite Carson’s status as maybe-lesbian, Reeves asked Carson when they would be married. She was nineteen.

Articulation

Carson McCullers, when she is remembered, is remembered as a novelist who grew up in Columbus, Georgia, moved to New York in her twenties, and spent the rest of her life writing about misfits in the American South. Her characters are mute or too tall or black or queer and almost always lonely and out of place in a conservative small town that looks a lot like her own. In 1940, her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, brought her fame at twenty-three. Her books were made into films and Broadway plays. One of her best friends was Tennessee Williams—she called him Tenn—and she feuded with copycat Truman Capote for years. She married the same man, Reeves McCullers, twice, and is rumored to have chased after women. She was often drunk, chronically ill, and, like so many of her era, she died young. If you’ve heard of her, you’ve probably heard some version of this.

To tell her own story, a writer must make herself a character. To tell another person’s story, a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her. This book takes place in the fluid distance between the writer and her subject, in the fashioning of a self, in all its permutations, on the page.

Correspondence

I wasn’t expecting love letters. The paper was browned with age and wrinkled at the edges. Annemarie’s handwriting filled the page, bearing hard to the right and often spilling back up the left-hand margin with last additions. I read through clear Mylar sleeves, too intern-nervous to remove the pages from their housings.

April 10th, at night
Carson, child, my beloved, you know that, leaving the day after tomorrow, feeling half-afraid and proud, leaving behind me all I care for, once again, and a wave of love—

I looked up at the rows of manuscript boxes that surrounded me, mind humming, face flushed. Did that mean what I thought it meant? What did she mean, “love”? Instinctively, I listened for anyone who might be coming. Hearing only the ticking of the sliding electric shelves, I read on. To Carson, Annemarie recalled talking as we did, you and I, at that lunch time, you remember, at the corner near the Bedford Hotel, with milk and bread and butter, ages ago.

Four years before I visited the Georgia archives housing Carson’s transcribed therapy sessions, before I knew much more of Carson than her name, I was an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a giant collection of writers’ and artists’ books and papers on the University of Texas campus in Austin. The gig was a kind of coup: it got me out of teaching for two years while I was a graduate student and gave me unfettered access to the papers and belongings of major writers.

On each day of my two years at the center, I came into the shared intern office and answered queries from scholars about their research from a stack of mail by the door. Most were boring. About half of them were about either David Foster Wallace or Norman Mailer. (My favorite find was a series of letters one of Mailer’s mistresses had written him with the salutation—summing up my own feelings—Dear American Shithead.) One day in early February 2012, a scholar wrote asking for letters between Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, whose name was utterly unfamiliar, and Carson McCullers, whose book titles had always struck a chord with me. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Like, same. But I’d never gotten around to reading any. Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them, or else I abandon them. I took the freight elevator down to the icy basement manuscript room, pulled the correspondence folder—it was 29.4, I still recall—and started reading it right there in the stacks.

Annemarie’s language in her letters to Carson is intimate, suggestive, or I read it that way. You remember. I had received letters like these. I had written letters like these to the women I’d loved. It was very little to go on, and yet I felt an utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women. Or at least, this woman had loved her. Immediately, without articulating a reason, I wanted to know everything about them both. I brought the folder upstairs to my shelf in the intern office, hurried to my three o’clock reference-desk shift, and started Googling. This was research, I rationalized; part of the job. Annemarie, I discovered, was a Swiss writer, photographer, silk heiress, and known lady-killer who spent time in New York in the 1930s and early ’40s.

In folder 29.4 I found eight letters from Annemarie to Carson, but none of Carson’s replies. One has the heading On the Congo River, Sept. 1941, another On the boat, from Portuguese Angola to Lisbon. After counting the pages for the scholar and replying to his request, I took the folder downstairs and tucked it back into its box. Later, I would keep stacks of Carson’s books and manuscripts on my shelf in the office, but at that moment I didn’t feel entitled to have these letters so nearby. I had, however, transcribed some of them into an email that I sent to myself. The scholar never ordered the scans.

Annemarie’s handwriting is so small and insistent that the letters read long, though often they cover only the front and back sides of a single sheet. Her letters, like mine, are overwrought, wrung with feeling and a need to declare it in writing. In the first letter, it seems as if she is ending her relationship with Carson—gently, but firmly. She writes from Zurich, having already left the country:

Thank you forever . . . Carson, remember our moments of understanding, and how much I loved you. Don’t forget the terrific obligation of work, be never seduced, write, and, darling, take care of yourself. As I will. (I wrote, in Sils. A few pages only, you would like them), and never forget, please, what has touched us deeply.

Your Annemarie, with all my loving affection.

The love she describes is bound up in writing, in creative work taken seriously by women. I think this part was just as striking to me as their romance, and now it reminds me of the feeling that Audre Lorde describes in her autobiography, Zami, when she first finds herself among a group of creative, queer women: “I felt myself pass beyond childhood, a woman connecting with other women in an intricate, complex, and ever-widening network of exchanging strengths.” Like my own letters from my late teens and early twenties, Annemarie’s letters are transmissions from one confused woman to another, an attempt to articulate a self she had not yet fully become. Rereading the letters I wrote during this period, I can hear myself still believing that one day soon my identity might resolve into something firm, fixed. I was waiting for my face to thin out, my hands to age. Other than my own, I had never read love letters between women before. For all Annemarie’s and Carson’s unfamiliarity to me, and their separation from me in time and space, I deeply understood them on the page.

I found the letters at the tail end of the major, slow-burning catastrophe of my twenties: never quite breaking up with my first love, a woman from Texas I’d met our freshman year of college in Vermont, after six closeted years together. In my second year of a six-year PhD program, I was already bored sick of academia. I didn’t want to be a literary critic, couldn’t stand the institutional hoops as I was jumping through them, and only six months into my internship I could tell I wasn’t cut out to be an archivist. I didn’t have the patience, and I spent too much time trying to solve mysteries of my own creation. I got an email out of the blue from one of my professors admiring my writing, and I jumped at what felt like validation. The praise continued, along with a barrage of poems and pressure to sleep with him, which I did, unsure exactly how I got there. My six-year relationship dissolved, and I moved out of our apartment. I was twenty-five and, when I wasn’t drunk on a porch smoking angry cigarettes with my friends, I was exquisitely alone for the first time in my life in a new, overpriced studio apartment I couldn’t afford. The dishwasher was full of roaches. The roaches were judging me. I was perplexed by my own behavior. I didn’t know if I wanted to date women—I never really had; my first love and I publicly remained “roommates” for all those years—but, on the heels of manipulation, dating men seemed pretty dismal. Like most twenty-five-year-olds, I couldn’t figure out what came next.

What came next was Carson.

I tried to tell a few people—coworkers, friends—about the letters, but I couldn’t explain why they were so significant to me. “She dated a woman,” they’d say. “So?” The years that followed were overtaken by my desire to understand the magnitude of this on-paper love. Within a week of finding the letters, I would chop my hair short. Within a year I would be more or less comfortably calling myself a lesbian for the first time. I would also catalog McCullers’s collection of personal effects at the Ransom Center, her clothes and objects that had made their way into the archive only to sit for years, unprocessed. Four years later I would live in Carson’s childhood home in Columbus for a month, and soon after I would move from Austin to Santa Fe with my new love, Chelsea—we met as interns—abandoning my academic job search to finish a book about Carson. Retrospect redefines everything in its path, and I am as hesitant to ascribe steady narrative meaning to my own life as to any other’s. But I suppose we could call those letters a turning point.