Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Carson McCullers A Life by Josyane Savigneau Carson McCullers: A Life by Josyane Savigneau. Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog. Copyrighted sample text provided by the publisher and used with permission. May be incomplete or contain other coding. Introduction. Carson McCullers would have been eighty-four years old on February 19, 2001, an age that would have made her our absolute contemporary. But she died prematurely, in 1967, at age fifty. She published only eight books, plus a posthumous collection of short stories, essays, and poems. That doesn"t sound like much to build an international reputation on. She attained one, however, and although she may not be very famous among the public at large, only rarely are serious readers unfamiliar with the work of this novelist from the American South. Could that be what annoys some of the people who knew and outlived her, causing them to minimize or obscure her writing, her status, her very existence? John Brown, one of her first editors in the early 1940s, who became her friend and was a constant source of support during her stays in France (he was working at the time for the cultural service of the American embassy in Paris), seems to wonder what could possibly prompt a full-length biography of Carson McCullers: "Granted, there are some fine texts, but, even so, she was not really much of a writer."1 "Moving, yes, but a minor author. And broken by illness at such a young age," adds the American playwright Arthur Miller.2 André Bay, who was Carson McCullers"s French editor at Éditions Stock -- he had read her work in 1945, on John Brown"s recommendation -- does not share this skepticism: Obviously, if you use the entire history of American literature as a yardstick, and you line up the major works, you could conclude that Carson McCullers"s four novels and her corpus of short stories make her "not really much of a writer." But there are "grand accidents." And they are essential. They are also what gives meaning to literature. Carson McCullers is one of the finest of those "accidents." No one has captured as she did the vast American sense of loneliness, and the suffering it causes, especially in the unreal, dreamlike South of her imaginings, which seems almost "bathed in rum." For me, it is also Carson McCullers, daughter of the South fascinated by snow that she was, who holds the answer to the question "When the snow melts, where does the whiteness go?" It is in her work.3. The view that Carson McCullers was merely a promising talent broken and unfulfilled has been strongly contested by another Southern writer, Tennessee Williams, one of her closest friends from the late 1940s on. In the foreword he wrote in 1974 for the major American biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr, Tennessee Williams refuses to let commentators shut his friend away in her illness. No one can deny the suffering and infirmities that Carson McCullers had to live with for twenty years, but Tennessee Williams firmly states that the existence of a writer cannot be evaluated in terms of difficulties, any more than by the number of volumes produced. "When physical catastrophes reduce, too early, an artist"s power, his/her admirers must not and need not enter a plea nor offer apology," he writes. "It is not quantity, after all, that the artist is to be judged by. It is quality of spirit and those occasions on which he/she was visited by assenting angels, and the number of those occasions is not the scale on which their importance is reckoned."4 Several years after her death, in another testimony to her reputation, Carson McCullers was the object of a monumental biography (during her lifetime, and with her assistance, one brief biographical essay, The Ballad of Carson McCullers, had been written by Oliver Evans). Carson had the most meticulous biographer one can imagine. Virginia Spencer Carr, a professor from the South who published The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers in 1975, carried out an extremely methodical investigation, seeking to leave no moment of Carson McCullers"s existence hidden, from her birth to her final day.5 Granted, Carr faced obstacles in documenting the life of her subject. McCullers"s heirs refused to assist Carr in any way and barred her from citing the documents -- unpublished texts and letters -- preserved in the archives of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. At the time, Carson McCullers"s sister, Margarita Smith; her lawyer, Floria Lasky (now her literary executor); and her agent, Robert Lantz, were hoping to find a biographer of their own choosing. Mary Mercer, Carson McCullers"s doctor and friend during the last ten years of her life -- a key figure for that period -- also refused to speak with the biographer. Virginia Spencer Carr nonetheless seems to have interviewed every other witness to Carson McCullers"s existence -- however minor or ephemeral. When she herself was not free to travel, she sent someone else to question people for her. Recollections were obtained from people who had met the American novelist only in passing -- such as Simone de Beauvoir, who vaguely remembered an evening spent with her in Paris. By now, most of the women and men who provided information to Carr have died. No work on Carson McCullers could possibly be done without Carr"s incomparably precise text, containing scores of comments now impossible to collect. Nothing can be written without referring to those unique testimonials, which is to say that we cannot but pay homage to the research of Virginia Spencer Carr. And yet, despite an appearance of neutrality often found in American biographies -- never a conjecture on points that are obscure or unexplained but a piling up of details, particulars, and testimonials as if all were of equal importance -- Virginia Spencer Carr"s work creates a rather negative image of Carson McCullers. The Lonely Hunter aims to be exhaustive, and it certainly comes close, but its portrait is cold, painted by a woman apparently unwilling to consider that a writer lives differently from people who don"t write, organizes her existence according to other criteria, feels different feelings, thinks other kinds of thoughts. A writer is not someone who on the one hand loves, hates, rejoices, becomes outraged, or suffers and then writes in her free time. Not only is a writer"s life partially refracted in fiction (that is, after all, what keeps the biographical enterprise from being inane), but the need to write fastens itself onto, indeed molds, every living moment. It is if not by that standard at least from that perspective that a writer"s life must be judged. Virginia Spencer Carr shows little warmth -- much less tenderness or compassion -- for her subject, who, visibly, shocks her puritanism and moralism. Carson McCullers is too free with her passions and her words, too independent, and too adept at surviving come what may so that she can continue to write. A few years after Carr"s American summa, in 1979, Jacques Tournier, a French writer and translator as well as a great admirer of Carson McCullers, published a new biographical essay, Retour à Nayack [sic] (Return to Nyack), at Éditions du Seuil.6 It is an intimate, enthusiastic, and passionate work inspired by a journey Tournier made, following in Carson McCullers"s footsteps, from Columbus to Nyack via Paris. A slightly revised version of this book appeared in 1990 at Éditions Complexe. Called À la recherche de Carson McCullers (In search of Carson McCullers), it is an emotion- filled and sentimental quest for Reeves McCullers, Carson"s husband, who dreamed of being the writer that his wife alone became. For Jacques Tournier, though he denies it and though his passion for Carson McCullers is undoubtedly sincere, everything must be read in relation to Reeves. The film he made on Carson for French television in 1995, like his book, proves it. According to Tournier, Carson"s life after the death of her husband -- that is, for fourteen years -- was nothing more than intense despair over his absence, a long lament, nights spent imagining that Reeves"s ghost had returned to roam in the garden of the author"s Nyack home. . . . Happily, alongside the skeptics Carson McCullers had some real friends who outlived her: Floria Lasky; Dr. Mary Mercer; Marielle Bancou, her other intimate during the 1950s and 1960s, a young designer at the time; and the photographer Henri Cartier- Bresson, a witness of the 1940s. The photos that Cartier-Bresson took of Carson in 1946 show both the admiration and the real tenderness he had for his subject. When these people speak of Carson McCullers, they evoke a person who is first and foremost a writer, a novelist entirely attached to her work. "Writing is my occupation," Carson often said as she was fighting to continue her work at the height of her physical suffering. "I must do it. I have done it for so long." Her devotion to her work served as proof of the exceptional talent, lucidity, and maturity already in evidence when, at twenty years of age, she started writing her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Much more than a woman destroyed by the death of the man she loved -- and she loved James Reeves McCullers, that much is certain -- Carson McCullers, in her life and in the comments of her friends, resembles the touching adolescents -- irritating, too, at once generous and egotistical, weak and yet uncommonly strong - - who are featured in two of her novels, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Mick) and The Member of the Wedding (Frankie). Adolescence seems to have remained intact in Carson, indestructible despite all the experiences of life -- the loves, the losses, and the afflictions of a body broken by illness -- preserving in her a young girl"s heart, with its angry outbursts and its torments. Society does not easily tolerate that kind of person, which may account for the obvious or latent hostility that Carson McCullers can arouse among those who have commented on her life. Further fanning the flames of jealousy and disapproval, she was a remarkable writer: she amassed in a small number of years the experiences of a long life, even marrying the same man twice; she achieved great successes and met with failures no less dizzying, became a triumphant Broadway playwright, and saw one of her novels being made into a film by John Huston, with Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor as its stars. Through it all, with inconceivable determination, she held on against the torments of the body and the heart. It might well irritate these naysayers to find that the adolescent spirit at the heart of Carson"s work -- the very mark of Carson McCullers -- is precisely what keeps her writing fresh. From one generation to the next, young readers are moved by Mick and Frankie, those girls who shot up too fast and refused to enter a world that didn"t suit them, rejecting the lies and the compromises of adult life. Paul Bowles, an American writer who lived in the same house as Carson did in Brooklyn during the 1940s, very aptly described "the essentially childlike woman she [was] all her life," insisting on the word childlike, which is nothing like infantile, to evoke the "born writer" spoken of by the British writer Edith Sitwell after she had read the novels of Carson McCullers. With "this exaggerated simplicity," said Paul Bowles in 1970 to Virginia Spencer Carr, who had come to visit him in Tangiers, where he was living, "went a total devotion to writing and subjugation to it of all other facets of her existence. This undeviating seriousness did not give her the air of an adult, but rather that of a prodigious and slightly abnormal child who refused to go out and play because she was busy writing in her notebook."7 Within the space of this peculiar paradox we must seek, more than thirty years after her death, the closest possible likeness of this strange woman-child, this writer so accomplished in her youth who never really grew up, who was seductive till the end, even when she was paralyzed and almost incapable of speaking, besieged by illness, and withdrawn into a thick fog of alcohol: Carson McCullers. We will have to find her in her books, in her stubborn will to keep on writing until the final day, which she did -- she was working on her autobiographical papers when she died. We must avoid the trap that others fell into when they set out in search of her and managed to conceal her instead, or almost made her disappear, as if Carson McCullers -- the accomplished writer and the "woman still a child" -- constituted a frightening chimera, foreign to the world as it should be, a ceaselessly improper, permanently unacceptable personality. Originally published as Carson McCullers: Un Coeur de jeune fille, copyright © 1995 by Éditions Stock Translation © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: McCullers, Carson, 1917-1967, Authors, American 20th century Biography, Southern States Biography. The Closeting of Carson McCullers. Carson McCullers, 1959. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Carson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.” Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The [husband] would come in and slap her, [and] the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy. Reeves had cheated on her with one of her friends, Nancy, which he told her their first night together. Their new marriage was already starting to disintegrate. So Carson went home, and Reeves stayed in North Carolina. She returned to her parents’ house in Columbus, Georgia, to begin a new book, “The Bride of My Brother,” her original title for The Member of the Wedding . Shortly thereafter, in what would become a pattern of reversals for them, separating and reuniting, Carson and Reeves used the advance from her first book to move to New York. Reeves chose to sail first from Charlotte to Nantucket with his old roommate (“roommate”?) Jack Adams. Carson rode the bus by herself. She spent the publication day of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , June 14, 1940, in a boardinghouse room, “cut off and lonely.” When the book appeared the reviews were staggering, especially for a twenty-three-year-old writer. They called her a child, baby-faced, and then in the same breath called her the new John Steinbeck. Richard Wright compared her to Faulkner, commending her “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In an ad for the book in the New York Times , T. S. Stribling called it “the literary find of the year.” In the days following her book’s publication, her own face in bookshop windows was the only friendly face in the city. That lonely summer, after paying a call to Greta Garbo, her idol, and finding her less than hospitable, and while waiting to hear back from Erika Mann, a lesbian transplant from Europe and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, Carson received a telegram from her editor, Robert Linscott, to meet at the Bedford Hotel. Carson writes that she went right out and bought a new summer suit, wanting badly to look the part of celebrated young writer and unable to do so in the cotton sundresses schlepped from Georgia. At the Bedford, Carson recalls, “a stranger” arrived. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life,” she writes in Illumination and Night Glare , “beautiful, blonde, with straight short hair. She asked me to call her [Annemarie] right away, and we became friends immediately. At her invitation, I saw her the next day.” Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach was one of the many lesbians Carson encountered in her new life in New York, and she was among the most glamorous. She wore custom suits from Paris, her hair was chicly cropped, and her features were severe and gorgeous. Or, as female writer R. L. York puts it, “Her head was a Donatello David head; her blonde hair was smooth and cut like a boy’s; her blue eyes dark and slow moving; her mouth childish and soft with shyly parted lips. She wore a skirt and boy’s shirt and a blue blazer and she was not afraid of my dog.” When Carson and Annemarie met again the following day, they talked about Annemarie’s morphine addiction (Carson had never heard of the drug) and her travels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and the Far East. Carson immediately fell hard for Annemarie. Who wouldn’t? She’d been dreaming of escaping Columbus and the South for years, and with her first book she had finally gotten out. The arrival of Annemarie offered her something else that she had been longing for without language to express it. Annemarie told Carson that when she was seventeen, her mother called her “a dope fiend, a communist, and a lesbian,” which was how she wound up in New York. Annemarie tried to remain polite to her mother, though she had little feeling for her. But when she would go home to Switzerland, York says, Annemarie “would don her most feminine blouse, pull her stockings straight, and set out to go visiting.” After she was gone, the neighbors would say, “ ‘Really a lovely girl, if it were not for the awful things one hears about her,’ ” York writes. “That was generally the epitaph.” Little remains of Carson’s interactions with Annemarie, but it’s clear from her letters and from the therapy transcripts that Carson was not shy about her feelings at the time or afterward. She did not disguise them or even question them. She loved Annemarie, and that was that. As I searched through the existing writings about Carson in my downtime as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, I found over and over that her relationship with Annemarie was sidelined or left out of a story about her and Reeves. It doesn’t seem as if these are, for the most part, acts of outright censorship on the part of biographers or the people they interviewed. Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative, the one in which inexplicable crushes on and friendships with women surface briefly within the confines of an otherwise “normal” life. In the published biographies, Annemarie is just a one-sided obsession. (“Carson loved Annemarie far more than Annemarie could ever requite,” according to Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter , and “Annemarie did not return Carson’s enthusiasm,” writes Sherill Tippins in February House .) The more I read, the more it seemed that all of her profound emotional relationships with women were either dismissed or ridiculed. Her therapist (and probable lover), Mary Mercer, becomes in these retellings some kind of nursemaid to a sickly, emotionally flatulent Carson, and the other significant women in Carson’s life—Mary Tucker, Elizabeth Ames, Janet Flanner, Natalia Danesi Murray, Marielle Bancou, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jane Bowles—all become minor characters. Yet as I read and reread her letters and conversations with Mercer, I found a fuller version of Carson’s life revealed through her relationships. I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others. Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer. There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring to have with wanting to be. It’s the combination of wants that makes these longings confusing, dangerous, and queer. There is a desire to know that is already knowing, a curiosity for what you deep down recognize, a lust for what you are or could be. Writer Richard Lawson describes it as “the muddied confusion over whether you want to be someone’s companion or if you want to step inside their skin, to inhabit the world as they do.” It is by no means easy to track or trace relationships between women, past or present. Women’s relationships with other women are often disguised: by well-documented marriages to men, by a cultural refusal to see what is in full view or even to believe such relationships exist. In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down. Reasons for this layer one upon the other: A lesbian purposely hides her identity and remains closeted. A lesbian refuses to call herself a lesbian, disidentifying from the term and its associations for reasons personal or political. A woman does not know she is a lesbian—because she does not ever have a relationship with another woman, or because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian. I didn’t call myself one for several years. Or, as in Carson’s case, her own self-understanding and identification are difficult to determine because of the efforts of those who outlived her and pushed her into the closet. It was her retroactive closeting by peers and biographers that I found most disturbing about my research. I took it personally. I began to feel unreal, deranged. If Carson was not a lesbian, if none of these women were lesbians, according to history, if indeed there hardly is a lesbian history, do I exist? Rather than name or talk about Carson’s formative loves and friendships with women, the biographies cast them aside in favor of an account of her “tortured” relationship with Reeves McCullers, the man she married and unmarried twice in her life. The straight narrative is given the benefit of the doubt, and writers feel comfortable filling in the blanks to create a great and desperate love story out of what looks, on my reading, like a series of manipulations of a woman struggling to name her own desires. Perhaps it isn’t even as sinister as knowingly replacing one narrative with another. Maybe it’s just that the stories of her relationships with women are partial, hard to compile. To piece them together, you have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it’s like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places. There are many ways to interpret a life. But what if we choose the most probable scenario, the path of least resistance, instead of trying to talk our way out of what seems evident, instead of trying to explain away the obvious? Lesbian historian Emily Hamer writes: We know that they were lesbians because this is the best explanation of their lives … The standard of visibility is not a universal prerequisite for knowledge. We cannot see electricity but we know that electricity exists because electricity is the best explanation of why moving a light switch leads to the illumination of a light bulb. Josyane Savigneau, the author of Carson McCullers: A Life , doubts whether Carson ever experienced sexual desires, period, “romantic obsessions” with certain women aside. She is, unfortunately, not alone in this opinion. She writes, “The labels lesbian and bisexual have been used by those who denigrate any form of marginality to distance themselves from Carson McCullers by categorizing her as an ‘abnormal artist.’ They have also been used by partisans of homosexuality—both male and female—who would appropriate the writer for their cause.” Savigneau’s biography came out in English in 2001. Her description positions me as a “partisan of homosexuality” seeking to “appropriate” Carson’s story for my “cause.” And perhaps I am. I think the cause rather a worthy one. Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House , Outside , The Lifted Brow , Essay Daily , The Paris Review Daily , and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the creative writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is her first book. From My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , by Jenn Shapland, published this week by Tin House Books. The Closeting of Carson McCullers. Carson McCullers, 1959. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Carson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.” Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. The [husband] would come in and slap her, [and] the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy. Reeves had cheated on her with one of her friends, Nancy, which he told her their first night together. Their new marriage was already starting to disintegrate. So Carson went home, and Reeves stayed in North Carolina. She returned to her parents’ house in Columbus, Georgia, to begin a new book, “The Bride of My Brother,” her original title for The Member of the Wedding . Shortly thereafter, in what would become a pattern of reversals for them, separating and reuniting, Carson and Reeves used the advance from her first book to move to New York. Reeves chose to sail first from Charlotte to Nantucket with his old roommate (“roommate”?) Jack Adams. Carson rode the bus by herself. She spent the publication day of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , June 14, 1940, in a boardinghouse room, “cut off and lonely.” When the book appeared the reviews were staggering, especially for a twenty-three-year-old writer. They called her a child, baby-faced, and then in the same breath called her the new John Steinbeck. Richard Wright compared her to Faulkner, commending her “astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In an ad for the book in the New York Times , T. S. Stribling called it “the literary find of the year.” In the days following her book’s publication, her own face in bookshop windows was the only friendly face in the city. That lonely summer, after paying a call to Greta Garbo, her idol, and finding her less than hospitable, and while waiting to hear back from Erika Mann, a lesbian transplant from Europe and daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, Carson received a telegram from her editor, Robert Linscott, to meet at the Bedford Hotel. Carson writes that she went right out and bought a new summer suit, wanting badly to look the part of celebrated young writer and unable to do so in the cotton sundresses schlepped from Georgia. At the Bedford, Carson recalls, “a stranger” arrived. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life,” she writes in Illumination and Night Glare , “beautiful, blonde, with straight short hair. She asked me to call her [Annemarie] right away, and we became friends immediately. At her invitation, I saw her the next day.” Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach was one of the many lesbians Carson encountered in her new life in New York, and she was among the most glamorous. She wore custom suits from Paris, her hair was chicly cropped, and her features were severe and gorgeous. Or, as female writer R. L. York puts it, “Her head was a Donatello David head; her blonde hair was smooth and cut like a boy’s; her blue eyes dark and slow moving; her mouth childish and soft with shyly parted lips. She wore a skirt and boy’s shirt and a blue blazer and she was not afraid of my dog.” When Carson and Annemarie met again the following day, they talked about Annemarie’s morphine addiction (Carson had never heard of the drug) and her travels in Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and the Far East. Carson immediately fell hard for Annemarie. Who wouldn’t? She’d been dreaming of escaping Columbus and the South for years, and with her first book she had finally gotten out. The arrival of Annemarie offered her something else that she had been longing for without language to express it. Annemarie told Carson that when she was seventeen, her mother called her “a dope fiend, a communist, and a lesbian,” which was how she wound up in New York. Annemarie tried to remain polite to her mother, though she had little feeling for her. But when she would go home to Switzerland, York says, Annemarie “would don her most feminine blouse, pull her stockings straight, and set out to go visiting.” After she was gone, the neighbors would say, “ ‘Really a lovely girl, if it were not for the awful things one hears about her,’ ” York writes. “That was generally the epitaph.” Little remains of Carson’s interactions with Annemarie, but it’s clear from her letters and from the therapy transcripts that Carson was not shy about her feelings at the time or afterward. She did not disguise them or even question them. She loved Annemarie, and that was that. As I searched through the existing writings about Carson in my downtime as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, I found over and over that her relationship with Annemarie was sidelined or left out of a story about her and Reeves. It doesn’t seem as if these are, for the most part, acts of outright censorship on the part of biographers or the people they interviewed. Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative, the one in which inexplicable crushes on and friendships with women surface briefly within the confines of an otherwise “normal” life. In the published biographies, Annemarie is just a one-sided obsession. (“Carson loved Annemarie far more than Annemarie could ever requite,” according to Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter , and “Annemarie did not return Carson’s enthusiasm,” writes Sherill Tippins in February House .) The more I read, the more it seemed that all of her profound emotional relationships with women were either dismissed or ridiculed. Her therapist (and probable lover), Mary Mercer, becomes in these retellings some kind of nursemaid to a sickly, emotionally flatulent Carson, and the other significant women in Carson’s life—Mary Tucker, Elizabeth Ames, Janet Flanner, Natalia Danesi Murray, Marielle Bancou, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jane Bowles—all become minor characters. Yet as I read and reread her letters and conversations with Mercer, I found a fuller version of Carson’s life revealed through her relationships. I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others. Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer. There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring to have with wanting to be. It’s the combination of wants that makes these longings confusing, dangerous, and queer. There is a desire to know that is already knowing, a curiosity for what you deep down recognize, a lust for what you are or could be. Writer Richard Lawson describes it as “the muddied confusion over whether you want to be someone’s companion or if you want to step inside their skin, to inhabit the world as they do.” It is by no means easy to track or trace relationships between women, past or present. Women’s relationships with other women are often disguised: by well-documented marriages to men, by a cultural refusal to see what is in full view or even to believe such relationships exist. In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down. Reasons for this layer one upon the other: A lesbian purposely hides her identity and remains closeted. A lesbian refuses to call herself a lesbian, disidentifying from the term and its associations for reasons personal or political. A woman does not know she is a lesbian—because she does not ever have a relationship with another woman, or because she is not aware that the relationships she engages in could be called lesbian. I didn’t call myself one for several years. Or, as in Carson’s case, her own self-understanding and identification are difficult to determine because of the efforts of those who outlived her and pushed her into the closet. It was her retroactive closeting by peers and biographers that I found most disturbing about my research. I took it personally. I began to feel unreal, deranged. If Carson was not a lesbian, if none of these women were lesbians, according to history, if indeed there hardly is a lesbian history, do I exist? Rather than name or talk about Carson’s formative loves and friendships with women, the biographies cast them aside in favor of an account of her “tortured” relationship with Reeves McCullers, the man she married and unmarried twice in her life. The straight narrative is given the benefit of the doubt, and writers feel comfortable filling in the blanks to create a great and desperate love story out of what looks, on my reading, like a series of manipulations of a woman struggling to name her own desires. Perhaps it isn’t even as sinister as knowingly replacing one narrative with another. Maybe it’s just that the stories of her relationships with women are partial, hard to compile. To piece them together, you have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it’s like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places. There are many ways to interpret a life. But what if we choose the most probable scenario, the path of least resistance, instead of trying to talk our way out of what seems evident, instead of trying to explain away the obvious? Lesbian historian Emily Hamer writes: We know that they were lesbians because this is the best explanation of their lives … The standard of visibility is not a universal prerequisite for knowledge. We cannot see electricity but we know that electricity exists because electricity is the best explanation of why moving a light switch leads to the illumination of a light bulb. Josyane Savigneau, the author of Carson McCullers: A Life , doubts whether Carson ever experienced sexual desires, period, “romantic obsessions” with certain women aside. She is, unfortunately, not alone in this opinion. She writes, “The labels lesbian and bisexual have been used by those who denigrate any form of marginality to distance themselves from Carson McCullers by categorizing her as an ‘abnormal artist.’ They have also been used by partisans of homosexuality—both male and female—who would appropriate the writer for their cause.” Savigneau’s biography came out in English in 2001. Her description positions me as a “partisan of homosexuality” seeking to “appropriate” Carson’s story for my “cause.” And perhaps I am. I think the cause rather a worthy one. Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House , Outside , The Lifted Brow , Essay Daily , The Paris Review Daily , and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the creative writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is her first book. From My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , by Jenn Shapland, published this week by Tin House Books. Ten Really Underrated Books. I love perusing Goodreads lists, and although I have made one or two about highly underrated books before, I thought I would pick out another ten titles from this list, entitled ‘Really, Really Underrated Books’. Each of the books on this list, which is compiled of fiction and non-fiction, has less than 100 ratings. I have chosen titles which have piqued my interest, and which I’d like to read soon. 1. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism by Nicola Humble ‘”Middlebrow” has always been a dirty word, used disparagingly since its coinage in the mid-1920s for the sort of literature thought to be too easy, insular and smug. Aiming to rehabilitate the feminine middlebrow, Nicola Humble argues that the novels of writers such as Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, played a powerful role in establishing and consolidating, but also in resisting, new class and gender identities in this period of volatile change for both women and the middle classes.’ 2. The Misses Mallett by E.H. Young ‘She sat there, vividly conscious of herself, and sometimes she saw the whole room as a picture and she was part of it; sometimes she saw only those three whose lives, she felt, were practically over, for even Aunt Rose was comparatively old. She pitied them because their romance was past, while hers waited for her outside; she wondered at their happiness, their interest in their appearance, their pleasure in parties; but she felt most sorry for Aunt Rose, midway between what should have been the resignation of her stepsisters and the glowing anticipation of her niece.’ 3. East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick ‘In sweep, color & grandeur, the conquest & settlement of Siberia compares with the winning of the American West. It’s the greatest pioneering story in history, uniquely combining the heroic colonization of an intractable virgin land, the ghastly dangers & high adventure of Arctic exploration, & the grimmest saga of penal servitude. 400 years of continual human striving chart its course, a drama of unremitting extremes & elemental confrontations, pitting man against nature, & man against man. East of the Sun, a work of panoramic scope, is the 1st complete account of this strange & terrible story. To most Westerners, Siberia is a vast & mysterious place. The richest resource area on the face of the earth, its land mass covers 5 million square miles-7.5% of the total land surface of the globe. From the 1st foray in 1581 across the Ural Mountains by a band of Cossack outlaws to the fall of Gorbachev, East of the Sun is history on a grand scale. With vivid immediacy, Bobrick describes the often brutal subjugation of Siberia’s aboriginal tribes & the cultures that were destroyed; the great 18th-century explorations that defined Siberia’s borders & Russia’s attempt to “extend” Siberia further with settlements in Alaska, California & Hawaii; & the transformation of Siberia into a penal colony for criminal & political exiles, an experiment more terrible than Australia’s Botany Bay. There’s the building of the stupendous Trans-Siberian Railway across 7 time zones; Siberia’s key role in the bloody aftermath of the October Revolution in 1917; & Stalin’s dreaded Gulag, which corrupted its very soil. Today, Siberia is the hope of Russia’s future, now that all her appended republic have broken away. Its story has never been more timely.’ 4. Death in Leamington by David Smith ‘ Death in Leamington is more than a crime story; it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Set in the genteel Regency town of Royal Leamington Spa, the murder of an elderly foreign visitor sets off an intricate chain of events, surprising literary encounters and one too many unexplained and gruesome deaths. Inspector Hunter and his new assistant DC Penny Dore race to solve the murders, but as the body count mounts and each new lead evaporates; Hunter becomes more and more convinced that there are darker forces involved. Death in Leamington will appeal both to those who enjoy solving a crime mystery and those with an interest in history, art and music. The story is a celebration of the literary and folk heritage of this elegant Warwickshire town, incorporating many of the characters from its history, and a few literary ghosts from its past, including quotations from works as diverse as The Faerie Queene, The Scarlett Letter, Alice in Wonderland and even Shakespeare’s Queen Mab puts in an appearance.’ 5. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons by Reggie Oliver ‘Born into an Irish family in Hampstead where she lived for most of her life, Stella Gibbons is probably best remembered for her book Cold Comfort Farm. Written by her nephew, this biography of the novelist and poet draws on her personal papers including two unpublished novels.’ 6. The Family Mashber by Der Nister ‘ The Family Mashber is a protean work: a tale of a divided family and divided souls, a panoramic picture of an Eastern European town, a social satire, a kabbalistic allegory, an innovative fusion of modernist art and traditional storytelling, a tale of weird humor and mounting tragic power, embellished with a host of uncanny and fantastical figures drawn from daily life and the depths of the unconscious. Above all, the book is an account of a world in crisis (in Hebrew, mashber means crisis), torn between the competing claims of family, community, business, politics, the individual conscience, and an elusive God. At the center of the book are three brothers: the businessman Moshe, at the height of his fortunes as the story begins, but whose luck takes a permanent turn for the worse; the religious seeker Luzi, who, for all his otherworldliness, finds himself ever more caught up in worldly affairs; and the idiot-savant Alter, whose reclusive existence is tortured by fear and sexual desire. The novel is also haunted by the enigmatic figure of Sruli Gol, a drunk, a profaner of sacred things, an outcast, who nonetheless finds his way through every door and may well hold the key to the brothers’ destinies.’ 7. Carson McCullers: A Life by Josyane Savigneau ‘In Carson McCullers: A Life , Josyane Savigneau gives us at last a truly popular biography of one of America’s greatest women novelists. Carson McCullers’s life story rivals the plot of any of her novels. A brilliant, sensitive artist who had a painful small-town childhood in the South and early international success, she was crippled by a mysterious disease in early adulthood. A woman who composed the most romantic of letters, she struggled to find lasting happiness with her husband, Reeves, whom she married twice. Carson wrote often of the loneliness of the human condiiton, and yet she surrounded herself with a constellation of witty, always entertaining celebrities: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Wright, John Huston, and Edward Albee, among others. The first biographer to have the full cooperation of the McCullers esate, Josyane Savigneau has uncovered the private Carson McCullers, a woman who never really grew up yet was always seductive, a woman whose candor and immense emotional needs sometimes overshadowed her great charm, generosity, loyalty, humor, and deep intelligence. Above all, Carson was a life force, a person who needed to write and who did so despite great physical pain, up until the very end. Published to rave reviews in France’ 8. A Place Apart by Dervla Murphy ‘At the height of The Troubles, Dervla Murphy cycled to Northern Ireland to try to understand the situation by speaking to people on either side of the divide. She also sought to interrogate her own opinions and emotions. As an Irishwoman and traveller who had only ever spent thirty-six hours of her forty-four years over the border to the north, why had she been so reluctant to engage with the issues? Despite her own family connections to the IRA, she travelled north largely unfettered by sectarian loyalties. Armed instead with an indefatigable curiosity, a fine ear for anecdote, an ability to stand her own at the bar and a penetrating intelligence, she navigated her way through horrifying situations, and sometimes found herself among people stiff with hate and grief. But equally, she discovered an unquenchable thirst for life and peace, a spirit that refused to die.’ 9. My Buried Life by Doreen Finn ‘What happens when you no longer recognise the person you have become? Eva has managed to spend her twenties successfully hiding from herself in New York. Attempting to write, but really only writing her epitaph, she returns to Ireland to confront the past that has made her what she is. In prose that is hauntingly beautiful and delicate, Doreen Finn explores a truly complex and fascinating character with deft style and unflinching honesty.’ 10. Queen’s Folly by Elswyth Thane ‘When Queen Elizabeth I rewards an ardent courtier with an old priory in the Cotswolds for his services, it has a profound effect on him and his male descendants as they transfer their devotion to their home in this unusual and romantic novel. Follows this family from the 16th to the 20th century.’ Which of these books have you read? Which are your favourite underrated books? CARSON McCULLERS: A Life. I once heard Eudora Welty quote some advice Willa Cather had given her: "Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." It is advice southern writers have traditionally taken to heart, creating from their regional postage stamps of America our nation’s literary landscape. On that fictional map is a small, hot, dreary Georgia mill town where during the Great Depression a girl named Lula Carson Smith (known as Sister) grew into a tall, gangly misfit who fled from loneliness by playing Bach and reading Flaubert and making up stories. At 20, she married another would-be writer, the charming Reeves McCullers, a serviceman at Fort Benning, the first boy who ever kissed her. Carson McCullers (1917–67) was 23 when her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), made her famous overnight. Like This Side of Paradise before it and The Catcher in the Rye for a later generation, McCullers’s novel depicted a character—awkward, androgynous, swaggering adolescent Mick—in whom young rebels, with or without causes, saw themselves. She wrote another novel, The Member of the Wedding (1946), and then adapted it for the stage. Starring Ethel Waters and Julie Harris, her first play became a huge hit on Broadway. Where could so fast a comet go but down? And down she went, into alcoholism, romantic despair, critical failures, debilitating illness. Like her fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor (who didn’t think much of her), McCullers died fairly young. Unlike O’Connor, she is occasionally dismissed as a "minor" writer. But since her death in 1967, there have been half a dozen McCullers biographies, including several by French admirers such as Savigneau. (McCullers lived for a while in France, although she never spoke the language.) No novelist could have a more passionate advocate than Savigneau, the author of a highly praised study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar. Carson McCullers: A Life offers a critically persuasive and deeply sympathetic portrait of this troubled, shy, grandiose, and extraordinarily talented woman. While acknowledging a debt to the voluminous biography by Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter (1975), Savigneau offers a corrective to what she perceives to be Carr’s subliminally hostile and moralistic attitude and her refusal to grant McCullers the license of her genius and her unique childlike intensity of emotion. Savigneau subtitled her book in the original French edition Un coeur de jeune fille, "a young girl’s heart," for out of that lonely heart, those "torments of the body and the heart," were born, she thinks, the novelist’s most memorable fiction. Frankie in The Member of the Wedding says, "I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me." It is in that raw sensibility, that luminous, eerie candor shared by Frankie’s creator, that Savigneau locates the peculiar genius of Carson McCullers. A star from an early age, McCullers traveled the celebrity circuit—hopping from London to Paris to Rome—and we are as likely to find her in Ireland with John Huston, or in Key West with Tennessee Williams and Françoise Sagan, as we are to find her sitting at home on the porch with her housekeeper. A lasting place in American letters was vitally important to her, and she fought to hold onto hers. Despite shyness, illness, and at times suicidal depression, she committed herself to her public presence as a writer. International literary festivals and writers’ retreats such as Breadloaf and Yaddo were second homes. Wherever she went, she was greatly beloved—and greatly disliked. Gore Vidal once said, "An hour with a dentist without Novacaine was like a minute with Carson McCullers." Undiagnosed rheumatic fever led to a series of strokes beginning in her twenties that took her in and out of operating rooms dozens of times. She had surgery to reconstruct a hand, so she could use at least one to type, and to replace tendons in a leg, so she could walk with a cane. Her drinking didn’t help, nor did smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. But through years of physical and emotional pain, as friends and family fell away (her caretaking mother died, her husband killed himself, allies such as Truman Capote became enemies), McCullers’s indomitable will kept her alive and writing. It took her 15 years to finish her final book, Clock without Hands (1961), but she did finish it. Although she left behind only a few plays, stories, poems, and essays, and the four novels, they are legacy enough to ensure her home in the modern canon. To McCullers, moral isolation was the normative human experience, and the desperate longing to connect, to find "the we of me," was the strongest human desire. In her fiction, she found it for herself—and gave it to a world of readers.