When it burst, I didn’t just lose Yaddo but the legible boundaries of my self. The world outside my cottage, my woods—the world I ingested primarily through the internet—was suddenly unrecognizable as a place where I could belong, not because it had changed, but because I was now required to see it for what it was. The night I watched the results come in at the home of Yaddo’s director, who handed out her daughter’s stuffed animals for us to hug as the dread wore on, Chelsea texted, “What’s going to happen to us?”
I processed my feelings alone, in bed, eating peanut butter cups, and on the phone with friends around the country as I walked the woods, shocked that the trees were still there. I took out my fear and confusion on the other residents at dinner, insisting at every turn, “Actually, it’s even worse than that,” and then explaining how it was worse, my ruminations on the stream of news I scrolled through with one eye open transformed into the hard truth it was my duty to expose. I felt cut open and kept recalling a passage from Member of the Wedding when the news of the war and the world’s instability hits Frankie for the first time.
Frankie stood looking up and down at the four walls of the room. She thought of the world, and it was fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and bigger than it had been before. . . . Finally she stopped looking around the four kitchen walls and said to Berenice: ‘I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me.’
One’s self and one’s world constantly shift and alter, and all we know for sure about either is that they are never the same, but this doesn’t stop us from acting as if they are continuous, stable. As if the future will follow logically from the present, as if the present is something we are really able to know. In an essay published after the election, Bosnian American novelist Aleksandar Hemon writes, “if the world and life are one, if I am my world, as Wittgenstein suggested, then the rupture in the solidity of that world transforms who I am, regardless of my will and intention.” When the older artists and writers around me at Yaddo saw my panic as I felt the world remade, they tried to reassure me: he won’t follow through on his campaign promises, he’ll be impeached, you’ll see. I refused their stabilizations. “If he’s impeached,” I snarled, “then we get a president who believes I should go through conversion therapy, who believes I might need electroshock.”
When I finally came out—eight years after the walk in the botanic gardens, two years after my narrative breakdown—it felt like an embrace of this kind of rupture. To open my self, my life to queerness was to eradicate the carefully hewn path that had lain before me since I knew anything: that I would marry some man, have kids, a house, a legible future. Queerness required me to throw legible futures out the window. It took me some time before I was able to do this. When I finally did, I marked the occasion with a tattoo. I didn’t even fully know it was queerness that I was embracing at the time, but when I went with my friend Jordan to Atomic Tattoo around the corner from the Ransom Center, I knew that a tattoo would distinguish the person I used to be or thought I was from the person I was becoming. It would be a marker. I got a line tattooed around my left bicep, its two ends sliding past each other without meeting.
Carson wrote much of Wedding in the summer of 1943 at Yaddo after Annemarie’s death, after Carson’s own world and self had split open. In therapy, after Carson finally tells her Annemarie story all the way to the end, Mary says to her, “You stand at the threshold of really coming into your own, and I would say it’s about time.”
Googling
Struggling to make headway on the project while feeling myself invalidated, I devoured book after book from Yaddo’s library of titles authored by former writers-in-residence. I spent hours in this room reading and learning who all had visited and what they had written here. No one else ever came in, so I was free to read and sit out of the rain and cry at my leisure. I devoured Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones in one sitting. Goldberg’s book struck a chord in me. Writing is a physical act, she insists, a movement of the body. I finished the book and reread the author’s bio on the back cover, then began to Google. Within a minute I was typing “Natalie Goldberg lesbian” into the search bar. I cannot tell you the number of times I have typed this search with different women’s names. I learned that yes, indeed, Goldberg has had a woman partner. But as far as this simple search told me, Goldberg does not identify publicly as a lesbian or bisexual or talk about her partner anywhere besides the one interview where she mentions her. I called Chelsea and before I knew it I was railing about how can even Natalie Goldberg—who lives, I might add, in our queer little Santa Fe—be closeted?
I’ve since read her other books, and she does write about her women partners quite openly. I also met Natalie—Nat—and learned that reading The Ballad of the Sad Café in ninth grade changed her life. She always thought it was because Amelia was such a strong woman character, but when she found out Carson was queer, she realized it went much deeper than that.
Preaching
So it isn’t about “Is Carson a lesbian?” or “Carson is a lesbian” or “What is a lesbian?” What I want to know is, how have lesbians gotten by and had relationships and found love and community? What does that look like? One answer: we don’t really know. If we—writers, historians, biographers—can just start acknowledging the lesbian parts of ourselves and others, maybe we can start to know what it is. What it is to love women. But please, no more demands for certain kinds of proof, no more “doesn’t count unless—” bullshit. Don’t tell me there’s just not enough evidence. Let’s call a lesbian a lesbian. Call yourself a lesbian if you’ve ever loved women. Loved another woman. Period. You loved your mother? Lesbian.
It’s all well and good for me to say this now, but what have I been doing all along if not looking for proof? When I found what I was looking for, I had no clue what to do with it, what it meant. Queer histories often take the form of lists, of calling out and naming kindred spirits. This practice has largely gone out of vogue, as labeling a person’s gender or sexual identity, past or present, is fraught with complexities—what did that person call themself and what did it mean at the time? Is it best to call a person queer, or to specify? Is labeling always an essentializing force? As Maggie Nelson insists, “the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours.” Perhaps in calling Carson queer, calling her a lesbian, I am shellacking, setting her on my terms despite my desire to give her space in her own words. By including her words, I make them my own.
But there’s a part of me, a defiant and somewhat juvenile part, that still wants the list. It’s not all that important to me to define what it is to be a lesbian—constant shifting, the ever-new—but I can’t help but want to know who else is at the table with me, who I can call kin.
List of Carson’s Possible Girlfriends
Joy Fleming
Helen (childhood friend)
Louise Dahl-Wolfe (photographer, took Carson’s author photos in 1941 and in 1961)
Unidentified woman “obviously a friend of Carson’s in France”
Hilda Marks
Miss Minnie (Jack Dobin’s mother)
Ida Reeder (Carson’s last nurse)
Marielle Bancou
Helen Johnson Visone (possibly “Helen from childhood”)
Kay Boyle (named her daughter Faith Carson)
Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach
Edith Begner
Miss Kathleen McCoy, 248 So Pryor Street, Atlanta, Georgia (postcard addressed, never sent)
Jane Bowles
Gypsy Rose Lee
Elizabeth Bowen
Katherine Anne Porter
Dr. Mary Mercer
Mary Tucker
Vera
Elizabeth Ames
Kathryn Hamill Cohen
Other Likely Lesbians
Rita
Jane
Warwick, to whom Rita left one-third of her estate
Rita’s “friend-roommate” Merle Berlant
Carson’s Aunt Isabel, the nun
Cheryl Crawford and Ruth Norman
Carson’s Aunt Tieh
Virginia Spencer Carr
Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen) and “her dear friend and secretary, Clara Svendsen”
Edith Sitwell
Ethel Waters
Second Marriages
Reeves went to war in November 1943 and was wounded at Normandy the following year, while Carson was at Yaddo. That same summer, she received news that her father had died. She returned to Columbus for the funeral in August. Her mother refused to go inside the house on Stark Avenue after he died. Carson, Bebe, and Rita all moved together to an apartment in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River where Carson would spend most of her remaining years.
Bebe’s unwillingness to return to their Georgia home makes more sense in light of a 2003 revelation in Virginia Carr’s introduction to the reissue of her 1975 biography. In Illumination, Carson had written, “in the middle of these years of fury and disaster my father suddenly died of a Coronary Thrombosis. He died in 1944 at his jewelry store.” According to Carr, this is not at all the truth. She writes, “both the coroner and the obituary in the local newspaper reported that Mr. Smith had died in his jewelry shop of a heart attack. But I learned later that he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head—Bebe, his wife, ‘insisted that we tell no one.’” It is another rewrite, one that makes it into Carson’s own retelling of her life. She does not speak of her father’s death to Mary in the therapy transcripts.
Reeves started sending Carson letters while he was abroad, and though their exchanges don’t follow reciprocally—each would often receive a batch of letters from the other written over several months—together they wrote sixty letters in total between 1943 and 1945. I chafe at the possessiveness that creeps into each of Reeves’s passes at affection. “You are my own Precious Carson and I don’t believe any one has ever been loved as much as I love you.” He insists that they “just need to live together for about five years straight without interruption,” and spends at least a paragraph of each letter contemplating where they might live after the war. It seems to be his way of coping with the fear that he might not come home. As the letters continue, he sounds desperate, cloying. “Nothing I do or feel is good unless I can share it with you.” He writes of and underlines his “great fear . . . that the imaginary friend would come between us to the extent that I would be destroyed.” More than love and affection, and certainly more than their future relationship, Carson’s letters to Reeves are frantic with worry over his immediate well-being and his safe return. Often she writes in impatience at not having had word from him recently, not knowing whether he is alive, and begs him to write immediately. The war and the threat of losing Reeves seem to provoke enormous anxiety in Carson, and she expresses it by wondering what he is doing and telling him her thoughts on what she’s been reading—Henry James, William Faulkner.
Reeves came back from the war, wounded and decorated, in February 1945, and Carson recalls in Illumination, “as soon as he returned to Nyack, he immediately started a barrage to make me marry him again. I said, ‘[Second] marriages are so vulgar . . . We’re much better as friends, without marriage.’ Marriage, however, was his motive.” Elizabeth tried to warn Carson off, seeing the “great danger in a remarriage.” Carson recalls that Reeves’s letters throughout the War returned repeatedly to the subject of marriage, though she felt unenthusiastic about the idea. She tells Mary that if she and Reeves had been able to be friends, without possessiveness or dependency, his life might not have ended so tragically. But Reeves would not take friendship for an answer. In March, unconscionably, they remarried in a civil ceremony in New York. This second marriage seems to be the basis for biographers of Carson to presume that theirs was a great love, a lifelong relationship that was constitutive of both their identities.
Why Reeves? Why a second time? Their first marriage showed that Carson wasn’t satisfied with being a wife for very long. I wonder if, after losing Annemarie, and then her father, in the shadow of war, it was a way of trying to hold onto some kind of legible identity. I come back to her protracted becoming: if she was still trying to figure out who she was, what she wanted, it isn’t so hard to be talked into a life, a self, an identity. It can seem easier to stop asking “who am I?” altogether. I find myself questioning, too, the line here between manipulation and consent. How much of Carson and Reeves was really love? Can love and manipulation co-exist? Manipulation and consent? He was violent—emotionally and psychologically abusive. What once seemed like passion morphed into rage, resentment, brutality. No love exists in a vacuum, no matter how much it feels like it does. It is filtered by all the loves we’ve ever read about, witnessed, watched, lived. Its definition is given by use (to nod at Wittgenstein). Love changes in each phase of a relationship, each day, even. As we, too, change constantly. Nor can love be proven. It’s more complicated, harder to see than a ring, a marriage license, a description of any physical encounter.
Reeves’s determination seems to be the primary force behind Carson’s decision. Elizabeth told her that in the aftermath of the war “girls everywhere are marrying and remarrying men they would not have married otherwise.” In fact, more marriages occurred during these years than in any other period of US history, and as men came home from the front the pressure for people to return to heteronormative gender roles mounted from many corners of society. In any case, Carson seemed powerless to keep saying no. She was in a new place, unable to write, unable to see well, months after losing her father to unspoken suicide. Carson writes in Illumination:
I don’t know why I felt I owed such devotion to him. Perhaps it was simply because he was the only man I had ever kissed, and the awful tyranny of pity. I knew he was not faithful to me sexually, but that did not matter to me, nor am I an especially maternal woman. . . . For some reason, certainly against my will, we became deeply involved with each other again and before I really knew what had happened, we were remarried.
In a history of Carson’s outward-facing life, marriage hides a decade of manipulation and dysfunction, but by Carson’s own account their second marriage was doomed from the start. Reeves got promoted to captain, took terminal leave, and moved to Nyack to live with Rita, Carson, and Bebe. Carson, meanwhile, headed to Yaddo for the summer of 1946 to finish Wedding.
Dedications
Carson dedicated The Member of the Wedding to Elizabeth Ames. Elizabeth was the sole person she allowed to read the book in draft form, insisting that only she understood the feelings behind it.
Fury and Disaster
Over the next four years, Carson finally published The Member of the Wedding, received her second Guggenheim Fellowship, met Tennessee Williams, learned to ski in Italy, had two more strokes, and attempted suicide. Tenn had written her a letter out of the blue in 1946 after staying up all night reading Wedding, and invited her to stay with him in Nantucket. Carson showed up in shorts and together they spent “a summer of sun and friendship” at the beach. “Every morning,” she writes, “we would work at the same table, he at one end, and me at the other.” She cooked Spuds Carson “almost every day,” her own recipe which “consisted of baked potatoes, mashed with butter, onions, and cheese. After a long swim it was good fare.” She befriended and later grew to despise Pancho Rodríguez, Tenn’s partner, and told Tenn all about Reeves. Unexpectedly, Annemarie’s old girlfriend, Baroness Margot Von Opel, stayed with them for some of the summer. Carson began a play version of Member of the Wedding in Nantucket, and Tenn helped her find a new agent, Audrey Wood.
Carson and Reeves traveled to Europe several times during these years, their last together, in various states of health and drunkenness. Lesbian writer and connector Janet Flanner welcomed Carson in Paris. Her partner, Natalia Murray, took Carson to her tailor in Rome and got her “the mos
t beautiful pants suit she ever had in her entire life,” which, sadly, didn’t make it into the archive. Carson and Reeves were drinking heavily, noticeably on this trip, and Carson had her second stroke. She was treated at a hospital in Paris, where writer Richard Wright came to visit her and then leased her and Reeves his Paris apartment.
In a photo from one of her trips abroad, Carson and Reeves stand in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Carson is smiling with her left arm tucked up, holding her cane. She is wearing the green tweed skirt suit that I catalogued. Her mouth is a fierce smile, but her eyes betray fear. Reeves stands about a foot and a half from her, holding a pigeon out at her, staring hard at the camera. He looks frightening. He has a boxer on a leash.
She writes in Illumination that during this trip, “Reeves’s temper became more violent, and one night I felt his hands around my neck and I knew he was going to choke me. I bit him on his thumb with such violence that the blood spurted out and he let me go. The disappointment and the [dreadfulness] of those days might well have caused the last and final stroke from which I suffered.” She had this final stroke alone in Paris in 1947, in Richard Wright and his wife’s apartment, where she was staying apart from Reeves. When she was finally found on the floor of the apartment after eight hours and taken to the hospital, Wright chartered a plane to come see her. Reeves makes no appearance in Carson’s retelling of this incident in Illumination. She and Reeves were then flown home from Europe ill: she weak from the fallout of her strokes, he with delirium tremens. I picture them laid out on stretchers on opposite sides of the plane.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Page 11