My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

by Jenn Shapland

  Going West

  In the fall of 1951, back in Nyack with Reeves and Bebe, Carson began a piece about a pharmacist called “The Pestle,” the seeds for her final novel, Clock Without Hands, which she would publish ten years later. She and Reeves sailed one last time for Europe, to Naples and then Rome, and finally to a home outside Paris, “a small house, but Reeves and I had separate bedrooms and there was a guest room.” Reeves was drinking constantly in the cellar beneath his “studio,” where he claimed to be writing a book, and he was continuing to threaten Carson. He had his sights set on a double suicide, convinced that they could never be happy, together or apart, and the only solution was to die as a couple. I read this as his acceptance of Carson’s love for women and his own unspeakable love for men, that because they are queer they can never love each other completely, though it’s impossible to know what he was thinking. (He had proposed the same solution, joint suicide, to David Diamond once, going so far as to push him toward the edge of a bridge.) In late summer, 1953, Reeves drove Carson into the woods. At her feet, on the floor of the passenger side, Carson saw the ropes. They stopped at a gas station and while Reeves was inside, Carson fled the car, fled Reeves, fled France. This time, thank god, for good.

  I remember feeling horrified when I first read this in one of Carson’s biographies. She doesn’t describe the scene in Illumination, but she refers to Reeves as a potential murderer multiple times. To me it shows how far manipulation and possessiveness can go in a relationship. Silence and secrecy around queer desires—Reeves’s refusal to accept his own sexuality, Carson’s “imaginary friends”—can create a desperation that leads to extreme beliefs about a single relationship’s importance and ability to define a person’s whole identity, whole world. I’m furious that Carson stayed with Reeves this long, but I also think I understand how hard it was to see a way out when so much was governed by Reeves’s increasing delusions and manipulations.

  In Paris, Janet Flanner continued to care for and support Reeves in Carson’s absence. According to her biographer, Janet had “always been sensitive to the myriad of causes underlying Reeves’s unhappiness and empathized with his suffering and confusion, his uncertainty about who he was and what he should be doing.” She told Carson, “We all recognized ourselves in Reeves. Each of us recognized the ‘disorientation’ we have all fought against.” Reeves in turn saw Janet as among the last people in the world who cared for him. He once asked David, “Do you think she will come to close my eyes when I die?” Back in the US, Carson learned that Reeves had killed himself in a hotel in Paris in November after sending cryptic messages to everyone he knew in town informing them he was “going West.” To Janet, he sent what she called “the most beautiful flowers I ever received in my life.”

  Carson refused to pay to have Reeves’s body returned to the US and did not attend his funeral abroad, asking Janet to go in her place. Many people were quick to criticize Carson for what seemed like callousness. None of the newspapers printed Reeves’s cause of death, mentioning an automobile accident or “natural causes.” Very few knew what had happened between them, in France or throughout their relationship, but plenty of people came to see Carson as coldhearted. Reeves’s family broke off all contact with her.

  Carson struggled to discuss Reeves in her conversations with Mary. She writes, “Mary understood. She did not think it was romantic when he sneaked onto the Queen Mary [sic] and threatened to jump overboard if I wouldn’t take him back. She sensed, as I knew, that we were dealing with a potential murderer as well as a thoroughly dishonest man.” Here (as though I am the authority on this matter) I have to credit Mary with knowing Carson better than her biographers, better than so many of the people around her. Like Elizabeth, she understood that Reeves was a great threat to Carson’s independence, her work, and her sense of self—as well as her life. This was no great romance, no lifelong love. Maybe what they had could be described as love, but I have trouble recognizing it as something other than pursuit and possession at all costs. Reeves was a shadow that loomed over Carson’s whole adult life, one with which she continuously reckoned but was never able to shake while he was alive. When he was finally gone, I can only imagine her feeling of relief. Freedom.

  Carson writes to Mary in 1958 that since falling in love with her, her pressing wanderlust has quite subsided.

  Coping Mechanisms

  When she went to Yaddo for the last time in the summer of 1954, at thirty-seven, crawling her way back from the traumas of the previous year, Carson finished a draft of The Square Root of Wonderful, a new play, while Elizabeth and Rita exchanged letters about Carson’s drinking. Carson was staying in Pine Garde, Elizabeth’s residence at Yaddo, a building where I did my laundry in a basement that felt truly haunted. Elizabeth insisted that Rita—who had joined AA—not repeat anything about Carson’s visits with a local doctor or their discussions of her alcoholism. Bebe, an alcoholic herself, wrote frequently to Boots, to Bigelow, and to Tenn about Carson’s health and drinking.

  Carson went to visit Tenn in Key West in the spring of 1955, where she worked on a stage adaptation of Ballad, a short story version of Square Root, and her new novel, Clock Without Hands, while Tenn wrote to deadline on the revised version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In June, a few weeks after Carson returned to New York, Bebe died of a heart attack. She was sixty-five, and Ida Reeder, the nurse who would later care for Carson, was the only person with her in the house in Nyack. Carson was staying with friends in the city, and when she heard the news from Boots that her mother had died, “it was too much, almost too much.” She didn’t want to come home and face the fact of her mother’s body. “I had slept with my mother in twin beds for all the years that she had been delicate,” she writes in Illumination. After the funeral, to which Carson wore all white, everyone stayed up drinking and toasting Bebe, who had been a constant presence among Carson and her friends. Bebe had been drinking sherry to the end and suffered from bleeding ulcers. It seems that Carson and Bebe enabled each other to drink, while each tried to watch out for and take care of the other.

  So many people in Carson’s life talked to each other about her drinking, but I wonder if anyone talked to Carson about it. In Illumination, Carson mentions alcoholism—her maternal grandfather’s, Reeves’s (“he had a splendid constitution and I would not have recognized alcoholism in those days”) but not her own or her mother’s. Carson set limits on her drinking and described attempts to cut back in her letters to Reeves during the war, and in her conversations with Mary, but her words suggest that she saw it more as a bad habit than as an unbeatable addiction.

  Carson, Tenn, and Reeves (and Annemarie, David, Boots, Janet, all the others) lived through an era of hatred and persecution of homosexuality that lasted throughout the twentieth century but was worst in the 1930s and again in the ’50s, with the slight reprieve of the war years, and each of them struggled with their sexual identities in their own way. It is not hard to draw the line between being unable to care for yourself, drinking yourself ill, and queer self-hatred. There is a tendency to blame the ill for their illness: to seek out a person’s bad decisions, their unhealthy behaviors, and point to these as proof of a personal failure instead of offering help or sympathy. In each of her biographies, Carson’s drinking hovers under the surface, never adequately addressed, but always mentioned in the context of her illness. When her contemporaries recall her, she usually has a drink in hand. To what extent her drinking contributed to her illness, to her weakness, cannot be determined. I’m not all that sure that parsing this connectedness matters. Sick is sick.

  Tennessee understood this. He wrote Carson:

  I am a vulnerable person, but it frightens me to see how even more vulnerable you are. Is there no way you can defend and spare yourself, learn how to live not so acutely, and still be yourself and an artist? I have been so careful of myself physically because I have to—to live—but you are quite heedless about keeping yourself physically well. When you get up again y
ou must promise all who love you to treat yourself with all the tenderness and wisdom that your work deserves from you. Think only of restoration.

  What Tenn calls her vulnerability, her living “acutely,” transcends the physical body and includes it. When I read these words, I associate them with anxiety, with my own anxiety, which feels to me like an oversensitivity to the world around me. I am lucky to live at a moment when there are many non-life-threatening options for managing anxiety—Lexapro and meditation and exercise help enormously to make it possible for me to live with my own brain. But for Carson, for Tenn, for Reeves, whom Tenn describes in a letter to Bigelow as “a very sick person and a very pitifully maladjusted one,” and for so many writers, especially queer writers, at midcentury, anxiety was the reality and drinking or pills the only way to soothe it. How else would someone with a secret, criminalized, pathologized identity feel but anxious and depressed?

  In the 1950s, queerness was still understood as a congenital disorder. Up until the nineteenth century, sexual “deviance” was seen as a sinful behavior, but when Western medicine got involved, it became a symptom of a faulty body, a degenerate self. Medical or psychiatric treatment was the solution to this “problem.” Though it isn’t said outright in any of the biographies, Annemarie’s hospitalizations, insulin shock treatment, and the choice she was given between institutionalization and deportation likely sought to cure her “diseased” inclinations toward women as much as to treat her morphine addiction. During these same years, Alan Turing was persecuted and Carl Solomon was institutionalized (voluntarily) at what Allen Ginsberg calls “Rockland” in Howl. Is it any wonder that Carson was averse to visiting a therapist? Lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s would go to therapy for insomnia or anxiety and be met with sexual conversion therapy. Pulp lesbian novels circulated, but could pass through the censors only if the protagonist chose a man in the end or was killed. Often she killed herself. The main cultural representations of women who loved women depicted them as tortured, sick, and unfit for living. Queerness can still be construed as a similar kind of weakness of will, an unfitness to live a normal life or to meet social expectations.

  My own chronic illness connects to fear, the feeling of not being real that accompanies queer womanhood. I don’t always remember or believe my illness is real, because there is no reflection of it outside myself, my own feelings. As a “fashionable illness,” it is a subject of ridicule (like Carson’s “obsessions” with women) or something that others fail or refuse to acknowledge (like lesbian invisibility).

  Seismographs

  Society tends to be suspicious of sick people, probably because we cannot feel precisely what a sick person feels. As a chronically ill person, on bad days I am aware that my body is in pain but no one can see it. I look the same. To think or talk about being sick makes me feel unduly self-pitying, or self-aggrandizing, or self-obsessed. I once heard Maggie Nelson describe the self as a seismograph for experiences: senses, feelings, and thoughts are facts only the self knows. When I am a body in pain, I have only self to turn to. Even well-meaning others can’t see or know or feel the facticity of all my skin aching at a light draft. For this same reason, it is difficult to chart the illness of a historical figure in relation to illness today. Illness is both culturally constructed and subjective. It is both within and without, felt in our bodies but filtered by the faulty language we have been given to describe it.

  Carson wrote each of her books during a bout of illness, bed rest, or recovery, including her first novel. Rest is often considered to be a failure—failure to be productive, to function—and exhaustion is not a quality that the world takes very seriously, at least not the worlds I have inhabited. Energy is the prized possession of the young and the deepest desire of the aging. In her later years, Carson was in bed by ten. “I want to be able to write whether in sickness or in health,” she writes, “for indeed, my health depends almost completely on my writing.”

  I often feel bedridden and work from bed. It’s hard to write on the days when I can’t sit up. Sometimes I just feel bad, weak, foggy. Illness is lonely and frequently hard. I’m left with my own ongoing wondering if this sense of loneliness is just me or if it’s a human feeling. I think this is one thing that drew me to Carson’s fiction in the first place. On the page, Carson is at pains to articulate the inarticulable, to find a way to express feelings of isolation, loneliness, and longing that I associate with queer life, with life as a sick person, and with life as a writer.

  I get a lot of sleep, I try not to drink too much, I eat well, I go on long walks for my weak heart, but I am still a queer, sick, writing person—woman—living in the world. I get lonely. I am alone because I don’t have the energy to participate as much as I’d like to, I’m alone because writing demands that I be alone, and I feel lonely because the world that finds its way through to me, via the internet, or invitations I often turn down, or cancelled plans, suggests that life is happening elsewhere. It is someplace outside my home, where I work, and outside my mind, where I often live. It can be lonely to be queer, especially if you choose to forego the usual signposts of a complete life, like marriage and children. And it is lonely to be a writer, to put your work first and your income second in a world that would rather you find a full-time job and earn more money. To stay home, to be sick, to write can make all of my life feel like a place out of time. In Austin, in my twenties, when I needed to remember that the world was still there, that I was still in it, I used to sit out on the porch smoking cigarettes, staring into the middle distance, wondering what my neighbor was doing. In my new, quieter life in New Mexico, I walk outside several times a day to babysit the puny vegetables, or look out at the mountains over our adobe walls.

  Diagnosis

  I saw a new therapist in Santa Fe and she gave me a civilian PTSD checklist to fill out. I looked down at the questions and tried to stay present in the room until the end of the session, but already as I left the building I was applying the diagnosis to Carson. I was asking her these questions: Have you ever had “1. Repeated, disturbing memories, thoughts or images of a stressful experience from the past? 2. Repeated, disturbing dreams of a stressful experience from the past? . . . 6. Avoid[ed] thinking about or talking about a stressful experience from the past or avoided having feelings related to it?” Yes, yes, and yes, I answered for her. Her life was a cascade of trauma, much of it undiscussed until her sessions with Mary: Annemarie, Reeves, her father, her strokes and the ensuing paralysis, temporary blindness, not to mention the trauma of being queer without the language or space to express it. It wasn’t until the last years of her life that things calmed down enough for her even to try to tell her side of the story.

  Those who were close to Carson encouraged her to be careful, to take care of herself. As when Elizabeth wrote to her, “I hope all that you have had to bear will not wear you down too much. Your gifts are great; think of yourself as their guardian and let nothing play havoc with them.” Or Annemarie: “Dear Darling, I know stronger than ever. That, in order to be true to our work, we must brave and face lonelyness [sic]. I know you learned a lot about it since you were so terribly ill—but I want you to be strong enough, oh Carson,—to stand even your weak health: it is, combined with your beautiful and pure talent, your great chance.” Or Mary’s constant refrain when they were apart, “Go gently, gently.”

  Blue Chair

  I did not sit in Carson’s blue chair. I did not even take a picture of it. There are two pale blue armchairs in the room of the Stark Avenue house I called the “entertainment room”—a record player, a mounted flat-screen TV, a piano, and the organ—but I could tell from photos which chair was the favorite, the one Carson could sit comfortably in right up to the end. I didn’t touch that chair. Several newspaper articles refer to Carson as “wheelchair bound” in the 1950s and ’60s, but I’ve seen only a few photos of her in a wheelchair. If true, this implies that someone—Ida, Mary—would lift her in their arms and place her in the blue chair. A beau
tiful image of care. Illness as revelator of love. As the photos flip back in time from folder to folder, Carson looks frail and small in the chair, then she looks spry and sprawling in a shawl with a friend, a Japanese painter, then there is a photo of her nurse, Ida, in the chair after Carson is gone. When I think of my time in Columbus my imagination will often first conjure this room, where I sat on the couch in the evenings watching Hillary win the presidential primary and episodes of Buffy, on the phone with Chelsea doing the same. Where the chair should be, there is a gap in my memory, a smudge on the lens.

  Organ

  I tried several times to play it, but couldn’t get it to sound. The organ stands in the corner of the entertainment room, taller than I am and dark wood and ornately carved. It was a gift from Carson to Mary Mercer.