Proof of devotion Jenn Shapland on Carson McCullers
JENN SHAPLAND ON CARSON MCCULLERS
INThe New Mexican
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, author Jenn Shapland cuts straight to the point.
“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,” she writes in the book’s first sentence.
A few paragraphs later, we learn that McCullers, who was 19 at the time, said no — but she had a few questions of her own. She wanted to know how lesbians behaved, where they lived, and how they interacted. She asked this of Reeves McCullers (whom she would eventually marry, twice) “as though lesbians might be a club that she could consider joining, or an unfamiliar species she might study,” Shapland writes.
A literary It girl in the Southern Gothic tradition, McCullers’ bestknown novels are The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946). She was known for her unflinching, deeply empathetic portrayals of race relations, disability, homosexuality, and characters who didn’t fit into the social order.
Shapland was interning as an archivist at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin in 2012, when a research request led her to pull a series of what she immediately recognized as love letters to McCullers from a Swiss photographer and writer named Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach. McCullers’ romantic l egacy is generally acknowledged to be her famously tumultuous relationship with Reeves McCullers, a would-be writer who struggled with his sexuality. At the time of her discovery, Shapland was dealing with her own issues around coming out. The more she investigated McCullers’ papers, and read her novels, t he more curious she became.
“If you talk to any queer reader, t hey’re l i ke, ‘ Of course Carson McCullers was gay. Duh!’ ” Shapland says. “But if you refer to the narrative that has circulated about her, that is totally missing. For instance, if you go to the museum devoted to her, you’re not going to see it at all. That’s the disconnect that I was interested in.” Finding the letters was hard evidence of a relationship between the two women “that was significant and complex for both of them, and that they cared deeply for one another and also supported each others’ creative endeavors. They also meant that someone like me — a woman who had been in love with another woman — could be a writer whose papers ended up at the Ransom Center, which is almost entirely devoted to white, straight, cis male writers and artists.”
My Autobiography of Carson MCullers (Tin House Books, 266 pages, $22.95) is a literary memoir in which Shapland combines elements of essay, poetry, journalism, journaling, and archiving in short chapters that explore a host of themes brought up by her research and by the personal connections she forges with her subject. Though it has a scholarly quality (Shapland has a Ph.D. in English), the book is warm, provocative, and often funny. It’s anything but a dry academic tome. Critics have responded with enthusiasm. Shapland made the short list for the 2020 National Book Award and the long list for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.
“Shapland’s book is the kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it,” Megan O’Grady wrote in The New York Times.
Shapland, 33, lives in Santa Fe with her partner, Chelsea Weathers, an art historian. (They met at the Ransom Center when both were working
on their doctorates.) Following her heart in her personal relationships and actually coming out were very different prospects for Shapland. She grew up in a conservative suburb of Chicago, where the only out, queer person she knew of was Ellen DeGeneres. Though Shapland was involved in a long-term lesbian relationship as an undergraduate student, she wasn’t comfortable identifying publicly as a lesbian. Officially, the pair were roommates.
“I think there’s a tendency to look at younger generations and their attitude — especially on social media — toward sexuality, identity, [and] gender, and to miss the fact that for people living in different parts of the country and different parts of the world, it’s still really complicated,” Shapland says. “I don’t know anyone who has come out who hasn’t had to have a really complicated conversation with a relative. Even if your parents are totally on board, which mine weren’t. It’s still really hard.”
Finding these eight handwritten letters from Clarac-Schwarzenbach to McCullers allowed Shapland to see herself in the context of history.
“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,” Shapland writes. “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. … Other than my own, I had never read love letters between women before.”
Within a year, Shapland was comfortably calling herself a lesbian. Notably absent from a book about such self- discovery, however, are stories of growing attraction to women or same-sex erotic awakenings on the part of Shapland or McCullers. Shapland admits to some repression around talking publicly about this level of intimacy, and a similar silence is reflected in McCullers’ writing. She never really explored such things, not even in her journals.
“She talks about [a] night with Annemarie, and she keeps trying to describe it,” Shapland says. “It’s an instance where she is having an erotic moment with this woman that she’s been in love with for a long time, and she just can’t even get the words out. When you look at the transcript, it’s [a] short line [and a] blank page, [a] short line [and a] blank page. It’s so frustrating! I think that dearth of language, and dearth of even being able to express that part of our identity, is super important to how long it took her to figure it out.”
McCullers found a queer community in which to be herself by leaving her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, for New York and Europe. Among her close friends were the playwright Tennessee Williams and entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee. She had great publishing success, but the people of Columbus found her work objectionable. When she would go home to visit, Shapland says, her neighbors gossiped. “All they do is talk about the fact that she’s wearing pants, smoking too many cigarettes, and she’s typing all the time on her typewriter. Of course, what they can’t handle, really, is the fact that she’s occupying her womanhood in a way that they are not comfortable with. She’s not doing any kind of homage to Southern Belle.”
When McCullers was in her 40s, she fell in love with her therapist, Mary Mercer, a relationship that seems to especially fire Shapland’s imagination. There is copious evidence of the romance, including approximately 50 instances of McCullers sending Mercer f lowers and other gifts. After McCullers’ death in 1967, Mercer kept many of her papers and preserved her childhood home as a museum, the Smith-McCullers House, in Columbus. (During a month-long residency there in 2016, Shapland soaked in McCullers’ bathtub and napped on the furniture while she finished her doctoral dissertation on contemporary literature and the environment.)
McCullers died at age 50 after a brain hemorrhage. She suffered a series of strokes, starting when she was in her 20s, after a bout of rheumatic fever as a teenager, and spent much of her life sick and in pain. She also drank
“All [the neighbors] do is talk about the fact that she’s wearing pants, smoking too many cigarettes, and she’s typing all the time on her typewriter. Of course, what they can’t handle, really, is the fact that she’s occupying her womanhood in a way that they are not comfortable with.” — Author Jenn Shapland
heavily, which caused some of her family and friends to question whether she was actually sick or just dramatic. Shapland has a condition called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), symptoms of which include dizziness and fainting. Their shared experience of living with chronic illness is another layer within Shapland’s book, especially the idea that illness, like queerness, reflects a weakness of character that society would prefer to be silently corrected, or willed away in a valiant effort at normalcy. “It connects back to our larger culture [that doesn’t] trust women’s understanding of their own bodies,” she says.
For many scholars and historians — and straight readers and critics — the stumbling block to believing McCullers had lesbian relationships hinges on sex itself, Shapland says.
“In queer relationships, there’s this need to prove that these women not only really loved each other and were connected, but that they had specific sexual encounters that we can somehow document. Otherwise, they’re not queer; they’re just straight women, according to history. Rather than focusing on ‘Did they have sex or didn’t they?’ I feel like there’s a way to broaden our understanding of what it means to be a lesbian, to be a queer woman, by focusing on these other aspects of their relationships, other forms of intimacy.”