My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

I am hardly qualified to write a biography of Carson McCullers. Who am I to her? I slid my arms up the sleeves of her long lime-green wool coat, I folded her nightgowns, I labeled her socks. I made biscuits in the kitchen of her childhood home and I walked in the park where she used to play by herself. I have read enough biographies to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a fiction writer, and this is not a biography.

While working as an archivist at the University of Texas' Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland discovered a set of letters from a Swiss socialite named Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the American author Carson McCullers, letters of fondness that don't shy away from words like "love." The discovery led Shapland to embark on the project that would become My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, a project in which Shapland plumbs the depths of McCullers' archives trying to reconstruct her relationships with women like Schwarzenbach and, in her later years, her therapist Mary Mercer, whose letters to and from Carson show too a profound intimacy. Shapland traces McCullers' life, quite literally: first as a researcher-in-residence at the museum that was her childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, and later as a resident at the Yaddo writers' colony in upstate New York McCullers joined a dozen times in her life.

For Shapland, the mission is personal: in recovering McCullers' lesbian relationships, she is able to recognize and affirm her own repressed and uncertain sexuality:

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: 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. Loved another woman. Period. You loved your mother? Lesbian.

There is a danger, Shapland concedes, in applying labels to people who did not or could not apply them to themselves. She pores over an account McCullers provides to Mercer of the time McCullers' abusive husband demanded to know if she was a lesbian. In the moment McCullers demurred, but Shapland sees in the silence and uncertainty around McCullers' the very dynamics of erasure that continue today. She recalls being sat down by the director of the McCullers home and being told that, in no uncertain terms, McCullers was not a lesbian and had no romantic relationships with women--though one can plainly see in the letters and notes Shapland collects that McCullers' intimacy with Schwarzenbach and Mercer, and many others, the pitch and resonance of love. Shapland rejects the constant demands of proof that are made regarding the sexuality of historical figures, as if in the absence of proof of queerness one remains conscripted by heterosexuality.

To my mind, the director's insistence is not only shocking, but silly. When you read McCullers' books, queerness is there on the page: the repressed lust of the army captain in Reflections in a Golden Eye, the love of Singer for Antonopoulos in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Biff's androgyny in the same, the wild love of Jester for Sherman in Clock Without Hands. What's the point of looking at all of that and saying, Oh no, McCullers might have written all of that--but she herself could never be queer? The question's outside of my expertise and capacity, but the defensiveness of such a position, regarding a writer whose work is so clearly queer, baffles me. Yet this thought reveals what I found missing in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: a deeper investigation of her books themselves. They feel sometimes like an afterthought, far less important than the letters and the notes from therapy--which perhaps they are, but they might have provided a richer context than they do.

Still, Shapland does a great job illuminating McCullers' life. Having never read another biography, I had never heard of how tumultuous McCullers' two marriages to Reeves McCullers, a tormented and closeted gay man himself, who once tried to kill her. This marriage, for both obvious and insidious reasons, has apparently captured most of the imagination of McCullers' other biographers. But it's Shapland who shows, in painstaking and thoughtful detail, the love that exists between the lines, for which those other biographers failed to account. At times I did feel like Shapland's identification with McCullers became overpowering--it struck me as sort of cringeworthy, for example, to insist that McCullers would have been excited about the election of Hillary Clinton. But the story that Shapland tells of her own sexuality, which she comes to embrace wholeheartedly by tracing McCullers', proves in the end to be very powerful.