Unsolicited Review: My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland (Tin House Books, 2020)

 

An unsolicited review--because every author deserves to have someone recognize the value of their work.

 It was already my intention to inaugurate this series of reviews with Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers this week. Then, as I sat down to write this afternoon, it was announced that Shapland’s book was longlisted for the National Book Award in non-fiction. Huzzah! A well-deserved honor, and not the first coincidence I’ve had with this autobiography.

 Jenn Shapland’s book is a good place to start this project of reviewing works relevant to southern queer identities, not the least of reasons being that, per my previous posts about the art of review, Shapland’s meditation on her own lesbian identity in communion with the revelation of Carson McCullers’ heretofore undocumented lesbian identity is distinctly non-pathologizing. It is an antidote to narratives of queer identity that pathologize queer existence as certain acts or a limited range of desires reducible to the pages of a diagnostic manual. Breaking away from a pathologizing perspective is no small feat given that much of Shapland’s evidence—to the extent her book is an archeology—comes from McCullers’s private conversations with a therapist, but not by way of diagnosis. Rather, McCullers shared and explored her lesbianism with her therapist, but nothing about the description that Shapland gives of their interactions reads like a medical effort at labeling disease. It was more a coming to self from a personal history not conducive to articulating positive queer identity.  

 Another reason why this book is such a good place for me to start is because of another coincidence that got me so stirred up about this book in the first place. In the early 2010s, I applied for a fellowship to study at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. I did not get that fellowship and had no money to travel to Austin on my own, so I reached out to the Center for help finding, scanning, and, thus, acquiring some Faulkner materials as well as some items about Hubert Creekmore, a forgotten gay Mississippi author whom I was trying to connect to Faulkner. The public service intern who helped me was Jenn Shapland. Jenn even went so far as looking up some additional items on Creekmore housed in a separate collection that I hadn’t even thought to check. She made scans and sent them to me in case I might could use them. As it turns out, she sent me a letter by Creekmore that explicitly connected him to Faulkner and placed him in proximity to the “Southern Protective Association,” a group of Southern artists living in New York and looking out for each other. It was also a group who happened to be mostly gay.

 For anyone who has read Shapland’s book, you might recognize the similarities between this group and the February House, a milieu of queer writers into which McCullers immersed herself to nurture her creative energies. Other similarities between what I will call (just here, once) Lesbian McCullers and my own book, which I will call (just here, this once) My Autobiography of William Faulkner abound, but maybe it is all just coincidence, which extends even to the trajectories that landed us on such near publication dates. When I had my book near to print, I looked up Jenn to thank her for her help all those years ago. That is when I found out she had her own book coming out based, in part, on material she discovered for herself on McCullers in the HRC somewhere in and around the time she got a query from me about my project. My book would be published in January, hers in February of this year. Mine mostly aligns with the expectations of a “scholarly” study, which deserves the scare quotes because it is misguided to assume that scholarship is different from creative non-fiction or that genres of creative non-fiction are not works of scholarship. Case in point: Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which is probably one of the best and most important works on southern queer identity that I’ve ever read.

 Shapland does not, however, mold herself to the expectations of scholarship. She briefly touches on her decision to leave academia towards the end of the degree program that led her to her job in the archives. She never clearly says what about academia didn’t suit her, but I’d offer that it is fair to say that “scholars” bar their doors to “writers,” and that is the fault of academics for limiting the scope of what we allow to be credited as genius. Of course, genius is, by definition, without preconceived limits on scope or insight, both of which are necessary tools for reconstructing queer lives.

 In the demands of “academic writing,” objective indifference is praised (such as the praise showered on white straight male scholars when they write about white straight male authors who are so amazing, so important). Standards of evidence are imposed mostly to deny a voice to possibilities. Queer life gets held down in the quagmires of “prove it,” which are just the banal repetitions of the epistemological somersaults required to justify all queer readings and which were summed up so deftly by Eve Sedgwick as the laconic “Don’t ask. You shouldn’t know.” Notably, heterosexual assumptions don’t face these burdens of proof.

 As seems to be eternally necessary for reclaiming queer lives, Shapland engages the problem of previous biographers who found euphemisms to avoid admitting what the evidence clearly showed about McCullers, if those biographers didn’t outright reject it. At one point she tells a story about having the director of a leading center for the study of McCullers tell her that the writer was obviously not queer—a story Shapland relates midway through her book and circles back to because of how it epitomizes the average response to projects that seek to claim queer identity for writers whom old guards have long tried to keep from depths that are far less gruesome and demeaning than they presume. Like, really, what do we lose when we say a writer was gay? Nothing. What do we gain? A whole new way of seeing.

 But seeing what? Answer: a lesbian. Among the many virtues of Shapland’s book is that she uses her lucid, nearly lapidary, prose to explore what it means to claim a lesbian identity for herself and for someone else, who also happens to be a pillar of the Southern Renaissance in letters.

 The former—claiming a queer identity for oneself—often proves vexing. From stories about her mother outing Shapland over breakfast because she read her daughter’s private writing while Shapland was away at college to her frank assessment of her complicity in constructing her own closeted life, Shapland’s personal coming out story provides a deeply human narrative of self. Her integration of the body politics of chronic illness into her coming out story elevates that story to the level of a treatise on the human condition. There are moments when she moves from archivist exploring the implications of a discovery to being the stone to step across the river between Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of One’s Self and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor.

 There, a bridge in the middle, is Shapland, constructing a visible self in the words of an autobiography. But there is also Carson, whose story Shapland takes in her hand to help tend across that river as well.

 The latter—claiming a lesbian, or any queer identity, for someone else—is vexing because on the one hand there are intercommunity queer politics that justly limit our right to claim identity for someone else, especially posthumously. On the other hand, there is the tradition of denials that demand actual semen stains on a dress, salacious pictures, or loud and repeated declarations in print or on sound recordings of an author’s gay self. Anything less and maybe the scholar/writer is stretching, reaching, appropriating, or—as Shapland puts it—looting the evidence box of someone’s life for their own purposes. Apparently, it is just the most horrible sin to admit that your own identity shapes your understanding of the life of someone else, and accusations that your interpretations are shaded by your subjective position are yet again another way to undermine efforts at exploring queer lives. I have yet to understand what non-queer interpretations are based on, but I suspect it is more ephemeral than we’ve been led to believe.

 Shapland did have the experience of holding McCullers’s clothes in her hands, feeling and smelling them. Obviously, she wasn’t looking for semen stains, but then what evidence would we think that she would find there? Shapland finds memories of perfumes and the shape of a chronically ill body in housecoats slid on over nightgowns for when guests arrived or Carson had to pose for a publicity photo. No evidence emerges of someone else in Carson’s clothes. Yet, somehow, the self is never enough proof of who a person is, or was in the case of Carson McCullers. We always have to find the other, or so we think, but Shapland outsmarts us here.

 Which is not to say Shapland doesn’t find the other. At one point, Shapland literally makes a list of possible girlfriends/lovers based on her analysis of archival material viewed through a lens that allows such possibilities to inform her interpretations. The list is not short. Shapland does not, however, quote the source material that would be the proof of her assertions—a third of the way through her book, she flatly states the “gap in the transcripts is killing me.” The records she found are often more notes than novels, some evidence alluded to in the archives was purposely destroyed by its original owners, and some evidence she admits that she is just not allowed to cite directly due to rules of use.

 Shapland doesn’t need to quote from those primary materials. Her lapidary prose reads as plain language but with the effect that it is chiseled, with exquisite effort, from the most valuable stone, like one that we would place to build bridges upon. She says enough without footnotes or direct quotations from embargoed documents. In what she does give us, she and Carson emerge from that river crossing, both visible as simply themselves.

 There is that other party, though. There is us, the readers. You can’t be visible if no one is looking (there’s your truism for today). Reading Shapland’s book, one feels distinctly that we are an active party in this telling of self. We are not seeing explicit evidence, but Shapland explains that even that evidence “is slippery, and discoveries never final.” So maybe that forensic evidence is not what we really need to see. Nor does she show us lesbianism as sex act or sexual desire, though she never treats either as if they are wrong or bad or inappropriate. In fact, Shapland even makes a few jokes about sex, which credible sources say is a fairly common life occurrence—sex that is, though maybe also jokes about it. Rather, she makes visible something less readily discernible. “Nor can love be proven,” she writes. “It’s more complicated, harder to see than a ring, a marriage license, a description of any physical encounter.”  In laying bear the intangible, Shapland erases the euphemisms for the lives she examines. Then she reconstructs selfhood to allow the intangible to come alive, to live, to be seen. We see Carson inhabiting herself; we see Shapland inhabiting herself. We see them together in words, in inference, in deduction, and in insight. The scope of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is not limited to a smoking gun admission, a letter to a Hyacinth, or a photo that proves it all. It is bigger—it is a life, two lives, queer lives, told with love and respect.  

 Which leaves us, queer readers, also more visible. We finish this book and realize we, too, have made a crossing, if we have been willing to follow. For we see that we are here and that we’ve been here. And we see that it is possible, powerful, productive, and marvelous to read away from objective indifference and read, instead, for ourselves.