Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Unveils the Lives Hidden in History
By: Sebastian S
Tags: Biography, Memoir, Literature, Book Review, Books

Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers Unveils the Lives Hidden in History

An Exploration on the Subjectivity of Biography and History

image via Tin House

Two days after finishing Jenn Shapland’s illuminating My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, I finished (after months of snail-paced and intermittent reading) Robert Caro’s The Path to Power, the first of his yet-to-be-completed five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro’s biography is long, heavily sourced, expansive, authoritative, and novelistic. In its early description of the Lyndon’s notable ancestors and limestone-plagued soil they chose for their home, it has an ambition and style reminiscent of many of the early passages in Steinbeck’s masterpiece, East of Eden. Caro writes in the third person, practically omniscient. One gets the sense that if something is knowable about Johnson, Caro knows it, and if Caro knows it, he’s put it in his book. Caro’s disappearance into the book makes it hard for a layman to doubt or question him. There is no personality to critique. Whatever editorial decisions have been made are invisible. The writing does not disappoint the research, the book marches along, carrying the reader with it, through LBJ’s life and early-to-mid-twentieth century. It is the epitome of historical biography.

Since Jenn Shapland’s book does not hew to the arbitrary lines set by precedent, it cannot be the epitome of any one genre. Instead, it is distinctly itself. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers suggests its personal ambitions from the onset with the oddly put yet alluring title. In an effort to understand both Carson McCullers and Carson’s McCullers’s effect on her and others, Shapland has blended biography, memoir, and literary criticism with the end result being a work that is strikingly intimate and impressively wide-ranging. She shows her deep affinity and care for her subject, and takes us backstage on the process of her research and her writing, in the process answering the types of questions I had about the LBJ biography: How did Caro write this? Why did he chase the topic with such dogmatism? Shapland gives us plenty of the how and the why, giving us a reason to care for McCullers, even if we came to this without an encounter with her.

I came across Carson McCullers in my junior of high school, my first year of serious “literary” reading, the first year that I ever read books that I would return to in adulthood. My independent reading for my English class comprised four books: East of Eden, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Sophie’s Choice, and Ethan Frome. They each had their genius, each opened me up to literature’s various possibilities. McCullers’s book was the first time that I read something where marginalization was not just a character trait meant to endear the character to the reader, the first time that eccentricity wasn’t shorthand for hidden genius, that ostracism was treated like a genuine fact of a person’s life: uncomfortable, painful, isolating, and yet world-expanding and not identity-defining.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers springs from Shapland’s own first encounter with McCullers’s writing at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, an archive of artists’ and writers’ papers where she discovers the letters from Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach to Carson McCullers. At the time, Shapland knew McCullers only as the author of books whose titles “always struck a chord” with her. As a grad-student who’d never felt comfortable calling herself a lesbian despite her romances with other women, Shapland says of those letters, “Retrospect redefines everything in its path, and I am as hesitant to ascribe steady narrative meaning to my own life as to any other’s. But I suppose we could call those letters a turning point.” For hard evidence of the turning point it was, we learn that within a week of reading those letters she cuts her hair short and within the year is “more or less comfortably” calling herself a lesbian for the first time. Shapland goes on to detail her research, her response to her research, and McCullers troubled but vibrant life, giving us a picture of two authors separated by time but intertwined via the simple, time-transgressing acts: writing and reading.

If there’s a focus in this languorous, spacious document, it’s one on the interpretive aspect that biography and autobiography often try to hide. Along with the letters, Shapland reads the session notes from McCullers late-stage therapy sessions with Dr. Mary Mercer to cure an acute case of writer’s block, previous McCullers biographies, and, of course, McCullers’s own writings. Within these texts Shapland finds herself and, partly because she seeks it out and partly because it’s there, a queer history embedded in coded language and shuttled off to the margins. In Reeves, the man McCullers joins in a torturous marriage of convenience, Shapland finds both an antagonist and hindrance to McCullers efforts at a joyful life and a gay man whose outward history she questions and interprets in a remarkably generous matter. When there is mention of him sailing with a roommate, she inserts the simple aside “roommate?” to show us her obvious interpretation, an obviously a personal one as she mentions her own past with “roommates” and one whose personal origins do not suffer loss of authority as she traces the many times that biographers, literary critics, and historians have couched queer lives in dulling language that queer lives need to discover, partly because only queer people can discover them: “Queer people have much to contribute to our collective knowledge of secrecy and its effects, though in this case it takes a queer ear, a familiarity with the interior of a closeted relationship, to hear it.”

Shapland’s is such a queer ear, and while the book has many pleasures and interests for someone, like myself, who admires Carson McCullers’s writing and knows precious little about her life aside from the standard, queer Southern writer, it mines equally as many pleasures from Shapland’s attuned listening and her own personal revelations. We witness her journey of writing this book, from the serendipitous discovery of the letters to her stay at Yaddo, which she introduces with the simple, unambiguous language that pushes her away from opaque expertise into lucid attention: “I interpreted this as a miracle. Yaddo was a dream of mine since I first started writing, and a goal for inhabiting the places that were most important to Carson.”

If the goal of the book was to inhabit the same space as Carson, then My Autobiography of Carson McCullers can only be considered a success. Shapland’s flaunted subjectivity is a great correction to the disingenuous efforts at objectivity that have marred so much of literary and historical biography, particularly when discussing queer figures. Even the book’s fragmented structure is a form of correction for the laboriously linear narratives that disjointed lives are often shoehorned into. Shapland might be guilty of projection, of too much attachment to her own interpretations, of agenda-setting, but she records these aspects of her process in the book, so we can see and judge them for ourselves. In doing so, she’s written a book that makes critics of the lay readers and encourages us to listen to the hidden codes that “authoritative” texts use to muffle the queerness and irreducibility that can connect past lives to our own.

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