A sensitive chronicle of a biographer’s search for truth.
An intimate look at the life and loves of Carson McCullers (1917-1967).
“To tell another person’s story,” Shapland observes in her deft, graceful literary debut, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.” The author knew little about McCullers before she became an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a repository for writers’ and artists’ archives at the University of Texas. Responding to a scholar’s request, she discovered eight letters from Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach to McCullers that struck Shapland immediately as “intimate, suggestive” love letters. For Shapland, at the time suffering the end of a “major, slow-burning catastrophe,” the letters marked a “turning point.” Within a week, she cut her hair short. “Within a year,” she writes, “I would be more or less comfortably calling myself a lesbian for the first time.” The letters inspired further research, focused especially on McCullers’ sexuality, about which Shapland found intriguing evidence in transcripts of her taped therapy sessions with Dr. Mary Mercer, begun when McCullers was 41 and which McCullers described “as an attempt of writing her autobiography.” In addition, following the sessions, McCullers wrote letters to Mercer “awash in the joy of self-revelation” and her “love for Dr. Mary.” The more Shapland discovered about McCullers, the more convinced she became that McCullers was a lesbian who had been intensely in love with several women. Identifying with McCullers “as a writer, as a queer person, as a chronically ill person,” Shapland felt she had special insight into her subject’s life. At the same time, looking to McCullers “as a role model,” she wondered if she was “reading into her queerness”: imposing her own life story, and her own needs, on McCullers, in part to rescue her from “retroactive closeting by peers and biographers.” Shapland interweaves candid self-questioning and revealing personal stories with a nuanced portrait of a writer who confessed her loves were “untouchable” and her feelings “inarticulable.”
A sensitive chronicle of a biographer’s search for truth.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947793-28-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Jacob Marley's injunction that we all bear the chains we forge in life could be the lesson of Cammermeyer's life story. But like Scrooge, she shows that we all have the power to break those chains and find happiness. Cammermeyer, the Army reservist who challenged the military policy on homosexuality, was born in 1942 in Norway and spent her early childhood under the Nazi occupation while her parents participated in the Resistance. The daughter of a stern, undemonstrative father and a subservient mother, she spent her youth in a household where only the male children ``counted.'' After the family moved to America in the early 1950s, she decided to go to medical school, following in the footsteps of her father, a prominent neurological research scientist. When poor grades in college put an end to that dream, Cammermeyer, by then a naturalized citizen, enlisted in the Army, and became a nurse. During a tour of duty in Germany, she met and married her husband, another officer. Though their marriage was plagued from the beginning, she was determined to be a good wife. When her husband was sent to Vietnam, she volunteered as well. Upon returning, both of them, who believed in the US mission in Southeast Asia, were shocked by the naãvetÇ of the American public. Though they raised a family and lived in a dream house, the couple finally divorced when she was 38. A few years later, Cammermeyer finally found fulfillment in a relationship with a woman. She also pursued her military career. During a routine interview for a higher security clearance, she admitted that she was a lesbian and was discharged. She set out to challenge the action in court and was eventually vindicated and ordered reinstated. Appeals continue, however, and she remains out of uniform. Her story is scheduled to appear as an NBC TV movie in February 1995. Cammermeyer tells her story with clarity and sincerity. Despite coauthor Fisher's somewhat repetitive style, the book has a power that brings readers along on this courageous soldier's journey. (16 pages of b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85167-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
A multivocal treatment well suited to the complex and dappled life of one of America's premier modern poets. Members of Bishop's wide circle of friends from literature and the arts (among them John Ashbery, Robert Giroux, Helen Muchnic, Anne Stevenson, Ned Rorem, and James Laughlin) recall with eloquence the poet's intelligence, her reserve, her anxiety, and her peculiar intensity through the stages and stories of her accomplished and troubled life. Born to a mentally ill mother and a father who died when she was eight months old, Bishop (19111979) spent her early years living with family members in Worcester, Boston, and Great Village, Mass. Recollections by her childhood friends reveal a very intelligent but odd personality—shy, and often embarrassed or pained by common experiences. Several contributors comment, however, on the order, discipline, and companionship she found at the Walnut Hill School between 1927 and '30; there she began to write plays, short stories, book reviews, and poetry for the school's magazine. From her Vassar days, Bishop is remembered for her strong mind, arch wit, sometimes taciturn demeanor, and her talent for writing. With Mary McCarthy and others, she launched the alternative literary magazine Con Spirito, which created a sensation on campus and brought her to the notice of the Ivy League literati of the time, eventually yielding an introduction to poet Marianne Moore. After graduating from college, Bishop traveled to New York, Europe, Key West, and Rio de Janeiro, and through several lesbian love relationships, the most sustained of which with Lota de Macedo Soares. Friends recall these adult years as difficult, sometimes drunken, but also rewarding for Bishop as a person and a poet. After her lover's death in 1967, Bishop's life took shape around a series of teaching appointments at the University of Washington, Harvard, and finally New York University. Although a few of Fountain's (English dept. chairman at Miss Porter's School) and Brazeau's (Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, 1983) transitions push too hard, the portrait of the poet this oral biography creates is, finally, absorbing and at times beautiful and graced with artfulness.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87023-936-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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