My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“To tell another person’s story,” Jenn Shapland comments, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.”
"All women are lesbians," according to Jill Johnston, even if they only love themselves. The author of this book, Jenn Shapland, uses her exploration of McCullers' sexuality and gender to research her own identity as a lesbian writer. As she pores through McCullers' papers, letters, therapy records, in at least four archives (U of TX Austin, Duke, Columbia, GA, and NYPL), she's trying to determine with whom the twice-married McCullers had relationships. She married Reeves McCullers twice and lived with several men while pursuing different women. There were many queer women writers who crossed her path while she lived in February House in NYC or at the Yaddo writing retreat in New York (Janet Flanner, Katherine Anne Porter, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, the director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, who was homophobically attacked by Robert Lowell for Communist sympathies during the red scares of the fifties) Described are her close relationships with Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and with her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer). Of course, affectionate letters notwithstanding, it is a challenge to try to determine the depth of passion in these relationships and the mixture of memoir and biography challenged at times, but I stayed interested. Microchapters help. McCullers was a dynamic, empathetic artist who suffered from ill health (rheumatic heart trouble generating numerous strokes, ten surgeries for paralysis in her left hand, removal of a breast) and alcoholism.. She traveled extensively and made a fetish of fashion. She wrote eight books, several plays, most dealing with loneliness and unrequited love which figured prominently in my teenage reading. When one wearies of reading scholarship, the story of Shapland and her partner, Chelsea, animates this unique memoir and sends us back to the work of McCullers.

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Sipsworth

Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Seeking respite from political mayhem, I picked up Sipsworth, a perfectly delightful escape: the tale of an 83-year-old woman regaining zest over a two-week period with the help of a pet mouse. Not my usual fare, but it was ideal. Detailed descriptions of her solitary meals, cups of tea, a Bakewell tart once a week, the old movies she favors on TV, her classical music programs, as she studies the facts about mice gleaned at the local library.
Memorable sentences:
"Returning after sixty years, Helen had felt her particular circumstances special: just as she had once been singled out for happiness, she was now an object of despair. But then after so many consecutive months alone, she came to the realisation that such feelings were simply the conditions of old age and largely the same for everybody....Those who in life had held back in matters of love would end in bitterness."
"The only real proof of her advanced age are a chronic, persistent feeling of defeat, aching limbs, and the power of invisibility to anyone between the ages of ten and fifty."

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Story of a Poem

Story of a Poem by Matthew Zapruder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An ideal book for me, Matthew Zapruder writes lyrically and thoughtfully about how a poem unfolds for him through various drafts and picks up bits of his reading along the way to add to his ideas, changing his poem with each draft. Part memoir, he talks about his pitch-perfect son's diagnosis of autism, his sobriety, his father's death, his reading, his visits to poets (W S Merwin), to the Isamu Noguchi Museum, about Basho, Li BaiLi Bai, and even Rupi Kaur, Paul Celan, Wallace Stevens, Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Mary Ruefle, Richard Hugo,and many more poets. Relatable and compelling, I read it late into the night and each morning I looked up poems.

"Dear Reader, I am trying to pry open your casket/ with this burning snowflake." James Tate

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Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was skeptical for the first five chapters but read encouragement online and kept moving along at which time, Rooney's realistic narration, musings and two-thread stream of consciousness story of the estranged brothers swept me up. I enjoyed the philosophical asides, the poetry, the pondering of each of the characters in their lively arguments and thoughts and empathized with their dilemmas. Alice, Peter's long-time lover reeling from pain after her mysterious accident leaves her unable to have sex (I keep thinking of Jake in The Sun Also Rises ) and Peter falls for a young sex worker named Naomi; Peter and his brother Ivan, a chess competitor, have just lost their father and are at odds over that and most of their relationship; Ivan loves Margaret, an older, married woman separated from her alcoholic husband; and, finally, there is a wonderful black and white dog. The only other Rooney I've read was which was not a high rating for me was Beautiful World, Where Are You: Chapter Samplerso I was delighted with how much I enjoyed Intermezzo.

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The Hundred Headless Woman (La femme 100 têtes)

The Hundred Headless Woman by Max Ernst
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The drawings in Max Ernst surrealist collage novel recollect Victorian black and white woodblock illustrations: nude women, besuited men, fantastic creatures, games, crimes, and conveyances encountered by Germinal/Perturbation, the hundred headless woman on her visit to a troubled dried-up earth, accompanied by Loplop the Swallow, "the Bird Superior".
References to mystery and religion throughout plus overt mention of impressionist painters of the era (Seurat, Cezanne, Rosa Bonheur) and other figures, Jules Verne, Mata Hari. Might be a fine college thesis and probably has been. Fascinating but still mysterious and worthy of rereading.

According to Andre Breton, The Hundred Headless Woman : La Femme 100 tetes

will be preeminently the picture book of our day, wherein it will be more and more apparent that every living room "has gone to the bottom of a lake" which, we must point out, its chandeliers of fishes, its gilded stars, its dancing grasses, its mud bottom and its raiment of reflections. Such is our idea of progress that, on the eve of 1930, we are glad and impatient, for once, to see children's eyes, filled with the ineffable, open like butterflies on the edge of this lake while, for their amazement and our own, fall the black lace masks that covered the first hundred faces of the enchantress.

"

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Small Rain *****

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who would expect to be so completely absorbed by the stream of consciousness thoughts of a man trapped in a hospital bed threatened by a puzzling and serious vascular medical condition early in the epidemic when medical cautions abound (limited visitors) and PPE is at a premium. The narrator/patient is a college poetry teacher and, to my delight, mentions a handful of poets especially Gerald Oppen and Geoffrey Hill, Frank Bidart, Sylvia Plath and a Valeri Petrov Bulgarian translation done by Richard Wilbur. I was in my element. His husband is a Spaniard and the two of them speak English and Spanish on alternate days. The book also treats the myriad indignities of the wounded body, the magnification of time as one awaits meds, the helplessness and hunger. When the poet patient is finally untethered and released, awaiting a ride home, he says to himself: "Try to remember this, I admonished myself, since I knew it would fade. All happiness fades, or does for me, misery digs deep gouges in memory, sets the course of the self, I sometimes think, it lays down the tracks one is condemned to move along, whereas happiness leaves no trace...Why should only suffering be a vale of soul-making, why shouldn't the soul be made of this moment, too, this unremarkable moment, remember this." And his book does just that, leaving a record of not only his suffering but of kindness, love and poetry.

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Tell Me Everything

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tell Me Everything, revisits many of the familiar denizens of the small town Maine surrounding Lucy Barton which the author created in other volumes. The quirks and abundant conversations continue in this book, although this time Bob Burgess and his feelings for Lucy are the focus, when the story has a focus, as it meanders through myriad people's lives. Olive Kitteridge is extant as is William and many new characters who wish to leave their mark on the world. I enjoyed it, but it it had stiff competition from my other selections this month. It's a red-letter fall for new titles.

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