The years that followed were overtaken by my desire to understand the magnitude of Carson and Annemarie’s on-paper love. I tried to tell a few people about the letters, but I couldn’t explain why they were so significant to me. Like most 25-year-olds, I couldn’t figure out what came next. I didn’t know whether I wanted to date women, but on the heels of emotional and sexual manipulation by a male professor, the idea of dating men seemed pretty dismal.
I found the letters at the tail end of the slow-burning catastrophe of my 20s: never quite breaking up with my first love-a woman I’d met our freshman year of college-after six closeted years together. Other than my own, I had never read love letters between women before. Like mine, they were overwrought, wrung with feeling and a need to declare it in writing. 1941.” Annemarie’s handwriting was so small and insistent that the missives read long, though often they covered only the front and back of a single sheet. One had the heading “On the Congo River, Sept. Annemarie, I discovered, was a Swiss writer, photographer, silk heiress, and known lady-killer who spent time in New York in the late 1930s and early ’40s, but there wasn’t much else.įolder 29.4 held eight letters from Annemarie to Carson, but none of Carson’s replies. I brought the folder upstairs, hurried to my 3 o’clock reference desk shift, and started Googling. I wanted to know everything about them both. It was very little to go on, and yet I felt utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women.
Another thing I recognized: The intimacy of Annemarie’s tone contained a hint of plausible deniability, as though the “wave of love” she referred to might not have been about Carson at all. Letters with words like darling and baby. I had written letters like these to women I’d loved. To Carson, Annemarie recalled “talking as we did, you and I, at that lunch time, you remember, at the corner near the Bedford Hotel, with milk and bread and butter, ages ago.”Īnnemarie’s language in her letters to Carson was intimate, suggestive, or at least I read it that way. Hearing only the ticktick of the sliding electric shelves, I read on. “Love”-did that mean what I thought it did? Instinctively, I listened for anyone who might be coming. I looked up at the rows of manuscript boxes that surrounded me, mind humming, face flushed.
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