[ Music ] >> Poetry and Prose is sponsored by the National Endowment
for the Arts. [ Music ] >> Hello, I'm Crosby Kemper. I'm the Director of
the Institute of Museum and Library Services in
the federal government, former Kansas City
Public Library Director, and a lifetime reader, which
is my main qualification for being here. We're part of the National
Book Festival here today, doing a segment on
Literary Lives. Our theme is Ingenuity, and that
will be an interesting theme to contemplate with
these two authors. The two authors, Mark
Doty and Jenn Shapland, are very engaging writers, I'll
fully introduce in one second. But first, I want to talk
about the problem of the day that we'll ingeniously solve. They have written, each written
a book, about another author. Very idiosyncratic
author, so different eras. And as a way of explaining
their own identities, their own exploration if
you will, of the identities of the authors and
of themselves. So, the basic question that
both authors are talking about is a sexual
identity of the authors and we'll let them talk about their own view
of that in a second. They have strong answers about
identity in both of these books. Mark Doty has written, "What is
Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life." He's written ten volumes
of poetry, three memoirs, he's won the National
Book Award, the National Book Critics Award, the Los Angeles Times
Book Award, and the T.S. Elliott Prize. He teaches at Rutgers and
lives in New York City. Jenn Shapland, has just
published her first book, "My Autobiography of
Carson McCullers." She has frequently appeared
in magazines and quarterlies and won the Rabkin Prize
for Art Journalism, and the Pushcart
Prize for an essay -- for her essay, "Finders
Keepers." She has a PhD from the
University of Texas, and lives in Santa Fe. I'm excited and honored to
be talking to them today about their book -- books. As a starting question for
both of you, Mark first and then Jenn, Emily Dickinson,
whom you Mark rightly compare to Walt Whitman as an inventor of the modern American
literature, took one look at Leaves of Grass and
immediately closed the book. And Jenn, I asked you
about Flannery O'Connor, the other dark angel
of southern writing, who apparently threw her copy
of The Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers,
into the trash. I ask you both, "Why?" >> Well, first of all, I don't
know if I believe that story, about Emily Dickinson. Dickinson was so brilliant,
[inaudible] thinker that I think she
had to find stuff of value in Leaves of Grass. How could she not? However, [inaudible] says that
Whitman was writing a poetry that had no audience when he
[inaudible] his first edition. He invented American free verse. His poems were [inaudible]
ranging massive things. It was hard to tell where one
started and another stopped. It was a very eccentric
project, self-published, appearing out of nowhere,
reviewed maybe 6 or 7 times. At least 4 of those were
written by the poet himself. It was just an odd production. It was a funny-looking book. No writer's name on the outside
-- on the jacket, you know? The cover of the book. And even on the title page,
no name of the author. What was this thing? So, people must have
had their reservations, but I think she would have
noticed some genius in it. I think she would
also have been aware that it was a very sexy
book, in a very direct way, and that might produce
some discomfort in the libraries of Amherst. Many people were
uncomfortable with [inaudible]. >> Though of course Emerson
famously wrote him a letter upon receiving the book
saying, "I greet you at the beginning
of a great career." He never went away completely. I mean, you sometimes see
him along with Melville as the Lost American Great
until we discover him in the 20th Century, etcetera. But he never really went away. He had his admirers and
interlockers through his life. And Jenn, one would have
expected, I would think, having read both of them
now, Flannery O'Connor to love the writing, which is
-- has its Gothic aspects to it, its darker aspects to it,
as O'Connor's writing did. But she didn't. >> Yes. I mean I have my own
theories about this, obviously. Carson McCullers and
Flannery O'Connor did run across each other
and were connected through their time at Yaddo. And were kind of on polar
opposites of scandal that happened at Yaddo, the
writers residency in New York. And at that time, Carson came
down defending the director of Yaddo who Flannery
O'Connor was arguing along with Robert Lowell and a
few others, was a communist, and then kind of underneath
that, the subtext was also that she was a lesbian or
that she was supporting kind of queer sympathies as well. So, Flannery O'Connor's kind
of famous throwing "Clock Without Hand" across
the room, suggests to me that she was really
uncomfortable maybe with the subject matter. Although, that book, you know
it's Carson McCullers last book, and it was published in the
60s, she's dealing with queer, multiracial relationships and
longings, and she's also dealing with kind of the backlash
of White supremacy in the small-town South. Kind of the burning of
different people's homes, the bombing of Black people's
homes in quote/unquote "White neighborhoods." So, it didn't receive a lot
of good reviews at the time. None of them really specified
that it was the racial content or the sexual content
that bothered them, but I suspect reading it now
that that was really difficult for some readers to
wrap their heads around, Flannery O'Connor included. And I'll just also mention that
there was recently an article in the New Yorker about
O'Connor and her kind of history of racism in her
letters and in her life. >> Oh, Elie. Yes. >> Yes. >> Yes, [inaudible] in fact
[inaudible] article I thought Paul Elie wrote. So, I would like to, if you
would, both talk a little bit about something that I think
unites Whitman and McCullers at an important moment
in their lives. The thing that begins
to be cathartic for their creative lives. And that is music. Paul Zweig, whose
book you like Mark, talks a lot about Italian Opera
suddenly becoming an important thing in Whitman's life, at
exactly the moment he changes from being a journalist
for the Brooklyn Eagle and the Democratic
Review, etcetera, and starts to become a poet. And similarly Jenn,
McCullers writes, both in her autobiography
and in the novels, about at a certain
age, discovering music, and particularly Mozart and Bach
I think are important to her. And later in life, she has
encounters with opera as well. Was music liberating
for both of them? Was it a deeply important
thing for their creative lives? >> Whitman as the poet was very
much drawn to the ecstatic. He wanted to be able to
embody experiences of his which went beyond the boundaries
of everyday experience. So, opera is a great place
to feel a transcendence, to feel the outpouring
of passion. And in a way, Whitman sort of
[inaudible] preparing the way or anticipating what would
become a tradition for gay men, which is using somebody
else, a vocalist, to [inaudible] one's feeling. You know, as the
diva, stands on stage and outpours all this passion, which the writer himself
could not express directly, with such intense emotion. Whitman loves that. He talks about listening to
the greats and the baritone and he shows she's being
sort of spun around the room in an orbit, like a planet. The soprano pours
out here heart. So, yes. I think it was an
absolute galvanizing experience, and one that probably ratcheted up his ambitions
for his own poems. >> And Jenn, the piano is really
terribly important to McCullers. She talks about Mary
Tucker, her piano teacher, and then McKelly [phonetic],
and her discoveries. >> Discoveries of
music, and yes, just like what Mark was saying, it's really the inexpressible
qualities of -- in life that McCullers found
expressed through music, as well as through writing. When she was young, she
wanted to be a musician and there's a bit of lore around
this in her life, that she was on her way to Julliard to study
music, and that along the way, she decided to become a writer. And it's kind of been
told different ways how that decision came about. But she was madly in love with
her piano teacher, Mary Tucker, when she was young, and had
this just really formative relationship with this person
who was teaching her how to express feelings through
music, through the piano. And then throughout her life,
she befriended musicians and composers when
she was in Brooklyn, living at February House. She was surrounded by
musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers. And the same at Yaddo. So, music was just kind of
a central part of her life. And I think from an
early age, it was a way of seeing how she could connect
to a world beyond Columbus, Georgia, beyond the south,
beyond the world that she knew. It was a way of connecting
with kind of the urban, the cosmopolitan, but also
yes, just a larger world. Music was one of the ways that
she met her first husband, Reeves, and also you know, several of her closest
friends when she was young. It was kind of almost her
ticket out of the south. >> So, now I'd like to talk
to you both about a ticket in, that your entry into the lives
of McCullers and Whitman. And Jenn, you --
and I'd like to talk about the physicality
of that for a minute. I mean, Jenn, you actually
lived in McCullers' house. And I hope I'm not
revealing anything here, that you'd rather have people
read about in the book, but you have a relationship
with her clothes even. >> Right, yes. Yes. Actually, that was one of
the first ways into her story. So, you know, I found a
set of letters that she -- well, that actually a
woman had written her, that Annemarie Schwarzenbach,
had written her in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center,
at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was an
intern during graduate school for two years. I found these letters. Got interested in her story,
and then in the second year of my internship, I had to
choose kind of a project to do. And I had always been
really interested in the personal effects
collection. So, the clothes and objects,
the typewriters, the eyeglasses, the kind of everyday,
household memorabilia that winds up in an archive that you know, doesn't always have
much use for scholars. And so, I ended up
cataloging her clothes, which included some wool coats,
some nightgowns, some socks, a hat, and the more I
interacted with those objects, the more interested I
became in her story, and which is how I kind of
wound up living in her house in Columbus for a month. Her childhood home,
which is a residency for writers and musicians. Although, I wasn't an
official resident there. But I lived there for
a month and really kind of immersed myself in her
surroundings, in her belongings. Again, I think as a way to
try to get closer to her, or to try to understand a
story that I wasn't finding in the written record about her. >> And Mark, we're all more
distant from Walt Whitman and it's hard to have the
same personal engagement, though you did -- the book opens
with your visiting his house, and describing the neighborhood. But there is, I feel
in your book, a very physical relationship,
or an attempt at least to have a physical relationship, which becomes almost
transcendental at the end of the book with Whitman. >> He was so interested in
moving through the page, to have a kind of personal
context with his reader. He's always saying, you know,
"I stop here waiting for you," or "I get weary of this cold,
[inaudible], in between us. I want to make contact." "Who touches this?" he said at one of
his -- touches a man. So, he's asking for that kind
of intimacy with his readers, and it seems to me that
when you read a poet, if it was that [inaudible], he's
always talking about desire, about his own sense of the
physicality, his size, his -- how he moves in the world,
that physicality speaks to the physicality
of the reader. And I think it's one of
the things that makes him so much of an intimate poet. When he's drawing us
in, on his bodily level. And he wants to be, he
says, "the poet of the body, and the poet of the soul." Poets of his time, wanted
to be poets of the soul, more than they wanted
to be poets of the body. So, that balancing
act is something that really involves
readers now, I think. And especially [inaudible]
readers. >> So, there is a question in
what [inaudible] about both of the -- both of them, and
what you are both writing about, about their presentations
of self, if you will. Both of them seem to me to
present their lives as -- and in their writing, the
character of Walt Whitman, the rough, the cosmos, and Mick
and Amelia and Frankie Adams in the novels, as
adventurers, if you will. Adventurers of the soul. They're seeking something. And you have both written
eloquently in your two books, about the sexual nature
of that, the revealing or unrevealed quality of that. I wonder if you could talk
a little bit about that, and maybe make a distinction. One of the things that I think
is interesting in the books, is that the modulations
between sex and eros and love in their lives, and also the -- and the word androgyny
comes to mind, too. And I think Jenn,
you used the word. I'm not sure Mark if you
do, but I felt an attempt on Whitman's part,
and your attempt to see it, to be androgynous. Maybe a failed attempt. But maybe a more successful
attempt with Carson McCullers. >> Yes. I think Carson
McCullers, if you look at photos of her today, for the most
part, you'll see someone who -- she's wearing clothes
that look masculine. She's often wearing a
suit, or she's wearing kind of a collared shirt and a
tie, in a lot of her photos. And so, there's almost this
like hemming it up gore, this androgynous look. And one of the things that
really drew me to her, was as you mentioned, she
was certainly on a quest in her writing and in her life. But she was also
truly unconventional. She was an unconventional woman. She didn't fit the model of what
was expected of her as a woman, growing up in the south,
in the 30s and 40s. And she was unconventional
in her relationships. Her relationships with
women and with men. She was unconventional in
her writing and on the page, in the characters she chose
to explore, especially kind of young, female characters,
like you mentioned. Nick and Frankie, who
are both you know, these kind of off-beat little
girls who are really, you know, seeking independence,
and seeking to kind of make their own
way in the world, in a world that's really
conscribed a very specific role for them. And it's interesting to me too, to look out at the
landscape of fiction today. I feel like I see so many Micks
and so many Frankies walking around in the pages of
fiction now, and in films. I think that she's -- she's
really captured a spirit of freedom and independence
for her characters. But she was also kind of living
out, which is what inspired me about her, that she was candid. She was frank. She was unabashed about who she
loved and who she wanted to be. And even in her politics,
she was not shy. Could be kind of
radically progressive, radically anti-racist, and
you know, radically open to other people and empathetic. So, I think all of those
things kind of came together, in the way she moved through
the world, the way she spoke, the way she wrote, and also
in the way she dressed, the way she presented herself. >> And Mark, Whitman is
trying to embrace the world. I mean, he's constantly talking
about embracing, embracing, the comrades, men and
women, but he seems to be more successful embracing
men than embracing [inaudible]. >> D.H. Lawrence said that Whitman's women
always turn into mothers. The maternal is never very far
away with [inaudible] nursing and caring and [inaudible]. You know, Walter Whitman, Jr. he's from Huntington,
Long Island. He had to invent the person
who could write the poems. He became Walt Whitman, which is
I think maybe a familiar pattern for gay or lesbian. We move from wherever our
place of origin, into cities, into some other community,
and recreate ourselves. I don't mean that we're
false, artificial, but rather that to become
the person you are inside, sometimes takes a work of art. So, Whitman [inaudible] to it. And a lot of what that
self is about is being on the cutting edge of a
certain new sort of sexuality. He no longer has to figure -- he's writing, especially
in his first edition, before the words heterosexual
or homosexual exist. He thinks it a kind of continuum
of desire, a kind of flow of desire can go in
different directions. If he -- behavior can be sexual, but that [inaudible]
change your identity. So, as those words come into
play later in the century, the world looks really
different. It's very hard for us to not
think about the world as split into gay and straight. But he didn't [inaudible]
that way. And nor did many
people of his time, especially in earlier editions. So, it's a kind of freedom
in that, and he takes that freedom to a new position. He's part of a generation of
people moving from small towns, farms, into cities, where they
were free to reinvent themselves and not be constricted by an
identity given by their family, but rather, to see
who they could be. I think New York
still feels like that. You know, New York, [inaudible]
who do I want to be today? Full of possibility. >> Of course, one thing
that both of them have in common is Brooklyn. They both lived in Brooklyn. McCullers writes about Brooklyn, and writes about Walt
Whitman having lived nearby. Family -- the interesting
thing -- one interesting thing to
me that I didn't realize until reading your books and
reading Leaves of Grass again, and reading McCullers for
the first time really, but really immersing myself, is how important family
was to both of them. And we think of them
correctly, as you both said, they have created a persona. They've each created a persona,
very difficult in McCullers case to do as a southern woman with what you've
just described, Jenn. Very difficult for anybody
to do, because you know, with Whitman, because
he's trying to create a universal
man, if you will. And yet, at the core,
for both of them, McCullers keeps returning to
her family in various ways, and brings her mother to
live with her, and there's -- Whitman and his brother, his younger brother who's
developmentally disabled, who, the more I read about
it, the more I -- "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry," seems to me to be about his brother, ultimately. Have I misread [inaudible]? >> Go ahead. Please, go ahead. >> No, I'm just -- that
was something that I got from reading your books,
and from reading them, and I'm wondering
what you think. >> Well, it's so
touching that he -- all his life, takes care
of the younger brother. He even has [inaudible]
brother died from [inaudible]. He left money to have the
brother cared for, for the rest of his life in institution. The brother died young. And Whitman had the brother
installed in the same tomb in Camden, and he
prepared for that. So, yes, he very much wanted
to hold that group together. He had a difficult
father, a mother who drank or [inaudible] many problems
with some other brothers and sisters, and I think
he constructed a family. It's one of the things you
do [inaudible] doing what [inaudible] hold together,
may take the place of a kind of unity that doesn't
already exist. In other words, I don't think
anybody handed him a family that was supportive,
that was whole, but he was trying to make one. >> And with Pete
Doyle, later in life, or his work in the hospitals
during the Civil War, there is some sense that
he's trying to create a world that he can -- that can be a
family, or can be this larger, universal world that he wants --
the world he wants to embrace. >> You know, he still believed
[inaudible] a democracy founded on our affections for each
other, and when he want down to the battlefields
of Virginia, early in the Civil War,
and saw what happened to those young men whom he
had you know, so admired, and who he thought might
be foundational members of this new society, he saw
them tearing each other apart on the battlefield. And as a result,
wound up working in the makeshift hospitals in D.C. A devastating
experience for him. He spent years there. [Inaudible] soldiers,
Confederate and Union soldiers, [inaudible] candies and fruit,
writing letters for them, reading letters to
the illiterate. And he was absolutely devasted
by [inaudible] of those bodies in these terrible places with
no antibiotics, you know? No sterilization [inaudible]. Really [inaudible] hospitals. A great [inaudible] for him. Probably the hardest
in his life, I think. >> And heroic, too, I think. >> Trying to make it. >> And, Jenn, one of the
things that so interested me about McCullers' life and
your engagement with it, you had a similar
experience by being at Yaddo, creating a family outside
of the family, if you will. She also had this experience,
which you mentioned in passing, what's called February House
with Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee, and the others, the Bowles,
Jane and Paul Bowles, etcetera. A kind of fascinating group, and was she recreating
her family in a way? >> I think so. I think that she
kind of had a series of chosen families
throughout her life, and one of those was
February House, was this group that you mentioned, the Bowles
and Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, Gypsy Rose
Lee, this group of people that she just ended up living
in a house with, in Brooklyn. And she kind of really came
into her own in that house. She was married at the time,
but just decided to live apart from her husband, who
she eventually divorced, and found in this community,
in this house, just the chance to -- to not only be
herself, but to find others who were trying to find
their way in the world, in a similar -- you know, with a similar sense
of unconventionality. She was surrounded as I said,
by artists of all stripes, while she was at February House. And then she had the same, or a
similar experience when she was at Yaddo, and she kind of would
find her way to what was dubbed as the Queer Table or the
Table of the Sensitives, which she said she never
knew that's where she was, that that's just kind
of where she landed. Other people who were also,
you know, kind of experimenting with different ways of
living, different ways of expressing their sexuality
and their gender identity. And so, she had these
chosen families. And then at the same
time, as we mentioned, her own birth family was
really important to her. Tragedy struck her family when
her father committed suicide, and she moved her mother
and her sister up to Nyack, and ultimately bought
them a house there. She lived with her mother
until her mother died, and they were extremely close. So, one thing that
I think is amazing about her story is the way that her actual family
also accepted her and supported her
throughout her life, and she supported them as well. >> So, we're about
to run out of time, and I want to ask you
both the same question about your relationship
with the authors that you've written about. These are both very intimate,
brilliantly intimate books. Intimate in your
exploration of their lives, and of your own lives
in relationship to them. So, the question
I want to ask is, "At the end of your exploration,
at the end of these books, are you thinking of
yourselves as a lover, a friend, a commarado [phonetic]?" Or Jenn, you have
a wonderful line about a biographer
being a burglar, stealing into someone's house. Or do you think -- do you think
of yourselves in that way, as a burglar who's
stolen into the house, or someone with the
ring of Gyges on? You're the invisible
stalker inside the house. What's your relationship
today to Carson and to Walt? >> Whitman said, "To
have great poems, there must be great audiences." And he did not have any
audience in the beginning. He called his audience
into being. And as I have lived with
his work, I felt more and more a sort of personal
tug in that [inaudible]. That work speaks to me in a
way that little else does. And I want to make something -- I wanted to be the reader
those poems deserved, you know? And I don't think
I can achieve that, but I can make gestures
in that direction. And it is a relationship of
comradery, of friendship, of mutual concerns, obsessions, and there is certainly an
element of [inaudible]. Absolutely, I -- yes. What can I say? He has vitality of all sorts. Pours out of those poems, and I find myself
responding to [inaudible]. So, yes. It's an archetype. >> Thank you. And Jenn? >> I think that there's
an element of every one of those identities and I kind
of address and explore each of those to a certain
extent, in the book. But I like what you said, Mark. I think the first thought
that came to my mind as well was that,
all I really want is to be a reader of
Carson McCullers. And to kind of encourage
others to read her work if perhaps they haven't
come across it before. And you know, that seems to me like the most meaningful
relationship that I have with her. And I still, you know, have
some sense of the burglar, have some sense of the
stalker, or the voyeur, [inaudible] looking so
closely at someone else's life. And then now, you know,
after the book coming out, being kind of in
these situations where I'm suddenly an expert
on her life, you know, just because of the
other research I've done and the writing I've done. This you know, being
asked to speak for her. I get asked a lot if I
ever encountered her ghost or what I would think
Carson would -- how she would feel
about the book. And I find these questions
really [inaudible]. And my feeling is
just that she's -- she likes the attention,
I would feel. You know, she's glad that
anyone's talking about her. You always love gossip
[inaudible]. So, yes. Yes, I would hope that
Walt and Carson are pleased that there's a conversation
about them happening today. >> Yes. >> Well, I would say as
an admirer of McCullers, a new admirer of McCullers,
and as a long-time admirer of Whitman, that you've
both successfully done that. And so, Jenn, I greet
you at the beginning of a great literary career. Mark, I greet you in the middle
of a great literary career. And thank you both so much for discussing your
books with us today. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure. [ Music ]
