Unread Books

In August 1974, a middle aged woman named Connie Converse packed some belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away from her Michigan home.  She has not been seen or heard from since.

The event never made the news at the time.  Her family, which had been out of town on vacation when Connie left, did not report her missing.  She had left them letters explaining her absence.  Connie had shown signs of discontent for a while and had hinted she might go away.  There wasn’t much to hold her down anyhow.  She was single, and her position as managing editor for a prestigious academic journal had just been eliminated after it moved its base from the University of Michigan to Yale.

Connie would have remained unknown to the world outside her family and friends but for the discovery of a remarkable set of artifacts.  During the 1950s Connie had tried to make a go of it in New York City as a singer-songwriter.  She met with limited success.  She had difficulty finding acceptance for her music.  It didn’t fit into the formulaic pop genre of the era.  The nascent Greenwich Village folk scene favored traditional ballads and protest songs.  A friend secured an appearance for Connie on Walter Cronkite’s CBS morning show in 1954, but nothing came of it.

The friend, Gene Deitch, was an animator by trade but his hobby was making sound recordings.  And so, at Deitch’s home in Westchester County, Connie performed her songs for posterity.  They were not heard again until 2004 when Deitch was invited to share his recordings on the public radio program Spinning on Air.  Connie’s witty and personal songs touched a nerve with the listening public.  Beginning in 2009, several editions of her compilation album How Sad, How Lovely have been released.  (There are a number of postings of the album on YouTube.  Here’s one.)

Connie eventually gave up on being a professional musician, settling into an obscure existence.  (The best known member of the Converse family was her younger brother Philip, who coauthored a seminal text in my field of academic endeavor.)  But the restlessness seems to have remained.  By any measure, Connie (née Elizabeth) was a remarkable individual.  The daughter of a strict Baptist minister, Connie chafed at her small town New England upbringing.  Graduating high school with top honors, she followed her mother and her grandmother before her to Mount Holyoke College where she excelled.  After two years, she quit.

It just happened to be music where Connie wanted to make her mark.  However, she was also a gifted painter, sculptor, and prose writer.  Her lyrics give voice to the frustrations brought on by the straitjacket of social convention inhibiting middle class women in midcentury America.   “Roving Woman” is a particular favorite of mine.  Connie sings of going to bars alone and playing poker with men at a time when respectable dining establishments with saloons would only seat accompanied ladies at dinnertime.  Ladies by themselves in standalone watering holes?  Scandalous.

Connie’s private life was a mystery even to those closest to her.  Her brother Phil recalls never meeting a boyfriend.  (He conceded in an interview before his own death that she may have been a lesbian.)  Photos of Connie in her thirties portray a slightly enigmatic figure.  Bespectacled, fair haired, she was a pretty but ordinary woman.  Her expression reveals little and inspires idle wonder rather than answers.

Aside from the accounts of the people in her life, and the letters she sent to them when she vanished, Connie herself didn’t say much about the mounting frustration her unmet potential caused her.  In an attempt to alleviate her discontent, family and friends pooled their money and sent Connie on a six-month sabbatical in Britain the year before she fell out of sight.  Her mother took her along on a vacation to Alaska to help Connie snap out of her funk.   

To no avail.  Connie had already lost her academic publishing career.  Her doctor then delivered the news she would have to have a hysterectomy.  Brother Philip suggested that this may have deepened her depression since it precluded having children, though at age fifty this would have been a remote prospect. 

So wither Connie Converse?  Philip believed that she was a suicide, driving off a bridge to her death since her car was never found.  (So much for the vaunted buoyancy of the original VWs.)  It does appear to be the most satisfying explanation.  Her Social Security number has not been used since 1974 nor her death reported.  No claimed sightings of her have ever been verified.  If alive, she would be ninety years old.  It’s possible, though unlikely given that Connie was a heavy smoker and drinker. 

The only parallel I can find with Connie’s disappearance was the presumed 1955 suicide of a contemporaneous artist, the poet, novelist, songwriter, filmmaker, and painter Weldon Kees.  Kees left his San Francisco apartment on a summer afternoon never to be seen again.  His car was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, keys in the ignition.  Kees, too, had been depressed in the weeks before going missing and had spoken of wanting to kill himself.  Then again, he had also mentioned decamping to Mexico so who knows?  No body was ever discovered, which gives us license to speculate.

My thoughts on Connie Converse?  I think in her lifetime she suffered the pains of the gifted and sensitive who go unappreciated.  She was an unread book on the shelf, gathering dust.   It’s strange and poignant, though, that a true polymath such as she should have waited forty years after her departure (real or metaphorical) to finally be noticed by critics and a mass audience alike.  We can chalk some of this up to the limits on women her generation experienced.  Perhaps her art was simply out of synch with her times.

I find the lack of reaction to her leaving a bit disconcerting but perhaps reasonable given she had voluntarily absented herself.  We are all at risk of falling through the cracks despite the panopticon nature of our monitored public spaces and the migration online of personal relationships.  I’m reminded particularly of the bizarre demise of Joyce Vincent, the woman who died suddenly in her London flat in 2003 while wrapping Christmas presents and watching TV not to be discovered for another three years.  No one seemed to have noticed her absence.  She was estranged from her family but was an attractive, vivacious woman popular with her co-workers.  Surely she had friends who might have checked up on her.  But it was only when her rent was sufficiently in arrears that the authorities entered the apartment only to find Joyce’s skeletonized remains. 

Joyce Vincent was yet another unread book.  It's a pity there are so many, many more resting on the shelves.

  

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar