Howard Fishman: ‘To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie Converse’

[It’s been a long time since I’ve written a book review, and there are a number of reasons for that, but the big two are not wanting to fix what I think about something, for myself, because it reduces it; and not wanting to engage in spurious authoritativeness, because I can string a sentence together. But I’m starting to think that disengagement is worse, and that there is probably a happy medium, a lighter touch. Again, we shall see.]

What I want to demand, and would not be caught dead demanding, was a few swims in the sea of unsaidness. [...] For the best communication, the most satisfactory human relationship... it seems now to me that knowing and being known are prerequisites... Being a complex and inward personality, I have always found it difficult to make myself known. Well, by and large it has never too much disturbed me that I generally conceal my own problems and listen attentively to those of others; that, indeed, without enjoying your apparent lack of inner conflict, I often turn toward the world a face much like yours - serene (or at least strong and cheerful) and imperturbable. But with you two, whose affection I value so highly, I wish to be known better and to know you better... [...] Love - Sis. (Chapter 23)

This is Connie Converse to her brother Phil, and his wife Jean, in 1957. Her relationship with Phil is one of the central pillars of this wonderfully generous, curious, detailed biography. There are a few dark hints here and there, and the odd moment of great tenderness and real connection (the above sparks one such). On balance, it seems he did support and encourage her in life, and champion her songs after her disappearance, but he also destroyed a lot of her papers, which, when confronted by the author, he admits but does not attempt to explain. He’s the best source Fishman had, but he’s ambiguous and not a completely reliable one.

The papers are where he starts: Converse left Phil a filing cabinet with an inventory, containing her life’s work, as well as letters and other documents. By the time Fishman saw it, many items were marked ‘dumped’ in Phil’s handwriting (so it’s not even as though he was discarding secretly, or - presumably - for space, since the filing cabinet remained the same size. Was he concealing something specific? Or curating to leave the best material?) What remained showed that as well as being ‘a great unknown songwriter’ she was ‘a polymath - a talented illustrator, painter, thinker, published political cartoonist and essayist, poet, photographer, and aspiring novelist’ (Chapter 6). Apart from the songs, the filing cabinet itself was a remarkable act of organisation, and that is a theme: the major work of her post-songwriting life was ‘The War of All Against All: A Review of The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1957-1968’. This journal was one she edited, run from the University of Michigan, its name a deliberate avoidance of the word ‘peace’ in order to keep suspicions of communism at bay. Fishman recounts a video conference with some academics, the better to understand what she had achieved with this. ‘Research expert’ Ivan Bojanic skims it on the call and can’t quite believe what he is reading:

‘Um, you guys?’ he interjected after some time. ‘This is not what I expected. I thought it would essentially be a synopsis of each article, in chronological order. But this is analysis, this is personal perspective... [...] She took all these disparate pieces of research, from people who were studying a million difference nooks and crannies of this nascent field, and tried to create a single unifying narrative out of it!’ (Chapter 28)

But I am skirting around the main event, the songs, which I don’t want to pin down or reduce. I’ve got a lot of exploring left to do, is one reason. They swim in unsaidness, not infrequently turning it inside out. They are punctuated with pauses (‘fermata’) and tempo changes. Converse wrote nearly all of them while living in New York, and had a small but enthusiastic following who heard them performed at house concerts, some of them able to remember great chunks of the songs when interviewed for the book over 50 years later, without having heard them since. A recording of one of these performances is what makes up the bulk of How Sad, How Lovely. There’s a digital-only release of her home recordings, Musicks, with about twice as much material. Then there’s Connie’s Piano Songs, a set of more arty, ‘through-composed’ (as in, melody keeps evolving and doesn’t repeat) songs, left behind mostly as sheet music, and eventually released in this version, by Charlotte Mundy and Christopher Goddard (Phil wasn’t too keen on these, not that he had any duty to be). I’m in love with the line in ‘Trouble’ that Fishman took for his play: ‘A star has burnt my eye’. Even more in context, actually:

My bed is made of stone
A star has burnt my eye
I’m going down to the willow tree
And teach her how to cry

As he points out, this predates Johnny Cash’s ‘Now I taught the weeping willow how to cry’ from ‘Big River’ by eight years. He wonders if he could somehow have heard it. How influence can work when the original has failed to enter the big river of popular culture. Which he questions as a way of going about things:

How many more Connie Converses are there out there - marginalized talents waiting to be heard; artists and thinkers lacking the emotional tools, the encouragement, the self-esteem, the community, needed to thrive? And what price do we pay, as individuals and as a culture, by continuing to use fame, wealth, property, and power as our primary metrics for success? (Afterword)

Good questions, and I’d like to know what the alternatives are. Perhaps fragmentation is a feature rather than a bug, and we should just give up on the notion of a culture everyone can be assumed to have access to. Perhaps that was always an imperialist idea.

Stills

It's been a while since there was any non-self-promotional content here, so here are some stills from films I've seen recently (this might be a regular thing, we'll see).

99% Cloudy... Always (2023)

Olivia (1951)

Scum (1977)

The Fall (2006)

A couple of these are moments of fracture: Olivia, left alone in the office of the head of her finishing school, with whom she's in love, lies on the floor in front of the fire, from heartbroken inertia. The dual roles in The Fall start to bleed into each other, as the narrator of the above scene begins to succumb to the morphine overdose he's just taken, and his character in the story is no longer able to stand. I guess you could say the same of Archer's vegetarianism in Scum, about to be breached by that sausage, but it's only a pose to annoy the borstal governor in the first place. Kazuha in 99% Cloudy... Always seems so much herself as to be incapable of being broken, though with her Asperger's she is vulnerable a lot of the time. In that scene, she's enjoying a moment outside an art class, where the tutor has encouraged feedback between the students. Completely oblivious to the hurt she has just caused by saying she could see no worth or interest in a photorealistic portrait, the opposite of her own explosive, abstract sculpture.

Whatever Works

Release day for the Mayfly Two album we trailed with the ‘Anti That’ single a few months ago. It’s baroque electronic indie pop, or something along those lines. The songs are warm, weathered, soft, sharp, comic, cosmic. They can cure you or skewer you, depending. They inspired the best arrangements I’m ever likely to make. We hope you enjoy them.

Instrumentals

Mayfly Two also have some instrumentals up, which could do with some ears if you would be so kind. These have been really fun to do, swapping loops or melodies and messing around with them. Me on guitar, both of us on beats and synths. Free to download at least until we decide it’s finished.

Anti That (Rock Version)

Not sure where to begin with this. Perhaps in April 2009, when Anne Bacheley and I collaborated on a track, ‘Anti That’, named after Stephen Pastel’s review of her album Headquarters:

Another record that we’re loving is Anne Bacheley’s Headquarters, a self released CD-R. From Poitiers, France, Anne looks like the secret third member of Melody Dog, and makes winning old-school indie music that lands somewhere between Holly Golightly and a less chaotic Comet Gain. Anne’s voice is perfect and imperfect, her playing primitive and gallant, her melodies true. It would be so great to see Anne get a record label to help out but maybe she’s anti-that.

It was finished but untitled when I heard the demo, and I suggested that title, but it could well have been written as a riposte to the very idea of getting help from a record label. I thought I heard something of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ in it, a certain worthy strumminess, that I set about unpicking with a beat pinched from Can and some very un-strummy Spanish guitar lines. And then, at the climax of the song, which literally cries out for power chords, I cut away almost everything but the drums, and let the vocal do the talking. Which it did, easily: it’s a great tune, and a great chord sequence, which only needs a light touch to do its work. It turned out really well, with this weird, lean, pop sound (like something on Morr Music, Anne always says). It didn’t rock though.

So anyway, I sent her my Morsels set towards the end of last year, which was not a little inspired by the playful hyperactivity of her anneemall EPs, and we – finally – ended up collaborating on more of her songs. It’s been worth the long wait, they’re so good I can’t tell you. And the reason I can’t tell you is that we’re looking for a record label to release the album we made of them, because they deserve to be heard. Don’t worry, when it’s time to decide we won’t compromise. And we probably won’t even find one. But! In the meantime, here is the opposite of that first version, played almost entirely with power chords. Rockism / Poptimism – who cares anymore, why not be both?