A Thousand Shapes and Shades: An Interview with Howard Fishman
Howard Fishman | To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse | Dutton | May 2023 | 576 Pages
On Wikipedia’s “List of people who disappeared mysteriously: 1910–1990,” Connie Converse appears. Date: August 1974. Age: Fifty. Missing from: Ann Arbor, Michigan. As the story goes, Converse drove off that summer in her Volkswagen Beetle, leaving the remainder of her life an open question.
It’s hard to discover the prescient songs of Converse and not simultaneously learn this haunting fact, large as it looms over the story of her life: at least, over the faintly drawn version that’s circulated during the past decade and change. One encounters this version online or in liner notes or in conversation, should her music materialize in the background of a party and catch someone by surprise. Such was certainly the case for Howard Fishman, author of To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, the first full-length book about the enigmatic mid-century singer, songwriter, and composer.
The record How Sad, How Lovely, released in 2009, introduced a small fraction of Converse’s music and lyrics to the world. It consists of eighteen songs, many of them recorded by animator Gene Deitch in the 1950s and later restored by Dan Dzula and David Herman. At a holiday gathering in December 2010, Fishman (a musician, composer, and performer himself) heard one of them, the Converse original, “Talkin' Like You (Two Tall Mountains),” with its soft acoustic guitar picking reminiscent of American folk singer Elizabeth Cotten’s style and notes of Hoagy Carmichael’s harmonic ingenuity, layered with Converse’s own wistful, witty lyricism. “The song swallowed me,” he writes. “The party froze. The room disappeared.”
Captivated by this little-known, blue-moon talent, Fishman sought out her full story but found only sparse accounts, the missing details of which left him with more questions than clarity. What he knew for sure: Full name, Elizabeth Eaton Converse. Her birthplace, Laconia, New Hampshire, 1924; her hometown, Concord. One of three kids (she the only girl), and the daughter of a Baptist minister. She would follow in her mother and grandmother’s footsteps to attend Mount Holyoke College with a scholarship, only to drop out and move to New York City, where she would spend the early 1950s composing original music for both guitar and piano. Deitch (the audiophile behind those informal recordings of her intimate live performances) and his friend Bill Bernal (a passionate advocate for Converse’s music and likely the reason Deitch knew about her in the first place, as Fishman would later learn) would attempt to promote her music. But their efforts to expand her audience would prove largely fleeting. She would leave the city for Ann Arbor in the early 1960s and take up a position as managing editor at The Journal of Conflict Resolution. She would struggle to shake a growing despondency. This would prompt a sabbatical in England, made materially possible by colleagues and friends. But the shadow remained.
“All this seemed like a collection of pieces from a puzzle for which no representation of the whole existed,” Fishman writes of his unwavering impulse to fill in the gaps. “No picture on the front of the box as a guide, just ‘A Thousand Shapes and Shades’—the name, as I would later learn, of a Converse song of which no recording seems to exist.” According to her brother Phil Converse (who died in 2014), everything she intentionally left behind was stored in a metal filing cabinet housed in his Ann Arbor garage: hundreds of letters; boxes of old tape reels; the 1950s-era song recordings (digitized by Phil); a folio labeled “Musicks,” containing typewritten lyrics to all her songs, along with annotations; ample evidence of her pursuits beyond music as an essayist, illustrator, painter, political activist, and aspiring novelist, to name a few. What Fishman found, after Phil flipped on a light in the garage, was a “a self-contained universe, the not-unproud distillation of one person’s life of ideas, accomplishments, and unbridled creativity.” Included in that cabinet is a one-page “all-purpose” typewritten farewell, dated August 10, 1974, addressed in all caps, to all of us: “TO ANYONE WHO EVER ASKS (If I’m Long Unheard From).” An excerpt reads:
To survive at all, I expect I must drift back down through the other half to the twentieth twentieth, which I already know pretty well, to the hundredth hundredth, which I have only heard about. I might survive there quite a few years—who knows? But you understand I have to do it with no benign umbrella. Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.
While Fishman spent more than a decade searching for Connie Converse, I was immersed in a parallel search of my own. It started in 2015, when those same uncanny How Sad, How Lovely recordings wafted through a studio during an audition for “Empty Pockets,” a contemporary dance piece by choreographer John Heginbotham. I was a twenty-two-year-old college student in New York City, beginning the final half of senior year and trying to figure out how to sustain a life in the arts post-graduation. I landed a role in the ensemble and spent the next five months in the company of Converse’s voice, which followed me from weekly rehearsals to a small record player in my Upper West Side bedroom. The longer I lived alongside her music, the more I believed, like Fishman, that there had to be a richer backstory behind the creation of these strangely anachronistic songs, which sounded like they could have been recorded yesterday; behind her lack of mainstream “success”; behind why she said farewell to friends and family, and left town fifty years into life, on her terms. A disappearance, I thought, for all its mystery, has to have its reasons.
My curiosity stretched to all the parts of Converse’s life and identity that remained just out of reach. In her emotionally attuned lyrics, in the memorable characters, vivid scenes, and undercurrent of independence she brought to life in song, I heard a young woman attempting to make sense of herself, to chart the contours of her relationships, to find belonging—if only in the spaces she carved out in these compositions. In her frequent out-of-placeness and lack of broad commercial appeal, along with what I knew then of her predilection for privacy (especially where her personal life was concerned), I intuited a rich inner life, channeled through an artistic expression that made me feel at home in her music. As I gradually grew into and found language for my queer identity somewhere around my mid-twenties, Converse’s elusiveness was a balm, especially when I felt an ambient pressure to make myself neatly legible for the sake of other people’s comfort. I heard the foreshadowing of future singer-songwriters—Liz Phair and Tracy Chapman, Kim Deal and Karen Dalton, Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos and Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief—whose formative albums joined the sonic backdrop of my own emotional landscape. As months turned to years, I felt I had found, in Converse, a true kindred spirit. Fishman, too, heard in Connie Converse “a woman reaching out across time and space to be understood, to locate her fellows—others who, perhaps like her, found mainstream American mores insulting and intolerable.”
Converse’s work has inspired creative responses in the form of plays, musical performances, essays, novels, documentaries, and dance pieces. Like the artists behind these works, I’m compelled to connect with this woman I’ve never met by growing her community of belated fans, in whatever small ways I can offer. I guess I want to let her know, from afar, that she has not failed to make herself known.
In his afterword, Fishman acknowledges that his portrait of Converse, though it reveals new layers of her personhood that might otherwise have been lost to history, is nevertheless incomplete. Still, the dedication and reverence that his research demonstrates—guided by his desire to nurture Converse’s audience, recognize her work beyond music, and solidify her place in American musical and cultural history—is invaluable.
On a bright morning in May, Fishman and I met for breakfast at Café Mogador in Brooklyn to talk about our early encounters with Converse’s music, the necessity of rethinking standard biographical forms in order to do her story justice, and those aspects of her legacy that Fishman hopes will stay at the foreground of whatever comes next.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Olivia Lindsay Aylmer: It’s clear we’re not the only ones who resonate with Converse, like some message in a bottle that finally found us, albeit several decades later. As To Anyone Who Ever Asks makes its way into the world, how does it feel to reach this culmination point?
Howard Fishman: It seems that the book is attracting an audience, and an audience not necessarily as familiar as you and I are with Converse. So in that respect, I feel very gratified, because my goal for making this book was to get more attention for her. And that seems to be working. I mean, I feel like I could have continued working on this for years, continued to try to find people that knew her and continued to try to unearth more details. But it was time to let her go. I think I feel good about the idea that, to the extent that I've acted as a shepherd, maybe now other people can come and help fill in the rest of the story. Or maybe just accept the story as I found it.
Even though it’s not a short book, I feel like it could have been even longer because of all the deep dives that still can be taken on these various subjects: thinking about her relationship to art song, thinking about her relationship to anti-racism, thinking about her statistics study of music. Any of these things could have been books on their own, or substantial sections of my book, but I don't think that they could have held a general reader. So yeah, I'm looking forward to reading those books for sure.
OLA: Anyone I know who has also developed an appreciation of and curiosity about the music of Connie Converse has a memorable story about their first time hearing it. After your first encounter with her music at a holiday party—experiencing this sense of familiarity, despite it being entirely new to you at that moment—what kept drawing you back to her world and work?
HF: I think the motivating force was always the brilliance of her music and the fact that it was unrecognized in her time—and now, to an extent. I just wasn’t aware of there being anything remotely like what she was doing at the time that she was doing it. I thought it was maybe a fake. And when I as a musician started playing through the songs and understanding how they work, I was completely charmed and surprised by her songwriting craft, which is so unusual, so personal, so unique, and so very hard to separate out her performances of them from the song.
So for example in my play, [“A Star Has Burnt My Eye,” performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2016], I had everybody in the play, including myself, perform. But there’s something about her own delivery of them and performances of them that I think nobody can really get close to.
Courtesy of The Musick Group
OLA: And the fact that you first heard her music at a party, it was almost in this eerie way like an extension of the room in which some of these pieces were recorded—like you picked up this invisible thread.
HF: Yeah, you know, there are suggestions in my book of there being almost a supernatural element to this quest to learn more about her and I don't know what I would say about that except that I feel like there’s a lot more about this universe that we don’t know, [things] that defy logic and defy rationality. And so yes, it does seem in a way, I could almost understand it as exactly what you say: That it’s almost like I was hearing the party that she was performing at.
OLA: In preparing for our conversation, I’ve been reading Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X, in which Connie Converse makes multiple appearances. Lacey’s novel is built around an (imaginary) irreverent artist and writer called X, and the biographical quest taken up by her widow, journalist C.M. Lucca. As Lucca attempts to piece together the unruly creative and romantic life of her larger-than-life late wife, the slippery nature of this process becomes increasingly apparent. Lacey’s book got me thinking about the challenges of rendering a portrait of someone on the page in all of their nuance, particularly someone who perhaps keeps some parts of themselves hidden, or held at a distance, even from people they love.
What elements of a traditional biographical form did you realize would not quite work in telling Converse’s story and its intersections with your own? What aspects of a more linear structure required some reconfiguring on your part in order to do justice to Converse’s remarkable life and its lack of closure?
HF: The first version of this book was a straight-up biography. No first person insertion at all. And I realized I couldn't tell the story that way, because there isn’t enough of the story to tell. There would be times when I would discover something magical and I would share that with the reader, but also there were times where I would hit a wall—I mean, there was nothing there—and then I had to share that with the reader, too. And share, as Catherine Lacey does, some thoughts about what might have happened in the story, without ever making assumptions, without ever saying, She was this or She did this, etc. But allowing the reader to understand where my mind went.
It seemed to me that because my goal was to reach as wide a readership as possible, I didn’t want this to be an academic book published by university press. Not that that would’ve been terrible, but that would’ve had an audience of about twenty people, and I wanted a larger audience for her. So I had to think about the general reader, and if I think about the general reader, that person has never heard of Connie Converse. I felt that it was a way to bring the reader along and interest them in somebody, in a subject, that they may have had zero interest in before picking up the book.
I was very fortunate to have the editor that I have for the book, because he allowed the book to be a kind of weird hybrid. He let me go on these tangents.
OLA: Your research reveals such a strong sense of personal integrity underlying Converse’s choices and multitude of projects, even when various people in her life did not fully understand or embrace them, and despite the fact that concrete markers of commercial ‘success’ perpetually eluded her. I sense a real intentionality on your part to invite readers to wonder alongside you, and to prompt broader reflection on how artists of all kinds are (or, as is too often the case, are not) supported in a profit-and-power driven society that persists to this day.
I’m thinking of moments when you ask: “How might Connie Converse have fared had she lived in a society in which everyday creativity was honored, and all took a genuine interest in the things one another made?” or “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?” Why was it important to you to include so many questions in this biography and to allow them to remain open-ended?
HF: Yeah, because I don’t have the answers to those questions. So I’m just leaving them there for other people to think about, too. It leaves more space for the reader, to not draw my own conclusions. Sure, I have certain thoughts about some of the open-ended things or certain opinions that I can’t express as a journalist. But I can think about them as a human being.
OLA: Before I even started reading, I delved into the extensive acknowledgments and endnotes, and was in awe of the vast number of people who made this book possible. Can you talk to me about the significance of these ample connections made along the way, including ones that you did not explicitly seek out, as you worked to piece together Convese’s story and trajectory over multiple years, cities, and eras of American life and culture?
HF: In many ways, the book is a quest. It's like an odyssey, and along the way, I come to these stations where somebody shows up and helps me and points me to the next thing or gives me a clue. And these points of connection were what made the book possible. As I say at the end of the book, that’s what sustained me in a way that Connie Converse was not sustained in her own life, because of her lack of connection. So for whatever reason, the universe seemed to have smiled on this quest and to have given me these Virgils along the way.
OLA: Right, I mean if I'm remembering correctly, when you first reached out to [Connie’s brother] Phil Converse, I think you got a reply pretty quickly, right?
HF: Within an hour, yeah.
OLA: If everyone had gotten back to you in an hour and given you everything you asked for, though, I feel like it wouldn’t have been as interesting.
HF: Yeah. In some ways, the frustrations and the walls that I hit are part of the story, too, because of what they reveal about either what she was maybe trying to hide or didn’t want people to know, or what they reveal about what other people didn’t want to be known about their relationship to her.
OLA: Yeah, I mean, I knew of the filing cabinet, because I think that was mentioned in the original liner notes for the album that came out in 2009, but I was not aware of the fact that some pieces of her archive were discarded after her disappearance. While that was upsetting, I appreciate that you don’t make any kind of a judgment call—you just let that exist as part of the story, too. You know, she intentionally left (nearly) everything behind, but then some of those things didn’t make it, and one wonders why that is and where they are . . .
HF: Yes. It’s very hard not to be upset by that reality. But as you say, I didn’t feel it was for me to judge. I can say as a person that I'm incredibly disappointed in that reality. But I didn’t want to be finger-pointing in any way.
OLA: Sure. And then in so many ways, there's just a gratitude for what does exist. I mean, mystery and uncertainty, like those things are also just inevitable forces of life. But for there to be as much as there actually is? It's pretty remarkable.
HF: Absolutely.
OLA: In that acknowledgments section, you also allude to “moments of self-doubt.” Can you tell me about the role that self-doubt played throughout this thirteen-year research and writing process, which traversed an extended period of your own creative and musical life?
HF: Yes, many times during this process, I was overcome and overwhelmed with self-doubt and frustration, anxiety. How can I tell this story? How can I do justice to this woman? There’s so much missing. There’s so much unknown. There’s so much—the enormity of what she got into is even hard to understand in a comprehensive way.
The fact that the book exists is miraculous to me. It’s completely miraculous, and I feel very grateful for it. But at any given point over those twelve or thirteen years, I could have given into despair and the idea that the book would never be published. That no one would ever publish it.
Basically, I think there was no turning back on the book when I visited Phil Converse and saw that filing cabinet, and I understood the immensity of what was in there and the significance of it. I think I say in the book that I wasn’t sure when the conscious thought came into my head that I was actually writing a book, but it seemed to be right around there. You know, it was like, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: going into the closet and understanding there’s this whole world behind the back door.
OLA: In what ways did your own experiences as a working musician and writer in New York City—with all the frustrations and setbacks, creative catharsis, moments of connection, and joy (however transient), precarity, and perseverance that this chosen path has likely included—inform your approach to exploring Converse’s artistic, literary, and musical endeavors?
HF: Yeah, there were times where she felt like an avatar for me, where I could easily place myself, or the experience that I’ve had, I could understand the kinds of struggles and challenges that she faced. I mean, obviously, she faced much greater challenges than I did because she was a woman who was trying to operate within a male-dominated society. And because, back then, the whole notion of musical genre was so calcified in a way that it has become less so today.
OLA: I was consistently struck by the duality of loneliness and connection as recurring themes across Converse’s life and multifaceted body of work. Your book conveys the multiple communities she inhabited and clearly impacted throughout her life—from her prodigious creative period in 1950s New York City to her years spent working as the managing editor of The Journal of Conflict Resolution in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You write about and include in the Appendix, for instance, a letter (accompanied by a lump sum check) written in April 1971 by a “committee” comprised of her family, friends and colleagues who sought to honor her “Unique Contributors to Scholarship, Education, and Human Individuality,” and show their support through a period of intense emotional, psychological, and material vulnerability for Converse. I wonder what you make of this recurring tension throughout Converse’s life: on the one hand, to be known and to connect with the world, while on the other, a pervasive instinct to isolate and to protect oneself, to inhabit a world of one’s own making and retreat inward?
HF: Yes. I think whatever it was that made her as reclusive and private as she was is anyone’s guess. There are clues in her letters and diaries, but there’s no hard evidence. Clearly, to me, I think it’s safe to say that at some point something, or maybe some things, happened to her that made her withdraw as a person, and kept her withdrawn for her known life. So yes, I think it’s sad that she felt that she had to live that way. And I think that these various pursuits and passions that she found were ways for her to try to connect to the world that she didn’t know how to connect to otherwise as a person. Some more successfully than others, but most unsuccessfully in terms of their efficacy during her lifetime. Obviously, now we can appreciate all those things.
It’s true, it is gratifying to know that she had a community in Ann Arbor that saw and appreciated who she was—even without the music, just as a person, as a teacher, as a community leader. Yeah, that’s why I'm so glad that we were able to include that letter from her friends because it really does give a glimpse into how important she was and [the importance of] what she was doing.
Courtesy of The Musick Group
OLA: It’s likely that Converse’s music and lyrics (some known and accessible, much of it still to surface), her work as a political thinker, her writing on conflict studies and systemic racism in American society, her visual art (photography, drawings, paintings, illustrations), her still-missing novel manuscript, so many more pieces in her universe of projects will continue to unfurl and gain greater appreciation in the years ahead. What’s one critical aspect of her story that you hope does not get lost going forward?
HF: Interesting question. I guess what I’m hoping is that the sensational aspect of her disappearance will not overshadow her story. Because the disappearance is the thing that people seem to latch on to first. It’s a remarkable thing to say about a person—that them disappearing is not the most interesting thing about their life—but I think it’s clear that it’s true about Connie Converse. So my hope is that the disappearance will not eclipse the remarkable things that she did in her life.
OLA: As you write in the Afterword, it’s simply “the exclamation point she left at the conclusion of her known life.” Why do you think this aspect of her biography, intriguing as it is for anyone first learning about Converse, has overshadowed her publicly known story for so long?
HF: You know, we’re beings that like mysteries and our brains like to try to solve things that are not solved yet. It’s not to take away from anybody—I don’t fault people for being interested in the disappearance. I’m sure I was, too, when I first heard her music and heard that detail. Sure, that was a fascinating aspect initially. And I think also, those of us who have had moments in our lives where we felt like things weren’t working, I think the idea of disappearing can be an alluring one.
OLA: Why did it matter to you that the animating force of your book focuses on the creative power and range of Converse’s numerous contributions, despite how (in many cases) underappreciated or misunderstood they were at the time of their arrival?
HF: I hope that her story is a teachable lesson about our values culturally, and what are the things that we choose to celebrate and why? And what are the things that get ignored and why? Obviously it’s about her, but it’s also about us, hopefully.
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Howard Fishman is an author, musician, composer, theater-maker, and culture writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his writing has also been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, the Telegraph, Vanity Fair, ArtForum, the Village Voice, and the San Francisco Chronicle.