To Anyone Who Didn't Ask

or: How Howard Fishman Failed Connie Converse

A common pitfall biographers blindly fall into is not only adulation of their subjects but an elevated opinion of themselves as a consequence of the working relation, an exaggerated sense of the importance of every single piece of information their work throws up because it is technically in relation to their idolised central figure. Hershel Parker’s Melville biography is one of the nadirs of this, having spent decades collecting every scrap of paper mentioning anyone even tangentially related to any figure in Melville’s large extended family he made damn sure he was going include it all, and so in fact spends several hundred pages not actually writing about Herman.

Howard Fishman is the latest victim of this inflated self-importance, in his book To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse he almost presents himself as a sort of John the Baptist after the fact, one come to rescue Converse from unearned obscurity in a mission he himself practically discusses in religious terms. He describes his first encounter with her music in the same way one might describe a spiritual experience, which in his case it may as well have been. I imagine that like many people my introduction to Converse was the reviews of this very biography, which emphasise the more tabloid-interest aspect of her story: her disappearance. Curiosity morbidly piqued I listened to “Talkin’ Like You” and immediately thrilled to the astonishing couplet: “Up that tree there’s sort of a squirrel thing|Sounds just like we did when we were quarrelling,” a rhyme the sheer temerity of which is on a level with Sondheim’s ‘personable/coercin’ a bull’ in Company. Now, as well as being brilliant technically this couplet is also very funny (apologies for dissecting the frog here as it were), the casual dashed-off nature of “sort of a squirrel thing” and the polysyllabic rhyme it’s part of indicate the extreme effort it takes to appear so ad-hoc. Such a display of skill (as when Jackie Chan pulls off an unbelievable and probably incredibly dangerous stunt), at least in my case, reduces me to an almost involuntary yelp of glee, joying in the human inventiveness it takes to conceive of such a thing and the ability it takes to pull it off.

This is not to reduce Converse to simply a writer of comic songs, a Tom Lehrer in drag, (but there is little more serious than the business of laughter, there’s a reason early BBC4 was rife with depressing bio-dramas about the bleak lives of British comedians of the last century) but Fishman seems to miss Converse’s sense of humour almost entirely, which is a huge part of her appeal to me personally and, I feel, her artistic project in her songs. Writing out of the staid buttoned up 50s before anybody invented any sort of counterculture her side-eye on her period’s hypocritical standards included a sharp satirical sense. Fishman struggles to see Converse’s songwriting as anything but veiled autobiography; her “Clover Saloon” is interpreted as boundary-breaking because it comes from the perspective of a female cowhand, which is not carried out by anything in the lyrics. Given that Converse was not in fact a six-shooting cowhand I assume this song is sung from the perspective of a constructed character, something Fishman doesn’t allow for in his own interpretations. And he includes his interpretation of pretty much every song Converse wrote, which pads out the book a hell of a lot. That this is a flaw can be seen by referring to Synge’s Playboy of the Western World when discussing Converse’s song of the same name, he neglects to mention (or has forgotten, or hasn’t ever read the play so doesn’t actually know) that Christy is revealed to be a braggart and liar who didn’t actually kill his father, and is violently ejected by the town once his facade has crumbled. Knowing this lies underneath the song lends it a delicious air of undercutting irony which Fishman entirely misses.

So anyway, having had our first encounters, Fishman set out to write his book and I decided to read it (more fool him for putting in all that effort). Having gotten over the hurdle of his speaking of his mission to rescue Converse’s career in the sort of terms John Brown used to describe his campaign against slavery Fishman then settles into a cheap trick that can easily be used to pad out any biography: casting the family history back as far as possible, on both sides, so we get an idea of Converse’s antecedents. Doing so much digging Fishman certainly knew more about Converse’s ancestors than she did herself, and I skimmed most of it. I cannot fault Fishman on the quality of his research or his dedication to tramping every square inch of America that might hold any evidence. I can and do fault him for thinking that I’d find it interesting, having started reading a book about Connie Converse, to hear about rather run of the mill American life in the 1800s which will have had little actual bearing on her own experience or artistry.

I skimmed a lot of this book for the same reason, a lot of it is not really about Converse. Feeling such a deep connection to her Fishman elevates his own thoughts and feelings to the same importance as his subjects. He includes an aside about the time he went to see The Shaggs, discusses the Greenwich Village folk scene (in which Converse was not involved and none of whose members had heard of her), he includes one especially self-serving passage in which someone basically says to his face: “God put you on earth to restore Converse’s reputation to its rightful place.” And despite all that I would still recommend it to anyone interested in Converse because when he writes about her he reveals more information than is available anywhere else, so fans of her should acquire it and also be ready to skim.

The tragedy of Converse’s musical career (such as it was) distinct from the tragedy of her disappearance is that she was ahead of her time, an original songwriter in a folky circle in which writing your own material was looked down, ahead of Bob Dylan doing whatever it was he did that appealed to people. Her position as a single woman in the 50s presumably playing a part, she was consistently looked down on, underpaid, exploited by employers. Fishman seems to feel that he can somehow vault her to a position similar to Dylan, that he can cause enough acclaim to arise that she will attain the fame he feels she deserves and become a household name, her prescience acknowledged and rewarded by reputation at least (I had a slight suspicion that he expected part of this reward to redound on him as her devoted prophet). But the fact of the matter is this isn’t possible, and if it was is it really desirable? He constantly makes somewhat strained comparisons to contemporary artists, talks of Converse as prefiguring subsequent developments, but because of her absolute obscurity she cannot play that part in the history of culture. Yes she came before a lot of people who would later be successful doing similar things to what she was doing but they quite literally could not have heard of her or heard her music, and so pretending she plays a part in their cultural genetics does her a disservice, making it so she is only important because she pre-empted other people.

Converse’s artistry should be enough satisfaction in itself (it is after the only one she can be said to have had) regardless of material success. I would thrill to write something as wonderful as the aforementioned couplet, and realistically I have to have any satisfaction arising entirely from the artistic accomplishment, we cannot expect even all of those artists who deserve wide success to find it, there’s simply too many of them. Fishman occasionally pays lip service to doing this as a way of also honouring all the other unsung artists out there, but the goal of getting everyone up to a Dylanesque level of fame is patently absurd. The fact is most artists will toil in almost absolute obscurity however good they are, Fishman’s refusal to accept this fact for Converse may well extend to himself, he continuously mentions his own music, explains that he understands Converse because they have been in the same situation as musicians, brags about his achievements and his efforts to promulgate Converse’s work as if to demonstrate his devoutness. At one point he invokes Symons’ Quest for Corvo but that’s an unflattering comparison because Symons’ book is less than a quarter of the length, carried on in a tone of detached donnish amusement rather than religious self-importance, and because Symons can rely on the interest of his narrative, that of a frankly demented maniac scarring his way across Europe alienating just about every single person he ever talked to before essentially starving to death in Venice, whereas Fishman feels the need to assert Converse as an unacknowledged key player in culture as if her work is incapable of standing alone without considering its wider position, when really if we are to consider her as an influence on anyone (which it’s likely too early to say) we should start from the 2009 commercial release of her music, just as Beowulf wasn’t really a factor in wider English literature until it was published in the 1800s.

Fishman’s self-importance and doggedness extending almost into delirium has been noted by no less important a player in the story than one of Converse’s nephews, an important source even if he was only a child the last time he saw her. This gives one a more generous view of Gene Deitch, whose coldness could come off as annoyance that a career approaching a century could be eclipsed by home recordings he’d made of a woman he hadn’t seen in fifty years. But this blinding devotion is ultimately essential in being a good biographer, Fishman just needed someone else on hand with a heavy duty pair of shears. To give you a better idea of his almost ludicrous obsession he compares his own quest to JFK conspiracists and says one of Converse’s songs has the same emotional effect on him as seeing footage of 9/11 (this is not a joke, check the final section of chapter 2).