‘You don’t go out of your way to make yourself something you’re not.’

After her return from England in January 1972, Ms Converse was adrift. She wrote, ‘the basic nerves and will by which I had always been able to survive my difficulties may have worn out or broken, and might not be easily reparable.’ Unable now to bear the stress of the sort of demanding job she’d had at the Journal of Conflict Resolution, she imagined working nine to five at Woolworth’s, and then ‘just go home at the end of the day’. To the friends who had paid for her stay in England, she wrote, ‘I began to realise that in order to survive at all I had to have a change of work, a change of scene, and a drastic reduction in current obligations’.
However, although flat broke she showed her continuing principled independence when she lost a clerical job for refusing to wear deodorant, saying, ‘you don’t go out of your way to make yourself something you’re not’.

And in spite of her low energy, she devoted herself to two voluntary community initiatives. One was the Learning Exchange, a ‘free educational matching service to help people share their knowledge, skills and interests’. She collected 200 offers of skills, wrote documentation, answered the phone, connected people. The other a plan of two local men to extend their successful bar into a community-focussed development of Ann Arbor’s downtown area. Her sister-in-law refused her a loan to invest, considering her a ‘bad risk’.

Meanwhile she was planning her departure.

She compiled, in her usual meticulous way, the records of her life. Recordings of the Guitar Songs. Manuscripts of her Cassandra song-cycle, and her opera The Prodigal Nephew. The full text of ‘The War of All against All: A Review of The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1957 –1968’. Her ‘Statistical Study of 1000 Melodies’, written in New York. Letters, photographs, diaries. She put these in a filing cabinet, which she left with her brother Phil.

She wrote individual handwritten (she habitually typed) notes to friends, each letter attuned to their personality and her relationship with them. In several she mentioned returning to New York, to regain her union card and resume working in the printing trade.

On 5 August 1974, Phil went on holiday. It seems she meant to leave then, but postponed her departure to watch the Watergate saga unfold on tv. On 9 August Richard Nixon, a politician she had despised since his attacks on her Institute of Pacific Relations’ colleagues in 1940s, and his part in McCarthy’s witch hunts in 1950s, resigned. Pleased, she posted the letters to friends, so they would arrive after her departure, and added a typed letter to the filing cabinet:

TO ANYONE WHOEVER ASKS (if I’m long unheard from):

‘This is the hard sublayer under the parting messages I’m likely to have sent: let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.’
Of the ‘elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor’, she writes, ‘if ever I was a member of this species, perhaps it was a social accident that has now been cancelled.’ And
‘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.’
‘To survive at all I expect I must drift down through the other half of the twentieth twentieth, which I already know pretty well, to the hundred hundredth, which I have only heard about. I might survive there quite a few years – who knows?’

She packed her VW Beetle, and on 10 August, 1974, drove away. Neither car nor Ms Converse were ever seen or heard from again.

We can imagine her in an anonymous small town, working 9 to 5 in a store and returning each evening to her small room to work on the novel she had always intended to write.

Or in one of the many off-grid communities of the time, where her music, radical spirit, and focussed energy would have made a difference.

Phil imagined her driving off a high cliff, into deep water.

Whatever. We have her songs. An album’s worth. And we have, thanks to Howard Fishman’s hard work and devotion to his subject, the record of a remarkable life. Plays about her appear here and there (the most recent in Manchester in 2023). Classical ensembles have performed her songs. Other artists have recorded them. Work is continuing on her Cassandra cycle. Her songs are on Spotify play lists. Elizabeth Connie Converse is an undercurrent in our culture, below the surface but always there.

I am grateful that, quite by chance, I found out about her. I return often, and with gratitude, to Connie Converse’s Guitar Songs.

Reference and acknowledgement:
To Anyone who ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, by Howard Fishman, Wildfire, 2023, is the essential, comprehensive and excellently written guide to Ms Converse’s life.
All the quotes above come from Mr Fishman’s book

How Sad, How Lovely, Musicks, and Sad Lady, the recordings of Connie Converse, are all available on Bandcamp.