Between 1 August, the 100th anniversary of her birth, and 10 August, when fifty years ago she disappeared, I want to celebrate the many lives of Elizabeth Connie Converse.

In 1944, age 20, she dropped out of her prestigious New England college, where she was the star student, and went to New York City, alone and knowing no one. She quickly became a writer for, and then managing editor of The Journal of The American Institute for Pacific Relations, a well-regarded research organisation, financed by among others the Rockefeller Foundation. Attacks from Congress, including by congressman Richard Nixon, led to cut-backs, and Elizabeth’s job disappeared.

From 1950 to 1960, while she was writing the Guitar Songs, and also an opera, and her song-cycle ‘Cassandra’, she worked in the unionised, male-dominated printing trade in New York.

In 1960 another abrupt change took her to Ann Arbor, a radical university town where her brother taught, and where she quickly became involved in political activism, and wrote for, and then for eight years was managing editor of The Journal of Conflict Resolution. This had been founded by professor Kenneth Boulding, a charismatic polymath, and is the establishing document of the Peace Research movement. While editing the Journal, in her own time she wrote what was effectively a PhD, studying every article published in the Journal, a mammoth work of analysis and synthesis which, together with the debilitating atmosphere of sexism at the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, and the departure of the supportive Boulding, precipitated a breakdown. Of which 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’.

Her condition was not helped by her self-neglect – she smoked and drank too much, didn’t eat properly, seemed to treat her body as a separate thing which concerned her little. Living through the sixties in a radical university town, she was affected greatly by the social and political upheaval – helping the SDS prepare for their confrontation at the Chicago convention, for example – but with little awareness of the cultural revolution, continuing to dress like a fifties’ librarian, not remarking on the wave of singer-songwriters. Both Joni Mitchell and Neil Young performed in Ann Arbor in 1960s. Socially gauche, never in an established relationship, she seems to have been by nature an isolate, one who is permanently separated, by however narrow a margin, from other people in the world. Relating in society, what for most people comes naturally, was for her an ongoing task, work. Which became progressively more debilitating. Regardless of her ferocious intelligence, her great work ethic, her endless creativity – painter, sculptor, cartoonist – her abilities as an inspirational teacher, as affirmed by her colleagues when she retired from JCR, she was, it seems, always alone. And possibly only ever at ease at 3am in New York City, smoking a cigarette, having finished writing a song. She took sick leave, and then resigned in 1971.

A trip with her mother to Alaska, and a six-month stay in London, financed by her friends who wrote her a letter of praise that overwhelmed her, failed to shift the ‘blue funk’ and ‘inaudible screaming meenies’ as she characterised her condition. In her letter of gratitude, 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’. She told her nephew how peaceful it must be to work at Woolworth’s.
She organised meticulously her affairs, including tapes of the guitar songs, into a five-drawer filing cabinet, at her brother’s house. Meanwhile she continued her activism, including starting a Learning Exchange, an informal forum connecting learners with teachers.

She arrived at her fiftieth birthday – significant then for women, not the ‘new forty’ it has become – homeless (she had moved into a room in her brother’s house), jobless, alone, depressed, unable to acknowledge to herself her manifold achievements listed here, with no obvious prospects. But perhaps, still, hopes.

I will approach 10 August 1974 in my next post.

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

Acknowledgement: my boundless debt to Mr Fishman’s book, which is the source of most of the information, and the quotes, above. If Connie Converse interests you, you will find Mr Fishman’s book endlessly stimulating and informative.