In 2010, writer and musician Howard Fishman went to a Christmas party at a friend’s house where, not knowing many people, he took to scanning the bookshelves to quell his anxiety. As he did so, a song called Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) came on the stereo that, he recalls, “swallowed me. The party froze. The room disappeared.” Set against a backdrop of gentle guitar picking, it was sung by a woman, plaintively and without affectation, about “a place they called Lonesome” where everything, from the nearby brook to the pigs in the yard, reminds her of an absent lover. Fishman sought out the host to ask who was singing, and she told him about Connie Converse, who recorded songs in her kitchen in 1950s Greenwich Village, and whose musical talents had gone largely unrecognised in her lifetime.
Fishman went straight from the party to a record store where he bought Converse’s How Sad, How Lovely, an album compiled by latterday fans in 2009. He wanted to hear more from this musician whose lyrics brimmed with poetic intimacy and whose lo-fi, homespun style sounded decades ahead of its time. Thus began a 13-year obsession, yielding a play based on Converse’s life; an album, by Fishman, of songs that Converse left behind in manuscript form; and now, in To Anyone Who Ever Asks, a rigorously researched and heartfelt biography.
The narrative of the musical genius who goes unrecognised for decades, only to be discovered later on, is an irresistible one. The folk singer Vashti Bunyan, who gave up performing in the late 1960s, thought herself a failure until the 00s when she learned that copies of her debut album were changing hands for thousands of dollars. The 2012 documentary Searching for Sugarman detailed the fate of the Detroit musician Sixto Rodriguez, who was once touted as the new Dylan but whose career failed to take off. Except that it did, much later, in South Africa where, unbeknown to him, he had sold half a million albums.
For Converse, there has been no such renaissance, though her story comes with an unexpected coda. In 1961, frustrated with her lack of success, she left New York and moved to Michigan (by coincidence, this was the same year that Bob Dylan pitched up in Greenwich Village, aged 19, and established himself as a songwriting hero). There, Converse worked on a novel, engaged in political activism and took a series of academic jobs, though, as time passed, she seemed to lose herself. She was drinking heavily, co-workers complained about her poor personal hygiene and there was a fractious period where she lived with her brother and his wife. In 1974, a few days after her 50th birthday, she packed up her Volkswagen Beetle and, leaving fond but cryptic letters to loved ones, abandoned her job and her home. She was never seen again.
Fishman has his work cut out filling in the blanks in Converse’s life, which accounts for the book’s many narrative detours. He gets rather too involved with the stories of Converse’s parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents, who lived and worked in New Hampshire. As well as chasing down every living acquaintance and relative, no matter how distant, we find him casing old houses and apartment buildings, knocking on neighbours’ doors and loitering in graveyards. Not everyone is willing to help. He gets relatively short shrift from Gene Deitch, the illustrator and amateur audio engineer who was the only person to have recorded Converse’s songs. Deitch, who was moved by the poignance and directness of her writing, recorded her at his home in Westchester in 1954, though his efforts to help her find a wider audience came to nothing and the pair lost touch.
Fishman gets a warmer reception from Converse’s brother, Phil, a political scientist whose testimony and belongings form the backbone of his research. Before Phil’s death aged 86 in 2014, the author visited him in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he kept a metal filing cabinet in his garage containing his sister’s letters, drawings and recordings. The contents reveal Converse as a polymath: not just a musician but an accomplished illustrator, painter, political cartoonist and essayist.
There is no shortage of evidence pointing to Converse’s creative brilliance and Fishman rightly puts her work front and centre. But there is no avoiding the fact that his close readings of her lyrics are based, for the most part, on guesswork. Getting a handle on Converse’s motivations and interior life is a near impossible task; perhaps the most certain thing that can be said of her is that she was contradictory. She was valedictorian of her high school class and earned a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College, yet, for reasons no one understood at the time, she dropped out at the end of her sophomore year and moved to New York. She remained unattached throughout her life – unhappily so, according to her letters, though she had lovers, which was unusual for a single woman in the 1950s.
Her correspondence with her brother suggests a desire for recognition, though she never hired an agent or gave a formal concert, instead performing at house parties and gatherings. Converse, it seems, wanted the impossible: to be feted for her work while remaining invisible. The closest she came to fame was a single performance on Walter Cronkite’s Morning Show on CBS (no film or audio footage survives, only photographs). But if a slot on a prime-time talkshow should have been the career boost she had been holding out for, it didn’t pan out that way.
Fishman is not the first writer to attempt to chronicle the life of Converse and he won’t be the last, though his portrait is the most complete so far. Even so, the mystery at the heart of her story – her character; her dreams; her demise, if indeed she died and didn’t live out her days under an assumed name – remains just that. Her final disappearance was, it appears, entirely consistent with how she lived her life. Converse was, Fishman writes, “unpredictable and inevitable; opaque and mesmerizing; complete and unfinished; and almost unbelievable”.
• To Anyone Who Ever Asks by Howard Fishman is published by Wildfire (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
