Literary Power Couple

Poet John Gould Fletcher stated in his autobiography, Life is My Song, that he first became aware of author Charlie May Simon upon reading her 1933 article in Scribner's Magazine entitled "Retreat to the Land, An Experience in Poverty." The article described her homesteading adventure in rural Arkansas with then husband, artist Howard Simon.

Simon never stated how and when she first became aware of Fletcher. She had many connections to Little Rock, including those through her first husband, Walter Lowenstein, whose sister Esther had married prominent Little Rock businessman Solomon Gans. The Pike-Fletcher-Terry House in downtown Little Rock was an Arkansas landmark, and the accomplishments of the poet himself, as well as the resources and political power of the family were well known.

Simon and Fletcher, who was 13 years her elder, first met at the Pike-Fletcher-Terry House in early 1934. Both were married to others—Fletcher to Daisy Arbuthnot, who lived in England; and Charlie May to Howard Simon, whom she met in France and lived together in rural Arkansas.

Entering into complicated relationships was a pattern for both Simon Fletcher. Daisy was married with two children when her liaison with Fletcher began; and Simon's first husband, an heir to wealth in Memphis, had previously been the subject of an international lawsuit over his "abandonment" of a young French girl.

Fletcher was so intrigued by Charlie May Simon that, attired in a seersucker suit and tie, he soon made a long journey into remote Perry County to visit the Simon couple's homestead. When the Simons left Arkansas for New York that summer, a series of love letters ensued between Fletcher and Charlie May, all remarkably preserved in her papers in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock archival collections.

Charlie May's letters were particularly adulatory and peppered with sexual overtones. In an early letter to Fletcher, sent while she and her husband still lived in a small New York studio in August 1934, she wrote, "Every woman and man I meet, I compare with your sister and you, and they all fall short..." and, remembering their first meeting, she added "…I had nothing to wear but an old French dress…and I had to borrow a dark slip to wear under it...it was too tight and I was uncomfortable in it." Their exchange of letters continued into the next year with Charlie May summing her feelings: "It was worth struggling three years on a homestead to have met you in the end." By then she was addressing him "My dearest Johnnie," and closing with "My dear little sweetheart, I love you so."

Charlie May Simon and John Gould Fletcher were married shortly after each received their divorce in January 1936. Whatever the initial motivations of either, Fletcher and Simon became one of the most well-known and accomplished married couples in 20th century Arkansas. They each wrote tenderly of the other in their autobiographical material despite the stress of Fletcher's continual fight against mental illness. They built a home together, wrote, traveled and lectured and were in the company of some of the most prominent American and international cultural icons. The marriage ended with Fletcher's drowning in a neighborhood pond in 1950, which was determined as a suicide. Simon lived and wrote for two more decades about and in the company of such luminaries as Albert Schweitzer.