R.I.P. Fanny Howe
An Interview with Fanny Howe
First published in 2007 inThe Modern Review vol. 2, issue 3.
I first encountered Fanny Howe’s work when I was an undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego. She had been hired as a fiction writer, a label which, though far too reductive to describe her writing, I didn’t question. I was a poet, and so I never studied with Fanny, though many of my close friends took her workshops and grew very fond of her as a mentor and friend. Fanny was, unquestionably and from the first, an important presence in our strange little west coast literary community. She had an air of the exotic about her, with her Boston provenance and her artistic Irish ancestry. To me and my friends Fanny’s Catholicism made her seem fabulously progressive, for these were the days when the role of liberation theology in Central American struggles for human freedom was much on everyone’s mind. Fanny, though far from the proselytizing type, still managed to make the possibility of religious commitment seem very attractive, so much so that one friend from this period ended by becoming a convert. A new life. It was what Fanny, as an artist, and as a person, seemed to exemplify. A life built from a passion for justice and commitment to writing.
I was privileged to be present at many group dinners with Fanny, and soon, as so often is the case when one socializes with a fascinating writer, I longed to read her work. I started with a few small bites, but soon enough was gorging. Her novel Lives of a Spirit had just come out from Sun & Moon. It was a beautiful little cloth covered volume with a wine-colored dust jacket. A fetish item to be sure. After my time with Lives, which certainly changed mine, I was on to In the Middle of Nowhere, Famous Questions, and so on. The Quietist was my first encounter with her poetry, and I have admired it ever since.
It has been almost twenty years since I first met Fanny, and since that brief San Diego period we’ve never lived in the same town. During the last presidential election we had her up to read at the University of Maine where I now teach. She gave a devastatingly moving reading of the “The Passion” from her book Gone. The audience was enraptured. Afterwards several friends gathered at my and Steve’s house to watch John Kerry debate George Bush (how strange their names seem in this context!). Fanny pulled our rocking chair up close to the screen, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and in a tone of hope mixed with horror and disbelief emitted a lively commentary on the proceedings. Things felt relevant, engagement real. No coward soul is hers. That is her gift.
This interview was conducted over email. I sent Fanny thirteen questions in a bunch and suggested she respond to those that seemed fruitful. She sent back a sort of essay, responding to all the questions in one go. I have attempted to rethread them, though sometimes answers bleed over.
–Jennifer Moxley, Maine 2007
JM: Five of your earlier novels have just been reprinted and published as a collection by Nightboat Books under the title Radical Love. This publication, in some ways, parallels your Selected Poems, which reprinted earlier books as well, some that had had a very charming small-press presentation in their original formats (I’ve always loved The Quietist, with those drawing by Italo Scanga). Even in the knowledge that they’ll be “new” for many readers, sometimes revisiting earlier works can be a strange business for a writer. How does it feel to you? Does past writing continue to inform your present projects, or is there a gulf there?
FH: It was during my time at UCSD, from 1987-2000 that I wrote four of the five novels included in Radical Love, just published by Nightboat. Of course going back is part of getting old, so it is interesting to recognize one’s old self in the old work. And I did make changes, mostly small ones, in the texts as I prepared them for reissue. The changes were almost always additions to sentences that seemed too suggestive and not conclusive enough. The integrity of the work as it was originally conceived seemed to have a value that I wanted to undermine, but resisted.
In one case, Famous Questions, I actually changed the structure of the novel, which had always bothered me. I felt there was a failure of realism in the outcome of the story as I had written it and so I changed that with great trepidation. The danger in these kinds of moves is that they occur in the area of basic human truths. For instance how much hope do you have at fifty compared to the hope you have at thirty five? Such a question is innate to the plot and its fulfillment. Changing a portion of a story years later is really unearthly.
However, going back over poems and fiction has had no effect whatsoever on the momentum of my own thinking and work now.
JM: Your essays have been collected under the title The Wedding Dress. It seems to me that the “vow”—matrimonial, religious, poetic—is a constant, if not always overt, concern in your writing. What does taking a vow mean to you?
FH: Paradoxically it was during a divorce that I came to believe in vows. I remember the hour when it hit. I was riding a bike in Reno, Nevada in the fall of 1964. The sun was blazing down. I didn’t want to go to my job at Harrah’s but I had no money. I didn’t want to go to anything or see anyone. I was a “walking breakdown.” I had been condemned to stay in the Biggest Little City in the World because I had run away from an early marriage and the husband said I was crazy for leaving him. For nine weeks I had to check in with the motel clerk every morning, so that my residence was on record. All of this is part of my collection of stories called Forty Whacks, which I wrote months after my release from Reno.
Keeping every vow or promise is stabilizing. It places you in time. When you break a vow, things go haywire around you. Time itself seems distressed.
JM: When I was at UCSD there was a legend that a student who happened by your office one afternoon found you weeping over a copy of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Like stories of your extreme empathy formed part of your mystique, and seemed counter to the soulless “halls of academe.” As a self-described “school hater,” how did you cope for all those years in the classroom? Did you find it strange to be anti-authoritarian while in a position of authority?
FH: Never in my wildest dreams did it occur to me that I would teach, and teach, and teach. Never did I imagine a University situation and life. This was simply not in the picture. I was a drop-out and an independent reader. I expected to make a hand-to-mouth existence or to marry someone who would support me. So “How did you cope for all those years in the classroom?” you asked quite rightly. It would take too much time to say why I coped, all to do with the realities of fear and money, but the way I coped was by going into a classroom armed with rituals and rigorous preparation, by holding myself apart from the environment after the class was over, and by throwing myself into my children at home and my own writing day after day. Teaching came to me by chance and then it was the only way I could make a living in short blasts.
In 1987 when I arrived at UCSD to teach fiction in the writing program, there was a small group of coherent, brilliant students, including you, who organized readings and gathered around wooden tables under palm and eucalyptus trees to talk about teachers, poetry, philosophy, prose and love. It was an unusually intense group that projected its dynamic outwards into the classrooms and general academic environment. There was nothing like this in Boston as far as I knew. In New York, if there were such a group, it would not be connected to the academic world.
In San Diego were you, Steve Evans, Scott Bentley, Bill Luoma, Shelley White and other friends about whom I believe you are writing now; three professors, Page Dubois, Rae Armantrout and Michael Davidson were also participants in this group. You met on campus for conversation and class, and of course you had your real lives elsewhere, but it seemed that the locale for your true ambition was there, at UCSD, between the Che Café and the Literature Building. I always felt that the Mexican border, being so close, created a sense of resistance to prevailing powers (helicopters) and politicized the arts.
This was during the essential break and change moment when poets left the streets and entered into graduate programs and began to discuss linguistics, philosophy and aesthetics under the umbrella of a University. I myself had grown up in “street mode,” having never graduated from college and having lived in New York and Berkeley during the sixties. My training ground as a poet was determined by other poets and the books we happened to read and exchange. The small presses that came out of NYC in the seventies were in no sense connected to a teaching environment and they were the soil out of which our work grew.
JM: Though to me you’ve always seemed solitary and itinerant, in reviewing your autobiographical writing I was struck by how many wild, unruly, and inter-generational households you have been a part of. Your grandfather, living in an upstairs room in your childhood Cambridge home, and your mother-in-law, living with you in the early years of your marriage and first motherhood, both are described as links to religious belief. I want to ask you about alternative ways of organizing one’s domestic life. Roland Barthes, in his 1978 College de France lectures Comment Vivre Ensemble, talks about the solitary and “idiorrhythmic” lifestyles of the early Church fathers. Under the “idiorrhythmic” model, people live and work together, but no one person’s rhythm dominates. Was there an idealized “way to live” in the back of your mind, an alternative “order” in your concept of the household?
FH: As for finding a “way to live,” I do think models come to mind, one’s elders especially as one ages, and especially the positive models. Because I had three children and no husband for most of my child-raising years, I had a set of needs that I would not have later. In those years I lived with other women and with their children cooperatively. I hardly ever lived alone. The children had chores. We always ate dinner together. We talked over problems and solved them together. We shared basic values of fairness and independence. I never had a baby-sitter and neither did the other mothers. We helped each other. This broke apart when I went to San Diego. I had no job left in Boston and had to accept the generous offer from the Literature department out there. It was a catastrophe for my family.
It was then that I became itinerant, unable to get comfortable anywhere. I lived in my office, arriving at 7am and leaving at 7pm, so I would hear other people around. And I locked myself in and read and wrote there. I am writing this to you, now, from my room in an Irish monastery where I come quite a lot and have wonderful friends. I find the monastic routine makes for a feeling of safety. Going to the offices to listen to the chants five times a day, working and walking in between—this is good.
But outside of the monastery the sense of uprootedness continues.
JM: In an interview you gave at the UMaine you describe yourself as being “weird in your generation” because you “don’t write from books” but rather from “experience.” Can you elaborate? Do you feel that the books you love take you out of experience?
FH: In 1987, when I left my home to make money to support the family, the whole process of turning the academic world into a benefactor to artists and writers was in its heyday. While it was obviously a terrifically welcome way to make a living, the effect on poetry and the arts was something we could not have predicted. This is what I mean about “writing from experience”—I mean it as an action unmediated by sources or references to other literature. Writing fiction was, to me, entering into a world that was essentially the world I had left, when I came to San Diego; then, in Saving History, it included San Diego. And as for my poetry, it was always with me, as a notebook or sketchbook might be. Many of my friends who were poets and novelists were deepening the critical interest in “text” and in deconstruction, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. . . . an interest directly linked to their relationship to the academy.
My writing was an interpretation of the world as I had received and accepted it. The books I love—do they take me out of experience? I read a lot of critical theory, philosophy, theology, etc. and happily. But the books I love are the ones I aspire to as models of thought: books by the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, the Americans, James and Joyce.
JM: Your work engages the “never,” “not,” and “nothing” of God. The strongest literary parallel I know of to apophatic theology is Mallarmé, and one feels that, finally, his quest for the ideal began in silence and would end there. Despite your privileging of experience and negation, you’re a very prolific maker. Do you see a contradiction here? And if so, is it perhaps a fruitful one?
FH: I stopped writing fiction deliberately in 2000 with Indivisible. I knew it was going to be my last novel. Then all I wanted was to write poems. And yet there were still some prose thoughts that I had not gone into yet, mostly to do with theology. My feeling about your question about contradiction (being prolific and praising silence) and its possible fruitful outcome reminds me of something a monk, who was a hermit, told me. He said that you had to be a naturally garrulous person to make a good recluse. Otherwise your attraction to solitude would be pathological.
JM: Being a mother seems paramount in both your life and work. Motherhood doesn’t interrupt in your work, but rather helps to generate it—in fact many of the poems in your recent collection On the Ground are dedicated to your children. I actually associate such a relationship to motherhood with poets of your generation, for example, Bernadette Mayer. Can you talk about the relationship between motherhood and writing?
FH: My years spent in a mob of friends and children, all co-habiting, did make it easier in the end to go into the nomadic state of mildly depressed solitude. One always misses physical love. Even a child’s hand in yours is better than loneliness. But there is a relief too in being fully independent and able to think.
JM: There is a connection between blackness and purity in your work. Can you talk about your relationship to African-American culture?
FH: For me the best part of American culture in my generation came from the African-American sector, including jazz, literature, religion and song. It is the one element I would hate to leave behind, if I decided to emigrate. I can take the Catholic church wherever I go and find it wherever I am, but the African American presence is all American.
JM: You called the leftist Cambridge of your childhood “Kremlin on the Charles” and Sesame Street your childrens’ “imaginary Cuba,” identifying yourself and your family with US political “others.” Do you feel like the enemy? If so, is such an identification connected to your identity as an writer?
FH: As a child I identified with my father who was a radical leftist teacher of law and activist in the civil rights movement. I never dropped this identification, even though he died when I was in my mid-twenties. Everything in public life seemed to confirm the truth of his position, and continues to. But I feel very disassociated from the America that is around me now, especially since both Bushes have been Presidents. No one in public office, for one thing, ever refers to a poem, a painting or a piece of music. Everything is business.
JM: I remember running into you in Cambridge late one evening. You were desperate to get home and finish watching Berlin Alexanderplatz! You’ve also written about Robert Bresson. Can you talk a bit about your relationship to movies, as well as your own work as a filmmaker?
FH: As for movies, I have loved them more than life itself. This is the terrible truth—a movie theater is a place of sanctuary and freedom. Dark, dream-driven, communal, borderless, I love to go to the movies. My love is so intense in this regard that I had to try making portions of movies, tiny videos, while I was at UCSD, just to see what it felt like, and to get behind, rather than in front of, the experience of film. I had support for this from the University, I could pay graduate students to help, and there was equipment available. So I dived deep into it and made three videos. Now the technology has changed completely from those days. I will need to learn digital editing in order to proceed. And frankly, that is what I would like to do when I have finished my set of essays Metempsychosis.